Scarlet Widow (21 page)

The Widow Belknap didn’t answer that, but sucked on her pipe again, although it had now gone out. Even if she had caused Kingdom’s sudden seizure – whether by curse or by poison or by satanic spell – she clearly had no intention of admitting it.

Beatrice said to Ambrose, ‘Thank you, Ambrose, let’s go,’ but just as they lurched forward she caught sight of a mass of pink and purple flowers by the Widow Belknap’s front porch. She hadn’t noticed them before because they were growing so deeply in the shade.

‘Stop, please!’ she said, and Ambrose pulled on the brake. ‘That’s lungwort!
There
, Widow Belknap, by your door!
Pulmonaria
.’

The Widow Belknap turned around to see where Beatrice was pointing. ‘Oh, yes. I call it “spotted dog” myself, but yes, you’re right. Lungwort.’

‘Do you mind if I take a few leaves?’ asked Beatrice. ‘I thought I would have to go all the way to the woods to find some.’

‘I suppose so. What do you want them for?’

‘I want to make an infusion to treat the Buckley twins. Their lungs are all clogged with fluid and lungwort will help them to breathe more easily.’

‘You want me to help you to cure them? I thought you suspected me of making them sick.’

‘
Was
it you who made them sick?’

‘You’re very barefaced, Goody Scarlet. Do you seriously think that if I had done I would confess to it? My life may not be a happy one, but I have no desire to lose it just yet.’

Ambrose Cutler said, ‘I’m sorry, Goody Scarlet, but I can’t tarry here much longer. I have chores to be doing at home.’

‘Well?’ said Beatrice.

The Widow Belknap smiled. ‘All right, pick some leaves if you want some. Take as many as you like.’

Beatrice lifted up her muslin petticoats and climbed down from her seat. ‘If it was you who made those children ill, Widow Belknap, God will see this as a gesture of redemption.’

The Widow Belknap stared at Beatrice with her green feline eyes and gave her an eerie smile.

‘You know what your trouble is, Goody Scarlet? A pretty young woman like you – you’ve been married to a man of God for far too long.’

*

As soon as she arrived home Beatrice went through to the kitchen to fetch Ambrose some jumble cookies for his trouble. While she was wrapping them up in a cloth, she asked Mary to fill a copper pan with water and put it on the stove to simmer.

Mary picked up one of the floppy green silver-speckled leaves that Beatrice had laid in a heap on the kitchen table and cautiously sniffed it. The leaves gave off a sappy, fresh fragrance, like comfrey or cucumbers.

‘You’re not thinking of making
soup
with those, Goody Scarlet?’

‘An infusion, Mary, to save two little lives. I will show you how to make it yourself, in case any of your family ever get sick with consumption, or the croup.’

‘I must hang out the wash,’ said Mary. ‘The bread’s almost ready, by the way.’

That morning Beatrice had left the house with Francis before her dough had proved, but while she was away Mary had rolled it out for her and put the loaves into the oven to bake. Mary had boiled all the laundry, too, and swept the floors, and peeled and chopped a whole barrel of quinces, ready for jelly-making. Because she had done all this, Beatrice at last had a little time to examine the residue of Kingdom’s sickness and the tarry substance that had looked like the Devil’s hoof prints.

She didn’t expect Francis to be home until late, and although she felt guilty about making these tests without telling him what she was doing, she didn’t want him to think that she, too, was questioning his authority. She was his wife, and she loved him, and she respected his absolute trust in God. When they knelt beside their bed at night and prayed, she would often open one eye to watch him and wish that her own faith burned as brightly as his.

‘Noah!’ she called. ‘Go out in the yard and play, my darling! Mary’s out there, hanging up the sheets!’

Noah toddled out into the sunshine. Beatrice meanwhile went to the musty-smelling leather-bound chest at the end of the hallway and took out her father’s notebooks, as well as a bottle of pure alcohol and three glass flasks, all wrapped up in grey tissue paper. Back in the kitchen, she half-filled two of the flasks with warm water and then pushed the clouts that she had used to wipe up Kingdom’s vomit and diarrhoea into them. To the flask with the vomit she added some of the dark green needles that she had found under his tongue and between his teeth.

