The Strange Death of Mistress Coffin

by Robert J. Begiebing

  I can say no more until we meet, my dear friend. Let me commend you to the protection of the Almighty.

  E.H.

  Had he become now just another in the line of suitors competing to win her skill, her labor, and her flesh? None of them, he told himself, could know her even as he did—and she him—nor feel such pangs of tenderness. But of course by now her own feelings toward the Reverend Mr. Vaughan had grown in ways he could not know or understand, perhaps did not even wish to imagine. Had she, perhaps, been incapable of natural warmth toward a man, as the poet said: “Doth carry / June in her eyes, in her heart January”?

  And what of Higgins? Wouldn’t he, Browne, have to expose the true history of Jared Higgins? Only then might she be able to obtain a bill of divorce from Higgins on grounds of desertion.

  When she returned, she did not let him know. He discovered it by the way and he felt certain now that she could not face him, so that he himself began to grow ashamed and hesitant again. He doubted that he would ever regain the courage he had found ten miles out at sea to tell her the truths he had discovered, to claim her back from across the gulf that had opened between them.

  It came only by chance that Richard and Elizabeth met, just as by the time it happened, they both knew it would be only chance. As late summer approached, Browne was walking in the wood near the settlement along a well-trodden path, as he sometimes did when he felt as though he needed a change of scene to think. The air had turned clear overnight, cool enough for such an outing, and he felt invigorated.

  He had turned to retrace his way and had been heading for some minutes back toward the point where the path opened upon the settlement when he heard women’s voices below him where the stream ran. He stopped and peered downward into the wood, but had to leave the path and descend some twenty feet to see who it was. The woods were open here, but the terrain rolling in its descent, so that he began to recognize the voices before he could see who spoke. His impressions were confirmed when soon before him, just on the opposite bank of the stream, were Elizabeth and her oldest daughter, Jerusha, and son Jared. They all held baskets and wore sacks for collecting wild mushrooms, herbs, and berries. They had not noticed him yet, and he stopped, hesitating between making himself known and quietly returning to the path above. But realizing he might be seen anyway, he called out to them in as friendly a voice as he could raise.

  “Mr. Browne!” Elizabeth called out, smiling. “We had been just wondering if we might bring you some of our wild harvest later this day or tomorrow.” Her children smiled and confirmed her.

  “It has been a long time,” Browne said. “I had not even known when you returned. But here we are now, finally.” He smiled, spread his arms, looked about the wood. Her laughter seemed a little embarrassed. Jared and Jerusha returned to their work as Elizabeth began to walk toward him. He took a few more steps toward her and added: “Come walk with me a moment, just over here.”

  She selected a great tree trunk and tucked her basket and bag within one of its rooty folds. She began to ford the stream on exposed flat rocks. He hurried to give her a hand and she accepted his help warmly.

  “And how come you here, Mr. Browne?” she asked.

  “Exercise only, good for clearing the mind when there is much weighing upon it.” They began to walk along a slight ridge that ran roughly parallel to the stream. “Good for one’s humors.”

  “I see,” she said. “You are troubled in mind?”

  “Were you really intending to pay me a visit, with your harvest?”

  “We had spoken of it. I believe we will, yes,” she said and looked at him as they walked. He avoided her eyes.

  “It has been so long, Goody Higgins,” he said, as if preliminary to some other point, but he stopped.

  “On both our parts,” she said.

  “Everything would have been simpler, as before, had I not written to you. I made a fool of myself?”

  “I was,” she said, “taken unawares, of the strength of your feelings I mean.” She paused and turned her head to glance at him. “There should continue such feelings of friendship between us, even tenderness, as you say, but I had not thought of marriage, Mr. Browne.”

  “Then I fear I am more than once unwise,” he said. “Mr. Cole advised me to court you as if my life depended upon it.”

  “Would he meddle in privy matters?”

  “He meant it only in the most helpful spirit.”

  “He sees no differences between us? He thinks such a match—” She stopped as if searching for a word.

