Familiar Spirits (25 page)

“The name of Deity comes readily to your lips, Mrs. Crispin, by which stratagem you hope to convince us that you are not of Satan’s party. But such words are cheap, are hawked at every street corner. They are easily had by rote memory, lisped on the tongue when the occasion requires—

to create a semblance of virtue when indeed there is no virtue at all.”

“That’s true, sir,” answered Jane. “Words are cheap. But if my words are cheap, then so are yours. If words can gloss a lie and make it shine like a verity, then a slander may daub a truth and make it appear a falsehood. But there are facts too, sir, and they are at times more substantial than words. I was dipped in the baptismal font of our church when eight days old, and have lived a Christian all my life. Who judges me may well remember the words of our Saviour: ‘Let him without sin cast the first stone.’”

These remarks of Jane’s caused a murmur in the court and the clerk had to call for silence. In his heavy lawyer’s gown Malvern was sweating profusely, and it was obvious he was growing vexed at Jane Crispin’s responses.

“Very well spoken, Mrs. Crispin,” he said. “I’m sure the court appreciates being preached to by a woman. But let that pass. Tell us now, your sister has made her accompliceship plain by confessing that she knew of Ursula’s meetings, of her craft. In so doing, she has practically confessed to being a witch—”

Jane started to protest, but Malvern hushed her with a wave of his hand and continued forcefully: “It comes to that by order of logic, Mrs. Crispin.
Your sister is a confessed witch! 
Now you, Mistress Eloquence, were that famous witch’s employer. I mean Ursula’s, of most detested memory in this town. Even she whose spirit has come to be called the Chelmsford Horror, to the dismay of honest Christians. What can be said of the mistress who allows her servant such liberties to the detriment of her soul and those of others?”

“I know not your logic, sir, having not been in school,” Jane replied, “but the Scriptures I know, for I have studied them from my youth. Did Jesus not have one follower who betrayed him? If, then, the master is answerable for all that the disciple does, how is it our Lord escapes the blame for Judas’s treachery?”

“What!” exclaimed Malvern, throwing back his hands in mock amazement and laughing hoarsely. “First you preach at

us. Now you would liken yourself to the Son of God! Has the court ever heard such blasphemy as this? This is mere chop logic. Yet the woman claims no learning.”

“Mrs. Crispin,” interrupted the magistrate. “We will have no blasphemous similitudes in this court. Please answer Mr. Malvern’s questions simply and without further resort to sacred writ.”

“Your honor, may a woman not defend herself, then?” Jane asked calmly, turning in the direction of the three judges.

“She may defend herself,” said the magistrate, “but as a woman, not as a man.”

“As a woman,” she said. “I understand, or at least I think I do. Very well, sirs.” She turned to the jury. “Goodmen and neighbors, you have every one known me for a long time as a decent honest woman—as no shrew or backbiter, gossip or railing wife. My tongue I have kept disciplined and, I pray, clean of filth. How can you believe these lies and calumnies inspired by ignorance and malice of my husband’s enemies? Curses against cattle and sheep! Strange characters scrawled upon paper! The Holy Sacrament administered to dogs! Why these are foolish fictions, every one, the fruits of idle—no, addled—brains!”

Several of those who had witnessed against the sisters rose up to protest these characterizations, and for a moment there was a great deal of shouting and name-calling, mostly from the baker’s wife, whose enmity toward the Waites and Crispins was now painfully obvious. “Liar and whore! Devil’s slut!” Mrs. Roundy raged. Over this din, the clerk shouted for order and the magistrate banged his gavel until the handle broke and he was forced to use his fist. Finally, Mrs. Roundy’s husband silenced her and the other irate witnesses resumed their seats. Jane Crispin stared at the hostile faces in the court as though their rage and vile expletives meant nothing at all to her.

‘ Another such outburst and I will have the court cleared of spectators,” growled the magistrate. “Mrs. Crispin, you will answer the questions put to you and say no more to the

jurymen. Let your answers be ‘yea’ or ‘nay.’ Nothing more. Do you understand?”

