Jane murmured her agreement. The subject seemed to have run its course. Matthew’s curiosity satisfied, he asked them about Brigit Able.
“Your sister’s servant Brigit Able has disappeared. I fear some new manifestation has occasioned her flight.”
“Another apparition, do you think, Mr. Stock?” exclaimed Jane.
“I’ll wager she’s with child and wants none to know it,” Crispin mumbled beneath his breath.
Ignoring her husband’s skepticism, Jane said, “I spent the morning helping my sister prepare herself for the funeral and did not see Brigit. I thought nothing of it but that she had been sent off on some family business. It was Susan who saw to my sister’s needs. My sister was grieved but calm. She has accepted her husband’s death as God’s will, not the work of
some sinister power, and seems consoled by the presence of her sons, who will remain with her the week until her affairs are put in order and the will is read. My greatest fear is the animosity of the town, as can be seen in this threatening letter.”
Crispin gave a deprecating glance at the note, which Matthew still held in his hand. He said he had taken precautions against trouble and when Matthew asked him what sort of precautions he meant, Crispin said he had armed his menser-vants. He said he hoped there would be no troubling of his house or shop, or that of his sister-in-law, but if there were, he was ready for it. He owned several firearms, he said, and a half dozen swords and was prepared to swear by the loyalty of his servants. “I stand by them and they by me,” the tanner said with a grim smile.
Matthew said he hoped no such violent defense of the house would be necessary, although he allowed that tempers were running high in the town. He briefly described his encounter with Alderman Trent.
“The Devil take him!” cried Crispin. “Peter Trent has been my brother-in-law’s enemy for years. I am not surprised by the enmity he shows Margaret or me, for that matter.”
“But how could anyone think that of my dear sister?” Jane exclaimed, as if only now recognizing the full significance of the accusations. “She’s a sweet, decent soul, a most devout Christian woman. Why, she has ever given alms to the poor.”
“It seems Christian living is not enough to stave off these scandalmongers and witch-hunters,” said her husband hotly. He repeated his promise to defend his house, and even talked of bringing a lawsuit against Peter Trent.
“What has my sister said to have done—cursed a cow, conversed with toads?” asked Jane, her handsome eyes flashing with unwonted anger.
“The apparition of Ursula has created the suspicion that your sister is herself a witch who has raised Ursula’s spirit from the dead,” Matthew said.
“Marry, for what purpose?” cried Jane. “To trouble her own house, to frighten the foolish?”
“It is thought she brought about her husband’s death by causing Ursula’s spirit to appear at the window,” said Matthew.
“A novel fashion of murder, then,” said Crispin in a derisive tone. “What absolute drivel!”
“It is a wicked, outrageous lie,” stormed Jane Crispin, rising from her chair and letting the coverlet drop to the floor. “My sister loved her husband with a sincere heart. Although her tongue was sometimes sharp and she overbearing, this was nothing more than her peculiar humor. No sin, certainly. Her love, I swear it, was as true and deep as is my husband’s love for me or mine for him.”
“This is the thanks we get for our good works,” Crispin said when his wife had sat down again. “Shelter we provided for Ursula and her brother, honest employment to save both from the parish rolls. And what do we receive in return? Why, to be hounded and railed at as witches and their consorts. The Devil’s brood they’ll be calling us next, condemned on all sides and deserted by our friends. Is God in His heaven, or does He sleep that such injustice should be visited upon us?”
“Oh, husband, how can you speak so?” cried Jane reproachfully, her eyes brimming with tears. “God is just. He will preserve us in our ordeal, even as Job.”
“Your relief of the poor and succor for these orphans has been noted and much approved,” Matthew said. “It is wrong to think that God has forsaken you, or that the town lacks gratitude.”
“Wrong, is it?” said Crispin, looking up at him under heavy brows. “I am heartily sorry, Mr. Stock, but at this moment I can think of but one wrong—that done to me and mine. Are we not most miserable who must barricade our door against our neighbors, who receive missives such as that you hold in your hand threatening our lives, who must de-
fend our good names from the slanders of men like Trent and Walsh?”
