The Strange Death of Mistress Coffin (17 page)

BOOK: The Strange Death of Mistress Coffin
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“Aye to that, Richard. In time, in time.”

A week later, after attending strictly to his own affairs, Browne went to Strawberry Banke after the truckman Black Ned. Cole's point about expecting little help from Goody Hussey seemed reasonable. But he had no luck in the port town. Ned was shipping with men who had hired him to move their goods and families to Gloucester. Some expected he might be back in about three days. So Browne decided to book a passage for Salisbury.

He discovered, however, that his bad luck held. Dr. Sedley had not returned from his own expedition deep inland. No, Sedley's housekeeper said, she could not say when he might return, but she certainly hoped before winter set in. Yes, she had heard Dr. Sedley speak of Balthazar Coffin, and met Mr.
Coffin once or twice, come to that, and she believed there had been some talk of Mr. Coffin's moving to Salisbury, but she would not know if such a thing came to pass. Yes, Mr. Browne might leave his name and residence. Sedley being absent some months, she explained, she had heard no more of Coffin or anyone else from the doctor.

Nor was there any further sign of Black Ned when Browne stopped at Strawberry Banke on his return. While he waited for the upriver boat, he grew angry with himself over time wasted. Never in his life had he so well known the value of time. He resolved that for a fortnight he would have absolutely nothing more to do with Coffin. But two hours into his trip upriver on the incoming tide he recalled Goody Hussey. The thought of her, of what she might know, nagged him, and he began to feel that somehow she would change his luck by knowing something, despite Cole's admonitions to the contrary. His own vacillations and uncertainties confused him. Watching herons constantly rise up with slow wing beats into the trees ahead of the boat, like truths escaping the truth seeker, he suddenly decided to try Goody Hussey.

And thus it was that he found himself, the very next day, at the center of the village where she lived, asking how he might find her cottage.

The cottage he sought, Browne was told in the village, was situated on a small peninsula of high ground that reached out into the salt marshes. It was necessary, he discovered, to travel from the village center a half mile through the wood to gain access to the old woman's spit of dry land. Suspicious of a stranger asking for Goody Hussey, townspeople reluctantly indicated the hay road leading through the wood to the marsh.

From Cole, Browne had learned that the old lady's son had discovered and claimed that elevated mead in the great marshes more than ten years before, shortly after their arrival among
the earliest settlers. The son had died of a fever five years ago while working on a privateer after Spanish loot in the West Indies. The town left to the lone woman only that cottage. That portion of the hay marsh her son claimed, his back pay, and his few valuables, the selectmen had brought into the town coffers. The old widow lived on the charity of one or two of the more comfortable families in town as well as by her skill at physic and midwifery. But as her eccentricities seemed to grow with age, she was called in these days as a last but often effective resort only in the most terrible crises of illness and birth.

Word was that she had grown more familiar with the Indians than with her white neighbors. She might be seen collecting her wild roots, herbs, and mushrooms at any time of day in the fields or woods. She was on such a mission the very day Browne trod along the hay road in search of her cottage, and a rough voice called out to him: “You seem lost, Sir.”

He turned quickly to see behind him an old woman standing in an open ferny space where her figure caught a rare shaft of sunlight that made her white hair and cap glow above her dark clothing. She leaned upon her walking stick and held an Indian basket in her other hand. She moved toward him, entering the shadows of the great trees.

“I may be!” he said. “You gave me a start!” He composed himself with a laugh. “I've come to speak with Goody Hussey. Might you be the same?”

“That I might, young man.” She looked him over. “Who be you?”

“Richard Browne, of Robinson's Falls.”

“And what business have you with Goody Hussey?”

“I am trying to find Balthazar Coffin. I understand that she knew him.”

“She may know him. But he lives where you come from, Sir. Why come you here?”

“He has removed. Yet I have important business with him.
Some business we had entered together, but left unfinished. His manner of departure left no one certain of his destination.”

“So that's why I haven't seen him these months.” She turned and motioned Browne to follow her.

