The Strange Death of Mistress Coffin

by Robert J. Begiebing

  The empty house had been ransacked, she said, but at that time she could not have said what might be missing. Searching among the debris of the keeping room with a mind to run over to her neighbor Adams, she heard a stirring from an adjacent storage room. She was so frightened that she could not run to the neighbor’s house. But hearing a sort of grunting noise from the storage room, she believed one of her family to be hurt and rushed in. She stumbled upon the accused, Henry Fletcher, lying amongst her and her mother’s clothes with his breeches pulled down.

  What, Cole asked, was the man doing?

  The young woman blushed. Cole asked her again.

  “He were jiggering his yard, Sir,” she blurted. Her face turned bewildered and then red. She looked suddenly at her shoes.

  There was a silence in the room. The older Fletcher brother, a man of twenty-two or three, began to giggle uncontrollably.

  “Silence!” Cole commanded. “Now tell us what it was you saw.”

  She failed to speak up, so Cole, growing impatient, insisted, his voice reverberating over the heads of the assembly.

  “Well, he had a stocking in one hand, my mother’s I believe.” She stopped. “And his yard in t’other. Against the stocking.”

  Jacob Fletcher began to snicker uncontrollably again. Henry slouched, his mouth open and his eyes half closed, as if he were unaware of the proceedings. His great body was muscular but already tending toward fat. His posture on the bench was marked by utter indolence and unconcern.

  “And what did he then?” Cole’s voice boomed.

  “He lay there till it were all finished, Sir. His eyes were closed and he did not see me till he sort of wakes up. Then he sees me watching him, too surprised to move.” She suddenly looked up and around the room. “He jumps up, makes like a growling, pulled up his breeches, and run fast as he could right past me and out of the house. Fast as he could. He must’ve believed my family returned. That was my luck, Sir.”

  She completed her testimony by detailing her clothing among the pile—stockings, a shirt, petticoats, et cetera.

  Then the mother testified and detailed which clothes had been hers. Later, the father listed all the articles missing from the house—two firearms, a sword, three knives, an Indian tomahawk, some foodstuff (mostly dried corn) that had been stored in an upstairs room, and a loaf of bread from the hearth.

  Standing in the back of the room, Richard Browne had a momentary vision of the brothers stalking about the empty house, gratifying any impulse that might take them, seeking any loot, boasting to one another of their finds and fantasies. He saw too the simpleton lying in the pile of women’s clothing.

  He despaired at the prospect of talking to these two men. What possible profit to him could there be in it? Yet how could he not try?

  Now two neighbors of the family, men, were making their statements. They had both joined the young woman’s father and gone after the Fletchers. Both Fletchers were discovered in a wigwam they had built well into the forest beyond town. In this wigwam was a cooking pot, foodstuffs, women’s clothing, and a large cache of weapons. All of the clothes and weapons had been identified through depositions now before the magistrate. The discovery of precisely the weapons and some plate missing from the maid’s house, they said, suggested that the elder Fletcher had left his younger brother behind to take his pleasures in the ladies’ clothing while he made off with his booty.

  A succession of witnesses followed, each one revealing similar facts. Browne left well before the testimony ended.

  Early the following day Cole led Browne into the reconstructed barn that served as a town pound and jail. Shackled in their corner, the Fletchers assumed Richard Browne to be some high magistrate to take their statements or direct their removal elsewhere, perhaps the county jail. It was only after realizing that Browne wanted to question them about an entirely different matter that Jacob began to talk.

  Yes, he said, they had on a few occasions worked for Mr. Coffin. The pay was good. What business, Jacob wanted to know, had Mr. Browne with Coffin and the brothers?

  “We are trying to find Mr. Coffin,” Browne said.

  “We?”

  “Mr. Cole and I.”

  “Well we don’t know because we wasn’t never told where he’s going,” Jacob said.

  “Never told you? When?”

  “Before he moved, I mean.”

