Scarlet Widow

by Graham Masterton

  *

  The next day she took the shay and drove to the village. The morning was warm but strangely foggy, so that Beatrice felt as if she were driving through some kind of ghostly dream. She called on Rodney Bartlett first, because he tended to so many horses and probably used more linseed oil than anybody else in the village. Linseed oil kept horses calm and made their coats and manes glossy and relieved them of the sweet itch, especially at this time of the year when the air was filled with midges.

  ‘I still find it hard to believe what happened yesterday, Goody Scarlet,’ said Rodney Bartlett. ‘You know that the whole of Sutton is mourning, and feels for you.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Bartlett, you’re very kind,’ Beatrice told him. She looked around the gloomy, smoke-filled smithy. The furnace had just been lit and there were five or six horses tethered in the lean-to at the back, who were beginning to grow restless, as if they knew they were soon to be shoed. ‘Has anybody bought any linseed oil from you lately?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ frowned Rodney Bartlett, as if she had asked him a question in a foreign language.

  ‘Linseed oil, Mr Bartlett. I’m looking for somebody who might have purchased quite a large quantity of it – about a week ago, possibly, I’m not exactly sure. Or they might have taken it without you knowing.’

  Rodney Bartlett slowly shook his head. ‘I’ve sold none of mine, Goody Scarlet, and there’s none missing that I’m aware of. You might ask Matthew Blackett. He uses linseed oil on his gunstocks. Or James Fuller, he uses it, too, when he’s making his furniture. But, of course, I get all of mine from Robert Norton, over at Billington’s Corners.’

  ‘Robert Norton, the paint-maker?’

  ‘That’s right. We do an exchange. He brings over forty gallons of linseed oil to feed my horses and I give him forty gallons of horse piss to make his paint.’

  ‘He makes his paint with—?’

  ‘Horse piss, that’s right. White lead and horse piss. The green paint anyhow, that’s what goes into it. God knows what he uses for his Spanish brown.’

  ‘All right,’ said Beatrice. ‘Thank you.’

  *

  She drove out to Billington’s Corners, which was more of a small scruffy crossroads ‘in back of no place at all’, as Caleb would have put it, rather than a village. It was here, however, that Robert Norton and his brother Abel ran their paint shop, which mixed and supplied paints for most of the county. Their factory was a large grey barn set back from the Bedford road, with several wagons outside, and stacks of wooden barrels, as well as countless glass carboys with wickerwork casings.

  The morning was growing hotter now and out of the paint shop’s open doors came a pungent smell of linseed oil and a sour metallic tang of colouring mixtures. Beatrice tied up Uriel to a ring at the side of the building and walked inside. Several young men and girls in long aprons were grinding and sieving soil or scraping metal flakes from tall earthenware jars.

  She found Abel Norton sitting at a desk in a small office on the left-hand side, in his shirt-sleeves, filling in account books. He was a plump little man, like a character out of a nursery rhyme. His pate was bald, but the rest of his hair was almost shoulder-length, and very white. He was wearing tiny eyeglasses, which he took off his nose as Beatrice came in.

  ‘Goody Scarlet!’ he greeted her, and stood up to clasp her hand. ‘What brings you here? Are you thinking of painting the parsonage? I have a new taupe mixture which has just arrived from Europe, very fashionable if I may say so, but discreet, and uplifting at the same time. Just right for a minister’s house!’

  ‘You clearly haven’t heard,’ said Beatrice. Although the Nortons were members of their congregation they rarely came into the village on any day except Sundays for communion. She told him how Francis had been murdered and turned rigid and displayed on the roof of the meeting house, and he listened in shocked silence, chewing his lip.

  ‘I don’t know what to say to you, Goody Scarlet, except to give you my heartfelt condolences. What terrible, terrible news! But... you haven’t come here only to tell me that?’

  ‘No, Mr Norton, I haven’t. I’ve come here to ask you if you happen to have sold a large quantity of linseed oil in the past few days. It would have been an unusually large quantity.’

  Abel Norton looked at her oddly and clipped his eyeglasses back on to the bridge of his nose.

