Scarlet Widow (44 page)

‘Bea, you owe me nothing. Everything that has happened to me has been of my own making. I was a drunk and a fool. Had I not been so blind I would have seen that my partner was cheating me, right left and centre. I am simply glad that I was close by when I saw that man approaching your house. Ever since Francis passed away, I have been keeping a watch on you. I know – that sounds as if I am obsessed with you, doesn’t it? Perhaps I am. But I will not be a burden to you, nor an embarrassment. I love you too much for that.’

Beatrice said, ‘Jeremy, you are my cousin and you are going to stay here and get well, and only after that will we decide what you can do next.’

She lifted Noah out of his high-chair and said, ‘Noah, I want you to meet your Uncle Jeremy. Can you say “Uncle Jeremy”?’

Three days later, when Beatrice was weeding the garden, Major General Holyoke came around the side of the house.

‘Beatrice!’ he called out. ‘Good morning to you!’

Jeremy was sitting on a kitchen chair by the side of the vegetable patch, wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat that used to belong to Francis, and one of Francis’s shirts and a pair of his pale blue britches. He had shaved off his beard and Beatrice had cut his hair, and although he was still pale he looked at least human, not like the wild beast in the brown cloak who had rescued Beatrice from Jonathan Shooks.

Beatrice had been applying goldenseal tincture and garlic to his wound and had dressed it freshly twice a day, and it seemed to be healing well, although he still complained of a pain in his chest.

‘Major General Holyoke,’ Beatrice greeted him. ‘You haven’t met my cousin Jeremy. He was the hero who saved us when Jonathan Shooks came here to murder us.’

Major General Holyoke shook Jeremy’s hand. ‘You did this community a great service, sir. I thank you. How are you, Beatrice? Are you well?’

Beatrice laid down her hoe. ‘I am quite well, thank you. Can I offer you tea, or cider?’

‘I thank you, but no. This is not really a social visit. I have come to show you two things. If you would be kind enough to follow me back to my carriage?’

Beatrice wiped her hands on her apron and followed Major General Holyoke around to the front of the house. His shiny maroon chaise was standing there, with his coachman standing beside it talking to Mary. Sitting in the chaise, wrapped in a shawl, was the Widow Belknap. When she saw Beatrice she smiled and weakly raised her hand.

‘Widow Belknap!’ said Beatrice. ‘I am so delighted they found you! How are you?’

‘My mind is still full of fancies,’ said the Widow Belknap hoarsely. ‘I still believe that I can see people who are not really there, and hear voices in my head. I still believe sometimes that I can fly, or walk on water. But Doctor Merrydew says that will pass in time.’

‘Where did they find her?’ Beatrice asked Major General Holyoke.

‘Not far from the lake where you said that you had seen her. She was quite naked and chewing tree bark. I doubt if she would have survived very much longer. Thank the Lord you sent us out looking for her.’

‘There is no way that I can thank you, Goody Scarlet,’ said the Widow Belknap.

‘I am a relict now, as you are,’ said Beatrice. ‘You should call me Widow Scarlet.’

The Widow Belknap nodded. ‘Yes... yes, they told me that the Reverend Scarlet had passed away. I am very sad for you. I know what grief is like. It is a kind of madness. In some ways it is even worse than the madness that I am suffering now. At least I know that my sanity will soon return to me, but not my dear dead husband.’

She paused, and then she said, ‘I have to confess to poisoning your horse, Goody Scarlet. I fed him with yew leaves even as you and the Reverend Scarlet spoke to me. I was angry with you for suggesting that I would cast such wicked spells on my neighbours. I meant only to make the animal sick and cause you to have to walk home. I did not think for a moment that it would die. I apologize, from the bottom of my heart.’

‘It’s forgotten,’ said Beatrice. ‘Just as so much else should be forgotten, and forgiven, too.’

She turned to Major General Holyoke. ‘Did you not say that you had
two
things to show me?’

‘Aha!’ said Major General Holyoke. He went round to the trunk at the rear of his chaise and opened it up. ‘This contraption we discovered in Mr Shooks’s calash. I would say that this is all the evidence we require for a posthumous conviction, wouldn’t you?’

He lifted out a two long rods made of oak, which were joined together by a short crossbar, like a pair of legs. On the end of each rod was a cloven hoof, which looked as if it had been cut from a goat. Each hoof was stained with a dark, sticky-looking substance. Beatrice didn’t have to smell it to recognize what it was.

‘The Devil’s hoof prints,’ said Major General Holyoke. ‘A very simple device indeed, but one that very successfully played on our fears.’

Beatrice heard Noah calling out. She looked around and saw Jeremy walking around the house, holding Noah’s hand.

We came here to make a new life
, she thought.
We wanted to leave behind all the
myths and superstitions of the Old World. But we brought our fears of devils and demons along with us
.

She promised herself then that she would bring Noah up to fear nobody and nothing.

*

Six weeks passed. Jeremy grew stronger every day and was soon able to help in the garden, and with feeding the pigs, and with painting the parsonage ready for winter. Beatrice, on the other hand, began to feel increasingly tired, and her breasts and her ankles were swollen. She hadn’t had a period since the week before Francis was killed.

