Maltby, of course, was a Protestant, and the only Christian cemetery in the town was Catholic. It was not possible a heretic should lie in consecrated ground, but the missionary priest took counsel with the rabbi of the little Jewish congregation and arranged to buy a grave-site in the Hebrew burying ground.
There was no ordained minister of his faith to do the final service for Maltby, so the priest and rabbi stood beside his grave, and one said Christian prayers in Latin, and the other Jewish prayers in Hebrew, while the grim-faced sailors from New England stood by and marveled at this show of charity in those they had been taught to hate, and responded with tear-choked ‘A-mens’ when prayers were done and time had come to heap the earth upon the body sewn in sailcloth in lieu of a coffin.
It was a Wednesday in mid-April when the killing took place, and Kundre, so the story goes, was sitting beside the brooklet that ran through her back-lot. The weather was unseasonably warm, and her children waded in the stream and searched for buds of ground-rose while she sunned and bleached the hair that was her greatest pride—or vanity, according to the neighbors’ wives. Suddenly she raised her head like one who listens to a hail from far away, shook back her clouding hair, and cupped one hand to her ear to sit there statue-still for a long moment. Then, with a cry that seemed to be the echo of her riven heart-strings’ breaking, she called out, ‘Pelatiah! Oh beloved!’ and fell forward on her face beside the brooklet, lying with her arms outstretched before her like a diver’s when he strikes the water, while her great, heroically-formed body twitched and jerked, and little, dreadful moans came bubbling from her lips, like blood that wells and bubbles from a mortal wound.
Presently she rose and dried her eyes and went into the house where she laid away her gown of crisp blue linen and put on widow’s weeds before she sought Ezekiel Martin the stone-mason and ordered him to cut and set a gravestone in the village churchyard. You could see that tombstone now if you should go to Danby burying ground. It reads:
Sacred to the memory of
PELATIAH MALTBY
Christian man and seacaptain
Most foully done to death by jealousie
at Tamatave in Madagascie
Now, you’ll allow it would be cause for comment, even in these days when extra-sensory perceptions are taken as more or less established facts, for a woman to become aware of her husband’s death halfway round the world from her at the very moment of its happening. The circumstances caused comment in mid-seventeenth century New England, too, but not at all of the same kind. Everybody dreaded sorcery and witchcraft then, and in every unexplained occurrence men saw Satan’s ungloved hand. So when Kundre went forth in her mourning clothes, sorrowing dry-eyed at the empty grave where she had placed the tombstone, neighbors looked at her from beneath lowered lids, and when she went to divine service at the meeting house the tithing man went past her hurriedly, and hardly paused to hold the alms basin before her, though he knew it would be heavier by a gold piece minted with the symbol of King Charles’ majesty when he withdrew it.
In August came the Bountiful Adventure with her ensign flying at half-mast, and Captain Maltby’s death was confirmed by the sorrowing seamen.
But what became of Captain Joel Newton and his ship the Crystal Wave nobody ever knew. He had set sail from Tamatave the same day he shot Maltby, for everyone agreed he had provoked the quarrel, and the commandant of the garrison threatened his arrest unless he drew his anchor from the harbor-mud at once. The rest was silence. Neither stick nor spar nor broken bit of wreckage ever washed ashore to show the Crytal Wave’s fate, or that of Captain Joel Newton and the twenty seamen of his crew.
Voyages of a year or even two years were the rule those days, and it was not until King Charles had been beheaded and the Lord Protectory proclaimed that Abigail Newton descended from her ‘widow’s watch’ that topped her square-roofed house beside the harbor and changed her home-spun gown of blue for one of black linsey woolsey, then sent for Zeke Martin the mason to cut and set a stone in Danby churchyard.
The twenty widows of the Crystal Wave’s crew also went in mourning, and bewailed their joint and several losses piteously. When they passed Kundre in the street they looked away, but when she’d gotten safely past they spit upon the ground and muttered ‘witch!’ and ‘devil’s-hag!’
