“And did she?”
“According to my aunt, she did, but not at once. Ursula said conjuring was not easy work. She said that if it was an ordinary familiar my aunt wanted, then she could provide that easily enough, but a member of the family was a different matter. That took time, she said, and the performance of good works.”
“Good works?” exclaimed Matthew. “That’s curious terms from a necromancer. What good works were these?”
John Waite took another long drink and then smiled grimly. “Ursula called them evidences of good faith. She meant money, of course. My aunt was to give her money and other valuables. A silver bowl and a set of spoons and a lace handkerchief she had of my aunt, as though my uncle’s business losses were not a sufficient misfortune. Oh, it was all a gross imposture, the lot of it, but my aunt is very credulous, you see. The town sent the wench to the gallows for witchcraft, but in my book she was a common mountebank who, had she lived, would have been able to set herself up nicely in London on the ill-gotten gains of superstitious women.”
The nephew laughed bitterly, and asked the constable if he would have more wine. Matthew declined politely and reminded John Waite that all of what he had said was prologue to the tale his aunt had told, which Matthew was waiting eagerly to hear.
“Oh, yes. Forgive me. But the background is important. You see, according to my aunt, my uncle was frightened to death.”
“Frightened to death. By what?”
“It seems a ghost, sir.”
A wry smile played about the nephew’s mouth. Matthew was astonished. “Whose?”
“The girl’s. Ursula Tusser’s.”
“Ursula’s!”
John Waite nodded, wiped his mouth on his sleeve. He was about to speak again when they were interrupted by footsteps in the passage. Both men turned.
“How do you do, Aunt Margaret?” John Waite said.
Margaret Waite was dressed in a loose shift that revealed white shoulders and thin forearms. Her long, sensitive face was haggard and drawn and bore no paint or other attempt to hide her blemished cheeks and her present distraction. Her nether lip was swollen and trembling, and the dark shadows beneath her eyes were accentuated by the lamplight into whose circumference she now glided like a spirit herself.
“I do as well as any wife so newly come to her widowhood,” she said. She nodded a greeting to Matthew and then cast a fleeting glance at her husband’s body. Her brow knitted in pain.
Both men had stood at her entrance. Matthew remained standing while John Waite walked over and leaned against the mantel as though to warm his backsides by the fire. Margaret Waite sat down and invited Matthew to do likewise.
“I prayed for sleep, but my prayers went unanswered,” she said after an awkward silence. Matthew leaned forward and regarded the widow intently. She had begun to cry softly and plucked at the loose hairs about her ears and neck.
“I am most sorry for your husband’s death,” Matthew said in an effort to console the woman. “Malcolm was a good man, a just man. He will be much missed.”
“Missed?” she replied, laughing bitterly through her tears. “Missed by his wife, his sons. None other. He was ruined, Mr. Stock. You know that. By the way, did John tell you how my husband died, the horrible manner of it?”
“He said there was a . . . manifestation of some sort.”
“Manifestation indeed,” she asserted, snorting, then glancing reproachfully at her nephew as though she expected him to confute her claim. Not responding, he turned his back to her and began to warm his hands at the fire as if the apparition and the terror it had caused were the farthest things from his mind. “It was she,” Margaret reiterated to Matthew in a hoarse whisper.
“She?”
“The witch.”
“Ursula Tusser? So your nephew told me.”
“He doesn’t believe me,” Margaret said.
Matthew heard the nephew heave a cynical sigh. So John Waite was paying attention, after all.
“I saw, myself,” Margaret said.
“You saw the ghost?”
“I did.”
“Where?” Matthew looked around the room.
Margaret twisted in her chair and pointed a shaking finger toward the window. She spoke slowly and with a tremor: “Malcolm and I were sitting here conversing and reading, our custom of an evening. Suddenly there came a little incessant rap at the window, like someone begging to come in. We both heard it—I first, but he, laying his book aside, rose, went to the window, and drew the curtain to see who or what thing it was there. The next moment, I heard him gasp, as though seized with a sudden pain, then cry out a most strange and ungodly scream. It was as though the air had been half sucked from him, and with what little remained he blurted out an appeal to heaven. I remember his exact words.
