The Coven

by Graham Masterton

  ‘There’s no profit in searching for him any further, not tonight,’ David Purbright put in. ‘We’ll return at first light, though, and we’ll bring a few dogs with us. Nigel Porter has two fine bloodhounds and if they can’t track your boy down...’

  He was about to add ‘...he’ll be lost and gone forever,’ but he closed his mouth instead, and gave Beatrice a sympathetic shrug.

  ‘Do you want to come into the village tonight and stay with us?’ asked Major General Holyoke.

  ‘Thank you for the offer, but no,’ said Beatrice. ‘What if Noah comes wandering back during the night and there’s nobody here?’

  ‘In that case, I recommend that you lock your doors and keep your windows closed tight. I would expect the Indians to have left the locality by now and taken their booty with them, but there is always a chance that some may still be lurking around. You have a musket? You have powder and shot?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Beatrice. When they had first arrived at the Sutton parsonage, Francis had bought a flintlock longrifle and taught Beatrice how to load and fire it. She had practised over and over again until she could tamp the gunpowder and ball into the muzzle and prime the pan within less than fifteen seconds. She could shoot accurately too. One October morning she had brought down a grouse from over thirty yards away, and they had eaten it for supper, with sweet potato soup.

  All the men left, and after she had heard their carriages and horses clatter away down the drive, she went upstairs to make sure that Florence was fast asleep. Usually she went to bed herself soon after Florence, because there was very little mending for her to do now that she was alone, and very little preparation in the kitchen. It saved on candles, too. This evening, though, she knew that she wouldn’t be able to sleep, and so she went back downstairs to the living room to write in her diary and to continue reading her novel, Pamela: Or Virtue Rewarded, which her friend, Sally Monckton, had brought her from England.

  Alone in the parsonage, though, except for her sleeping Florence, all she could write by the flickering light of her candle was I beg you, Lord, to shield Noah from any harm and to deliver him back to me unscathed. She looked at her leather-bound novel, but she couldn’t even begin to think of reading any more about the virginal Pamela and the way she conveniently swooned every time a lecherous man approached her, bent on seduction.

  Her grief had been almost overwhelming when Francis had been murdered, but she found it even more agonising to think of losing Noah. Francis had at least lived out some of his life, and loved her, and married her, and come to New England with a vision of bringing his Christianity with him. Before he had been killed, Francis had at least been aware that he was facing a challenge from men who were determined to do him harm. Noah was only five, and his only experience of life so far had been play, and singing songs, and he knew nothing whatsoever about evil.

  Beatrice sat there all through the night. She nodded off after two or three hours, but she jerked awake when the wind rose up again, and shook the kitchen door like some intruder trying to break in. She strained her ears and she could hear crying and whistling in the woods, but it was only the whippoorwills and the nighthawks. Just before dawn it started to thunder, and to rain again heavily, so that all she could hear was the water gushing out of the eavespouts.

  She went to the kitchen window and looked out over the yard. Her basket of laundry was still there, becoming more and more sodden, and there was Noah’s hobby horse lying on its side. Rain was drifting up from the river like a cortège of ghosts.

  She closed her eyes and said another prayer for Noah, but even as she did so, she accepted that she might never see him again, or ever discover what had happened to him.

  3

  Later that morning, Major General Holyoke brought his search party back to the parsonage, and they came with Nigel Porter’s bloodhounds, but even after they had sniffed Noah’s pudding cap they could find no scent of him outside. They circled around and around and sniffed at his hobby horse but then they came back, panting, with their tongues hanging out.

  ‘I regret that I am even more persuaded that he was kid-nabbed, because of that,’ said Major General Holyoke. ‘If he had strayed away on foot, he would have left a trail that the dogs could follow, even after all this rain. But if he was picked up, and carried away in the arms of some abductor, then of course there would be no trace at all.’

  ‘Is there not someone you know who has dealings with the Ossipee?’ asked Beatrice. ‘Some trapper or some trader? What about the militia? Do you not know any officer who could send out rangers? Perhaps they might be able to catch up with the Indians before they take Noah into Canada.’

