Chapelwood (The Borden Dispatches #2)(69)

I’ve seen the phrase myself, in the scriptures the mad Arab left behind.

It stands to reason. A wheel is a pattern of another kind, each spoke rising and falling again and again to the same point, in the same path. Everything comes around again, in some form . . . until the wheel is broken and reassembled into something greater, and rolled onward to someplace better.

So I gave Edwin’s behavior a blessing after the fact. He’d operated independently, but he was guided by the same hand as the rest of us. If I was wrong, then fine: I was wrong—but I still had an inconvenient figure removed from the equation, at no reputational cost to myself or Chapelwood. There is room in the world for little thugs. Like everything and everyone else, they serve a purpose, and that purpose might as well be higher than rage or chaos.

Since the trial is done, and since Edwin is free, he has come here to join the fold in a formal manner. It only seemed fitting, after our last service in the underground hall, where I received the expected revelation.

As every piece slots into position, a new edict appears.

Much as Edwin Stephenson is the final member of our coterie, his daughter is the final sacrifice after all.

She was taken from us by the priest, and now she’s been given back. Or she will be given back, that much is assured and I am much relieved to hear it. Though Leonard hacked his way through our lists of worthy subjects, and though he inconvenienced us and delayed us, he has not prevented us from anything. His success has turned out to be our success, for he adjusted the timing in a fortuitous manner.

This was how it was intended all along. We all serve our purposes. There is a place in the world—and beyond it—for all of us.

? ? ?

I asked the Lord how we should collect Ruth Stephenson, and I was told to wait. I was told that she would bring herself to Chapelwood in time, and then our setting would be complete. She will be the lynchpin, the keystone. We will unlock the door, and she will hold it open.

I am assured, and I am trying to have faith . . . that she will come to us.

I hope it is soon. The wait has been so long already, and so fraught with delay and confusion. I want her here, now, at our disposal and at our mercy.

If only she knew. I can’t help but think that if she really understood, she would march directly to the estate, climb the steps with confidence and pride, and offer herself up in service to the greater plan.

She will hold the door ajar. She will save the world. Her blood will be the solvent that wrecks the walls between heaven and earth, and then . . . then we will all be whole, and home with our Creator.

I tried to make her understand, but I could not. That particular failing is mine, but as another book says, “All things work together for good.” This, too, this failing of mine, this stretching of the timeline . . . Oh, how we have trudged through the calendar, and our trudge was all the more disheartening for not knowing whether we yet progressed, or only treaded water.

I am impatient, and this is another failing. We have all fallen short of the glory of God, but it is upon us all to do our best to correct ourselves. This is part of that effort—this record I leave behind: It makes me feel like I’m accomplishing something, like my time is being used productively, rather than simply passed. It’s all I can really do, while I wait for the young woman to find her own path back to the fold.

The pattern is a promise. It brings us all home, in time.





George Ward, Birmingham City Commission President (Former)




OCTOBER 3, 1921


Here we are, then, on the other side of the trial.

Here we are, on the other side of the election.

Here we are, at the end.

It took so little time for them to undo so much. We spent years upon years trying to heal the grievous wound left by the war; and for a moment there, during the one that engulfed the whole world so recently, I wondered whether a different war wasn’t the answer we’d all been seeking. We rallied together again, North and South. One country, joining other countries—fighting a good fight, for the benefit of the whole world. All of us, rallied together for a greater cause.

It was not a perfect solution, no. But is there one? Could there ever be one?

Sixty years ago, the Confederacy tore itself loose . . . only to be conquered and stitched back onto the Union. Might as well try to reattach an unwilling arm or a leg, and expect everything to work just fine again in a fortnight. Some things are only impossible.

And when the Great War began in earnest, when the United States of America threw its hat into that ring of fire, I had the horrible thought that, yes, one war might mend the damage of another. Someone else’s war, this time. Let someone else’s land be the battlefield, and let us ride together, blue and gray beneath the red, white, and blue.

It worked, didn’t it? In some places, yes, I must believe that it did.

But not here. Not for the long haul. Oh, it’s true—we had a wave of unlikely immigrants, Jews and Italians and Bohemians, and it looked like we might all live alongside one another in peace, didn’t it? We even had the sanity to take strides toward equality for all our citizens, and to beautify our city, and to bring it into the twentieth century with pride. Electrical lights and traffic direction, telephones, paved walkways, and more . . . we are a modern city, for Christ’s sake! How can we behave like this, and expect the rest of the world to judge us as civilized and progressive?