Scarlet Widow (11 page)

‘What do you think did for them, Goody Scarlet?’ asked Mary. She was a plump, gingery girl with curly ringlets, only fifteen years old, although she had been helping out in the Scarlet household since she was twelve.

‘I can’t tell, Mary, not just by looking at them,’ said Beatrice. ‘They have no marks on them, do they? And if somebody has deliberately killed them, why did they do it? We have no enemies that I know of. Who would do such a thing to spite us? And if it was Indians looking for food, why didn’t they carry them away – or drive them away while they were still alive? That would have been easier, wouldn’t it?’

It occurred to her that it might well have been Indians, but Indians who were seeking revenge rather than provisions. The Penacook tribe still bitterly resented the English settlers for driving them off the land that had once been theirs, and they would raid the village every so often. If that were the case, though, they would have been much more likely to enter the house and kidnap Beatrice and Mary for ransom, and maybe take little Noah, too, who was still asleep.

She didn’t mention this thought to Mary, however. The poor girl was upset enough as it was.

‘What can we do now?’ asked Mary. ‘Should we butcher them? We should butcher them, shouldn’t we, before the meat becomes maggoty? It’s so hot today.’

‘No, Mary,’ said Beatrice. ‘Not until we know what killed them. It could have been the scour, or another infection much worse. If we were to eat their meat, we could suffer the same fate as them. When Francis returns I’ll have to see what he decides. My Lord, he’s going to be mortified. We paid more than two pounds ten shillings a head for these poor creatures.’

There was nothing more that she could do for the moment, not without discussing it with Francis. If the pigs had been the victims of some disease, she had no idea what it could have been, although she had treated many sick pigs in the past. Pigs with long-term illnesses would visibly waste away, but it would take them weeks, if not months, before they died. Acutely sick pigs would invariably vomit or suffer from copious diarrhoea.

She went back out through the gate, with Mary following her. As she was latching the gate, she glimpsed a bright reflected sparkle in the boar’s open mouth, as sharp as a star.

‘Wait, Mary,’ she said, and went back into the pen. She bent over, and when she pried the boar’s lips open wider, she saw that there was a small triangle of broken mirror stuck to its thick grey tongue. She carefully picked it out, wiping it on her apron, and then she held it up so that Mary could see it.

‘What’s that?’ asked Mary.

‘It’s a little piece of looking-glass. I can’t think what it was doing in his mouth. Surely he wouldn’t have tried to eat it.’

‘Oh, my Lord,’ said Mary, and pressed her hands together as if she were praying.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘You know what they say, Goody Scarlet, about a piece of broken mirror on your tongue. That’s the Devil’s Communion.’

‘The Devil’s Communion?’ said Beatrice. ‘I’ve never heard of that before.’ She went over to one of the sows and opened up her mouth, too. Right at the back of her tongue she saw another shard of mirror. She left it where it was and examined the other sows. All of them had fragments of mirror on their tongues, of different shapes and sizes, some of them curved, some of them thin and pointed like knife blades. Whatever mirror they had come from, it must have been smashed with considerable violence.

‘Satan’s work, this is,’ said Mary. ‘The Devil makes mock of the holy communion by placing a piece of a broken looking-glass in your mouth instead of a wafer. Your own vanity cuts your tongue, see, so that you drink your own blood instead of the blood of Christ.’

‘And who told you that?’ asked Beatrice. She came out of the pen again and fastened the gate. She was trying to keep calm but her heart was beating fast beneath her stays and she was feeling very hot and breathless.

‘The pastor himself told me,’ said Mary.

‘You mean the Reverend Scarlet? My husband?’

‘Yes, Goody Scarlet. When I was much younger. He said that it was to teach me not to be too proud of my appearance.’

A ruffed grouse suddenly burst out of the orchard, off to their left, squittering in panic as if it had been disturbed by Satan himself, loping away through the apple trees.

Francis was much later than she had expected in returning home, and the clock in the parlour had chimed eight before Beatrice heard his shay rattling and squeaking down the rutted drive. The sky had turned mauve and it was still very warm, although over to the west an ominous bank of black cloud was building up. Scores of brown bats were flying around the house to catch the insects that were rising up into the evening air.

