Newes from the Dead

by Mary Hooper

  Robert glanced over to the coffin, which had been placed next to the window so that its contents could derive the most benefit from the morning’s pale and unsatisfactory light. He was not generally squeamish, for he’d been a scholar at Oxford for a year, had seen drawn and quartered corpses as well as hangings and amputations, but there had been something intensely depressing about the girl and her death; about the way that she’d stood, trembling, pathetic, in the prison yard, looking around in some awe at the attention given her by the gathered crowd, her glance passing over them as she, perhaps, looked for a loved one.

  And now, less than four hours later, her body lay in that flimsy parish coffin that stood on the trestle table before him, her life blood hardly cool within her. Had her soul yet departed? Was her ethereal presence nearby—or had she, being a murderess, been consigned to hell, already enduring its fires and eternal torments?

  Even though he’d stopped at the tavern, Robert was first to arrive at the apothecary’s house; the physicians weren’t due for another half-hour or so. Being early he could, he knew, have taken the best place right beside the coffin. He could. But even as he told himself to move closer, get as near as possible to where the great men would be working so that he might garner every scrap of intelligence, he hung back, surveying the trestle at a distance while trying to warm his hands inside the sleeves of his black gown.

  Why did he feel like this? What was he so apprehensive about? Anne Green couldn’t hurt him. A girl like that, tremulous on the scaffold, trembling with cold, couldn’t hurt a fly whether she was dead or alive.

  But she had hurt someone, he thought with a start. She was a murderess, had been found to be so by judge and jury, and thence had become one of the five hanged persons a year that the teaching establishments of Oxford were able to claim for dissection.

  Robert forced himself to recall that early morning scene when Anne had appeared from the confines of the jail, supported by two burly prison officials. She’d tried to cling, weeping and shaking, to her mother, but had been roughly pulled away by the hangman. “I protest my innocence,” she’d whispered, and her words had passed around the crowd. “May God in his wisdom prove me innocent of the charges against me.”

  Her speech was recorded by two pamphleteers who stood beside the scaffold, endeavoring to write in the rain. The pamphlets, Robert knew, would be published on the morrow with many a linguistic flourish added and perhaps even a poem, together with an etching of Anne praying beside the scaffold steps and calling upon God’s mercy. These would be best sellers—for cases such as this, tales of fornication and murder, could hardly be got off the printing press quickly enough.

  He had watched, horrified yet fascinated, while Anne Green climbed the ladder to the scaffold and the heavy noose was placed around her neck. Her final words had been, “May God convey me swiftly to paradise,” but the last of these was hardly out of her mouth when the hangman shoved her off the ladder, and put an end to her and her prayers. Some young men—her brothers, perhaps—had rushed out of the crowd and, weeping freely, hung on her legs in order to hasten her death. One of them had lifted her body several times and pulled it down again with a sudden jerk, the sooner to break her neck and dispatch her out of her misery. After twenty minutes or so, a sergeant-at-arms had climbed the ladder and pounded several times on her breast with the butt-end of a musket, using some considerable violence, in order to drive the last remaining breaths from her body. After thirty minutes, when she was observed to neither twitch, breathe, nor move, her body had been cut down and pronounced dead by a prison official and a doctor.

  So, Robert pondered, if Anne Green was neither bold nor fierce enough to hurt him in life, what was he frightened of? Did he truly think that now, dead, she might have taken on a more frightening aspect? That as a wraith she was capable of doing him harm? But what was it that Dr. Willis said about wraiths and ghosts? That they were nothing but creations of the imagination. That once the immortal spark was gone from someone, all that remained was a carcass.

  Mr. Clarke’s maidservant, a girl named Martha, with frizzy red hair and pale freckles, well-wrapped against the cold, came in and struck a tinder to spark the fire, then began lighting tapers around the room. These, however, did little to dispel the gloom of the December day.

