‘No, not dead,’ said Beatrice after a few moments. ‘Is Doctor Merrydew still here? Doctor Merrydew!’
Harriet Mendum let out an extraordinary wail and then struck Beatrice on the shoulder with her black parasol. ‘If anybody in Sutton is a demon, Beatrice Scarlet, it is you! Look what you have done to my beloved husband! Look at him! You are a witch in widow’s clothing!’
Thirty-four
That evening, just before sunset, Major General Holyoke came to the parsonage and knocked at the door. Mary let him in and led him through to the parlour, where Beatrice was writing up the church accounts, so that she could hand them over to the Reverend Miles Bennett. She was framed in a rectangle of crimson sunlight from the window, as if she were a portrait of herself painted only in shades of red.
‘Major General Holyoke,’ she said, laying down her quill and standing up. ‘How is Henry Mendum?’
‘Not at all well,’ said Major General Holyoke. ‘Doctor Merrydew fears that he may be bleeding beneath the skull which will either bring about his death or leave him permanently comatose. Even if he does regain consciousness, he will more than likely be a jingle-brains for the rest of his life.’
‘It shouldn’t have ended like this,’ said Beatrice. ‘He should have been fairly tried by the court for what he did and punished accordingly.’
‘I came to tell you that I have talked with Harriet Mendum,’ said Major General Holyoke. ‘She has confessed to me that she knew of her husband’s ambition to extend his farm. He wanted it to be the most extensive and most profitable dairy farm in the whole of New Hampshire, and he had ambitions beyond that, too, such as standing for state president.
‘Two years ago he approached most of the farmers whose property abutted his and offered to buy large tracts of their land, but in almost every case he met with refusal. Mistress Mendum told me that one farmer showed some interest – John Tufnell, I think she said – but Mr Tufnell demanded twice the price for his acreage that her husband was willing to pay.’
‘So instead he decided to terrify his neighbours into giving him their land?’
‘That’s right. According to Mistress Mendum, the idea came to him when he met a ship-owner on one of his business trips to Salem, and the ship-owner introduced him to Jonathan Shooks. Mr Shooks had acquired for this ship-owner three sloops from rival shipping companies by causing all manner of hideous accidents aboard their vessels. He had persuaded these rival companies that Satan was responsible for these mishaps, as a punishment for bringing Christian missionaries to America from England. He told them that the only way in which they could save their entire fleets from disaster would be to forfeit some of their ships.’
‘Jonathan Shooks is a devil,’ said Beatrice. ‘He is clever and skilled in all manner of chymical tricks and his knowledge of herbs is extraordinary. He also has no soul and no conscience whatsoever.’
Major General Holyoke hesitated for a moment, blinking, as if he sensed that Beatrice’s hatred of Jonathan Shooks ran even deeper than her grief for the death of her husband.
Slowly, and keeping his eyes on her as he spoke, he said, ‘Mr Shooks had also extorted land on behalf of three other farmers, in Maine and Massachusetts. No news of those extortions was ever spread abroad because their victims were cautioned that they must keep silent about them or they would face even further horrors.
‘Henry Mendum offered Mr Shooks a great deal of money to come to Sutton and extort hundreds of acres of land for him.’ Here Major General Holyoke smiled and laid his hand on Beatrice’s arm. ‘What Mr Shooks clearly didn’t realize is that in Sutton he would be confronted by a woman whose knowledge of alchemy and herbs was almost as great as his own, if not greater.’
‘Oh, I think he knew it only too well,’ said Beatrice. ‘He was trained as an apothecary himself, in London, and he was aware of my dear father’s reputation, and of who I was. He told me so. No – before he started to terrorize our community, he made a careful study of everybody with any influence, and where each of us came from, and what our weaknesses were likely to be.
‘I believe he knew all about the skills my father had taught me and that right from the very beginning he regarded me as a challenge rather than a threat. He has tried with every fresh atrocity to baffle me and outwit me, and most of the time he has succeeded. I still don’t know how he killed our pigs, or what he gave to Henry Mendum’s cows to make them appear to be dying, or what he used to drug Ebenezer Rowlandson’s fish. Yet I don’t doubt now that he did it.’
