The Strange Death of Mistress Coffin (22 page)

She raised her head and looked at him again, fully conscious now. “Thank God you are here,” she finally said.

“You are safe, Elizabeth,” he whispered. “What happened?” The smell of the wool and bed linen wet with her perspiration seemed profoundly intimate to him.

“He spoke to me, in a dream; his mouth was bloody. Then I woke and felt him here again. Then you came and it was your hand on me.”

He sat on the bed beside her, and she began to weep.

“What did he say?”

“I don't know. It was not our language.”

Browne put his arm around her shoulder and pressed her against him. He saw and heard nothing unusual in the room. The room was gradually turning gray with first light. Her damp body had collapsed against his like that of an injured child after the first shock of pain had passed. She wept quietly. Whatever it is, he thought, it is real to her. She might have just run a mile in July from some raging beast.

They sat together quiet on the bed. His lips near her ear, he tried to comfort her by whispering: “‘The Lord is thy keeper: the Lord is thy Shade upon thy right hand. The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night.'” Then her voice softly joined his to the end of the psalm: “‘The Lord shall preserve you from all evil: he shall preserve thy soul. The Lord shall preserve thy going out, and thy coming in, from this time forth and even for evermore.'”

She grew still. Eventually she fell asleep against the hollow of his chest, her body beginning to dry in the cool room. He
covered her legs with the bedclothes and held her a little longer. Then he laid her back into the featherbed, hearing the soft crunching. He got up, stoked their fire quietly, and returned to his chair in the other room.

He began to wonder if there were something he did not know in all this. Fundamentally, she must not be well. But such dreams every seventh day? And what might he do? Spend every Sabbath night like this, indefinitely? There would be scandal in two or three weeks at the least.

He looked into the fire, reduced now to red and black coals in the shape of disintegrating logs. He knew he should rise, stir the coals, stoke his own fire, but he was too tired. He pulled his blanket more tightly around him. His legs resting on logs he should have set into the fire, he dozed sprawling in the chair and slipped into deep sleep.

When the family arose in the morning they did not wake him. He might have been some sickly elderly uncle asleep in his chair before the hearth as they went about their business. He did not awake until noon, but just as he was coming up out of the nothingness of deep sleep, he began to dream.

He was bathed in May sunlight, and then realized that he stood in a flowering orchard. Orioles sang in the trees and the buzzing and flipping sounds of bees and hummingbirds seemed magnified, as if his sense of hearing were tuned to a most unnatural degree. Then he heard a woman singing a ballad he recognized.

In this merry Maying time,

Now comes in the Summer prime.

Countrey Damsels fresh and gay,

Walke abroade to gather May:

In an evening make a match,

In a morning bowes to fatch.

Well is she that first of all,

Can her lover soonest call,

Meeting him without the towne,

Where he gives his Love a gowne.

Tib was in a gowne of gray,

Tom he had her at a bay.

Hand in hand they take their way,

Catching many a rundelay,

Greeting her with a smile,

Kissing her at every stile.

Then he leades her to the Spring

Where the Primrose reigneth king.

Upon a bed of Violets blew,

Downe he throwes his Lover true.

She puts finger in the eye,

And checkes him for his qualitie.

She bids him to her mothers house,

To Cakes & Creame & Country souce.

He must tell her all his mind,

But she will sigh and stay behind.

Such a countrey play as this,

The maids of our town cannot miss. . . .

The woman came out from the cover of the far trees and began to walk in his direction. It was Elizabeth Higgins. As she walked past him—unaware of him, still singing—he hid behind a tree full of flowers.

Thou at the first I liked well,

Cakes and Creame do make me swell.

This pretty maiden waxeth big:

See what ‘tis to play the Rig.

Up she deckes her white and cleene,

To trace the medowes fresh and green:

Or to the good towne she will wend

Where she points to meet her friend.

Her gowne was tuckt above the knee,

Her milkwhite smock that you may see.

