Scarlet Widow (42 page)

Somebody shouted out, ‘Mendum! Is this true?’

Henry Mendum said nothing, but took hold of his wife’s hand and pulled her away down the meeting-house path, past the freshly mounded graves of Francis and the Buckley family, heading for the gate. The crowd of villagers called out angrily, ‘Shame!’ and ‘Shame on you, Henry Mendum!’ and ‘Where are you running to?’ and one woman screamed out ‘
Demon
!’

Constable Jewkes was standing outside the gate, untethering his big brindled horse. Major General Holyoke called out, ‘Jewkes! Constable Jewkes! Detain Mr Mendum!’

Constable Jewkes looked up and around, bewildered, as if his name had been called out of the sky by God.

‘Detain him!’ shouted Major General Holyoke, pointing frantically to Henry Mendum as he reached the gate.

Constable Jewkes took two steps forward with his right hand raised and said, ‘Stop! Stop, sir! You are arrested!’

Henry Mendum pushed Constable Jewkes so hard in the chest that Constable Jewkes staggered back and almost fell over on to the grass. But as the Mendums hurried away, hand in hand, heading for their carriage, Constable Jewkes went over to his horse and drew out the yard-long mahogany baton that he kept in a leather holster beside his saddle. Half running and half hopping, he caught up with the Mendums, raised his baton and hit Henry Mendum so hard on the back of the head that Beatrice could hear his skull crack like a pistol shot.

Henry Mendum pitched face-first on to the road, still gripping Harriet Mendum’s hand so that she tumbled over beside him, her gown flying up to show her petticoats and her piano-like legs in black silk stockings.

‘
Henry
!’ she shrilled as she climbed to her feet. ‘
Henry
!’

But Henry Mendum lay still, his face against the dry rutted mud, his eyes closed and blood sliding out of both nostrils.

‘May the saints preserve us!’ thundered Bishop Coker. ‘Don’t tell me that you have killed him, constable, right in front of our very eyes?’

Beatrice hurried out of the gate and knelt down in the road to feel Henry Mendum’s pulse. Harriet Mendum hovered close to her, saying ‘Well?’ ‘
Well
?’ ‘He’s not dead, is he?’ ‘Don’t say that he’s dead!’

‘No, not dead,’ said Beatrice after a few moments. ‘Is Doctor Merrydew still here? Doctor Merrydew!’

Harriet Mendum let out an extraordinary wail and then struck Beatrice on the shoulder with her black parasol. ‘If anybody in Sutton is a demon, Beatrice Scarlet, it is you! Look what you have done to my beloved husband! Look at him! You are a witch in widow’s clothing!’

That evening, just before sunset, Major General Holyoke came to the parsonage and knocked at the door. Mary let him in and led him through to the parlour, where Beatrice was writing up the church accounts, so that she could hand them over to the Reverend Miles Bennett. She was framed in a rectangle of crimson sunlight from the window, as if she were a portrait of herself painted only in shades of red.

‘Major General Holyoke,’ she said, laying down her quill and standing up. ‘How is Henry Mendum?’

‘Not at all well,’ said Major General Holyoke. ‘Doctor Merrydew fears that he may be bleeding beneath the skull which will either bring about his death or leave him permanently comatose. Even if he does regain consciousness, he will more than likely be a jingle-brains for the rest of his life.’

‘It shouldn’t have ended like this,’ said Beatrice. ‘He should have been fairly tried by the court for what he did and punished accordingly.’

‘I came to tell you that I have talked with Harriet Mendum,’ said Major General Holyoke. ‘She has confessed to me that she knew of her husband’s ambition to extend his farm. He wanted it to be the most extensive and most profitable dairy farm in the whole of New Hampshire, and he had ambitions beyond that, too, such as standing for state president.

‘Two years ago he approached most of the farmers whose property abutted his and offered to buy large tracts of their land, but in almost every case he met with refusal. Mistress Mendum told me that one farmer showed some interest – John Tufnell, I think she said – but Mr Tufnell demanded twice the price for his acreage that her husband was willing to pay.’

‘So instead he decided to terrify his neighbours into giving him their land?’

