Scarlet Widow

by Graham Masterton

  ‘Not necessarily. Satan can turn the hearts of men, he doesn’t have to send demons to do his work for him.’

  ‘No, Bea. You are still influenced far too much by what your father taught you. Not everything in this world can be explained by science, nor should it be. If everything can be explained by science, then how can there be miracles? Lazarus would not have risen from the dead, nor the water at Canaan turned into wine. Don’t you understand, Bea? What has been happening here in Sutton is not just empirical proof of the existence of Satan, it is empirical proof of the existence of God.’

  Beatrice didn’t know what to say to him. She had always thought that his faith was shining, unquestioning and flawless. Did he really need evidence that God was real?

  Caleb had finished harnessing Uriel and Francis said, ‘Now, my darling, I have to go or I will lose him. I will be back as soon as I can.’

  ‘Francis—’ she began, but then she realized that nothing was going to stop him from going after Jonathan Shooks. It was as much to prove his manhood as it was to prove his belief in God.

  Twenty-six

  By a quarter to eleven, Francis had still not returned home, so Beatrice took Noah and Mary and walked down to the village. Both Beatrice and Mary wore black and Noah was dressed in his dark grey pinafore.

  Beatrice was desperately hoping that Francis had decided to go to the village first, in order to make sure that the meeting house had been properly prepared for the funerals. As soon as she reached the village green, however, she could see that even though a large crowd of mourners had gathered outside the front doors, Francis was nowhere to be seen, nor Uriel, nor their shay.

  ‘Goody Scarlet!’ called out Major General Holyoke, as she crossed the grass. He was a short, stout man with wiry grey whiskers, ruddy cheeks and a black eye-patch over his left eye socket. ‘Is the reverend not with you? Most of these people were here betimes but now we are more than ten minutes delayed.’

  It was well past eleven now and the congregation were beginning to file into the meeting house and take their seats, with the men in the front benches and the women and children right at the back, although Peter Duston had raised the women’s benches so that they had a better view. The only exception was Judith Buckley, who was sitting beside the two elm-wood coffins that stood on trestles in the centre of the aisle, her head covered with a black lace veil.

  Inside the meeting house it was hot and airless and smelled strongly of musty clothes and warm people. The only sound was a low, reverential murmuring, the scuffling of children’s feet, and the flap-flap-flapping of fans.

  Both of the coffins were closed now because the weather had been so hot. Peter Duston had been concerned that if he delayed screwing down the lid of Tristram’s little coffin before much longer, Tristram’s body would become so bloated that he wouldn’t be able to screw it down at all.

  Outside, Beatrice said, ‘Francis went off on an errand four hours ago and I have not seen him since. I’m worried that he may have met with an accident.’

  ‘Did he tell you where he was going?’

  ‘He didn’t know himself.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Major General Holyoke. ‘I’m not sure that I quite understand you. He went off on an errand but he didn’t know where to?’

  ‘He was following Jonathan Shooks. He’s mentioned Jonathan Shooks to you, I presume?’

  ‘Yes – yes, he has. He has told me more than once that he suspects Shooks of being a mountebank, although he has no real proof of it. Is that why he was following him?’

  Beatrice nodded. ‘I’m very worried for him, general. Jonathan Shooks has always been the soul of courtesy to me, but I very much fear that he is not a man to be meddled with lightly.’

  Major General Holyoke took out his pocket watch. ‘We will give the reverend ten more minutes, Goody Scarlet, but if he doesn’t arrive by then we will have to commence the funeral proceedings without him. We have to consider poor Goody Buckley, with both her husband and her infant son to commit to the ground. I’m sure that Goodman Lynch knows the words of the funeral service off by heart.’

  Benjamin Lynch was Francis’s sacristan and had frequently led prayers when Francis had been away on ecclesiastic business, or unwell. He was easily the oldest man in Sutton, nearly seventy, and Beatrice could see his white hair shining like a dandelion puffball on the opposite side of the graveyard.

  ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘But if he doesn’t appear by the end of the service, I think we should send men out to go looking for him.’