He followed, saying: “I had hoped you would have some word of him, Goody Hussey. Yet I see you yourself are taken unawares by my news.”

“That I am, Sir.” She kept walking in her slow way into the woods. The trees were enormous, gray-green with moss, and well spaced, retaining the look of an Indian game grove. The high, dense canopy of leaves parted at rare intervals to let in a flash of blue or a blaze of sunlight.

Browne began to feel a sense of frustration and waste kindling in him again. Yet he felt strangely vulnerable too, and his mind began to move toward his immediate situation. He was not a man given to excesses of superstition. He knew—by the common and ancient testimony of humanity—that the dead at times returned to the living. But he did not see in every old crone a witch, nor in every animal a familiar, nor in every rarity a sign from the Darkness or the Light. He increasingly believed that nature, for the most part, could be classified and understood. He knew Aristotle, Lucretius, Von Gesner, and even a recent production of Sir Thomas Browne entitled
Pseudodoxia Epidemica.
Still, he could not shake his momentary apprehensions.

“Here we are, Sir,” she was finally saying as she pointed her stick at a large outcropping of ledge. “Some call it the pulpit. I find this lower section makes a fine seat for old bones. Now . . . do sit, Sir. Tell me something of this business between you and Mr. Coffin.”

He saw no point in reticence before this old woman. He suspected she might know more than she yet showed. If he could not find Coffin he would have to stop. The thought of stopping filled him with desperation, however. He would see this through,
then get on with his own work. He began by explaining how he had come to Robinson's Falls under Cole's dispensation to help relieve Goody Higgins' tribulations, perhaps even by answering questions left in the aftermath of Mistress Coffin's murder.

“A foul business that!” she interjected.

He nodded his head and returned to his explanation. He felt that were he to stop he would not be able to continue. So he spoke quickly, letting it all tumble out, saying finally that Coffin had given him a private journal whereby he had a glimpse into the lives of the Coffins. As a result he had begun to feel that he was making headway into strange, interlocking events when, upon his return from England, he had discovered Mr. Coffin's abrupt departure. Only Coffin, he believed, could offer the necessary resolution to these affairs, the fulfillment of his, Browne's, duty toward Mr. Cole, his neighbor Goody Higgins, and even Coffin. He did not speak of his large personal curiosity, which was also a goad to him.

Goody Hussey listened. When he had finished she said: “I'm sorry I cannot help you. You saw that already. You have no sign of Coffin's destination?”

“Only that Black Ned might have helped in the move.”

“Ah!” She thought for a moment. “Then that is the path to follow.”

“Have you heard of a Dr. Sedley? A colleague of Mr. Coffin's?”

“Mr. Coffin spoke of him once or twice as a knowledgeable, much honored man.”

“I thought he might know something of Coffin, but he is up in the country on researches of his own.”

“Another path, Mr. Browne!”

“Indeed, Goody Hussey, if obscure at present. But I have a feeling about these Fletcher brothers. They say nothing, yet I believe they know something useful to me.”

“Oh, the Fletcher brothers!” she said and paused. “You may have something there, Sir. Do you see the mark of their hands in this?” From her seat she looked over and up at him with a deep, inquiring eye. He could see clearly now that she was old, and not well. Her skin was an unhealthy white; he could discern no teeth in her black mouth, but then she barely opened her mouth to speak. Yet despite what people said, her mental vitality seemed intact.

“I know only that they have had dealings with Coffin in the past,” he said, “and that they shipped some materials for him at one time, probably about the time he left.”

“And you do not believe their ignorance?”

“Just so.”

“Well, that's the way with those two. You may have something there, Mr. Browne.” She stopped, shifted in her seat, seemed to ponder a moment or two the implications of introducing the Fletchers into Browne's quest. She chuckled to herself.

“You know them?”

“Oh yes. They purchase some decoction, plant, or essence of me from time to time. Infrequently. I don't ask people many questions, having my living to get. I'll trade for whatever people need, or believe they need. If I have it.”

“And the Fletchers?”