Thus her amorus Love and she,

Sports from eight a clocke till three:

All the while the Cuckow sings,

Towards the evening home she flings,

And brings with her an Oaken bow,

With a Country Cake or two.

Straight she tels a solemne tale,

How she heard the Nightengale,

And how ech medow greenly springs:

But yet not how the Cuckow sings. . . .

Then he noticed a man emerging from the trees at the other end of the orchard. She drew closer to this man, who now stepped fully into the light, and Browne realized that the man was Balthazar Coffin. She was not the least surprised or afraid. Indeed, they spoke pleasantly to one another as old friends. He stopped and she moved very close to him as they spoke. He smiled; he folded his hands behind him.

Later, he drew out one hand and gave her a little red book, which Browne recognized as Kathrin Coffin's journal. As she took the book with one hand, she reached her other hand into his codpiece, which Browne suddenly realized had become grotesquely enlarged, as if belonging to some buffoon in a rustic morality play.

Thus the Robin and the Thrush,

Musicke make in every bush.

While they charme their prety notes,

Young men hurle up maidens cotes.

But 'cause I will do them no wrong,

Here I end my Maying song,

And wish my friends take heed in time.

How they spend their Summers prime.

Browne began to panic, but just as he fought to catch his breath, he awoke to Elizabeth Higgins shaking him. Startled, nauseous with fatigue, he looked up at her.

“You cried out,” she said, and smiled at him. “Would you like to lie down? You need sleep, Mr. Browne. It is just past mid-day.”

Half awake, he continued to stare at her. For a moment he believed in his dream, that she had been Coffin's lover, that he had tormented her in outrage at Jared Higgins' trespasses against him. Gradually he grew more awake, the dream receded, and he was increasingly able to separate her from the figures in his dream. He struggled to stand up, stretched, and began to gather his things that he might leave.

“No, thank you, Goody Higgins. I have much to do myself today and cannot afford to sleep away the afternoon as well.”

“If you say so,” she said. “How can I thank you for being with us?”

“We need to think more of what to do now. But please thank me no further. It is enough to help you through this.” He waved his arm toward the other room. “I must be off.” He was fully awake but confused and tired.

She stopped him a moment and pulled the red book from under her shawl, as if it had been in some pocket hanging out of sight. He gave a start, but then becalmed himself and took the offered book.

As he stepped out into the dooryard, he bent and scooped up a handful of snow to press against his face. The snow and the walk home braced him, made him clear and alert finally. He forced the previous night and his dream completely out of his thoughts.

Closeted in his study, he worked all afternoon on correspondence, accounts, legal documents of sale and agreement. But an hour or so after darkness had returned, he grew tired of
working in the bad light and sat back to rest his eyes. Then the details of his dream returned to him. He could face it as a dream. But he could not avoid the feeling that the dream had significance. What it signified he could not begin to say. “We have dreamed a dream, and there is no interpreter of it. . . . Do not interpretations belong to God?”

He heard Cole's voice again telling him from some previous discussion of the law: “Richard, fornication and adultery, taken together, are the most common crimes in these colonies. Any magistrate will tell you the same. And though I have not studied it, I believe there are as many ‘early' babies—six, seven, eight months—as there are babies born to a woman's full time. Now, why is that, Richard?”

He could not recall his response. And he believed he had even less of an answer now than he must have had then. He had heard the litany of lusts, of wives and daughters and their paramours—others' husbands, lads, servants, and of course the transient seamen, soldiers, and Indians, and even some of the ministers, one or two notorious for aging lecherously. There are good people, of course, he thought. But were some gods to look down on all the lusty antics and falsehoods of mankind, they would surely laugh. However tragic the issue of such goings on to men, women, and children in their individual lives, the gods—he saw them as Olympians at the moment—are laughing. Is not comedy the best approach? The bright lines of Jonson occurred to him:

'Tis no sinne, loves fruit to steale,

But the sweet theft to reveale:

To be taken, to be seene,

These have crimes accounted beene.

