Dropping. The word caught in his throat, lodged there as though he had spoken it aloud. The scaffold again. Ursula Tusser limp and smiling. Should he concede, then? Admit the girl had been falsely accused, her condemnation an outrage against reason, morals, true religion? And what if Ursula had been innocent for a fact, the victim of malicious gossip? Yet the jury had returned a speedy verdict. All those testimonies. The bewitched girls. He had heard it all—by hearsay, of course, since he was ill at the time. Could the whole town have been wrong?
“I heard she would not repent on the scaffold,” Joan said, bringing him back to her, the table, their kitchen.
“No, she did not. The parson could not prevail upon her, nor the crowd. You would not believe the uproar. She died keeping her counsel.”
“Then she had much integrity for one so young,” Joan said sadly. “Why should she answer to such ridiculous charges?”
“Why, to save her own neck,” he said. “It was a poor pitiful defense of her life that was made. Why, look you now, even her brother could hardly do more in her behalf than swear no ghost came from the grave at her bidding. It was never in dispute that she was the leader of the group of idle young persons who met in Malcolm Waite’s barn loft to practice curious arts. Even Ursula admitted that."
“Be that as it may,” Joan said, “there was no small envy in the accusations. Consider her accusers—Brigit Able and Susan Goodyear—green girls and lazybones, the both of them. The Devil will find work for idle hands to do. What is upon their minds at that age but young men and mischief?”
“They claimed Ursula had bewitched them, cast a spell upon them—”
“Ha!”
Betty cleared the table, brought more beer. Joan continued: “I suppose her brother has taken his sister’s death very ill. She was his only kin, you know. Both were orphans. Thomas Crispin showed much kindness in taking them in when their father died.”
“And no little risk, since he got the brother in the bargain,” Matthew said. “There’s a strange young fellow, Andrew Tusser. He’s much in demand when Chelmsford plays Moulsham in football, but otherwise he isn’t worth a farthing. Thomas Crispin complains of his idleness. I suppose the tanner will be rid of Andrew now.”
“I don’t think the boy would want to stay in Chelmsford, not after this,” Joan said. “It’s a wonder Andrew wasn’t cried out against as well.”
“Oh, he’s a kind of simpleton, harmless.”
“Well, surely he’ll leave the town now.”
With that Joan did drop the subject of the Tussers, to Matthew’s great relief. The remainder of the evening was pleasantly spent. Joan stitched while Matthew, who had a fine tenor voice, sang.
In the weeks following, the weather turned wet and gloomy, and talk of the Chelmsford witch subsided, as such talk will, replaced by fresher news of town, county, and court. It was said the Queen was sick abed and near to death, that the little Scots King, James, was to be named her successor. There was a nervousness, it seemed, throughout the land, fear of treasons and sedition, an alertness for signs and portents of things to come. Meanwhile, to Joan’s surprise, Andrew Tusser did not leave Chelmsford. He was seemingly unaffected by his sister’s death and disgrace. Idle and shiftless as ever, he apparently enjoyed the attention he was now receiving, and if there was revenge or resentment on his mind, his countenance did not reveal it. Thomas Crispin, the tan-
ner, kept him around for odd jobs—perhaps, the Stocks conjectured, out of simple charity. He was, after all, an orphan.
Then, one Sunday whilevMatthew was at table relishing a succulent pork pie, a knocking came at the door. It was Jeremiah Carter, a near neighbor, complaining that while out for an afternoon stroll he observed a group of men and boys playing at football in the widow Singleberry’s meadow.
“On the Sabbath!” exclaimed Matthew, wiping his mouth with a napkin.
Jeremiah Carter nodded grimly.
Casting a regretful eye at the pork pie, Matthew did his duty. The playing of football was expressly forbidden by law, save on Christmastide at home. Such a bloody and murderous game was particularly obnoxious on the Sabbath.
He told Joan where he was off to and went at once to the meadow, which was no more than a half mile from his shop door. Even before arriving he could hear the shrill excited cries of the players. There were several dozen men and boys, most from the neighborhood, scrapping around after a brown leather ball and kicking up clouds of dust. Conspicuous among them for his speed and agility was Andrew Tusser.
