Scarlet Widow (25 page)

Beatrice looked where Francis was pointing and through the rain she could just make out the brown hooded figure she had seen before.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I believe it’s the same.’

‘Then I shall challenge him,’ said Francis. ‘If it’s some maunder, then I shall give him a few pence and something to eat. But if it’s some rogue, I shall chase him away on pain of calling the constable. Perhaps you were right, though. Perhaps it’s the Angel of Death, looking this time for the soul of little Tristram.’

‘Francis, don’t. Leave him be. He could well be armed.’

‘I’m not frightened of death, Bea, no matter how death might manifest itself. Robber, beggar or angel.’

‘Francis –
please
– don’t,’ said Beatrice, but Francis gently but firmly pulled himself away from her. He marched off down the driveway, his coat collar turned up against the rain. Beatrice was deafened by a rumble of thunder like somebody rolling a hundred empty barrels down a cobbled street, and the rain began to beat down even harder.

‘
Hoi
!’ Francis shouted out, waving his arm. ‘You there! Who are you? What do you want?’

He wasn’t even halfway along the driveway, however, when the figure stepped back into the shadows beneath the trees and disappeared. Francis hurried up to the place where it had been standing and looked around, but even from a distance Beatrice could see that he had lost sight of the figure altogether.

Who in the world could he be? she thought, as Francis came trudging back. If he was somebody who wished them harm, then surely he would have attacked them by now. If he simply wanted alms, all he had to do was approach them and ask. But who had given her that bottle of expensive perfume? Was it him? Or had the perfume been left by some unknown admirer who was either too shy to give it to her directly, or somebody she knew only too well? She fleetingly thought of the looks that Jonathan Shooks was always giving her – sceptical and knowing, but also seductive, as if he were thinking,
I could have you, pretty goodwife, if I were so minded
.

‘Well – whoever it was, they’ve made themselves scarce for now,’ said Francis, wiping the rain from his face with his cravat. ‘I have the feeling, though, that you might be very close to the truth when you called him the Angel of Death.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I think he is not a real person but an apparition – a shade, a phantom, a spirit, call it what you will. He has come as an omen, or a warning, like a stopped clock or a picture that falls off the wall for no apparent reason, or a sudden flock of crows. Perhaps that is what all these terrible incidents have been – warnings that the people of this community should act more devoutly and not to be so concerned with wealth and creature comforts.’

‘I still think you should tell Constable Jewkes about it,’ said Beatrice. ‘And you could put word around the parish for people to keep their eyes open. It might be an omen, but it could equally be a budger, or a footpad.’

Francis took hold of her hands and kissed her on the forehead. ‘You are such a down-to-earth person, Bea, and I am so head-in-the-air! That very first morning I saw you, when I was coming out of Sunday prayers, I could almost hear a voice inside my head saying, “This is the one, this is the woman you will marry, this is the woman who will anchor your beliefs and make your life complete. This is the woman who will help you to fulfil the purpose for which God has put you here on this earth.”’

Beatrice kissed him back. He looked so lean and handsome and saintly with his long dark hair all wet. The smell of warm rain blew in through the open front door, but the sun was beginning to break through the clouds. Yes, Francis could be unworldly, but she loved him for that. His faith always made her feel protected, as if it was enfolding them both, and Noah, too, in an iridescent cloak of light.

Francis had convinced her that there
was
a heaven. Sometimes she thought back to the frozen girl that she and her father had found that Christmas morning in the alley off Giltspur Street. Francis had made her confident that her soul
was
being cared for after all.

*

Beatrice drove back into the village on her own the following morning. She wanted to see if Apphia was any better, and Francis had also asked her to talk to the Buckleys about the funeral arrangements for Tristram. When she entered the Buckley house, however, she found that Judith was lying on her bed in the front parlour, with three or four of her neighbours around her. She looked as white as wax, and one of the women was vigorously fanning her.

‘Judith? What’s happened?’ asked Beatrice. ‘Are you unwell?’

‘She’s fainted from exhaustion,’ said Goody Rust. ‘Nicholas went out last night, saying that he had urgent business to attend to, and he has not returned since. Judith fears that he went back to see the Widow Belknap.’

‘Has anybody been to the Widow Belknap’s house this morning to ask her if she has seen him?’