  ‘I know of no trappers or traders who might have contact with them, I’m afraid, and as you are aware, all of the Abnaki tribes are hostile to a high degree. I know a militia officer with the First Battalion, Colonel Andrew Petty, but he and his men have more than their hands full keeping those damned perfidious French at bay, and in any event I doubt if I could even manage to get in touch with him.’

  There was a long silence between them. Then Major General Holyoke said, ‘We will search further and wider, Widow Scarlet, but I am afraid that we must accept that the worst has probably happened, and your Noah has been taken from you. Let us pray that his captors treat him well.’

  Florence appeared in the kitchen doorway, carrying her doll, Minnie. Beatrice had disliked Minnie from the moment that her former housemaid, Mary, had first given it to her, because of her madly staring eyes. She looked as if she had just escaped from a lunatic asylum.

  ‘Where’s No-noh?’ she asked, frowning. ‘I want to play.’

  *

  Three days went by. Several members of the search party rode further afield to see if they could find anybody who had witnessed a small white boy being taken away by Indians. Two farmers and a drover said that they had seen a small band of Ossipee Indians heading north up the Merrimack River valley, maybe fifteen or twenty of them, but they had been too distant for them to tell if they had Noah or any other white captives with them.

  Beatrice wrote a message to Jeremy and gave it to the post rider to take to Portsmouth, informing him that Noah had gone missing. Meanwhile, Major General Holyoke sent word to Colonel Petty, asking if his militiamen could keep an eye open for any sign of white women and children being abducted by Indians. He was aware how unlikely this was: the Indians only travelled at night, and very quickly, and by the most devious routes.

  At midday on the third day, Beatrice was sitting in the kitchen eating pease-and-ham soup with Florence when she heard a carriage outside, and then a knock at the door.

  It was Goody Harris again. The day was windy but sunny and she was wearing a light-blue cape and a matching bonnet. As before, John Meadows was waiting in his calash on the opposite side of the driveway.

  ‘I have heard that your little boy has still not been found,’ said Goody Harris. ‘I cannot imagine how concerned you must be.’

  ‘Come inside,’ said Beatrice. ‘Does John not want to come inside, too? He is more than welcome.’

  ‘He wants to let me speak to you in confidence, Widow Scarlet. He is feeling sufficiently guilty as it is.’

  Beatrice led Goody Harris through to the kitchen. Florence had been trying to feed both herself and Minnie with the thick green soup, and both of them had it smeared all around their faces.

  ‘Florrie, just look at you!’ said Beatrice, wiping her face with a damp muslin cloth. Then, ‘Sit down, Goody Harris, please. Can I offer you anything? Some tea, perhaps, or would you care for a bowl of soup? There’s plenty, and, as you can imagine, I have very little appetite myself.’

  ‘There’s no word of your boy at all?’

  Beatrice shook her head, and said, ‘None.’ She didn’t like to think how frightened and hungry and exhausted Noah might be. ‘But what help do you need?’

  ‘I am mortally ashamed to tell you this,’ said Goody Harris, lowering her eyes and twisting the ribbons of her emb
roidered purse around and around between her fingers. ‘Since the first day of July, John Meadows and I – well, we have been lovers.’

  ‘I see,’ said Beatrice. ‘I assume by “lovers” you mean that you have lain together.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Goody Harris, so quietly that Beatrice could hardly hear her, especially since Florence was rocking Minnie in her arms and singing to her at the top of her voice: ‘Hush-a-bye, baby, in the treetops.’

  Beatrice said, ‘Hush, Florrie, and please sing some other song.’ ‘Hush-A-Bye Baby’ had been inspired by the Indian custom of suspending a baby’s birch-bark cradle from the branch of a tree so that the wind would rock it to sleep. She couldn’t bear to think of little Noah trying to fall asleep in the open, in the chilly wind, surrounded by hostile Indians. As it was, he had always been afraid of the dark.

  ‘You’re not with child?’ she asked Goody Harris.

  ‘No. But John went to Boston on business last month, and when he returned he had a soreness and a slight yellow weeping. We thought little of it, but soon afterwards I too began to feel sore.’