‘That’s right. According to Mistress Mendum, the idea came to him when he met a ship-owner on one of his business trips to Salem, and the ship-owner introduced him to Jonathan Shooks. Mr Shooks had acquired for this ship-owner three sloops from rival shipping companies by causing all manner of hideous accidents aboard their vessels. He had persuaded these rival companies that Satan was responsible for these mishaps, as a punishment for bringing Christian missionaries to America from England. He told them that the only way in which they could save their entire fleets from disaster would be to forfeit some of their ships.’

‘Jonathan Shooks is a devil,’ said Beatrice. ‘He is clever and skilled in all manner of chymical tricks and his knowledge of herbs is extraordinary. He also has no soul and no conscience whatsoever.’

Major General Holyoke hesitated for a moment, blinking, as if he sensed that Beatrice’s hatred of Jonathan Shooks ran even deeper than her grief for the death of her husband.

Slowly, and keeping his eyes on her as he spoke, he said, ‘Mr Shooks had also extorted land on behalf of three other farmers, in Maine and Massachusetts. No news of those extortions was ever spread abroad because their victims were cautioned that they must keep silent about them or they would face even further horrors.

‘Henry Mendum offered Mr Shooks a great deal of money to come to Sutton and extort hundreds of acres of land for him.’ Here Major General Holyoke smiled and laid his hand on Beatrice’s arm. ‘What Mr Shooks clearly didn’t realize is that in Sutton he would be confronted by a woman whose knowledge of alchemy and herbs was almost as great as his own, if not greater.’

‘Oh, I think he knew it only too well,’ said Beatrice. ‘He was trained as an apothecary himself, in London, and he was aware of my dear father’s reputation, and of who I was. He told me so. No – before he started to terrorize our community, he made a careful study of everybody with any influence, and where each of us came from, and what our weaknesses were likely to be.

‘I believe he knew all about the skills my father had taught me and that right from the very beginning he regarded me as a challenge rather than a threat. He has tried with every fresh atrocity to baffle me and outwit me, and most of the time he has succeeded. I still don’t know how he killed our pigs, or what he gave to Henry Mendum’s cows to make them appear to be dying, or what he used to drug Ebenezer Rowlandson’s fish. Yet I don’t doubt now that he did it.’

‘Let me ask you this,’ said Major General Holyoke. ‘Are you sufficiently certain that Jonathan Shooks was responsible for at least some of these outrages to be able to give evidence to a jury?’

Beatrice nodded. She could prove that Jonathan Shooks had purchased two hundred gallons of linseed oil and she was sure that alone would be enough to convict him, even if it meant exhuming Francis’s body to show a jury how he had been dried like wood.

‘Excellent,’ said Major General Holyoke. ‘In that case I shall issue a warrant for the arrest of Mr Shooks, and perhaps we can exorcize Satan from our village for good and all. You are a brave and clever woman, Beatrice Scarlet, and I commend you for what you have done.’

All the time they had been talking the parlour had been growing increasingly shadowy, and now it was so dark that Beatrice could hardly see Major General Holyoke’s face. She felt as if they were standing in the shadows of days that had gone and would never return. Tomorrow everything would dawn new and bright and different, and she would start her life again, but just for now she felt as if Francis were standing close beside her, as well as Major General Holyoke, and the feeling was so sweet and so painful that her eyes filled with tears.

Major General Holyoke must have seen her tears glittering in the gloom because he reached out and took her hand and squeezed it, and said softly, ‘Beatrice, my dear. Beatrice, my poor, poor dear.’

*

The following day did start bright, although a chilly breeze was blowing from the north-west. The tall pines swayed like dancers and the air smelled of autumn.

Beatrice woke early and started her morning by mixing dough. When Mary arrived she would enlist her help in killing one of the pigs and butchering it ready for the winter. She had seen signs already that this winter was going to be exceptionally cold: the corn husks were thicker than usual, and the raccoons had much bushier fur and brighter bands than last year. The cows, too, had thicker hair on the napes of their necks.

She kneaded the dough for four large loaves and then covered them with cloths and left them to prove. She was washing the flour from her hands when she heard Noah crying upstairs. She went out into the hallway and there, standing in front of her, was Jonathan Shooks. She jolted in shock.

This was not the smart, suave Jonathan Shooks who had first visited the parsonage. This Jonathan Shooks had lost his silver wig and one of the sleeves of his tailcoat was hanging down in shreds. His face was smudged with dirt and he hadn’t shaved. He had even lost one of his silver-buckled shoes. He stood staring at her and he was wild-eyed with rage.

