Scarlet Widow (15 page)

After a while Mary picked him up and carried him, even though he started to grizzle.

‘We should put him in a wheelbarrow,’ she said. ‘If we can push potatoes around on wheels, why not children?’

They reached the village and climbed the steeply sloping green to the meeting house. Beatrice wanted to make sure that the grass in the graveyard had been scythed, and the brick path weeded, and that the floor had been swept ready for Sunday’s services. Noah was still whining so she went inside alone. The interior of the two-storey meeting house was very plain, with no stained-glass windows or ornaments or pictures of Jesus. Its box pews were as simple as cattle stalls and its high pulpit was bare and unadorned. All the same, it was filled with sunlight, and utterly silent, and Beatrice stood still for a moment and closed her eyes and whispered a prayer.

‘
Dearest Lord, please forgive us for any arrogant thoughts that have entered our heads, and protect us from evil. Amen
.’

She went back outside. Mary had put Noah down now and he was tottering around the gravestones, trailing his leading-strings behind him. The newest stone marked the recent burial of Mercy Quilter. Beatrice had known Mercy well, and liked her. She had died in April during the difficult birth of her seventh child, at the age of thirty-three. Her gravestone recorded that she was ‘Eminent for Prayerfulness, Watchfulness, Zeal, Prudence, Sincerity, Humility, Meekness, Patience, Diligence, Faithfulness & Charity’. Beatrice remembered her more than anything for her wicked sense of humour, but that would not have looked well on her gravestone.

‘Come along, naughty little Noah!’ she called him. ‘I have to go down to see Goody Holyoke, and if you like you can play with little Eliza.’

They walked across the slanting green towards the Holyoke house, which was one of the larger dwellings in Sutton, with two tall chimneys and a pillared porch. At the far end of the green three small boys were climbing on a cannon, a relic of the French and Indian War, and Noah stopped to stare at them enviously. In the end Mary had to pick him up again and carry him.

They had nearly reached the other side of the green when a plump young woman appeared from the doorway of one of the salt-box houses next to the Holyokes’. She came hurrying along the track, holding up her skirts with one hand and keeping her cap on her head with the other. Beatrice recognized her as Jane Saltonstall, the wife of Andrew Saltonstall, the shoemaker.

As she reached them, Goody Saltonstall stopped and pressed her hand to her breast to get her breath back.

‘Jane – what’s wrong?’ asked Beatrice.

‘I’m going for the doctor,’ Jane panted. ‘Although your husband might be needed just as much.’

‘Why? What’s happened?’

‘Judith Buckley’s twin babies, Apphia and Tristram. They’re both awful sick. But there’s a sign above their cribs. A cross, upside down. It looks as if the Devil himself has left his mark.’

Beatrice said, ‘Bring Doctor Merrydew, Jane, as smartly as you can. Mary, I want you to take Noah directly back home. If there is sickness around, I don’t want him to catch it.’

‘And what will you do?’ Mary asked her.

‘I’m the minister’s wife,’ said Beatrice. ‘If Satan really has come calling, I need to see for myself.’

She walked quickly along beside the white picket fence until she came to the Buckley house. The front door was open and there were four or five women crowded into the narrow hallway, all of whom Beatrice knew well.

‘It’s a curse come upon us, Goody Scarlet,’ said Goody Rust, a thin woman in her fifties who had always told Beatrice that she believed in witches. ‘Somebody in this town has sinned and we are all having to pay the price for it.’

Goody Cutler beckoned Beatrice to a room at the back of the house. It was stifling and dark and Beatrice smelled sickness as soon as she stepped inside. There was one large bed on the left-hand side, covered with a patchwork quilt, where Nicholas and Judith Buckley slept. Against the opposite wall stood two basketwork cribs and in each lay one of the twins. Judith Buckley and one of her cousins were leaning over them and Judith’s cheeks were glistening with tears.

On the white plastered wall between the cribs a large black cross had been daubed – an inverted cross, over two feet high.

‘Oh, Goody Scarlet,’ sobbed Judith. ‘Oh, look at them, my babies!’

Both children were naked except for cotton clouts. Beatrice remembered that they had been born in late February, so they were just a few days over six months old, although they were very small for their age. Their eyes were closed and they were pale and sweating. Now and then their fingers twitched, as if they were having nightmares.

