The Strange Death of Mistress Coffin (26 page)

“Yes, Father,” Apphia said.

“You can talk to us, Father,” Aaron added. “We can help with this burden.”

“Father, we wish to learn more ourselves,” Apphia said.

“More?” her father asked.

“About her. About both of you,” she said.

“Who knows her better than you two?” he asked.

“We knew her, yes of course, Father, but there was so much of her life we did not know,” she added.

“She loved us,” Aaron added, “and we her. But Apphia means we knew her not as her other children, in the earlier days.”

“Neither of you ever told us what happened to Mother's first husband,” Apphia added, “even when we asked. We know little of her people in England, even though Aaron has traveled to Old England with you.” Apphia stopped and looked at her father as he sat down again at his table. “Something happened, long ago, Father. Can you finally tell us what it was?”

Richard Browne motioned for his children to be seated. He said nothing for some minutes, only looked down at the papers before him. When he began to speak his voice was so soft they could hardly hear his words: “I suppose you should know some of these matters now.” He looked up at his children. “It seems, no it is, another life. It is not our life, our life in this town.” He waved his arm about as if to indicate the street, the small and great houses, the port itself, and all the ships and earnest people of trade.

“Your mother,” he continued, “was a strong woman. When we first met she suffered great distress and impoverishment, which you shall never or fully understand. Nor will I, to be honest.” He shifted in his seat, leaned back to look at his patient children, and began to tell what he knew of the death of Mistress Coffin, of the small success and larger failures of his efforts on Elizabeth Higgins' and Jonathan Cole's behalf.

He spoke for more than an hour, and when he had finished
his children were silent, expecting him to continue. But Browne could say no more.

“And so you had to keep a portion of the truth from Mr. Cole?” Aaron asked finally to stop the silence.

“For a time,” his father answered. “He learned part of the truth—Jared Higgins deserted his wife and family for a life of savagery—as magistrate in the court that granted your mother's divorce on like grounds. Your mother wouldn't have it any other way. I told him in deposition all I knew of Jared Higgins, and then later I told him privately what I knew of the entire matter. And of course made many excuses for myself for having divulged only partial truths previously.

“What Higgins did to his wife and family was an evil thing,” Browne added. “He seems to have believed his reasons sufficient, the curses laid against him by whatever powers formidable enough, to excuse his behavior. But he had betrayed his wife from the first. Yet I don't know that any of us was free of a share of foolishness and lies.

“Naturally, Mr. Cole would have little of my self-justifications and there grew an irreparable rift between us. Finally, there seemed to your mother and me little else we could do but remove to the Banke, the most reasonable place considering my trade, her cousins, so forth. Even the Reverend Vaughan at first looked upon me as a pariah.

“Just prior to our removal to the Banke and our marriage, I met, at his request, with Mr. Vaughan.” Browne looked up; his eyes wandered about the room. “To tell you the truth, I had nearly forgotten it after all these years. When I came to him he was no longer cordial, as he had remained even in our disagreements, even when I more or less turned your mother over to his more appropriate care. The Reverend Vaughan had come to take a sort of proprietary interest in her it seems. He spoke to me of her gifts, a woman of visions and utterances; he went on in that vein. She had become one of his visible saints,
under his care. As Mr. Vaughan spoke with vehemence of his concern for her, I began to believe he had come to see her as a gift—to himself, perhaps his congregation. A sort of holy vessel. For so he had transformed her visions. A vessel easily damaged once out of the hands of its protector. Or perhaps a vessel for evil, in the wrong hands.

“You see my conceit? She was like the beautiful, magical vessel of some exotic tale. One did not own the vessel; one was granted her for a time. And her gifts were yours only so long as you needed them. I believe now that is how he came to view her then.

“Of course to marry such a woman and take her to a place without a minister of its own again, well, you see how that placed me, in his regard, beyond the pale. But we were married in town here shortly after I had removed my entire household. We joined our households here. What more could I do? I could not face my old benefactor continually as I must had I stayed on. Had I dissembled to gain this woman? One might interpret events that way. Though I've searched the matter in my own heart and do not believe so. Yet does one truly understand one's own motives?”

