The Strange Death of Mistress Coffin

by Robert J. Begiebing

  “You have responsibilities to yourself, your family, and your associates,” Cole advised. “You’ve lost much time better spent developing your forest trade.” He seemed almost jolly as he sat before his fire smoking his pipe at the end of day. “And in this country especially must a man have his helpmeet.” He smiled at Browne. “Few men improve themselves in this wilderness, Richard, without a good wife. Quite the contrary!” He took a long draw on the pipe. “Your instinct to get on with it seems right to me, Richard. Pursue the present course of your investigations to their end as quickly as you can. You have done the job well, as well as anyone could hope or expect in these strange entanglements. Yes, that legacy is an exorbitancy, but consider it genuinely tendered and, on your part, earned.”

  “Were I to collect the sum, I could not in good conscience do less than share it equally with Goody Higgins. And I suspect that any other arrangement would raise her suspicions and warrant complicated explanations.”

  “Ah, yes! I see. You may be right. Very good, Richard. But say nothing to anyone of this or there will be talk of collecting from her for the town coffers. The poor woman, with those children, will be needing help. You are right there. She may marry again, but there seems some pain in her that prevents it. And in any event, should she not be given something now, she’ll end up on the poorlists anyway, collecting from us.”

  “She would receive some relief from her condition, would she not, if her husband were declared dead?”

  “Yes. Some. At least she would know just where she stands. But then too if we could prove desertion, her circumstances might become settled.”

  “Not necessarily to her advantage, I imagine.”

  “True. Not necessarily to any advantage under current practices.” He relit his pipe, drew deeply, looking steadily at Browne.

  “Then I should help.”

  “Indeed, Richard.”

  “I find much relief in your advice, Mr. Cole.”

  “Ah!’ he said, the smoke rising between their faces. “You’ve done well, ferreted out certain of our vermin. We may never know all that has happened. But think too of the relief you’ve brought Goody Higgins. Jared Higgins, guilty or not, is gone from us forever, as near as I can fathom. Coffin’s role, his instigations, you yourself have said we’ve discovered in this diary. Or so it seems. I’m anxious for you to tell me more of it some day. And in any case, whatever his guilt, he is dead now. I doubt we shall uncover sufficient evidence to turn off the ladder whatever rogue squeezed the life from that poor woman.” He pulled on his pipe. “And those Fletchers are to be sent from our shores as soon as you deem them useless to any further inquiry.”

  XVIII

  “You say you have no reason to suspect my husband’s where-abouts?” Elizabeth Higgins asked Browne.

  “I have none,” he answered. He loathed lying to her, but there was more truth in this now than in some of the things he had told her. After more than a year in the wilderness, what might not have befallen Jared Higgins? He might be with the savages still, or he might not. He might have left for England, the Indies, or one of the southern colonies. Might he as possibly be dead by now, a white man living as he had? He tried an explanation: “I have only the sense that I have not hunted for him sufficiently. Darby Shaw has agreed to guide me once again.”

  “No,” she said. “It is hopeless.” She looked at the floor. “I’m sure of it now, these two years. The loss of my husband is but one of my torments that began since Mr. Coffin hired him. That past is gone now.” She looked up at him. “With much thanks to you, Mr. Browne.”

  “You credit me with too much, Goody Higgins. Now I merely want to see this final matter through, as I believe it’s all I can do.”

  She rose and walked to the open doorway, where she stood looking out. He rose from his rude chair, which Higgins had made immediately after building his house, and stood three feet behind her.

  “I don’t want you to waste your time,” she said. “Why not stay here and attend your trade?”

  “It’s a matter of curiosity at this point. Don’t feel in any way responsible yourself. I’m being more selfish than you think.”

  “Curiosity?” She turned toward him.

  “Yes. A hard taskmaster.”

  “Why so curious?”

  “Once one enters a maze, one desires the secret of it. Even if one knows he will not live long enough or maintain the strength of purpose to emerge.”

