Familiar Spirits (16 page)

some sinister power, and seems consoled by the presence of her sons, who will remain with her the week until her affairs are put in order and the will is read. My greatest fear is the animosity of the town, as can be seen in this threatening letter.”

Crispin gave a deprecating glance at the note, which Matthew still held in his hand. He said he had taken precautions against trouble and when Matthew asked him what sort of precautions he meant, Crispin said he had armed his menser-vants. He said he hoped there would be no troubling of his house or shop, or that of his sister-in-law, but if there were, he was ready for it. He owned several firearms, he said, and a half dozen swords and was prepared to swear by the loyalty of his servants. “I stand by them and they by me,” the tanner said with a grim smile.

Matthew said he hoped no such violent defense of the house would be necessary, although he allowed that tempers were running high in the town. He briefly described his encounter with Alderman Trent.

“The Devil take him!” cried Crispin. “Peter Trent has been my brother-in-law’s enemy for years. I am not surprised by the enmity he shows Margaret or me, for that matter.”

“But how could anyone think
that
of my dear sister?” Jane exclaimed, as if only now recognizing the full significance of the accusations. “She’s a sweet, decent soul, a most devout Christian woman. Why, she has ever given alms to the poor.”

“It seems Christian living is not enough to stave off these scandalmongers and witch-hunters,” said her husband hotly. He repeated his promise to defend his house, and even talked of bringing a lawsuit against Peter Trent.

“What has my sister said to have done—cursed a cow, conversed with toads?” asked Jane, her handsome eyes flashing with unwonted anger.

“The apparition of Ursula has created the suspicion that your sister is herself a witch who has raised Ursula’s spirit from the dead,” Matthew said.

“Marry, for what purpose?” cried Jane. “To trouble her own house, to frighten the foolish?”

“It is thought she brought about her husband’s death by causing Ursula’s spirit to appear at the window,” said Matthew.

“A novel fashion of murder, then,” said Crispin in a derisive tone. “What absolute drivel!”

“It is a wicked, outrageous lie,” stormed Jane Crispin, rising from her chair and letting the coverlet drop to the floor. “My sister loved her husband with a sincere heart. Although her tongue was sometimes sharp and she overbearing, this was nothing more than her peculiar humor. No sin, certainly. Her love, I swear it, was as true and deep as is my husband’s love for me or mine for him.”

“This is the thanks we get for our good works,” Crispin said when his wife had sat down again. “Shelter we provided for Ursula and her brother, honest employment to save both from the parish rolls. And what do we receive in return? Why, to be hounded and railed at as witches and their consorts. The Devil’s brood they’ll be calling us next, condemned on all sides and deserted by our friends. Is God in His heaven, or does He sleep that such injustice should be visited upon us?”

“Oh, husband, how can you speak so?” cried Jane reproachfully, her eyes brimming with tears. “God
is
just. He will preserve us in our ordeal, even as Job.”

“Your relief of the poor and succor for these orphans has been noted and much approved,” Matthew said. “It is wrong to think that God has forsaken you, or that the town lacks gratitude.”

“Wrong, is it?” said Crispin, looking up at him under heavy brows. “I am heartily sorry, Mr. Stock, but at this moment I can think of but one wrong—that done to me and mine. Are we not most miserable who must barricade our door against our neighbors, who receive missives such as that you hold in your hand threatening our lives, who must de-

fend our good names from the slanders of men like Trent and Walsh?”

The question hung in the air while the tanner smoldered, his anger now moving to dejection. His wife tried to comfort him but to no avail. He fell silent, staring into the fire as though he were imagining some vengeance. “Most miserable, most miserable,” he repeated to himself.

Jane saw Matthew to the door. “Good night, Mr. Stock. We value your friendship.”

“Good night, Mrs. Crispin,” Matthew replied, still holding the threatening letter. He advised her to bar the door behind him.

The chill wind whistled down the street, driving against his face, and he pulled his coat about him and his hat down to his eyebrows. He started up the street to his own house, thinking still of the tanner and his wife. To him their prosperity seemed much deserved, their happiness in each other genuine and reminiscent of his with Joan. But now fortune had turned her wheel. Prosperity had become adversity, wretchedness, public scorn, and danger. What explained it? The tanner’s question echoed in his head. Why had God allowed such misfortune to fall upon the good, while evil triumphed and escaped punishment?

Matthew had no answer. He was seized by a melancholy himself, the fruit of his troubled thought and his physical weariness. Suddenly he became aware of his surroundings as though, preoccupied before, he had paid no attention to where he was. He was the lone traveler on such a night. On each side of him, the tall houses whose painted fronts and signs were as familiar to him as his own face, and whose occupants he knew by Christian name and family name, had assumed a forbidding aspect. He felt himself a stranger in a strange town, with every door barred against him. He stared at the windows as he passed. He could see lights within, but they were pale, timid lights, quite overpowered by the darkness in the street. Doubt and fear clutched at his soul with an icy hand. The houses seemed now the houses of his enemies, and he fully expected dogs to come forth and bark

at him. But on such a night even the dogs quaked beneath their masters’ tables, judiciously ignoring whatever scratches and knocks might send them out-of-doors.

In the alehouses of Moulsham they would be saying Ursula Tusser’s curse had fallen upon the town. Damp-footed and dejected as he was, weak from his missed supper and beset by weighty thoughts of God’s unfathomable ways, Matthew could almost believe in the curse himself.

The
wind rattled the windowpanes incessantly, the shop sign creaked on its hinges, but in the kitchen of Matthew’s house there was warmth and security. Joan was waiting for him with his supper, and although he had been famished before, he was now so disheartened by his visit to the Crispins he could only pick at his meat like an old toothless man searching amidst the stew for something soft to swallow whole. His wife commented on his lack of appetite. “Come, husband, 
eat!
There’s cheese and pippins to come. What, don’t you like my cooking? A cheerful look makes a dish a feast!”