Into the third flask she tucked the linen handkerchief with the tarry hoof print on it, and then poured half a cupful of alcohol into it. She had guessed from its strong naphtha smell that the hoof print was mainly composed of coal tar, even though it was mixed with other substances, and she knew that coal tar was insoluble in water. Her father used to make a mixture of alcohol and coal tar for the treatment of chronic skin complaints, like psoriasis or St Anthony’s Fire.

She stirred all three flasks with the handle of a wooden spoon and then waited for a few minutes for the solids to dissolve. While she did so, she looked out of the kitchen window at Noah sitting next to Mary while she hung up the wash, playing with her clothes pegs. He was tapping them together and then throwing them as far as he could across the grass.

She felt sad for him – and sad for herself, too. It had taken her nearly five years before she had first fallen pregnant, even though she had prayed every day for a child and regularly taken solutions of red clover and motherwort. Since Noah’s birth she still hadn’t fallen pregnant a second time, even though she wanted so much to give him brothers and sisters. Most of the goodwives in Sutton had at least five children and some had seven or eight, or even more. Goody Knowlton had eleven.

Beatrice knew that Francis wanted more children. He considered it his duty to set a good example to his parishioners and multiply. But he had always been considerate and understanding and if he was disappointed by her inability to conceive he tried not to show it. He had reassured her several times that Noah was a blessing and that God might have some other mission for her apart from motherhood.

She sniffed the flask of diluted vomit first. She was relying mainly on her sense of smell to find out if Kingdom had been poisoned. Her father had encouraged her to open every jar and bottle that crowded the shelves of his apothecary and breathe in the contents until she could identify them with her eyes closed, as he could.

The vomit water smelled distinctly like tonquin beans or vanilla. She knew that tonquin beans could make you very sick if you ate too many of them, although many wives used them for flavouring cookies and cakes. They were also supposed to have magical properties. When she had been trying for Noah, Goody Rust had told her that if you held a tonquin bean in your hand and made a wish, your wish was supposed to come true, and only a month afterwards she had conceived.

The Widow Belknap was familiar with poisons and herbs and magical potions. Perhaps she had fed Kingdom a handful of tonquin beans along with the weeds that she had torn out of her garden? But Beatrice doubted if she would have been able to feed him enough to stop his heart – and she could detect another smell in the liquid, much more pungent than vanilla, which put her in mind of cat’s urine or leather.

She sniffed the diarrhoea water and that smelled similar, although not as strong.

She opened up her father’s notebooks and flicked through page after page until she came to a chapter that he had written about ‘Equine Ailments’. His writing was tiny and crabbed, but very neat, and at last she found what she was looking for: ‘Vegetation Toxic to Horses & Cattle’.

Wm Chandler ask’d me to come to Islington to see to his piebald mare which was suffering from palpitations of the heart and sickness. By the time I arrived at his property it was too late and the mare had expired. It was clear however the cause of death. His gardeners having trimmed his yew hedges had thrown the cuttings into the field where he keeps the mare and she had eaten them. The vanilla smell was most distinctive on her breath and her mouth was still filled with yew leaves and berries, both of which are toxic to horses. Less than 6 lbs of yew leaves can kill an adult horse in less than 5 mins, even quicker in the winter, when the toxin is stronger.

Her father had painted a watercolour picture of the yew leaves that had poisoned Mr Chandler’s mare and they were almost identical to the slimy green leaves Beatrice had found in Kingdom’s mouth.

She knew now what had probably caused his death, but she was still frustrated. She had hoped that if she discovered
how
he had died, she would be able to tell if somebody had poisoned him on purpose, and if so, who. But she would have to go back to the village to see if there were yew bushes growing in the Widow Belknap’s garden, and even if there were, she would have no absolute proof that it was the Widow Belknap who had fed them to him.

She glanced out of the window and saw that Mary had almost finished pinning up the wash, so she turned to the third flask. She took out the linen handkerchief and sniffed the alcohol inside it, which had now been turned pale amber by the dissolving coal tar.

The smell was very complex, but when she closed her eyes Beatrice could detect several other notes in it apart from coal tar and cloves. She was sure that there was civet oil, which gave off an odour even more like cat’s urine than the yew leaves. There was sulphur, too, which reeked like rotten eggs. There was also an aroma that was cloying and very sweet, but which she found hard to identify. She guessed that it was molasses. There must also have been some strong acid or alkali content which had burned Francis’s fingers when he had touched it, but it had no smell.

