Greenbeard (9781935259220)

by Bentley, Richard James

  “You whoreson villain!” screamed Magistrate Chumbley, his face purpling. “How dare you smirk in my court!”

  “I merely try to ease my lips, your vastness, which have been bruised by the fists and boots of your beadles…” said the Captain soothingly. A mumble went through the crowd, revealing that the beadles were perhaps not well-liked in the town.

  “And how right they were to chastise you thus, since you now insult their esteemed elder brother, for here are Linen Mather and Grogram Mather, officers of this court!” The two burly men nodded to the Captain, smiling grimly.

  “The Reverend Cotton Mather may well be esteemed by his brothers and by his relatives by marriage,” said the Captain, “but one book does not make a fact, but merely an opinion expressed upon a printed page, that much must be obvious, surely, your worshipfulness?”

  “You curséd miscreant! Some wise cove once said ‘Satan’s greatest triumph was to convince men that he does not exist’ and that must be obvious, surely, or there would be no evil in the world! All learned men agree upon the reality of sorcery!” Magistrate Chumbley scabbled among the papers on the lectern. “Aha! Listen to this, you viper!” He read from another book; “‘How so many learned heads should so far forget their metaphysicks, and destroy the ladder and scale of creatures, as to question the existence of spirits. For my part, I have ever believed, and do now know, that there are witches!’ So you see, the great savant Sir Thomas Brown is also of the opinion that witchcraft is not mere tittle-tattle by old wives! How say you now, you slubberdegullion?”

  “I stand second to no man in my admiration of the excellent Thomas Brown!” said the Captain stoutly, “and yet even he is not an infallible paragon of veracity in all things, because no man can be! I note that you quote his comments upon the Bury St Edmunds witch trial from Religio Medici, which is a most estimable book, and yet he also says in that work, and I quote from memory: ‘I have often admired the mystical way of Pythagoras and the secret magicke of numbers.’ By your way of thinking that would also cause the good Sir Thomas Brown to be suspected of being a witch!” The spectators laughed and clapped at this sally, and the Captain turned to them and winked. “Religio Medici, meaning ‘the religion of the doctors’. A book which the infallible Pope himself has banned as wicked!”

  “You can twist and turn, you slippery rogue, but we have ways of finding the truth!” shouted Magistrate Chumbley. “Bring me the witch cake!”

  Grogram Mather scuttled from the chamber and returned with a soggy-looking pudding upon a wooden trencher. “Here it is, Magistrate Chumbley!”

  “This smells ... odd, Grogram. Did you follow the instructions I gave you?”

  “Indeed, Magistrate Chumbley, but we had the greatest difficulty getting the dog to piddle into a bucket. It is not in their nature to do so.”

  “You fool! Can you do nothing a-right! The witch cake is to be made from rye meal and the urine of the witch’s victims and then fed to the dog, not the other way about!”

  “But we could find none who would admit to being afflicted by the witch’s sorceries, Magistrate, so we thought it must be that way!”

  Magistrate Chumbley covered his face with his hands and groaned. The spectators howled with laughter.

  “We could find none who would admit to being afflicted by the witch’s sorceries!” repeated Captain Greybagges, turning to the spectators and shaking his head sadly.

  “You have tested the patience of this court too far, you scurvy rapscallion!” shouted Magistrate Chumbley. “We shall discover the truth! Then we shall find you guilty! Then we shall hang you like a dog, you dog! Bring the stones and the board! We shall resort to peine forte et dure, as is required by the law!”

  “That torture has been banned by act of Parliament these twenty years past!” shouted Captain Greybagges as the beadles grabbed him.

  “We care but little in these parts for the vaporings of weaklings who sit upon velvet cushions!” snarled Magistrate Chumbley. “Here in Salem we follow the law of God! Take off his shirt!”

  The beadles ripped Captain Greybagges’s black shirt from his back. There was a gasp from the spectators, then a mutter of admiration. “Nice tattoo!” someone called out.

  “Your guilt is writ upon your own skin, you sorcerous ... you sorcerous ... you sorcerous ... scamp!” crowed Magistrate Chumbley.

  “You fat fool! That was a costly shirt! If every sailor with a tattoo was to be tried as a witch there wouldn’t be enough of them left to crew a jolly-boat!” cried the Captain.