  ‘Do you have other symptoms? I notice your eyes are quite red.’

  Goody Harris said, ‘Yes. I have a nagging pain in my stomach, which comes and goes. My privates are swollen, and I have a burning sensation whenever I relieve myself. I have sometimes left spots of blood on the sheets after we have lain together, and I have also been bleeding in between the usual time for my flowers.’

  ‘Emma,’ said Beatrice. Although she didn’t know Goody Harris well, it seemed ridiculous to address her formally when they were discussing such an intimate problem. ‘Do you have a discharge too?’

  ‘Yes, and it is most unpleasant. Yellowish, like John’s.’

  ‘Did you consider going to Doctor Merrydew?’

  ‘How can I? Doctor Merrydew would insist on knowing how I acquired my condition, and he is one of William’s closest friends. They play quadrille together twice a week.’

  ‘Have you been intimate with William since you began to feel sore? You realize that you could pass this on to him, and then he would be certain to find out about your relationship with John.’

  ‘William lost interest in the intimate side of our marriage over two years ago. We sleep in separate rooms and he relies on me only for running the household and book-keeping. He wanted children – a son, especially – and when we discovered that I was unable to conceive, I think that took away his sole motivation for having physical contact with me. He doesn’t even embrace me or kiss me these days. Can you blame me for seeking comfort with John?’

  Beatrice said, ‘I might be a pastor’s widow, Emma, but I am not a judge of others’ morality. However, I have to ask you if John has explained to you how he came by this disease.’

  Emma’s cheeks flushed, and she twiddled with her purse strings even more furiously, as if they were some kind of frustrating puzzle.

  ‘He admitted that while he was in Boston he had missed me greatly, and that one evening he had been thinking about our lovemaking and that had aroused him beyond endurance. He had been directed by one of his colleagues to a house run by a woman called Hannah Dilley, where men could lie with whores.

  ‘He said that immediately afterwards he had been filled with remorse, but his remorse had not been enough to cleanse him of the pox that the whore had infected him with.’

  ‘Well, it is best that you came to me,’ said Beatrice. ‘I have no idea how much Doctor Merrydew knows of sexual diseases, but I do know that he is still prescribing lunar caustic for your condition, which can stain your skin irrevocably and cause even greater sickness or even death. My late father was an apothecary in the City of London, and taught me everything he knew about diseases and their treatments, and of course he frequently had to prescribe medicines for the same disease that you and John are both suffering from. I am reasonably certain that you have gonorrhoea, Emma – commonly known as the clap.’

  ‘I suspected so,’ said Emma, without raising her eyes. ‘I prayed and prayed that it would cure itself but it has been growing progressively worse for both of us each day. Can you cure us?’

  Beatrice stood up and went across to the cupboard on the other side of the kitchen. Inside the cupboard were all the powders and pills and medicines that she had prepared herself to treat those villagers who came to her instead of Doctor Merrydew – either because they were too embarrassed about their complaints, like Goody Harris, or because they knew that Beatrice had all the very latest and most effective treatments. She took out a large brown-glass bottle with a cork stopper and set it down on the kitchen table.

  ‘Like Doctor Merrydew, most physicians will prescribe a metal for gonorrhoea – arsenic or antimony or bismuth. One physician we knew in London would suggest that a woman should sit on a commode and fumigate her private parts with cinnabar, mercury and sulphur, which would be placed on a hot iron plate underneath her.

  ‘But this treatment I came across when I met a ship’s doctor in Portsmouth. He had recently arrived from Brazil, and he had discovered it while he was treating some of the natives there. It’s a balsam taken from a tree called the copaiba and the natives use it to calm sores and skin inflammation and as a cough medicine. They also use it to ward off hexes, although I don’t think you will be requiring that particular attribute unless William finds out about your liaison with John.

  ‘This ship’s doctor tried applying the balsam to sailors who had contracted gonorrhoea after visiting whores in various ports, and he found it to be most efficacious, without the staining and other side effects of lunar caustic.’

  ‘Widow Scarlet, I can’t thank you enough,’ said Emma, and she was in tears. ‘What do I owe you?’