‘There was nothing wrong with them at all this morning,’ said Judith. ‘They were bright and laughing and they took their feed without any trouble. At eleven I put them down for their sleep, but three hours later they still hadn’t woken up, and when I came in to see why they were sleeping for so long, I found that they had both brought up their milk and soiled their clouts. And there was
this
.’

She pointed to the upside-down cross.

Beatrice went up to the wall and examined the cross closely, although she didn’t touch it. It appeared to have been painted with the same tarry substance that had been used to make the hoof marks in Henry Mendum’s pasture and when she leaned closer and sniffed it she detected that same irritating clove-like smell. If the Devil had come into this room to make the Buckley twins sick, then it was the same Devil who had infected Henry Mendum’s cows.

‘You saw nobody around the house or on the green?’ she asked Judith. ‘You heard nothing?’

Judith shook her head. ‘I was baking and then I was mending. Please ask the Reverend Scarlet to come and pray for them. I couldn’t bear it if they died. I think I should die, too.’

Beatrice looked down at Apphia and Tristram. ‘Try to give them a little water each, Judith. Little and often. Doctor Merrydew will know why they have such a fever and give them a medicine for it, a posset of marigold probably. But water will help for now.’

‘They won’t die, will they?’

Beatrice looked at the cross again. She didn’t fully understand why, but it disturbed her more deeply than any omen had ever disturbed her before. ‘No, Judith, I pray not. But I have a feeling that we are being played with, although I don’t yet know why, or by whom.’

‘It’s Satan,’ said Goody Rust from the doorway. ‘Somebody in this village has called on the Devil to take revenge on us, and I know who it is.’

‘You have no proof of that, Goody Rust,’ said Judith, in a quiet, panicky voice, almost as if she were worried that they could be overheard.

‘What more proof do I need?’ Goody Rust demanded. ‘She has a sharp tongue for everybody and not a week goes by without her making false accusations about this person or that. Only last week she told Roger Parminter that she would see him in hell, for no other reason than his dogs had chased after hers. And what poisonous potions she cooks up in her kitchen, goodness only knows.’

‘You’re talking about the Widow Belknap,’ said Beatrice.

Judith frantically waved her hands to shush her. ‘She’s told me so many times that my babies are unnatural because they had fits when they were being born, both of them, and both stopped breathing.’

‘What’s unnatural about that? They both survived, thank God.’

‘She said that they should have died, by rights, but that God blew life back into them to show that it was
He
who decided who was punished, not Satan.’

Beatrice didn’t ask why Satan should have felt that he was justified in taking the lives of the newly born twins. Unless both had been very premature, Judith would have conceived them while her husband Nicholas was away in Boston for two months on legal business. That was the gossip, anyhow. Nobody had dared suggest it to Judith’s face because Nicholas was so well respected, and so was John Starling, who might well have been the father.

Beatrice said, ‘Well, Goody Rust, if you’re right about the Widow Belknap, if she really has called on Satan to punish us all for our sins, then all I can say is, may the Lord preserve us.’

At the same time, however, she was thinking: maybe the Widow Belknap didn’t
need
to call on Satan. Maybe the Widow Belknap had enough knowledge of poisons to bring sickness and death to the local community without any help from the Lord of the Flies. After all, there were plenty of highly dangerous herbs that were native to New England – herbs that even her father wouldn’t have known about, like Jamestown weed and thorn apple and devil’s trumpet.

She suddenly thought of her father, and her mother, too, lying side by side in their caskets in St James’s Church in Clerkenwell, and she felt a pang of homesickness and grief that she thought she had long ago managed to bury, and tears unexpectedly sprang to her eyes.

Francis must have seen her hurrying down the driveway towards the house because he came out of the front door and walked quickly to meet her.

‘Bea, my darling!’ he called out. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘You must come quickly!’ said Beatrice, pressing her hand against her chest to get her breath back. ‘It’s the Buckley twins, Apphia and Tristram! They’re sick close to death and somebody has painted a sign on their bedroom wall, an upside-down cross! Doctor Merrydew was on his way to them, but they need you, too!’