“And Mother,” Apphia asked, “did she not also charge your dissembling against you?”

“She did, to be sure, and justly,” he answered. “I did not give up, however. Too much had been lost already. And I continued to offer my help in worldly matters. I've never understood exactly how she worked it out in her own mind—she was never able to explain it herself, so far as I know—yet she eventually came to accept my position. We had traveled a long and dangerous road together. I suppose that counted for something. And how explain the way love grows between two people, even in the most improbable of circumstances?

“She confessed to me, after we had been married some years, that as far back as the time we discovered Mr. Coffin's death
she, your mother, had begun to think of me as more than a neighbor or protector. She confessed that my concern and kindness toward her had led her, in those nights when she had difficulty falling asleep, to little half-dreaming fancies about strengthening relations between us. By day, she said, she saw such fancies as preposterous. Yet these innocent dreamings continued harmlessly, fluttering back to her, as she put it, like bright silver birds.

“Something more than dependency had been growing between us in the inexplicable ways it does between men and women. There was, well, a capacity within your mother's nature. How explain it? Say simply that she forgave me.”

“Out of love,” Apphia said, smiling.

“If so, I did not know it at the time.” He looked at each of his and Elizabeth's children again. “She grasped, somehow, the complexities and delicacies of my position, of that world I had entered and which had entangled me. I believe her love and forgiveness blossomed only from the ground of that understanding, clearer than my own, however she attained it. And I can say, dear children, that the love between us, once planted, lasted to the end with a strength I have seldom seen in husbands and wives. I am more proud and lucky in that than in anything else in my life. Love that surmounts the differences, the vices, the pettiness, and the vanities of men and women is the rarest gift. There is more explanation in such a gift than in anything else I can say to you.”

“You have been fortunate, Father,” Aaron said. He sat up straighter in his chair.

“Yes,” Browne answered. He did not wish to recall all that he had lost any further. He stood up and paced about the room as his children sat watching him. He said only, in the course of perhaps five minutes, that he saw no savage's hand in her death now, that he accepted the fact that his wife, in a state of extreme distraction and illness, had taken her own life.

His children said nothing.

Browne moved to his bookcase, scanned the volumes a moment, and took down a relatively slim red book with a golden clasp.

“You might as well know as much as I,” he said. From the book he pulled out several sheets of yellowed paper and handed one to his son, who began to read, silently sharing it with his sister.

Apphia looked up, confused.

“That note,” Browne explained, “fell out among certain of Mr. Coffin's papers sent to me over thirty years ago by Dr. Sedley. Coffin, Sedley, and I are the only ones who have seen it. And the author, of course.”

“So it was Mother who alerted Mr. Coffin, by this accusation?” Apphia asked.

Browne nodded his head and was about to speak when she continued.

“Mother always knew things,” Apphia said.

“She had a sense, like a steeple attracting lightning,” Browne said.

They were all silent again. Apphia and Aaron reworked the patterns of events they had just been told. Apphia spoke first: “A misunderstanding?”

“Yes. As to Mistress Coffin's acts.”

“And Mother, she discovered this, her misunderstanding?” Apphia asked.

“Yes,” Browne said.

“How could she have borne the truth, Father?” Apphia asked.

“At first, somehow she managed to. Now I see that she might have carried it all these years. That it might not have been bearable, after all.”

“It must have eaten at her,” Aaron said, to no one in particular. He shifted in his chair, slowly crossing his legs.

“Lately the bite sharpened, I believe,” Browne said. “I was not sufficiently aware of it, being too enveloped in my own business.

“But I happened across Mistress Coffin's journal again a month or two ago, among volumes I had not consulted in years. Not having read it since our marriage, I was drawn to the journal. So I placed it upon some papers on the table here, intending to return to it at my first opportunity. Perhaps she saw it there, even read it, even came across her letter of accusation again. And this too,” Browne said, handing to Aaron his old fair copy of Balthazar Coffin's will.