‘No, but do you think she would tell us, even if she had?
Especially
if she had!’

‘How is Apphia? Is she any better?’

‘A little. She has taken a feed of pap and she has kept it down so far, fingers crossed. I think the lungwort is helping to clear her chest.’

Beatrice went along the hallway to the children’s bedchamber. Apphia was asleep, breathing through her mouth, but her cheeks were flushed a healthier pink than yesterday and she was wearing a clean white flannel pilch over her belly-band, which showed that she hadn’t soiled herself for a while.

Back in the parlour, Beatrice asked Judith where she thought that Nicholas might have gone last night, on what kind of urgent business.

Judith’s dark brown pupils darted from side to side, almost as if she were dreaming with her eyes open. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know. All he said was that he had to settle it once and for all. That’s what he had to do. Settle it.’

‘Do you think he might have gone to see the Widow Belknap?’

‘He swore to me that he would see her brought to justice. He was certain that it was she who made the twins so sick.’

‘Well, let’s wait upon him a little longer. If he doesn’t return by the middle of the afternoon, we can arrange for a party to go out looking for him.’

Judith reached out and took hold of Beatrice’s hand. Her own hands were surprisingly cold, considering how warm it was inside the house.

‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’ she said. ‘I know it. I can feel it my water. I felt a chill last night when I was lying in bed, as if the Angel of Death had passed my window, and I haven’t felt warm since.’

Beatrice sat down on the bed beside her. ‘You’re worn to a rag, Judith, that’s all. You’ve had days of dreadful anxiety and hardly any sleep. Poor Tristram died only yesterday. It’s not surprising that you’re thinking the worst. But Nicholas will be back soon, you’ll see. He cares for you too much to let you worry.’

‘But where has he gone and why is he taking so long?’

‘Judith – our husbands don’t always tell us all of their business, do they? – and we can’t expect them to.’

‘He’s dead,’ said Judith, her pupils still flickering from side to side. ‘I know he is. He’s dead.’

*

As she came out of the front door, Beatrice found that Constable Jewkes was sitting outside on his huge brindled horse. He was leaning forward in his saddle and talking in low, earnest tones to William Rolfe and Thomas Woodman, the tailor, as if he were passing on some scandalous rumour. As soon as he saw her, however, he sat up straight and raised his hat and called out, ‘A very good morning to you, Goody Scarlet!’

Beatrice went over to him. Constable Jewkes was very tall and lanky, with arms and legs that looked as if the disconnected parts of a man’s body had simply been thrown into a soiled white shirt and a dusty blue coat and hurriedly buttoned up before they all fell out again.

He had a prominent nose but a sharply receding chin, which gave him the appearance of a sharp-shinned hawk, especially since his eyes were always so bloodshot from drink.

‘I hear you visited the Gilmans yesterday,’ he said. ‘Deeply shocking, that was. Deeply! I’m surprised that you had the stomach for it.’

Constable Jewkes had a strong Welsh accent which made it hard for Beatrice to understand him, especially when he was drunk.

‘Do you have any notion yet who might have done it?’ she asked him.

‘I have some strong suspicions, Goody Scarlet. But I was on my way there now to talk to the Gilmans’ servants and their slaves. I want to know if any of them noticed anybody unfamiliar around the farm before those poor beggars were set afire.’

‘Well, good. But with respect, you should be careful not to jump to any hasty conclusions. I believe that there’s more to what’s happening here in Sutton than we can guess at.’

‘Oh, I’m never hasty, Goody Scarlet, you know me! Slow and measured, that’s what I am. If the court is going to order somebody to be hanged by the neck, or pressed, or burned at the stake, then I like to make sure that it’s the person what has actually perpetrated the deed.’

I’m sure you do
, thought Beatrice
.
Five years before, three young sisters in Haverhill had been hanged for killing their father with a hatchet. Not everybody in Sutton knew it, but their fate had been sealed by the evidence given by Constable Jewkes, even though he had been so drunk on cider that he could hardly stand up. Later, it was discovered that a Penacook Indian had committed the murder when he was surprised by the girls’ father during a robbery.

Constable Jewkes turned to William Rolfe and Thomas Woodman and said, ‘Well, gentlemen, I must be on my way! Justice waits on no man, especially me.’ He raised his hat again to Beatrice and clicked his tongue to start his horse.

