Scarlet Widow Read online

  ‘Did you remove them?’

  ‘I took out just the one piece, for you to see.’

  ‘You didn’t take it into the house, I hope?’

  ‘Yes, why? Did I do wrong?’

  ‘You weren’t to know, my dearest. But we must remove it from the house at once. It is a piece of Satan’s mirror, through which the Devil can see us as clearly as we can see ourselves.’

  He looked around at the pigs and shook his head. ‘This is plainly the work of some witch.’

  ‘A witch? You really think so?’

  ‘Believe me, Bea, Satan is still doing everything he can to prevent us from establishing our faith in this country, and as usual he is using weak and immoral people as his instruments. We were discussing it only today, at the parish meeting, and trying to decide what steps we could take to defend ourselves.’

  ‘But why would anybody kill our pigs? What would be the point of it?’

  ‘I really don’t know, my dearest. Perhaps it’s because I’m a pastor. Shake the roots, Satan surmises, and the whole tree will tremble and all of its fruit fall to the ground and spoil.’

  ‘You don’t really think it could have been a witch?’ asked Beatrice. ‘I mean, look what happened in Salem. So many poor women were hanged for witchery but every one of them was shown in the end to be innocent.’

  ‘I know, yes,’ said Francis. ‘But this is quite different. What happened in Salem was common hysteria. There was no material evidence, only hearsay.

  ‘But here, look, we have the material evidence lying before us, and nothing could be more material than five dead pigs. They have no marks on them, have they? They show no sign of sickness. But they all have these pieces of looking-glass on their tongues. What other conclusion can we come to?’

  They stood for a few moments longer looking at the pigs and then walked back along the garden path. Beatrice went into the kitchen and Francis followed her. ‘So what can we possibly do?’ she asked him. ‘If this person is so determined to do us harm, witch or not, how can we protect ourselves?’

  Francis went over to the kitchen table where Beatrice had left the triangular piece of mirror. ‘Is this it?’ he asked. He bent over it so that he could see his eye reflected in it, but he didn’t touch it. ‘Our first urgency is to bury this outside so that Satan is unable to see where we are or what we are doing. Once that is done, I will bless this house and pray to the Lord to be our shield against anyone who wishes us evil.’

  He picked up a damp grey cotton rag from the side of the washtub and wrapped it around the piece of mirror. He took it outside, with Beatrice carrying the lantern for him so that he could see his way. It was completely dark now because the clouds had rolled right over to the eastern horizon, so that no stars were visible. Using the garden trowel, Francis dug a hole in the earth next to the paddock fence and dropped the piece of mirror into it. Kingdom came up to the fence and whinnied, as if he were asking them what they were doing.

  ‘There,’ said Francis. ‘We have blindfolded his Satanic Majesty, at least for now. Tomorrow morning early I will ask Jubal to help us burn the pigs to ashes.’

  ‘Burn them? Can’t we just bury them?’

  ‘The blowflies will have laid their eggs in them, and their larvae will hatch, and when those larvae in turn become blowflies they will carry the Devil’s infection in their spittle. If they enter the house and settle on our food, then we could be infected with it, too.’

  ‘What about the witch?’ asked Beatrice.

  ‘I will make discreet enquiries of the men in the village, and perhaps I can ask you to do the same among the women. I know how much they like to gossip. Maybe some goodwife has overheard her neighbour spreading slanders about us, or seen her behaving strangely – brewing up unusual potions or talking to dogs or suchlike.’

  ‘It’s not someone we know, surely? I can’t think of anybody who would wish us ill.’

  ‘I’m keeping an open mind, Bea. There are several women in this village who are not malevolent in themselves but have the weakness of character to lay them open to being suborned by Satan. Goody Merrow, for one, or the Widow Belknap. I passed the Widow Belknap’s cottage last week and heard her singing to her goat. A love song, too, as if that on its own were not profanity enough.’

  Once they were back in the kitchen Beatrice patted some of the dust from the shoulders of his coat and said, ‘Why don’t you change out of those clothes, my dear, and I will serve up our supper? Go in to see little Noah, too. He was out in the garden most of the day, picking strawberries for me. I think he ate as many as he picked, but we have more than enough for our meal tonight.’