  “Moved?” Browne asked. He was surprised, but saw they knew something after all. Yet he did not relish dragging every hidden detail from simpletons and rogues. The odors of unwashed men, of confined animals and offal, nauseated him.

  “Come, Fletcher!” Cole said. “If you speak to us, and the truth, we may find you some mercy in your present troubles. You know you are both in for many stripes at the very least. Had this simpleton touched the daughter he would be in for a hanging. Better you were in England, ask me, for blinding and castration. We just might make an example of you as it is.” He stared at Fletcher in disgust. “Now, what services had you performed for Coffin relative to his removal?”

  “We’d done a job for him long time ago that was the last one.”

  “When?”

  “Two years ago, wasn’t it?” He looked down at his brother, who had remained slouched in his corner. Henry said nothing and gave no indication of having followed the questioning. “Maybe last year?”

  “What kind of job?” Browne asked.

  “Some shipping. And finding some people.”

  “Who? What shipping?”

  “It were just toting lots of old boxes to a ship bound for Salisbury, Gloucester, and Boston.”

  “What people?”

  “Oh, just some people owed him money. Not from around here, Sir. He paid us well not to give no names, and promised to curse us if we ever told a soul. He would too, that one. So we haven’t.” He swelled out his chest like a bad actor. “And we won’t. Not if they torture us even!” He looked back at the straw-covered floor. “It’s just collecting money owed, like I say. And nothing to do with where he might of gone to.” He paused to look at Browne. “You might ask Black Ned, the Negro truckman. He finds boats for anyone wants goods or persons shipped upriver. Or other parts. Mr. Coffin’s hired him out.”

  “And you have,” Cole interrupted, speaking slowly, “on your souls, no knowledge of his whereabouts?”

  “None, hope to die, Sir. That’s all the truth, just as I told. You’ll get us mercy, Sir, like you promised?” He jerked his brother up to stand beside him.

  Cole looked at them in disgust. “Mercy?” he said. “What business have such long-shanked rogues with mercy? Count yourselves lucky if you are not hanged as the issue of this.” He glanced again at Browne, then back to the brothers, nodding particularly toward Henry. “See that this offal eats his waterlily roots each day. As to mercy, we shall see, according to your current merit, whether you be hanged or no.” He motioned Browne to leave with him. As they turned, Jacob called after them: “We’d be most thankful, Sirs. Hire us out sometime, and see if we don’t do a job for you!”

  Browne looked at Cole as they left. “Henry, the dumb one,” he said, “non compos mentis?”

  “I should think not, Richard. He is neither a natural fool, nor a lunatic. And as for his memory, well there is hardly a question of his gaining or losing it.” He shook his head and murmured: “Bots that crawl on the beast’s tail.”

  “‘The ravens,’” Browne quoted, “‘shall pick out the eyes of such in the valley.’”

  “Aye to that, Richard. In time, in time.”

  A week later, after attending strictly to his own affairs, Browne went to Strawberry Banke after the truckman Black Ned. Cole’s point about expecting little help from Goody Hussey seemed reasonable. But he had no luck in the port town. Ned was shipping with men who had hired him to move their goods and families to Gloucester. Some expected he might be back in about three days. So Browne decided to book a passage for Salisbury.

  He discovered, however, that his bad luck hel
d. Dr. Sedley had not returned from his own expedition deep inland. No, Sedley’s housekeeper said, she could not say when he might return, but she certainly hoped before winter set in. Yes, she had heard Dr. Sedley speak of Balthazar Coffin, and met Mr. Coffin once or twice, come to that, and she believed there had been some talk of Mr. Coffin’s moving to Salisbury, but she would not know if such a thing came to pass. Yes, Mr. Browne might leave his name and residence. Sedley being absent some months, she explained, she had heard no more of Coffin or anyone else from the doctor.

