The Coven

by Graham Masterton

  Eliza coughed and looked up at her. ‘What if I don’t want to?’

  ‘Then, yes, I’ll hand you in, because you’re a thief. But think about it, Eliza. If you come back with me now, you’ll be given a hot meal, and clean clothes, and a bed of your own to sleep in. You won’t be in danger of catching the pox any longer, or some other horrible sickness like the King’s Evil. You won’t find yourself with child, so that you risk an abortion. As it is, you don’t sound at all well, and I could give you some physic for that.’

  ‘What will my aunt think, if I don’t come back, and she never sees me again?’

  ‘We can get word to her and tell her where you are, and she can come and visit you if she wishes. But listen to me, Eliza – this is an opportunity you may never be given again, ever. Even if the court doesn’t find you guilty, what will you do? Go back to selling your body, until you’re too old and too ugly, or dead of syphilis? Have you seen women with syphilis, all covered in blisters, with their noses all fallen in? Or will you go back to your thieving, with the strongest chance that you’ll be caught again, and hung?’

  Eliza’s eyes filled up with tears, which ran down her dirty cheeks and dripped off her chin. She didn’t sob, but she coughed again, and had to wipe the phlegm from her lips with the back of her hand.

  Beatrice said, ‘Come on, Eliza, what’s it to be?’ as sternly as she could, although she knew that she wouldn’t really hand her to a constable, or give evidence against her in court. If she absolutely refused to come to St Mary Magdalene’s with her, she would simply let her go. In Beatrice’s eyes, the life of prostitution and pickpocketing that she was leading was punishment enough. She would probably be dead in two or three years from venereal disease or scrofula or puerperal fever.

  Eliza looked around. An elderly woman in a stringy grey shawl appeared around the corner of the alley, her back stooped, one eye covered with a black eyepatch. She stared at them both as she shuffled past, and for no reason at all said, ‘Hah!’

  Perhaps Eliza saw that as a warning of how she might look in the future, because she said, ‘All right, then. I’ll come. Is it far?’

  ‘In distance? Not even ten minutes. But from this life – it’s about as far away as you could imagine.’

  Beatrice released her hold on Eliza’s skinny wrist and started to walk back towards Shoemaker Row. Eliza could have run away, but after a moment’s hesitation she followed her.

  23

  Ida welcomed Eliza as warmly as she welcomed all her ‘stray lambs’, as she called them. Eliza’s frock was torn and stained, her cheeks were smudged with street dirt and her nose was running, but Ida hugged her like a long-lost daughter.

  ‘You must think of this house as your new home, my dear, and everybody in it as your friends!’

  Eliza looked over Ida’s shoulder at Beatrice, slightly bewildered, but Beatrice gave her a reassuring smile.

  ‘She’s very hungry, and she’s thirsty, too,’ she told Ida. ‘Before we do anything else, let’s give her something to eat.’

  She led her through to the kitchen where Katharine and three other girls were making mutton pies and a celery ragout. Martha the cook was there, too, stirring up a saucepan of lentil soup with carrots and parsnips and ham. Beatrice sat Eliza down at the table and Katharine brought her a bowl of soup and the crusty end of a fresh-baked loaf.

  ‘All my nits have gone now, Beatrice!’ said Katharine, cheerfully. She peered closely at Eliza and said, ‘You’ve got ’em, though, ain’t you, love? Nits! But don’t you worry, Beatrice ’ere will soon get rid of ’em for you!’

  It was then that Eliza covered her face with her hands and started to sob. She cried so sadly that she could hardly breathe, and every sob ended in a bout of coughing. Beatrice put her arm around her shoulders and shushed her.

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I know. Sometimes it’s hard to understand that strangers can want to take care of you. But that’s what the Bible tells us to do, and that’s what this refuge is for.’

  Eliza managed to stop sobbing. She wiped her nose on her sleeve, and looked up at Beatrice with her eyelashes stuck together with tears.

  At that moment, Florence came into the kitchen carrying her doll, Minnie, with No-noh trotting close behind her.

  ‘Why is that girl crying?’ she said.

  ‘That’s Eliza,’ said Beatrice. ‘She’s come to stay here, and she’s crying because she’s happy.’