  She stoked the wood-burning Franklin stove to warm up the big iron pot of chicken stew that she had made that afternoon, while Francis went up to their chamber. She could hear him creaking about upstairs before he eventually came down wearing his banyan, an ankle-length cotton gown with a blue diamond pattern on it, which he usually wore in the evening, or when walking through the orchard seeking inspiration for his sermons.

  ‘Did you see Noah?’ asked Beatrice as they sat down at the table.

  Francis nodded. ‘He is a blessing from God, Bea. Such an angelic little boy. I do not know if I could ever forgive myself if some harm were to come to him because of me.’

  ‘No harm will come to him, Francis, not so long as I am here to watch over him, I promise you.’

  ‘I don’t know, Bea. It’s not just our pigs. At our meeting today, I heard of many disturbing things that have been happening in our parish lately. John Mechison said that in Dover five newborn infants have died within the past three weeks for no accountable reason. Several orchards in Ipswich have been stricken by some blight that blackens all of their fruit, both apples and pears, and in Londonderry dozens of cattle have fallen sick. It is almost as if the very air we breathe has become tainted.’

  He looked across the table at her, and in the candlelight Beatrice saw something in his eyes that she had never seen before, even when they first set sail for New England. Uncertainty.

  She laid her hand on his, and then he laid his other hand on top of hers, but it seemed to her that he was seeking reassurance for himself, rather than for her.

  ‘I confess that I am frightened,’ he said. ‘I know that God will shield us, but I wish I knew against what. It is the unknown that unsettles me the most.’

  Beatrice ladled chicken and asparagus and potatoes into his bowl. Then she cut a quarter of fresh rye loaf for him and passed it over, with the brown stone jar of butter.

  Francis clasped his hands together, closed his eyes and bowed his head. ‘Dear Lord,’ he said, ‘we thank Thee for this day and for this sustenance. We thank Thee for all of Thy blessings and humbly ask for Thy deliverance from whatever evil is arrived at our door. Amen.’

  *

  That night it was so hot and airless in their bedchamber that they left the window wide open. Beatrice was exhausted and her back ached from planting nine long rows of beans and cutting asparagus, but she found it impossible to sleep. She couldn’t help thinking about the dead pigs with the fragments of mirror stuck to their tongues, and who might have given them the Devil’s Communion. At the same time, however, she couldn’t help asking herself how such a communion could possibly have killed them.

  Beatrice believed in God and Satan, but her father had brought her up always to question the inexplicable. Just because you can’t work out how something is done, my little Bea, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s magic.

  She was reminded of St Luke’s account in the Bible of the Gadarene swine – when Jesus exorcized a man possessed by demons by transferring them into a herd of pigs, which then all rushed over a cliff and drowned in a lake. Maybe the slaughter of their pigs had been a deliberate mockery of Jesus’s demonstration of His power over evil. But unlike the Gadarene swine, she could not see any reason why their pigs had died, apart from witchcraft, or imagine who might have killed them.

  For all she knew, th
at same person might be creeping around their house even now, in the darkness, carrying a bagful of broken mirrors. In the morning, she might find all of their geese and chickens dead, or Kingdom lying dead in his paddock.

  She listened, but all she could hear was an owl hooting and the endless scissoring of insects.

  *

  She had only just fallen asleep when she was woken up again. Francis had reached across the bed in the darkness and lifted one side of her nightgown. She opened her eyes, but she didn’t move, and she continued to breathe steadily, as if she were still sleeping.

  He cupped her right breast in his hand and gently tugged at her nipple, which stiffened and knurled. Then he ran his fingers down her side, making her shiver when he reached her hip. But still she lay motionless and still she kept on breathing deep and slow. She is not dead, but sleepeth.

  He parted her thighs and lifted himself up so that he was kneeling between them. Then, with a struggle, he reached behind him and pulled his nightshirt over his head and dropped it on to the floor. She couldn’t see him in the darkness but she felt him as he leaned forward and guided himself into her. She was warm and slippery by now, and he slid in easily, until she felt the crispness of his hair pressing against hers.

