The Strange Death of Mistress Coffin (23 page)

All that was clear to him now was that he had not uncovered what was real. He had succeeded only in finding Jared Higgins, and that had ended in a lie. His own. He and Higgins ended as liars together. One crossed oneself, again and again. Worst overwhelmed best.

He returned home, poured a cup of fine brandy from a bottle his brother had given him as a parting gift, and drank until he was drowsy and forgetful enough to fall asleep. He awoke early, in darkness, his mind racing and heart pounding from the brandy, and rose to look out the window. The stars were still clear and strong. His mind seemed cleared. His trade was what mattered. He must cultivate his own plot. He returned to bed, able to think only about his prospects for trade. To relent was to fail at trade. Just at dawn he fell asleep again.

All that day he worked, convinced that the decision to tend to his own work was the right one. No longer would he torment himself over the true or false nature of Goody Higgins. He would be neighbor, friend, and parallel life. There was too much unsettled, and impractical, to follow Cole's advice about courting her. Their lives lay in other directions. And it was best, fitting, wholly more proper that she turn to the Reverend Mr.
Vaughan in her present strait. By the end of the day he knew he should tell her as much.

He entered her yard in the dark, seeing the dim light from a small window. Unsure of just how he would explain his thoughts to her, he hesitated. He moved toward the window, not entirely aware that he was doing so. When he reached the window, he looked in. Elizabeth Higgins and her children were gathered around the fireplace, each busy in some domestic chore. Suddenly he realized what he was doing and felt like a fool. But as he turned away to retrace his steps home his feelings of foolishness turned to relief. Indeed, he began to feel emptied of the doubt and confusion that had troubled him since spending the night watching and waking for her.

He would have to speak to her soon, he thought, about Mr. Vaughan. But he would not disturb her this night.

Browne knew he had to see Elizabeth Higgins, but it was very easy at the moment to busy himself in other matters. So it was that she again arrived at his door. She had brought him fresh bread and wanted to thank him again. She could not explain it, she said, but she was feeling much better, much less fearful now. And she hoped her fears would trouble him no further. She had seen some footprints about her dooryard and window; these alone troubled her. Did he know what they might mean?

For Richard Browne it was one of those moments when you suddenly step outside your situation, knowing that the moment will pass, yet forced to savor the intensity of your embarrassment. He explained, as close to the truth as he was able, that he had gone to see her two evenings ago in a troubled state of mind, troubled by dreams and forebodings of his own. In his confusion, he said, he found it difficult to knock on her door. He began to think better of it, his visit, just then, and turned to go home when he was drawn by the light in her window. To be sure they were all right since his waking with them, he merely glanced in at the window to set his own mind at ease.

He apologized. “There it is, that explains the footprints. They are the marks of an indecisive fool.”

She looked at him a moment and then laughed. He was startled. Then he laughed with her.
“Misce stultitiam Consiliis brevem—Dulce est desipere in loco,”
he quoted, and then translated, “For
once, be unwise; there is a time when it is sweet to play the fool.”

She laughed again. “Now I have the explanation,” she said, “I am pleased you take such an interest in us, Mr. Browne.” He smiled but looked down in his lingering embarrassment, unable to hold her eye. “But what was it you wanted to speak to me about?”

“Several things,” he said. “Most of which I think better now ought to be left unsaid. But I did want to say that I believe myself unfit for the role I had come to play, as your protector and advisor in these new torments. I was going to suggest that the Reverend Mr. Vaughan might be far more effective in your present distress, as he is your minister and more suitable for handling these troublesome apparitions.”

She looked at him quietly, enlarging his sense of embarrassment again. Then she said: “I was coming to the same belief myself. Not your being unfit, Mr. Browne, but that I have lain my broken life at your door so often I no longer have any right to ask you to indulge me.”

“I did not mean . . .”

“No, Mr. Browne,” she cut him off pleasantly. “You see I agree. I feel this way myself, I say.”

“When I find a song bird that has blown up against my window or door, I try to help the unfortunate creature. But if I believe that things have gone beyond my capacity to help or heal, I seek another who may be more gifted and knowledgeable, or possess the necessary physic. I can do no less for you.”

“Yet no neighbor should become a burden.”

“And so you have not! I have taken up your cause of my own will, please do not forget, not as a mere duty. Every step I have taken is of my own choosing, out of my affections for you and your children, and for Mr. Cole, and then out of my own curiosity. You have never been to me a burden. Yet I find the larger matters in all that I've pursued in your behalf and in my
curiosity have defeated me. I've grown less certain and more confused. Shed too little light. If what little I have been able to accomplish has offered some relief to you, and your children, that must be sufficient for me now.”

“You too quickly shrink the result of what you have done. But I'm pleased by your honesty.”

He felt all his resistance to her, all his faith in returning to his own life completely, beginning to melt and flow toward her. But she quickly added: “I shall ask Mr. Vaughan whether he will help me, as my own heart told me to do.”

“He knows of your past tribulations.”

“Yes. And of your aid.” She turned away from him and gathered some needlework. “I've not told him yet anything of recent trouble.”

“Then speak to him,” Browne said, hoping his voice did not plead too much. “Can we not arrange for the three of us to discuss these apparitions next Sabbath evening? After delivering his sermon again, of course, to his family. We may draw him from his final hours in his study before his deserved rest. At that time we can determine who will watch with you that night.”

“If you think that best, but please don't trouble yourself, Mr. Browne. I can turn to him myself.”

“He will be wanting my experience of this,” Browne said, “and I would see you safe in good hands, Goody Higgins. I am not the proper Shepherd in this matter.”

