Familiar Spirits (10 page)

at the house, half expecting to see Margaret or one of her servants or perhaps the nephew observing her progress, critical of its intent, preparing to call her back. But she saw no one, either at the door or at the windows. The house might have been deserted for all the signs of life she could see. A dead house. She cast a quick nervous glance beyond the garden to the meadow, then looked toward the neighboring houses and their similar complement of gardens and outbuildings. There was nothing. Under the glowering sky a vast stillness had fallen, and she felt unaccountably afraid.

But she was not inclined to go back. The barn beckoned to her. She continued along the path and was nearly to the doors of the barn when she saw the cat.

Lithely it came from out of the dark interior, as though to meet her, and took up a position of watchfulness, mewing plaintively. It was a large brindled cat with a flat face, bristling fur, and eye slits that opened to reveal hard gemlike eyes. Since she was fond of cats, she greeted it pleasantly, but as she did the cat arched its back and hissed.

“Now there’s a good gentle cat,” she said, extending a hand to stroke it, bending over. The creature struck at her with its paw and made a hostile snarling noise.

She recoiled, her heart thumping. “Inhospitable devil to use me so ill,” she said in a quaking voice.

The cat ignored the rebuke and continued to glare menacingly. She told herself the cat was but an ordinary cat, probably a capable mouser and—if a male, as its size seemed to suggest—a patriarch of some eminence in the neighborhood. And yet it blocked her way and threatened with an uncanny purposefulness.

Then it occurred to her that the cat may have been Ursula Tusser’s familiar, and the thought triggered another spasm of apprehension. It was almost as strong as a premonition. For what seemed a long time, she stood in a quandary, uncertain whether to proceed or to return to the house. She had almost decided to return when the cat unaccountably forsook its position and bounded off into the weeds.

Now that her way was open again, she began to breathe

more easily. Slowly her courage returned. With an effort of will she reasoned that the gaping doors of the barn presented an opportunity. The Waite house returned to normal might not permit such unsupervised investigation as she intended. Having convinced herself, she resolved to go on, if only to spite the impudent cat, who, she concluded in her more confident frame of mind, was a mere cat, after all.

She stepped across the threshold into the barn, bending her head for the low lintel and leaving the doors ajar. The chamber was without windows, and it took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the dimness. The air was moist and rank with the odor of horse dung, and presently she could see the originator of this stench: the Waites’ mare, standing in the first of a line of stalls. The horse shook its head and whinnied, and at this friendly greeting Joan’s apprehension began to fade. She approached and stroked the mare’s nose and withers. The mare nudged at her ear affectionately. “Poor creature,” she said softly, in a deliberate undertone as though she expected her conversation with the animal to be overheard. “To endure such filth. Do those lazy louts never clean your stall or let you graze in the meadow?”

The horse wheezed and stamped to share Joan’s complaint. Her desire to explore revived. At the end of the stalls she could see a ladder she knew would lead to the loft. She walked toward it, glancing as she did at the dark empty stalls, filled with trash. She came to the ladder and looked upward at the rectangular opening in the ceiling, dimly perceiving, beyond the underside of the roof, the gaps of light in the rotting thatch. Testing the rungs of the ladder and finding them sturdy, she began to climb.

The great door of the loft was closed but light came in through the chinks in the wallboards. On a summer day the loft would have been an oven, unbearable. Now the layer of matted hay, turned into compost by moisture from the leaking roof, exuded a warm, earthy smell. It was not unpleasant, and while she remained on her guard, her heart beating like a drum, she admitted to herself the loft was not the chamber of horrors she had expected. There was little to be

seen—certainly little evidence of secret ceremonies or incantations that had given it its local reputation. A mouse watched her with its beady little eyes, then scampered off. In dark corners she could make out the skulls and bones of birds who had found their way into the loft but not out again. Spiders and their webby habitations. A few rusting tools. The pendent shapes of bats in their black cloaks waiting for the true dark. Now that she was here, what was she to do? There remained an edge to her curiosity as though she had not seen all there was to see.

