The Strange Death of Mistress Coffin

by Robert J. Begiebing

  “And one has to know when to move on to other things, especially since one always has responsibilities to others. That, finally, is what we, your mother and I, tried to do. It took time, of course. But for the past twenty years I have given those events and inquiries little thought. That lack of any complete resolution in the case of the Coffins and the Higginses is a fact we soon learned to live with and, as I say, put out of our minds.

  “Even now, the principals, the places, the events recede into uncertain historical record. Cole is deceased. All that remains is fragmentary.” Browne paused to adjust the fire with a long iron fork. No one spoke while he did so. Aaron and Apphia merely looked at one another. Mrs. Hawksworth stuck her head into the room and announced supper. The old man straightened up, placed the fork against the hearth and added: “None of it is my affair any longer. This is the world we live in now.”

  XXV

  When their evening meal was over, Browne’s children wished to return to their own homes, so he climbed to his study with another dram of mulled wine. He hoped to order, for an easier start the next morning, the papers he and Aaron had spread about on his writing table. But he went to his window over the street first and watched Aaron and Apphia walking towards their dwellings. He saw again how much Apphia reminded him of Elizabeth, just as Apphia’s own daughter mirrored her mother. It could have been a young Elizabeth Higgins walking below out of sight. In a whisper, he recited:

  A Lillie of a Day,

  Is fairer farre, in May,

  Although it fall, and die that night;

  It was the Plant, and flowre of light.

  In small proportions, we just beauties see:

  And in short measures, life may perfect bee.

  And would they not prosper, his beautiful children and grandchildren? Yes, he thought, prosper they must. Aaron one day—not too far away now surely—would come into all his father’s trade and, more importantly, his land. For he, Browne, had turned much profit over the years into that safest and most transferable of investments. Above all, the wealth that tied the ensuing generations together would be land. Moreover, between them Apphia and Aaron could count in their relations by marriage the wealthiest families in the region—the Champernownes, the Cutts, the Sherburns, among others distant or close. A warmth, like that of red wine reaching an empty stomach on a cold day, spread through his body as he thought how substantial would be the increase unto his children and their children for generations to come.

  Apphia had been delighted when he had offered her any of her mother’s most costly clothing—a silk hood and sleeves, petticoats, a few silver clasps, combs and such things as Elizabeth had accumulated over the years, some of them gifts he or her children had given her. She might as well have the best of it, he thought. He could not have any of it in the house much longer. He wondered briefly what to do with the rest, the mundane clothes and personal effects, the worst reminders of his loss, these possessions that renewed pain.

  Elizabeth seldom wore the “gaudy garments,” as she called them, excepting the most formal occasions and ceremonies, preferring against the time plainness of dress and demeanor. She had grown fond of quoting Zephaniah: “He will visit or send his plague among such as are clothed with strange apparel.” The great picture he had had painted of her in the proper attire of a wealthy merchant’s wife he knew to be false to her. And most of her plain clothes would have to be thrown out, he realized, unless charitable distribution could be arranged shortly.

  He turned back to his table and stood over the papers, but he could not concentrate on them yet. There would be time enough tomorrow. The street was darkening now. He thought that he had begun to feel a degree of regeneration that day, as if his severed limbs, the open wounds, were healing over. His appetite was returning also. If the physical qualities of the pain were slowly receding, the internal or mental pain remained. This, he thought, is what it’s like to be left alive. If one survives the wounds to body and soul, one slowly begins to heal, growing again like a lightning-shorn tree. One’s will has nothing to do with it.

  Below in the street a woman hurried home, her cloak pulled tightly about her. About the vanity of this life, he thought, Elizabeth had been no doubt correct.

  But you are lovely Leaves, where we

  May read how soon things have

  Their end, though ne’r so brave;

  And after they have shown their pride,

  Like you a while: They glide

  Into the Grave.

  But if he was to live in the world, he could not change himself. No, he did not wish to shun the world.

  So he was to survive after all. Then he could but continue to work for the benefit of his children and grandchildren (with whom Aaron and Apphia had promised to visit soon, at his insistence). And to work in continuing good faith for his brother’s sake and for the sake of the subscribers to their company. He thought, however, that he would no longer enlarge his trade; he would leave all new ventures to Aaron. Full of days, he must now devote some thought to the other business of launching himself into that ocean of Eternity where all must go, to prepare his posture, as Elizabeth might have put it, for my Lord’s coming. “For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past: and as a watch in the night,” he thought, and then picked forward a few further of the psalmist’s lines: “We spend our years as a tale that is told . . . for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.”

  He glanced back at his papers but did not move to them. At the moment they only reminded him of his dead wife’s other sense of what was most important. But now he was alone, and what was there to adjust the balance in his life; what would be his equipoise now?