He had gone no more than twenty yards, however, before another rider appeared at the top of the village green, and he was cantering very fast. He rode his horse straight across the grass at a steep diagonal and reined it in right in front of Constable Jewkes.

Beatrice recognized him as John O’Dwyer, a young Irishman who was indentured to Ebenezer Rowlandson, a farmer and forester on the far side of Henry Mendum’s property. He was a stocky lad, gingery-haired and freckled from working out in the sun, and his forehead was bursting with perspiration.

‘I’ve been looking for you all over, constable! They told me you was over at the Goodhue farm, but you’re not, you’re here!’

Beatrice could hear the distress in his voice and so she walked along the road to join them.

‘John O’Dwyer, isn’t it?’ she asked him. ‘What’s wrong, John?’

Constable Jewkes twisted around in his saddle and looked down at her with an expression that seemed to mean,
I’m the one who asks the questions, Goody Scarlet, not you, even if you are the pastor’s wife
.

‘It’s the fish in Master Rowlandson’s trout pond!’ John O’Dwyer blurted out. ‘They’ve all come floating up to the surface! There’s scores of them!’

‘Dead?’ asked Constable Jewkes.

‘Some of them, sir, but only a few. Most are still breathing but it’s like they’re asleep.’

‘What the devil are you talking about, boy? Fish don’t
sleep
. They don’t have eyelids, so how can they possibly sleep?’

‘These ones seem to be sleeping, sir. You can pick them right out of the water with your hand and they set up no struggle at all.’

Constable Jewkes lifted out his pocket watch. ‘Well, boy, I have to attend the Gilman farm on account of those slaves that were burned, which to my mind is more important than sleeping fish. I’ll pay your master a visit when I’m finished up there.’

‘There’s another thing that Master Rowlandson said I should tell you, constable.’

‘Oh, yes, and what would that be?’

‘There are footprints on the wooden jetty at the side of the pond. Well, they’re hoof marks, really, not footprints, as if they were made by a donkey or a goat.’

‘Hoof prints?’ Beatrice asked him. ‘Can you describe them, John, these hoof prints?’ Again, Constable Jewkes gave her a sideways look which meant,
Leave this to me, if you don’t mind, Goody Scarlet.
I
represent the law in Sutton
.

‘I don’t know, ma’am,’ John O’Dwyer told her. ‘They’re brown and they smell strong and they’re sticky, that’s all I can say. Master Rowlandson said not to touch them because they could be have been trod by the Devil himself.’

‘I think I need to come and take a look at them,’ said Beatrice.

‘Be sure not to tamper with them before I arrive,’ cautioned Constable Jewkes. ‘The Devil may come under
your
jurisdiction, Goody Scarlet, or that of your husband at least, but all other wrongdoers come under mine.’

He gave his horse an irritable smack on its rump with his whip and set off towards the Gilman farm. John O’Dwyer waited for Beatrice while she walked back to her shay. Then he rode beside her as she steered Uriel out of the village towards the Rowlandsons’.

‘How long before you finish your indenture, John?’ she asked him, raising her voice to make herself heard over the clattering of wheels and squeaking of leather straps.

‘Another two years, seven months, and three days,’ said John O’Dwyer.

‘It sounds to me as if that won’t be too soon, so far as you’re concerned.’

‘Master Rowlandson expects his money’s worth, ma’am, that’s all I’m going to say.’

Beatrice drove down the track that led between split-rail fences to the Rowlandson home-lot. Around the red-painted house and barns and outbuildings the fields were mostly given over to corn, which was tall and ripe and whiskery and almost ready for harvesting. A warm breeze was blowing across them, so that shining ripples ran from one side to the other.

Beatrice followed John O’Dwyer around the edge of the fields until they gave way to scrubby grass and rocky outcroppings, and she saw a pond glittering up ahead of them. When they came closer she saw that it was so wide that it was almost a lake, with several smaller ponds around it. On the far side of it stood acres of hardwood forest, mostly hemlock and yellow birch and sugar maple. There were tall pines, too, but these were reserved for His Majesty’s navy. The trees were reflected in the water as if there was another forest, upside down, beneath their feet, with an upside-down sky and clouds.