  ‘I wish I could let you have it for no money,’ Beatrice told her. ‘Unfortunately the church pays me only a meagre widow’s pension, which is why I have to supplement my income by preparing and selling my medicines. Two bits, though, will be more than enough.’

  Emma took a quarter dollar out of her purse and set it down next to the bottle. Then she stood up and held Beatrice close and whispered, ‘Thank you. God bless you,’ in her ear.

  Florence sang, ‘Ring-a-ring of roses! Ashes! Ashes! All fall down!’

  4

  Two days later, Jeremy arrived from Portsmouth. When he stepped down from the carriage, Beatrice could see at once that he had put on weight, and that his wavy brown hair was cut shorter. He looked pasty and tired and his long brown coat was covered in dust from the journey, but after he had taken off his cocked hat and brushed himself down, he held out his arms to her and gave her the saddest of smiles.

  Beatrice hugged him and pressed her cheek against his chest. It gave her a huge sense of relief that he had come to console her, and that she now had someone with whom she could share her grief. Ever since Noah had disappeared, she had only been able to sleep when she was so exhausted that she was almost delirious, and she had eaten hardly anything except for corn chowder and pumpkin bread.

  ‘How are you, Jeremy?’ she asked him.

  ‘Fair fagged out, to be truthful. The carriage lost a wheel at the nineteenth milestone and we had to wait for over three hours for it to be repaired. But I had to come, my dearest. It is just too terrible, what has happened to young Noah. You must be devastated.’

  Jeremy took off his coat and hat and they went inside. Beatrice called out to Florence, who was playing with Seraph in the back yard, throwing a wooden spoon for him to fetch. Florence came running in and Jeremy swept her up off her feet and kissed her.

  ‘My lovely Florrie! I’ve only been away for a month and how much you’ve grown!’

  ‘No-noh’s gone,’ said Florrie. ‘Mommy’s been crying and me too.’

  ‘Yes, Florrie. I know that. But don’t you worry. We’ll find him and bring him back to you, I promise you that.’

  When Florence had run back outside, Beatrice said, ‘You shouldn’t raise her hopes, Jeremy. Nor mine. Major General Holyoke sent men to search as f
ar north as White Mountain, and he has advised an officer in the militia that Noah might have been taken by Indians, so that his men can watch out for him. But if the Lord has kept him safe, and he has survived, I doubt if I will ever hold him in my arms again.’

  She started to cry, with deep painful sobs that made it hard for her to breathe. Jeremy held her close and kissed her forehead and said, ‘Bea, Beatrice. If I believed that I could possibly find him, I would go looking for Noah myself.’

  ‘I know you would, Jeremy. You have always taken such good care of us. But I really fear that it is hopeless. It would have almost been more bearable if he had fallen sick and died. Now I shall never know if he is alive or dead, or what kind of a man he has grown into, if he is still living.’

  *

  They spent the next few hours in the kitchen, while Beatrice mixed dough with wheat flour and corn mush and molasses to make two large loaves of bread, and then prepared a chicken pot pie with onions and carrots and celery. Jeremy sat at the table with a mug of hard cider and tried to keep her mind off Jonah by telling her all about the antics that he and his fellow clerks got up to after a day in the shipping office.

  ‘You must miss Mary,’ he said.

  ‘She still comes in to help me sometimes,’ said Beatrice. ‘But of course I can’t afford a maid these days. Still – we have only the two of us now, me and Florrie, so there is nothing like the washing and the cooking that there used to be. Francis was always so particular about having clean stockings every day, and he did love his chowder.’

  Jeremy got up to stoke the cast-iron Franklin stove with more wood. When he sat down again, he said, ‘I missed you a very great deal in Portsmouth, Bea. I am enjoying the work, without question, but I think of you constantly.’

  ‘I miss you too, Jeremy. I have many good friends here in Sutton, but it can be lonely, especially at night. Florrie is adorable, but it would be enjoyable to spend an evening talking about something more grown-up than dollies and doggies and when are we going to bake some more snickerdoodles.’