“Good.”
“Then we shall see.”
“No. Court her, Richard. As if your life depended on it. Make that your first business. We’ll see she gets a widow’s third, at least. He left no will, I suppose, the blackguard, skulking in the suburbs of Hell. She’ll need time for mourning, yes. But she’s a quick and resilient woman who has long prepared herself for this, expects it.” He looked at Browne, who was in the act of leaving. “Mind you, Richard, don’t let the others get there ahead of you. No hesitant blockhead will win such a woman.” He winked and laughed. Browne finished his brandy and left. At the end, he told himself, they had become simply two men in frolic company.
So it happened that Browne eventually lied again to Elizabeth Higgins that her husband was indeed—just as she had expected—dead. Shaw came along to confirm the story, the two men grimly walking together to her house, dead to the beauties of field and meadow—the drooping blue flowers of flax, the violet of flower-de-luce, the deepest greens of grains and grasses about to ripen into yellows and browns.
She took the news calmly. “Do you know how it happened?” she asked.
“Some sort of hunting accident, it seems, Elizabeth,” Shaw offered. He too was uncomfortable, but believed this course the best. “He had completely gone over to them, as far as we can tell. He was an Indian. He had taken the name White Robin.”
“And here am I,” she said, folding her hands on the table and looking at the table top. “I knew it was so.”
“Can we do anything?” Shaw asked.
Browne, after delivering the news, was speechless. He felt as if he were in a dream, helpless to change the course of events. For a moment he thought he might weep, as one might in such a dream until waking.
“Not just now, thank you,” she said. “May I be alone for a day or two? To think what I will do.”
Browne found his tongue. “Do nothing immediately, Goody Higgins. At least until your mourning has passed. Let me, let us, help in any way we can. These matters need maturation; they need to be properly considered.” Then he was suddenly silent again, holding back an unfamiliar anger with himself. Surely, however, as Shaw had said, they were laying the foundation on which she might build a solid life for herself and her children.
Or, he wondered, was he a mere hypocrite making excuses for himself. Yet both men had sworn to secrecy for the woman’s sake. He was buffeted by desires he had not even admitted to himself. Were our lives so saturated with sensuality? Must we human beings always be so blown about by the storms in our flesh, like ships at bad anchorage? Was it all some jest played on humanity? No. Nothing in God’s world was in jest. Blasphemy. How lucky he never entered the ministry. How much more suitable the law in such a world. And even in the law he had foundered.
How many escaped these hungers? Very few. Despite all our pretensions. Damnation to the miscreants and election to the few, the very few. That was the way of the world. And he not even a Calvinist, merely a wayward Anglican adrift in the New World.
The two men left her. Never again did they speak to one another about their journey or Jared Higgins. Browne lost himself in his work for three months. He avoided Elizabeth Higgins, who had gone into an official period of mourning. The suitors, he knew, drew ever closer about her and waited, as inevitable as the tides. But he could make himself forget nothing of what he had done, and he could not say whether he had done the right thing. He fought himself to ignore it all, and that was the best that he could do.
Finally, three months later he paid her a visit. She was appropriately dressed. She seemed to him more than ever a woman of integrity, humility, and energy. He realized how much he had missed seeing her.
“They have begun leaving their little gifts and names, as if we were in Boston,” she said and let out a small laugh.
He tried to enter her mood. “I would add my own, but being a simple neighbor, I have none to bring.”
She looked at him curiously and smiled. “Suitors must be fools,” she said. “They ignore my sorry condition. One day I am married, the next a widow. Thenceforward when I open my door, men enter. I look out my window, more men. If I go to my garden to gather herbs and flowers, I find men blooming in the late summer winds. There are days I dare not enter my pantry. Have we all gone mad, Mr. Browne?”
“I fear we may have, Goody Higgins. Why not choose one?”
“Oh, I cannot! These fools who leave their verses and prayers, their gift sermons and trinkets?”
“I suppose it is all so much impertinency.”