Jane said she understood. She said she was weary of standing and asked if she might sit upon the stool her sister had used. The stool was brought forward and Jane sat down.

“Tell us plainly, Mrs. Crispin,” Malvern said. “Were you aware of what transpired in your sister’s barn?”

“By hearsay, sir, not by direct knowledge.”

“Yes or no, Mrs. Crispin?”

“If I must answer categorically as you require, then I am forced to say no.”

“No? Forced? Why? Because you don’t want to incriminate yourself?”

“I
know
that which I have seen, smelled, tasted, touched, heard. Someone told me my servant was practicing witchcraft in my sister’s barn. That’s not
knowledge,
sir.”

“Oh, very well, Mrs. Crispin,” Malvern said with exasperation. “Tell us what you
heard,
then.”

“I heard many things, but I hear many things about this person and that in our town. Not all are true, and certain it is that none ought to be believed without certain proof. It
is 
certain proof you are interested in, isn’t it?”

The magistrate reminded Jane that she was present to answer questions, not to put them to the prosecutor. Malvern was now dripping with sweat. The courtroom was stuffy and stale. The jury looked tired, and Malvern was in a rage.

“Were you aware,” continued Malvern, “that your sister sought a familiar spirit of this Ursula Tusser,
your servant?” 
“I know not if there be such things as familiars,” Jane replied calmly. “It is true that the Bible speaks of them, yet I have been forbidden to speak of that book and therefore will leave the text to the learned. Perhaps familiars are beings that belong to the old dispensation of Moses and the Prophets and are done away in Christ, such as they say miracles and the speaking in tongues are. In any event, they are not within the scope of my knowledge or experience.”

“Well, then, Mistress Theologian,” returned Malvern, “are familiars within the scope of your
sister's
knowledge?”

“For that, sir,” Jane answered, “you are well advised to ask my sister, for the question pertains to her and not to me.”

Someone laughed in the back of the room and Malvern swiveled around to see who it was. Red-faced with fury, he turned back to his witness. “Enough of this foolish talk, woman. Will you confess? Will you confess before God and man that you are a witch? Confess and save your soul from damnation! No one here is deceived by your clever tongue, for with such a tongue Adam was tempted to sin and thus the whole race of mankind fell.”

“I am responsible for my sins, sir,” said Jane. “Mother Eve must look to her own.”

There was another ripple of laughter at this witty reply. Malvern mopped his brow and then looked at the magistrate, opening the palms of his hands to suggest that with a witch of this obduracy there was little more to be done.

“The hour is late,” said the magistrate, who also seemed angered by Jane Crispin’s answers. “The court will adjourn until tomorrow morning, at which time I trust this business will be brought to a conclusion. Mr. Malvern, will you have any more witnesses?”

“Just one, your honor. One I have saved for last. It will be a most important and conclusive one, I promise you.” He leveled a look of hatred at Jane Crispin, who sat very still on her stool, contemplating the faces in the courtroom with a mild air of one far removed from the conflict her responses had generated.

“I 
THOUGHT
 
Jane Crispin gave as good as she got from that slippery pettifogger,” Joan remarked the next morning at breakfast as she watched her husband attack his food as though he were on the rump end of a long fast. She was speaking of Malvern, to whom she had taken an instant and intense dislike. Great bag of guts, she had called him, mocking his red swollen face and mimicking his growl.

“The tanner’s wife has a head on her shoulders,” Matthew responded between mouthfuls. “Like
you,
Joan.”

Joan acknowledged the compliment with a smile. Matthew turned his attention to the porridge. It was excellent—a concoction of turnips, coleworts, and barley made in a thick soup of wheat flour and eggs. Joan’s recipes were famous in the neighborhood.

“I wonder what trick the prosecutor intends for today,” she said. “How ominous his words were. Who could this witness

be?”