She came out with a lantern. Francis was backing Kingdom into the carriage-house so that he could unfasten his harness and lead him into the paddock beside the orchard. It had been a long journey from Bedford, twenty-two miles, and both Francis and Kingdom were covered in a fine whitish dust, like ghosts.

‘Thank the Lord you’re back,’ she told him.

He looked at her quizzically.

‘What’s wrong?’ he asked her.

‘You’ll have to come and see for yourself, my darling.’

‘No, tell me. Noah’s not sick, is he?’

‘Noah’s quite well. It’s the pigs. Mary went to feed them this morning and found every one of them dead.’

‘
Dead
? How? What’s happened to them? How can they all be dead?’

He led Kingdom to the paddock and then accompanied Beatrice around the back of the house to the pig-pen. He stood staring at the dead pigs for a few seconds without saying a word. Then he said, ‘Please, my dear,’ and held out his hand for the lantern. He swung open the gate and went inside, shining the light over each of the animals in turn.

‘They don’t have any injuries, or at least none that I can see,’ said Beatrice. ‘But every one of them has a piece of broken looking-glass on its tongue. Mary said that when she was younger you told her a story about such a thing. The Devil’s Communion, that’s what she said.’

‘Did you remove them?’

‘I took out just the one piece, for you to see.’

‘You didn’t take it into the house, I hope?’

‘Yes, why? Did I do wrong?’

‘You weren’t to know, my dearest. But we must remove it from the house at once. It is a piece of Satan’s mirror, through which the Devil can see
us
as clearly as we can see ourselves.’

He looked around at the pigs and shook his head. ‘This is plainly the work of some witch.’

‘A
witch
? You really think so?’

‘Believe me, Bea, Satan is still doing everything he can to prevent us from establishing our faith in this country, and as usual he is using weak and immoral people as his instruments. We were discussing it only today, at the parish meeting, and trying to decide what steps we could take to defend ourselves.’

‘But why would anybody kill our pigs? What would be the point of it?’

‘I really don’t know, my dearest. Perhaps it’s because I’m a pastor. Shake the roots, Satan surmises, and the whole tree will tremble and all of its fruit fall to the ground and spoil.’

‘You don’t
really
think it could have been a witch?’ asked Beatrice. ‘I mean, look what happened in Salem. So many poor women were hanged for witchery but every one of them was shown in the end to be innocent.’

‘I know, yes,’ said Francis. ‘But this is quite different. What happened in Salem was common hysteria. There was no material evidence, only hearsay.

‘But here, look, we have the material evidence lying before us, and nothing could be more material than five dead pigs. They have no marks on them, have they? They show no sign of sickness. But they all have these pieces of looking-glass on their tongues. What other conclusion can we come to?’

They stood for a few moments longer looking at the pigs and then walked back along the garden path. Beatrice went into the kitchen and Francis followed her. ‘So what can we possibly do?’ she asked him. ‘If this person is so determined to do us harm, witch or not, how can we protect ourselves?’

Francis went over to the kitchen table where Beatrice had left the triangular piece of mirror. ‘Is this it?’ he asked. He bent over it so that he could see his eye reflected in it, but he didn’t touch it. ‘Our first urgency is to bury this outside so that Satan is unable to see where we are or what we are doing. Once that is done, I will bless this house and pray to the Lord to be our shield against anyone who wishes us evil.’

He picked up a damp grey cotton rag from the side of the washtub and wrapped it around the piece of mirror. He took it outside, with Beatrice carrying the lantern for him so that he could see his way. It was completely dark now because the clouds had rolled right over to the eastern horizon, so that no stars were visible. Using the garden trowel, Francis dug a hole in the earth next to the paddock fence and dropped the piece of mirror into it. Kingdom came up to the fence and whinnied, as if he were asking them what they were doing.

‘There,’ said Francis. ‘We have blindfolded his Satanic Majesty, at least for now. Tomorrow morning early I will ask Jubal to help us burn the pigs to ashes.’

‘Burn them? Can’t we just bury them?’