I never shall forget them. ‘Oh, Jesus God,’ he said. ‘It’s she. Forgive my treachery.’
“I jumped up and ran to my husband, who had fallen back in his chair. He was muttering incomprehensibly. His eyes were rolling in his head. He didn’t seem to recognize me. I went to the window. Without a thought of danger to myself,
I pulled the curtain back to see what he had seen. Oh, horrible! It was the face—the girl to the life. Her visage, pressed to the pane, was pale and ghastly. The lips were curled in a vengeful smile. Too terrified to scream, I turned again to my husband and saw now that the vision had been the death of him.”
Margaret broke off her narrative and hid her face in her hands, while her nephew, who was now pacing the room, stopped long enough to pour her a drink and encourage her to regain control of herself. Matthew walked over to the window to peer out into the darkness. He started at his own 1
reflection, a wide, fleshy face with deep-set eyes. He shaded the light and could see dimly. The Waites’ barn loomed beyond the garden.
“Her face appeared at this window?” Matthew asked. Margaret nodded. “I saw” she repeated.
“Aunt Margaret, Ursula Tusser has been dead a month, six weeks,” said John Waite in an impatient tone of voice.
“Had she been dead a year or twain, a century or more, yet she was at the window this night,” Margaret pronounced solemnly. “My husband saw her and the sight killed him. His last words seared my soul. Her face was as it was while she lived, her hair long and lank about her shoulders, like flax on a distaff. And her eyes, so accusing.”
“By now her body is food for worms,” John Waite said matter-of-factly. “How could she then appear as she was? What—did she appear decayed?”
“She appeared as I have said,” his aunt replied firmly. “As I and my husband saw at the window. Oh, poor dear husband. What shall become of me now?”
The nephew made a gesture of exasperation and resumed pacing. Matthew asked some more questions about what the couple had been doing when the ghost had appeared.
“Strange it was,” said Margaret, drying her eyes with a handkerchief her nephew had provided her with, “but we were speaking of Ursula about that time. We testified against her at her trial, you know. My husband and I. My husband encouraged me. He said if we did not, the town would believe we were witches too. I complied with his wishes. But he too regretted it afterward. When this last week her brother died, we thought the guilt of them both confirmed. My husband was happier. Then the ghost.” She shuddered and ceased to speak.
“Isn’t it possible, Aunt Margaret,” suggested the nephew, pausing again in his course, “that your very converse on this topic invited the apparition? Often the thought provokes the vision itself. So say scholars.”
“Scholars may say what they will. I know what I saw,” Margaret said, casting a reproachful glance at her nephew. “Had you seen her, Mr. Stock, you would know that no idle fancy or trick of thought could project upon that glass a visage such as I and my husband saw there. What, will the
fancy kill as her horrid shape did? Never believe it. The specter was real, as real as my own flesh. Had I then the courage to open the window, I could h
ave reached out and touched her face.”
“Spirits have no flesh, so says the Church,” corrected the nephew in his caustic vein. “After the resurrection, yes— before, the body grows to dust where it was planted. If you did see something at the window, I am of the mind it was a trick of your own overheated imagination and your vain regret for having testified against the girl. Consider now what you yourself have admitted. You were discoursing upon her. Suddenly she appears. Reason tells us the ghost was in your brain.”
“In my husband’s brain too—in both brains at once? Nephew, your reason is addled,” Margaret said shortly. “My husband, if you must know, was reading the Scriptures. See, there on the floor they lay still, where he dropped them in his fright. Some passage he came upon awakened a thought. A passage concerning bearing of false witness. It was that which brought Ursula to mind. As I have said, after the trial we had second thoughts as to what we had testified to at the trial, thinking that we might have kept silent or, like my sister and her husband, spoken in the girl’s behalf to mitigate her crime. But Andrew Tusser’s wondrous death laid all our fears to rest. So we thought.”