Matthew had thought to break up the game and send the players home with a stern warning, but fate decreed otherwise. Matthew witnessed the strange accident and later described it to Joan.
Andrew had the ball, having emerged from a boisterous and violent melee of bodies with a shout of triumph, and was racing toward the opponent’s goal line. The ball skipped along ahead of him. Andrew ran fast. The other players were hard put to keep up with him. The hapless defender of the goal, seeing Andrew’s advance, came running out to stop it and the two young men collided.
Matthew called out to the players but none paid attention to his call. They were all gathered about the fallen bodies. Both players lay prone in the dirt. Matthew hastened forward, was seen by one of the players, who gave the alarm, and then they all scattered. The goal defender into whom
Andrew had smashed was helped to his feet and hurried off with the rest. Only Andrew remained. Motionless.
Matthew knelt down beside the fallen youth and spoke his name. There was no response. Not a tremble in the limbs or a flicker in the eyelids. The boy’s face was streaked with dirt and sweat, but the flush of his recent exertion was fast fading into a morbid colorlessness. Alarmed, Matthew listened for a heartbeat, felt for pulse of life.
There was nothing. By all the signs he knew, Andrew Tusser was dead. The only mark on him was a slight discoloration on the forehead.
Behind him now, Matthew heard a voice. Turning to look over his shoulder, he saw approaching a handsome man of about thirty-five, with broad chest, ruddy cheeks, thick, curly black hair, and neatly trimmed beard.
“How now, Mr. Stock? An injury, is it?”
“Good morning, Mr. Crispin,” said Matthew. “More than an injury, I fear.”
The tanner came over and recognized his servant. “It’s my bird, is it? I wondered where he’d flown. What ails him?”
“I think he’s dead.”
“Great God in heaven!” Crispin exclaimed incredulously, kneeling down beside the body and beginning to shake it as though Andrew’s unconsciousness were feigned and a little roughness would bring him to his senses again. But it was no use. The shaking did nothing, and shortly the tanner gave it up. He groaned and stood, staring with unbelief at the body. “Dead,” he said somberly. “Of football! Would to God he had worked for me with half the effort. This is sad news, Mr. Stock. First his sister, now him.”
Matthew agreed. The death was as sad as it was strange. It was only a tiny bruise and swelling, no more than a man got for not watching for a low-hanging tree limb.
Evidently the news of the accident had spread. Across the meadow several persons were coming from the town to see for themselves. One of these offered to help Thomas Crispin carry his former servant home.
• THREE •
FOR the next several days, Matthew kept himself very busy in his shop. When he wasn’t behind the counter, he spent long hours inventorying his goods, making lists and revising them, haggling with suppliers, or poring over his accounts with such fastidious zeal that one would have supposed the Judgment Day at hand and the clothier’s trade goods the very substance of the great summing-up. All the while, Ursula Tusser remained in the back of his mind like the twinge of a disquieted conscience.
For a while he had put her out of his mind. Now she was back with a vengeance. It was her brother’s death that reopened the wound and left it raw and bleeding. The whole town talked of it, marveling that the young man should have been struck down
so mysteriously, wondering that death should have taken both brother and sister in so short a span. Fate seemed bent on wiping out the Tusser race. In anxious whispers the town speculated on the meaning of it all. Was it a mere coincidence, or divine retribution upon the ungodly?
Matthew thought it pure coincidence but avoided debate. Still he was haunted by the thought that Joan might have been right. What if Ursula had been innocent, after all? That vengeful smile of hers had made his flesh crawl, but there was no sin in smiling. Doubt robbed him of his peace of mind. He became moody about the house, hectored his apprentices, lost interest in singing. Joan watched his change and said
nothing. Then a disturbing incident occurred that brought the whole issue to a head.