  Nor was there any further sign of Black Ned when Browne stopped at Strawberry Banke on his return. While he waited for the upriver boat, he grew angry with himself over time wasted. Never in his life had he so well known the value of time. He resolved that for a fortnight he would have absolutely nothing more to do with Coffin. But two hours into his trip upriver on the incoming tide he recalled Goody Hussey. The thought of her, of what she might know, nagged him, and he began to feel that somehow she would change his luck by knowing something, despite Cole’s admonitions to the contrary. His own vacillations and uncertainties confused him. Watching herons constantly rise up with slow wing beats into the trees ahead of the boat, like truths escaping the truth seeker, he suddenly decided to try Goody Hussey.

  And thus it was that he found himself, the very next day, at the center of the village where she lived, asking how he might find her cottage.

  The cottage he sought, Browne was told in the village, was situated on a small peninsula of high ground that reached out into the salt marshes. It was necessary, he discovered, to travel from the village center a half mile through the wood to gain access to the old woman’s spit of dry land. Suspicious of a stranger asking for Goody Hussey, townspeople reluctantly indicated the hay road leading through the wood to the marsh.

  From Cole, Browne had learned that the old lady’s son had discovered and claimed that elevated mead in the great marshes more than ten years before, shortly after their arrival among the earliest settlers. The son had died of a fever five years ago while working on a privateer after Spanish loot in the West Indies. The town left to the lone woman only that cottage. That portion of the hay marsh her son claimed, his back pay, and his few valuables, the selectmen had brought into the town coffers. The old widow lived on the charity of one or two of the more comfortable families in town as well as by her skill at physic and midwifery. But as her eccentricities seemed to grow with age, she was called in these days as a last but often effective resort only in the most terrible crises of illness and birth.

  Word was that she had grown more familiar with the Indians than with her white neighbors. She might be seen collecting her wild roots, herbs, and mushrooms at any time of day in the fields or woods. She was on such a mission the very day Browne trod along the hay road in search of her cottage, and a rough voice called out to him: “You seem lost, Sir.”

  He turned quickly to see behind him an old woman standing in an open ferny space where her figure caught a rare shaft of sunlight that made her white hair and cap glow above her dark clothing. She leaned upon her walking stick and held an Indian basket in her other hand. She moved toward him, entering the shadows of the great trees.

  “I may be!” he said. “You gave me a start!” He composed himself with a laugh. “I’ve come to speak with Goody Hussey. Might you be the same?”

  “That I might, young man.” She looked him over. “Who be you?”

  “Richard Browne, of Robinson’s Falls.”

  “And what business have you with Goody Hussey?”

  “I am trying to find Balthazar Coffin. I understand that she knew him.”

  “She may know him. But he lives where you come from, Sir. Why come you here?”

  “He has removed. Yet I have important business with him. Some business we had entered together, but left unfinished. His manner of departure left no one certain of his destination.”

  “So that’s why I haven’t seen him these months.” She turned and motioned Browne to follow her.

  He followed, saying: “I had hoped you would have some word of him, Goody Hussey. Yet I see you yourself are taken unawares by my news.”

  “That I am, Sir.” She kept walking in her slow way into the woods. The trees were enormous, gray-green with moss, and well spaced, retaining the look of an Indian game grove. The high, dense canopy of leaves parted at rare intervals to let in a flash of blue or a blaze of sunlight.

  Browne began to feel a sense of frustration and waste kindling in him again. Yet he felt strangely vulnerable too, and his mind began to move toward his immediate situation. He was not a man given to excesses of superstition. He knew—by the common and ancient testimony of humanity—that the dead at times returned to the living. But he did not see in every old crone a witch, nor in every animal a familiar, nor in every rarity a sign from the Darkness or the Light. He increasingly believed that nature, for the most part, could be classified and understood. He knew Aristotle, Lucretius, Von Gesner, and even a recent production of Sir Thomas Browne entitled Pseudodoxia Epidemica. Still, he could not shake his momentary apprehensions.

  “Here we are, Sir,” she was finally saying as she pointed her stick at a large outcropping of ledge. “Some call it the pulpit. I find this lower section makes a fine seat for old bones. Now . . . do sit, Sir. Tell me something of this business between you and Mr. Coffin.”