Margaret had spoken of her sister and her husband, and the Crispins, as if by summons, now appeared. Their expressions of sadness made it evident that someone had apprised them of Malcolm Waite’s death.
“Oh, sister, thank God you’ve come!” Margaret said.
Without a word, Jane Crispin, a tall, attractive woman in her mid-thirties with smooth, pale complexion and striking blue eyes, moved forward to embrace her sister. For a few moments condolences were offered, then Margaret repeated her story of her husband’s death. She omitted no detail from her earlier version; the Crispins listened intently but noncommittally. When Margaret had finished, Jane said, “You poor dear,” and then, casting a glance at the dead man, suggested
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that it was high time the body was removed from the parlor and that the men might perform this duty while she ushered Margaret upstairs. “My sister is exhausted,” she said. “She must rest.”
When the women were gone, the three men moved the body to an adjacent room, a small office that during the days of Malcolm Waite’s prosperity, he had used daily. There was a table there, cluttered with papers, which, when cleared, provided a place for the body. Waite was very tall. His legs hung over the table end. John Waite found a coverlet; a candle was placed at the dead man’s head. Then the three men went out, shutting the door behind them.
John Waite now begged to be excused to go to bed, leaving Matthew and Thomas Crispin to wait the return of the tanner’s wife.
When they were alone, Matthew asked Crispin his opinion of Margaret’s story. The tanner stroked his beard thoughtfully. “It’s a very strange story, I’ll say that for it. That something was observed at yonder window I make no doubt— Margaret Waite is an honest woman, for all her faults. But that it was Ursula Tusser come for revenge I wonder at, allowing of course that ghosts are and have as much ground in true religion as do angels and other heavenly spirits. Sometimes, however, the conscience works upon the imagination in curious ways and—”
Matthew interrupted to ask whether the tanner’s wonder was at the reality of the apparition or its motive for appearing in the window. Crispin pondered this, rubbing his hands together as though in a moment he would separate the palms and from between them the answer to the constable’s question would appear. “If Ursula’s spirit has risen from the grave, I suppose it could be with cause. Malcolm and Margaret testified against her at the trial, but then so did others in the town.”
“I understand from what I have heard that you spoke well of her at her trial.”
“Spoke justly of her, you mean,” replied Crispin somewhat uneasily. “I extenuated in no way her mischief, nor did I
magnify it by falsehood or exaggeration. Do not misunderstand, sir, I imply no criticism of Malcolm or Margaret. Their testimony was theirs. I said what I knew. Ursula was a good servant but given to silly fancies as young girls often are. I don’t believe there was any malice in her. Stories about her consorting with demons in the shape of cats and toads were just that—stories. We never saw her with any creature more terrible than a homeless cat or stray dog she would feed kitchen scraps to. I tell you, Mr. Stock, she was unjustly hanged, and if her spirit has visited this house it will not be the last house in Chelmsford she visits.”
This ominous prediction caused Matthew a certain uneasiness. He looked toward the window where the ghost’s form had been seen. For a moment he thought something moved there, but to his relief he saw no pale, vengeful face, only his own reflection.
Jane Crispin now returned from upstairs. The signs of strain were beginning to show in her smooth features. “She’s asleep, poor dear,” Jane said, speaking of her sister. She cast an eye on the empty chair at the window and seemed relieved to find the body gone. Then she went over to stand by her husband, who was staring moodily into the fire.
“How will my brother-in-law’s death be interpreted—officially, I mean?” she asked, regarding Matthew intently.
“I found no marks upon him to indicate the death was anything other than a natural one. For death by specter the law makes no provision, nor could it do much to bring such ghostly forms to justice if it did.”