  “Throw him down!” roared Magistrate Chumbley. The beadles grappled with the Captain. He was a large and powerful man, and might have prevailed, but his wrists were tied before him, and they tripped him, and lay him on the wooden floor, one sitting upon his legs. “Arrgh! I’ve got a splinter!” the Captain shouted.

  “Hah! You won’t notice that in a minute, I promise you!” snarled Magistrate Chumbley. “Pile on the stones!”

  The beadles put the wooden board upon the Captain’s chest and loaded the stones – great slabs of granite – upon the board. They stood back, and watched as his face turned slowly purple. The courtroom was silent, all that could be heard was the Captain’s laboured wheezing gasps as he strained against the crushing weight forcing the breath from his lungs.

  The door was flung open with a crash, and a striking figure stood in the doorway. It was a man of unusual height, a tall angular man in a long black cloak and a battered black slouch hat, his eyes hidden in the shadow of the hat-brim. His big dusty square-toed boots clumped loudly on the wooden floor as he strode into the chamber.

  “What? In the name of all that’s sacred!” he growled in a harsh deep voice. He shouldered the beadles roughly aside, reached down, and with a huge hand, the knuckles the size of walnuts, he hurled the board and the granite slabs from Captain Greybagges’s chest with a clatter. The Captain took a vast gulping breath, and another, and struggled to sit up. The tall man helped him with an arm around his shoulders. He turned to the bench;

  “You tomfools! This is an honest seaman and no sorcerer or witch! What species of preposterous hare-brained caper is this?”

  “He is a witch!” Magistrate Chumbley insisted querulously, his eyes flickering nervously round the courtroom for support.

  “And you, Master Chumbley, are a jackass!” The tall man, squatted down by Captain Greybagges, who was wheezing and coughing, his eyes red and watering.

  “Are you alright, Sylvestre?” the tall man murmurred.

  “John ... Smith ...” whispered Captain Greybagges to him, in between gulps of air. The tall man winked a clear blue eye at the Captain and helped him to his feet and onto a courtroom settle, roughly shoving aside several spectators who were not quick enough to move from it.

  “I know this man ... John Smith ... of old!” thundered the tall man. “He is a stout-hearted mariner, and a God-fearing man! This is disgraceful clownish monkey-trick!”

  He untied the rope from the Captain’s bound wrists. A plump man with a cheerful red face and a stained apron appeared in the courtroom doorway, a look of bovine surprise on his face, and a wooden tray piled with tarred-leather jacks in his hands. The tall man spotted him, grabbed a jack – “my thanks, innkeeper!” – and gently placed it in the Captain’s hands. The Captain waited until his wheezings lessened, then gratefully took a sip of the ale. The tall man patted him on the shoulder and turned to the bench.

  “You are an imbecile, Master Chumbley! Witch-finding is not work for the ignorant! If this fine man had been in truth a warlock, and not an honest sailor, why! he could have ensorcelled you and glamoured you such that you would have imagined your own fat fingers to be pork sausages, and you would have bitten them off one by one and eaten them, smacking your lips with relish as you did so! I repeat; witch-finding is a task for those who know the ways and wiles of witches, not for fat bumpkins like yourself!”

  “He has a great tattoo of the Devil himself upon his back ...” muttered Magistrat
e Chumbley sullenly.

  “And examine it it closely!” cried the tall man. The spectators clustered to look at the Captain’s back as he sat hunched upon the settle. “There is Lucifer gazing down upon the Earth with an expression of the profoundest disgust upon his face! He knows the evil that men do, and even he is perturbed by it! That is hardly the sentiment of a witch! And everybody knows that rough sailors oft-times have tattoos in, shall we say, dubious taste!” The spectators chuckled. “That is hardly a reason to try to crush him to death by piling great heavy stones upon him!” The tall man looked around and saw the innkeeper, his tray now empty, his ale distributed among the crowd and their coins in the pocket of his apron. “Landlord! have you a room for the night, so this poor abused fellow may recover himself? I shall stay, too.” The innkeeper nodded nervously, and slipped out of the door.

  “Now where is poor Mr Smith’s coat, and his purse and possessions?” called out the tall man. The beadles rushed to obey, their delving into their pockets making it obvious to the crowd that they had divided the Captain’s money and valuables amongst themselves.

