Familiar Spirits (17 page)

shoulder. But the oblivion did not last for long. The fire burned low in the hearth; it lay like a hundred hot red eyes on the blackened stones watching her sleeping. The gathering cold stirred her and she began to dream.

At first her dream was disconnected and static, like a succession of portraits. She envisioned the Waites, the husband alive and grim of expression, standing next to his wife, gaunt and cross. She saw the Crispins. Matthew. Her daughter Elizabeth, holding her child. The images, disconnected logically, had a unifying anxiety. She had a terrible sense of danger, enough to cause her mental pain but not enough to jerk her into waking.

At length her visions coalesced into a disturbing dream of unusual vividness in which were figured herself and her friend Mrs. Monks. The two women were standing before the door of the Crispins’ house. Joan knocked and it was a very long time before there was a response. Finally the door opened and they were admitted by a serving girl, whose small pale features Joan dimly recalled. The girl’s manner was not rude but it did inspire in Joan a certain unease that went with her up the stairs, where they found a bedchamber richly laid out and spacious—so spacious Joan was sure it must fill the entire upper part of the house. There was a great ornate hearth on one wall, and close-woven tapestries with perplexing allegories on the other. The floor was richly carpeted, and on the mantelpiece above the hearth no less than a dozen German clocks of exquisite design ticked loudly, although each showed a different time. The massive four-poster bed in the center of the room now drew her attention. The curtains had been pulled back, and Joan could see that the bed was occupied by an ancient woman taking rasping breaths, each so deeply and painfully drawn that it seemed to be her last. Somehow Joan knew this poor ailing creature was Jane Crispin, although there was no basis for the identification in the woman’s ghastly appearance. Joan moved across the room toward the bed. The ancient woman wore a loose-fitting shift that exposed her bony yellowed shoulders and shrunken paps. The woman emitted a foul odor. Despite her revulsion, Joan

went up to the bed and asked its occupant, who appeared to be sleeping, if there was anything she wanted.

At the sound of Joan’s voice, the old woman’s eyes opened slowly and turned in Joan’s direction. Her eyes were blue and aqueous. Was it Joan’s imagination that in the pupils she could see her own image, small and confined like a miniature in a locket? Surely she wasn’t standing so close.

The woman’s skin was mottled and drawn tight against the skull. She seemed wasted by some mysterious ailment, for the deterioration Joan observed, which both repelled and fascinated her, she was certain was something more insidious than the mere devastation of years.

The parched lips moved in response to Joan’s question but made no sound. Joan repeated, “Dear Mrs. Crispin, is there anything you need?”

In her dream she heard her own voice small and distant, and it gave her the eerie feeling of being detached from herself, her body one place and her intellectual being farther off. Her body turned—she saw rather than felt it move—to see how her friend Mrs. Monks was taking in this piteous spectacle.

But Mrs. Monks, who Joan was sure had entered the room with her, had vanished.

Suddenly she was aware of how damp and cold the room seemed despite the large, crackling fire in a hearth large enough to roast an ox in. She turned her attention again to the bed and the old woman, and was now overcome with a terrible dread. Her dread was that at any moment the woman would rise from the bed and embrace her and she would feel the rotting body and unspeakably foul breath next to her.

The very thought made her sick, yet she was ashamed to think it. This was no leper before her, but her friend. And even if it were a leper or, almost the worse, a poor plague-inflicted stranger, did not Christian charity require more of her than abject fear of infection?

As she pondered the moral implications of her revulsion, it did not occur to her to ask the woman—whom she still believed to be Jane Crispin—how it was that she had grown so

old and decrepit since their last meeting. Instead, Joan began to search the room for a vessel of water to relieve her friend’s parched lips. This took quite a while. The room was so filled with
things,
more now than she had first noticed upon entering it. Everywhere she looked, there were
things
—statuary, plate, ornate chests, tapestries—multiplying by the minute, as though whatever Joan conceived of immediately materialized as a furnishing of the room. And on the mantelpiece—how grand it was!—there now appeared more German clocks than before, all still showing different times and ticking so loudly she could hardly hear herself think.