  “Appropriate?” he offered.

  “Yes.” She looked at him, but he avoided her eyes a while longer as they walked slowly through the big trees.

  “He sees nothing real or substantial against it, not here, in New England.” Browne spread his arms out toward the whole forest and the settlement. “There need be few such considerations here. Here the world, and everyone in it, is new!”

  “Nonsense,” she said. “We bring our stations with us, as laborers their indentures.”

  “That is not so clear in these parts, as you well know. But put all such thoughts aside. We are speaking of one another, not of others.”

  She ignored the direction his speech was taking. “And you expect to stay in New England?” she asked. “I had thought you’d be returning to your home in Mother England at some later time.”

  “I have no intention to do so now, certainly not for a long time.” He stopped and turned toward her, looking directly into her face. “You have considered my letter, no doubt?”

  “Yes.”

  “And has there been any issue of your considerations?”

  “As to marriage? I am sorry that I have not responded, as I should have. You threw me into such confusion. And then I had to visit my cousins. Everything at once. I didn’t know how to answer you. Or it seemed I could not.” She looked at him, almost defiantly. “So I have not.”

  “I thought you had, more or less, run away from me,” he said. “I too became confused, frightened by what I had done.”

  “I’m sorry. I owed you honesty.”

  “No. I have not been honest either, from the best of motives of course, as most who are dishonest will tell you.” He found, however, that now he had started, he could not continue.

  “Oh?” she said to prompt him.

  “No. This is not the place to tell you everything. May I come to you, some time convenient for you, and explain these things? There is so much to explain. Perhaps if we face it together. . . .”

  “What is it you have found, Mr. Browne?”

  “It must wait until we may talk calmly and honestly to one another, and when you are in a more comfortable place than this wood.”

  “Then let’s return now and be true with one another.” She turned back toward her children and he followed. She remained pleasant but efficient. They walked together, all carrying their harvest, to her house. She looked after all her children immediately and set them about cleaning and preparing what they had gathered for cooking and storage. Then she returned to Browne, who had been mentally rehearsing a hundred ways to tell her, and they sat down opposite one another. She looked directly at him.

  “Well?” she said, a trace of a smile on her mouth, her eyes intent. Then he began. He briefly reviewed the contents of Kathrin Coffin’s journal, and from there told her everything he now knew, and had heard. She asked an occasional question, or rose to walk about the room and then sit down again several times. He told her about Goody Hussey’s help with the Fletchers, about the bungled conspiracy with the Fletchers in the face of Coffin’s vengeance, Coffin’s death letter, and, finally, her husband’s continued but separate life as an Indian. Before he had finished she was weeping, but he went on, even stopping to explain why each secret, and even the lies about her husband, were necessary at the time, or seemed to be terribly necessary, part of the oaths he had sworn, the protection he and Shaw had ringed about her. What he still could not bring himself to tell her, only, was
the full amount Coffin had left to them, or rather to him, in his last will. He could not admit to her that she had not received the half he had promised and intended.

  It was some time before she spoke to him, but he waited, feeling as if he himself had ended all his hope forever. And once she stopped weeping and seemed to gather herself again, he had to tell her his final doubts about the murder of Kathrin Coffin. For although Jared Higgins had told him and Shaw a tale that incriminated others, he could not decide from one moment to the next whether to believe it or dismiss it. Only the truth of her husband’s life did he know first hand. Everything else was based on sometimes conflicting testimony, and on the journal and letters of others. He could not himself say at this point how much he now believed, how much had been concocted and staged for him, or for them, just as, he now explained, the Fletchers and Jared Higgins had once supposedly staged a violent, bungled tragedy to fool Mr. Coffin.

  “It may not be worthy of credit,” Browne said, “but I have written out the full account, in his own words, of your husband’s version of the events leading to Mistress Coffin’s death. Shaw and I have witnessed this secret document, but I will send a copy over to you tomorrow morning. You may judge then yourself of its truth or falsity.

