She laughed again. “Now I have the explanation,” she said, “I am pleased you take such an interest in us, Mr. Browne.” He smiled but looked down in his lingering embarrassment, unable to hold her eye. “But what was it you wanted to speak to me about?”
“Several things,” he said. “Most of which I think better now ought to be left unsaid. But I did want to say that I believe myself unfit for the role I had come to play, as your protector and advisor in these new torments. I was going to suggest that the Reverend Mr. Vaughan might be far more effective in your present distress, as he is your minister and more suitable for handling these troublesome apparitions.”
She looked at him quietly, enlarging his sense of embarrassment again. Then she said: “I was coming to the same belief myself. Not your being unfit, Mr. Browne, but that I have lain my broken life at your door so often I no longer have any right to ask you to indulge me.”
“I did not mean . . .”
“No, Mr. Browne,” she cut him off pleasantly. “You see I agree. I feel this way myself, I say.”
“When I find a song bird that has blown up against my window or door, I try to help the unfortunate creature. But if I believe that things have gone beyond my capacity to help or heal, I seek another who may be more gifted and knowledgeable, or possess the necessary physic. I can do no less for you.”
“Yet no neighbor should become a burden.”
“And so you have not! I have taken up your cause of my own will, please do not forget, not as a mere duty. Every step I have taken is of my own choosing, out of my affections for you and your children, and for Mr. Cole, and then out of my own curiosity. You have never been to me a burden. Yet I find the larger matters in all that I’ve pursued in your behalf and in my curiosity have defeated me. I’ve grown less certain and more confused. Shed too little light. If what little I have been able to accomplish has offered some relief to you, and your children, that must be sufficient for me now.”
“You too quickly shrink the result of what you have done. But I’m pleased by your honesty.”
He felt all his resistance to her, all his faith in returning to his own life completely, beginning to melt and flow toward her. But she quickly added: “I shall ask Mr. Vaughan whether he will help me, as my own heart told me to do.”
“He knows of your past tribulations.”
“Yes. And of your aid.” She turned away from him and gathered some needlework. “I’ve not told him yet anything of recent trouble.”
“Then speak to him,” Browne said, hoping his voice did not plead too much. “Can we not arrange for the three of us to discuss these apparitions next Sabbath evening? After delivering his sermon again, of course, to his family. We may draw him from his final hours in his study before his deserved rest. At that time we can determine who will watch with you that night.”
“If you think that best, but please don’t trouble yourself, Mr. Browne. I can turn to him myself.”
“He will be wanting my experience of this,” Browne said, “and I would see you safe in good hands, Goody Higgins. I am not the proper Shepherd in this matter.”
So it happened that the Reverend Nehemiah Vaughan agreed to champion Elizabeth Higgins in these recent bouts with whatever had begun to accost her. And so it was that these three—Browne, Elizabeth Higgins, and the Reverend Vaughan—came together in her house at the close of the next Lord’s Day.
At previous encounters Browne and Vaughan had found certain common interests and understandings. But Browne did not possess the temperament of faith and fervor that would have put the two men on more intimate terms. Short, grave, and intense, the Reverend Vaughan, a man just into his forties, was a model of the “hard study” ministers of his day. He was considered one of the colonial frontier’s greatest Hebricians, and fluent also in Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Syriac. Beyond that Browne knew him as a man who strove after righteousness by his preaching, his labors, and his example of keeping the beast in him tied with a short tether. And if Browne was not himself a covenanted member of the church, he was unlike Elizabeth Higgins in that neither he nor anyone else—above all Mr. Vaughan—would have expected Browne to become a member.
Had not the Reverend Vaughan reproached Richard Browne and all his kind in his sermons? More than once Vaughan preached that merchants had charged planters unfair prices to cover their risks. Browne had to agree that there had been a degree of such practices, but not so much as Vaughan made out.
His mind jumped to a day long ago; he had been sitting about the fire in a tavern with a group of merchants. Pipes in hand, aglow from their cordials, they spoke of the impracticality of John Cotton’s old principles of commercial ethics. That pious gentleman had thought it meet in 1639 to protest against such time-worn practices as taking advantage of another’s ignorance or necessity for one’s personal gain, recouping one’s losses by raising prices, or selling as dearly and buying as cheaply as the market would bear. Cotton had witnessed extortion, usury, the overpricing of “foreign commodities,” and the host of ancient excesses, and he thought they might be stopped in this new Canaan by appeal to conscience and to law. But Browne clearly saw in his mind the hearty, laughing merchants, himself included, ridiculing such unworldliness.
Yes, Browne had to admit, even he had raised prices to cover his own risks when he had tried diversifying his trade. In conversation on such matters, Mr. Vaughan once told Browne: “When the Lord stirred the spirits of his people to come over into this wilderness, it was not for worldly wealth, or a better livelihood here for the outward man. It was to further the reformation of religion according to God’s word.” Browne then responded that the Reverend did not understand the background of settlement among the Piscataqua planters. But Mr. Vaughan was not to be convinced so easily.
