The Coven

by Graham Masterton

  ‘I heard children singing when I arrived,’ said Beatrice.

  ‘Yes! We have expanded the meeting house so much in the past eighteen months... well, almost as much as I have expanded, myself. But now we have a school here for some sixty-odd ragged children, with two masters. We also have an apothecary for the distribution of medicines to the poor, gratis, as well as a surgeon who visits from St Bart’s twice a week to conduct minor operations such as lancing boils or amputating gangrenous toes. We are thinking, too, of building and opening an almshouse.’

  ‘You are doing excellent work, Reverend,’ said Beatrice, tiredly. All she wanted now was to change her clothes and bathe and retire to bed for the rest of the day, although she knew that she would have to find somebody to take care of Florence while she slept. Florence didn’t seem to be tired at all, but then she had slept until it had been time for a lighter to row them upstream from Deptford, and ashore.

  A long-case clock in the hall chimed one, and almost as soon as it did so, the door opened and a woman bustled in like the female figure popping out of a weather house.

  She had a dead-white face, except for two crimson spots on her cheeks, and she was wearing a curly reddish wig with two long ringlets, and a slate-grey bonnet which matched her slate-grey dress. Plain as it was, this dress, it was widened so much by the panniers on her hips underneath it that it brushed against the door frame on either side.

  She was in her mid-thirties, Beatrice guessed, although it was difficult to judge her age exactly because of the masklike whiteness of her face. This had been achieved by the application of a thick lead-based paste, and the two rosy circles on her cheeks had been dabbed on with vermilion. Her lips were a little bee-stung pout, although she had painted them only the faintest pink with beeswax and carmine. She hadn’t wanted to look like an actress, or a prostitute.

  Beatrice was conscious that her own face was unfashionably suntanned from tending the vegetable garden at the parsonage, which made her look like a working woman. But she knew that when lead was absorbed through the skin over a period of time, it could be lethal, and that many fashionable young women had died from using it regularly to make up their faces. Vermilion was even more toxic: it was made from cinnabar, which was sulphide of quicksilver.

  She would say nothing, though. It was so fashionable for women to make up their faces like this, and who was she to tell them that they shouldn’t? Some women even spread white lead paste on their cleavage and painted blue veins on their breasts to make themselves appear to be even more anaemic than they actually were. And for all Beatrice knew, this woman had unsightly smallpox scars on her cheeks which she needed to cover up, and she didn’t want to embarrass her.

  As her father had always said as he mixed up his medicines in the outbuilding at the back of his shop, ‘The most virulent poison of all, Beatrice, is vanity. Most of us would sooner be dead than ugly.’

  The Reverend Parsons stood up and held out his hand to the woman in greeting. ‘Ida! You are looking a picture as always! Let me introduce you to Beatrice Scarlet, who will be assisting you at St Mary Magdalene’s. And of course to young Miss Scarlet here.

  ‘Beatrice, this is Ida Smollett, who has transformed our home for refractory young women beyond all of our expectations. I trust the two of you will be the very best of friends and companions.’

  Ida nodded her bonnet and puckered her lips into a smile. In spite of her appearance, she spoke with considerable fluency and warmth, as if she were used to addressing an audience.

  ‘It is such a pleasure, Beatrice, if I may be so familiar. Our work at the home has become almost overwhelming, and with winter approaching I will be sorely in need of assistance.’

  ‘Let me arrange for us to take some tea,’ said the Reverend Parsons, and left the drawing room while Beatrice and Ida sat side by side in the upright wooden chairs.

  ‘How many young women do you currently care for?’ asked Beatrice. Sitting so close to Ida, she could smell her perfume, a musky amber toilet water, but she could also smell cinnamon, which was commonly used to sweeten bad breath. Among other side effects, such as blackening the skin, white lead rotted the gums and attacked the enamel of the teeth.