Aaron read the will aloud, slowly. Then he asked: “Hadn't you said half of Mr. Coffin's legacy to Mother?”

“Yes,” Browne answered. He looked away from his children, his body seeming to sink against his chair.

“But £112, Father?” Aaron said.

“Yes, that's correct, Aaron. I had told her that amounted to half, so she'd take something, you see.” Now he rose from his chair suddenly and walked to the window.

“It became a commercial decision, finally,” he said. He explained about the growing competition for timberland and sawmills just at that time.

“So mother received but a quarter of the sum,” Aaron said.

“Yes,” Browne said without turning from the window.

“And you told her of this, later I mean?” Apphia asked.

“I did not,” Browne said. No one spoke, so he added: “I never found the courage to tell her.”

“But she would have understood, Father,” Apphia said. “She would have forgiven, as before. And is not marriage a kind of truth? Isn't it honesty between partners, or nothing?”

Looking at his father's silent back, Aaron said: “Sometimes it is necessary to be untrue, for greater good. In rare cases, mind you, but sometimes necessary. Why need mother know? The money was left to Father, after all. Her quarter portion
was a gift, a generosity. The amount, as Father said, was determined by pressing matters of trade.”

“But to live with such untruth between you, all those years?” Apphia asked.

Aaron made a motion with his hand to quiet her, but Apphia seemed not to notice him and pressed on: “Is not a lie a broken stone in the foundation of marriage?”

She looked up at her father's back and suddenly blushed. Her hand rose to her mouth.

“If it is difficult to discover truth,” Browne said without turning, “it is even harder to live truth.”

Neither Apphia nor Aaron responded.

Browne turned toward his children. “No, Apphia is right,” he said. “I did your mother wrong, God help me. I can only hope she never discovered my lack of honesty in this instance, but of course it is possible, even likely, that she did. We'll never be certain.” He pointed to the journal and the papers now tucked back within it. He looked each of his children in the eye in turn. “I should have been more alive to her inmost heart.”

“The Indian wars have caused her great distress,” Aaron put in immediately. “She suffered in her heart under God's scourge of our people.”

“That's true, also,” Browne said. “Perhaps too many things came to press upon her. She was distraught as well by the drought and terrible winter. She seems to have seen some rebuke from God in it all.”

The room was silent again. Browne lowered his head like a man fatigued beyond restoration.

“Yet I cannot see,” Aaron finally said, “that Mother would ever grow so separate from her God that she would capitulate to such diabolical temptation, such apostacy, as to take her own life. That is unthinkable, Father.”

“Yes,” Browne said, “what you say is true, Aaron. Yet everything is possible to a distracted and melancholic mind.”

No one knew what to say next, but silence grew intolerable. Aaron finally spoke against the Indians, in the manner common to the time.

Browne too found that he had become capable of mouthing the same phrases and sentiments. Everywhere now white people spoke of Indians this way.

“‘Oh, daughter of Babylon,'” Browne said, “‘who art to be destroyed: happy shall be he that rewarded thee, as thou hast served us. Happy shall he be that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.'”

Outside Richard Browne's window the daylight was taking on an evening hue now and the clatter from the wharves and markets was subsiding. He felt thankful, for some reason he could not name and did not care to pursue, that day was done. There was also a feeling of relief that had come from speaking to his children. They were silent as he looked out over a few rooftops to the masts of ships in their berths, some of which would be unloading and loading into the night. There were ships at port that he had built or bought. The thought comforted him at the moment. Then without speaking he turned, went to a cabinet, and removed a bottle of claret. He began to pour a substantial draft into a bowl. He sipped from the bowl and passed it to his children, who stood up and sipped from the bowl in turn. When Aaron passed the bowl back to his father, the old man raised the bowl slightly and toasted his wife, Elizabeth. He then added that they must continue their lives and labors together, drawing now greater strength from one another.