  “You sacrifice much for curiosity.”

  He pulled a purse out of the large pocket he had worn over his shoulder and set the purse on the nearby table.

  “You must accept this. It is half of the legacy I told you Mr. Coffin left to us both upon his death. I don’t know whether it is merely guilt money or not. But it’s left to you, as to me, so you might as well take it.”

  She stared at the purse, seeming for an instant both angry and pleased. When she looked directly at him, her pale eyes searched his as if to test his truthfulness.

  Browne turned away, and she again looked at the purse on the table. He said nothing but began to pace, his hands folded behind him, his eyes on the floor, his mind reasoning with itself. Certainly he owed her nothing, and Coffin had left the complete sum to himself. He had been through all such reasonings before. One hundred and twelve pounds was a lot of money. It was a gift that would change her life entirely.

  He had been forced to retain better than half himself, well over £300. He had been growing troubled lately by the discovery that men from Massachusetts—Hutchinson, Broughton, Hull, others—were buying up timberland and sawmills of the Piscataqua watershed to insure a flow of timber products in their own trade. In his first surprise at Coffin’s legacy and his impulse toward generosity he had briefly forgotten how worrisome such competitors had become. In his reasonings, he had convinced himself that Elizabeth would refuse any sum unless she believed the legacy left to both of them. Therefore, he had, before traveling to the probate clerk, paid her a visit to smooth the way, telling her of Coffin’s death and of an as yet uncertain sum that had been left to them equally. There had never been a question in Browne’s mind of giving Elizabeth Higgins a substantial gift, but, he told himself, he had to concoct this further untruth to make her accept his gift. The more than £330 that he had kept he used to purchase nearby sawmills and timberland ahead of his competitors to the south. It seemed an obvious solution. He simply could not afford to lose timberland—the very lifeblood of his accelerating trade.

  Finally, she stepped over to the table briefly, opened the purse and looked in, then after a little start returned to the doorway, looked out, and finally turned toward him.

  “One hundred and twelve pounds,” he said.

  “One day, I don’t remember when, it became clear to me that I won’t see him, Jared, again,” she said. “I was sure of his death. Like someone diverting water from a mill. The wheel simply stopped. There would be no more water. And that was that.”

  Browne walked back to his chair, leaning on it rather than sitting. He watched her as she rubbed her chin with a finger and turned back to look out the doorway. If Higgins were only dead, he thought, it would all be much more simple. He would have no journey before him. Cole might simply dispose of the Fletcher brothers according to their sentence. He would be able to return to his trade. And why might they not then become more than neighbors? He wanted to protect her from further torment. Her life had been plain, even humble. But she had none of that coarseness he had found so often in those of her station. Yes, she was without learning. But she was quick, and capable of learning, and she was wise in womanly craft. And she was so alive with her fair skin and hair, the very abundant hair he had once seen for himself and which even now strayed from her cap as if nothing were equal to containing it. What, come to think of it, had he before him as things now stood? Years of living and laboring in the wilderness alone?

  She turned to look at him, still silent. And suddenly he saw himself a fool, a fool and a liar. Wh
o was this Jared Higgins to him that he should keep his oath of secrecy now? He would have to tell her eventually. Yes, he would tell her when he got back, whatever he found. And that would be the end of it. He would be completely his own again, without ties or interests other than his own. There would be no more oaths sworn to.

  She came over to him now and began to speak about the legacy. She stood close and he caught a scent of her and felt the rough tongue of desire lick his loins. He felt his own throat swell and ache pleasurably, and he had to turn away from her that he might not be discovered with the beast whimpering and mocking at his feet.

  He felt a certain terror that he was about to express his feelings to her, which feelings he told himself were the result merely of physical deprivation. He would have to count in years the time since he had felt the touch of a woman who loved him. He would count in many months the time since he had felt the touch of any woman at all. He told himself that he was feeling only the contre-coup of celibacy—those assertions of the baser mechanisms. It was all at its most simple level hydraulic, pressure and release, he told himself.

