The Sot-Weed Factor (58 page)

" 'Tis not far to the end of't," Mary grumbled, and with some reluctance picked up the thread of her story. "Kate soon got wind of how my life was changed, and lost no time in seeking out the cause of't. I knew she'd set her cap for Charley directly she laid eyes on him, and so made every effort to avoid her. The plain fact is, 'twas not till he had killed her that I learned he'd been two months her lover."

"Nay!"

"He told me so himself, along with many another thing, before they took him off to jail. Somehow Miss Kate had sought him out, and told him she was my sister. She was fair of face, as I was not, and her body was a sweetmeat, where mine was e'er a nine-course meal. But for all her conniving she was dull and gameless, and a sluggard in the bed, and spiteful, and a snot; and while Charley loved and hated me at once, he could only loathe a bitch like Kate, as even he confessed. In sooth, that is the explanation of't."

Ebenezer nodded. "An hour ago I'd not have grasped your meaning, but it seems no paradox now. Why did he do the awful murthers?"

"They hanged him for the lot of 'em," Mary said, "but Kate was the only one he slew. The rest slew one another, albeit dear Charley was the engineer."

She explained that on becoming Katy's lover, Charley had soon learned how matters stood in the house of Mynheer Tick, and for reasons not immediately clear had taken pains to gain the brothers' confidence -- not a difficult achievement, since they were regular patrons of Mary's traveling brothel and knew no more than did its proprietress of his relationship with Kate. He guided them on hunting trips, raced horses with them, and at their invitation was a frequent visitor on the Tick estate, where he would drink and carouse on the lawn with Willi and Peter and slip away at intervals to cuckold Mynheer Wilhelm. It was not long before the brothers made known to him their fear and hatred of their stepmother, and Charley, with a laugh, at once proposed a double murder.

Willi had cried, "Thou'rt not serious!"

To which Charley had replied, " 'Twould be quite easy. Peter could go down to the end of the path that runs through the woods behind the house, and hide himself in the junipers where you were wont to swive Miss Katy in the old days. Then Willi can send Katy down there on some pretext, whereupon Peter leaps upon her and kills her. In the meanwhile, 'twill be simple for Willi to murther old Wilhelm alone in the house. Do't with a knife or tomahawk, and blame the Indians for't."

Willi had applauded the plan at once, but Peter, though he expressed his readiness to scalp Kate, was less enthusiastic on the matter of parricide. "A common whore is no great loss, but can we not leave Father to die naturally, or from grief? He is old, and shan't stand long 'twixt us and wealth."

Charley Mattassin had then replied, "Do as you wish, 'tis your affair; but methinks you'll be no sooner rid of Kate than he will wed the next wench with art enough to fool him."

"Aye," Willi had agreed. "Let's kill him now. He hath no love for us."

At length Peter was obliged to overcome his reluctance, and left the drinking-bout to take up his station at the end of the path, carrying with him his hunting knife. But scarcely had he gone before Willi, the cleverer of the two, began to question the division of responsibility.

" 'Tis nowise fair," he complained to Charley, "that I be given the tasteless task of murthering Father, whilst Peter hath Katy to himself in the junipers and may do his list with her ere he doth her in." And the longer he reflected, the less equitable seemed his lot, until at last, forgetting who had proposed the scheme, he commenced to blame Peter for it.

"Check your wrath," Charley had urged him then. "I planned it thus, and for a purpose: send Katy down to Peter, and then tell Wilhelm they are swiving in the junipers. Two of the three will soon be dead, and you've only to kill the third to have the whole estate yourself."

It did not take long for Willi to see the merits of this plan, and when a cursory search failed to discover his stepmother, he readily acted on the Indian's next advice: "Tell Wilhelm anyhow, and I shall run to warn Peter that his father comes to shoot him. The result will be the same, and in the meantime you can search farther for the whore and take your pleasure on her."

Willi went off beaming towards his father's accounting room, and Charley took a short cut through the marshes to the juniper grove where Peter waited, knife in hand. But so far from warning him of Wilhelm's approach, the Indian said "Mistress Kate is hurrying hither and never looked more fetching. Since you mean to kill her in any case, why not have your will of her first? Drop your breeches, man, and stand in ambuscado."

"Peter needed no urging," Mary Mungummory laughed, "for dull wits do not mean dull desires, and a clotpoll in the classroom may be brilliant in the bed: even as Charley left, the boy lowered his breeches, took cod in hand, and waited for his victim to arrive."