‘Let me ask you this,’ said Major General Holyoke. ‘Are you sufficiently certain that Jonathan Shooks was responsible for at least some of these outrages to be able to give evidence to a jury?’
Beatrice nodded. She could prove that Jonathan Shooks had purchased two hundred gallons of linseed oil and she was sure that alone would be enough to convict him, even if it meant exhuming Francis’s body to show a jury how he had been dried like wood.
‘Excellent,’ said Major General Holyoke. ‘In that case I shall issue a warrant for the arrest of Mr Shooks, and perhaps we can exorcize Satan from our village for good and all. You are a brave and clever woman, Beatrice Scarlet, and I commend you for what you have done.’
All the time they had been talking the parlour had been growing increasingly shadowy, and now it was so dark that Beatrice could hardly see Major General Holyoke’s face. She felt as if they were standing in the shadows of days that had gone and would never return. Tomorrow everything would dawn new and bright and different, and she would start her life again, but just for now she felt as if Francis were standing close beside her, as well as Major General Holyoke, and the feeling was so sweet and so painful that her eyes filled with tears.
Major General Holyoke must have seen her tears glittering in the gloom because he reached out and took her hand and squeezed it, and said softly, ‘Beatrice, my dear. Beatrice, my poor, poor dear.’
*
The following day did start bright, although a chilly breeze was blowing from the north-west. The tall pines swayed like dancers and the air smelled of autumn.
Beatrice woke early and started her morning by mixing dough. When Mary arrived she would enlist her help in killing one of the pigs and butchering it ready for the winter. She had seen signs already that this winter was going to be exceptionally cold: the corn husks were thicker than usual, and the raccoons had much bushier fur and brighter bands than last year. The cows, too, had thicker hair on the napes of their necks.
She kneaded the dough for four large loaves and then covered them with cloths and left them to prove. She was washing the flour from her hands when she heard Noah crying upstairs. She went out into the hallway and there, standing in front of her, was Jonathan Shooks. She jolted in shock.
This was not the smart, suave Jonathan Shooks who had first visited the parsonage. This Jonathan Shooks had lost his silver wig and one of the sleeves of his tailcoat was hanging down in shreds. His face was smudged with dirt and he hadn’t shaved. He had even lost one of his silver-buckled shoes. He stood staring at her and he was wild-eyed with rage.
‘You trull!’ he spat at her. ‘You whore!’
‘Get out of my house at once!’ said Beatrice. ‘There is a warrant out for your arrest and if you much as breathe on me again I shall happily make sure that you are hanged!’
‘You betrayed me, Widow Scarlet. You, the widow of a pastor! They came for me at the Penacook Inn and Samuel and I were lucky to escape with our lives! As it is, I have lost my calash and my horses and all of my possessions! Everything!’
‘You killed my husband, Mr Shooks. You kidnapped my child and you took me by force. What on earth led you to suppose that I would keep my word to you?’
‘I fondly imagined that you would keep your word to me because you were afraid of me, and of what I might do to you if you did not.’
‘I am not afraid of you,’ she said, even though her voice was shaking. ‘There is nothing that you can take from me now that you
have not already taken. You disgust me. Apothecaries are supposed to use their knowledge to cure people and to ease their suffering, not to terrify them and steal their property and murder them. You are not even worthy of being called a demon. You are a slug.’
Jonathan Shooks sniffed loudly in his right nostril, then wiped his nose with the back of his hand. ‘You think that I can’t take any more from you, you whore? You think that you have nothing more to give me? I’ll tell you what you can give me. You can give me my revenge.’
With that, he strode towards her and seized hold of her arm, whirling her around so that she lost her balance and throwing her on to the kitchen floor. Her left shoulder was jarred by one of the table legs and she knocked her forehead against the rung of a chair. She twisted herself around, making a grab for the back of the chair so that she could pull herself up, but Jonathan Shooks kicked the chair over and then kicked her hard in the hip. When she tried again to sit up, he kicked her again, in the thigh this time.
