Familiar Spirits

by Leonard Tourney

  jurymen. Let your answers be ‘yea’ or ‘nay.’ Nothing more. Do you understand?”

  Jane said she understood. She said she was weary of standing and asked if she might sit upon the stool her sister had used. The stool was brought forward and Jane sat down.

  “Tell us plainly, Mrs. Crispin,” Malvern said. “Were you aware of what transpired in your sister’s barn?”

  “By hearsay, sir, not by direct knowledge.”

  “Yes or no, Mrs. Crispin?”

  “If I must answer categorically as you require, then I am forced to say no.”

  “No? Forced? Why? Because you don’t want to incriminate yourself?”

  “I know that which I have seen, smelled, tasted, touched, heard. Someone told me my servant was practicing witchcraft in my sister’s barn. That’s not knowledge, sir.”

  “Oh, very well, Mrs. Crispin,” Malvern said with exasperation. “Tell us what you heard, then.”

  “I heard many things, but I hear many things about this person and that in our town. Not all are true, and certain it is that none ought to be believed without certain proof. It is certain proof you are interested in, isn’t it?”

  The magistrate reminded Jane that she was present to answer questions, not to put them to the prosecutor. Malvern was now dripping with sweat. The courtroom was stuffy and stale. The jury looked tired, and Malvern was in a rage.

  “Were you aware,” continued Malvern, “that your sister sought a familiar spirit of this Ursula Tusser, your servant?” “I know not if there be such things as familiars,” Jane replied calmly. “It is true that the Bible speaks of them, yet I have been forbidden to speak of that book and therefore will leave the text to the learned. Perhaps familiars are beings that belong to the old dispensation of Moses and the Prophets and are done away in Christ, such as they say miracles and the speaking in tongues are. In any event, they are not within the scope of my knowledge or experience.”

  “Well, then, Mistress Theologian,” returned Malvern, “are familiars within the scope of your sister's knowledge?”

  “For that, sir,” Jane answered, “you are well advised to ask my sister, for the question pertains to her and not to me.”

  Someone laughed in the back of the room and Malvern swiveled around to see who it was. Red-faced with fury, he turned back to his witness. “Enough of this foolish talk, woman. Will you confess? Will you confess before God and man that you are a witch? Confess and save your soul from damnation! No one here is deceived by your clever tongue, for with such a tongue Adam was tempted to sin and thus the whole race of mankind fell.”

  “I am responsible for my sins, sir,” said Jane. “Mother Eve must look to her own.”

  There was another ripple of laughter at this witty reply. Malvern mopped his brow and then looked at the magistrate, opening the palms of his hands to suggest that with a witch of this obduracy there was little more to be done.

  “The hour is late,” said the magistrate, who also seemed angered by Jane Crispin’s answers. “The court will adjourn until tomorrow morning, at which time I trust this business will be brought to a conclusion. Mr. Malvern, will you have any more witnesses?”

  “Just one, your honor. One I have saved for last. It will be a most important and conclusive one, I promise you.” He leveled a look of hatred at Jane Crispin, who sat very still on her stool, contemplating the faces in the courtroom with a mild air of one far removed from the conflict her responses had generated.

  • SEVENTEEN •

  “I THOUGHT Jane Crispin gave as good as she got from that slippery pettifogger,” Joan remarked the next morning at breakfast as she watched her husband attack his food as though he were on the rump end of a long fast. She was speaking of Malvern, to whom she had taken an instant and intense dislike. Great bag of guts, she had called him, mocking his red swollen face and mimicking his growl.

  “The tanner’s wife has a head on her shoulders,” Matthew responded between mouthfuls. “Like you, Joan.”

  Joan acknowledged the compliment with a smile. Matthew turned his attention to the porridge. It was excellent—a concoction of turnips, coleworts, and barley made in a thick soup of wheat flour and eggs. Joan’s recipes were famous in the neighborhood.

  “I wonder what trick the prosecutor intends for today,” she said. “How ominous his words were. Who could this witness

  be?”