Nearly from his first acquaintance of Elizabeth Higgins, on the other hand, Mr. Vaughan had designed that she would eventually be accepted into membership in his church. Not for her social status, certainly, but for what he recognized in her of those tremblings in the soul that rose out of her depth and which he hoped to nurture and channel. She had, or so the minister seemed to believe, that ripeness of spirit which sensed and reflected in those bound to the earth the supernal presences and conflicts. If he could but tutor, develop, direct such a gift as hers, he would, he intimated, have a presence of spirit in his parish that few could claim to equal. He would know, of course, that mere ecstacy and vision were never enough, were in themselves no sign of salvation, were indeed as like as not to arouse contention and unholy excesses in the communities where they manifest.
During the meeting at the Higginses’ house, Mr. Vaughan spoke to his auditors of the “breathing of Elizabeth’s soul after Christ,” of her soul’s struggles against dark powers, and of her overcoming threats and temptations and trials. Looking directly into her eyes, his body compressed with assurance and the force of his rapid speech, he assured her that he believed she would be accepted into church membership, if she but desired it, at the next membership hearings. There was no substantial doubt, in his mind, that she would “give good satisfaction” in both private and public testimony.
She promised to consider such an honor, although, as she said, she harbored doubts as to her worthiness. She agreed that throughout her trials her own salvation had been much on her mind. And she admitted that she hoped earnestly to come fully into the bosom of Christ before, as the minister put it, the trapdoor of death dropped beneath her.
“The Lord is at your elbow,” Mr. Vaughan told her. “He is in this world among us every moment. We have but to turn to Him.”
“I would turn,” she said. She looked down at the table top.
“Then you shall,” he said, his eyes shining. “This life has eternal consequences. That, good woman, is the deepest truth confronting every man, woman, and child. To learn righteousness—that is the great trial of each life.”
Browne asked what the minister proposed in her immediate extremity.
“I wake la
te into the night at my lucubrations, Mr. Browne,” he replied immediately. “Surely I can find such excellent employment here while I see Goody Higgins through whatever passage this night after Sabbath might bring.”
Browne realized that the transition had been made, and with little effort on his part. He himself was no longer prepared to meet such adversaries as she continually placed before him, nor had he been comfortable with the nature of her growing dependency. As he said his good evening, he left them before the fire, the minister already opening biblical texts to her.
During the rest of that winter Browne tried, and largely succeeded, to forget the Coffins and Higginses, and all the relations of events and people that had absorbed him so much. He was gladly immersed in his own work. And it was only during an odd moment of respite—enjoying a cup of sack, noting the lush winter reds of late afternoon sunlight drifting over his bookcloset, sliding into sleep in the night—that he found he was not as comfortable as he thought he should be by Elizabeth Higgins’ growing independence from him and, so far as he knew, her growing dependence upon the Reverend Vaughan.
When the spring of 1652 had fully arrived, he realized that he had seen her only twice, and briefly, since he had left her before the fire with the minister. She was about to be elected into the small circle of actual church membership. But he also concluded, to his discomfort whenever he thought about it, that her fastings and readings, her sessions with Mr. Vaughan, her complete entering of the church’s circle of protection, led to “the estrangement,” as he began to put it to himself, between them.
Moreover, she had begun to speak of the minister as a kind of personal savior, as one who had exorcised evil presences from her life and substituted the joy of Christian covenant, community, and spirit. Of all such things and changes she had spoken happily, even, it seemed to Browne, distractedly. She was becoming for him a kind of lovely figure diminishing in a dream. Had he himself become too distracted by his own work?
What finally forced him to confront himself on the matter was a three-week sojourn that spring to Strawberry Banke and the Isles of Shoals. To conclude a certain large shipment of wood products to England in the best possible way, to diversify the products of his trade on a more solid foundation, and to extend his company’s partnership to fishmongers of London, he found it necessary to oversee the handling and transfer of certain commodities himself.
It was while staying on the islands some ten miles offshore from the Banke that, in a number of idle moments, he had the opportunity to examine his recent life and his true desires. As he thought about Elizabeth Higgins he discovered a sense of urgency and loss.
From his room at an inn on the islands, while watching a ship take on its cargo, he sat at a tiny table by the window one afternoon near the mid-point of his island sojourn writing to Elizabeth.
As he sought the best way to put things, the words of a song revelers had been singing in their cups at the tavern two nights ago kept ringing through his mind.
A batchelour I have beene long,
and had no minde to marry,
But now I find it did me wrong
that I so long did tarry;
Therefore I will a wooing ride,
there’s many married younger,
Where shall I goe to seeke a Bride?
Ile lye alone no longer.
So many sinnes are incident
unto a single life,
That I all danger to prevent
with speed will seeke a Wife;
If I with Women chance to drinke
I’me call’d a Mutton-monger,
But now Ile stop their mouthes I thinke
And lye alone no longer.
O Fate send me a handsome Lasse
that I can fancy well,
For Portion Ile not greatly passe,
though Money beares the bell.