It was about a week later. The Stocks had retired early after a long day in which Matthew and Joan had worked side by side to prepare a large shipment of broadcloth for London. They had been asleep at least an hour when they were awakened by a desperate rapping at the door. Half awake but knowing from experience what such a nocturnal summons portended, Matthew crawled drowsily from bed, put on his dressing gown, and stumbled downstairs, taper in hand.
He opened the door and saw standing in the street a girl of about fifteen with sharp, anxious features and a petulant mouth. He recognized her before she identified herself. She was Brigit Able, the serving girl who had testified against Ursula Tusser at her trial. Her cap was askew and her plain russet smock looked as though it had been put on in great haste and disregard for appearance.
“Oh, Mr. Stock!” she cried, gasping for breath. “Come see what has befallen my master.”
“Malcolm Waite?” said Matthew. “What, does he need a physician, then?”
“He's beyond that, sir,” said Brigit, her eyes wide with horror, her lower lip trembling.
“Dead, is he?”
“Yes, sir, he’s dead.”
Matthew felt his heart sink. He counted the glover a friend. In his mind’s eye he saw the cold white body, already laid out.
“How did it happen? His long illness, was it?”
She shook her head, terror still shining in her eyes. She began a confused account of the death, punctuated by frequent sobs and prayerful utterances. From what Matthew could understand, she had been working in the kitchen when she heard her mistress scream. She had grasped the import of the cry and run to the parlor where Mr. Waite—by whom she meant not the dead man but a nephew residing in the house—interposed himself between her and the threshold.
Beyond him, she had glimpsed her mistress, pale as death herself, all tearful and gasping and carrying on about a window and a face.
"Whose face?”
But she didn’t know. She said she had seen the master too. The sight was awful, she said. The nephew told her her master was dead. She was to fetch the constable straightway.
Matthew told the girl to come inside and wait while he dressed, then went back upstairs where—without waking Joan, who had fallen back asleep—he groped around for his clothes, got them on, and went downstairs again. Brigit was waiting. Her lantern guided them down the street to where the glover lived.
Matthew had known Malcolm Waite all his life. About ten or twelve years Matthew’s senior, the glover had been moderately successful until recent years, when failing health and foolish investments had allowed his competitors the advantage and his trade had diminished to practically nothing. As his debts mounted, his friends began to avoid him. His wife was a proud, domineering woman named Margaret, given to dressing beyond her means and wearing thick layers of powder and rouge to hide a distressed complexion. They had two grown sons—glovers like their father—established in other towns.
Shortly the glover’s house came into view. It was a two-storied house of timber and plaster behind which was a spacious, if unkempt garden, a meadow, and several outbuildings, one of which, the dilapidated barn, had been the scene of Ursula Tusser’s nocturnal gatherings. The upper part of the house was dark, but through the bay windows of the shop Matthew could discern a glow of light coming from somewhere in the back of the house.
Brigit led the way through the shop. It was small and untidy. They passed through an adjoining room and were on the threshold of a third when they were met by the dead man’s nephew.
John Waite was a young man of about twenty, thin and neat. Smelling of tobacco and pomander, he was dressed in a
loose-fitting dressing gown of good cloth, decked with stars and crescent moons, and he had a nightcap on his head. His hair was lank and oily and came down below his ears, and on his upper lip there were the beginnings of a mustache. His expression was intelligent but not altogether pleasant. His mouth, left to its own devices, tended to sneer, even when its owner had no occasion for it. He spoke in the clipped speech of London, from whence he came, and although he had been living under his uncle’s roof not more than a month or two, his citified manners and contempt for Chelmsford had already aroused local resentment.
At the moment, he seemed more irritated at the fuss his uncle’s death had caused than grieved. He spoke sharply to Brigit, telling her to go to bed. Then he beckoned Matthew to follow him into the next room.
It was this room—a kind of parlor with a hearth and old faded furnishings—the lights of which Matthew had observed from the street. The fire in the hearth had died down to practically nothing, but there was a lamp on a long table in the center of the room and it illuminated the corpse. The glover was sprawled in a high-backed chair facing a window with its curtains pulled back. His long arms hung loose to the floor, the wrists as angular as though they had been broken. A table napkin or similar piece of cloth had been placed discreetly over the glover’s face, but Matthew recognized at once the massive head of white hair that had been Malcolm Waite’s most distinctive feature.