  “Why, here is a fine thing!” cried the tall man. “The very officers of this trumpery court are thieves! For shame! For shame!” The crowd echoed him, shouting “For shame, you dogs! For shame!” with apparent keen enjoyment. The beadles’ faces burned red and they kept their eyes cast down as they restored the Captain’s things to him and helped him into his coat.

  “ Master Chumbley!” said the tall man, pointing his finger at the dumb-struck magistrate. “It seems to me that your devotion to your religion is far less than your devotion to causing pain to your fellow men! You freely torment and mistreat your slaves, and wish to torment and mistreat free men, too, if you may find the least excuse! God watches us all, and we will all stand before Him in our time and be judged! Mend your ways ere it is too late!” Then the tall man stepped forward, knocked away the magistrate’s wig with a slap of his hand, and up-ended the trencher of soggy witch-cake on the revealed bald pate. “There, you jackass!”

  And with that he escorted Captain Greybagges from the courtroom, supporting him tenderly with an arm at his waist and a hand at his elbow. The crowd gave an appreciative cheer, but whether it was for the tall man’s performance or for his righteousness was not entirely clear.

  Captain Greybagges chewed on a chicken leg, then shifted uncomfortably. “I have a splinter in my arse from that damned courtroom floor,” he explained. He and the tall man were sitting at a table in an upper room of the inn. The picked-clean bones of the roast fowl lay on a pewter platter between them, and a basket of bread. The Captain tossed the chicken bone onto the platter, squeaked the cork out of the rum bottle and refilled their glasses.

  “Master Chumbley is an odious man, Sol, and I have met a few choice bastards in my time,” continued the Captain. “One wonders how they get to be that way.”

  “Well, owning slaves is destructive of a man’s soul, surely, Sylvestre, and should to be abolished on that basis alone. It weakens the spirit of these colonials, who are sturdy pioneers for the most part, and in many ways very admirable fellows. I do not ignore the effects of slavery on the enslaved, of course, but to discourse upon their hardships attracts only puzzlement and derision in these parts, such as might arise from objecting to the flogging of mules or the gelding of harness-bulls.”

  “Slavery is indeed a factor, Sol, but I have encountered plenty of vile men who have never owned slaves, not even indentured labourers in tied cottages, who are, after all, slaves in all but name. I suspect that it is rather a failure of perception.”

  “How so?” The tall man cleaned his platter with a hunk of bread and pushed it aside with a satisfied belch.

  “Well, Sol, imagine a competition to find the fastest of two horses. One might race them together around a course to see which arrived first at the finish, or one might set them off around the course one-by-one and time each horse with one of these new pocket-watches, the ones with a little dial to count the seconds, such as this fine Breguet Perpétuelle which I nearly lost today.” The Captain produced the watch from his coat pocket. “Using the watch one makes reference to a standard of absolute measurement, but in the case of the horse-race the competition is relative, for one horse is compared directly to the other and the actual time taken is not known, so in the horse-race there is a temptation to cheat. One jockey may strike the other in the face with his crop, or lean his horse into the other at a corner, or some other unsportsmanlike caper. It seems to me that happiness is an absolute quantity – the Hindoo holy man, they say, posesses only a loincloth and a begging-bowl, and yet knows great rapture from his solitary meditations upon the nature of the sublime - yet many people mistake happiness for a relative quantity, believing that if they can make those around them unhappy then they will be all the more happy by contrast, much as the cheating jockey imagines his horse to be the faster, despite having stooped to wicked underhanded tricks to win his race.”

  The tall man sipped his rum, a thoughtful expression upon his long face. “You may have an insight there, Sylvestre. Master Chumbley is a very stupid man, and all the more stupid because none around him may tell him that he is, except his fat wife, and he pays little attention to her, I’m sure. This witch-finding obsession of his, for an example. He knows nothing about it except for the idiotic opinions of his wife’s cousin, and yet he fancies himself a great warrior against ghoulies and ghosties and tommy-knockers and things that go ‘bump’ in the night. I have told him before to leave it to experts like me, but he hasn’t taken much notice, apparently.”

  “How did you become a witch-finder, Sol?”

  “Well, as you know, I used to be something of a coffee-house wheeler-dealer.”