The question hung in the air while the tanner smoldered, his anger now moving to dejection. His wife tried to comfort him but to no avail. He fell silent, staring into the fire as though he were imagining some vengeance. “Most miserable, most miserable,” he repeated to himself.
Jane saw Matthew to the door. “Good night, Mr. Stock. We value your friendship.”
“Good night, Mrs. Crispin,” Matthew replied, still holding the threatening letter. He advised her to bar the door behind him.
The chill wind whistled down the street, driving against his face, and he pulled his coat about him and his hat down to his eyebrows. He started up the street to his own house, thinking still of the tanner and his wife. To him their prosperity seemed much deserved, their happiness in each other genuine and reminiscent of his with Joan. But now fortune had turned her wheel. Prosperity had become adversity, wretchedness, public scorn, and danger. What explained it? The tanner’s question echoed in his head. Why had God allowed such misfortune to fall upon the good, while evil triumphed and escaped punishment?
Matthew had no answer. He was seized by a melancholy himself, the fruit of his troubled thought and his physical weariness. Suddenly he became aware of his surroundings as though, preoccupied before, he had paid no attention to where he was. He was the lone traveler on such a night. On each side of him, the tall houses whose painted fronts and signs were as familiar to him as his own face, and whose occupants he knew by Christian name and family name, had assumed a forbidding aspect. He felt himself a stranger in a strange town, with every door barred against him. He stared at the windows as he passed. He could see lights within, but they were pale, timid lights, quite overpowered by the darkness in the street. Doubt and fear clutched at his soul with an icy hand. The houses seemed now the houses of his enemies, and he fully expected dogs to come forth and bark
at him. But on such a night even the dogs quaked beneath their masters’ tables, judiciously ignoring whatever scratches and knocks might send them out-of-doors.
In the alehouses of Moulsham they would be saying Ursula Tusser’s curse had fallen upon the town. Damp-footed and dejected as he was, weak from his missed supper and beset by weighty thoughts of God’s unfathomable ways, Matthew could almost believe in the curse himself.
• ELEVEN •
THE wind rattled the windowpanes incessantly, the shop sign creaked on its hinges, but in the kitchen of Matthew’s house there was warmth and security. Joan was waiting for him with his supper, and although he had been famished before, he was now so disheartened by his visit to the Crispins he could only pick at his meat like an old toothless man searching amidst the stew for something soft to swallow whole. His wife commented on his lack of appetite. “Come, husband, eat! There’s cheese and pippins to come. What, don’t you like my cooking? A cheerful look makes a dish a feast!”
But he was beyond cheerful looks. He was feeling very black indeed. “Thomas Crispin has armed his servants and prepares to defend his house against the town,” he reported glumly. “He’s had a threatening letter nailed to his door giving him and his family leave to take up residence elsewhere or face the consequences.” He showed her the letter. She quickly read it over.
“Oh, I see,” Joan said, softening. “What consequences are these, pray?”
“As you can see, the letter leaves that up to the tanner’s imagination.”
“Thus the armed servants. I don’t like that. ”
“Nor I.”
“What a shame,” she said.
“It is. I don’t know them well, the Crispins, but they seem a perfectly admirable couple.”
“Oh, they are notorious for it,” she said, wiping her hands on her apron. She had been standing with her back to the hearth, enjoying the tingle of warmth penetrating the several layers of good cloth she wore. But it was too warm now; the tingling had become a roasting. She pulled away and joined him at the table. He began to eat, and this pleased her. “How are they notorious?” he asked, picking up the thread of her remark about the Crispins.
She laughed. “Why, he dotes upon her and she upon him.”
“He seems a model husband,” Matthew said between mouthfuls.
“Some would say so,” Joan said, meaning of course her gossips, whose knowledge of the marital relationships of the town was prodigious.