Then they stopped ticking. Joan heard a door open behind her and was about to turn to see who had entered, hoping that it would be Mrs. Monks, when she noticed the expression of alarm on the old woman’s face. A yellow, bony arm was thrust out from the coverlet and a quivering hand was pointed toward the door.

Now Joan did turn, and saw that the serving girl who had admitted her had returned. The girl’s face was lighted with a sinister smile, at once both mocking and vengeful. And Joan knew in that instant, knew in the depths of her being, that the servant was somehow responsible for her mistress’s decaying condition. Joan knew this and she also knew who the servant was.

Suddenly all the things in the room—statues, plate, tapestries, everything—began to fly around the room like a flock of birds sent to wing by a sudden fright. And through this strange welter, she saw the servant’s face.

It had been transformed into a grinning, mocking death’s-head.

Joan woke, terrified. It took her some time to collect herself. The dream—it had been a nightmare of the first order—had left behind it a residue of nausea and shock, and she knew if she tried to rise from her stool her legs would buckle under her. She noticed that the fire in the kitchen had nearly died and a chill had settled in the room—the chill she had experienced in her dream. Her clothing was damp with sweat. Her heart still racing, Joan tried to compose and in-

terpret the confused elements of her vision—Mrs. Monks’s vanishing, Jane Crispin’s aged appearance, the servant with the sinister smile, looking as though she understood full well what malady had infected her mistress. The awful odor of the charnel house. The odor of putrescent flesh.

Her effort produced only a deeper stupor of thought. She rose steadily, bracing herself by holding one hand against the wall, and reached down to put another faggot on the fire. She poked in the embers until the faggot spurted with a steady flame, and then she sat down again. She remained so for a while until her heartbeat returned to its regular pace; then she picked up the stitchery she had dropped to the floor, hoping to find solace in this familiar work, an emblem of the world of waking that she hoped to return to.

But it was a vain wish, the returning. It was as though the dream and its horrors would not confine themselves to sleep. She could not rid herself of the disturbing images or reckon what they meant.

She put her stitchery aside. She had no heart for it now. She sat staring into the fire, mesmerized by the flames’ erratic dance. The heaviness of her ignorance and confusion was upon her, and it was some time before she became aware of the tapping, too insistent and regular to be the wind.

She turned to see from whence it came, the signal, and almost by instinct looked first at the window that gave a view of the back parts of the house. The curtains were pulled across it, and mechanically she got up and opened them.

She heard the tapping again. In the glass panes now exposed to the firelight, she saw her reflection move like a shadow, and then, merging with her shadow, materializing out of the darkness of the yard, a pale face pressed so close against the window that Joan thought she could feel the warm breath through the thin panes.

It
was nearly nine o’clock when Matthew arrived at the Saracen’s Head. The rest of the town had gone to bed, but in this part of Moulsham lights could still be seen inside the windows of taverns and alehouses, and shouts and rude boisterous laughter could be heard. The dark streets and cartways of the neighborhood were inhabited by shadowy figures staggering homeward or to their next dissolute enterprise, or slumped helplessly in the filth of the street.

The tavern itself was a shabby affair with a bad reputation. Upstairs was a notorious brothel. The light and scene of confusion held Matthew in the doorway for a few moments, and if at any time he had wondered what had become of the great crowd of strangers that had flocked to Malcolm Waite’s funeral his question was now answered. Elbow to elbow at the bar were as ill-looking a bunch of roisterers and winebibbers as Matthew ever hoped to see cursing some other town with their presence. The disarray of tables and stools, overturned benches, and glitter of broken glass made it evident the tavern had already been the scene of one brawl during the evening. The air, which was heavy with tobacco smoke, held the lingering pungency of fresh vomit.