But he was beyond cheerful looks. He was feeling very black indeed. “Thomas Crispin has armed his servants and prepares to defend his house against the town,” he reported glumly. “He’s had a threatening letter nailed to his door giving him and his family leave to take up residence elsewhere or face the consequences.” He showed her the letter. She quickly read it over.

“Oh, I see,” Joan said, softening. “What consequences are these, pray?”

“As you can see, the letter leaves that up to the tanner’s imagination.”

“Thus the armed servants. I don’t like
that. ”

“Nor I.”

“What a shame,” she said.

“It is. I don’t know them well, the Crispins, but they seem a perfectly admirable couple.”

“Oh, they are notorious for it,” she said, wiping her hands on her apron. She had been standing with her back to the hearth, enjoying the tingle of warmth penetrating the several layers of good cloth she wore. But it was too warm now; the tingling had become a roasting. She pulled away and joined him at the table. He began to eat, and this pleased her. “How are they notorious?” he asked, picking up the thread of her remark about the Crispins.

She laughed. “Why, he dotes upon her and she upon him.”

“He seems a model husband,” Matthew said between mouthfuls.

“Some would say so,” Joan said, meaning of course her gossips, whose knowledge of the marital relationships of the town was prodigious.

He stopped chewing and laid down his knife. “Would
you
say so?” he said, a little jealous.

“I’d call him a paragon of husbandhood,” she said. “He is most solicitous of his wife’s happiness. They say her house is furnished like a gentlewoman’s. That it has carpets on the floors and a German clock above the mantel that tells the hours. When an hour strikes, a little knight in silver armor comes boldly forth and then marches back again. They say her servants whisper in her presence for fear of speaking too loudly and that her husband buys her whatever her heart desires.”

Joan smiled whimsically and watched her husband.

“I have seen the house,” Matthew said with a slight note of disgruntlement. “Carpets it has for a fact, and the furniture is very fine for a tanner’s house. As to the clock you speak of, I didn’t notice it. It sounds noisy to me—the knight in silver a terrible distraction. Is the great clock upon the church tower not sufficient to know what hour it is?”

Deciding she had played with him sufficiently, she didn’t answer his question about the German clock; the clock in fact meant little to her. She wanted to know all the Crispins had 
said.

He recounted the conversation, word for word as he was able to recall it.

“Tom Crispin is probably right. The slander touching Margaret Waite will blacken their own reputations, as this horrid letter proves. Do you think he really means to defend his house, or will he leave?”

“I think he will defend the house,” Matthew said, “though when I left him he was most dejected, despite the patient encouragement of his wife, who, it seems, takes these slanders with greater forbearance than he.”

“A man’s pride,” she observed, shaking her head. “It is both a thing of strength and a source of folly. Are these threats of violence real, do you think, or just the idle pastime of troublemakers?”

“They’re real enough. There’s fear in the town,” he said grimly. “Already they’re calling the apparition the Chelmsford Horror.”

She shuddered, thought of the loft, and said, “Poor Margaret, poor Mrs. Crispin.”

Matthew finished his supper. Then a knocking was heard. At first they thought it was the wind.

“Someone’s there,” Joan said.

“At this hour? Lord, what now?” He rose to see who it was this time; carrying the lamp through the darkened shop, he thought that at least
they
—whoever it was that knocked— had left him at peace long enough to fill his stomach.

“Well?” she said when he came back a few minutes later looking more grim than ever.

“There’s a brawl at the Saracen’s Head. Across the river in Moulsham—you know the place. I am summoned for fear the roisterers will break heads as well as the furniture.”

“Oh, what a pity you must go out again,” she said sympathetically. “And on such a night.”

“There’s no help,” he said with an air of resignation. “What did I do with my hat and cloak?”

“Behind the door,” she said.

“The wind’s giving over, at least.”

“A small blessing.”

He put on the cloak and held his hat in his hand as he bent down and kissed his wife on the forehead. Her skin was smooth and warm to his lips and he wanted very much to remain. How weary of his duties he was, and how he desired the peace of his own house at this moment. But it was not to be his, he knew—not yet.

“When shall I see you again? Shall I wait for you?” she asked.

“No, go to bed when you please. I may be some time.”

“Please be careful, Matthew,” she said, adding that she hoped he knew how little she really cared for fancy carpets and German clocks.

He gave her his blessing and went out.

When he was gone, Joan prayed—for Matthew and for herself, then for her neighbors the Waites and the Crispins, and lastly for the town, plagued by its own fears and something more and even worse. She prayed that the forces of good might prevail over the horror, which she did not fully comprehend but felt deep in her being as a profound and murky pool that the light could not penetrate or human reason fathom. Her prayer, made fervent and desperate by her husband’s being suddenly snatched from her, somewhat allayed her dread. But she could not rid herself entirely of her disquiet.

She tried to regain possession of herself by moving busily about the kitchen. Having sent Betty to bed earlier, to insure the greater privacy of her communication with Matthew, Joan now saw before her the dirty plates and cups, saw them with a kind of relief. Here was something, at least, to keep her occupied. But the dishes and cups were too quickly put away. She swept the floor. Twice. She resolved not to go to bed until Matthew returned. She found the stitchery she had been working on in odd moments for a week or more and went to sit by the fire. By a sheer effort of the will she plied her needle. It was a simple labor, virtually doing itself.

In time a warm, imageless sleep stole upon her, taking her without struggle or even awareness. Her stitchery dropped into her lap, then slid to the floor. Her head rolled onto her