Scarlet Widow (35 page)

Just after two o’clock she drove back through the village and out towards Penacook. She went first to Rutger’s Farm, which lay about a mile and a half to the east of Penacook. She knew that it had been lying empty for almost a year. James Rutger had died of the black jaundice last March, and his widow Jessica shortly afterwards, and since her death the estate had been furiously disputed in the courts between seven sons, three of whom had been the progeny of James Rutger’s marriage to his first wife, Helen, who had died in childbed.

When she arrived there she found the fields overgrown with weeds, almost waist-high, and the orchards littered with rotting brown apples. The buildings were dilapidated, with peeling grey paint and broken windows. As she approached a dark cloud drifted across the sun which made the farm look even more derelict.

Behind the main farmhouse stood two large barns, although the nearer one was leaning at an angle, as if it were close to collapse. Beatrice climbed down from her shay and went across to look at them. It was evident that nobody had entered the nearer barn for months, because the doors had dropped on their rusted hinges and purple flowering lady’s-thumb was growing thickly up in front of them.

The doors to the second barn, however, had been cleared of weeds and two semicircular scrape marks on the ground showed that they had recently been opened. Gasping with effort, Beatrice managed to tug the left-hand door a few inches ajar so that she could squeeze inside.

This barn had once been the farm’s feed store. Bales of hay were still stacked up against the opposite wall, almost to the rafters, while forty or fifty sacks of oats were heaped up in a pyramid on the right-hand side. Most of the sacks had been gnawed open by rats or mice and oats had spilled across the floor. There was a strong musty smell in the barn of half-composted hay and rotting oats and rats’ urine – as well as the smell of linseed oil.

Almost in the centre of the barn stood a large circular cheese-kettle, almost six feet in diameter, made out of tarnished copper. As soon as Beatrice saw it the clouds must have moved away from the sun, because it was suddenly illuminated with shafts of light from the clerestory windows in the roof, as if the barn were a church and the cheese-kettle some kind of unholy font.

Beatrice had seen cheese-kettles like this before, in Haverhill, where they made Swiss cheese at Saltonstall’s dairy farm. Not far away from it were scattered about a dozen empty demijohns. When she walked up to the cheese-kettle she could see that it was filled almost to the brim with amber-coloured linseed oil.

She knew that a demijohn held fifteen gallons, so the cheese-kettle must have contained at least two hundred gallons, which tallied with Abel Norton’s bill of trade. The oil was glowing in the sunlight, but its surface was thick with dust and globules of fat and it was speckled with scores of dead flies.

There was only one reason why anybody would have filled up a cheese-kettle with two hundred gallons of linseed oil. Beatrice stood by its brim and stared at it numbly, trying to picture what had happened. She could only visualize it as some two-dimensional medieval painting, with Francis lowered naked into the oil like a martyred saint. She hoped to God that he had already been dead before they immersed him.

It puzzled her, though, that the cheese-kettle was still filled up. How could Jonathan Shooks have been so careless as to leave it like this? Had it not occurred to him that she might well understand how Francis had been solidified and that she might go looking for the source of his linseed oil? Or had he done it intentionally to taunt her, to show her that he wasn’t in the least afraid of her?

He could easily have opened the spigot in the cheese-kettle and let the evidence soak away, or he could have set fire to the barn which would have destroyed it forever.

Beatrice slowly circled around the barn, brushing aside the hay and the oats with the side of her foot, trying to find proof that Francis had been brought here. She picked up a filthy grey cravat with some dark brown stains on it that might have been blood, but she couldn’t be sure it was his, so she dropped it.

Before she stepped back outside she paused at the door of the barn and looked back at the cheese-kettle. She felt like burning the building down herself, but she knew that would be nothing but a mindless act of vengeance and that she should leave vengeance to God. Besides, she had something much more important to do.

*

As soon as the Penacook Inn came into view she could see that Jonathan Shooks was still there. His calash was parked by the stables at the side and when she came nearer she could see Samuel outside in a long leather apron, rubbing down the grey.

The inn was a white-painted, double-fronted building, with maroon shutters, surrounded by dark green oaks. It overlooked an ox-bow lake in which it was reflected, although the reflection was rippled into white fragments by the loons that were swimming across it.