  “It will be a shame to have you away so long,” she was saying now. “We shall miss you, Mr. Browne, our neighbor who never stays.”

  “This shall be my last absence for some time, I believe,” he said. “I must tread other paths very soon. Whatever I discover this time out.”

  “You’ll not find him, Mr. Browne. He is dead. Or as far removed as one dead. I know that now; I have felt it.”

  The beast had departed. “I’m not so certain.”

  “He is dead to me,” she said. “But God go with you, Richard Browne.”

  XIX

  By the time he had returned from his second journey to contact Higgins, Richard Browne had half decided to let the truth about Higgins rest. At this point he saw little choice but to hide the truth from those who knew of his recent expedition and say that the man was dead. Walking to see Mr. Cole, Browne recalled his questions to Shaw as they had paddled homewards from their unproductive interview with Higgins, who had been more immovable than ever.

  “Do you believe him?” Browne had called back over his shoulder as they ran downstream.

  “Why should I not?” Shaw answered.

  “And should I? His resistance to his loved ones due to his new family, his tale of woe?”

  “You have nothing else, Mr. Browne, and you never will. Don’t expect the Fletchers to be your measure of truth.”

  “But Higgins, after all he’s been through? This White Indian?”

  “He’s as good as his word, ask me. He has chosen. He has taken his leave of me. Neither of us will ever see the man again, you can be sure. You might sooner find the tormented soul of Balthazar Coffin.”

  “But I cannot rest for this man’s family!”

  “You had better rest, Mr. Browne. You had better, than squander yourself. Anything more here is impossible now. Better to say we found he is dead. Then the poor woman can get on with it. I’ll back you. And he’s as like as dead.”

  “I cannot,” Browne said. “Not yet.”

  Shaw had said no more about it in the following days as they negotiated their canoe toward the seaport at Newbury.

  Yet now he found himself once again before Cole distorting some of the truth while revealing some of what he had hidden previously.

  Higgins, a White Indian, he lied, was dead. The essence of Mistress Coffin’s journal, however, he now uncovered for Cole. And they had the Fletcher testimony. That testimony lent possibility to a version of events something like what Browne now secretly knew as Higgins’ story. Even without the benefit of that story, Jonathan Cole was fitting the pieces together. But Cole was greatly troubled by the direction the truth seemed to be taking, and by the number of these discoveries Browne had hidden from him for so long.

  “You knew the nature of Balthazar Coffin from the journal, corroborated by these criminal Fletchers, and you said nothing? I had come to believe they were lying to save their skins, to be honest, Richard. Am I some tattling schoolboy or gossiping crone?”

  Cole’s mood smouldered. Browne quietly reminded Cole of the many delicate dimensions of his researches. “I have always told you the truth I was sure of, nothing I was either unsure of, or that would make you responsible for the jeopardy of another.”

  “But this man’s whereabouts? Kept from me and, worse, from his long-suffering wife? This fool of an Englishman-become-savage!”

  “I determined her in danger from such knowledge. And I was sworn to secrecy. Any breach might have destroyed all possibility of the trust necessary between us if I was to nourish the chance of Higgins’ return. Mr. Coffin has never seemed to me a man to take chances with. Higgins too was in grave danger, it seemed to me, might there be any possibility—however farflung—of Coffin’s discovering his position. Each time any person is told such information, the information is tenfold more likely to come out, somehow, despite the good intentions of everyone. Anyone might be in danger with such knowledge and such a man as Mr. Coffin appears now to have been.”

  “No matter. No matter. Who am I? Someone you cannot trust? You disappoint me, Richard. No, don’t interrupt me. I could have helped you more. We could have restrained this dangerous man, whatever he was up to. Exactly what, is not so certain, and never will be now.”

  “I endeavored to keep as many souls from harm as I could, Sir. I was uncertain of his powers myself. If I have let you down, I tender my deepest apologies and regrets. . . .”

