Familiar Spirits (21 page)

Binding, who was the man Thomas Crispin had wounded, stood supported by a staff. His right thigh, where the ball

had struck, was bound with cloth. At the carpenter’s cry there were expressions of sympathy all around. Somebody said the poor man was like to lose his leg and there were cries for vengeance and a hail of curses. Out of the night came a cobblestone someone had hurled. It whizzed past Matthew and struck the tanner’s sign with a sharp crack.

“I have issued my warrant and taken the prisoners into custody, as you can plainly see, good people,” the magistrate called out sternly. “There is no need for you to remain in the streets. Go home! Go to your beds! I charge you, in the Queen’s name!”

But the crowd seemed unwilling to move. Hodge continued to rail against the prisoners, especially the tanner. The magistrate threatened to clear the streets by force if the mob did not go home, and his men drew their blades and prepared to execute his order. For a few tense moments it seemed the strategy of surrender would fail. But then the crowd’s courage began to waver. Some of them, mostly citizens who had been caught up in the initial wave of hysteria and were now shuddering in the cold and losing heart at the prospect of a pitched battle, begain to trail off to their homes. Soon only the hard core of troublemakers from the Saracen’s Head remained clustered behind their self-appointed general.

The magistrate turned and whispered to Matthew, “See now, Mr. Stock, cold hands and hearts have done their work. We’re more than a match for them now. Rebellious knaves to stir up such trouble! By God, fortunate they are that it is I who am magistrate here and not someone like Sir John Popham, who’d dangle a hundred of the worst of them from every tree in the parish.” Having said this, the magistrate ordered his lieutenant to advance upon the remnants of the mob and seize its leader, which they presently did, or at least attempted. Hodge, nimble-footed and seeing himself abandoned by his friends, was able to escape in the ensuing retreat.

The magistrate was not pleased when he heard that the leader of the mob had escaped, and Matthew and his prisoners had to remain standing in the street while the gen-

tleman berated his lieutenant. Then he said to Matthew, “Constable, these people are in your charge. See that they are properly housed and protected. I charge you to commission as many deputies as are needful to keep them safe until their trials. In the morning I want you at the manor house by ten o’clock. There we will determine what additional charges are to be levied against them.”

“Additional charges!” protested Crispin, overhearing the magistrate’s instructions. “What additional charges do you mean? Surely I am not be held accountable for blasting the leg of the abominable villain who would have spoiled my house had he had his will?”

Jane tried to calm her husband, who was glaring fiercely at the magistrate and at Matthew too. Finally he had to be subdued by two of the magistrate’s men. They handled him roughly.

“Take them away, Constable,” ordered the magistrate, his patience seemingly gone.

The women began to cry. They were shivering with cold, having stood so long in the street. Matthew took them to the Blue Boar, which was only a handful of houses away. There he found quarters for them, waited until a proper fire had been laid and a guard appointed them, and then returned to where the magistrate was still supervising the dispersal of the final mobbers.

“The prisoners are at the inn, sir, and bedded down for the night,” Matthew reported to the magistrate, who was standing in the street beside a bonfire that had been made.

“Very well, Mr. Stock. There remain a few troublemakers about, but presently we can all go home to bed, I think.”

The magistrate had no sooner said this than there was a fearful cry from the back part of the Crispin house. Will Simple came rushing from the door of the tanner’s shop to report that he had seen flames shooting out of the roof of the Waite barn.

The magistrate ordered what men stood by the bonfire to assist in this new emergency while Matthew ran up and down the street shouting “Fire!” at the top of his lungs. Once more

