Scarlet Widow

by Graham Masterton

  ‘He’s dead,’ said Judith, her pupils still flickering from side to side. ‘I know he is. He’s dead.’

  *

  As she came out of the front door, Beatrice found that Constable Jewkes was sitting outside on his huge brindled horse. He was leaning forward in his saddle and talking in low, earnest tones to William Rolfe and Thomas Woodman, the tailor, as if he were passing on some scandalous rumour. As soon as he saw her, however, he sat up straight and raised his hat and called out, ‘A very good morning to you, Goody Scarlet!’

  Beatrice went over to him. Constable Jewkes was very tall and lanky, with arms and legs that looked as if the disconnected parts of a man’s body had simply been thrown into a soiled white shirt and a dusty blue coat and hurriedly buttoned up before they all fell out again.

  He had a prominent nose but a sharply receding chin, which gave him the appearance of a sharp-shinned hawk, especially since his eyes were always so bloodshot from drink.

  ‘I hear you visited the Gilmans yesterday,’ he said. ‘Deeply shocking, that was. Deeply! I’m surprised that you had the stomach for it.’

  Constable Jewkes had a strong Welsh accent which made it hard for Beatrice to understand him, especially when he was drunk.

  ‘Do you have any notion yet who might have done it?’ she asked him.

  ‘I have some strong suspicions, Goody Scarlet. But I was on my way there now to talk to the Gilmans’ servants and their slaves. I want to know if any of them noticed anybody unfamiliar around the farm before those poor beggars were set afire.’

  ‘Well, good. But with respect, you should be careful not to jump to any hasty conclusions. I believe that there’s more to what’s happening here in Sutton than we can guess at.’

  ‘Oh, I’m never hasty, Goody Scarlet, you know me! Slow and measured, that’s what I am. If the court is going to order somebody to be hanged by the neck, or pressed, or burned at the stake, then I like to make sure that it’s the person what has actually perpetrated the deed.’

  I’m sure you do, thought Beatrice. Five years before, three young sisters in Haverhill had been hanged for killing their father with a hatchet. Not everybody in Sutton knew it, but their fate had been sealed by the evidence given by Constable Jewkes, even though he had been so drunk on cider that he could hardly stand up. Later, it was discovered that a Penacook Indian had committed the murder when he was surprised by the girls’ father during a robbery.

  Constable Jewkes turned to William Rolfe and Thomas Woodman and said, ‘Well, gentlemen, I must be on my way! Justice waits on no man, especially me.’ He raised his hat again to Beatrice and clicked his tongue to start his horse.

  He had gone no more than twenty yards, however, before another rider appeared at the top of the village green, and he was cantering very fast. He rode his horse straight across the grass at a steep diagonal and reined it in right in front of Constable Jewkes.

  Beatrice recognized him as John O’Dwyer, a young Irishman who was indentured to Ebenezer Rowlandson, a farmer and forester on the far side of Henry Mendum’s property. He was a stocky lad, gingery-haired and freckled from working out in the sun, and his forehead was bursting with perspiration.

  ‘I’ve been looking for you all over, constable! They told me you was over at the Goodhue farm, but you’re not, you’re here!’

  Beatrice could hear the distress in his voice and so she walked along the road to join them.

  ‘John O’Dwyer, isn’t it?’ she asked him. ‘What’s wrong, John?’

  Constable Jewkes twisted around in his saddle and looked down at her with an expression that seemed to mean, I’m the one who asks the questions, Goody Scarlet, not you, even if you are the pastor’s wife.

  ‘It’s the fish in Master Rowlandson’s trout pond!’ John O’Dwyer blurted out. ‘They’ve all come floating up to the surface! There’s scores of them!’

  ‘Dead?’ asked Constable Jewkes.

  ‘Some of them, sir, but only a few. Most are still breathing but it’s like they’re asleep.’

  ‘What the devil are you talking about, boy? Fish don’t sleep. They don’t have eyelids, so how can they possibly sleep?’

  ‘These ones seem to be sleeping, sir. You can pick them right out of the water with your hand and they set up no struggle at all.’

  Constable Jewkes lifted out his pocket watch. ‘Well, boy, I have to attend the Gilman farm on account of those slaves that were burned, which to my mind is more important than sleeping fish. I’ll pay your master a visit when I’m finished up there.’