  “At this very moment,” he added, “I am inclined to believe, in outline, the general pressure of the events I have told you, and let smaller inconsistencies fall by the wayside.”

  “Mr. Cole knows all of this?” she finally asked.

  “Some. Some more than you did. But not all you know now. And neither has he seen the document of Higgins’ secret tale. I do not yet judge it worthy of his notice.”

  “And will you tell him?”

  “I must. But I have not been able to. Perhaps now I can. That he too may judge for himself. Yet if I do I can no longer live here. I don’t believe he would forgive me what further secrets I have kept from him, what further lies I have told. Whatever my reasons, or reasonings. I could not now, in conscience, remain here as so much his beneficiary, so much in his debt. Nor, I’m sure, would he wish me to so remain. Do you see?”

  Yes, she said, she saw.

  Then she thanked him for being honest with her finally. She thanked him for trying his best to protect her from the worst until now, but she wished he hadn’t. She thanked him again for all he had done for her and felt for her. But she asked him to leave her. She wanted to be with her children. She wanted to consider what she would do now and what, in all this long, terrible dream she had been living since Mistress Coffin’s death, was real.

  Part IV

  How long halt ye between two opinions?

  If the Lord be God, follow him: but if Baal, then follow him.

  And the people answered him not a word.

  —I Kings 18:21

  XXIII

  The gathering about the grave of Elizabeth Browne at Point of Graves was impressive. Among the dignitaries and guests were Colonel Waldron (President of the new Province of New Hampshire), prosperous merchants and their ladies, the Reverend Nehemiah Vaughan from Robinson’s Falls, six of Elizabeth’s surviving, grown children—Jared, Jerusha, Sara, Enoch, Aaron, and Apphia—and numerous grandchildren. Near the front of this group, looking into his wife’s grave as the simple farewell progressed, stood Richard Browne in his black bombazine suit, a man well into his sixties, gray, stooped in sorrow yet plainly still strong. The day was windy and clear with a brilliance that only a great river, as it opens to the sea, can impart to the light. Browne squinted at the gravestone.

  HERE LYES BURIED THE BODY

  OF ELIZABETH BROWNE

  WIFE TO RICHARD BROWNE

  DIED MAY 14 1682

  ON Ye DAY OF HER 66TH YEAR

  Had she chosen death, as the date would suggest, or had there been a terrible coincidence? There were hard feelings now against the Indians. Many placed the blame there. So had Richard Browne upon first hearing that his wife’s body had been pulled from the river. But he no longer placed the blame elsewhere. For some time her mind had been unsettled—perhaps in more torment than he had realized—so that she had seemed unaware of this world. And there were bodily ills. She had long complained of occasional weakness in the heart and bowels, ever since a difficult pregnancy and birth with their youngest child, Apphia. In her later years these afflictions seemed to grow more frequent and agonizing.

  Yet the strong spark of her life had never really flagged until, as he now supposed, she walked into the Piscataqua River. Of course no one would believe it of a woman so steadfast in her observances of the Lord. Even the Reverend Vaughan—normally a very pragmatic man—blamed an undefined group of wandering Indians whom she must have had the misfortune to encounter on one of her meditative walks.

  Mr. Vaughan did not pray or actively officiate in the port town’s lingering absence of a minister, shunning in the old tradition any hint of ritualism even regarding the dead, but he attended, a grave old man, a stern reminder, as some might say, of earlier times and political ties. Neither could he, Vaughan, admit the possibility of self-murder, a crime against church and country. Grounds to refuse Christian burial. Who among one’s friends and one’s neighbors would suggest such a thing?

  No, Browne thought, and what matter would her secret be to the public mind? There was for Browne irony enough in either death. Here was a tragic quirk of Fate that humbled: a good woman who with her whole family survived the Indian wars of Metacom’s Rebellion only to meet a violent death by her own hand (or even the hands of savages). His sense of Fate’s cunning might have increased, however, had he known that his wife met her death in the uneasy lull between King Philip’s War and that long series of more bloody Indian wars—if more profitable to these gay merchants—beginning with King William’s War in 1689. For it would take nearly a century for the colonists to defeat what they had aroused of outrage in the local tribes and of commercial competitiveness in the French.

