Familiar Spirits (26 page)

She developed her argument with easy assurance. “The ar-

rest of the sisters. The disgrace of both houses. Look, Matthew, doesn’t it all make a terrible sense?”

“Vengeance?” he answered. “But why stop with the Crispins and Waites? There’s the jury that convicted her, the hangman that hanged her. Mrs. Byrd who complained to the authorities in the first place. And the spirit’s visit to you. What in God’s name had you to do with
her
that she should visit this house? Were I a ghost, able to materialize where I wished and to whomever I wished, I would dog my enemies until they ran mad in the streets. As for the rest—they that had done me no ill—let them sleep of nights.”

“Oh, but there’s something—something in this all. If we could only fathom it,” she said. “But one thing seems simple to me. The sisters have suffered too greatly from these horrors to be their authors.”

“A reasonable inference,” Matthew said, “and yet when I look at Margaret and Jane now, I see sometimes the women I know, and at other times the creatures I fear. Expressions I would have deemed sad suddenly seem sinister and conniving. Their very movements and whispers fill me with a kind of dread.”

“Much of that is your own fear, Matthew. It distills from your brain. As for my vision—well, it was a true one. I swear it, but as I have said, I don’t conclude from it that either Margaret or Jane was its cause.”

At that moment Peter Bench looked in the door to say that John Waite was in the shop and wanted to speak to Matthew.

“What does he want?” Matthew asked, annoyed at this interruption of his breakfast.

“He wouldn’t say, sir. He said only that he must speak to you at once concerning a matter of some urgency.”

“Some urgency, is it?” Matthew got up from the table. He gave his wife a skeptical look, wiping his mouth with the napkin. He went to see what John Waite wanted, promising Joan to return presently. John Waite was browsing among the clc b-laden tables. When he saw Matthew, he imme
diately explained why he had come. “It’s happened again,” he said.

“What has happened?” Matthew hoped the young man did not mean the ghost had put in another appearance.

“It’s the prowler again,” said John Waite with a nettled expression. “Susan Goodyear woke me at midnight pounding upon my door without mercy. ‘God help us!' she screamed, all in a crazy flutter and half-dressed. ‘There’s a spirit walking among the ruins of the barn with a lantern in his hand.’ I leaped from my bed and flew to the window to see this marvel, only then remembering my window did not look upon the backsides and I must go to the chamber where my cousins lay. I did. Woke them at once and told them both what Susan had said. She had followed me into the room, terrified of being left to herself, and moaning and groaning as she was, she gave Dick and Edward a fright, I can tell you. She looked a very spirit herself, but a truly ugly one, with her hair flying every whichway and that sullen face of hers with her lower lip a-trembling. In a twinkling they were on their feet, half naked and shivering, neither caring that Susan stood there gaping at their bare legs.

“We all looked from the window and saw the flicker of light Susan spoke of. It was but a little light, as though the lantern had been hooded for secrecy’s sake. I could see him that carried it, though. He was no more than a moving shadow, stalking around in the rubble as though he had lost something there and wanted desperately to find it. He would bend down, pry loose a board or two, then stand erect again.”

“You’re sure it was a man you saw and not a woman?” Matthew asked, thinking perhaps what the nephew had seen was a spirit, after all, and doubtless Ursula’s.

“Well,” John Waite said, pausing thoughtfully. “It was of mankind, not animal. Of that I’m sure enough. It might have been a woman. Of course, whoever it was wore a cloak and hat, so how was I or my cousins to tell? Susan Goodyear declared it was Ursula’s ghost, as sure as she lived. But I told her spirits have no need of lanterns to see by.”

“And did that persuade her it was no ghost you saw?” John Waite laughed mirthlessly and stroked the hairs on his upper lip. “You must be joking, or you don’t know Susan. The whey-face is addled beyond redemption. She’s a giddy goose if there ever was one. My good aunt could not seem to employ better.”

“What was she doing up and about at that hour anyway?” Matthew asked.