  ‘There’s another thing that Master Rowlandson said I should tell you, constable.’

  ‘Oh, yes, and what would that be?’

  ‘There are footprints on the wooden jetty at the side of the pond. Well, they’re hoof marks, really, not footprints, as if they were made by a donkey or a goat.’

  ‘Hoof prints?’ Beatrice asked him. ‘Can you describe them, John, these hoof prints?’ Again, Constable Jewkes gave her a sideways look which meant, Leave this to me, if you don’t mind, Goody Scarlet. I represent the law in Sutton.

  ‘I don’t know, ma’am,’ John O’Dwyer told her. ‘They’re brown and they smell strong and they’re sticky, that’s all I can say. Master Rowlandson said not to touch them because they could be have been trod by the Devil himself.’

  ‘I think I need to come and take a look at them,’ said Beatrice.

  ‘Be sure not to tamper with them before I arrive,’ cautioned Constable Jewkes. ‘The Devil may come under your jurisdiction, Goody Scarlet, or that of your husband at least, but all other wrongdoers come under mine.’

  He gave his horse an irritable smack on its rump with his whip and set off towards the Gilman farm. John O’Dwyer waited for Beatrice while she walked back to her shay. Then he rode beside her as she steered Uriel out of the village towards the Rowlandsons’.

  ‘How long before you finish your indenture, John?’ she asked him, raising her voice to make herself heard over the clattering of wheels and squeaking of leather straps.

  ‘Another two years, seven months, and three days,’ said John O’Dwyer.

  ‘It sounds to me as if that won’t be too soon, so far as you’re concerned.’

  ‘Master Rowlandson expects his money’s worth, ma’am, that’s all I’m going to say.’

  Beatrice drove down the track that led between split-rail fences to the Rowlandson home-lot. Around the red-painted house and barns and outbuildings the fields were mostly given over to corn, which was tall and ripe and whiskery and almost ready for harvesting. A warm breeze was blowing across them, so that shining ripples ran from one side to the other.

  Beatrice followed John O’Dwyer around the edge of the fields until they gave way to scrubby grass and rocky outcroppings, and she saw a pond glittering up ahead of them. When they came closer she saw that it was so wide that it was almost a lake, with several smaller ponds around it. On the far side of it stood acres of hardwood forest, mostly hemlock and yellow birch and sugar maple. There were tall pines, too, but these were reserved for His Majesty’s navy. The trees were reflected in the water as if there was another forest, upside down, beneath their feet, with an upside-down sky and clouds.

  Beside the pond there was a long wooden jetty with a small boat tied up to it. Standing by the boat was Ebenezer Rowlandson with three of his farm-workers. Ebenezer Rowlandson was a short, stubby man, with a wiry brown wig and a face like a cross little Boston terrier, with bulging eyes. He turned around when he saw Beatrice and John O’Dwyer approaching, one hand shading his face against the sun. Beatrice drew up the shay and one of the farm-workers came over and took Uriel’s bridle for her.

  ‘Goody Scarlet!’ barked Ebenezer Rowlandson, obviously surprised to see her. Then, ‘John – where’s the constable?’

  ‘He had first to attend to the Gilmans, sir, because of those four slaves that were burned,’ said John O’Dwyer. ‘He told me he’ll be here directly.’

  ‘I’d like to know which
matter is the more pressing,’ retorted Ebenezer Rowlandson. ‘Gilman’s slaves are dead and can’t be resurrected, can they? – but look at my trout! They’re still alive, most of them, but who can tell what mischief has been done to them or how much longer they can survive?’

  Having said that, he turned to Beatrice and bowed his head and said, without much grace, ‘Good day to you, Goody Scarlet. I trust you’re keeping well. May I ask what brings you here?’

  ‘The Reverend Scarlet is attending to other business at the moment,’ said Beatrice. ‘I have come here on his behalf to see if you needed any pastoral help.’

  ‘You mean you came to see if this was the work of the Devil, too – like your own pigs and Henry Mendum’s milk-cows and the Buckley twins and George Gilman’s slaves?’

  ‘Well, yes, that too, to be truthful. In the light of what’s been happening lately, the pastor obviously needs to know if your fish have suffered some natural misfortune or whether somebody has poisoned them.’