He stopped chewing and laid down his knife. “Would you say so?” he said, a little jealous.
“I’d call him a paragon of husbandhood,” she said. “He is most solicitous of his wife’s happiness. They say her house is furnished like a gentlewoman’s. That it has carpets on the floors and a German clock above the mantel that tells the hours. When an hour strikes, a little knight in silver armor comes boldly forth and then marches back again. They say her servants whisper in her presence for fear of speaking too loudly and that her husband buys her whatever her heart desires.”
Joan smiled whimsically and watched her husband.
“I have seen the house,” Matthew said with a slight note of disgruntlement. “Carpets it has for a fact, and the furniture is very fine for a tanner’s house. As to the clock you speak of, I didn’t notice it. It sounds noisy to me—the knight in silver a terrible distraction. Is the great clock upon the church tower not sufficient to know what hour it is?”
Deciding she had played with him sufficiently, she didn’t answer his question about the German clock; the clock in fact meant little to her. She wanted to know all the Crispins had said.
He recounted the conversation, word for word as he was able to recall it.
“Tom Crispin is probably right. The slander touching Margaret Waite will blacken their own reputations, as this horrid letter proves. Do you think he really means to defend his house, or will he leave?”
“I think he will defend the house,” Matthew said, “though when I left him he was most dejected, despite the patient encouragement of his wife, who, it seems, takes these slanders with greater forbearance than he.”
“A man’s pride,” she observed, shaking her head. “It is both a thing of strength and a source of folly. Are these threats of violence real, do you think, or just the idle pastime of troublemakers?”
“They’re real enough. There’s fear in the town,” he said grimly. “Already they’re calling the apparition the Chelmsford Horror.”
She shuddered, thought of the loft, and said, “Poor Margaret, poor Mrs. Crispin.”
Matthew finished his supper. Then a knocking was heard. At first they thought it was the wind.
“Someone’s there,” Joan said.
“At this hour? Lord, what now?” He rose to see who it was this time; carrying the lamp through the darkened shop, he thought that at least they—whoever it was that knocked— had left him at peace long enough to fill his stomach.
“Well?” she said when he came back a few minutes later looking more grim than ever.
“There’s a brawl at the Saracen’s Head. Across the river in Moulsham—you know the place. I am summoned for fear the roisterers will break heads as well as the furniture.”
“Oh, what a pity you must go out again,” she said sympathetically. “And on such a night.”
“There’s no help,” he said with an air of resignation. “What did I do with my hat and cloak?”
“Behind the door,” she said.
“The wind’s giving over, at least.”
“A small blessing.”
He put on the cloak and held his hat in his hand as he bent down and kissed his wife on the forehead. Her skin was smooth and warm to his lips and he wanted very much to remain. How weary of his duties he was, and how he desired the peace of his own house at this moment. But it was not to be his, he knew—not yet.
“When shall I see you again? Shall I wait for you?” she asked.
“No, go to bed when you please. I may be some time.”
“Please be careful, Matthew,” she said, adding that she hoped he knew how little she really cared for fancy carpets and German clocks.
He gave her his blessing and went out.
When he was gone, Joan prayed—for Matthew and for herself, then for her neighbors the Waites and the Crispins, and lastly for the town, plagued by its own fears and something more and even worse. She prayed that the forces of good might prevail over the horror, which she did not fully comprehend but felt deep in her being as a profound and murky pool that the light could not penetrate or human reason fathom. Her prayer, made fervent and desperate by her husband’s being suddenly snatched from her, somewhat allayed her dread. But she could not rid herself entirely of her disquiet.
She tried to regain possession of herself by moving busily about the kitchen. Having sent Betty to bed earlier, to insure the greater privacy of her communication with Matthew, Joan now saw before her the dirty plates and cups, saw them with a kind of relief. Here was something, at least, to keep her occupied. But the dishes and cups were too quickly put away. She swept the floor. Twice. She resolved not to go to bed until Matthew returned. She found the stitchery she had been working on in odd moments for a week or more and went to sit by the fire. By a sheer effort of the will she plied her needle. It was a simple labor, virtually doing itself.
