Scarlet Widow (26 page)

Beside the pond there was a long wooden jetty with a small boat tied up to it. Standing by the boat was Ebenezer Rowlandson with three of his farm-workers. Ebenezer Rowlandson was a short, stubby man, with a wiry brown wig and a face like a cross little Boston terrier, with bulging eyes. He turned around when he saw Beatrice and John O’Dwyer approaching, one hand shading his face against the sun. Beatrice drew up the shay and one of the farm-workers came over and took Uriel’s bridle for her.

‘Goody Scarlet!’ barked Ebenezer Rowlandson, obviously surprised to see her. Then, ‘John – where’s the constable?’

‘He had first to attend to the Gilmans, sir, because of those four slaves that were burned,’ said John O’Dwyer. ‘He told me he’ll be here directly.’

‘I’d like to know which matter is the more pressing,’ retorted Ebenezer Rowlandson. ‘Gilman’s slaves are dead and can’t be resurrected, can they? – but look at my trout! They’re still alive, most of them, but who can tell what mischief has been done to them or how much longer they can survive?’

Having said that, he turned to Beatrice and bowed his head and said, without much grace, ‘Good day to you, Goody Scarlet. I trust you’re keeping well. May I ask what brings
you
here?’

‘The Reverend Scarlet is attending to other business at the moment,’ said Beatrice. ‘I have come here on his behalf to see if you needed any pastoral help.’

‘You mean you came to see if this was the work of the Devil, too – like your own pigs and Henry Mendum’s milk-cows and the Buckley twins and George Gilman’s slaves?’

‘Well, yes, that too, to be truthful. In the light of what’s been happening lately, the pastor obviously needs to know if your fish have suffered some natural misfortune or whether somebody has poisoned them.’

‘Oh, somebody has poisoned them, right enough, or put a curse on them, more likely, and we all know who that “somebody” is! The sooner we can find some evidence against that widow-woman, the better. As if we didn’t already have evidence enough, just in the way she looks at us, and speaks about us, and talks to that devilish bird of hers, and sings to her goat!’

‘Do you think that I could see your fish?’ asked Beatrice. She paused, and then added, ‘Please’.

‘I don’t know what earthly good that will do,’ said Ebenezer Rowlandson, but he grudgingly led her over to the jetty. In the water below, scores of shining brown trout were lying on the surface, their gills still opening and closing and their tails still waving, but only feebly.

Ebenezer Rowlandson said, ‘Here, I’ll show you,’ and with an effortful grunt he knelt down on the jetty and reached down into the water. He scooped up one of the trout and though it made a half-hearted attempt to wriggle out of his hand, it seemed to have hardly any strength at all, as if it were drugged.

Beatrice held out both hands and said, ‘May I hold it?’

‘For what purpose?’ asked Ebenezer Rowlandson. ‘Will you ask it who cast a spell on it? I would have done that myself, if only I could speak Troutanesian.’

All the same, he laid the slippery brown trout across her upturned palms. It was gasping even more desperately now that it was completely out of the water, but it could barely manage to flex its body from side to side or flap its tail. It reminded her of the gudgeon that she had sometimes found lying on the mud on the banks of the Thames, stunned by the bleach from London’s riverside laundries.

Apart from its weakness, the trout was silvery-scaled and apparently healthy, so she guessed that it had been affected by some substance added to the water in the pond, rather than diseased. It might be oil of rhodium, she thought, which her father had sold to anglers to attract and stupefy fish, and to rat-catchers to do the same with rats, to lure them into a sack which could then be tied up and thrown in the river. Or perhaps it was
Cocculus indicus
, a climbing Asian plant that was also used by unsportsmanlike anglers, and by unscrupulous brewers to give their weak beer more ‘giddiness’.

‘Well?’ asked Ebenezer Rowlandson. ‘What has Master Trout told you? Did the name “Belknap” pass his lips?’

Beatrice returned the fish to him and Ebenezer Rowlandson dropped it with a plop back into the pond. ‘Master Trout was quite helpful, as a matter of fact,’ she said. ‘Do you think you could show me the hoof prints?’

Ebenezer Rowlandson puffed out his cheeks. ‘I’m not so sure about that, Goody Scarlet. Don’t you think that we had better wait for your husband, and for Constable Jewkes? If laws have been broken here, either holy or human, they are the men appointed to deal with such things, after all.’