She noticed a pitchfork standing against the wall, and without a definite sense of what she was looking for she began to poke around in the matted hay. It came up in clumps, sticking to the prongs, revealing dark moldering underlayers. At length her explorations were rewarded. She found a piece of red ribbon, the nub of candle (what mischief had it illuminated?), a fragment of yellowing paper upon which she could just make out the word “whereas” written in a fine, secretary’s hand. Heartened by these small discoveries, she persisted in her labors and was ready to give over her task when her tool struck a hard object. Kneeling down, she extracted the thing with her hands, then took it to the wall and a ray of light the better to inspect it. She saw, cleaning it off with her hands, that it was a carved figure of human shape, with eyes, nose, and mouth carefully etched in soft wood. The figure was armless, but two legs had been crudely represented. In the groin was an obscene parody of a male member, raised and bloated.

She cried out in disgust and cast the image into the corner. She knew what it was, the image. She knew its purpose—the laming of an enemy or his cow or his horse, the spoiling of crops. At its most innocent, causing love, or lust, to flourish in an obdurate heart. But even that was witchcraft, were it possible. And even if it was not possible, was not the intent equally malign?

Through the long cracks in the walls she could see outside, down into the garden, if she pressed her face against the wood. She did, and saw Susan Goodyear walking down the

path in the direction of the privy. Joan watched the girl. Susan was carrying a chamber pot and walking listlessly, in no hurry. As she passed the barn, she looked up and Joan drew back, fearful of being seen. But she was not seen. The girl walked on, went inside the privy, came out a few minutes later, walked back to the house. Joan watched, waiting. She was ready to leave now, more than ready. She had found what she had come for. She realized there had been something more than gossip behind the charges against Ursula Tusser. She was not convinced yet it was
all
true, but now she believed it was partly so. She shuddered, imagining the scene. The conjurers with their images, their incantations and spells. The awful consequences—loss of valuables, sickness of man and beast, impotency, death. Poor Malcolm Waite. She moved toward the ladder and had her foot on the top rung when she froze.

Whispers. She could hear them, coming from below, male or female she could not tell. She hardly dared to breathe, wondering at the same time why she should be so terrified of discovery. It wasn’t as though she were a thief or ordinary intruder. She was a friend of the family. All she had to do was to call out, Hello, is anyone there? But she dared not speak. The whispering stopped. She heard footsteps, the creak of a hinge, a dull thud. Then nothing.

She continued to listen. From time to time she could hear the stirring of the mare. She focused her mind, realizing that she could not remain where she was indefinitely. She peered into the murky darkness below her and saw nothing but an empty stall. Slowly she descended.

All the way down she held her breath, almost afraid to look about her for fear of seeing someone waiting. Worse was the thought of someone grabbing her by the ankle or calf. She could almost feel the iron grip. She stood on the barn floor and stared into the dimness. Nothing but what was there before. She moved quickly toward the doors, noticing that they were closed now although she had deliberately left

them open. More evidence that she had not been alone in the barn. She paused to look at the mare. The sad equine face regarded her with its great round glistening eyes. “Who was here?” she whispered, as though the dumb beast would tell.

She pushed open the shaky doors of the barn, emerged from the gloom, and ran toward the house.

Joan
 
burst into the kitchen to find Susan Goodyear sitting on a stool in front of the fire. The girl hummed tunelessly and did not look up. Her small hands lay idle on her coarse apron and her head hung listlessly as though her physical energy had been sapped.

“I was walking—in the meadow,” Joan blurted out in a voice she felt must surely betray how distraught she was. She was still clammy with fear and her heartbeat roared in her ears.