“Those two are fond of things that make them drunk, or lustful, or see things they wouldn't otherwise see in the dullness of their base senses.”

“But these are crooked fragments of humanity, Goody Hussey. . . .”

“That may be, but an old woman has to live, hasn't she? I don't lead them to their ways. Nor do my sweets cause them to act in any way. It is their own will that bends them.”

“But, Goody Hussey, in their wild anarchy of drink. . . .”

“Sir. My truck with these brothers is scarce. Nothing I pass
in itself causes men to do evil, in spite of what some may say of me. Fools and gossips! Would you, like the rest of them, have an old woman starve to death, if you don't hang her first?”

“Please don't misunderstand me. I apologize if my words seemed to say so. The truth is I have come for your help, if that be possible, good woman.”

“I know nothing of Coffin's departure. I am not privy to it, Sir.”

“I understand. But might you not help me now with the Fletchers?”

“How so?”

“They lie. I am certain of it. They are refractory.”

“And I am to find the truth?”

“Perhaps your influence upon them. Get them to speak . . .”

“Bah! Dullards and jades, Sir. Base carnal matter. What talk of influence?”

“Perhaps they fear you, Goody Hussey? Many do.”

She laughed outright. “Many will burn in Hell!” She laughed again. “They see in me whatever they want to see.” She shot Browne a look. “You do not fear me?”

“I am no more afraid than any man who is honest with you, and in God's protection. But the Fletchers; they may fear your disapprobation if you question them sharply with me and Mr. Cole.”

“No, Sir. I have no business with Cole or the Fletchers.”

“Might we not in some way frighten them into the truth. They fear not the laws of God or man.”

“Tell me what I owe to Cole or Goody Higgins, or to yourself, that I should be troubled in this affair.”

“Nothing, I own. Can finding truth not be its own reward? But as I've told you, Mr. Coffin as well sought resolution to his wife's terrible death. Perchance I may discover such a resolution as well, resolve his own torment and doubt.” She seemed unimpressed. “And I would of course pay you honestly for any
trouble to you, in British currency. Perhaps we could represent your own displeasure to them, or interest, or something.”

“English currency?” She slid another look at him.

“As you wish.”

She raised herself by her stick and shuffled about for a few moments. Browne watched her. “I don't know,” she finally said. “We might try a decoction.”

“Decoction?” he said. It was as if Browne had caught a glimpse of the exit to a maze he had wandered in for nearly two years.

“To give them violent fits and bring them to the invisible world.”

“Until they beg for relief?”

“And exchange relief—which I can offer them—for information.”

“Excellent!” Browne said. “But no one must know our method.”

“Just so!” She turned to look him in the eye. “Say nothing of my cause in this. I will introduce myself as needs be.”

“What of this decoction? Something that would make them see what is not with them in their cells? Nightmares? Convulsions?”

“Something to make them see. I tell no one, Mr. Browne, what to believe or disbelieve. I am no Zealot. No Opinionist. We have enough of those about.” She waved her arm and smiled.

Browne rose from his seat and, about to leave, promised to pay for her labors. “Balthazar Coffin may ultimately be the benefactor here as well,” he said. “We shall tell him whatever I discover after he has set me on the right path, which he can hardly fail to do now that I have read the diary.” She said nothing, so he continued. “One last thing, Goody Hussey. We will need access to the Fletchers.” She nodded her head in agreement and continued to look directly at Browne, leaning toward him. “Cole must know therefore something of our plan.”

She looked down a moment without speaking. “You ask me
to place myself in danger, Mr. Browne.” He made as if to protest, but she went on. “But I am old now and it hardly matters. You will pay me well, in pounds, for my trouble.”

“Anything within reason, good woman.”

“If you must, tell Cole. But swear him to secrecy as a protection to both of us, and out of respect for our acts in his behalf.”

Browne agreed. Since the old woman did not move from her spot, he said goodbye. As he walked back the way he had come, he felt that he would make progress now. But he could not, for the life of him, give one clear reason why he should feel that way.

BOOK: The Strange Death of Mistress Coffin
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