In time a warm, imageless sleep stole upon her, taking her without struggle or even awareness. Her stitchery dropped into her lap, then slid to the floor. Her head rolled onto her
shoulder. But the oblivion did not last for long. The fire burned low in the hearth; it lay like a hundred hot red eyes on the blackened stones watching her sleeping. The gathering cold stirred her and she began to dream.
At first her dream was disconnected and static, like a succession of portraits. She envisioned the Waites, the husband alive and grim of expression, standing next to his wife, gaunt and cross. She saw the Crispins. Matthew. Her daughter Elizabeth, holding her child. The images, disconnected logically, had a unifying anxiety. She had a terrible sense of danger, enough to cause her mental pain but not enough to jerk her into waking.
At length her visions coalesced into a disturbing dream of unusual vividness in which were figured herself and her friend Mrs. Monks. The two women were standing before the door of the Crispins’ house. Joan knocked and it was a very long time before there was a response. Finally the door opened and they were admitted by a serving girl, whose small pale features Joan dimly recalled. The girl’s manner was not rude but it did inspire in Joan a certain unease that went with her up the stairs, where they found a bedchamber richly laid out and spacious—so spacious Joan was sure it must fill the entire upper part of the house. There was a great ornate hearth on one wall, and close-woven tapestries with perplexing allegories on the other. The floor was richly carpeted, and on the mantelpiece above the hearth no less than a dozen German clocks of exquisite design ticked loudly, although each showed a different time. The massive four-poster bed in the center of the room now drew her attention. The curtains had been pulled back, and Joan could see that the bed was occupied by an ancient woman taking rasping breaths, each so deeply and painfully drawn that it seemed to be her last. Somehow Joan knew this poor ailing creature was Jane Crispin, although there was no basis for the identification in the woman’s ghastly appearance. Joan moved across the room toward the bed. The ancient woman wore a loose-fitting shift that exposed her bony yellowed shoulders and shrunken paps. The woman emitted a foul odor. Despite her revulsion, Joan
went up to the bed and asked its occupant, who appeared to be sleeping, if there was anything she wanted.
At the sound of Joan’s voice, the old woman’s eyes opened slowly and turned in Joan’s direction. Her eyes were blue and aqueous. Was it Joan’s imagination that in the pupils she could see her own image, small and confined like a miniature in a locket? Surely she wasn’t standing so close.
The woman’s skin was mottled and drawn tight against the skull. She seemed wasted by some mysterious ailment, for the deterioration Joan observed, which both repelled and fascinated her, she was certain was something more insidious than the mere devastation of years.
The parched lips moved in response to Joan’s question but made no sound. Joan repeated, “Dear Mrs. Crispin, is there anything you need?”
In her dream she heard her own voice small and distant, and it gave her the eerie feeling of being detached from herself, her body one place and her intellectual being farther off. Her body turned—she saw rather than felt it move—to see how her friend Mrs. Monks was taking in this piteous spectacle.
But Mrs. Monks, who Joan was sure had entered the room with her, had vanished.
Suddenly she was aware of how damp and cold the room seemed despite the large, crackling fire in a hearth large enough to roast an ox in. She turned her attention again to the bed and the old woman, and was now overcome with a terrible dread. Her dread was that at any moment the woman would rise from the bed and embrace her and she would feel the rotting body and unspeakably foul breath next to her.
The very thought made her sick, yet she was ashamed to think it. This was no leper before her, but her friend. And even if it were a leper or, almost the worse, a poor plague-inflicted stranger, did not Christian charity require more of her than abject fear of infection?
As she pondered the moral implications of her revulsion, it did not occur to her to ask the woman—whom she still believed to be Jane Crispin—how it was that she had grown so
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