  “I don’t know. But his methods will be subtle, true to his nature. Pray God that Jane Crispin proves his match for the second round. She’s quite come out of her shyness in these circumstances. She’s a fighter now.”

  “Yes,” Joan agreed. “Strange, isn’t it? Margaret was always the dominant one. She always insisted on having the last word on everything. Then these wicked charges. I fear for her life, even if she is found innocent.”

  “Mrs. Crispin doesn’t seem afraid,” Matthew said, signaling to his wife that he had had enough of the porridge and that she could return the ladle to the pot.

  “She should be,” said Joan darkly.

  Joan was right, Matthew decided. The trial was not going well, despite Jane Crispin’s clever retorts. Not going well because of her cleverness. Her witty tongue was working to her disadvantage as far as the judges and the jury were concerned. It didn’t matter about the prosecutor. Matthew knew his fellow townsmen. Malvern was a type they didn’t like. But it was a dangerous thing to make a fool of a prosecutor, especially if the one making the fool was a woman. If Matthew read the jurymen’s faces right, their verdict was certain: Jane Crispin was either a witch or a shameless virago who had set a bad example for the wives of the town and needed hanging to learn to be civil to men in authority.

  He and Joan talked some more about the trial, working themselves into a fit of melancholy. “Ah, if there were only some new evidence,” he murmured.

  “Another apparition?”

  But he wasn’t thinking of spectral evidence. God knew there had been a superfluity of that. He wanted something palpable. Like a bloody knife. Or a smoking pistol. Or an eyewitness, or even an intelligible motive to connect the case of the Chelmsford witches with the world of his own understanding—a world in which constables could do their job without mixing up with theology and the supernatural.

  “It’s passing strange that Ursula’s spirit has made no further appearances. For a while, it was a busy spirit indeed.”

  Joan said this airily, as though she had not been scared out of her wits by the face in her window. Matthew remembered well how he had had to comfort her. For several nights afterward, she had made him get out of bed to see to every bump and squeak in the dark house. He had become the chief investigator of groaning timbers, rattling windows, and mice scampering in the pantry. But the ghost of Ursula had not appeared again. Not to Joan. And not, evidently, to anyone else in town. That was passing strange. “Well, let God be thanked for the dead that keep to their graves,” he said, aspiring to her lightheartedness. “What, would you want another visit to our window?”

  “Hardly,” she replied soberly. “Unless someone has seen her since and has kept quiet about it, Ursula’s visit to us was the last of her visits. It was the night the sisters were arrested and the barn burned.”

  Matthew agreed that if anyone else had seen the ghost he would have surely made a noise about it. No one in town seemed reticent on that score. “Every witness in the trial has become a local celebrity. Simon Roundy has done a booming business in his bakery since his wife confronted the ghost and proclaimed the fact from the housetops. Customers come in not for cakes and marchpane but to gawk at the woman and to hear the latest version of her ordeal. Before they leave, they buy some biscuit or cake for a memento. Roundy’s well paid for his wife’s fright.”

  “And so is her vanity. She’s grown very tedious,” Joan said cattily. She didn’t like Mrs. Roundy either. “It is almost as if with the arrest of the sisters the spirit was satisfied,” she conjectured.

  “Or left town for fear of the riot,”
he said, trying to be funny but failing. Joan smiled charitably. He could tell she was still wrestling with the question.

  “Brigit hasn’t been seen again either,” she said.

  “No. She’s vanished.”

  “I wonder if there’s a connection.”

  “Well, the spirit has probably scared her off. That dark, gloomy house. Rank with death and failure. I’ll wager she’s gone home to her mother.”

  “But suppose,” Joan went on, as though she hadn’t been paying attention at all, “that the spirit—Ursula—had done whatever it was tnat she was intended to do?”

  “Frighten Malcolm Waite? Terrify the town? You?” He looked hard at her, trying to figure out what it was she was saying. Her expression was one he recognized. It was the look she had when she had reached a conclusion for which he would have no satisfactory rebuttal.