  ‘Linseed oil? A large quantity, you say? An unusually large quantity?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Ah... well, the problem is that my business transactions are always strictly confidential. I have to keep them that way for many reasons, but mostly because my customers wouldn’t be at all happy if I were to divulge their financial affairs to others.’

  ‘You have, though, haven’t you?’

  Abel Norton gave her an almost imperceptible nod, as if he were afraid that somebody might see him or overhear him.

  ‘Please, Mr Norton, you must tell me to whom.’

  ‘Goody Scarlet, I’m really not sure – well, to be honest with you, I’m really not sure what the consequences might be.’

  ‘It’s a matter of life and death, Mr Norton. I can put it no plainer than that.’

  Abel Norton looked around. He even leaned sideways a little so that he could see over Beatrice’s shoulder to the yard outside. Then he said, in a very low voice, ‘I was out of my office when you first arrived. By chance I had left on my desk a bill of trade that referred to a certain unusual quantity of linseed oil. If by chance you happened to see it, then it was certainly not with my knowledge or permission.’

  With that, he sat down and opened his left-hand desk drawer. He took out a bill of sale and laid it on top of his ledger. Then he turned his head away and stared up at the little window high above his desk, as if he had developed a sudden fascination for cloud formations.

  Beatrice went over and picked up the bill of sale. It was for two hundred gallons of best-quality linseed oil, to be delivered to Rutger’s Farm near Penacook. The price was twopence halfpenny the gallon, making a total of two pounds ought and eightpence, with a carriage cost of fourpence.

  The bill was addressed to ‘J. Shooks, Esq.’

  ‘I thank you, Mr Norton,’ said Beatrice. Her hand was shaking as she put the bill back on his ledger. ‘I have seen all I need to. You have been most accommodating.’

  Abel Norton folded the bill and returned it to his desk drawer. ‘I’m sorry, Goody Scarlet?’

  As she left his office, however, he said, ‘Was he responsible for what happened to your husband? That fellow Shooks? I thought him queer, I have to admit, him and that coachman of his.’

  ‘I’m not entirely sure yet, Mr Norton. But I believe him to be implicated at the very least.’

  ‘But what use would he have for such a quantity of linseed oil?’

  ‘What is the principal quality of linseed oil, Mr Norton? Why do you mix into paint and into putty?’

  ‘Oh, my dear Lord, Goody Scarlet. You don’t mean—? Dear Lord, and I was the provider of it! Oh, I am mortified, I really am! If my knees were not so stiff I would get down on them and beg for your forgiveness!’

  Twenty-nine

  Beatrice went back home first to make sure that Noah was fed and changed, and that Mary was coping with all of her chores. After she had helped Mary fold some sheets she sat in the kitchen with a plate of cold roasted pork with bread and pickled cucumbers. She chewed her food slowly and deliberately, and drank frequent mouthfuls of cider to help her swallow it, even though she had no appetite and the meat seemed tasteless. She was grieving so much that it gave her a pain in her stomach, but she was filled with determination and she knew that she would need strength and stamina to do what she had to do next. Uriel had needed a rest, too, and water and a feed.

  The parlour door was closed and she didn’t open it. As far as she was concerned, the wooden man lying on the floor beneath a sheet was only a replica of Francis, not Francis himself. Francis was alive, and ge
ntle, and loving – still alive inside her heart.

  Peter Duston would be calling on her later to take measurements for a coffin and she had already talked to Benjamin Lynch about a funeral service.

  Just after two o’clock she drove back through the village and out towards Penacook. She went first to Rutger’s Farm, which lay about a mile and a half to the east of Penacook. She knew that it had been lying empty for almost a year. James Rutger had died of the black jaundice last March, and his widow Jessica shortly afterwards, and since her death the estate had been furiously disputed in the courts between seven sons, three of whom had been the progeny of James Rutger’s marriage to his first wife, Helen, who had died in childbed.

  When she arrived there she found the fields overgrown with weeds, almost waist-high, and the orchards littered with rotting brown apples. The buildings were dilapidated, with peeling grey paint and broken windows. As she approached a dark cloud drifted across the sun which made the farm look even more derelict.