So it happened that the Reverend Nehemiah Vaughan agreed to champion Elizabeth Higgins in these recent bouts with whatever had begun to accost her. And so it was that these three—Browne, Elizabeth Higgins, and the Reverend Vaughan—came together in her house at the close of the next Lord's Day.

At previous encounters Browne and Vaughan had found certain common interests and understandings. But Browne did not
possess the temperament of faith and fervor that would have put the two men on more intimate terms. Short, grave, and intense, the Reverend Vaughan, a man just into his forties, was a model of the “hard study” ministers of his day. He was considered one of the colonial frontier's greatest Hebricians, and fluent also in Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Syriac. Beyond that Browne knew him as a man who strove after righteousness by his preaching, his labors, and his example of keeping the beast in him tied with a short tether. And if Browne was not himself a covenanted member of the church, he was unlike Elizabeth Higgins in that neither he nor anyone else—above all Mr. Vaughan—would have expected Browne to become a member.

Had not the Reverend Vaughan reproached Richard Browne and all his kind in his sermons? More than once Vaughan preached that merchants had charged planters unfair prices to cover their risks. Browne had to agree that there had been a degree of such practices, but not so much as Vaughan made out.

His mind jumped to a day long ago; he had been sitting about the fire in a tavern with a group of merchants. Pipes in hand, aglow from their cordials, they spoke of the impracticality of John Cotton's old principles of commercial ethics. That pious gentleman had thought it meet in 1639 to protest against such time-worn practices as taking advantage of another's ignorance or necessity for one's personal gain, recouping one's losses by raising prices, or selling as dearly and buying as cheaply as the market would bear. Cotton had witnessed extortion, usury, the overpricing of “foreign commodities,” and the host of ancient excesses, and he thought they might be stopped in this new Canaan by appeal to conscience and to law. But Browne clearly saw in his mind the hearty, laughing merchants, himself included, ridiculing such unworldliness.

Yes, Browne had to admit, even he had raised prices to cover his own risks when he had tried diversifying his trade. In
conversation on such matters, Mr. Vaughan once told Browne: “When the Lord stirred the spirits of his people to come over into this wilderness, it was not for worldly wealth, or a better livelihood here for the outward man. It was to further the reformation of religion according to God's word.” Browne then responded that the Reverend did not understand the background of settlement among the Piscataqua planters. But Mr. Vaughan was not to be convinced so easily.

Nearly from his first acquaintance of Elizabeth Higgins, on the other hand, Mr. Vaughan had designed that she would eventually be accepted into membership in his church. Not for her social status, certainly, but for what he recognized in her of those tremblings in the soul that rose out of her depth and which he hoped to nurture and channel. She had, or so the minister seemed to believe, that ripeness of spirit which sensed and reflected in those bound to the earth the supernal presences and conflicts. If he could but tutor, develop, direct such a gift as hers, he would, he intimated, have a presence of spirit in his parish that few could claim to equal. He would know, of course, that mere ecstacy and vision were never enough, were in themselves no sign of salvation, were indeed as like as not to arouse contention and unholy excesses in the communities where they manifest.

During the meeting at the Higginses' house, Mr. Vaughan spoke to his auditors of the “breathing of Elizabeth's soul after Christ,” of her soul's struggles against dark powers, and of her overcoming threats and temptations and trials. Looking directly into her eyes, his body compressed with assurance and the force of his rapid speech, he assured her that he believed she would be accepted into church membership, if she but desired it, at the next membership hearings. There was no substantial doubt, in his mind, that she would “give good satisfaction” in both private and public testimony.

She promised to consider such an honor, although, as she
said, she harbored doubts as to her worthiness. She agreed that throughout her trials her own salvation had been much on her mind. And she admitted that she hoped earnestly to come fully into the bosom of Christ before, as the minister put it, the trapdoor of death dropped beneath her.

“The Lord is at your elbow,” Mr. Vaughan told her. “He is in this world among us every moment. We have but to turn to Him.”

“I would turn,” she said. She looked down at the table top.

“Then you shall,” he said, his eyes shining. “This life has eternal consequences. That, good woman, is the deepest truth confronting every man, woman, and child. To learn righteousness—
that
is the great trial of each life.”

Browne asked what the minister proposed in her immediate extremity.

“I wake late into the night at my lucubrations, Mr. Browne,” he replied immediately. “Surely I can find such excellent employment here while I see Goody Higgins through whatever passage this night after Sabbath might bring.”

Browne realized that the transition had been made, and with little effort on his part. He himself was no longer prepared to meet such adversaries as she continually placed before him, nor had he been comfortable with the nature of her growing dependency. As he said his good evening, he left them before the fire, the minister already opening biblical texts to her.

During the rest of that winter Browne tried, and largely succeeded, to forget the Coffins and Higginses, and all the relations of events and people that had absorbed him so much. He was gladly immersed in his own work. And it was only during an odd moment of respite—enjoying a cup of sack, noting the lush winter reds of late afternoon sunlight drifting over his bookcloset, sliding into sleep in the night—that he found he
was not as comfortable as he thought he should be by Elizabeth Higgins' growing independence from him and, so far as he knew, her growing dependence upon the Reverend Vaughan.

When the spring of 1652 had fully arrived, he realized that he had seen her only twice, and briefly, since he had left her before the fire with the minister. She was about to be elected into the small circle of actual church membership. But he also concluded, to his discomfort whenever he thought about it, that her fastings and readings, her sessions with Mr. Vaughan, her complete entering of the church's circle of protection, led to “the estrangement,” as he began to put it to himself, between them.