“I have advised my sister to say nothing more of the apparition—at least outside the house,” Jane said. “It will only cause more alarm in the town and a deal of new gossip as well. Cousin John believes the ghost is a figment of my sister’s imagination. I am inclined to agree. The less she says about it, the better.”
Crispin nodded his head in agreement. Matthew considered Jane’s advice and then said, “As far as I am concerned, the death, though strange, was God’s will. I don’t know what Malcolm Waite saw in the window—flesh, spirit,
or image of the mind—but his heart must have been overtaxed by his long illness. The power of suggestion is strong. Hearing her husband’s cry, the wife may have thought—”
“Yes, that’s very likely it,” interrupted Crispin impatiently, as though he had something else on his mind now and needed desperately to get to it.
“My sister’s sons must be notified of this,” said Jane.
“I’ll send someone at first light,” said Crispin.
“Once again, my condolences to the family,” said Matthew, preparing to leave.
“I have a lantern. If you do not, Mr. Stock, I’ll see you home,” said the tanner. “You will keep Margaret’s story to yourself, won’t you? We would consider it a point of friendship.”
Matthew promised he would. He agreed it would only cause alarm if Margaret’s tale were noised around. Surely it would mean more suffering for the widow.
He went home, Thomas Crispin guiding his way. Later, cracking his shin on the bedpost in an effort to undress himself in the dark, he uttered a mild oath and woke Joan. She wanted to hear the news, she said, every bit of it, and would not be content to wait the light of day.
• FOUR •
MATTHEW kept his promise to the Crispins and—except for Joan, from whom he could keep very little—told no one about the strange circumstances of Malcolm Waite’s death. But his discretion was to no avail. Someone else told and must have told again. By eight o’clock he noticed a crowd gathered outside the Waite house. It was a small crowd and orderly—he thought little of it. Deaths always attracted some attention, questions, sympathy. When at midmorning he took the time to look down the street again, he saw the crowd had become a great one and he went to investigate. It was then he discovered that the appearance of Ursula’s ghost was common knowledge. Most of the crowd were neighbors of the dead man, drawn by curiosity and not a little fear of this new supernatural manifestation. Others were strangers, who, informed of the reason for the gathering, acted as concerned as the neighbors. The crowd remained orderly; they stood in the street in little clusters whispering, watching, and pointing. But the sentiments Matthew overheard as he moved among them were not kin
dly disposed toward the house or its occupants. The consensus was that if Ursula Tusser had chosen the Waite house to haunt, then that was hardly an endorsement of the godliness of the Waites.
“Good day, Mr. Parker,” Matthew said to the prosperous corn-chandler, who stood with the others gazing at the house. “Your business has moved into the street, I see.”
The corn-chandler scowled in response to Matthew’s at-
tempt at wit. He was a thickset, burly man of about fifty with a broad, flat face, a liverish complexion, and very thick brows. He had been one of the jurymen at Ursula Tusser’s trial and was obviously unsettled by this strange news of her reappearance.
“I would fain know what you intend to do about this, Mr. Stock,” Parker grumbled, knitting his thick brows threateningly.
“Is it some disorder you fear?” Matthew asked, looking up at the house, which seemed unusually quiet and deserted for this time of the day. Of course the glover’s shop was closed. A long piece of black crepe had been hung upon the doorframe as a sign of mourning. The upper windows of the house were shuttered, and no smoke curled from the chimney.
“No,” said Parker. “No riot in the streets, but disorder within the house. We thought we had cleansed the town with the death of the witch. Now it appears she has left behind a nest in which to breed more of the Devil’s vermin. You’ve heard the news?”
“I have heard that Malcolm Waite is dead,” Matthew replied, pretending ignorance of more in order to determine just what version of the incident had spread abroad.
“Why, that she-devil herself, Ursula Tusser or her shape, appeared yesternight. With her was a legion of spirits in monstrous shapes that entered at every window and door, came down the chimney, and hovered above the house an hour or more, screeching and threatening as if all hell broke loose.”
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