  “’Tis extreme cold,” she said to Robert, rubbing her hands up and down her arms to warm them, “and the rain looks like turning to snow.”

  ’Tis the year’s midnight, Robert thought to himself, and glanced up at the sky, which was leaden and streaked ugly yellow. For sure it would snow, and then perhaps it would seem more like Christmas—although Cromwell had already decreed that there should be no dancing, carousing, or festooning of dwellings with greenery this year, but that people should simply offer up an extra prayer.

  “A beggar died under St. Clement’s bridge of cold and hunger,” Martha went on. “At least, he began to die in St. Peter’s parish, but the parishioners discovered him and carried him into St. Clement’s to breathe his last there and so to save St. Peter’s two shillin’ for his burying!” She rolled her eyes to heaven. “That never used to happen with our king on the throne. If you ask me, people are acting meaner since Cromwell’s been in charge. And now he’s put a stop to mumming!” She seemed to check herself after saying this, looked over her shoulder, and put her finger to her lips.

  Robert smiled and made the same gesture back. It didn’t do for a citizen to speak against Cromwell—or to speak in support of the royal line, either. Why, only last week two fellows had been arrested in the Rainbow for drinking a health to young Charles, the dead king’s son and contender for the throne.

  Martha, obviously wanting to stop and gossip, pulled her shawl more tightly around her and nodded toward the coffin. “Take yon girl, for instance. There’s talk of whether she was truly guilty or not, or whether her employer had a hand in seeing her found so.”

  Robert looked at her inquiringly, hoping she might say more, but she merely straightened up, pushed the hair out of her eyes, and considered him. “You’re here with the gent’men from the college to see the cutting?” she asked, and when Robert nodded, added pertly, “Don’t have much to say for yourself, do you?”

  Robert swallowed nervously. She was pretty, but she was only Mr. Clarke’s servant and so of very little consequence. There was no call for him to be timorous. He could offer her a pleasantry, comment on the foul weather, or wonder aloud where everyone else was. Nothing could be easier.

  “W . . . w . . .” he began, and then cursed himself silently. W was one of his worst starts. He should have gone for a softer beginning. “M . . . m . . . mer . . .” he began again as Martha looked at him, head on one side. “M . . . m . . .”

  Realization spread across her face, and she put her hand to her mouth and giggled behind her fingers. “Oh, I beg your pardon, sir,” she said. “I didn’t realize you were afflicted! But don’t you strain yourself by trying to speak on my account. People say I talk enough for two anyway.”

  Robert swallowed and nodded at the girl. This was what always happened, and it wasn’t just with pretty girls, either. He’d grow out of it, his father had said. But what if he didn’t? What if he ended up a proper, qualified physician with a pronounced stammer? How would he attend to his patients and find out what was wrong with them? How was he going to be able to treat anyone if they giggled when he tried to ask what their symptoms were?

  The church bells began tolling, and Martha counted on her fingers, listening for the number of strikes. “There! That’s another soul hanged. A man this time. Pity he’s not for the cutting instead of the young lass here.”

  They both glanced over at the coffin, and Robert gave a sudden shiver as a forgotten memory stirred in him. A coffin . . . yes. He could see in his mind another coffin—though not a parish box, but one fashioned from rich cherrywood with clasps and handles in gleaming brass. But whom had it contained—and why had he suddenly remembered it so vividly?

 
; Chapter ~ 3

  Isearch my mind for a prayer to help me through. Though I walk through the valley of death, I will fear no evil. But, oh, I’m in the valley of death now, and I do fear it, for it seems to me that being shut alive in a box and put into the earth is the most cruel and wicked thing that can ever happen to anyone. I swear I didn’t do that wicked murder, and God knows my innocence.

  How could I be brought to this? Thinking on the answer brings to mind my intention of recalling my life, and I let myself dwell on the hated name of Geoffrey Reade.