‘I assure you I won’t touch anything,’ said Beatrice. ‘I would just like to look at them, to see how they compare with the hoof prints we found at Henry Mendum’s.’

‘Well... very well,’ said Ebenezer Rowlandson. He walked about thirty feet further along the jetty and then stopped and pointed down to the planks beneath his feet. ‘They begin here and they run all the way down to the very end there, see? Whatever made them – whether it was man or beast or Satan himself – it ran right off the jetty and into the water.’

He hesitated for a moment and then he said, ‘Maybe, on the other hand, it
didn’t
go into the water. Maybe it had wings and flew off into the air. Or maybe it ran right across the surface to the other side and into the forest.’

‘And which of those do you think it did?’ Beatrice asked him.

‘I don’t know, Goody, I’m sure. Every one of those possibilities puts the fear of God into me, I can tell you. Do you know what I keep thinking? I keep thinking that if by chance I had been here at the time, I would have come face to face with Satan himself. It makes me tremble to my very boots.’

Beatrice looked down at the hoof prints that ran from the middle of the jetty to the end. She found it curious that they started only halfway along, as if the creature that had made them had dropped right out of the sky, run down to the end of the jetty, and then either jumped straight into the water or flown away into the air, as Ebenezer Rowlandson had said. The only other alternative was that it had walked across the water, like Jesus when he rescued his disciples on the Sea of Galilee. That thought was not only blasphemous but very frightening.

The hoof prints appeared to be made of the same treacly substance as the prints at Henry Mendum’s farm and the two upside-down crosses that had been daubed on the walls at the Buckleys’ and the Gilmans’. What Beatrice thought was amazing, though, was that they ran in a dead straight line, with left and right hoof prints completely parallel, all the way down to the very end of the jetty, each one about a yard apart.

In shape they were cloven, like those of a goat, and yet they had clearly been made by a creature with two legs rather than four. A goat would have left its prints in pairs, with the hind hoof prints slightly in front of the fore hoof prints, but these hoof prints had been made singly, like those of a man.

What was even more curious was how evenly spaced they were. If the creature had launched itself into the air from the end of the jetty, its hoof prints would surely have been clustered closer together just before it had started to flap its wings. The same would have happened immediately before it jumped into the water – or
on to
it, if it had been able to walk across the surface. The water was at least two feet below the level of the jetty and she couldn’t imagine that it had simply run off the edge without changing its gait at all.

‘Well?’ said Ebenezer Rowlandson. ‘What do you see?’

‘I see a great deal, thank you, Master Rowlandson.’

‘Such as?’

‘I’m sorry, but there is little point in my telling you now. I haven’t yet been able to make sense of it all myself, and I’m quite sure that you won’t be able to, either.’

‘Oh, I see. Thank you for the compliment.’

‘When I have a better understanding of what might have happened here, I’ll be sure to explain it to you, have no fear.’

‘Well, I thank you for that, Goody Scarlet, although I am much surprised that the pastor allows you to be so condescending.’

Beatrice turned to him. ‘A wife can be assertive, sir, without being disobedient. Sometimes a wife has a duty to her husband to speak her mind.’

Ebenezer Rowlandson grunted again, as if he didn’t really understand what she meant, and didn’t want to – but if he did, he probably wouldn’t like it one bit. His own wife, Emily, was one of the most timid women in Sutton and she was frequently in need of Solomon’s seal for her bruising.

‘Have you seen enough, then?’ he asked her testily. ‘Perhaps you can now take word back to the pastor and see what he makes of it all.’

‘I will go and tell him post-haste, Master Rowlandson.’

‘Good. If Satan
has
been at work here, I will urgently need his advice on how to protect my livelihood from any further depredation, don’t you think? Unless, that is,
you
already know better.’

‘I don’t mean you any disrespect, sir. Don’t think that.’

‘Huh! Well, that’s as may be.’

Ebenezer Rowlandson was now so impatient for her to leave that she could see that it was going to be difficult for her to take a sample of the hoof prints, as she had in Henry Mendum’s field. She took a step to the side, so that her gown covered one of the prints, and then she jabbed two or three times with the heel of her shoe on to the hem of her petticoat, hoping that some of the tarry substance would stick to it.