  He held in his hand the large silver brooch that was his wife’s favorite, and usually her only, ornament. And just as his mind began to unloose a horde of memories and old associations from the nearly thirty years of their marriage, his daughter by Elizabeth, Apphia, placed her gentle arm through his and spoke.

  “Come, Father,” he heard her saying now. “We must return with the others to the house.” Her eyes were also wet, but she managed to smile as he looked at her. Her dimple as she smiled reminded him of Apphia the child, even as he began to walk with the grown woman, to see her again near the age of two walking uncertainly about the house clutching some object. Was it a doll? He saw again her childish, natural ringlets jiggling brightly on the back of her head, heard her high sweet voice talking some private nonsense to imagined auditors.

  It was as if her coming not long after the miserable death of another baby girl, somehow to redress an imbalance of pain and ugliness in the world, caused Apphia to be an extraordinarily beautiful child. And in the first years of Apphia’s life he had struggled to keep a distance from her, for he had not known until the death of his first daughter the pain of watching one’s own very young children die. He had not known how he could ever bear it again, however common a thing it had once seemed to him before he had children of his own. But then the childbearing stopped suddenly and there were only Aaron and Apphia for his own offspring.

  Of course he knew death was the price of life, and he was enough of an Anglican to gather some relief from the thought of the heavenly peace of the souls he had loved, now that the suffering of each one’s passage was over. Yet just at the moment he was in that state of meaningless emptiness which facing a loved one’s burial brings. He walked on Apphia’s arm like a partially animated corpse.

  Once the duties of putting one’s dead to rest were completed, the mourning rings and gloves appropriately distributed, Browne went directly to bed. He lay awake in the daylight and well into the night praying for strength, weeping from time to time, and hoping to live long enough to enjoy his grandchildren as they grew. How one held o
n to life against any pain, he thought. How one sought to squeeze every possible moment out of life when one might better be seeking to join that gathering of beloved spirits too tired or beaten or blasted to remain bound to the earth!

  The next day at home he tried to begin attending to his commercial interests, but his heart was not ready. Neither could he read nor write his correspondence, nor eat, nor even walk in his garden.

  He was merely sitting dumbly at his writing table, staring at nothing in particular, feeling vaguely nauseous, vaguely stiff-jointed, vaguely pained about the chest, when his son Aaron and daughter Apphia entered his study.

  He smiled at them, his first smile in days, and stood up stiffly to embrace them both at once.

  “I feel,” he said, holding them, “as if I have lost some part of myself.” He began to weep again and turned away toward a window overlooking the street to collect himself. Below, people bustled about their daily rounds. “That’s a strange sensation to me,” he finally added, “that sense of bodily loss and pain that endures. One would have expected it to be more a longing or aching of the soul. But something vital has been cut from me and now the pain of the wound has come into itself.” He turned as if to be sure they understood him. “It is, you see, a physical pain I speak of, more definite than that pain I suffer in my thoughts.”

  “Yes, Father,” Apphia said.

  “You can talk to us, Father,” Aaron added. “We can help with this burden.”

  “Father, we wish to learn more ourselves,” Apphia said.

  “More?” her father asked.

  “About her. About both of you,” she said.

  “Who knows her better than you two?” he asked.

  “We knew her, yes of course, Father, but there was so much of her life we did not know,” she added.

  “She loved us,” Aaron added, “and we her. But Apphia means we knew her not as her other children, in the earlier days.”

  “Neither of you ever told us what happened to Mother’s first husband,” Apphia added, “even when we asked. We know little of her people in England, even though Aaron has traveled to Old England with you.” Apphia stopped and looked at her father as he sat down again at his table. “Something happened, long ago, Father. Can you finally tell us what it was?”