  ‘Presently we have thirty-six,’ said Ida. ‘They are mostly girls who have become estranged from their families, for one reason or another. Either their parents were so destitute that they couldn’t afford to feed them or clothe them, or else they were too sick to care for anybody except themselves, or they were drunk – or in many cases, deceased. I don’t know if any intelligence of it reached you in the colonies, but there was a mortally bad plague of consumption here in London last winter, and hundreds died. So many bodies were stacked up in coffins in the Quaker cemetery that they toppled over into the next-door brickyard.

  ‘Some of our girls managed to survive by thieving, or by begging, but the majority kept themselves alive by prostitution. I expect you have seen them yourself, some of them as young as twelve or thirteen, loitering around outside the theatres after the end of each evening’s performance, trying to catch the eye of some dissolute fellow with five shillings in his pocket.’

  ‘So how do you lift them out of that life?’ Beatrice asked her.

  ‘We shelter them, we feed them, we teach them simple arithmetic and to read and write. We give them moral education, too, and catechism classes. After that, with the generous help of several benevolent businessmen and factory owners who are members of our church, we find them gainful employ.’

  ‘It all sounds most gratifying,’ said Beatrice. ‘I believe I shall be honoured to assist you.’

  ‘I will not pretend for a moment that it is easy,’ Ida told her. ‘Some of these girls are veritable savages when we first take them in. They are used to drinking gin and smoking and their everyday language would make Satan shrivel. They have been used by men ever since they can remember, sometimes by their own fathers and brothers, so they think nothing of virtue or virginity. In some cases, their own mothers have sold their maidenheads to the highest bidder to make ends meet.’

  ‘But surely they must be grateful that you have saved them.’

  Ida shrugged. ‘A fair number learn to be thankful, I’ll grant you. But some regard us as pious busybodies and cannot wait to return to their life on the streets. They relish the flattery they are given by licentious men, and the money. They enjoy the orgies, and the drink. They have never been used to discipline or decorum, and they cannot understand that they are not only destroying themselves here on Earth but abnegating any chance they might have had of going to heaven.’

  ‘So what do you do about them?’

  Ida reached across and laid a claw-like hand on Beatrice’s knee. She was wearing three gold rings – one with turquoise, one with garnet and one with amethyst. Close up, Beatrice could smell how foetid her breath was, in spite of the cinnamon. But that was nothing exceptional – some of her very dearest friends in Sutton had decaying and missing teeth, and Major General Holyoke had been fitted with wooden dentures, which he would take out from time to time and wipe on his cravat.

  ‘This is where I shall be relying on you, my dear Beatrice,’ said Ida. ‘You are younger than me, and I am counting on you to build a rapport with our most difficult girls, and show them that that modesty and abstinence are their own rewards. I am sure that you can do it!’

  She stared at Beatrice intently, and gripped her knee tight – so tight that she felt as if a hawk had settled on it. Beatrice looked back into her eyes and saw how puffy and inflamed they were. She remembered all those ailing customers who had come in to her father’s shop riddled with mercury poisoning, and she reckoned that Ida would probably be dead in three years, if not sooner.

  The Reverend Parsons returned, and soon afterwards the girl with the scrubbed-looking face brought in a tea tray, with a glass of milk for Florence. While Beatrice and Ida and the Reverend Parsons talked further about St Mary Magdalene’s, little Florence dipped her fingers into her milk so that
the cat could lick it off.

  Beatrice looked down at her and smiled sadly and thought, Yes – if I can give even one wretched girl a life of purity and love such as Florence will enjoy, then I will.

  8

  After they had finished their tea, the Reverend Parsons guided Beatrice around the Foundery so that she could visit the apothecary and the children’s classroom.

  The apothecary was a long, gloomy room with a high, tiny window and shelves that were crowded with green, brown and clear glass bottles, as well as mahogany boxes of powders and pipes of pills. At the far end stood an oak bench where a young, balding man with spectacles and a very large nose was stirring a sticky mixture in a china bowl.

  ‘Godfrey!’ said the Reverend Parsons. ‘Allow me to introduce you to Widow Scarlet, who has come to assist Mistress Smollett at St Mary Magdalene’s. Beatrice, this is Godfrey Minchin, our resident apothecary, who will be happy to provide you with any medicines or salves that you require.’