‘You
trull
!’ he spat at her. ‘You
whore
!’

‘Get out of my house at once!’ said Beatrice. ‘There is a warrant out for your arrest and if you much as
breathe
on me again I shall happily make sure that you are hanged!’

‘You betrayed me, Widow Scarlet. You, the widow of a pastor! They came for me at the Penacook Inn and Samuel and I were lucky to escape with our lives! As it is, I have lost my calash and my horses and all of my possessions! Everything!’

‘You killed my husband, Mr Shooks. You kidnapped my child and you took me by force. What on earth led you to suppose that I would keep my word to you?’

‘I fondly imagined that you would keep your word to me because you were afraid of me, and of what I might do to you if you did not.’

‘I am not afraid of you,’ she said, even though her voice was shaking. ‘There is nothing that you can take from me now that you have not already taken. You disgust me. Apothecaries are supposed to use their knowledge to cure people and to ease their suffering, not to terrify them and steal their property and murder them. You are not even worthy of being called a demon. You are a slug.’

Jonathan Shooks sniffed loudly in his right nostril, then wiped his nose with the back of his hand. ‘You think that I can’t take any more from you, you whore? You think that you have nothing more to give me? I’ll tell you what you can give me. You can give me my revenge.’

With that, he strode towards her and seized hold of her arm, whirling her around so that she lost her balance and throwing her on to the kitchen floor. Her left shoulder was jarred by one of the table legs and she knocked her forehead against the rung of a chair. She twisted herself around, making a grab for the back of the chair so that she could pull herself up, but Jonathan Shooks kicked the chair over and then kicked her hard in the hip. When she tried again to sit up, he kicked her again, in the thigh this time.

‘Did you really think that you could outsmart Jonathan Shooks? Did you really believe that some mousy minister’s wife could prove herself to be cleverer than me? So your father was Clement Bannister and he taught you some of his tricks and how to brew up some of his possets. But your father never travelled like I did. He never got to know half of what I know.’

‘Let me up,’ said Beatrice. ‘My son is crying. Can’t you hear him? I must go up to comfort him.’

‘You are going nowhere at all, Widow Scarlet, ever again. Where you lie now is where your life will come to its well-deserved conclusion.’

Noah was screaming now and between each scream he could hardly catch his breath.

‘Please,’ begged Beatrice. ‘It will make him sick if he cries any more.’

‘Isn’t life tragic? I thought you would have learned that much – you, an apothecary’s daughter. Life is nothing but sickness and worry and pain and cruelty, and then we die. Do you want to know how I made those little Buckley twins sick? I gave them each a spoonful of boar’s taint to clog their lungs. But the effects of boar’s taint can be cured with sulphur dissolved in water, which is why I gave them a drink made from Chinese fire-sticks.

‘And poor Ebenezer Rowlandson’s trout! All it needed was some soap-root in the water and they were stupefied. The Indians use it in the west. Too lazy to catch their fish with spears.’

‘You killed our poor horse, Kingdom, with yew leaves,’ said Beatrice. ‘Why did you have to do that?’

Jonathan Shooks shook his head. ‘I did nothing to your horse! Your
horse
? Why would I? Did I not do enough to show your late husband how ineffectual he was by poisoning your pigs, and all
that
needed was fiddleneck seeds. Did you not guess that from their symptoms?’

‘It must have been the Widow Belknap who fed him those leaves,’ said Beatrice. At that moment she didn’t really care who had poisoned Kingdom, but Noah was still screaming and she was trying to keep Jonathan Shooks talking in order to give herself time to think how she could get away from him.

‘The Widow Belknap! Well, it’s possible, I suppose! In fact, it’s not only possible, it’s very likely. She’s a very vengeful woman, that Widow Belknap. I’m surprised her parents didn’t christen her “Resentment”. Still, it’s a pity she witnessed what we did to Mr Buckley.’

‘She
saw
you?’

‘Regrettably, yes. We didn’t expect anybody to be walking around the village green at that ungodly hour, but there she was, watching us. What choice did we have? We force-fed her wormwood to make her lose her mind, and then we took her away and left her in the woods. Whether she lived or died, we assumed that everybody in the village would blame her for every misfortune that had blighted their pathetic, obstinate lives – especially since most of them blamed her already. And they did!’