  Florence dragged out the chair next to Eliza and climbed up to sit on it. ‘Hallo, Eliza. This is Minnie and this is my doggy. His name’s No-noh like my brother who got lost.’

  ‘Your brother got lost?’

  Florence nodded, with a serious expression on her face. ‘The Indians took him away.’

  Beatrice laid her hand on Eliza’s shoulder again. ‘Just eat your soup,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell you all about it later.’

  Eliza picked up her spoon and looked at her upside-down reflection in it. ‘I think I was lost, too,’ she said. ‘’Ow the fuck did you manage to find me?’

  *

  After Eliza had scraped up the last spoonful of soup and wolfed down her bread, Grace took her upstairs to change her clothes and wash. To begin with, she would be given the small bedroom at the back where Judith had been quarantined – at least until Beatrice had deloused her and cleared her lungs and made sure that she had no venereal disease or tapeworms.

  Before she followed them upstairs, Beatrice went through to the atelier, where Ida was supervising a millinery class, teaching the girls to weave straw-work flowers into the brims and crowns of wide summer hats.

  ‘You don’t mind that I brought young Eliza back with me?’ Beatrice asked her.

  ‘Not at all, my dear. It is our divine mission to rescue young girls like her. Where did you find her?’

  ‘In an alleyway off Shoemaker Row. I caught her giving herself to some drunken old fellow who should have known better.’

  Beatrice decided not to mention the two rascals who had robbed the man in the olive-green tailcoat. There was no need for Ida to know that Eliza was a thief as well as a prostitute, and she would only have to explain how she had managed to chase them away.

  As it was, Ida said, ‘Shoemaker Row? I thought you were going to Covent Garden.’

  ‘Oh, I did, but Collin’s didn’t have the oils and the powders I needed, so I tried Culpeper’s in Aldgate.’

  Beatrice could feel herself blushing. She had never lied so blatantly in her life, to anyone. Yet how could she now tell Ida that she had lied to her to begin with, and had gone out to buy herself a pistol?

  But Ida appeared to accept this explanation, because she smiled and said, ‘For Eliza’s sake, it is just as well that you did. Sometimes we are led in unexpected directions, but I do believe that when this happens, the Lord is guiding our footsteps to carry out his own benevolent purpose.’

  She turned to one of the girls in the class and said, ‘No, no, Josephine, dear – under and then over and then tie it into a knot.’

  ‘I must attend to Eliza now,’ said Beatrice. ‘She has a very troublesome cough and I don’t want it to get any worse.’

  Ida said, ‘By the bye, Mr Hazzard has sent word that he will be visiting us again tomorrow, and the Reverend Parsons, too. I trust that you have accepted that it really was Satan who gave our girls the wherewithal to escape, and that George knew nothing of it until they had gone.’

  ‘It’s one possibility, I grant you,’ said Beatrice. ‘But I am still inclined to believe that their disappearance was contrived by man, rather than Satan.’

  ‘In spite of the man with the looking-glass face, and the demon that clawed at your door?’

  ‘I’m simply reserving judgment, Ida, until I have more evidence.’

  ‘But what evidence could you possibly hope to find?’

  ‘I have no idea yet, but in my experience even the cleverest tricksters usually make mistakes. If that trickster turns out to be Satan, then yes, I’ll accept that it
was him. But I am a long way from coming to that conclusion just yet.’

  Ida laid her hand on Beatrice’s arm. ‘Please say nothing about your misgivings to George, will you? He is the most generous of men but he doesn’t take kindly to being doubted. We depend almost entirely on his benevolence to keep St Mary Magdalene’s open.’

  ‘I promise, Ida. Now, I really must go and see to Eliza. I don’t want her coming down with the phthisis.’

  *

  Eliza kept coughing until well after midnight. Beatrice had given her three spoonsful of her own cold remedy, which was a mixture of red roses, balsam of sulphur, oil of vitriol and syrup of coltsfoot. It loosened the phlegm in her lungs a little, but eventually Beatrice dosed her with a tincture of opium so that both of them could get some sleep.

  It was nearly eight o’clock before Beatrice woke up. It was a dark and gloomy morning, so dark that if Florence hadn’t left the bed she could have believed it was still night-time. Florence had probably gone downstairs to give No-noh his breakfast. She had become so fond of him that Minnie had almost been forgotten.