  Master Geoffrey came into the household when he was fourteen, about the time his father perished and Sir Thomas made him his heir. He was a big lad even then; as tall as a man, and strong and muscular, with a lot of fair curls and sandy eyelashes. I think about his appearance now, just briefly, and cannot say if he was handsome or not. I know I had thought so at first, for he had dark eyes like shiny brown conkers, and they looked very well with his fair curls. But when I recall him now, his face is clouded by my more recent thoughts of him, and he appears ugly and defiled.

  But I must put things straight in my mind; order my thoughts so that I don’t lose my sanity. And the facts are these.

  After Barton Manor was burned down in the war, the Reade household moved to Dun’s Tew, which is a village a short way off, with a manor house and farm held by Sir Thomas. Dun’s Tew Manor is a very large and noble house, with many suitable and convenient offices, including a laundry and pressing room, a dairy, still room, brewhouse, salting room, and ice house. All these rooms, however, meant more work for the servants, for whereas previously Lady Mary had elected to send out to have her pigs salted, her flower essences made, or her ale brewed, now all these tasks were done in the house. The manor-house grounds also contain a large dovecote, which holds six hundred doves a-calling and a-cooing to each other day and night, two lakes well stocked with fish, a big kitchen garden, and a farm that supplies milk and beef and mutton. With these the household is almost replete and hardly needs to look outside its gates for any other provision.

  Things changed for all of us at Dun’s Tew, however, for with all the extra work there was not so much gaiety to be had. And ’twas not just this, but the fact that Sir Thomas and Milady were much altered by the deaths of Master Geoffrey’s father and uncle and the destruction of Barton Manor in the war, and became stricter and more remote from us.

  Master Geoffrey stayed with us but briefly when he was fourteen, for he was soon sent away to be a scholar in London. We were a busy household, however, for other members of the family came and went: aunts, cousins, and grown-up nephews and nieces of Milady, so that there could be two or twenty of the family living there at any one time. We had a kindly old cook at first, Mrs. Norman, who treated me like her own, but when she developed a toothache, Sir Thomas said that she wasn’t able to do her job properly and must go to the poorhouse. She was replaced by Mrs. Williams, who didn’t much like me. She brought two other servants with her, and one of these was Susan, who was a housemaid and also her niece. Susan is my age but looks younger, for there’s no shape to her, and she’s as thin and flat as a pressing board. Her face is flat, too, and scarce ever has any expression on it but a peevish one.

  Susan and I started friendly enough, but then I did something that upset her, and she has hardly given me a word since. This came about when we had two journeymen barbers call at the house to cut the hair of Sir Thomas and the other men of the household, and also to shave and bleed them. The younger of these fellows, Tobias, had a merry eye, and we soon fell to laughing and joking together. At the end of the day I offered to read his palm and tell his fortune, which Ma had taught me and which was merely a bit of fun. But telling palms meant I had to hold his hand, and Susan came upon me doing this at the scullery table and slammed out of the room in a temper, which I was very amazed at.

  I excused myself from Tobias and went after her, catching up with her on the back stairs and asking her to hold a moment.

  “Well might you ask me to hold a moment, Anne Green,” she said very crossly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “How dare you act the trollop with my suitor!”

  “I did no such thing,” I said, astonished, for although Tobias was a merry fellow, he had a pink, round face and tiny eyes within it, and I didn’t find him the least bit handsome.

  “I saw you hand-holding, and looking at him so wanton!”

  “I was telling his fortune—nothing more,” I protested. “But I didn’t know you were even acquainted with each other.”

  “I knew him from my last position,” she said sullenly. “We were friends whenever he came to the house, and we . . . we had an understanding.”

  “Oh,” I said, for I’d seen no signs of such a thing.

  “But because you’ve been acting so shameless with your giggles and wanton ways, he’s hardly spoken to me all day.”

  “Well, I do beg pardon, I’m sure.”

  “’Tis too late now for the begging of pardons!”

  “You should have told me that there was an arrangement between you.”

  She went red. “’Tis not an arrangement as such . . .”