“We thought it best not to move my uncle. He died in his chair, as you can plainly see.”
Matthew nodded to John Waite and, without saying anything, went over to examine the body, removing with appropriate reverence the napkin and placing it on the dead man’s chest. Under the great mane of hair, Malcolm Waite’s face seemed shriveled, wasted by his recent illness. The pores of his large, hooked nose seemed unnaturally conspicuous and a week’s growth of grizzled beard bestubbled the cheeks and was oddly dark contrasted with the pallor of the flesh. The dead man’s jaw was slack, exposing pink swollen gums and
two missing teeth. The tongue reclined upon the lower lip. Most strange and terrible was the expression of the eyes. They were glazed and stark. It was the expression of one whose last mortal view is too terrible for utterance.
Avoiding the dead man’s stare, Matthew hastily examined the body for signs of violence while the nephew looked on without comment.
“Why was I summoned?” Matthew asked when his examination was done. “By all appearances your uncle died a natural death.”
John Waite explained that he had been out for the evening with some friends and upon his return had been alarmed by his aunt’s screams. He had rushed into the house to find the aunt hysterical and his uncle in the state in which the constable now found him. When he had succeeded in calming her, she told him what happened. He reiterated the fact that nothing had been touched. Summoning the constable had been his aunt’s idea, he remarked in a tone implying he would not have done so without her pleadings and was therefore blameless for disturbing the constable’s sleep. It was because of what she said was the peculiar manner of the glover’s death.
“Your uncle had been long ill—I
“Yes, very long. The physicians despaired of a cure. The death was not unexpected and yet ...”
“And yet?”
“My aunt told a most incredible tale.”
“What sort of tale?”
John Waite sighed and frowned. With a motion of his hand he suggested the two men move away from the body, the presence of which was making Matthew uncomfortable too. Matthew replaced the napkin over Malcolm Waite’s face and followed the young man to two chai
rs that were placed directly in front of the hearth. John Waite picked up some faggots and got the fire stirring again, and then he asked Matthew if he would have some wine.
There was a flagon on the table and some cups. The nephew filled two and brought them to where Matthew was
sitting in one of the chairs. Matthew watched the flames in the hearth while he waited patiently for the aunt’s story.
“Ursula Tusser’s trial and execution was most upsetting to my aunt and uncle, as you can imagine. The cursed girl had practiced upon our servants, you know, filling their heads with all sorts of nonsense. Even my uncle was taken in by her devilry—for a time, at least. My aunt was the worst. It was all rot to me, this business of witchcraft. Like alchemy or a similar fraud. I tried to reason with them, my uncle and aunt. Of course when Ursula was accused, they changed their tune. Claimed to have nothing to do with her then.”
John Waite paused to refill his cup. Matthew listened carefully. He had not realized the depth of the Waites’ involvement, but of course it stood to reason. It was, after all, their barn and their servants who had been allegedly bewitched. The wonder was that the couple had escaped being accused themselves.
“They thought they would be implicated,” the nephew said, picking up on the constable’s own thoughts as though he were a mind reader. “Their solid reputations saved them—that and testifying against Ursula themselves.”
“You said your aunt and uncle were . . . patrons ... of Ursula’s. What would they have had from her—some charm or familiar to advance their fortunes?”
John Waite smiled and shook his head. “My uncle could well have used spiritual advice on his investments, but it wasn’t that. My aunt had a brother once, much beloved of her, who was murdered ten or twelve years ago. You may remember him. Philip Goodin was his name.”
“I think I do,” said Matthew. “A tavern brawl, was it not?”
“A robbery, according to the evidence. His body was found a week after. It had been deliberately covered with leaves so as not to be found until the spring following. Now, as I said, my aunt loved this brother and ever after mourned his death. She wanted nothing more than to know whether he was in heaven or hell. Ursula promised to conjure his spirit and put her doubts about his redemption to rest.”
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