  Beatrice climbed out of bed herself and quickly dressed in her favourite Prussian-blue gown. She had so many chores to do today. Her period had almost finished, but her pads had been soaking in cold water in the scullery and she needed to boil them.

  Ida had told her that the periods of nearly all the girls in the house had synchronised now, and she wondered if she would soon be joining them.

  ‘Starting with the new moon, we always have a few days of weeping and argument and disorder,’ Ida had told her. ‘I call it the “fretful moon”.’

  As she closed the deeply scratched sitting-room door behind her, Beatrice heard the clattering of a carriage outside. She went along the landing to the window that overlooked Maidenhead Court, and saw a young lad climbing down from a two-horse calash. Once he was down, the driver handed him a large brown hatbox. The young lad came up the steps of the house and Beatrice heard him knocking at the front door.

  At first she thought that Ida must be having a new hat delivered, but then spots of rain started to fall, and the calash driver took off his black wide-brimmed hat to look up at the sky. Beatrice recognized him at once as the leathery-faced man from George Hazzard’s tobacco factory, the one who had first led her through the factory to his office, and had offered Florence a puff of his pipe.

  She went across to the banisters and looked down to the hallway below. She could hear Ida and the young lad talking, although she couldn’t make out what they were saying. Then the front door closed, and when she went back to the window she saw the young lad climbing back into the calash. The leathery-faced man flicked his whip and the calash drove off.

  Beatrice thought: Well, that’s strange – or perhaps it isn’t. Perhaps George Hazzard has made Ida the gift of a hat, or perhaps one of the girls has a birthday coming, and he has arranged for her to be given a hat as a present. That didn’t seem likely, though, because the girls had been learning millinery for over a week now, and they were all busy making their own hats.

  She went in to see if Eliza was any better. She was still sleeping, but her cheeks were rosy pink and although she was breathing through her mouth she sounded much less clogged up than she had yesterday. Beatrice quietly closed her bedroom door and went downstairs.

  She found Ida in the kitchen, talking to Martha, but there was no sign of the hatbox. Florence was kneeling on a chair at the kitchen table, still in her nightdress, spooning up a bowl of gruel with a lump of melted butter in it. No-noh the pug was sitting on the chair next to her, occasionally licking his lips as if he had just eaten.

  ‘Good morning, Beatrice,’ Ida smiled. ‘How is our new stray lamb this morning?’

  ‘I gave her opium last night and she’s still fast asleep. But her lungs sound much clearer, and I’m sure that having a good supper and a warm bed will have worked wonders.’

  ‘For that young girl, Beatrice, the real wonder was being rescued by you. I must tell George this afternoon what you did. He’s coming here about two o’clock, and Martha is going to lay on a splendid lunch for him and the Reverend Parsons. We’ll be having oyster soup and sweetbreads and stuffed cabbage and partridge and roasted pork – complete with the pig’s head with its ears baked crisp! Then jellies and meringues for dessert.’

  ‘That all sounds delicious, Martha,’ said Beatrice.

  ‘Doesn’t it just?’ said Ida. ‘And after we’ve eaten, the girls will entertain us with songs. Not all sacred, mind you – “Country Gardens” and “The Raggle-Taggle Gypsies” and “Fare Thee Well”. For their finale, though, they’ll be singing John Wesley’s new hymn, “Come Thou, Almighty King”. You haven’t heard it yet, have you? It’s so stirring it brings tears to the eyes.’

  Beatrice wondered if she ought to ask about the hatbox, but she decided not to. Ida had been nothing but supportive, almost motherly, but after her experiences in New Hampshire, Beatrice had learned to be wary of any incidence of ill-fortune that was claimed to be the work of Satan, whether it be cattle disease or bouts of madness or babies struck dead in their cribs.

  If Ida believed that the looking-glass man and the beast at her door really had been the Devil, or one of his emissaries, then let her believe it. But Beatrice was still highly suspicious about both visitations, and until she knew for certain who was behind them, she was beginning to think that she and Florence might be safer if she kept her thoughts to herself.