the citizenry came streaming into the street, most still dressed from the earlier broil, but more bent to cooperation now that a familiar peril threatened, not a supernatural one. Having given the alarm, Matthew ran to help, mindful of the danger a single blaze presented to the entire street. He arrived on the scene and saw that the fire in the barn had already become a conflagration. Bright licks of flame could be seen from the cracks in the walls and clouds of black smoke bellowed from the sodden rotting thatch. Crispin's household servants were running to and from the well with buckets of water to douse the flames, but the fire was too intense. From inside the barn could be heard the shrieks of the mare, whom no one had thought to let out. Now it was too late. The men who tried to do so staggered into the open air coughing and gagging. Matthew helped with the bucket brigade, but the effort was soon seen to be futile. With a great crash, the barn collapsed in a heap of burning rubble and the air was filled with cinders and sparks. This started smaller fires, which were quickly extinguished. Several people who had fought the blaze, particularly the tanner’s servants, sat down on the bare cold ground and wept from sheer exhaustion. The absence of wind had saved the house and probably the neighborhood, and there were expressions of gratitude for that. Matthew thought it was just as well Margaret Waite had not seen this new misfortune. How much misery could a person stand in a single day? Her husband buried at noon, her house invaded in the evening. Now this.

Onlookers began to drift away. The danger was past. Someone remarked, in a voice loud enough to carry for some distance, that the fire had been arson plain and simple. But another voice said no, the fire was the judgment of God upon the Waites for their entertainment of the Devil. Matthew heard no third voice denying it.

Well
after midnight, numb with exhaustion, Matthew returned to his house and was amazed to find the lights still burning in the shop and the kitchen. He knocked twice and called out. The door opened and Joan admitted him; she was still dressed as he had last seen her, in her apron. Her face was drawn; she seemed to be in the midst of a strange waking dream, only half aware of his presence, but she clutched at his sleeve and would not let go until they had passed through the shop, he had extinguished the lamps, and they had gone into the kitchen where there was a great roaring fire to warm him.

“Thank God you’ve come home,” she said, her voice quavering.

“The Waites’ barn was set afire,” he said, embracing her. “Margaret Waite and Jane Crispin and her husband are all conveyed to the Blue Boar under arrest. Tom Crispin shot a man with that pistol of his, but the fellow will live.”

She said she had heard all that. The riot had drawn her out-of-doors—at least far enough to satisfy her curiosity about what was going on.

“You look tired,” he said. “More than tired—you look as though you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Faith, I think I have,” she said. They sat down at the table and she poured them both a hot drink. When they had drunk, Matthew waited for her to explain herself. He could

tell by her expression that she had not been joking about the ghost.

She told her tale rapidly and concluded breathless. She told him everything—her terrible dream, her sudden awakening, the dread, and then her terror as she saw the face peering in at her.

“And this visage at the window. It was—”

“Ursula Tusser, to the life,” Joan said, looking at him directly as though challenging him to deny it. “It was the face in my dream too. The serving girl. She looked familiar to me then ... in my sleep. Strange that I did not recognize her at once. My blood ran cold.”

“But how can you be certain it was she and not one of the mob—or some innocent passerby, for that matter? They were all about the back parts of the houses. Some of them might have drifted on up the street. Observing the light, they might have supposed—”

“No, husband. It was no passerby—no mobber, either. Besides, this happened before the riot. It was within an hour or so of your leaving. Later I heard the clamor of the church bell.”

“Some passerby, then, or neighbor come to beg sugar or salt or—”

“I know the girl’s face,” she insisted. “It was her very eyes, her nose, her mouth.”

Joan’s face was hard with certainty; he dared dispute with her no further, nor did he care to. He was satisfied; he believed that she had seen the face. But whose?

“What happened then?” he asked.

“When?”

“When you saw the face.”

“Nothing. For a moment the face was there, looking in at me, breathing against the glass.”

“Breathing you say?”

“Yes, it was breathing. I think I could see the breath.”

“No ghost
breathes,
Joan,” he said quietly.

She reflected a moment. “That’s right,” she said. “It

breathed. Therefore it was not dead, yet it was she, my life upon it.”

“A mystery, then. Tell me, when the face appeared you were startled?”

“Yes, and then the face vanished. I didn’t even have time to scream. The scream lodged in my throat. I felt I was choking.”

“So the face must have appeared to Malcolm Waite the night he died,” Matthew said. “Did you go outside to see where the apparition went?”