“A nightmare had awakened her and she had risen to use the chamber pot. Having graced it with her bum, she was on her way back to bed again when a dreadful fear came upon her. She looked from her window toward the backsides and saw the light.”

“I see. Go on.”

“At once I knew it was the prowler of whom I had complained to you earlier. I told Susan to go back to bed and cease her blubbering, and then I and my cousins armed ourselves and in our nightclothes stole downstairs and out the postern door, careful not to make a noise. We hoped to fall upon the wretch before he was aware.”

“You feared no spirit, then, or armed man either?” “Who, I?” said the young man, making a cynical face. “I thought at the worst him a flesh-and-blood thief or perhaps one of our fine upstanding loyal neighbors out to do us more mischief. Besides, there was but one of him and three of us and we had the advantage of surprise, or thought so.” “Well, what happened? Have you caught him?”

“Sadly no,” answered John Waite. “We could see the light again when we were in the yard. He was digging. We could hear his spade at work. We were within a dozen feet of the fellow when my Cousin Dick stumbled over a piece of the wreckage and went sprawling, crying out as he flew. The cry alarmed the trespasser. We could hear him running off in the darkness, leaving the lantern and spade behind him.”

“Did you give chase?”

“Did we not?” John Waite laughed. “We were unshod, you understand, and him whom we would have pursued was 
lost to us in a moment. Look, I have brought you both the lantern and the spade.”

John Waite opened his cloak to show Matthew the lantern and spade. Clumps of mud mixed with ash clung to the blade’s edge.

“Now why should anyone be digging around in the ruins of your aunt’s barn? Had your uncle some treasure concealed there?”

“To my knowledge,” answered the nephew dryly, “the only thing of value Malcolm Waite had in that pestilent ruin was the mare, now a rotting corpse. I doubt if the mysterious digger was some lover of horseflesh bent on giving the beast a decent burial.”

“Well,” said Matthew, conscious of the time and his need to bring his prisoners to the court, “he’ll probably not return now that you’ve discovered him.”

“Probably not,” said John Waite ruefully. “But we intend to keep a guard just in case he does.”

Matthew examined the lantern and the spade. Neither bore its owner’s mark and both were of a common variety easily had in the town. “You have a good lantern and spade for your pains,” he said.

“Yes,” said John Waite. “I suppose I do.” He sighed heavily. “Well, I thought you should know of this. I’m off now to the trial, where I expect to hear the worst regarding my poor aunts.” The young man’s face showed what seemed genuine sadness.

Matthew shook his hand and said he was sorry for his family’s troubles. His words sounded flat and insincere even to himself, and he wondered what the nephew made of them. He watched the young man leave, then returned to the kitchen to tell Joan what John Waite had said.

“A prowler digging in the barn ruins. How strange,” she said.

“Despite what the nephew says, someone might have thought there was silver or gold buried there,” Matthew said.

“At least it was no ghost.”

Matthew was about to leave to fetch his prisoners when Joan stopped him.

“You know, there’s something very strange about the barn,” she said mysteriously.

“What do you mean?”

“The barn. Ursula’s loft. It was there I felt the intruder’s presence and didn’t know what to make of it. Now this strange and secret excavation. Oh, Matthew, I have the strongest feeling that the barn loft is the key.”

“The key? Key to what?”

“Why, to the mystery. Why Ursula’s spirit cannot rest.”

“But the barn is a heap of ash now,” he protested.

“The rubble must be cleared and searched,” she said firmly.

“Impossible,” he answered impatiently. “The Waites and Crispins are not about to do the work themselves, not with their women on trial. And they were unable to find anyone in town willing to help them for love or money. It would take all day, clearing that mess.”

“We must do it, then.”

“We?”

“The apprentices can be spared this morning. There won’t be a half-dozen customers in the shop with the trial in progress and the verdict in the offing.”

He stood stupefied. When his wife got a notion in her head, it was set in mortar and hardened a week. As for himself, he had not an idea in the world what the barn, ruin that it now was, would or could demonstrate about any aspect of the present business.

But she insisted, and would not let him out the door until he had relented to her request.