Samuel turned his head when he heard Beatrice approaching in her shay. He stayed where he was, though, with his hand resting on the horse’s flank, and when she drew up outside the front of the inn and tied up Uriel he made no attempt to come over and greet her. She looked across at him as she mounted the steps that led up to the verandah, but he remained expressionless, as if he were waiting to see what would happen next.

Inside the hallway a small, beaky-nosed woman in a frilly white cap and pale yellow gown came up to her, smiling, and said, ‘Good day to you, ma’am. Can I help you? Are you looking for some place to stay?’

The inn was light and sunny, with tall vases of white chrysanthemums standing in the hallway and yellow drapes at the windows embroidered with birds and butterflies. Beatrice could smell warm biscuits and beeswax floor polish. Somewhere at the back of the inn, a girl’s high voice was singing ‘The Raggle-Taggle Gypsies-O!’ It gave Beatrice an unexpected pang because her mother used to sing it to her when she was small.

‘I’m looking for a guest of yours, Mr Jonathan Shooks.’

‘He’s in the dining room, ma’am, taking his dinner. May I tell him who’s calling?’

‘That’s all right. I can introduce myself, thank you. Through here, is it, the dining room?’

‘Well, yes, ma’am, but I don’t know if Mr Shooks would wish to be disturbed at the moment.’

‘
Disturbed
?’ said Beatrice. What a word, she thought, for a man who might be guilty of murdering her husband and turning him into a wooden statue. ‘Don’t worry, I intend to do very much more than disturb him.’

‘
Please
—’ said the woman as Beatrice stepped forward. ‘I cannot permit you to walk in unannounced! It would not be proper!’

Beatrice said, ‘I am the wife of the Reverend Francis Scarlet of Sutton and I have urgent business with Mr Shooks. Church business. So, if you don’t mind—’

‘Very well,’ said the beaky-nosed woman, becoming even more flustered. ‘If you’d care to follow me.’

She led Beatrice through into a large dining room, with three circular tables in it, all draped with long white linen tablecloths. Two young men who looked like travelling salesmen were sitting on the left-hand side, laughing over bowls of chicken stew. They stopped laughing when Beatrice walked into the room and followed her with their eyes, nudging each other.

In the far corner, beside a window that looked out over the gardens, sat Jonathan Shooks. The sunlight behind him made him look strangely blurry. In front of him was a plate of hogs’ ears ragout with pumpkin squash, and when Beatrice came in he was just about to lift a glass of white wine to his lips. As soon as he saw her he put it down, without drinking.

He stood up as she came across the dining room and bowed. He was wearing his grey linen coat and the grey wig, which made him look much older than he must really have been, although he looked tired today, too, with plum-coloured smudges under his eyes.

He didn’t hold out his hand. He obviously sensed from the look on Beatrice’s face that she wouldn’t have taken it.

‘Well, well. Goody Scarlet,’ he said. His voice was deep and soft and as blurry as his image, and he made her name sound almost like a question.

Beatrice said, ‘The
Widow
Scarlet, as of yesterday, sir.’

‘Yes, of course. You have my very deepest sympathy. If there is anything I can do to ameliorate your grief, please don’t hesitate.’

‘May I join you?’ she asked him. ‘I think we have matters to discuss.’

‘But of course. Mistress Pitcher, perhaps you could bring us another glass.’

‘There’s no need,’ Beatrice told her. ‘I will not be taking wine.’

Jonathan Shooks came round and drew out a chair for her and then sat down himself. Mistress Pitcher hovered beside them for a moment, before saying, ‘Should I return your dinner to the oven, Mr Shooks, to keep it warm?’

‘Don’t trouble yourself,’ said Jonathan Shooks, keeping his eyes on Beatrice and giving her that mocking, self-reverential look that he always gave her – that look that seemed to imply,
I could have you, my lady, any time I wanted to
. ‘I fear that when Goody Scarlet and I have finished talking I shall have lost my appetite altogether.’

Beatrice wondered why he had said ‘altogether’, until she looked down at his plate and noticed that one of the hogs’ ears protruding from the orange ragout sauce still had bristles on it.