She followed Ebenezer Rowlandson back along the jetty. As she reached the steps at the end of it, however, she noticed that the narrow channel of water between the pilings and the steep grassy bank was clogged with thick whitish foam. She had been remembering the fish poisoned by the laundries beside the Thames, and now here was a mass of bubbles that looked like soapsuds.

‘Are you coming, Goody Scarlet?’ called Ebenezer Rowlandson. ‘I have much to do this afternoon!’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Beatrice and walked briskly back to her shay. She settled into her seat and took up the reins, but before she could leave Ebenezer Rowlandson held on to the harness and looked up at her with one eye closed against the sun.

‘I will say this, Goody Scarlet. If you were a wife of mine, a few stripes would soon cure you of your boldness,’

Beatrice smiled at him. ‘If I had chosen to be a wife of yours, Master Rowlandson, I think I would deserve them for my stupidity.’

When she returned home Beatrice immediately ran upstairs and took off her petticoat. She had managed to impress almost half of one of the hoof prints on to the hem and it had stained the cream linen dark brown. She sniffed it and it smelled exactly the same as the tarry substance that she had taken from Henry Mendum’s cow pasture: coal tar, civet oil, sulphur and something sweet, like molasses or dark treacle.

She wished that she had taken a sample of the thick white foam that she had seen beside the jetty. It had looked so much like soapsuds and yet where had it come from? She wondered if any of the Rowlandsons’ maids had emptied soapy water into the pond after washing the laundry, but that didn’t seem likely when Talbot Brook ran so close to the farmhouse. Even if they had, she didn’t think that soap would have affected the trout like that, making them comatose.

She stepped into a clean petticoat and tied the laces, and then went back downstairs. She was well behind with her housekeeping now, even though Mary had done so much. She had at least two hours of plain-work to do: shirts and cravats to sew for Francis, and stockings to darn. Then she had aprons and bed-linen to iron, as well as making damson jam which was now nearly a week overdue, and she had beans and asparagus to preserve in stone jars filled with clarified butter. She needed to have all these chores finished today because tomorrow morning she and Francis would go to Londonderry to buy six more pigs. Autumn would be here before she knew it, and she needed to have her bacon salted and smoked up the chimney and stored in barrels before the winter.

When she came into the kitchen she found Caleb there, drinking a mug of cider. He was so hot that his shirt was sticking to him and he smelled strongly of sweat.

‘I fetched all the things from the village you asked me, Goody Scarlet. The flour and the vinegar and the candles and the side of beef.’

‘Thank you, Caleb. Did you hear any news of Nicholas Buckley?’

‘No, nothing – only that he’s yet to come home. I saw Goody Buckley and she’s almost distracted. She told me that Constable Jewkes is talking of sending out some fellows to search for him, but they don’t even know where to start looking. They’ve already called on the Widow Belknap, but she says she’s not seen hide nor hair of him – but then she would.’

‘Who was the last person to see him?’

‘Mr Bartlett, the farrier. That’s what Goody Buckley told me. He was leading a horse out of his smithy after shoeing it and he saw Mr Buckley leave his house and walk quick towards the Widow Belknap’s. He waved to him but Mr Buckley didn’t wave back. Mr Bartlett didn’t see him go to the Widow Belknap’s door, though. He could just as well have walked straight past and kept on going.’

‘That’s really strange. Nicholas Buckley is usually such a considerate man. I can’t imagine that he would allow Judith to fret about him so.’

‘I don’t know, Goody Scarlet. You have to admit there’s been some real uncouth goings-on round Sutton of late. Maybe this is just one more of them.’

‘Yes, maybe,’ said Beatrice. ‘How’s little Apphia, by the by?’

‘Much better. Goody Buckley said to thank you again for the confusion you gave her.’

‘
In
fusion, Caleb.’

‘Yes, ma’am. Whatever you say, ma’am.’

*

By the time Francis was brought home that evening by young John Jenkins it was growing dark and it was too late for him to go out to the Rowlandson farm. When Beatrice came out on to the porch to greet him she saw three comets in the eastern sky. She wondered if they were an omen.

During the afternoon she had boiled chicken with cream and onions, which they ate at the kitchen table out of large blue bowls. Francis had been sitting for most of the afternoon with Goody Jenkins, who was very close to death now, and Beatrice thought that he looked haggard and dispirited. She reached across the table and laid her hand on his.