She looked at him incredulously. “Are you in jest? What woman or man either, seeing such a sight, would pursue it?” Since he was not sure he would have followed the spirit himself, he did not contend with her answer.

“Which window was it?”

She pointed to the window next to the postern door. It was a small rectangular window with leaded panes. He picked up the lamp that sat between them and carried it outside. Joan followed, asking him where he was going.

“You’ll see anon,” he said, lifting the lamp so it illuminated the area beneath the window. In the spring and summer the patch of earth was a bed of hollyhocks and marigolds. Now it was covered with a thin layer of moist leaves. “I’m looking for footprints,” he said, crouching for a closer inspection of the ground. He poked around in the leaves and stood up and tried to peer into the window. He was just able to see inside, but only by standing on his tiptoes. “How tall was Ursula?”

“Tall? Oh, I think of middle height.”

“Taller than you?”

“I don’t think so. About the same.”

“And her feet—were they small or great?”

“Small, I think. She seemed most daintily made in every part.” She sighed with exasperation and weariness, her arms akimbo. “Husband, what mean all these questions?”

“There are prints here—impressions in the soft moldering leaves. As though someone
stood
at the window.” He held the

lamp so she could see for herself. “A spirit that
breathes
and
stands. ”

“I know it
was
Ursula.”

“Ursula is dead. I saw her die.”

She did not respond. They went back inside.

“Don’t you believe me?” she asked in a small voice as they climbed the stairs.

“I believe you,” he said, but his suspicions were deep and disturbing. He did not know how to explain what she had seen.

He slept until nearly six and then awoke with a start. By his side Joan moaned softly and rolled onto her back, her own repose as peaceful as a child’s. Deciding not to wake her, he dragged himself from bed, dressed hurriedly, and left the house to go at once to the Blue Boar to see how his prisoners had spent the night.

His own sleep had been restless, full of vague disturbing shapes and noises, eerie wails, and the terrified stomping and shrieking of the Waites’ mare suffocating in its stall. Now as he walked briskly down the street, the short night’s disquiet remained with him, mocking the distinction between sleep and wake and discoloring the images of the day.

At the inn he found his prisoners secure but agitated. Their sleep had been no longer or sounder than his own; they were disheveled in dress and their faces bore the pallor of the infirm. Crispin paced the floor nervously and answered curtly when Matthew asked him how he did. Margaret wailed like a child. She wanted to go home, she said, and looked pleadingly at Matthew as though permission were fully within his power. Matthew assured them that their safest course was to remain where they were. Breakfast was served, but they ate little and the boy who brought breakfast looked at the prisoners with a mixture of fear and loathing, although a few days earlier he would have tipped his hat respectfully as the tanner passed.

“So we are secure here,” said the tanner with a scowl on his

face. He leaned against the windowsill. “Some security it is when we are treated no better than common felons. Come, tell us, what are the new charges to which the magistrate referred?”

“They will be determined this morning,” Matthew replied not unsympathetically, for he too felt that new and more serious charges had not been part of the tanner’s reckoning when he agreed to lay down his weapons and submit to arrest. Matthew couldn’t help feeling himself a participant in the betrayal.

“This is a fine mess,” Crispin said. He turned to look out the window. “See now,” he said, his voice breaking, “I can almost see my shop.” The tanner’s muscular shoulders shuddered, betraying his silent grief. Matthew, finding Crispin’s sorrow difficult to look upon, turned to the two women, who were seated on the bed. They too aroused pity in his heart. He was doing his duty as he saw it, yet if it was his duty he did, why did he now feel a persecutor of the innocent rather than a friend of justice? For a while it was very quiet in the room. Crispin had regained his composure but remained staring into the street. The women waited, and Matthew watched them. He thought about Joan’s terrible vision and remembered that Margaret too had seen it. What did it mean? The question assumed a center place in his consciousness. The apparition had been real, and the evidence was that it was mortal still—a corporeal spirit, then. He was sure it had been real. And Joan had said so. But what did it want? Why had it come to his house?