Scarlet Widow (12 page)

For all she knew, that 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.’

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?’

‘I confess that I don’t know yet,’ Beatrice told him. ‘We might well have the Devil to blame. But I see no harm in considering other possibilities, more commonplace. After all, why would God allow the Devil to do such a thing to us? It is not as though we are lacking in piety. Perhaps we have sinned without knowing it, but I cannot think how.’

‘Sometimes God teaches us lessons
before
we have sinned,’ said Henry Mendum darkly. He didn’t explain himself further, but Beatrice had heard the gossip about him and Goody Greene, a young widow who lived on the outskirts of the village, not far from his farm.

‘Well, I think Beatrice
should
come with us,’ said Francis. ‘Who knows? What she learned from her father could be helpful, as it was with our chickens.’

‘Your
chickens
?’

‘Yes. Twenty or thirty of our chickens went lame last spring, and some were unable to walk at all. I had no idea why, and I had resigned myself to destroying them all. But it had been raining almost constantly for weeks and Beatrice discovered that the chickens’ feed had become waterlogged and mouldy.’

‘Well, that was humdrum enough. And what was her humdrum remedy for that?’

‘It was very simple, Henry. She gave all of the birds a dilution of molasses to clean the mould from their stomachs, and then she fed them on crushed oyster shells to strengthen their bones, and almost all of them recovered and were soon strutting about as healthy as you please.’

‘Hmm,’ said Henry Mendum, with his mouth turned down. He was refusing to be impressed. ‘I think you will see that my Devons have been stricken by something far more alarming than mouldy feed.’

Beatrice gave him a conciliatory smile, but he wouldn’t smile back or give her anything more than a cross, sideways glance.

Francis went outside and called Caleb to bring Kingdom out of his paddock and harness him up to the shay. Beatrice, meanwhile, told Mary to take care of Noah for her until she came back, and to feed him his mush, then she buckled on her black leather shoes and wrapped her fine yellow shawl around her shoulders, the one with the tassels. Francis helped her to climb up into the shay and they went jolting off down the driveway. Henry Mendum rode up ahead of them, his large buttocks bouncing up and down in his saddle, snorting and wheezing almost as much as his long-suffering mare.

‘Why is Henry in such a state, I wonder?’ asked Beatrice as they reached the end of the driveway and turned left towards the village. ‘He’s so thick-skinned, usually, and he fought with the militia, didn’t he, once? I’ve never seen him in such a bad temper and so fearful.’

‘Well, we shall find out soon enough,’ Francis told her. He paused, and then he said, ‘It’s one thing to believe in Satan, Bea, but it’s quite another to be presented with material evidence that he really exists. It’s just the same whenever God makes His presence known to us by some sign or other. No matter how faithful we are, it still shakes us to the very core.’

‘Yes, my dearest,’ said Beatrice. She was used to Francis’s little sermons. In the three and a half years that they had been married she had learned that he composed them to help himself cope with the apparent contradictions of daily life, as much as for his congregation.

As they approached the village, with its sloping green, they could see the meeting house clock tower rising above the oak trees. Then, next to the meeting house, a higgledy-piggledy row of salt-box houses, and Goody Pearson’s store, and the smithy run by Rodney Bartlett. His hammer was ringing on the anvil as loud and monotonous as a funeral bell.

They clattered past the village and down the two-mile track that led to Henry Mendum’s dairy farm. It was breathlessly hot and Beatrice fanned herself with the calico fan she had made at the beginning of the summer. On either side of them the trees rustled and whispered, as if they were gossiping about them.
Where are they going, these people? What are they doing?

Beatrice had never before had such a feeling that something momentous was about to happen, and she prayed that it wouldn’t be something dreadful. She looked up at the ink-blue sky and wondered if God were watching them as they rattled between the trees, and whether He was caring for them or teaching them the consequences of being so proud and self-reliant.