“Worse. I do not know these men, but as names on town lists, or mere acquaintances—a few—as speakers at meetings and taverns. Or tradesmen, woodsmen, soldiers. My children do not even daunt certain widowers with broods of their own. One spoke of doubling the size of his house.
“I have sat before the fire evenings, my children gathered about me, and I ask: ‘My dears, what shall become of us?’”
“Have you any thoughts of what shall become of you?”
“Nothing that seems possible. I had thought of opening a tavern, if Mr. Cole would help me through the regulations and approvals.”
“Surely with all these men offering themselves, you have better prospects before you.”
“Better? Perhaps. But I cannot see it so. And in that matter I have no advisors. I am still too unsettled to know my mind. And I will not be hurried about like a leaf in November winds.” She quickly rose from the settle and walked to the table, upon which sat a small cake.
“It may be difficult to remain rooted here, however.”
“Yes, but I’ve managed. I have nearly determined to winter here, once again. Not because I wish to.”
“Because you are too uncertain to decide your future?”
“Just so.” She handed him a piece of her cake.
“Then winter will allow proper time to consider.”
“If I am allowed privacy.” She sat down again, crossing her legs, and leaned forward to eat a piece of her cake.
“I’ll stand before your door with my sword.” He laughed.
“Some such protection might be best,” she said and smiled.
Even if it be, Browne thought, this avuncular neighbor Browne?
“Well, Goody Higgins,” he said, “you may call on me at any time or in any pass. Though I fear I cannot turn men’s affections or desires, even with my sword. One might as well try to turn the rivers from the seas.”
She smiled again. There were awkward silences and pleasantries, and he saw that he was himself becoming a nuisance. So he made ready to leave and left a gift of his own, making her promise to read it and tell no one. He had examined his motives in this instance too. Had he merely wished to discredit the “dead” husband, to look the better in the widow’s eyes? (He had such an advantage here over the suitors.) Or was he an apostle of the truth, just now? After hours of internal debate, he thought that she had better know the truth in the private journal at least. She deserved to know, and Mistress Coffin deserved whatever exoneration was due her. As he departed, he reaffirmed his wish to help her in any need.
As autumn turned into winter, Richard Browne and Elizabeth Higgins saw nothing of one another. Neither wished to impose upon the other. And when he took the time to think about it, Browne realized that it would be best to allow her suitors opportunity to pass before her without interference, to allow her time to assess her own condition and future. To be honest with himself, further, he saw that he had been hesitating like a shy schoolboy as he became more and more aware of her attractions. His impulses toward her had begun to feel like violations of his protective friendship.
By January, however, she again called on him, arriving alone and bundled beyond recognition against the drifting snow and high winds. She began by explaining that least of all did she wish to become a neighbor who visits only in need, but it was he she had learned to trust.
He welcomed her and begged her to speak her mind.
“You may think me foolish,” sh
e said, unwrapping herself. “I don’t want the thing to start again.”
He asked her to explain.
“I awake in the night and feel him standing there.”
“Him?”
“I know he is dead. . . .”
“Your husband?”
“No. Mr. Coffin.”
“You are overwrought. I can see that.” He tried to make his voice very calm. “All that is done with. Don’t punish yourself.”
“Please do not believe I would come to you were I not sure. I sleep, dream, wake, and he is there. I feel him.”
“Feel him?”
“Watching me.”
“Where?”
“In the room, standing below my bed. Like a shadow.”
Browne considered this new turn. Had she lost her reason wintering alone with her children? Such things happened. She had always seemed to him competent and completely connected to the earth, yet she was prone to visions. And here she was again claiming to be the object of dark intent.
“How often?” he asked.
“Three times.”
“Three?”
“I believe so. He is there. I believe he wants my life.” He heard a touch of anger in her voice. “It is like hunger.”
The only way, he decided, was to treat this thing as real and see where she led him. How could he refuse her appeal?
“You are able to sleep, you say?” He waited until she nodded. “Are you eating?”
“Yes,” she said. “But it is in sleep that he comes. He does no harm to me, but he will if he finds the power. That is his desire.”