"But where was your sister whilst these machinations were in progress?" Ebenezer demanded.

Mary clucked her tongue. "She was neither innocent nor idle, ye may be sure." In fact, Mary explained, it was Kate, and not Charley, who had conceived the scheme to begin with. She had told him in detail of her fear of the brothers and of her life with Wilhelm -- how, unable to aspire to natural intercourse, he obliged her to dance for him lasciviously every night in the accounting room, amid his tobacco-notes and business papers -- and she had pledged to marry Charley and make him master of the Tick estate if he would aid her in disposing of the other legatees. Their trysting-place was a thick clump of myrtles some distance down the path behind the house: hither it was that she would slip away any hour of the day or night when she heard her lover's signal -- a high-pitched yelp like that of a fox or an Indian cur; here it was that she would linger while he caroused with the brothers, and wait for him to find pretext to join her; and here it was she lay this fateful evening, and watched the scheme unfold. She had seen Peter go down the path to the juniper trees and had even heard Charley urging him to rape before he slew; it was scarcely necessary for Charley to tell her, when immediately afterwards he joined her in the myrtles, that their conspiracy was under way. Moreover, their hopes were additionally confirmed a few moments later, for Wilhelm himself came stalking down the path, a pistol in each hand and anger in his face, clearly in response to Willi's announcement. And when he met his trouserless son, they could hear quite clearly the string of Dutch curses he let fly.

"Wait!" they heard Peter cry. "For the love o' God, don't shoot!"

And Wilhelm, to their disappointment, instead of firing at once, asked, "Where is your mother, Peter?"

"I do not know!"

"Why were ye standing so," Wilhelm had demanded then, "with your breeches in one hand and your shame in the other?"

And it must have been that Wilhelm had come closer as he spoke, and threatened with the pistols, for Peter grunted and then replied, "There ye see, 'twas but to ease nature I came hither!"

"Willi told me ye were swiving Katy from stump to stump," Wilhelm had declared.

"Ah," said Peter. "But I am not doing what Willi said, as any wight can see."

"Then why should Willi send me running hither?" his father wanted to know, and Peter asserted that it was not he but Willi who had designs on Kate and had sent Wilhelm out of the house in order to catch her alone and force her virtue.

"Ach!"
said Wilhelm, and came crashing back along the path.

All this the two conspirators had clearly heard, and near the end of it, from the direction of the house, had come the voice of Willi calling Katy's name.

"What will happen now?" Katy had whispered to Charley.

" 'Tis time for Willi to give o'er his search for you," the Indian replied. "If all goes well he'll come down the path to murther whoever's left alive, and Peter will come up to do the same."

He could explain no more, for by that time old Wilhelm had come as far as the clump of myrtles, brandishing his pistols and puffing with fatigue. In fact, such toll had his emotions and exertions taken on him, he suddenly stopped still, clutched his heart, and sat down on a gum stump in the middle of the path.

" 'Tis his foolish heart hath failed him!" Katy whispered, and Charley clapped his hand over her mouth just in time to prevent their discovery by Willi, who at that moment came running down the path with his musket at the ready.

"What ails you?" he asked his father.

Wilhelm clutched his son's arm and shook his head. "Why did you send me where no trouble was? Your brother was only pissing, nothing more."

"Fogh," sneered Willi. "Why should he walk a mile into the woods to piss, when for years he hath been doing it in the rosebush?"

"You send me to kill Peter, and Peter to kill you," Wilhelm went on, "and both have designs on my sweet Kate. Either way I lose a son, and belike my wife as well!"

"She is a whore, and you a fool," Willi declared, and let go a musket blast point-blank at his father's chest.

"Now I shall do the same to him," Katy had whispered then, and fetching a loaded pistol from her skirts, had taken aim at Willi. But again Charley had restrained her, for the sound of the shot had brought Peter hurrying from the junipers, and before Willi could get powder and ball into the gun, his brother was upon him with the knife. Over and over they rolled in the dirt, and in a minute Willi lay beside his father with an open throat.

Peter rose and wiped the knife blade on a leaf. "So," he said, and said no more, for Katy shot him in the chest where he stood.

"God be praised!" she had cried aloud when it was done. "I am free of the knaves at last!" And so moved was she by the spectacle of so many dead Dutchmen in the path, she would not leave without mounting the gum stump about which they lay and dancing, for Charley's benefit, the same dance that had served poor Wilhelm for lovemaking.

"So now you have your heart's desire," Charley had observed.