“I don’t know. But his methods will be subtle, true to his nature. Pray God that Jane Crispin proves his match for the second round. She’s quite come out of her shyness in these circumstances. She’s a fighter now.”

“Yes,” Joan agreed. “Strange, isn’t it? Margaret was always the dominant one. She always insisted on having the last word on everything. Then these wicked charges. I fear for her life, even if she is found innocent.”

“Mrs. Crispin doesn’t seem afraid,” Matthew said, signal
ing to his wife that he had had enough of the porridge and that she could return the ladle to the pot.

“She should be,” said Joan darkly.

Joan was right, Matthew decided. The trial was not going well, despite Jane Crispin’s clever retorts. Not going well 
because
of her cleverness. Her witty tongue was working to her disadvantage as far as the judges and the jury were concerned. It didn’t matter about the prosecutor. Matthew knew his fellow townsmen. Malvern was a type they didn’t like. But it was a dangerous thing to make a fool of a prosecutor, especially if the one making the fool was a woman. If Matthew read the jurymen’s faces right, their verdict was certain: Jane Crispin was either a witch or a shameless virago who had set a bad example for the wives of the town and needed hanging to learn to be civil to men in authority.

He and Joan talked some more about the trial, working themselves into a fit of melancholy. “Ah, if there were only some new evidence,” he murmured.

“Another apparition?”

But he wasn’t thinking of spectral evidence. God knew there had been a superfluity of that. He wanted something palpable. Like a bloody knife. Or a smoking pistol. Or an eyewitness, or even an intelligible motive to connect the case of the Chelmsford witches with the world of his own understanding—a world in which constables could do their job without mixing up with theology and the supernatural.

“It’s passing strange that Ursula’s spirit has made no further appearances. For a while, it was a busy spirit indeed.”

Joan said this airily, as though she had not been scared out of her wits by the face in her window. Matthew remembered well how he had had to comfort her. For several nights afterward, she had made him get out of bed to see to every bump and squeak in the dark house. He had become the chief investigator of groaning timbers, rattling windows, and mice scampering in the pantry. But the ghost of Ursula had not appeared again. Not to Joan. And not, evidently, to anyone else in town. That
was
passing strange. “Well, let God be thanked for the dead that keep to their graves,” he said, as
piring to her lightheartedness. “What, would you want another visit to our window?”

“Hardly,” she replied soberly. “Unless someone has seen her since and has kept quiet about it, Ursula’s visit to us was the last of her visits. It was the night the sisters were arrested and the barn burned.”

Matthew agreed that if anyone else had seen the ghost he would have surely made a noise about it. No one in town seemed reticent on that score. “Every witness in the trial has become a local celebrity. Simon Roundy has done a booming business in his bakery since his wife confronted the ghost and proclaimed the fact from the housetops. Customers come in not for cakes and marchpane but to gawk at the woman and to hear the latest version of her ordeal. Before they leave, they buy some biscuit or cake for a memento. Roundy’s well paid for his wife’s fright.”

“And so is her vanity. She’s grown very tedious,” Joan said cattily. She didn’t like Mrs. Roundy either. “It is almost as if with the arrest of the sisters the spirit was satisfied,” she conjectured.

“Or left town for fear of the riot,” he said, trying to be funny but failing. Joan smiled charitably. He could tell she was still wrestling with the question.

“Brigit hasn’t been seen again either,” she said.

“No. She’s vanished.”

“I wonder if there’s a connection.”

“Well, the spirit has probably scared her off. That dark, gloomy house. Rank with death and failure. I’ll wager she’s gone home to her mother.”

“But suppose,” Joan went on, as though she hadn’t been paying attention at all, “that the spirit—Ursula—had done whatever it was tnat she was intended to do?”

“Frighten Malcolm Waite? Terrify the town? You?” He looked hard at her, trying to figure out what it was she was saying. Her expression was one he recognized. It was the look she had when she had reached a conclusion for which he would have no satisfactory rebuttal.