“If you like I will watch. I’ll come tonight? Tell no one.”
“On the Sabbath. He comes only then, the night following Lord’s Day. I cannot say why only then.”
“Well, I shall come to you next Sabbath then, to watch for you. Unless you prefer Mr. Vaughan in this instance.”
“I have come to you.”
“I’ll come then, Sabbath night.”
She looked relieved. Finally she said: “You attend now. I’ve seen you.”
“There are few who escape Mr. Vaughan’s teaching. Now that we have our minister, the old strictures are enforced. It would be foolish of me to keep Sabbath quietly within the confines of my house and garden, as beforetime.”
“Come at the close of Lord’s Day, then,” she said. “We will have a light supper. I find myself in your debt again, as seems my fate.”
“Don’t speak of it,” he said and smiled. “Haven’t we traveled this road together before?” He wanted to say something about taking responsibility for one’s fate but he knew she would not believe it.
“Why must the road be so dark and endless?” she said.
“Life, as Mr. Vaughan says, is much in darkness.”
“And might not even the Lord dwell in the darkness, as Solomon says,” she added. “And as Moses before him found: ‘Unto the thick darkness where God was’?”
“But let’s give one another strength as we travel,” he said. “Banish this shadow, whatever it be.”
She was about to leave when she turned to him again and, with a curious look, said: “It has been so long I had almost forgotten. Forgive me.” He said nothing and she went on immediately. “It was widow Gage then.” It was simply a statement. “I knew it was somebody.”
“Yes,” he said.
“There was a time of difficulty between us,” she said. “We had grown dependent on each other, as husbands and wives do. There was that foundation of some deeper understanding or love . . . something lasting and as certain as the warmth of the other’s body as he sleeps beside you night after night.” She looked directly into Browne’s eyes. “But suddenly I just knew it. I put it to him—that I knew, that it must cease, that I would not live with a man who betrayed me.”
“And he admitted . . . to something?”
She turned away. “To nothing! He feigned ignorance. His denial, now that I felt sure, drove me into a passion. That he could lie about this betrayal.
“Together we got through it finally, made our accommodations toward one another again, out of necessity. In all his troubles after Mistress Coffin’s death, he needed me. I took pity. It all might have destroyed him. I believed he had returned to me. I will admit even that much of my old feeling for him returned. He seemed resourceful. He had said before that he had severed this other relation, and I believed him.”
“He never blamed you?”
“He never placed blame upon me by his tongue. His deeper feelings were perhaps otherwise. And there may be something in that, some fault of my own I mean.” There was a weariness, a defeat, in her voice that he had not heard since their first meeting.
“But you reacted vehemently. At the moment of discovering the betrayal.”
“Yes. I sent my letter out of anger, the anger of that moment, as you say. I wished to expose him, if he would not admit the truth to me himself. If he should both betray and lie.”
“Expose him to embarrassment or punishment?”
“I cannot say. Not now. Both? At the time it was perhaps both.”
“And you never knew for certain the issue of this missive?”
“I never knew.” She was facing Browne once again. “But I see now how it is connected to all our torments thereafter, in some dark manner I know not.”
“In our unruly passions we mortals make many errors. It ever has been and ever will be so.”
“So it must be. You shall have her journal back when you come, Mr. Browne. Thank you for helping me see.”
XX
So it was that he came to her at the closing of the next Sabbath in the cold calm that followed a snowstorm. As he approached her house, Browne looked up and saw stars blowing ragged clouds free of the evening sky. There was a half-moon. The air felt unusually dry and sharp, making his cheeks numb and his nose sting. He thought of her fresh from observing the Lord’s Day, saw her again making her way in the snow with the children and all of them in the new meeting house at the sounding of the great trumpet shell in the sharp morning air, the rows of benches, the few high pews among which Mr. Cole had been seated, the ministerial sonorities booming off the sounding board as the Reverend Vaughan stood at the scaffold above the deacons’ pews, the people rising, singing, praying in the cold, the musketry slam-and-rattle of the seats coming down again, the tithing-man watching over the restless boys, the few Indians and Africans in the loft looking over the lengthy proceedings as if from Heaven. How this woman would be resonant, he thought, with her day of obedience, song, and prayer. How the strictures and meditations of the day would tremble to the surface of her flesh like a lamp of holy oil flickering deep within, or like a spirit wavering on the verge of this world and the next.