  Ida clapped her hands. ‘Now, girls, we have much to do this morning!’ she announced. ‘The floors need sweeping and all the chamber pots need to be thoroughly washed out. We want the house to smell sweet for Mr Hazzard now, don’t we?’

  24

  The Reverend Parsons arrived first. He was in a jolly mood, his cheeks flushed, breathing out the small beer that he had drunk for breakfast and the pipe that he had smoked soon afterwards. He embraced Ida and nodded to Beatrice and then let out a squeaky fart.

  ‘I so much enjoy my visits here, Ida! It is so heart-warming to see the charitable aspirations that we have put into practice, and all these young girls saved from a life of turpitude!’

  ‘Having Beatrice join me has been such a boon,’ said Ida. ‘Only yesterday she rescued some poor young girl from the streets and brought her here to find God.’

  ‘I trust the Devil has now left you in peace, Beatrice,’ smiled the Reverend Parsons, as he eased himself into an armchair. ‘There are times when we have to leave the administration of justice to the Lord, and I believe this is one of those occasions. I have prayed for those seven young witches, that they will see the error of their ways, and repent, and seek to return to Christ’s bosom. I expect that you have, too. Apart from that, there is little else that we can do.’

  Beatrice said nothing, but nodded, and gave him the ghost of a smile.

  Ida said, ‘Would you care for some cider, Reverend Parsons? Or a glass of spruce ale?’

  The Reverend Parsons didn’t answer at first, but continued to stare at Beatrice, as if he were still expecting some response – some word that she agreed with him, and that the girls had been possessed by Satan.

  ‘Or a lemon cordial?’ Ida persisted. ‘Or a posset, with honey and wine?’

  Still without taking his eyes off Beatrice, the Reverend Parsons said, ‘A posset sounds tempting, Ida. It will help to clear my head.’

  ‘Let me fetch it,’ said Beatrice, and stood up. She was beginning to feel more and more that she had been cast without her knowledge in some mysterious religious play – a play in which everybody knew their lines except her.

  *

  Four tables had been arranged end-to-end in the atelier and laid with a long white linen cloth, and places had been set for sixteen. The Reverend Parsons sat at the head of the table with Beatrice on his left while Ida sat at the opposite end with George on her right. The remaining places were taken by the girls who had been resident at St Mary Magdalene’s the longest. None of them was pretty, which was pro
bably why George hadn’t picked them for his tobacco factory; but they could be counted on to make at least some attempt at polite conversation, and not to swear or take the name of the Lord in vain. They were all dressed in their best and had sprinkled themselves with rose water and rouged their cheeks, and they chattered and giggled as soon as they had sat down. All the other girls would be fed later, in the kitchen.

  Because the afternoon was so dark, two three-branched candelabra had been set on the table, as well as the centrepiece, which was a crystal vase crowded with pink and yellow alstroemeria. Raindrops pattered against the window, and every now and then from over the river they heard the distant grumbling of thunder, as if Southwark were at war.

  Beatrice couldn’t help noticing that George was oddly distracted, and that Ida had to keep patting his arm to keep his attention. When he did speak, it wasn’t in his usual rich, measured tones, but in a series of abbreviated blurts, and he kept turning his head around and looking towards the door, as if he were worried that the Devil himself might walk in.

  The Reverend Parsons went into a long self-congratulatory discourse about the charitable work that the Foundery had been doing since Francis and Beatrice had left for America; and in return Beatrice told him about the hardships of life in New Hampshire, creating her vegetable garden out of a wilderness, and rearing her own pigs.

  ‘But we never felt that God had abandoned us there,’ she told him. ‘In fact, we felt that he was closer than ever, watching over us, and doing everything he could to give us strength.’

  ‘I can only offer you my condolences again about the loss of your little son,’ said the Reverend Parsons. He paused, and belched softly into his fist. ‘It only goes to show that you can never trust a heathen. We have been planning to send missionaries to Africa, you know. Yes, Africa! If any continent is crying out for the light of the Lord, in every respect, it is Africa. Some of the natives believe that humans were created by a so-called god fashioning figurines out of mud, and breathing over them. I ask you! Others believe that their deities send them messages of life or death through the sound of the wind, or the cries of passing animals. It is going to take much dedicated work to convince them of the truth.’