No one seemed to take notice of his entrance; all attention was fixed upon two strapping fellows squared off in the middle of the room. One of these Matthew recognized as Will Simple, Thomas Crispin’s foreman at the tannery. The other man was a stranger. Will Simple and the stranger were naked

to the waist, and in the lamplight and haze of tobacco smoke their well-muscled shoulders and chests shone with sweat. The host, a short dumpy man named Snitch with a pocky anguished face, was wedged between them trying to settle the quarrel, whatever it was about. Snitch looked near to soiling his breeches for fear more ruin would come to his precious establishment, which was a scurvy filthy place to begin with. The other patrons egged their favorites on, told the host to let the two combatants have at it, and laid wagers on who should win and whether the loser should be killed or merely maimed.

Matthew surveyed the scene with disgust and apprehension and was about to elbow his way to the center of the room and stop the fight before it started when he saw someone else he knew. It was Ned Hodge, the unemployed handyman and carpenter with whom Matthew had spoken outside the Waite house the day before. Hodge was drunk. He had a queer look on his narrow ugly face and his bald pate glistened as though he had been anointed with oil. It was evident the recognition was mutual. Hodge wended his way toward Matthew until his hot garlicky breath blew strong in Matthew’s face like the effluvia of a midden-heap on a hot day in August.

“Marry, heaven be praised!” Hodge proclaimed, in a high wheedling old woman’s voice. “It’s our constable. Come to the Saracen’s Head to honor the company with his presence.”

Matthew acknowledged Hodge’s rude greeting coolly and made a move to get around him. Hodge blocked his way. “Tell me now, Mr. Stock, how is your good friend Mother Waite, she who gives the evil eye to her neighbors and knows how to rid herself of husbands when she puts her mind to it? She serves your needs, I warrant, since you and she are such great gossips?”

The mention of Mother Waite caught the attention of some of the men standing close at hand, and they turned to look at Matthew suspiciously. More might have followed from Hodge’s question, shouted above the din in the same wheedling voice as before, had the two combatants not decided at that moment to commence battling in earnest. A

flurry of blows and kicks savagely delivered to head, chest, and groin caught the attention of everyone, especially the more drunken of the men. His vision obscured by the onlookers who had pressed in tightly around the fight, Matthew glimpsed the bloody face of the stranger and then, maneuvering closer, he saw Will Simple let fly with a strong right arm that sent his opponent sprawling onto one of the tables, whereupon it collapsed with a huge crash.

“Kill him, Willy!” cried a harsh female voice from somewhere in the room.

“Hell and damnation,” cried another voice, a man’s. “He shall not, else I am no Christian!”

“Look out, he’s got a dagger,” shouted a blowzy slattern perched out of danger on the stairway.

Someone shoved Matthew from behind. He recovered his footing only by seizing the shoulder of a man in front of him. His effort to save himself was wrongly construed as an assault, however, and the man turned sharply, spat out an oath, and took a swing at Matthew’s jaw. The blow clipped Matthew’s ear, his vision blurred, and he felt unsteady on his feet. The stench of tobacco, which he detested, the sharp pain and ringing in his ear, the closeness of the room, and the rankness of sweat—all conspired to undo him. For a moment he stood wobbly, staring stupidly at the man who had struck him. Behind the man, the two fighters had resumed their struggle and seemed well on their way to mutual extinction. The man muttered another oath and turned around to watch the fight, while Matthew nursed his damaged ear and wiped from his eyes the tears of pain that momentarily blurred his vision.

When he could see again, he realized that the fight was winding down. The tanner’s foreman had his opponent on the floor and was pummeling him severely in the face. Hoots and shouts of delight mixed with encouragement and praise for the victor. Matthew pushed forward, ignoring the throbbing pain in his ear, and seized Will Simple by the shoulders. In a loud voice he commanded him to stop. Someone— not Hodge but another—recognized Matthew and cried, “It’s

the constable!” The beating ceased, Will Simple got off the fallen man, and the crowd quieted.