Kundre was a Swedish woman, and though the good folk of Danby had small use for King James’ politics and even less for his religion, they were with him to a man in his views on witchcraft. Moreover, they recalled how Scandinavian witches had raised storms and tempests to prevent the Princess Anne from reaching Scotland where her marriage to King James was to be solemnized, and some of the more learned in the village knew the legends of Sangreal and remembered that the temptress who all but kept the Holy Grail from Parsifal was named Kundry. There seemed little difference between her name and Kundre’s. Kundry of the legend was a witch damned past redemption, might not Kundre—the strange outland woman who knew of her husband’s death four months before the news came home—also be a potent witch?
It seemed entirely possible and even probable, and when the widowed Abigail met widowed Kundre in the village street and taxed her with destroying both the Crystal Wave’s master and crew by witchcraft something happened to confirm the worst suspicions.
‘Thou art a wicked, devil-vowed, and wanton witch!’ said Abigail in hearing of at least three neighbor women. ‘By thy vile arts thou raised a monstrous storm and sank the Crystal Wave and all her people in the ocean.’
Kundre looked at her, and in her ice-blue eyes there seemed to kindle a slow light like that which the aurora borealis makes on winter nights. ‘Thy tongue is dipped in venom like a serpent’s, Goody Newton,’ she replied in the deep voice which was her Nordic heritage. ‘It never wags except to hurt thy neighbors, so ’twere best thou never used it hereafter.’
Whether from the look in Kundre’s eyes, or from astonishment that anyone should dare to tell her to keep still, we do not know, but it was amply attested that Abigail for once had no reply to make, and we find in the old town records of Danby that on the evening after this encounter she lost her power of speech completely. More, she lost the use of her tongue, for it swelled until she could not keep it in her mouth, and she could take no nourishment but liquids, and those with the greatest difficulty.
In the light of present-day medical knowledge it would not be too difficult to attribute her misfortune to that rare condition known as macroglossia or hypertrophy of the tongue, which doctors tell us is due to engorgement and dilation of the lymph channels. Most of us who have served in hospitals have seen such cases, where the swollen tongue hangs from the mouth and gives the patient a peculiarly idiotic look. But medicine was far from an exact science in those days, and besides there was the testimony of the women who had seen the curse of silence laid on Abigail. Three hours after sunset Kundre was ‘spoken against’ as a witch and duly lodged in Danby jail.
By the common law of England torture was forbidden to force a prisoner to accuse himself, but by the witchcraft statutes of King James certain ‘tests’ which differed from torture neither in degree nor kind were permitted. One of these was known as ‘swimming’, for it was believed a witch’s body was so buoyed up with evil that it could not sink in water.
Accordingly, upon the second day of her confinement Kundre was brought out to be ‘swum’. Stripped to her shift they led her from the jail to the horse-pond which served the village as reservoir and ornamental lake at once, forced her to sit cross-legged on the ground, and tied her right thumb to her left great toe, her right great toe to her left thumb with heavy linen thread which had been waxed for greater strength, and to make it cut more deeply in the tender flesh. Then over her they dropped a linen bed-sheet, tumbled her all helpless as she was upon her side and tied the sheet’s loose ends together, exactly as a modern housewife makes a laundry bundle ready. A rope was fastened to the knotted sheet and willing hands laid hold on it and dragged it out into the water.
Now here we have a choice between the natural and the supernatural. We have all seen the properties of wet cloth to retain the air and resist water. The device known as water wings with which so many children learn to swim is simply a cloth bladder wet before inflation, and as long as outside pressure is evenly applied it will support surprisingly large weights in calm water.
Perhaps it was as natural a phenomenon as this that kept the accused woman afloat on the calm surface of the village horse-pond. Perhaps, again, it was something more sinister. At any rate, the sheeted bundle bobbed and floated on the quiet surface of the pool as easily as if it had been filled with cork, and a great shout went up from the spectators: ‘She swims! She swims; it is the judgment of just Heaven; she is a proven witch!’