  “Yes, indeed. Specialising in stocks made of horse-feathers, shares in companies that were incorporated to mine the Moon for green cheese. Getting you off those charges took all my arts as a lawyer.”

  “I think this day I have repaid you with interest, Sylvestre!”

  “Yes, you have, and I thank you.” The Captain raised his glass in salute.

  “Anyway, I felt it might be wise to avoid my usual haunts for a time, so I took a passage here to the colonies. There was little opportunity for selling stocks, for the bedriegers of New Amsterdam had the market sewn up tight, catching gullible fools by chalking the prices of their worthless investments up on the wall down by the waterfront. Then there was an outbreak of ghostly manifestations down in Yonkers, accompanied by all sorts of horripilation and collywobbles, so I set myself up as an exorcist! With the last of my money I bought myself a big black bible, a brass hand-bell and a candlestick of German-silver, and set about casting out demons, haints and grafschenderen wherever somebody would pay me. It was all great fun, I must say, and I used to put on a good show, rolling my eyes and thundering blood-curdling stuff in Latin, mostly quotations from Caesar’s Commentaries which I remembered from school. Gave ‘em their money’s worth, you may be sure. Then there was the witch-panic down here, and I was so well known by that time that they sent for me in person!”

  “You, Solomon, are incorrigible! Have you no shame at all!” laughed Captain Greybagges.

  “You may mock me, Sylvestre, but I did a necessary job. The people of these parts were in a mortal terror, imagining spells and sorcery lurking in every nook and cranny, and I calmed their fears and brought peace and tranquillity back to the land. Not only that, I was able to save a number of harmless old ladies from being burned at the stake by the likes of Master Chumbley, poor white-haired old darlings whose only fault was to have sold love-potions - flasks of sugar-water and pepper mostly - to keep a little food on their tables and a few sticks of firewood in their grates. I am sure that the good Lord will view my activities in a kindly light when the Day of Judgement do come.”

  “I am sure that you are a great benefactor to all mankind,” said Captain Greybagges with a grin.

  “There is more,” said the tall man quietly. “When I he
ard reports of monsters lurking in the pine-barrens, I went a-hunting them, light-heartedly thinking I would do a little rough shooting and return with a hair-raising yarn or two, but I did find monsters! Monsters resembling giant man-like toads! Luckily I had gone equipped to hunt ducks, with a kind of a long-barrelled great arquebus mounted like a bow-chaser on a shallow-draught punt. It fired about a half-pound of small bird-shot, and it discouraged the toad-men quite efficiently, taking down a swathe of pine-saplings, too, and I was able to escape by paddling furiously through the swampy creeks as fast as I was ever able. At which point things became more serious.”

  The Captain had ceased grinning now, and he nodded to indicate that the tall man should continue.

  “I returned to the pine-barrens several times, hunting the toad-men, and winged several of them, but they are fearful hard to kill. I was intent on trying to get a skin or a head for a trophy to prove the truth of my tale, and I did not realise that I had become the hunted, and I was caught.”

  The Captain held the tall man’s gaze. “Little grey men with big black eyes,” he said slowly. The tall man nodded, then dipped his finger in his glass of rum and rubbed his eyebrow. He leaned forward into the candle-light and Captain Greybagges could see that the hair of the eyebrow was green. He suddenly looked afraid and went to rise from his seat.

  “No, Sylvestre!” said the tall man. “She sent me here! She sent me here to watch your back!”

  Captain Greybagges rubbed his face with his hands, exhaling noisily. “For a moment …” he said.

  “It nearly was that way. You are not missed yet, but there is a vague suspicion of something awry. They manufactured a copy of me, a copy with a scrambled soul, and sent him to make enquiries among men. I was to be fed to the toad-men, but she somehow had me smuggled onto the transport as well as my copy, and I dogged his steps all the way here. Maybe I would not have found you by myself, for I am a swindler and a liar, not a human bloodhound, as they had made him. He was easy to follow, though, as all I had to ask was ‘has my twin brother been this way?’ My twin lies in a shallow grave two miles from here. It gave me a very strange feeling to murder myself and bury my own corpse at midnight, but not a guilty feeling at all.” He smiled a grim and unsettling smile, and took a gulp of rum. “He was surprisingly easy to kill. In making him so completely their creature they had erased much of his human cunning and suspicion. Fortunately for me, I must say, for I am no assassin either.”