Love now adayes with Gold is bought
but I’me no Money-monger,
Give me a Wife, though shee’s worth nought
Ile lye alone no longer.
Yet if she chance to proove a Slut,
a Scold, or else a Whore,
That could not chuse but be a cut,
and vexe me very sore.
A Slut would make me loath my meate
were I halfe dead with hunger,
But I must leave this fond conceate,
And lye alone no longer.
5 June 1652,
Smuttynose Island
MY DEAR GOODY HIGGINS,
You may, or may not, know by now that I have removed myself temporarily to the Isles of Shoals to oversee some shipping. I endeavor to establish some importing of goods such as wine and cloth, etc., through a certain fishmonger in trade for dunfish and others. The opportunity arose quite by chance through my brother’s watchful eye. And he believed it essential that I give the matter my immediate attention as a lively prospect.
This is a rocky, windy, and bawdy sort of place that has given me time and cause to think about my own circumstances and about our neighborly relations, which of late neither of us has sufficiently cultivated, for divers private reasons.
From my lodging in the Rose and Sun Chamber, I survey a half dozen ships at anchor about these bright and raucous isles. I have a prospect as well from another window of the brick meetinghouse of this island and a number of fine houses tucked in about it, also the courthouse. This Smuttynose Island looks a prosperous place perched atop the main. Indeed, there are men of modest fortune here, one would think more so than ashore, although some few as I understand it have recently removed to the more comfortable mainland while retaining their holdings here.
As the ships unload and load, come and go, and as the sea gulls call and argue in the passing days, I have often time to ponder and examine myself and my ways. These same sea gulls, by the by, have begun their annual nesting, I believe, and have turned most boisterous and ill-humored, to the point of attacking the unwary intruder. Just as we human beings, so with God’s creatures. For they are sometimes known for their playfulness and spirit, yet at other times they turn morose and ill-tempered and even lash out at whatever they unjustly imagine might in some manner harm them.
So have I seen with the fishermen here whose drying racks surround us. Just at the moment the fishing is prodigious, and the fishermen and their bawds grow daily more exuberant and joyous. Yet nearly a fortnight earlier, upon my arrival, the catch was slim and there were arguments and fights and accusations breaking out continuously.
I am most happy that you have found, through Mr. Vaughan, relief from your afflictions, that unholy visions have turned holy. But there is a great deal on my mind now that I need to say to you with all the directness and honesty I can summon. I set these thoughts down here for fear that I might not speak them as I have resolved to do once I stand again before you. You see, I intend to give these thoughts a degree of irrevocability from which I, however timorous in speaking them before you, now must address when we next meet.
For you see I have not written to relate such descriptions of the turmoils and delights of these seaborne rocks which I temporarily inhabit, but rather to tell you that I can no longer pretend the indifference of mere proximity or even friendship toward you. Perhaps the wild and open beauty of this place loosens my tongue, or pen rather; perhaps my removal from the habits and routines of our lives on land makes me bold, as if I had regained some lost element of my manhood here. I cannot say.
In brief, I would be more than a good neighbor and protector. I would be your constant companion. It has become clearer and clearer to me that I cannot continue indefinitely to live alone, to deny the common affections of humanity, to flee responsibility for others who are dearer to me than any other woman and her children. “Love makes me write, what shame forbids to speak.”
I now have prospects and income enough to make us comfortable. Yet I suffer the greatest apprehensions that I may have delayed for too long, that some one of your suitors might through his persistence and a
ttractions have won you, or at least captured your affections sufficiently to insure the future bond between you. Nor am I comforted by the thought that your liberation from these darker apparitions and your joy in Christian fellowship might have turned you from me, your friend and neighbor, to an irrevocable degree. I hope, I pray, it is not so.
When I return I will come to you that I might speak my true feelings openly, and that you, after due consideration, might answer mine with your own, whatever they may in truth be. Until then, God keep you, dear woman.
I remain your faithful neighbor,
RICHARD BROWNE
XXII
When he returned to Robinson’s Falls, satisfied with his work but tired and anxious over Elizabeth Higgins’ reaction to his admissions, he found that she herself was away visiting relatives who had just moved to Strawberry Banke. He did not know who these people were. His maidservant, who had accepted the message and a note, had no further information.
He opened the note, noticing first that it was brief and written in an unfamiliar hand, understanding that she found writing onerous.
MR. BROWNE,
The children and I are to the Banke for a fortnight. Thus we shall not be able to speak to one another when you return. You might foretell how your letter surprised me. For some time I have thought your feelings for me honest. And mine are warmest towards you. And we both know how much I am in your debt. But do we not also know that men and women cannot live together only by such feelings?
I cannot say to you what I feel. I do not want to offend such a dear friend. But as I look at my mourning gown, and as I see the kind of man you are, I cannot foresee a life of constant companionship, as you say, even though you speak so readily of it.
You also speak of suitors, but I have no interest in them. And how would that Christian fellowship under Mr. Vaughan turn me from another? Christ turns not from others, only from Evil, but turns in love to all His children.
The Strange Death of Mistress Coffin Page 17