  ‘Oh, somebody has poisoned them, right enough, or put a curse on them, more likely, and we all know who that “somebody” is! The sooner we can find some evidence against that widow-woman, the better. As if we didn’t already have evidence enough, just in the way she looks at us, and speaks about us, and talks to that devilish bird of hers, and sings to her goat!’

  ‘Do you think that I could see your fish?’ asked Beatrice. She paused, and then added, ‘Please’.

  ‘I don’t know what earthly good that will do,’ said Ebenezer Rowlandson, but he grudgingly led her over to the jetty. In the water below, scores of shining brown trout were lying on the surface, their gills still opening and closing and their tails still waving, but only feebly.

  Ebenezer Rowlandson said, ‘Here, I’ll show you,’ and with an effortful grunt he knelt down on the jetty and reached down into the water. He scooped up one of the trout and though it made a half-hearted attempt to wriggle out of his hand, it seemed to have hardly any strength at all, as if it were drugged.

  Beatrice held out both hands and said, ‘May I hold it?’

  ‘For what purpose?’ asked Ebenezer Rowlandson. ‘Will you ask it who cast a spell on it? I would have done that myself, if only I could speak Troutanesian.’

  All the same, he laid the slippery brown trout across her upturned palms. It was gasping even more desperately now that it was completely out of the water, but it could barely manage to flex its body from side to side or flap its tail. It reminded her of the gudgeon that she had sometimes found lying on the mud on the banks of the Thames, stunned by the bleach from London’s riverside laundries.

  Apart from its weakness, the trout was silvery-scaled and apparently healthy, so she guessed that it had been affected by some substance added to the water in the pond, rather than diseased. It might be oil of rhodium, she thought, which her father had sold to anglers to attract and stupefy fish, and to rat-catchers to do the same with rats, to lure them into a sack which could then be tied up and thrown in the river. Or perhaps it was Cocculus indicus, a climbing Asian plant that was also used by unsportsmanlike anglers, and by unscrupulous brewers to give their weak beer more ‘giddiness’.

  ‘Well?’ asked Ebenezer Rowlandson. ‘What has Master Trout told you? Did the name “Belknap” pass his lips?’

  Beatrice returned the fish to him and Ebenezer Rowlandson dropped it with a plop back into the pond. ‘Master Trout was quite helpful, as a matter of fact,’ she said. ‘Do you think you could show me the hoof prints?’

  Ebenezer Rowlandson puffed out his cheeks. ‘I’m not so sure about that, Goody Scarlet. Don’t you think that we had better wait for your husband, and for Constable Jewkes? If laws have been broken here, either holy or human, they are the men appointed to deal with such things, after all.’

  ‘I assure you I won’t touch anything,’ said Beatrice. ‘I would just like to look at them, to see how they compare with the hoof prints we found at Henry Mendum’s.’

  ‘Well... very well,’ said Ebenezer Rowlandson. He walked about thirty feet further along the jetty and then stopped and pointed down to the planks beneath his feet. ‘They begin here and they run all the way down to the very end there, see? Whatever made them – whether it was man or beast or Satan himself – it ran right off the jetty and into the water.’

  He hesitated for a moment and then he said, ‘Maybe, on the other hand, it didn’t go into the water. Maybe it had wings and flew off into the air. Or maybe it ran right across the surface to the other side and into the forest.’

  ‘And which of those do you think it did?’ Beatrice asked him.

  ‘I don’t know, Goody, I’m sure. Every one of those possibilities puts the fear of God into me, I can tell you. Do you know what I keep thinking? I keep thinking that if by chance I had been here at the time, I would have come face to face with Satan himself. It makes me tremble to my very boots.’

  Beatrice looked down at the hoof prints that ran from the middle of the jetty to the end. She found it curious that they started only halfway along, as if the creature that had made them had dropped right out of the sky, run down to the end of the jetty, and then either jumped straight into the water or flown away into the air, as Ebenezer Rowlandson had said. The only other alternative was that it had walked across the water, like Jesus when he rescued his disciples on the Sea of Galilee. That thought was not only blasphemous but very frightening.

  The hoof prints appeared to be made of the same treacly substance as the prints at Henry Mendum’s farm and the two upside-down crosses that had been daubed on the walls at the Buckleys’ and the Gilmans’. What Beatrice thought was amazing, though, was that they ran in a dead straight line, with left and right hoof prints completely parallel, all the way down to the very end of the jetty, each one about a yard apart.