  ‘Don’t you worry, my dear,’ said Major General Holyoke, patting her on the shoulder. ‘I’m sure that no harm has come to him. His carriage may have lost a wheel, nothing more serious than that, or perhaps the traces have snapped.’

  ‘If that had happened he would have unharnessed our driver and ridden him here.’

  ‘You never know, your driver may have been lamed.’

  Beatrice was looking around to see if Jonathan Shooks was among the crowd, but there was no sign of him, either. She could see Henry Mendum, all dressed in black with a black cocked hat, looking sombre but bored. His wife, Harriet, had her nose lifted as haughtily as ever and she was wearing a voluminous black silk hood which denoted her social status in the community. A woman of lesser standing would have risked a fine for wearing such a hood.

  ‘Come on, Goody Scarlet, let’s go inside,’ said Major General Holyoke. ‘Fretting will do you no good at all. There will be a good reason for Francis’s delay, I’m certain of it, and he’ll be back before you know it.’

  *

  But Francis didn’t come back. Benjamin Lynch had to conduct the funeral service in his place, which he read from the pulpit in a high, scratchy voice like a crow cawing from a nearby tree. It seemed to Beatrice that it took him hours to get through it, with interminable quotations from the Psalms. ‘You have made my days a mere handbreadth, O Lord.’ He ended with an uplifting verse:

  Ye mourners who in silent gloom

  Bear your dear kindred to the tomb,

  Grudge not when Christians go to rest,

  They sleep in Jesus, and are blest.

  Afterwards, as the coffins of Nicholas and Tristram were lowered into their graves, Beatrice kept looking around, shading her eyes with her hand, but there was still no sign of Francis. She went across to the Buckley house to give her condolences to Judith, and to make sure that little Apphia was still improving, but she didn’t stay for burnt wine and biscuits. She urgently needed to return home in case Francis had been hurt and had managed somehow to make his way back to the parsonage.

  Hurrying back along the roadway, with her black gown lifted to help her to walk more quickly, she couldn’t stop herself imagining all kinds of horrifying scenarios. Francis covered in blood. Francis brought back home unconscious in the back of the shay, his skull broken. Francis beaten by robbers and his dead or senseless body thrown into the porch.

  She even began to think that he might have been right, after all, and that Jonathan Shooks had been meeting with a demon, and that when Francis had followed him he had been discovered and the demon had melted him like Nicholas.

  Perhaps all the time she had been too pragmatic and hadn’t allowed herself to accept that the world really was full of wonders and miracles and spirits both good and malevolent.

  ‘Ma-ma!’ called Noah, trying to keep up with her, but she only hurried all the faster.

  *

  When she arrived home, though, she found that Francis had still not returned. She heard squealing noises from the back of the house and when she walked round she found that the farmer from Londonderry had delivered their pigs. Caleb had already filled their trough with water and was feeding them with bran and cabbage stalks.

  ‘Bacon’s come, ma’am!’ he called out to her.

  Beatrice walked over to the pig-pen and said, ‘Thank you, Caleb. Thank you.’

  She started to ask him, ‘The Reverend Scarlet hasn’t been home, has he?’ but befo
re she could finish her throat tightened and she started to sob. Her eyes blurred with tears and she waved her hand uselessly because she simply couldn’t speak.

  Caleb dropped his pail of bran and let himself out through the gate.

  ‘Goody Scarlet! Goody Scarlet! Whatever’s wrong?’

  ‘It’s the Reverend Scarlet, Caleb,’ Beatrice managed to tell him, smearing the tears from her cheeks with her fingers. ‘He’s been missing since early this morning. He didn’t come to the Buckleys’ funerals to officiate. I have had no word from him at all.’

  ‘Did he tell you where he was going?’

  Beatrice shook her head. ‘He said only that he was going to follow Mr Shooks, to discover what manner of business he was up to. I cautioned him not to, but he insisted and now I don’t know where he is.’

  ‘Well, we’d best go look for him,’ said Caleb. ‘I’ll fetch Jubal. He’s down by the brook cutting back the bushes and he has two of Mr Barraclough’s boys with him. They can go out looking, too.’

  ‘Thank you, Caleb. I’m worried that he might be lying hurt somewhere and needs our assistance.’