‘Did you really think that you could outsmart Jonathan Shooks? Did you really believe that some mousy minister’s wife could prove herself to be cleverer than me? So your father was Clement Bannister and he taught you some of his tricks and how to brew up some of his possets. But your father never travelled like I did. He never got to know half of what I know.’
‘Let me up,’ said Beatrice. ‘My son is crying. Can’t you hear him? I must go up to comfort him.’
‘You are going nowhere at all, Widow Scarlet, ever again. Where you lie now is where your life will come to its well-deserved conclusion.’
Noah was screaming now and between each scream he could hardly catch his breath.
‘Please,’ begged Beatrice. ‘It will make him sick if he cries any more.’
‘Isn’t life tragic? I thought you would have learned that much – you, an apothecary’s daughter. Life is nothing but sickness and worry and pain and cruelty, and then we die. Do you want to know how I made those little Buckley twins sick? I gave them each a spoonful of boar’s taint to clog their lungs. But the effects of boar’s taint can be cured with sulphur dissolved in water, which is why I gave them a drink made from Chinese fire-sticks.
‘And poor Ebenezer Rowlandson’s trout! All it needed was some soap-root in the water and they were stupefied. The Indians use it in the west. Too lazy to catch their fish with spears.’
‘You killed our poor horse, Kingdom, with yew leaves,’ said Beatrice. ‘Why did you have to do that?’
Jonathan Shooks shook his head. ‘I did nothing to your horse! Your horse? Why would I? Did I not do enough to show your late husband how ineffectual he was by poisoning your pigs, and all that needed was fiddleneck seeds. Did you not guess that from their symptoms?’
‘It must have been the Widow Belknap who fed him those leaves,’ said Beatrice. At that moment she didn’t really care who had poisoned Kingdom, but Noah was still screaming and she was trying to keep Jonathan Shooks talking in order to give herself time to think how she could get away from him.
‘The Widow Belknap! Well, it’s possible, I suppose! In fact, it’s not only possible, it’s very likely. She’s a very vengeful woman, that Widow Belknap. I’m surprised her parents didn’t christen her “Resentment”. Still, it’s a pity she witnessed what we did to Mr Buckley.’
‘She saw you?’
‘Regrettably, yes. We didn’t expect anybody to be walking around the village green at that ungodly hour, but there she was, watching us. What choice did we have? We force-fed her wormwood to make her lose her mind, and then we took her away and left her in the woods. Whether she lived or died, we assumed that everybody in the village would blame her for every misfortune that had blighted their pathetic, obstinate lives – especially since most of them blamed her already. And they did!’
‘Please, let me go. I promise that I will tell no one that you have been here.’
‘How can I believe anything you say, Widow Scarlet? You betrayed me once and you will betray me again. Because of you, I now have to flee from Sutton as a fugitive, without my calash or my horses or any of my possessions, and more importantly, without any of the money that Henry Mendum was going to pay me for acquiring so much land for him. Samuel will probably have to go back to sea and start hoisting up sails again.’
‘Better to be hoisting up sails than slaves,’ Beatrice challenged him.
‘Aren’t you the sharp one, Widow Scarlet! No mistake about that! But now I’m going to show you how sharp I can be.’ He reached across the kitchen table and picked up Beatrice’s boning knife. Its blade was eighteen inches long and she had taken it out to sharpen it in readiness for killing one of the pigs.
‘What are you going to do to me?’ asked Beatrice. ‘Whatever it is, please don’t let it hurt. And don’t harm Noah, I beg you.’
Jonathan Shooks ran the ball of his thumb down the blade of the boning knife and a thin trickle of blood ran down the inside of his wrist. ‘I intend to do something demonic to you, Widow Scarlet, since you don’t seem to think that I am worthy of being called a demon. I could cut your throat, but that would be altogether too humane. I could stab you in the heart, but that would be much too quick. For what you have done to me, I am going to suffer for years, so I believe that you should suffer, too – not for years, of course, but for as long as possible.’
Beatrice closed her eyes. She tried to imagine that she wasn’t there at all, lying on the kitchen floor, listening to Jonathan Shooks talking to her in that low, measured voice. Although he was threatening her, he sounded as if he were trying to seduce her, and that made his words even more chilling.