As soon as the children finished their supper, Elizabeth dismissed them from the board to complete certain chores before bedtime: Jared to shell corn—brought down out of winter stores—against the fire-peel, the girls to attend a large kettle of yarn, to knit, or to card while watching Enoch, the youngest. She and Browne slowly ate their pottage. In the parlor all of the beds had been ranged around the hearth, forming their winter redoubt. They could hear the children working and laughing. Browne said that Jared, who had yet to carry in extra firewood, must be a great comfort to her, being nearly a man now. She agreed that were it not for her oldest son she would have grown mad by now, but he was still a boy, a boy in a man’s body. And like all boy-men, she said, he will be off soon to some girlwoman.
After everyone had gone to bed, Browne again found himself waking before the kitchen hearth. He fed the fire, sipped hot cider, sat, stood, paced, and thought all the while of so many things he had not taken the time to think of lately. By midnight his mind had turned to the lies between them, and he could not shake himself free of them no matter what else he tried to think about. It was, he realized with a grim sorrow, too late to turn back to the more complex truth before this woman and Mr. Cole.
Looked at with a certain distance, wh
at could the truth matter anyway? Jared Higgins was as good as dead to them all. He was dead to the life they were all living at Robinson’s Falls, and alive only in his other life. These two lives would never intersect. Higgins had no choice, nor any other will, but to remain what he had become.
But then, he thought, how can one be certain of such things? For the first time it struck Browne that he should not remain at Robinson’s Falls. If he would keep from any further embroilments or betrayals or lies, he must leave.
Yet how could he? How abandon everything he had worked to build right here, everything he had come to enjoy—his house and grounds, the high promise of his labors in the forest trade, his friend Elizabeth Higgins, Mr. Cole? He could not at the moment trace backwards how he had come to take so many risks, or even whether he had been aware of risks while he had acted. Had he built his entire new life here over a dangerous void?
As the night passed he began to feel ill with fatigue. Now he would have to spend the next day sleeping. He sat and dozed before the fire. But he moved in and out of consciousness. He was aware that the sleepers in the other room were quiet, and felt that they were alone in the house. He had felt strange presences before, he knew what that was, but he felt nothing now. There was nothing. Was she playing him like some poppet? Using his ties to her for some purpose of her own? He dozed off again. The fire ebbed. He started awake. Nothing.
He got up and replenished his fire. How much time had passed? Dawn must be close. He found he had absolutely no idea. He sat down and dozed again. Then, shortly it seemed, he was awake. There was wind outside, but nothing else. Finally, he faintly heard her and came to full consciousness.
She was catching her breath. Had she forgotten about his being in the house during her sleep? He rose quietly so as not to startle her. “No,” he heard her say. Then there was a tremulous whimper. He reached for his Bible and moved slowly, quietly toward the other room. He heard nothing, not even her breathing, as he moved.
She was sitting up in bed. At first she seemed awake. As he moved toward her silently, watching her, her eyes were open but, he believed, unseeing. She began to breathe heavily again, her chest rising and falling, the smallest tremulous whimper again escaping from someplace as deep as her soul. The children were all undisturbed. He moved right up to her and saw her shaking as she sat. He touched her very carefully on the shoulder, and she turned to look at him, seeming fully awake now. But she was still not speaking. He could feel her woolen shift clinging to her with sweat. Her face glistened in the low light of fire coals. She shook her head sharply twice, still unable to speak, then closed her eyes and bowed her head. Her body relaxed now, her innermost trembling ceased. Gently he stroked her hair, as a man might calm his dog after a chase or a fight. But he felt that tenderness a man feels for a woman.
The Strange Death of Mistress Coffin Page 15