When she had finished she poured all three liquids away and rinsed out the flasks. The pan was simmering now, so she quickly chopped up the lungwort leaves and lowered them into the water. They would take about an hour and then she could strain them and take the infusion down to the Buckley twins.

She needed to find out more. The coal-tar mixture that had been used to make the hoof prints and the upside-down cross had obviously been intended to look and smell like the marks of the Devil, and there was no question that they had badly frightened most of the villagers who had seen them. However, they had finally convinced Beatrice that Sutton was being threatened by a human man or woman, and not by Satan, or a demon, or even anyone acting on Satan’s behalf.

If this viscous brown concoction had really been left behind by Satan, it would surely have been some evil substance exuded from his own demonic glands, and she doubted that she would have been able to determine what it was made of. It was highly unlikely that it would have been a mixture of coal tar, civet musk, sulphur and refined sugar beet, which were all ingredients that could be bought at any grocery store or pharmacist’s.

*

Once she had put away the flasks, and washed the clouts, she spent a few minutes leafing quickly through her father’s notebooks in search of any entry about Chinese fire inch-sticks and whether they could really be used to ease lung congestion.

She was still reading what he had written about betony, and how it helped to cure shortness of breath, especially when mixed with honey, when she heard a light carriage approaching the parsonage, very fast. There was a jingle of traces and then somebody frantically banged the knocker at the open front door.

‘Reverend Francis! Reverend Francis! You must come quick! It’s hellfire, reverend! Hellfire!’

Beatrice immediately closed the notebook and hurried out into the hallway. She thought she had recognized the young man’s voice, even though it was hoarse with panic. It was Nathaniel, the youngest of the five sons of George and Elizabeth Gilman. The Gilmans owned a large farm that lay to the north-west of Henry Mendum’s property.

Nathaniel was a broad-shouldered, well-fed, round-faced boy of nineteen, with a tangle of blond curls and blue eyes and freckles. He had obviously been working in the fields because he was wearing a broad-brimmed hat, his shirt-sleeves were rolled up, and his stockings and the knees of his cotton britches were stained with sandy orange soil.

‘Where’s the Reverend Scarlet?’ he asked. ‘I have to fetch the Reverend Scarlet!’

‘Nathaniel, calm yourself!’ said Beatrice. ‘The reverend isn’t here at the moment, he’s gone to Henry Mendum’s to buy us a new horse.’

‘Then I’ll have to go and find him! My father said to bring him back home with me at any cost!’

‘What’s the matter, Nathaniel? What’s happened? Is there anything I can do?’

‘It’s the Devil, Goody Scarlet! He’s come to
our
farm now! Three of our slaves are dead and one nearly! He’s burned them alive, in hellfire!’

‘Dear God, Nathaniel, that’s terrible! But how do you know it’s the Devil?’

‘Because of the cross that he’s marked on the wall of the barn, a topsy-turvy cross!’

‘Is it painted, this cross, in some kind of tar?’

Nathaniel nodded furiously, as if he were doing his best to shake his head off. ‘My mother said there’s no doubt about it. It’s the same as the cross they found in the Buckleys’ house.’

‘In that event I’m coming with you!’ said Beatrice. ‘Just let me tell Mary to look after Noah.’

‘But father said I needed to fetch the reverend!’

‘I understand that, Nathaniel. But I know as much about this as the reverend does, if not more. Take me first to your farm and then go to Henry Mendum’s to find my husband.’

She told Mary that she was going out again, and gave Noah a quick kiss. Then she took down a linen shawl and went outside. Nathaniel was waiting with a two-wheeled carriage and a scruffy-looking roan. He helped her to climb up into the seat and they went trotting briskly off towards the village.

‘When did this happen?’ asked Beatrice.

‘The burning? Less than an hour since. I was up in the five-angle field when I heard my father shouting. I looked up and saw smoke coming from out of the barn and father running towards it, and then my brothers and some of the field-workers, too. By the time we got there, though, it was much too late. There was nothing we could do to save them. Well, one slave called Quamino was still alive, but he’s been badly burned. Prince and Cumby and Isum, they were all three dead already.’