  ‘Bea?’ he said, so close that she could feel his breath on her face.

  ‘What is it, Francis?’

  ‘I love you,’ he said. ‘I love you till death.’

  She reached her arms around him and kissed his nose before she found his lips.

  ‘And I you, my dearest,’ she told him. ‘And I you.’

  Twelve

  Soon after the sun came up the following morning, their labourer, Jubal, and his younger brother, Caleb, dragged the dead pigs out of the pen and across to the far side of the rough triangular field behind their vegetable garden.

  There they built a pyre of shagbark hickory branches and heaved the bodies on top of it, covering them up with more branches. Then they poured whale oil over them, but before they set them alight Francis opened the mouth of every one of them and carefully removed the pieces of mirror, which he dropped into a blue cotton offertory bag, ready for burying next to the piece he had buried the evening before.

  Mirror glass might be blackened by smoke, but it wouldn’t burn, and through every fragment Satan would be able to spy on them.

  Both Francis and Beatrice had busy mornings ahead of them. Francis had to go to the village to see to the needs of Goody Jenkins, who was dying of consumption, while Beatrice had to dress and feed Noah and then turn her attention to sewing and knitting and ironing her aprons and Francis’s shirts. She also had fresh bread to bake and beans to be trimmed and salted.

  All the same, they stood side by side in the field for a while to watch the fire crackle, and the smoke rise up through the trees, with shafts of sunlight playing through them as if they were the windows of a church.

  ‘We will have to replace these poor animals,’ said Francis. ‘We won’t be able to last through the winter without hams and bacon and lard.’

  ‘Can we afford them?’ asked Beatrice. The pigs themselves had caught fire now, with a strong smell of scorching hair, and she held up her apron over her face because the smoke was making her cough.

  ‘Jubal!’ she called out. ‘When you and Caleb have finished, come into the kitchen for breakfast.’

  She started to walk back to the house, where Mary had already pegged out Noah’s freshly washed clouts on the line outside the kitchen.

  It was going to be another hot day. The only clouds in the sky were thin and wispy, and she could hear the soft, feverish drumming of grouse in the woods. She had never before thought that the sound of them beating their wings like that was threatening, but this morning she felt as if it had a renewed urgency about it. Watch out! Watch out! Evil is about!

  They had almost reached the door when they heard the jingling sound of a horse and saw a stockily built man riding towards them down their driveway. He was dressed all in brown, with a floppy brown Monmouth cap, and a brown shirt and brown leather sleeveless jerkin. His britches and his boots were brown and even his horse was a shiny chestnut colour.

  ‘Reverend Scarlet!’ he shouted out in a rasping voice. ‘Reverend Scarlet!’

  Francis and Beatrice waited while he came jogging up to them. It was Henry Mendum, a dairy farmer whose estate lay to the north-east of the village. He was one of the wealthiest and most influential of Francis’s congregation. He was hot, because he was so fat and was riding at a trot, but his face was always a dark shade of crimson. His head put Beatrice in mind of a large joint of rare roasted beef, but she was never uncharitable enough to say so, even to Francis. His pale green eyes were bulging and his forehead was bursting with perspiration.

  ‘Reverend Scarlet! It’s a disaster!’ he said as he heaved himself out of the saddle. ‘I shall be ruined!’

  ‘What’s happened, Henry? Please, my dear friend – come inside. It’s much cooler.’

  ‘My Devons, reverend! My pedigree Devons!’

  Henry Mendum tied his horse to the split-rail fence and followed Beatrice into the house. She led him through to the parlour, where Mary was sitting, sewing a smock. Mary stood up and curtseyed, and Beatrice said, ‘Please, Mary, bring Mr Mendum a glass of apple juice, would you?’

  Henry Mendum dragged out a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his face. ‘They have all fallen sick! All twenty-nine of them! When the girls went to milk them this morning, they found them all lying around on the ground, labouring for breath!’