  ‘Did you see which direction he first went off in?’

  ‘Left, towards the village, but after that I don’t have any idea. Jonathan Shooks is staying at the Penacook Inn, so they might have headed that way, but he is very elusive. Like a ghost, the Reverend Scarlet called him.’

  *

  Jubal and Caleb and the two Barraclough boys went off to search for Francis. The Barraclough boys had come to the parsonage on one horse and they said that they would first ride back to their home-lot and saddle up another, so that they could widen their search even further. They would also try to enlist the help of as many people in the village as they could. Francis was well liked in Sutton and nobody in his congregation would wish to see any harm come to him.

  Beatrice stayed at home. She knew that she would be of very little use trampling through the woods in her mourning dress. Better that she stay here, so that she could welcome Francis when he did return and tend to any injuries he might have sustained. She couldn’t get the thought out of her mind that he was badly hurt, almost as if he were trying to communicate with her by animal magnetism.

  The afternoon passed and there was still no news. The sun began to sink behind the pines. Beatrice fed and washed Noah herself, even though Mary had stayed on, and she tucked him up in his crib and sang him a lullaby.

  Dear God let Francis be safe, she thought. Don’t let Noah become a fatherless child.

  Noah cried when she left the room, but she knew that he would soon fall asleep. As she reached the bottom of the stairs she heard horses outside, and a carriage. Immediately she opened the front door to see who was out there.

  ‘Thank the Lord,’ she said, because it was their own shay, with Uriel pulling it. When she hurried out of the porch, however, she saw that Henry Mendum’s black stable-boy was driving it, and that Henry Mendum himself was riding beside it, still dressed in his black cocked hat and his funeral coat.

  ‘Goody Scarlet,’ he said, lifting his hat. He climbed down from his horse and handed the reins to his stable-boy.

  ‘What’s happened?’ she asked him. ‘Where’s Francis? What’s happened to him? Have you found him? Is her hurt?’

  ‘I regret that we haven’t yet found him, no,’ said Henry Mendum. ‘Less than an hour ago Bobbin turned up at my stables pulling your empty shay behind him. I don’t know where your husband is, Goody Scarlet, but obviously he and the shay parted company at some point, so Bobbin made his own way home.’

  Beatrice laid her hand against the horse’s neck. ‘Uriel, we call him, after the archangel Uriel. Could you tell how far he might have travelled, or where he might have come from?’

  ‘There was steeplebush caught in the wheel spokes which caught my attention, because steeplebush grows mainly beside rivers and lakes, not close to the highway. In particular it grows around Johnson’s Pond, and that’s a good six miles off.’

  ‘Can you send some of your men to Johnson’s Pond, to see if Francis is anywhere nearby? I am so worried that he might be badly hurt and unable to walk.’

  Henry Mendum looked towards the tall pines beyond the orchard. The sun had sunk behind them now and the evening air was whirling with bats.

  ‘It’s too late now, I regret. It will be so dark soon that we won’t be able to tell if our eyes are open or closed. But I promise you that I’ll have every available man out at first light tomorrow.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Mendum. I understand, and I appreciate it. And I thank you, too, for bringing Uriel back.’

  ‘My heart is with you, Goody Scarlet,’ said Henry Mendum. ‘So soon as I have any news, I will let you know. I bid you good evening.’

  With that, he heaved himself up into the saddle, turned his chestnut horse around and trotted off down the driveway, with his stable-boy trotting behind him on foot.

  Mary came out and helped her to unbuckle Uriel from his traces. She led him to his paddock and opened the gate for him.

  ‘There, Uriel. Good boy. If only you could talk.’

  *

  Mary stayed the night in Noah’s bedchamber, so that as soon dawn broke Beatrice could harness Uriel again and get ready to leave for Johnson’s Pond. She knew that any search she made for Francis would probably be fruitless, but she was too agitated to remain at home any longer, constantly going outside and looking down the driveway to see if anybody was coming, or listening for the sound of horses or carriage wheels.

  She had hardly slept all night, and when she had she had been woken by the trickling of rain down the window, which she had thought at first was somebody whispering very quietly in her ear.