She had no way of proving it, but she was sure that she was pregnant. She stood looking at herself in the mirror in the parlour and because of the distortion in the glass she was unsure if she was expressionless or if she was secretly smiling to herself.

If she was pregnant, she couldn’t be sure whose child she was carrying. With Francis, she hadn’t conceived since Noah, and Jonathan Shooks had taken her in such a way that conception seemed remote.

She looked out of the parlour window and she could see that the leaves of the oaks along the driveway were already turning yellow. Even with Noah and Jeremy and all her friends in the congregation, she had never felt so alone in her life.

~

We hope you enjoyed this book.

The next gripping instalment in The Scarlet Widow series will be released in autumn 2017

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About Graham Masterton

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An invitation from the publisher

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One wet, windswept November morning, a field on Meagher’s farm gives up the dismembered bones of eleven women...

Their skeletons bear the marks of a meticulous butcher. The bodies date back to 1915. All were likely skinned alive.

But then a young woman goes missing, and her remains, the bones carefully stripped and arranged in an arcane pattern, are discovered on the same farm.

With the crimes of the past echoing in the present, D.S. Katie Maguire must solve a decades-old murder steeped in ancient legend... before this terrifying killer strikes again.

Can’t wait? Buy it here now!

John had never seen so many hooded crows circling around the farm as he did that wet November morning. His father always used to say that whenever you saw more than seven hooded crows gathered together, they had come to gloat over a human tragedy.

It was tragedy weather, too. Curtains of rain had been trailing across the Nagle Mountains since well before dawn, and the north-west field was so heavy that it had taken him more than three hours to plow it. He was turning the tractor around by the top corner, close to the copse called Iollan’s Wood, when he saw Gabriel frantically waving from the gate.

John waved back. Jesus, what did the idiot want now? If you gave Gabriel a job to do, you might just as well do it yourself, because he was always asking what to do next, and was it screws or nails you wanted, and what sort of wood were you after having this made from? John kept on steadily plowing, with big lumps of sticky mud pattering off the wheels, but Gabriel came struggling up the field toward him, still waving, with crows irritably flapping all around him. He was obviously shouting, too, although John couldn’t hear him.

As Gabriel came puffing up to him in his raggedy old brown tweeds and gumboots, John switched off the tractor’s engine and took off his ear-protectors.

“What’s wrong now, Gabe? Did you forget which end of the shovel you’re supposed to be digging with?”

“There’s bones, John!
Bones
! So many fecking bones you can’t even count them!”

John wiped the rain off his face with the back of his hand. “Bones? Where? What kind of bones?”

“Under the floor, John!
People’s
bones! Come and see for yourself! The whole place looks like a fecking graveyard!”

John climbed down from the tractor and ankle-deep into the mud. Close up, Gabriel smelled strongly of stale beer, but John was quite aware that he drank while he worked, even though he went to considerable pains to conceal his cans of Murphy’s under a heap of sacking at the back of the barn.

“We was digging the foundations close to the house when the boy says there’s something in the ground here, and he digs away with his fingers and out comes this human skull with its eyes full of dirt. Then we were after digging some more and there was four more skulls and bones like you never seen the like of, leg-bones and arm-bones and finger-bones and rib-bones.”

John strode long-legged down toward the gate. He was tall and dark, with thick black hair and almost Spanish good looks. He had only been back in Ireland for just over a year, and he was still finding it difficult to cope with running a farm. One sunny May morning he had been just about to close the door of his apartment on Jones Street in San Francisco when the telephone had rung, and it had been his mother, telling him that his father had suffered a massive stroke. And then, two days later, that his father was dead.

He hadn’t intended to come back to Ireland, let alone take over the farm. But his mother had simply assumed that he would, him being the eldest boy, and all his uncles and aunts and cousins had greeted him as if he were head of the Meagher family now. He had flown back to San Francisco to sell his dot.com alternative medicine business and say goodbye to his friends, and here he was, walking through the gate of Meagher’s Farm in a steady drizzle, with a beery-breathed Gabriel
following
close behind him.

“I’d say it was a mass murder,” Gabriel panted.

“Well, we’ll see.”

The farmhouse was a wide green-painted building with a gray slate roof, with six or seven leafless elms standing at its south-eastern side like an embarrassed crowd of naked bathers. A sharply-sloping driveway led down to the road to Ballyhooly, to the north, and Cork City, eleven miles to the south. John crossed the muddy tarmac courtyard and went around to the north side of the house, where Gabriel and a boy called Finbar had already knocked down a rotten old feed store and were now excavating the foundations for a modernized boiler-house.

They had cleared an area twelve feet by twenty. The earth was black and raw and had the sour, distinctive smell of peat. Finbar was standing on the far side of the excavation, mournfully holding a shovel. He was a thin, pasty-faced lad with a
closely-cropped
head, protruding ears, and a soggy gray jumper.

On the ground in front of him, like a scene from Pol Pot’s Cambodia, lay four human skulls. Nearer to the damp,
cement-rendered
wall of the farmhouse, there was a hole which was crowded with muddy human bones.

John hunkered down and stared at the skulls as if he were expecting them to explain themselves.