  “I will go and ask his pardon this minute and tell him that I was sorry to have caused a falling out between you.”

  This made her crosser than ever. “You will not do any such thing!” she said, and as she spoke gave me such a hard pinch on my arm, it later turned quite blue.

  The next time Tobias and his brother called, about a month later, I stayed out of the way. Things did not go as Susan wished, however. I heard from Jacob the footman that Tobias had hardly spoken a word to her. This was no surprise to me, for to my mind he was a skipjack sort of fellow who would have a girl in every house. I tried to say this to Susan, but she wouldn’t listen, and we were never friends again.

  I got on well enough with the other servants, but Susan was the girl I had to work beside and also share a room with, so the fact that we didn’t speak was troublesome. I say work beside, for we were both housemaids and could be called upon for most kitchen duties. But over the last good while, it had seemed to me that she’d been doing all the dainty work: the sugaring and the candying of flowers, the making of junkets and taffety tarts, the distilling of violets, and the mending of lace collars, while I was responsible for the rest: the salting of the swine, the skinning of the eels, and the morning ritual of emptying the chamber pots into the cesspit. The only cooking I’d been allowed to undertake of late was the making of calf’s-head pie, and I believe that Mrs. Williams only let me do this because she knew that such a business wouldn’t be to my taste, and that rinsing out the brains of the creature and cutting out its tongue would certainly turn my stomach.

  Mrs. Williams is not what she seems. The family thinks her an excellent and proficient cook, and indeed she always acts both humble and courteous when any of them is about, but they don’t know her at other times, however, for I’ve marked many an occasion when she’s been slatternly or dishonest. She takes her instruction from Mr. Peakes, but they are birds of a feather flocking together, and there are lewd goings-on between them, for I once surprised them in the brewhouse with his hand under her petticoats.

  Not that I can think on that sort of matter while pretending to have the virtue of a maiden, however, for I must confess that I am that no longer. And here I think again about what happened concerning this and what it led to, and a dread comes over me. Oh, let not me be alive and in the ground . . .

  Master Geoffrey. I must think now, carefully and truthfully, about whether I am to blame for anything of what came to pass.

  When he was seventeen, he came back from his school in the early summer and was much changed, having lost his boisterousness and adopted the manners and costume of a man. A man, I say, and not a gentleman, for I believe I know how they are supposed to behave, and his manners were not conversant with that.

  He began to flirt with me and to indulge in saucy conversation, which I supposed he
had learned from his fellow scholars, and this led me into some confusion, for I was not sure of how to act in response. On the one hand, I was mindful of the deep gulf between us—he the master and I the servant—but on the other hand, there was something playful and pleasing about his manner toward me that was very appealing, especially as Mrs. Williams and Susan were acting so cold.

  By the strangest coincidence, it was just about this time that I first became acquainted with John Taylor, a young and bluff fellow who was apprenticed to the blacksmith in the village.

  When I picture John Taylor, my heart contracts with sorrow, for if I’d not been so trusting, so easy to fool, and so puffed up with my own vanity, then surely I wouldn’t be lying here, recounting my downfall. If only I’d valued John for the good and decent man he was and not looked higher . . .

  But I will think of him now, for he has a part to play in my story.

  I had seen him in church before, and we had oft smiled at each other, but we began to be friends about the middle of May, on the occasion of one of our big wash days at the house. At these times Mrs. Williams took on extra girls, and so my sister, Jane, had come over from Steeple Barton the night before. Jane is younger than me and still living at home, for she is very headstrong, and not biddable enough to be a housemaid. She finds work enough to pay her way, however, for she tills the land in the spring and helps bring in the harvest, and is also able to turn her hand to glove-making, mending, sheep-minding, or whatever else might be called for. That morning we had to rise at two to begin heating the water, but I was mighty pleased to have her beside me, and she and I talked the whole time of happy days at home as we washed and starched and blued the linen.