  She developed her argument with easy assurance. “The ar-

  rest of the sisters. The disgrace of both houses. Look, Matthew, doesn’t it all make a terrible sense?”

  “Vengeance?” he answered. “But why stop with the Crispins and Waites? There’s the jury that convicted her, the hangman that hanged her. Mrs. Byrd who complained to the authorities in the first place. And the spirit’s visit to you. What in God’s name had you to do with her that she should visit this house? Were I a ghost, able to materialize where I wished and to whomever I wished, I would dog my enemies until they ran mad in the streets. As for the rest—they that had done me no ill—let them sleep of nights.”

  “Oh, but there’s something—something in this all. If we could only fathom it,” she said. “But one thing seems simple to me. The sisters have suffered too greatly from these horrors to be their authors.”

  “A reasonable inference,” Matthew said, “and yet when I look at Margaret and Jane now, I see sometimes the women I know, and at other times the creatures I fear. Expressions I would have deemed sad suddenly seem sinister and conniving. Their very movements and whispers fill me with a kind of dread.”

  “Much of that is your own fear, Matthew. It distills from your brain. As for my vision—well, it was a true one. I swear it, but as I have said, I don’t conclude from it that either Margaret or Jane was its cause.”

  At that moment Peter Bench looked in the door to say that John Waite was in the shop and wanted to speak to Matthew.

  “What does he want?” Matthew asked, annoyed at this interruption of his breakfast.

  “He wouldn’t say, sir. He said only that he must speak to you at once concerning a matter of some urgency.”

  “Some urgency, is it?” Matthew got up from the table. He gave his wife a skeptical look, wiping his mouth with the napkin. He went to see what John Waite wanted, promising Joan to return presently. John Waite was browsing among the clc b-laden tables. When he saw Matthew, he immediately explained why he had come. “It’s happened again,” he said.

  “What has happened?” Matthew hoped the young man did not mean the ghost had put in another appearance.

  “It’s the prowler again,” said John Waite with a nettled expression. “Susan Goodyear woke me at midnight pounding upon my door without mercy. ‘God help us!' she screamed, all in a crazy flutter and half-dressed. ‘There’s a spirit walking among the ruins of the barn with a lantern in his hand.’ I leaped from my bed and flew to the window to see this marvel, only then remembering my window did not look upon the backsides and I must go to the chamber where my cousins lay. I did. Woke them at once and told them both what Susan had said. She had followed me into the room, terrified of being left to herself, and moaning and groaning as she was, she gave Dick and Edward a fright, I can tell you. She looked a very spirit herself, but a truly ugly one, with her hair flying every whichway and that sullen face of hers with her lower lip a-trembling. In a twinkling they were on their feet, half naked and shivering, neither caring that Susan stood there gaping at their bare legs.

  “We all looked from the window and saw the flicker of light Susan spoke of. It was but a little light, as though the lantern had been hooded for secrecy’s sake. I could see him that carried it, though. He was no more than a moving shadow, stalking around in the rubble as though he had lost something there and wanted desperately to find it. He would bend down, pry loose a board or two, then stand erect again.”

  “You’re sure it was a man you saw and not a woman?” Matthew asked, thinking perhaps what the nephew had seen was a spirit, after all, and doubtless Ursula’s.

  “Well,” John Waite said, pausing thoughtfully. “It was of mankind, not animal. Of that I’m sure enough. It might have been a woman. Of course, whoever it was wore a cloak and hat, so how was I or my cousins to tell? Susan Goodyear declared it was Ursula’s ghost, as sure as she lived. But I told her spirits have no need of lanterns to see by.”

  “And did that persuade her it was no ghost you saw?” John Waite laughed mirthlessly and stroked the hairs on his upper lip. “You must be joking, or you don’t know Susan. The whey-face is addled beyond redemption. She’s a giddy goose if there ever was one. My good aunt could not seem to employ better.”

  “What was she doing up and about at that hour anyway?” Matthew asked.

  “A nightmare had awakened her and she had risen to use the chamber pot. Having graced it with her bum, she was on her way back to bed again when a dreadful fear came upon her. She looked from her window toward the backsides and saw the light.”