  Godfrey bowed his head in greeting, and wiped his nose with the back of his cuff.

  ‘Welcome to the Foundery, Widow Scarlet. You are the daughter of the late and very lamented Clement Bannister, are you not? While I was studying, I found several of his papers on the pox to be of great assistance, not leastly those preparations on corrosive sublimate.’

  By corrosive sublimate, Godfrey meant mercuric chloride. Mercury had commonly been used to treat venereal disease for many years but its side effects had been almost as destructive as the disease itself, so Beatrice’s father had reduced its potency and combined it with chlorine.

  ‘My father was a wonderful apothecary, and most inventive,’ said Beatrice. ‘What are you mixing there, may I ask?’

  ‘Sacred bitters, Widow Scarlet, or hiera picra to give them their proper name. I am preparing it for the warden, Mr Jewkes, who has been suffering lately from all manner of ill humours – in particular, gripes of the stomach and blockage of the bowels.’

  ‘Ah, yes... aloes and canella bark. And honey?’

  ‘I’m impressed, Widow Scarlet.’

  ‘I spent many hours in my father’s laboratory when I was a girl, Mr Minchin. And I remember when he devised his new treatment for the pox, calomel and corrosive sublimate. He heated the sublimate and almost blew both of us up to kingdom come. My apron was torn to tatters and we had to replace the window glass.’

  ‘Well, it is still the best treatment for syphilis,’ said the Reverend Parsons. ‘You know what they say... one night with Venus and the rest of your life with Mercury.’

  Next, they went across the brick-paved yard to the schoolroom. This was high-ceilinged and airy, with tall windows overlooking the lime trees and lawns of Moorfields. About fifty children of varying ages were sitting at six rows of long tables, each with a slate and some broken sticks of chalk. They were laboriously copying a list of words that had been written on the large blackboard that stood on an easel in the corner of the classroom: cough, plough, rough, though, brought.

  Their teacher was standing at the blackboard with his back to the door as the Reverend Parsons ushered Beatrice inside. She could see that he was tall and slim and straight-backed, with wavy dark-brown hair flowing over his collar. He was wearing a moth-eaten rust-coloured frock coat with a thick green velvet collar, which looked a little moth-eaten too.

  ‘James!’ exclaimed the Reverend Parsons, and the teacher turned around. Beatrice didn’t know what she was expecting a teacher of ragged children to look like – pale and bespectacled and spotty, perhaps, like Godfrey the apothecary. But this young man was remarkably handsome. In some ways she reminded her of Francis, but if anything he was better-looking, with a strong, squarish face, and a short, straight nose, and large, compelling blue eyes.

  He tossed his stick of chalk onto his desk, smacked his hands together to get rid of the chalk-dust and came up to Beatrice with an expression on his face that she could only think of as mischievous.

  ‘Reverend Parsons,’ he said. ‘And who is this you have brought to visit to me this morning? Whoever you are, madam, it is the greatest honour.’

  With that, he bent his arm across his long green waistcoat, and bowed. Beatrice couldn’t help blushing.

  ‘Beatrice, this is one of our two teachers, Mr James Treadgold,’ said the Reverend Parsons. ‘James, may I present Beatrice Scarlet, widow of the late Reverend Francis Scarlet, returned only this very morning from America.’

  ‘I heard about the sad demise of your late husband, Widow Scarlet,’ said James. ‘It has been some time since his passing, I know, but may I offer you my belated condolences.’ All the time his eyes were focused intently on hers, as if he could see a shadow-show behind them of what she was thinking.

  ‘You’re very kind,’ said Beatrice. She didn’t mention that she had also lost Noah. Since setting sail for England she had been trying hard not to think about either Francis or Noah, because it always tightened her throat and brought her so close to tears. She had found that the most effective way of coping with their loss was by concentrating her mind on Florence’s welfare, and what the future years might bring them.