"And so shall you," Kate had called back from the stump. "Come hither, now, and celebrate our wealth!"

And not content to profane the dead by her dance alone, Katy had insisted that they do then and there on the gum stump what they were wont to do secluded in the myrtles, and had whooped and yelped throughout, Indian-fashion. . .

"Stay!" Ebenezer cried. "You do not mean to tell me --"

"No less," Mary declared. "What's more, he asked her to cry their secret signal-cry when the time came, and he did a thing that he and I had learnt together -- a thing we'd vowed no other soul should share. . ."

"I say --" the poet protested, much embarrassed, but Mary raised her hand for silence.

"And when she instantly let out the signal cry, he fetched up his knife. . ."

"Nay! He murthered her then and there?"

Mary nodded. "I'll say no more than this, that what he did is a famous trick of soldiers the world over, Christian and heathen alike, with women of the enemy."

"I shall be ill if you say more," warned Ebenezer.

"There is no more to tell," Mary said. "He walked off and left 'em where they lay, all four together, and for want of heirs the estate passed over to the Crown. The joke of't was, as Charley had known from the first and not told either Kate or the brothers, 'twas not till the next sitting of the Maryland Council that old Wilhelm's plea for denizenship was due to be approved."

"I do not grasp the point."

"That means he died a Dutchman," Mary explained, "and aliens can't will property in the first place: the Crown would have got the estate in any event!" She laughed and got up off the stable floor. " 'Twas his huge enjoyment of this jest that undid Charley. That same night, in all innocence, I proposed to him we do our little secret, and he took such a fit o' laughing in the midst of't that I wept like a bride for the first time in my life! He vowed he was sorry, and by way of apology told the entire story just as you've heard it from me, laughing all the while, nor left out a single detail of't. He knew me inside out, did my sweet salvage: he knew 'twould tear my heart to hear he'd played me false, and doubly to hear 'twas Kate he'd done it with, and triply to hear he'd done her to death; yet he knew as well I must and would forgive him all -- nay, he knew at bottom I would love him the more for't when the shock had passed, and he was right! What he
didn't
know, by a hundredth part, was how I prized our little trick, not alone that we'd discovered it together, but because 'twixt a man so ill endowed with manly parts and a woman too versed in men to be impressed by any such endowment, this trick of ours was the entire world o' love. 'Twas as if you and your mistress together had invented swiving, that no soul else on earth had thought of: think how ye'd feel then if she told ye, not that she'd kissed another man, but that she'd taught him all that glorious secret ye'd shared!"

"Really," Ebenezer said, "I --"

"Yes. Thou'rt still a virgin and can't know." Mary sighed. "Then bear't in mind, and one day ye'll see it clear enough. In the meanwhile 'tis enough to say, my Charley's error was to tell me he'd shared that thing with Katy. I'God, I could not speak, or weep another tear! I climbed from the wagon and ran down the road, nor stopped till I reached Cambridge, a day and a half later, and told the Sheriff that the Tick family was murthered, and their murtherer was Charley Mattassin!"

Again the tears coursed down her cheeks.

"They found him waiting in the wagon, little dreaming what I'd done, and packed him off to jail. I never spoke to him after that, but they say he took it as a farther joke that I had played him false, and laughed whene'er he thought of't. They say he still was chuckling when they led him to the gallows, and I saw myself that when the noose snapped tight two wondrous things occurred. The first I told ye at the outset, that what was small in life grew uncommon large in death, as sometimes happens; the other is that he died with that monstrous laugh upon his face, and bore it to the grave! That is the tale."

"I ne'er have heard its like," swore Ebenezer. " 'Tis pathetic and terrible at once, and I am still astonished by the likeness of this Indian to my friend and former tutor! I would venture to say that if your Charley had been born an Englishman he could play this world like a harpsichord, as doth my friend, and that if my friend had been born a salvage Indian, he too could die with just that laugh." He shook his head. "What is behind it? Your Charley and my friend, each in his way, came rootless to the world we know; each hath a wondrous gift for grasping it, e'en a lust for't, and manipulates its folk like puppeteers. My friend hath not yet laughed after Charley's fashion, and God grant he never shall, but the potential for't is there; I see it plainly from your tale. A certain shrug he hath, and a particular mirthless smile. 'Tis as though like Jacob he grapples yet with some dark angel in the desert, the which had got the better of your Charley; and 'tis no angel of the Lord whose votaries have this laugh for their stigma, do you think?"