‘I will not beat around the bush, Mr Shooks,’ said Beatrice. ‘I know that you were responsible for my husband’s death.’

She spoke as calmly as she could, trying to keep her voice low so that the two travelling salesmen wouldn’t overhear her.

Jonathan Shooks looked at her for a long time without saying anything. Then he picked up his wine glass and started to swirl it around and around. A curved reflection from the wine flickered across his lips so that he appeared to be smiling, and then not smiling, and then smiling again.

‘That is a very damning accusation, Goody Scarlet. An accusation like that could send me to the gallows.’

She noticed that he hadn’t asked, ‘Why do you think that?’ or ‘Do you have evidence?’ He hadn’t even said, ‘That’s a damned lie, how dare you?’

‘My husband was immersed in a vat of linseed oil, Mr Shooks, which had the effect of hardening his body until it took on the consistency of wood. About a week ago, you purchased from Abel Norton’s paint shop two hundred gallons of linseed oil, which you had delivered to Rutger’s Farm, and filled up a cheese-kettle with it. This cheese-kettle is about six feet in diameter, which is quite sufficient to accommodate the body of a man with both of his arms outstretched.’

Jonathan Shooks stopped swirling his wine and sat back in his seat.

‘You are a very intelligent and astute young lady, Goody Scarlet. Considering that you lost your husband less than a day ago, I greatly admire your pluck in pursuing this matter. Most women would be wailing inconsolably and reduced to a jelly.’

‘Believe me, sir, I am suffering pain so intense that I cannot even begin to describe it to you. But I
will
see justice for my husband, and I
will
know why he had to die in such a manner, and I
will
see an end to all of this pretended devilry.’

‘
Pretended
devilry? Do you not believe, then, that Sutton is being persecuted by some agent of Satan?’

‘Yes, Mr Shooks, I do, but I do not believe that this agent of Satan is some witch or wizard or some Indian spirit from the woods. Every misfortune that has been visited on Sutton since our pigs were killed in a Devil’s Communion can be attributed to chymistry or botany. Some of the events I admit I have not yet been able to explain, but I shall. I believe, Mr Shooks, that the agent of Satan is
you
, and you alone.’

‘Well, well, the apothecary’s daughter,’ said Jonathan Shooks. ‘He taught you very well, your father, didn’t he? Oh, don’t give me that look! Of course I know who you are. Before I came to Sutton I made it my business to find out everything I could about everybody of any importance in the village – who they were, where they originally came from, what their background was. Their strengths and their foibles. How wealthy they were, or how destitute. You cannot properly protect people unless you know them intimately. Your late-lamented husband will have been aware of that.’

‘
Protect
, Mr Shooks, or deceive? I think that you are nothing but a clever trickster – a charlatan who uses chymistry to frighten superstitious and God-fearing people into thinking that they are being threatened by the Devil. I think that my husband followed you and found you out and when he confronted you with your deception you killed him.’

‘I see. Is that what you truly believe?’

‘Yes, it is. What other explanation can there be?’

‘What if I told you, Goody Scarlet, that there
is
a demon and that everything I have said since I came to Sutton is true? What if I told you that I
am
doing business with an agent of Satan and that I have been persuading the local people to surrender some of their land only to save them from a fate so ghastly that I could never describe it to you?’

Beatrice was trembling and underneath the table she was twisting the ends of her shawl around and around as if she were wringing them out.

‘If you told me that, sir – if you told me that, then I would not believe you.’

‘You
do
believe in Satan?’

‘Of course. But what does Satan want with people’s land?’

‘It’s very simple. He wants Christianity driven out of it. He wants demons to dance on it again. Satan has never encouraged evil for evil’s sake, whatever you think. He advocates complete human freedom – that we should think what we like, say what we like, and if you are offended by the way your neighbour looks, go pluck out
his
damned eyes, rather than your own. If you want something, take it, says Satan, whether it’s land or gold or pigs or a woman’s body. All Satan is trying to do is to make sure that the this wild and virgin country never becomes so noisy with ecclesiastical cant that we can no longer hear ourselves think, and that its air never becomes so choked with Bible dust that we suffocate.’