  “I see. Go on.”

  “At once I knew it was the prowler of whom I had complained to you earlier. I told Susan to go back to bed and cease her blubbering, and then I and my cousins armed ourselves and in our nightclothes stole downstairs and out the postern door, careful not to make a noise. We hoped to fall upon the wretch before he was aware.”

  “You feared no spirit, then, or armed man either?” “Who, I?” said the young man, making a cynical face. “I thought at the worst him a flesh-and-blood thief or perhaps one of our fine upstanding loyal neighbors out to do us more mischief. Besides, there was but one of him and three of us and we had the advantage of surprise, or thought so.” “Well, what happened? Have you caught him?”

  “Sadly no,” answered John Waite. “We could see the light again when we were in the yard. He was digging. We could hear his spade at work. We were within a dozen feet of the fellow when my Cousin Dick stumbled over a piece of the wreckage and went sprawling, crying out as he flew. The cry alarmed the trespasser. We could hear him running off in the darkness, leaving the lantern and spade behind him.”

  “Did you give chase?”

  “Did we not?” John Waite laughed. “We were unshod, you understand, and him whom we would have pursued was lost to us in a moment. Look, I have brought you both the lantern and the spade.”

  John Waite opened his cloak to show Matthew the lantern and spade. Clumps of mud mixed with ash clung to the blade’s edge.

  “Now why should anyone be digging around in the ruins of your aunt’s barn? Had your uncle some treasure concealed there?”

  “To my knowledge,” answered the nephew dryly, “the only thing of value Malcolm Waite had in that pestilent ruin was the mare, now a rotting corpse. I doubt if the mysterious digger was some lover of horseflesh bent on giving the beast a decent burial.”

  “Well,” said Matthew, conscious of the time and his need to bring his prisoners to the court, “he’ll probably not return now that you’ve discovered him.”

  “Probably not,” said John Waite ruefully. “But we intend to keep a guard just in case he does.”

  Matthew examined the lantern and the spade. Neither bore its owner’s mark and both were of a common variety easily had in the town. “You have a good lantern and spade for your pains,” he said.

  “Yes,” said John Waite. “I suppose I do.” He sighed heavily. “Well, I thought you should know of this. I’m off now to the trial, where I expect to hear the worst regarding my poor aunts.” The young man’s face showed what seemed genuine sadness.

  M
atthew shook his hand and said he was sorry for his family’s troubles. His words sounded flat and insincere even to himself, and he wondered what the nephew made of them. He watched the young man leave, then returned to the kitchen to tell Joan what John Waite had said.

  “A prowler digging in the barn ruins. How strange,” she said.

  “Despite what the nephew says, someone might have thought there was silver or gold buried there,” Matthew said.

  “At least it was no ghost.”

  Matthew was about to leave to fetch his prisoners when Joan stopped him.

  “You know, there’s something very strange about the barn,” she said mysteriously.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The barn. Ursula’s loft. It was there I felt the intruder’s presence and didn’t know what to make of it. Now this strange and secret excavation. Oh, Matthew, I have the strongest feeling that the barn loft is the key.”

  “The key? Key to what?”

  “Why, to the mystery. Why Ursula’s spirit cannot rest.”

  “But the barn is a heap of ash now,” he protested.

  “The rubble must be cleared and searched,” she said firmly.

  “Impossible,” he answered impatiently. “The Waites and Crispins are not about to do the work themselves, not with their women on trial. And they were unable to find anyone in town willing to help them for love or money. It would take all day, clearing that mess.”

  “We must do it, then.”

  “We?”

  “The apprentices can be spared this morning. There won’t be a half-dozen customers in the shop with the trial in progress and the verdict in the offing.”

  He stood stupefied. When his wife got a notion in her head, it was set in mortar and hardened a week. As for himself, he had not an idea in the world what the barn, ruin that it now was, would or could demonstrate about any aspect of the present business.

  But she insisted, and would not let him out the door until he had relented to her request.