  Behind the main farmhouse stood two large barns, although the nearer one was leaning at an angle, as if it were close to collapse. Beatrice climbed down from her shay and went across to look at them. It was evident that nobody had entered the nearer barn for months, because the doors had dropped on their rusted hinges and purple flowering lady’s-thumb was growing thickly up in front of them.

  The doors to the second barn, however, had been cleared of weeds and two semicircular scrape marks on the ground showed that they had recently been opened. Gasping with effort, Beatrice managed to tug the left-hand door a few inches ajar so that she could squeeze inside.

  This barn had once been the farm’s feed store. Bales of hay were still stacked up against the opposite wall, almost to the rafters, while forty or fifty sacks of oats were heaped up in a pyramid on the right-hand side. Most of the sacks had been gnawed open by rats or mice and oats had spilled across the floor. There was a strong musty smell in the barn of half-composted hay and rotting oats and rats’ urine – as well as the smell of linseed oil.

  Almost in the centre of the barn stood a large circular cheese-kettle, almost six feet in diameter, made out of tarnished copper. As soon as Beatrice saw it the clouds must have moved away from the sun, because it was suddenly illuminated with shafts of light from the clerestory windows in the roof, as if the barn were a church and the cheese-kettle some kind of unholy font.

  Beatrice had seen cheese-kettles like this before, in Haverhill, where they made Swiss cheese at Saltonstall’s dairy farm. Not far away from it were scattered about a dozen empty demijohns. When she walked up to the cheese-kettle she could see that it was filled almost to the brim with amber-coloured linseed oil.

  She knew that a demijohn held fifteen gallons, so the cheese-kettle must have contained at least two hundred gallons, which tallied with Abel Norton’s bill of trade. The oil was glowing in the sunlight, but its surface was thick with dust and globules of fat and it was speckled with scores of dead flies.

  There was only one reason why anybody would have filled up a cheese-kettle with two hundred gallons of linseed oil. Beatrice stood by its brim and stared at it numbly, trying to picture what had happened. She could only visualize it as some two-dimensional medieval painting, with Francis lowered naked into the oil like a martyred saint. She hoped to God that he had already been dead before they immersed him.

  It puzzled her, though, that the cheese-kettle was still filled up. How could Jonathan Shooks have been so careless as to leave it like this? Had it not occurred to him that she might well understand how Francis had been solidified and that she might go looking for the source of his linseed oil? Or had he done it intentionally to taunt her, to show her that he wasn’t in the least afraid of her?

  He could easily have opened the spigot in the cheese-kettle and let the evidence soak away, or he could have set fire to the barn which would have destroyed it forever.

  Beatrice slowly circled around the barn, brushing aside the hay and the oats with the side of her foot, trying to find proof that Francis had been brought here. She picked up a filthy grey cravat with some dark brown stains on it that might have been blood, but she couldn’t be sure it was his, so she dropped it.

  Before she stepped back outside she paused at the door of the barn and looked back at the cheese-kettle. She felt like burning the building down herself, but she knew that would be nothing but a mindless act of vengeance and that she should leave vengeance to God. Besides, she had something much more important to do.

  *

  As soon as the Penacook Inn came into view she could see that Jonathan Shooks was still there. His calash was parked by the stables at the side and when she came nearer she could see Samuel outside in a long leather apron, rubbing down the grey.

  The inn was a white-painted, double-fronted building, with maroon shutters, surrounded by dark green oaks. It overlooked an ox-bow lake in which it was reflected, although the reflection was rippled into white fragments by the loons that were swimming across it.

  Samuel turned his head when he heard Beatrice approaching in her shay. He stayed where he was, though, with his hand resting on the horse’s flank, and when she drew up outside the front of the inn and tied up Uriel he made no attempt to come over and greet her. She looked across at him as she mounted the steps that led up to the verandah, but he remained expressionless, as if he were waiting to see what would happen next.

  Inside the hallway a small, beaky-nosed woman in a frilly white cap and pale yellow gown came up to her, smiling, and said, ‘Good day to you, ma’am. Can I help you? Are you looking for some place to stay?’