“Oh, very well. You’re right about business anyway. The boys will only sit on their hands all morning, or sneak down to the Sessions House to hear fresh news of the trial.”

He called to Peter, and when his assistant stuck his head in the doorway, he gave him his orders. “Go fetch Arthur Wilts. Tell him to come straightway.”

Matthew lingered until Arthur arrived, which was not more than a few minutes. During the interval, Matthew tried to pry from Joan just what it was she thought would be found in the ruins besides ashes, but she wouldn’t say. It wasn’t clear that she knew herself. However, her uncertainty made her no less positive about what should be done. Matthew’s apprentices were to do the dirty work. Arthur, who wanted to go to hear the verdict, was disappointed when Matthew told him he was to supervise the digging.

“You wish the horse buried, Mr. Stock,” asked Arthur, curious, of course, why this project should be undertaken at all.

\“Yes, yes, bury the beast. I’ll come to you at dinnertime and inspect the work. If you find anything unusual”—he paused to glance at Joan—“anything . . . strange, bring me word at once.”

Joan looked pleased. She was off to the Sessions House herself, and she planted a warm kiss on his cheek as he went out the door to fetch the women.

The horse and cart were ready, brought up before by Peter. By the time he was halfway to the Blue Boar, Matthew had forgotten completely about the Waite barn.

The
journey from the Blue Boar to the Sessions House, a distance of not more than a quarter mile, was more tumultuous than it had been the day before, and therefore seemed the longer. Faces surged toward Matthew as they might have done in the worst of nightmares, in which the threat of physical danger joins forces with verbal abuse and calumny of the vilest sort. Hands clawed at his prisoners huddled in the back of the cart, grasped at the moving wheels and tried to restrain them. The cart was rocked and jostled, pelted and spat upon, yet Matthew drove it forward, thanks to the aid of three of the magistrate’s men who rode alongside. The epithets hurled at him slashed like razors.

By some miracle, Matthew got the women into the court without injury to them or himself. The trial, scheduled to resume at eight o’clock, did not get under way until nearly nine, an unfortunate delay. By that time claps of unseasonable thunder could be heard in the distance, and these gave the onlookers and the jurymen even more cause for concern. When the great Bible, used for the swearing in of witnesses, was inadvertently knocked onto the floor by a flustered clerk, nearly everyone concluded that this second and final day of the trial had begun on an ominous note indeed.

The prosecutor Malvern rose first to make a short summary of the previous day’s evidence against the accused women, as though it were not already etched permanently in the minds of all those who had attended the proceedings. He made

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much of the testimony of Mrs. Roundy, the baker’s wife. He emphasized her special status as an eyewitness to the reality of the apparition, and interpreted her fainting fit as a clear sign of the Satanic influence that continued to emanate from the accused women. He summarized rapidly and with an air of confidence, as though to say, “This all is behind us, like the foundation of a great edifice upon the which I will now erect an even more spectacular superstructure.” He gestured dramatically like a player on the stage, his bulging eyes fixing by turn on the judges, the jurymen, and the onlookers.

Finally it was time for the last witness. Seated rigidly next to Malvern was the boy with whom the prosecutor had arrived in town. Upon entering and taking his place behind Margaret and her sister, the constable had not noticed him. Now, in response to the clerk’s summons, Michael Fletcher—or so he was called—stood up. He did not step forward to the witness stand, however, nor was his oath taken. It was quickly apparent that the young man was to be a witness of a different sort.

“Michael Fletcher, whom you see before you, was himself possessed of an evil spirit,” Malvern explained when the magistrate asked to know who the boy was and what use the prosecutor hoped to make of him.
“Was
possessed, I hasten to add. For nearly a year he was afflicted. During that time, he languished, convulsed, spewed pins and needles from his mouth, vomited rocks and stones, to the wonderment of his friends and parents. At length he was freed from the possession through much earnest prayer, both of learned clergy and of his family. Since then, he has on many occasions done valuable service to towns such as yours cursed with this terrible malignancy of witchcraft.”