Her trial lasted a full day, and people came from miles about to hear the evidence poured on her. Ezekiel Martin the stone-mason told how she came to him and ordered him to cut the tombstone for a man whose limbs were scarcely stiff in death, though none could know that he had died until his ship came a full four months later.
There was no dearth of testimony concerning the fine winds and weather that had been her husband’s portion since he married her, or concerning the storms that had plagued his rivals.
Abigail Newton stood up in court that all might see her swollen tongue, and though she could not speak, she went through an elaborate dumb-show of the way the curse had been laid on her. Less reticent, Fell-from-the-Wrath-to-Come Epsworth, Rebecca Norris, and Susan Clayton told under oath how they had seen and heard Kundre strike Abigail with speechlessness.
A tithe of such evidence would have been enough to hang her, and the jury took but fifteen minutes to deliberate upon their verdict, which, of course, was guilty.
Asked what she had to say in her defense before the court pronounced sentence, she made a seemly curtsey to the judge and answered without hesitation: ‘’Tis true I am a witch as ye have charged me. Long years agone my sire and dam made compact with the Prince of Evil and bound me by their covenant, but never have I used my power to hurt a living creature, brute or human. That I should wish my man to prosper was but natural. Thus far I used my power over wind and tides, but no farther. Whether heaven punished Goodman Newton for the foul murder that he did on my poor man I cannot say. I know naught of the matter, nor did I lift a finger to bring heaven’s retribution on him. “Vengeance is mine, I will repay,” saith the Lord.
‘As for the swollen tongue of yon shrew, belike it is the malice of her black and jealous heart that bloats it. As to that I cannot answer; but hark ye, neighbors, if I had the power to release her I’d not use it. The town is better for her silence, as I wis ye all agree.’
With that she made another curtsey to the judge and stood there silent, waiting for the sentence: ‘Since, therefore, Goodwife Kundre Maltby hath by her own confession admitted she was justly tried and convicted, so let her on account of her bond with the Devil and on account of the witchcraft she hath practiced, be hanged by the neck until she be dead.’
The usual formula in hanging cases was for the court to add, ‘and may God have mercy on thy soul’, but such a sentiment seemed obviously out of place here, and the judge forebore to express it.
They carried out the sentence next day, and a mighty crowd was gathered for the spectacle. The members of the trained band were much put to it to control the rabble when the hangman drove his cart beneath the gallows tree and made the hemp fast to her neck.
She wore her widow’s weeds to execution, and round her neck was clasped a slender chain of some base metal with a flat pendant like a coin hung from it. It was the only ornament she’d had when Pelatiah found her floating on the grating, and she had laid it by when they were married. Now, through a whim, perhaps, she chose to wear it at her death.
They’d let her children visit her in jail the night before, and she had sent the girl back for the bauble. ‘Look well on it, my sweet,’ she told the child when it was clasped about her neck. ‘The time may come when thou’lt have need of it, and if it comes thou shalt not cry for it in vain.’
As the hangman bound her elbows to her sides before he slipped the noose beneath her chin she begged him, ‘Leave the worthless chain in place when thy grim task is done, good Peter Grimes. In my left shoe thou’lt find a golden sovereign hidden to repay thee for thy work. Take it and welcome, but if thou take’st the chain and pendant from me—a witch’s curse shall be on thee.’
Peter Grimes was a poor man, and the clothes a felon stood in when he died were part of his perquisites, but he had no stomach for a witch’s curse, so when he found the gold piece in her shoe as she had promised he took it and was well pleased to leave the worthless chain in place.
She did not die easily, from all accounts. Her splendid body was too powerful, the tide of life ran too strong in her, so she dangled, quivering and writhing in the air a full five minutes, then Peter Grimes, perhaps in charity, perhaps because he wished to have the business over with and go home to his breakfast, seized her by the legs and dragged until the double burden of his weight and hers proved too much for her spinal column, and with a snapping like the cracking of a fire-dried stick her neck broke and her struggles ended.