  Mary had insisted on wrapping up a small crusty loaf for her in a cloth and giving her a stone bottle of apple juice, but she felt neither hungry nor thirsty. As she drove Uriel towards the village she could see from the clouds that the weather was going to be much more disturbed today, with strange streaky clouds, and cooler, too.

  There was nobody in sight around the village green as she drove past it, although she could hear clanking coming from Ronald Bartlett’s smithy. Because it had rained during the night the green smelled strongly of horse manure.

  She passed by the Widow Belknap’s house, but it didn’t look as if the Widow Belknap had returned, either. Her curtains were half-drawn and her goat was gone. Either the goat had gnawed through its rope and escaped or else it had been taken into care by one of her neighbours.

  The road to Johnson’s Pond wended its way northwards for a little less than five miles, almost parallel to the Merrimack river. Then it turned sharply north-east, with the forests growing denser and the ground becoming rockier. At last it sloped to the north again, sharply downhill, until it passed through a thickly wooded valley with a large dark pond in the middle of it, as black and reflective as a sheet of glass.

  This was Johnson’s Pond, and as Henry Mendum had said, its banks were thick with fuzzy purple steeplebush, like the brushes that her father used to use for cleaning out bottles. Beatrice stopped the shay beside the water so that Uriel could rest and have a drink. The woods all around were dark and cool and aromatic, and every now and then the silence was interrupted by the repetitive whistling of nuthatches. She took a drink of apple juice herself and then tilted her head back and tiredly closed her eyes.

  She almost nodded off to sleep for a moment, but then she heard a crackling sound, like somebody stepping on twigs, and she opened her eyes and turned her head in alarm. She gasped in surprise, because a figure in brown was stealthily creeping towards her and was less than thirty feet away.

  Although it was dressed in brown, it didn’t look the same as the brown-cloaked figure she had seen around the parsonage. Its head was covered so that its face was hidden, but it was wrapped only in a blanket, rather than a cloak.

  ‘Who are you?’ said Beatrice, trying to sound challenging. ‘What do you want? I have no money!’

  T
he figure came and stood beside the shay, not moving. Beatrice stared at it with her heart beating hard against her ribs – so hard that she thought the figure might be able to hear it.

  Another nuthatch whistled and as it did so the figure swung its left arm so that it dropped its blanket to the ground. Beatrice jerked back in her seat, startled. The figure was the Widow Belknap, completely naked, skeletal and white-skinned except for a triangular suntanned V on her chest where she had worn her low-cut gown. Her tangled blonde hair was prickly with twigs and leaves and burrs and hung right down to her bony shoulders. Her breasts were flat and pendulous, with nipples as dark as raisins, and covered in criss-cross scratches. She had no pubic hair and her legs were as thin as broomsticks.

  She stared up at Beatrice with those emerald-green eyes, although she didn’t appear to be able to focus on her, and she was swaying very slightly from side to side, as if she were being blown by the wind, though there was no wind.

  ‘Widow Belknap,’ said Beatrice. ‘What’s happened to you? What are you doing here in the forest? Where are your clothes? Has somebody whipped you? You look as if somebody’s whipped you!’

  ‘Who did you say I was?’ asked the Widow Belknap in a slurred voice.

  ‘You’re the Widow Belknap.’

  ‘I’m nobody of the sort. My name – my name is Bernice.’

  ‘Very well, you are Bernice. But what are you doing here, and where are your clothes? You cannot roam around here naked. I’m looking for my husband, Francis, the Reverend Scarlet. Have you seen him?’

  ‘I am looking for revenge. I am preparing to wreak havoc!’

  ‘Revenge against whom? And for what?’

  The Widow Belknap lifted one finger and then looked around her as if she suspected that somebody might be eavesdropping.

  ‘Revenge for all of their slanders, every one of them. Revenge for all of their hypocrisy, especially that brown one.’

  ‘What “brown one”? Who are you talking about?’

  ‘Oh, he seems to be so upright. He seems to be so blameless. But there are devils and then there are devils. At least Satan makes no pretence about what he wants, unlike this devil.’