‘The blowflies will have laid their eggs in them, and their larvae will hatch, and when those larvae in turn become blowflies they will carry the Devil’s infection in their spittle. If they enter the house and settle on our food, then
we
could be infected with it, too.’

‘What about the witch?’ asked Beatrice.

‘I will make discreet enquiries of the men in the village, and perhaps I can ask you to do the same among the women. I know how much they like to gossip. Maybe some goodwife has overheard her neighbour spreading slanders about us, or seen her behaving strangely – brewing up unusual potions or talking to dogs or suchlike.’

‘It’s not someone we
know
, surely? I can’t think of anybody who would wish us ill.’

‘I’m keeping an open mind, Bea. There are several women in this village who are not malevolent in themselves but have the weakness of character to lay them open to being suborned by Satan. Goody Merrow, for one, or the Widow Belknap. I passed the Widow Belknap’s cottage last week and heard her singing to her goat. A
love
song, too, as if that on its own were not profanity enough.’

Once they were back in the kitchen Beatrice patted some of the dust from the shoulders of his coat and said, ‘Why don’t you change out of those clothes, my dear, and I will serve up our supper? Go in to see little Noah, too. He was out in the garden most of the day, picking strawberries for me. I think he ate as many as he picked, but we have more than enough for our meal tonight.’

She stoked the wood-burning Franklin stove to warm up the big iron pot of chicken stew that she had made that afternoon, while Francis went up to their chamber. She could hear him creaking about upstairs before he eventually came down wearing his banyan, an ankle-length cotton gown with a blue diamond pattern on it, which he usually wore in the evening, or when walking through the orchard seeking inspiration for his sermons.

‘Did you see Noah?’ asked Beatrice as they sat down at the table.

Francis nodded. ‘He is a blessing from God, Bea. Such an angelic little boy. I do not know if I could ever forgive myself if some harm were to come to him because of me.’

‘No harm will come to him, Francis, not so long as I am here to watch over him, I promise you.’

‘I don’t know, Bea. It’s not just our pigs. At our meeting today, I heard of many disturbing things that have been happening in our parish lately. John Mechison said that in Dover five newborn infants have died within the past three weeks for no accountable reason. Several orchards in Ipswich have been stricken by some blight that blackens all of their fruit, both apples and pears, and in Londonderry dozens of cattle have fallen sick. It is almost as if the very air we breathe has become tainted.’

He looked across the table at her, and in the candlelight Beatrice saw something in his eyes that she had never seen before, even when they first set sail for New England. Uncertainty.

She laid her hand on his, and then he laid his other hand on top of hers, but it seemed to her that he was seeking reassurance for himself, rather than for her.

‘I confess that I am frightened,’ he said. ‘I know that God will shield us, but I wish I knew against
what
. It is the unknown that unsettles me the most.’

Beatrice ladled chicken and asparagus and potatoes into his bowl. Then she cut a quarter of fresh rye loaf for him and passed it over, with the brown stone jar of butter.

Francis clasped his hands together, closed his eyes and bowed his head. ‘Dear Lord,’ he said, ‘we thank Thee for this day and for this sustenance. We thank Thee for all of Thy blessings and humbly ask for Thy deliverance from whatever evil is arrived at our door. Amen.’

*

That night it was so hot and airless in their bedchamber that they left the window wide open. Beatrice was exhausted and her back ached from planting nine long rows of beans and cutting asparagus, but she found it impossible to sleep. She couldn’t help thinking about the dead pigs with the fragments of mirror stuck to their tongues, and who might have given them the Devil’s Communion. At the same time, however, she couldn’t help asking herself how such a communion could possibly have killed them.

Beatrice believed in God and Satan, but her father had brought her up always to question the inexplicable.
Just because you can’t work out how something is done, my little Bea, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s magic.

She was reminded of St Luke’s account in the Bible of the Gadarene swine – when Jesus exorcized a man possessed by demons by transferring them into a herd of pigs, which then all rushed over a cliff and drowned in a lake. Maybe the slaughter of
their
pigs had been a deliberate mockery of Jesus’s demonstration of His power over evil. But unlike the Gadarene swine, she could not see any reason why their pigs had died, apart from witchcraft, or imagine who might have killed them.