‘I am going to slice through your Achilles tendons, so that you are unable to walk. Then I am going to fetch down your little son and dangle him up in front of you and cut open his belly so that his bowels drop into your lap. Then I shall cut open your belly, too, and force him back inside you, so that mother and child can again be as one, joined as you were at the start of his life and now reunited at the end.’
Beatrice seized the edge of the table top and again tried to pull herself to her feet, but this time Jonathan Shooks kicked her in the ribs – so hard that she was winded and couldn’t speak. He pushed her on to her back and then forced her over on to her face. He grasped her right foot and raised her leg, lifting the boning knife to cut through the tendon at the back of her ankle.
‘Please God, no!’ she screamed, kicking and struggling and trying to twist herself on to her back again. ‘Dear God, don’t do this! I’ll give you anything! You can have all of my land! All of my money! Anything!’
‘What good to me now is your land or your money? You have made me a hunted man, Widow Scarlet! You can pay me now only with your miserable life – that and the life of your miserable squawking son!’
Beatrice made a last effort to pull herself free, but Jonathan Shooks was gripping her foot with such ferocity that the bones in her toes crackled. He wrenched her leg up even higher, but as he did so she heard the front door bang open and footsteps rushing along the hallway and somebody collided with Jonathan Shooks so hard that he was sent sprawling across the kitchen floor, thumping his back against the iron stove.
Beatrice turned around and with a thrill of alarm she saw that the brown-cloaked figure was standing over her. Inside the kitchen he seemed even taller than he had when he was lurking at the end of the driveway under the trees. His hood had dropped back, revealing a man with wild brown hair and staring brown eyes and a bushy brown beard.
‘What? Who are you?’ was all that Beatrice could manage to gasp out before Jonathan Shooks had heaved himself up from the floor. Jonathan Shooks obviously didn’t care who the man was, only that he had violently pushed him over, and without saying a word he came stalking across the kitchen, his face contorted with anger. He was holding up the boning knife, stabbing it upwards into the air, stab, stab, stab, as if he were daring the brown-cloaked man to come any closer.
The brown-cloaked man feinted to the left and Jonat
han Shooks caught his sleeve with the point of the knife. The brown-cloaked man tried to snatch at his wrist, but Jonathan Shooks was too quick for him and stabbed him in the back of his right hand. Blood flew in a red fan pattern across the floor, but the brown-cloaked man was undeterred and tried to grab the knife again.
Jonathan Shooks swept the knife from side to side, cutting at the brown-cloaked man’s fingers again and again, and when at last the brown-cloaked man took a step back, holding up both of his bloodied hands, Jonathan Shooks lunged forward with a hog-like grunt and stabbed him in the side. The blade must have lodged between his ribs, because at first Jonathan Shooks couldn’t pull it out.
As Jonathan Shooks tried to tug the boning knife out of him, the brown-cloaked man seized his moment and grasped his wrist with both hands. Grunting and struggling together, they pulled out the knife, but now the brown-cloaked man twisted Jonathan Shooks’s wrist backwards and upwards and forced him to stab himself twice in the side of his neck. Blood abruptly sprayed over both of them, and as they wrestled and danced around the kitchen they began to look like life-size marionettes with their faces varnished scarlet.
Jonathan Shooks swayed violently from side to side, trying to break the brown-cloaked man’s grip on his wrist, but the brown-cloaked man was taller and bigger and younger. He forced Jonathan Shooks to stab himself in the face again and again. The boning knife sliced his right cheek open, and then cut his upper lip apart so that it looked like a harelip, and then stuck right up his nostril.
Both men were grunting, but neither of them spoke. Beatrice climbed unsteadily to her feet. She could still hear Noah crying, but the two men were lurching from side to side in front of the kitchen doorway and she couldn’t get past them. They crashed together into the hutch, so that half a dozen china plates fell to the floor and smashed. Then they stumbled into the stack of copper saucepans beside the stove, with a clatter like the bells of hell. All the time droplets of blood were flying in all directions, and the kitchen floor was becoming dahlia-patterned with bloody footprints.
Scarlet Widow Page 33