They raised the stone that she had set above her husband’s empty grave, scooped out a shallow opening beneath it, and dropped her in, coffinless and without proper graveclothes. So, as the neighbors sagely said, she had outreached herself and ordered her own tombstone when by her wicked wizardry she had the tidings of her man’s death at the instant it occurred.
And here again we’re forced to make a choice between the natural and the supernatural. That Kundre should have confessed she was guilty was not particularly important. We know that under heavy mental stress people will accuse themselves of almost any crime. There’s hardly a sensational murder case in which the police don’t have to deal with numerous entirely innocent self-accusers. That part of it is understandable.
What is more difficult to explain is that at the very moment Peter Grimes broke Kundre’s neck the swelling in Abigail Newton’s tongue began to subside, and by noon she had entirely regained the power of speech. Indeed, she regained it so fully that within six months she was twice sentenced to the ducking-stool for public scoldings, and finally was forced to stand before the meeting house on the Sabbath with a muzzle on her face and a paper reading ‘Common Scold’ hung by a string around her neck.
Not the least mystifying thing about the mystery of Kundre Maltby was the way her fortune disappeared. That she and Pelatiah had been rich was common knowledge, but when the assessors went to her house to take her property in custody they could find nothing of substantial value. Not a single gold or silver coin, nor yet a bit of jewelry could they turn up, though they searched the place from cellar to ridgepole and even knocked down several walls in quest of concealed hiding places. So, balked in the attempt to work a forfeiture of her fortune, they sold the house and land at public vendue, put the proceeds in the town treasury, and farmed the children out to be taught useful trades.
Micah was apprenticed at the rope-walk owned by Goodman Richard Belkton, Kundre took her place among the sewing maids of Goodwife Deborah Stiles, and except when they were in school or went, well chaperoned, to divine service at the meeting house, they never saw each other.
Their lot was not a happy one. We all know the sadistic cruelty of the young. The lad who goes to a new school today has a hard time until he’s proved himself to be the equal of the class bully, or till the novelty of hazing him wears off. But Kundre and her brother had to face the taunts and insults of their classmates endlessly. No one wished to sit with them or share a hornbook with them. If, maddened by the spiteful things said of his mother, Micah fought his tormentor and came off winner, his victory was vociferously attributed to witchcraft. If he lost the fight the victor called on all to witness how heaven had helped the right in overcoming evil.
Both were apt pupils, but their readiness in reading, ciphering,
and writing caused no commendation from the schoolma’am. She too believed their aptitude infernally inspired and made no secret of it. So successful recitations were rewarded by an acid reference to their mother’s compact with the Evil One. Failure brought a caning.
In all the dreary monotone of life the one highlight for Kundre was Hosea Newton. It may seem strange that the son of her mother’s fiercest persecutor should prove her only friend, but it was no stranger than the contrast between Hosea and his mother. Where she was angular and acid and sharp-tongued he was inclined to plumpness, slow of speech, and even-tempered. When all the little girls drew their skirts back from Kundre as from diabolic pollution, he chose a seat beside her on the form, and shared his primer with her and, to the scandal of the class, often gave her tidbits from the ample luncheon which his mother packed for him each morning. When Charity Wilkins accused Kundre of stealing a new thimble from her he found the missing bauble concealed in Charity’s pocket and pulled her hair until she admitted her fault. Charity’s big brother Benjamin took up the lists for his sister, whereupon Hosea entered combat with enthusiasm and left Benjamin with a bloody nose and greatly chastened tongue.
But this little interlude of friendship had disastrous results. Goodwife Wilkins went to Abigail, who, horrified that her son had espoused the witch-child’s cause, took him forthwith to Reverend Silas Middleton, who quoted Scriptural texts to him—‘Evil communications corrupt good manners’—exhorted him, prayed over him, and finally caned him soundly.
After that Hosea had to content himself with smiling at Kundre over his primer. All speech between them was forbidden, and though the Reverend Middleton’s precepts had made but small impression on Hosea, he had a vivid memory of the thrashing that accompanied them.
Night Creatures Page 29