  ‘So, what ails them?’ asked Francis. ‘I don’t see how I can help you. I know very little of cattle, I regret, except for what is said in the Bible about them.’

  Henry Mendum sat down in one of the wheelback chairs and took the glass of apple juice that Mary offered him. He drank it thirstily and then belched, and belched again, and wiped his mouth with his handkerchief, and sniffed.

  ‘I thought at first they might be suffering from the grass staggers,’ he said. ‘Some of my Linebacks were affected last spring, but that was when the grass was new and very lush because of the rain. My Devons, though, they’ve all been feeding well and there’s no sign around them that they’ve been thrashing, so as far as I can tell they have not been having convulsions.

  ‘It is not the scour because they have passed no foul movements, and it is not the pasture bloat. Neither are they infected with lungworms or sucking lice.’

  ‘Did you send for Andrew Pepperill?’

  ‘That cow-leech? I wouldn’t trust Andrew Pepperill with a dying rat. Did you hear what he did to Goody Bradstreet’s cow? Bled it, purged it, blistered and fired it, and caused it more pain than any sickness could have done, and still it died. My Devons are far too valuable for such mistreatment.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I believe that you might be the only man you who can help me, Reverend Scarlet. I strongly suspect that what has happened to my Devons may be the same thing that has befallen your pigs.’

  ‘I’m sorry? You know about our pigs?’

  ‘Well, of course, my dear reverend. The whole village knows about your pigs.’

  Mary quickly picked up Henry Mendum’s empty glass and said, ‘More apple juice, sir?’ Her cheeks were blushing almost as crimson as his.

  ‘Mary,’ said Beatrice.

  ‘Yes, ma’am?’

  ‘When you went to the village yesterday afternoon for basket salt, who did you speak to?’

  ‘Only Goody Pearson, when she served me.’

  ‘And did you tell Goody Pearson about our pigs, and how we found them dead?’

  ‘I may have mentioned it. Yes, I believe I did.’

  ‘Oh, Mary! For pity’s sake! Did you tell her about the mirrors?’

  Mary nodded, blushing even more than before. Beatrice put her arm around her shoulders and gave her an affectionate squeeze. ‘You are a noodle, aren’t you? You might as well have told the Gazette as Goody Pearson!’

  Henry Mendum said, ‘Don
’t be hard on the girl, Beatrice. It is better to be aware that the Devil is among us, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘But did any of your cows have pieces of broken mirror on their tongues?’ Beatrice asked him.

  Henry Mendum shook his head. ‘No, no they didn’t. But my cows are not yet dead, so perhaps they were spared the unholy communion that was given to your pigs, and only cursed.’

  ‘They have no obvious sign of injury?’

  ‘None. Having said that, though, they are still far too sick even to stand up – and there is something that I would ask you to come and look at, reverend, and tell me what you make of it. Something that disturbs me greatly.’

  ‘What is it?’ asked Francis.

  ‘I think you need to see it for yourself,’ said Henry Mendum, lifting himself out of his chair. ‘I am by no means a superstitious man, reverend, and I would very much dislike to be accused of having an imagination.’

  Francis took out his pocket watch. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘I think that Goody Jenkins will be able to postpone her passing for a little while longer.’ He went out into the hallway and took down his wide-brimmed pastor’s hat. He was wearing his long black vest over his loose white shirt, but the day was too warm for him to put on his coat.

  Beatrice stood up and said, ‘Francis, let me come too.’

  Henry Mendum looked across at Francis with one bushy eyebrow lifted, as if to say why on earth should we take your wife with us? How could a woman possibly know anything about cattle sickness? Besides, she must have plenty of unfinished chores here at home.

  Beatrice saw the look on his face and said, ‘My father was a man of science, Henry. He taught me from a very early age never to accept anything at face value. Some things that appear at first sight to be supernatural can quite often turn out to have the most humdrum of explanations.’

  ‘Your pigs all died with broken mirrors on their tongues,’ Henry Mendum retorted. ‘If that wasn’t some witch’s work on behalf of the Devil, what would be your humdrum explanation of that?’