But Susan showed no interest in where Joan had been or why. She ceased humming and looked up slowly, reluctantly drawn away from whatever had held her attention. She nodded her head and said that her mistress had come down, pointing in the direction of the parlor. Joan went through the narrow passage that connected the kitchen with the parlor, pausing only long enough to catch her breath and brush the telltale hay from her skirts. She could feel the heat in her face, the flushed cheeks, and thought how absurd she must have looked rushing like a madwoman from the barn, terrified of a whisper and a piece of wood. But the evil had been palpable. She could not deny it, although she could not make sense of it rationally. Dread still clutched at her heart, and it was only the shock of seeing Margaret Waite that dislodged the thought of the barn from her mind.

At her friend’s entrance Margaret Waite rose from a chair near the fireplace and smiled thinly. She was dressed in

widow’s weeds, but carelessly, as though she had been forced to wear the sable garments. Her face was gray, the features sharpened by grief. Her pockmarked cheeks were hollow, and it seemed to Joan that death, which had so recently seized upon her husband, had somehow already marked her as well. Joan tried to hide her dismay as she took the chair offered to her and sat facing the widow. “God bless you in your bereavement, Margaret,” she said. “How is it with you?”

“Oh, Joan, my dear good friend,” the widow said in a tired voice, “would that a happier occasion had brought us together after so long an absence.”

Joan scorned the consolatory platitudes by which clergy and laity were wont to stifle the natural outpourings of grief, and therefore refrained from talking of heavenly mansions. She knew Margaret wanted more at the moment an ear for her anguish than a tedious lecture. After expressing her sympathy as briefly and simply as she could, she sat back and listened while Margaret vented her grief, mindful at the same time that but for the grace of God this wretched state might be hers too. Margaret spoke fondly of her dead husband, enumerating his virtues as though she had forgotten how long the two families had known one another. Nothing she said would have suggested to a stranger how hard she had borne down on her husband throughout their married life. Now it was all roses, roses without thorns. But Joan did not feel it was her place to dispute this picture of marital bliss, and she noticed too that Margaret scrupulously avoided saying anything about the manner of her husband’s death. She wondered if the widow had determined to put the awful business from her mind, or was merely being cautious. Joan listened with a sympathetic countenance, and when the opportunity presented itself, she brought up Margaret’s long-dead brother, remembering that it was his strange death that had given rise to Margaret’s participation in Ursula’s conjurings. “It’s a great shame,” she remarked, “that you have not your only brother alive to comfort you.”

Margaret replied, “Yes, Philip would have been a great comfort, and had he lived I would heartily wish him at my

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side now, but since he is dead, I would not wish him other than where he is.”

Joan concluded from this circuitous response that Margaret was satisfied her brother’s soul was in heaven. Joan decided to pursue the topic further. “I quite forget how it was your brother Philip died.”

Margaret paused and her brow furrowed as though the recollection caused considerable pain. “He was murdered,” she said. “It has been almost twelve years now since his death.”

Margaret’s eyes glazed with emotion as she recalled the gruesome details. The disappearance, the discovery of the naked decaying corpse, the futile inquiries.

“I do not remember him well,” Joan confessed, although in fact she remembered him quite well. He was an ill-tempered youth, prone to quarrel.

“He was a well-proportioned young man,” said Margaret, “handsome one might say, with raven hair. He was most beloved of our family, the favorite of our mother, and he had many friends, each of whom would have trusted him with his life if need be.”

“Blessed is he who has so few vices,” said Joan.

“He had not a one,” Margaret asserted. “Or if he did, they were such vices as make men admired by other men. He had a strong will—a hot temper, some would say who knew him least. But I thought it no vice, and he kept clear of violent quarrels such as bring to ruin some young men’s lives.”

“It is for that reason, then, that your faith is so strong that he is in heaven?”

Margaret looked surprised at the question but answered promptly. “Wherefore should his soul not be in heaven, being the virtuous man he was? Besides,” she said, “I have more recent confirmation that sets my old fears and uncertainties at rest.” She folded her hands complacently in her lap and smiled at the crackling fire. For a few moments she was lost in her own thoughts, and Joan was certain they had to do with her brother. She sat there motionless, like a figure in a painting, seemingly oblivious to Joan’s presence. She started from her trance only when Joan asked in the most casual