But then his mood changed again and the lines did not reflect a feeling of bitterness, a strange cynicism and even anger. Why was he feeling this way?

There was more at stake here than merely being caught, perhaps, he thought, trying to account for this bitterness at the human sexual comedy. It was the not infrequent tragic issue of our hidden indiscretions that bothered him at the moment. The tragic face of the same mask. “If I find in Sodom fifty righteous within the city, then will I spare all the place for their sakes.”

Could so much of peoples' lives remain hidden from him? Had everyone at Robinson's Falls and its environs shown him only so much as they had wanted him to see? Had he been both the poppet in their drama and the hoodwinked groundling? The truth, he told himself, is always difficult to know. But is it impossible to know? In its completeness, perhaps. Yet truth can be approached, grasped in part, through trial and labor.

His dream of Elizabeth and Balthazar ran smack up against everything he had seen, known, and believed of her; against every feeling, impression, witness. Could so much of the nature of her person and her life have remained hidden from him? Is that what his dream signified?

Impossible. There were limits even to comedy; restraints, boundaries between the real and unreal, even if one granted with the common consent that the boundaries between the natural and supernatural were unclear and, at times, fordable.

But just as he was discounting the thought of Elizabeth Higgins' duplicity and adultery, and feeling comfortable and on stable ground again, another terrible thought came to him. Coffin had, in the dream, handed her the journal, with that strange, self-satisfied smile on his face. What possibility might that signify? Might he not have fabricated the entire journal himself? Another string to jerk the unwary poppet? Or the two of them together? No. In his mind now he acquitted Elizabeth Higgins of the worst. But Balthazar Coffin was surely another matter. His guilt might be great, as the legacy left to himself hinted. But then, he thought, what would be the purpose in concocting such a journal? What benefit to Coffin? He could
not dwell on the possible reasons and benefits. He was becoming frightened and confused. His mind turned instead to the various problems with the testimony of others that he had seen, even the original depositions of, for example, Shaw.

He stood up from his chair and paced about, trying to force his mind off of everything associated with the death of Mistress Coffin. He was so confused and so terrified at the thought of having uncovered nothing real that he could not bear it any longer. He did not know what to think. He could see no way of proceeding further.

He noticed that he was perspiring. Was he being driven mad himself? Had he long since entered her nightmare to be swallowed by it?

He told himself that he could not continue. Things seemed to be moving beyond his power to contain them. He must turn her over to the Reverend Vaughan; this was more properly within his province.

He ran downstairs, bundled himself in heavy clothes, and went out into the night. It was still clear and frigid in the aftermath of the previous day's big, fast-moving storm. He tried to force his mind back to his own work while he walked where the snow had been trampled. But somehow the voice in him kept leading him elsewhere, and he began to ask himself if Kathrin Coffin was not the completely innocent victim of some conspiracy against her, with her own husband the archconspirator. Might she not be a woman murdered by her husband and his agents for no plausible reason from the surface of their lives?

Yet how might such a theory undermine the innocence of Goody Higgins! He had nothing against her, no. And was it not her children who had suffered and died, her family broken, peace disrupted, her heart torn? He was for the moment comforted by this thought. At the moment, indeed, Elizabeth Higgins and Mr. Cole seemed the only solid people in the New
World. Yet, he finally had to ask himself, do we not bring on so much of our suffering ourselves? Is it not in our natures to cross our own best interests? To bring on so much of our own suffering, to say nothing of the suffering we cause others. Again and again our worst natures cross our best.

He felt suddenly so helpless that he began to weep. He stopped, leaned his arms and face against a tree and wept out of his confusion, his fatigue, his sorrow for everyone, for all the harshness and loss and pain caused by our worst, and truest, nature. All these defects he pictured as a host of infant souls, the souls of all the secret children that had been murdered at their very births.