  He saw no point in reticence before this old woman. He suspected she might know more than she yet showed. If he could not find Coffin he would have to stop. The thought of stopping filled him with desperation, however. He would see this through, then get on with his own work. He began by explaining how he had come to Robinson’s Falls under Cole’s dispensation to help relieve Goody Higgins’ tribulations, perhaps even by answering questions left in the aftermath of Mistress Coffin’s murder.

  “A foul business that!” she interjected.

  He nodded his head and returned to his explanation. He felt that were he to stop he would not be able to continue. So he spoke quickly, letting it all tumble out, saying finally that Coffin had given him a private journal whereby he had a glimpse into the lives of the Coffins. As a result he had begun to feel that he was making headway into strange, interlocking events when, upon his return from England, he had discovered Mr. Coffin’s abrupt departure. Only Coffin, he believed, could offer the necessary resolution to these affairs, the fulfillment of his, Browne’s, duty toward Mr. Cole, his neighbor Goody Higgins, and even Coffin. He did not speak of his large personal curiosity, which was also a goad to him.

  Goody Hussey listened. When he had finished she said: “I’m sorry I cannot help you. You saw that already. You have no sign of Coffin’s destination?”

  “Only that Black Ned might have helped in the move.”

  “Ah!” She thought for a moment. “Then that is the path to follow.”

  “Have you heard of a Dr. Sedley? A colleague of Mr. Coffin’s?”

  “Mr. Coffin spoke of him once or twice as a knowledgeable, much honored man.”

  “I thought he might know something of Coffin, but he is up in the country on researches of his own.”

  “Another path, Mr. Browne!”

  “Indeed, Goody Hussey, if obscure at present. But I have a feeling about these Fletcher brothers. They say nothing, yet I believe they know something useful to me.”

  “Oh, the Fletcher brothers!” she said and paused. “You may have something there, Sir. Do you see the mark of their hands in this?” From her seat she looked over and up at him with a deep, inquiring eye. He could see clearly now that she was old, and not well. Her skin was an unhealthy white; he could discern no teeth in her black mouth, but then she barely opened her mouth to speak. Yet despite what people said, her mental vitality seemed intact.

  “I know only that they have had dealings with Coffin in the past,” he said, “and that they shipped some materials for him at one time, probably about the time he left.”

  “And you do not believe their
ignorance?”

  “Just so.”

  “Well, that’s the way with those two. You may have something there, Mr. Browne.” She stopped, shifted in her seat, seemed to ponder a moment or two the implications of introducing the Fletchers into Browne’s quest. She chuckled to herself.

  “You know them?”

  “Oh yes. They purchase some decoction, plant, or essence of me from time to time. Infrequently. I don’t ask people many questions, having my living to get. I’ll trade for whatever people need, or believe they need. If I have it.”

  “And the Fletchers?”

  “Those two are fond of things that make them drunk, or lustful, or see things they wouldn’t otherwise see in the dullness of their base senses.”

  “But these are crooked fragments of humanity, Goody Hussey. . . .”

  “That may be, but an old woman has to live, hasn’t she? I don’t lead them to their ways. Nor do my sweets cause them to act in any way. It is their own will that bends them.”

  “But, Goody Hussey, in their wild anarchy of drink. . . .”

  “Sir. My truck with these brothers is scarce. Nothing I pass in itself causes men to do evil, in spite of what some may say of me. Fools and gossips! Would you, like the rest of them, have an old woman starve to death, if you don’t hang her first?”

  “Please don’t misunderstand me. I apologize if my words seemed to say so. The truth is I have come for your help, if that be possible, good woman.”

  “I know nothing of Coffin’s departure. I am not privy to it, Sir.”

  “I understand. But might you not help me now with the Fletchers?”

  “How so?”

  “They lie. I am certain of it. They are refractory.”

  “And I am to find the truth?”

  “Perhaps your influence upon them. Get them to speak . . .”

  “Bah! Dullards and jades, Sir. Base carnal matter. What talk of influence?”

  “Perhaps they fear you, Goody Hussey? Many do.”