  The inn was light and sunny, with tall vases of white chrysanthemums standing in the hallway and yellow drapes at the windows embroidered with birds and butterflies. Beatrice could smell warm biscuits and beeswax floor polish. Somewhere at the back of the inn, a girl’s high voice was singing ‘The Raggle-Taggle Gypsies-O!’ It gave Beatrice an unexpected pang because her mother used to sing it to her when she was small.

  ‘I’m looking for a guest of yours, Mr Jonathan Shooks.’

  ‘He’s in the dining room, ma’am, taking his dinner. May I tell him who’s calling?’

  ‘That’s all right. I can introduce myself, thank you. Through here, is it, the dining room?’

  ‘Well, yes, ma’am, but I don’t know if Mr Shooks would wish to be disturbed at the moment.’

  ‘Disturbed?’ said Beatrice. What a word, she thought, for a man who might be guilty of murdering her husband and turning him into a wooden statue. ‘Don’t worry, I intend to do very much more than disturb him.’

  ‘Please—’ said the woman as Beatrice stepped forward. ‘I cannot permit you to walk in unannounced! It would not be proper!’

  Beatrice said, ‘I am the wife of the Reverend Francis Scarlet of Sutton and I have urgent business with Mr Shooks. Church business. So, if you don’t mind—’

  ‘Very well,’ said the beaky-nosed woman, becoming even more flustered. ‘If you’d care to follow me.’

  She led Beatrice through into a large dining room, with three circular tables in it, all draped with long white linen tablecloths. Two young men who looked like travelling salesmen were sitting on the left-hand side, laughing over bowls of chicken stew. They stopped laughing when Beatrice walked into the room and followed her with their eyes, nudging each other.

  In the far corner, beside a window that looked out over the gardens, sat Jonathan Shooks. The sunlight behind him made him look strangely blurry. In front of him was a plate of hogs’ ears ragout with pumpkin squash, and when Beatrice came in he was just about to lift a glass of white wine to his lips. As soon as he saw her he put it down, without drinking.

  He stood up as she came across the dining room and bowed. He was wearing his grey linen coat and the grey wig, which made him look much older than he must really have been, although he looked tired today, too, with plum-coloured smudges under his eyes.

  He didn’t hold out his hand. He obviously sensed f
rom the look on Beatrice’s face that she wouldn’t have taken it.

  ‘Well, well. Goody Scarlet,’ he said. His voice was deep and soft and as blurry as his image, and he made her name sound almost like a question.

  Beatrice said, ‘The Widow Scarlet, as of yesterday, sir.’

  ‘Yes, of course. You have my very deepest sympathy. If there is anything I can do to ameliorate your grief, please don’t hesitate.’

  ‘May I join you?’ she asked him. ‘I think we have matters to discuss.’

  ‘But of course. Mistress Pitcher, perhaps you could bring us another glass.’

  ‘There’s no need,’ Beatrice told her. ‘I will not be taking wine.’

  Jonathan Shooks came round and drew out a chair for her and then sat down himself. Mistress Pitcher hovered beside them for a moment, before saying, ‘Should I return your dinner to the oven, Mr Shooks, to keep it warm?’

  ‘Don’t trouble yourself,’ said Jonathan Shooks, keeping his eyes on Beatrice and giving her that mocking, self-reverential look that he always gave her – that look that seemed to imply, I could have you, my lady, any time I wanted to. ‘I fear that when Goody Scarlet and I have finished talking I shall have lost my appetite altogether.’

  Beatrice wondered why he had said ‘altogether’, until she looked down at his plate and noticed that one of the hogs’ ears protruding from the orange ragout sauce still had bristles on it.

  ‘I will not beat around the bush, Mr Shooks,’ said Beatrice. ‘I know that you were responsible for my husband’s death.’

  She spoke as calmly as she could, trying to keep her voice low so that the two travelling salesmen wouldn’t overhear her.

  Jonathan Shooks looked at her for a long time without saying anything. Then he picked up his wine glass and started to swirl it around and around. A curved reflection from the wine flickered across his lips so that he appeared to be smiling, and then not smiling, and then smiling again.