‘An upside-down cross?’ said Francis, taking Beatrice by the hand and leading her up to the house. ‘Do they have any idea who painted it?’

‘No. But it was made of the same tarry stuff as the hoof prints in Henry Mendum’s meadow. It even
smelled
the same.’

Francis obviously didn’t think to ask her how she knew what the hoof prints had smelled like. Instead, he asked, ‘Was anybody seen around the house before the children fell sick? Has anybody made threats against the Buckleys?’

‘No. But some of the women are blaming the Widow Belknap. They say that she’s been behaving very vengefully of late, for no particular reason. Well, you said yourself that you heard her singing to her goat. Goody Rust believes that she’s called up the Devil.’

‘In that case, I must attend to them at once,’ said Francis. ‘Mary, if you would kindly take care of Noah until we return. Caleb!
Caleb
!’

Caleb appeared around the side of the house, his hands full of witchgrass which he had been pulling up out of the garden. ‘Yes, reverend?’

‘Please harness Kingdom for us, would you, as quick as you can!’

After a short while Caleb came back, leading Kingdom at a trot. He harnessed him up quickly between the shafts of the shay and they headed off down the driveway towards the village. Beatrice turned around in her seat to see Noah waving them goodbye.

‘There is something very
dark
happening here!’ Francis shouted over the clattering and creaking of the shay and the syncopated drumming of Kingdom’s hooves on the hard-baked mud. ‘It may not be the Widow Belknap herself who has made the Buckley children fall sick, but as I said before, she could well be one of those weak-spirited people whom Satan picks to manipulate, like a puppet-master makes a puppet dance!’

Beatrice didn’t reply. She believed in the Devil as much as she believed in God, and she respected Francis’s faith. But the smell of those hoof prints and that upside-down cross had brought back the long-ago smells of her father’s laboratory – coal tar and cloves and civet oil and sulphur. It was hard for her not to wonder if there was a human poisoner at work here rather than His Satanic Majesty.

She said nothing, though, because it was possible that Francis’s appeals to God might well save the Buckley children and she didn’t want him to think that she doubted him, because she didn’t. She didn’t want God to think that she doubted Him, either.

As they drove around the green Beatrice saw to her surprise that Jonathan Shooks’s black calash was standing outside the Buckley house. Its top was folded down and its two horses were grazing on the grass beside the path. Samuel was holding the horses’ reins and as Francis and Beatrice drew up beside him he lifted his three-cornered hat and gave them a sweeping, exaggerated bow, as if he were imitating his master.

When they had climbed down from their shay he let out a high-pitched screech and pointed towards the Buckley house.

‘Mr Shooks is inside, I presume?’ asked Francis, and Samuel nodded vigorously.

They went in. The hallway was still crowded with six or seven goodwives, all of whom curtseyed when Francis edged his way past them.

‘So glad to see you, Reverend Scarlet,’ said Goody Rust. ‘We need God’s representatives today and no mistake.’

Inside the children’s bedchamber it was warm and airless and smelled of sick, and something else, like faeces, only sweeter. Jonathan Shooks was standing over Apphia’s crib, his hand pressed against her forehead. He looked up when Francis and Beatrice came into the room and gave them a sad, solemn shake of his head, as if to say that there was very little hope of the children surviving.

Doctor Merrydew was sitting on the Buckleys’ bed, rummaging in his brown leather bag. He was portly, red-faced, with a bright russet wig that clashed with his cheeks. He was wearing a long mustard-coloured waistcoat with dinner stains on it, and wrinkled white stockings.

‘Ah! Reverend Scarlet!’ he said in his hoarse tin-whistle voice. ‘What are we to make of
this
devilry, then?’

He nodded towards the inverted cross on the wall behind the children’s cribs. Francis went across to it and stared at it for a few seconds, his eyes narrowed, lifting his hand towards it but not touching it. Then he looked down at Apphia and Tristram. They were both as white as wax and bubbles of pink froth had dried around Tristram’s lips.

‘My God,’ he said. ‘I cannot imagine who could have wished these little ones such harm. Whoever it is, though, they are plainly trying to intimidate all of us. First the pigs, then the cattle, now the children.’

‘They can’t breathe, can they?’ said Beatrice. ‘What will you give them, doctor? They need something to clear their lungs.’