  He thought of the burgeoning town and port about him as he stood before his dark window. The place was rapidly coming into its own as a center of international trade. Settled by fishmongers, lumbermen, fur traders, and the like under the aegis of that old gallant Mason, especially, for the profit of the Laconia company, one of those early unregulated and poor communities inhabited by seekers of adventure and profit, Strawberry Banke seemed to have shone with a more lurid than divine light, and now it promised a future of trade and power second to none in New England. Each citizen and every newcomer seemed to contribute to this growth of industry and independence as a province. That gulf of independence seemed to be growing as large as the gulf between the old elegant, agrarian dreams of Captain Smith and the theocratic visions of the New England saints. A great material civilization was growing on the twin trunks of investment and the tractability of those who labored. But then, as he had often said, the whole world had changed, and was changing still.

  The real New World was not America, it struck him, not British America at any rate. The life he saw around him now, materially as spiritually, was increasingly the life of England since the Restoration of Charles II, less the life of biblical utopias or even the relatively humble Christian life his wife had preferred. She was, he had to admit, not suited to this coming century, this—for all he could tell—secular millennium. He began to realize, as if for the first time, though he had been aware of it, how separate his wife had become, in her deeper life, from the very women with whom she associated: those wives of important merchants and officials, those few even who co-directed their husband’s estates and adventuresome interests, those local Dame School teachers, liquor sellers, keepers of public houses, and cheese vendors.

  One might say that while he had been growing more and more a man of his time, she had been receding more and more into earlier centuries still. It mattered not that she loved, was industrious, associated with the grandest of local ladies. Her private life had been otherwise, growing less and less attached to this world. The Reverend Nehemiah Vaughan had seen to that development of her vitality. Was he putting it too strongly? Perhaps. He knew only that he had not really contemplated their lives in quite this way before, had been too much caught in the nets of commerce. There was perhaps a stroke of broad truth in it. Some final lines of
Donne’s “Break of Day” shot into his mind.

  Must business thee from hence remove?

  O, that’s the worst disease of love,

  The poor, the foul, the false, love can

  Admit, but not the busied man.

  He thought about this New Time, as he put it, and he saw that of course here too, despite the advancing disenchantment, there would be evil. Mankind succeeded, everywhere pushing ahead, establishing order and profit out of wilderness. Just as he himself had done. And if all is tenuous before God, none, it seemed, thought his particular life to be as fragile as it is. The trick all must play on themselves. Each little order created amidst the gigantic wild. A world rife with violence—war, persecution, pestilence, famine, pride, greed. Men speaking evil of good, good of evil. Works of mankind a righteous God might scourge with terrible swiftness. Generation upon generation, each with renewed expectations and will. Yet each doomed to the same excoriating round.

  Suddenly he recalled reading in some exotica about an ancient slave revolt in the East. The name of the black rebels returned to him like a concrete fact that he had seen for himself, the Zanj. Was it about the seventh century? They had revolted against their masters, whose cruelties were explicitly in violation of the Koran. They had created a great community of fugitive slaves; for more than a decade they were invincible. But they turned their power upon their oppressors and upon others, seizing cities, killing Arab men and enslaving, in turn, the women and children. What horrors must have occurred under the sun in those times for such women and children, the slaves of the Zanj! “And all their wealth, and all their little ones, and their wives they took captive, and spoiled even all that was in the house.”

  A train of brutal images swam before him and he shook his head rapidly to throw them off.

  Still, he thought, if evil is palpable, so is mystery: the invisible made visible, spirit shot into matter, the dark and wonderful intricacy in the ways of Providence, the mysterious presence of the rebellious, secret self. Who would be ever without guilt? Maleficence and malefactors might change, as the shapes always change, but as Elizabeth knew there was no escaping it, whether in the shapes of yesterday or today, in others or in oneself. Moreover, is it not in searching out the darkness in others that one may find the worst, the darkness, in oneself? He thought of Elizabeth’s suffering. His mind returned to the Donne poem.

  Love, which in spite of darkness brought us hither,

  Should in despite of light keep us together.

  Browne stepped away from the window and rearranged some of his papers. Then he chose a book to read as a better antidote to his speculations, which were of little use either to himself or to Elizabeth at this point. It was the fat octavo volume of the now obscure Herrick that his resourceful bookseller, one Hezekiah Usher of Boston, had discovered.

  But soon his eyes troubled him in the poor light and he put his book down, made his usual rounds of the house, undressed, and went to bed. He realized that he would never get used to sleeping alone, even though it had seemed the most common of his experiences in all the years before his marriage. He had not even the faintest desire to marry again. And God alone knew how long he would mourn, the deeper mourning, even after he had again donned his scarlet coat lined with green sarcenet. He recalled the old men he had seen standing or sitting in the burial ground, visiting in lonely silence for an hour or more. Yes, he would be like them, alone until the end. It would not matter any more if he were the only man in a town of beautifully bosomed and bedecked widows.

  He had opened a window before turning in and now the chill night air of May made him cold, but he knew he would not get out of bed to close the window. He sat up, not quite ready to lie flat, closed his eyes and breathed evenly, letting his mind run down toward sleep. Somewhere in a grove a lone thrush was ending its evening song later than the others, its trill growing less frequent and softer. Souls of the dead.