  “From now on let me worry about keeping harm from myself or another soul. Keeping information from me does more harm than good, and it reduces our chance of progress towards some resolution.” He looked sharply at Browne: “Take as your motto with me, from the Apostle Paul, that you can do nothing against the Truth.”

  “As you say, Sir,” Browne said. He felt crushed between Cole’s reaction and his new lie. He was tempted for a moment to throw it all over and tell Cole everything. But he feared further outrage, hesitated a moment, then decided to persevere. “What,” he asked, “would you advise, as to telling Goody Higgins?”

  Cole got up, started pacing about the room, and ordered two brandies of his new servant girl.

  “I am conscious of all I owe you, of all you have done on my behalf,” Browne said. “I have never, I hope, wanted gratitude on that score, nor affection for you as a friend and advisor.”

  “I know that, Richard. I know all that. Let me think on Goody Higgins. Let me think.”

  The brandy arrived.

  Richard Browne could no longer contain the truth about his disposition of Coffin’s legacy. Cole looked surprised at first, but as Browne explained his reasoning, Cole began to nod his head in understanding. The two men agreed that £112 was generous, and that in the battle over trade one must be at least as ruthless as one’s competitors.

  “The Fletchers are what trouble me now,” Cole said. “They must be gone tomorrow. We’ll no more with them.” Cole slammed his fist on the table. “There’s little else we can do under law, as things are left now. As to their hands in this affair, and their degree of innocence, we have only their own testimony. Nothing else is likely to come. But they must be sent into exile, according to their sentence.” His fist hit the table again. “They are a blight on the land, on the community.”

  Browne nodded assent. “The Lord shall reward the doer of evil, according to his wickedness.”

  “And you have said nothing, not a word, to Goody Higgins as yet?” Cole asked.

  “She does not yet even know I have returned.”

  “Good. Now, what to do. She had better know,” Cole said. “Tell her he is dead, I suppose, eh?”

  “I believe so. That was my thought, Mr. Cole.”

  Cole drank the residue of brandy straight off.

  “She can decide what to do from here,” Browne said, “once we tell her. All for the best, even though it will cause her pain.”

  “It will,” Cole agreed, “but it will also
relieve other kinds of pain.” Cole pondered a moment, licked a spot of brandy from his lips. “Young Elderidge has been around, trying to court her,” he continued. “Now he’ll leap in after her. A few others have had their eyes on her, if I’m not mistaken.” He paused as if tallying up the would-be suitors, their names, their positions. “Not that I blame them.” He smiled. “She is no mere snoutfair young thing. But she’s come to be like a daughter to me, a daughter who married less than she might have, but a daughter whose difficulties I cannot neglect. Whether she follows my wishes, or not. You see what I mean, Richard?”

  “Yes.”

  “How about you?”

  “Me?”

  “Yes. Your interest in her. Don’t be the blockhead.”

  “Sorry. I’ve thought about it . . . her. Her housewifery, her delightful person. With some book learning a fit consort. I must admit I have found myself increasingly drawn to her. But I could not expose such feelings even while I sought the woman’s husband.”

  Cole laughed. He seemed assuaged now. “‘A just reward for her high housewifery,’” he quoted. “She may not be from your people, of course,” he said musingly, “but she’s all the woman any man could hope for or deserve.”

  “I quite agree.”

  “Then hadn’t you better discover whatever her feelings for you are?”

  “I suppose I could test the waters, after I have borne the news, and appropriate time for sorrow has elapsed. . . .”

  “And you’ll let Elderidge, or some other beat you at a man’s game?” Cole laughed. He was happy to be joking with Richard again, man-to-man, in their private moment, as if they were putting all secrets and lies behind them.

  But Richard Browne was uncomfortable, his misery increasing every moment. He thought of running away, confessing his errors, begging forgiveness, returning to England, suicide, shooting Higgins himself. None of the possibilities was satisfactory. He merely stood up to leave. “I’ll speak to her now,” he said. “Get the awful news behind us.”