  In shape they were cloven, like those of a goat, and yet they had clearly been made by a creature with two legs rather than four. A goat would have left its prints in pairs, with the hind hoof prints slightly in front of the fore hoof prints, but these hoof prints had been made singly, like those of a man.

  What was even more curious was how evenly spaced they were. If the creature had launched itself into the air from the end of the jetty, its hoof prints would surely have been clustered closer together just before it had started to flap its wings. The same would have happened immediately before it jumped into the water – or on to it, if it had been able to walk across the surface. The water was at least two feet below the level of the jetty and she couldn’t imagine that it had simply run off the edge without changing its gait at all.

  ‘Well?’ said Ebenezer Rowlandson. ‘What do you see?’

  ‘I see a great deal, thank you, Master Rowlandson.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘I’m sorry, but there is little point in my telling you now. I haven’t yet been able to make sense of it all myself, and I’m quite sure that you won’t be able to, either.’

  ‘Oh, I see. Thank you for the compliment.’

  ‘When I have a better understanding of what might have happened here, I’ll be sure to explain it to you, have no fear.’

  ‘Well, I thank you for that, Goody Scarlet, although I am much surprised that the pastor allows you to be so condescending.’

  Beatrice turned to him. ‘A wife can be assertive, sir, without being disobedient. Sometimes a wife has a duty to her husband to speak her mind.’

  Ebenezer Rowlandson grunted again, as if he didn’t really understand what she meant, and didn’t want to – but if he did, he probably wouldn’t like it one bit. His own wife, Emily, was one of the most timid women in Sutton and she was frequently in need of Solomon’s seal for her bruising.

  ‘Have you seen enough, then?’ he asked her testily. ‘Perhaps you can now take word back to the pastor and see what he makes of it all.’

  ‘I will go and tell him post-haste, Master Rowlandson.’

  ‘Good. If Satan has been at work here, I will urgently need his advice on how to protec
t my livelihood from any further depredation, don’t you think? Unless, that is, you already know better.’

  ‘I don’t mean you any disrespect, sir. Don’t think that.’

  ‘Huh! Well, that’s as may be.’

  Ebenezer Rowlandson was now so impatient for her to leave that she could see that it was going to be difficult for her to take a sample of the hoof prints, as she had in Henry Mendum’s field. She took a step to the side, so that her gown covered one of the prints, and then she jabbed two or three times with the heel of her shoe on to the hem of her petticoat, hoping that some of the tarry substance would stick to it.

  She followed Ebenezer Rowlandson back along the jetty. As she reached the steps at the end of it, however, she noticed that the narrow channel of water between the pilings and the steep grassy bank was clogged with thick whitish foam. She had been remembering the fish poisoned by the laundries beside the Thames, and now here was a mass of bubbles that looked like soapsuds.

  ‘Are you coming, Goody Scarlet?’ called Ebenezer Rowlandson. ‘I have much to do this afternoon!’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Beatrice and walked briskly back to her shay. She settled into her seat and took up the reins, but before she could leave Ebenezer Rowlandson held on to the harness and looked up at her with one eye closed against the sun.

  ‘I will say this, Goody Scarlet. If you were a wife of mine, a few stripes would soon cure you of your boldness,’

  Beatrice smiled at him. ‘If I had chosen to be a wife of yours, Master Rowlandson, I think I would deserve them for my stupidity.’

  Twenty-three

  When she returned home Beatrice immediately ran upstairs and took off her petticoat. She had managed to impress almost half of one of the hoof prints on to the hem and it had stained the cream linen dark brown. She sniffed it and it smelled exactly the same as the tarry substance that she had taken from Henry Mendum’s cow pasture: coal tar, civet oil, sulphur and something sweet, like molasses or dark treacle.

  She wished that she had taken a sample of the thick white foam that she had seen beside the jetty. It had looked so much like soapsuds and yet where had it come from? She wondered if any of the Rowlandsons’ maids had emptied soapy water into the pond after washing the laundry, but that didn’t seem likely when Talbot Brook ran so close to the farmhouse. Even if they had, she didn’t think that soap would have affected the trout like that, making them comatose.