  ‘James is the youngest son of Sir Walter Treadgold, who in our early days was one of our most generous benefactors,’ said the Reverend Parsons. ‘Regrettably, Sir Walter’s business was a victim of the war with Spain, but he and his family have remained to this day some of our staunchest supporters. What they can no longer give us in gold they give us in service.’

  ‘I teach the children writing and grammar, and my colleague Timothy French comes on alternate days to teach them their sums,’ James explained.

  ‘If these children are ever to overcome the dragon of misfortune, then their two sharpest swords will be words and numbers,’ put in the Reverend Parsons. ‘Their breastplates, of course, will be a thorough acquaintance with the scriptures.’

  James continued to stare at Beatrice with such concentration that she was beginning to feel quite light-headed. She thought that he was extremely attractive, yet she wondered if he were staring at her because he felt the same about her, or if he was simply showing sympathy for her.

  One of the older boys at the back of the classroom put up his hand and said, ‘Do you say it “cow”, sir, or “cog”?’

  James kept his eyes on Beatrice and raised his hand to indicate that he would answer the boy in a moment.

  ‘You must be overwhelmingly weary, Widow Scarlet,’ he said. ‘However, perhaps when you have rested, we could meet, and you could tell me all about your experiences in America. I have long considered going there myself and I would be fascinated to hear what you made of it.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Beatrice. ‘I have to caution you, though, that not all of my experiences were happy, and there were times when they were fearful. It is still a savage land with many unexpected dangers, not the least of which are some of the colonists themselves.’

  James said, ‘I can’t wait to hear all about it! I’ll take you to the Three Cranes in the Vintry, if you have never eaten there before. They serve a delicious roasted dotterel, and excellent wines.’

  Beatrice smiled. ‘You’ve reminded me, James, that I’m hungry as well as tired. I’d better collect my daughter and allow Mrs Smollett to take us to St Mary Magdalene’s. It’s been a pleasure to make your acquaintance.’

  James bowed again. ‘The pleasure was all mine, Mrs Scarlet. Rest well.’

  *

  The Reverend Parsons took Beatrice back to the drawing room, where Ida Smollett and Florence were waiting for them. Ida was teaching Florence to sing ‘London Bridge Is Falling Down’ and clapping hands with her.

  ‘If you are not too tired, we can make our way on foot to Maidenhead Court,’ said Ida. ‘It is only five minutes away.’

  ‘The minute our factotum, Henry, returns from running an errand to Cheapside I will have him wheel around your trunks on his barrow,’ said the Reverend Parsons.

  ‘We have more items of luggage to be delivered here when the sh
ip is fully unloaded,’ Beatrice told him. ‘Perhaps he could be kind enough to bring that, too, when it arrives.’

  The Reverend Parsons laid his hand on her shoulder and said, ‘I know what pain you have suffered, Beatrice, and that you continue to suffer, and may never completely overcome. May the Lord God give you solace and peace of mind and reward you in the fullness of time for your faith and your endurance. But do not grieve too bitterly for your Francis. He drew his prize early, and you should wish him joy.’

  Beatrice was unable to reply. She simply nodded, with tears in her eyes.

  *

  They made their way across the rutted City Road and past the Bunhill burial grounds. They could see a wagon with a plain coffin on it, although there were no mourners around it. The only people in sight were two gravediggers, one of whom was digging in a desultory fashion while the other was leaning on his spade and smoking a pipe.

  Next they crossed Bunhill Row into Blue Anchor Alley. The houses and workshops that lined both sides of the alley were rickety old wooden buildings that had survived the Great Fire, and their tilting upper stories overhung the alley so far that their eaves almost touched. They shielded the alley from the wind, so that it was not only gloomy along here, and reeking of sewage, but eerily silent.

  They had nearly reached the end of the alley when Beatrice heard the quick patter of footsteps behind her. She turned around and saw that three rough-looking men were running towards them – one in a cocked hat, another in a ratty-looking wig, and the third with a blue-shaven head. The one with the blue-shaven head was carrying a knife, almost as long as a sword, while the one in the cocked hat was swinging a cudgel.