  This one seemed the song of a child’s shade. He felt a pang of love for his six grandchildren, saw each one’s face and spoke their names, then prayed that each would survive him. He wanted a rest from death. He would go willingly himself, but please, he prayed, do not take the children. He was old, full of the petty corruptions and compromises and failures and successes of a long life as a man of fortune. He thought his worth must be roughly £10,000.

  His memory suddenly ran to the Reverend Mr. Vaughan, who once insisted to him: “Nay, instead of looking to the Bible for the way of life, you merchants look to the English Gomorrah and ape courtly pomp and delicacy. Men are seen in the streets with monstrous and horrid periwigs, and women with their borders and false locks and such like whorish fashion, whereby the anger of the Lord is kindled against this sinful land.”

  Browne recalled now how he had protested and how Mr. Vaughan had left him, unregenerate man that he was, in disgust. They had had heated arguments on the subject from time to time, until Vaughan finally curtailed his visits to his friend Elizabeth Browne. But the minister’s sermons would on occasion take up the refrain.

  “My brethren,” his voice boomed above the congregation, “this is never to be forgotten, that New England is originally a plantation of religion, not a plantation of trade. Let merchants and such as are increasing cent per cent remember this, that worldly gain was not the end and design of the people of New England, but religion. And if any man amongst us make religion as twelve, and the world as thirteen, let such an one know he hath neither the spirit of a true New England man nor yet of a sincere Christian.”

  Browne recalled hearing that the Reverend Vaughan had gone so far as to preach during the recent Indian war that God’s judgment upon the greed and follies of the fathers had lighted upon the present generation. Elizabeth had received a gift copy of the sermon. “The woeful neglect of the rising generation is a sad sign that we have in great part forgotten our errand; and then why should we marvel that God hath taken no pleasure in our young men, but they have been numbered for the sword.”

  What would the minister have said, Browne thought, had he known of Browne’s lucrative trade in provisions during that war and, worse, his reopening of the French trade while the blood of that war had not yet dried upon the ground! These opportunities had at the time troubled him briefly. Yet he, Browne, had seized them, just as he had seized the greater portion of Coffin’s legacy.

  He laughed at himself. “‘Let no man seek his own; but every man another’s wealth,’” he said aloud.

  Yes, he was expendable. “‘My substance was not hid from thee when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. Thy eyes beheld my unformed substance; in thy book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.’” But not these children, he thought; they are not expendable. Though in truth, like that brave infant of Saguntum, might not any child creep back into its mother’s womb than be borne into the strife of its age?

  Where shame, faith, honour, and regard of right

  Lay trampled on; the deeds of death, and night,

  Urg’d, hurried forth, and horld

  Upon th’ affrighted world:

  Sword, fire, and famine, with fell fury met;

  And all on utmost ruine set;

  As, could they but lifes miseries fore-see,

  No doubt all Infants would returne like thee.

  Suddenly he recalled the death of a local man—was it nearly twenty years ago?—one grandfather Shurtleff killed by lightning, the very reach of the Lord’s arm, while his grandchildren sat in his lap and a third stood between his knees. “Cast forth lightning, and scatter them: Shoot out thine arrows, and destroy them.” The children remained untouched. Each generation a new innocence, a new chance.

  Yes, he thought, that was the way to die. Cleanse me. Take me. Leave these children untouched. Well, it would be enough then to leave the grandchildren. Come what may.

  Let them shun evil. Let them prosper. Let them, Oh Lord, stand safe among the shaft
s of Thy fire.

  About the Author

  Robert J. Begiebing was born in Massachusetts and holds degrees from Norwich University, Boston College, and the University of New Hampshire. He is professor of English at New Hampshire College, where he teaches writing and American literature. He lives with his wife and their family in Newfields, New Hampshire.

  Praise for Robert J. Begiebing’s The Strange Death of Mistress Coffin

  “Not since Kenneth Roberts has anyone written of early New England life in such vivid and convincing detail.”

  —E. Annie Proulx, The New York Times Book Review

  “It turns and twists upon itself, revealing complications and complexities of truth and character in suspects and sleuth. The Strange Death of Mistress Coffin is also a contribution to the ranks of fictional solutions to unsolved true crimes, such as we find in Tey’s Daughter of Time, Satterthwait’s Miss Lizzie, or Dexter’s recent Gold Dagger–winning The Wench is Dead.”

  —Mystery News

  “Begiebing illuminates ‘the dark and wonderful intricacy’ of the human heart.”

  —Yankee

  “Like a good wine, this book has an aftertaste that lingers in the mind well after it is finished. It will not be quickly forgotten by any who read it.”

  —Mostly Murder

  “This is not ordinary mystery. Just imagine Peyton Place as Hawthorne might have written it.”

  —Booklist

  “Begiebing brings warmth and passion to a people who are often remembered for their rigidness and superstitions, as in The Scarlet Letter and the Salem witch hunts.”

  —Portsmouth Herald

  “There is the stuff of a compelling motion picture in this imaginative and carefully written work. Great summer reading.”

  —The Keene Sentinel