Familiar Spirits (5 page)

“Your uncle had been long ill—I

“Yes, very long. The physicians despaired of a cure. The death was not unexpected and yet ...”

“And yet?”

“My aunt told a most incredible tale.”

“What sort of tale?”

John Waite sighed and frowned. With a motion of his hand he suggested the two men move away from the body, the presence of which was making Matthew uncomfortable too. Matthew replaced the napkin over Malcolm Waite’s face and followed the young man to two chairs that were placed directly in front of the hearth. John Waite picked up some faggots and got the fire stirring again, and then he asked Matthew if he would have some wine.

There was a flagon on the table and some cups. The nephew filled two and brought them to where Matthew was

sitting in one of the chairs. Matthew watched the flames in the hearth while he waited patiently for the aunt’s story.

“Ursula Tusser’s trial and execution was most upsetting to my aunt and uncle, as you can imagine. The cursed girl had practiced upon our servants, you know, filling their heads with all sorts of nonsense. Even my uncle was taken in by her devilry—for a time, at least. My aunt was the worst. It was all rot to me, this business of witchcraft. Like alchemy or a similar fraud. I tried to reason with them, my uncle and aunt. Of course when Ursula was accused, they changed their tune. Claimed to have nothing to do with her then.”

John Waite paused to refill his cup. Matthew listened carefully. He had not realized the depth of the Waites’ involvement, but of course it stood to reason. It was, after all,
their
barn and
their
servants who had been allegedly bewitched. The wonder was that the couple had escaped being accused themselves.

“They thought they would be implicated,” the nephew said, picking up on the constable’s own thoughts as though he were a mind reader. “Their solid reputations saved them—that and testifying against Ursula themselves.”

“You said your aunt and uncle were . . . patrons ... of Ursula’s. What would they have had from her—some charm or familiar to advance their fortunes?”

John Waite smiled and shook his head. “My uncle could well have used spiritual advice on his investments, but it wasn’t that. My aunt had a brother once, much beloved of her, who was murdered ten or twelve years ago. You may remember him. Philip Goodin was his name.”

“I think I do,” said Matthew. “A tavern brawl, was it not?”

“A robbery, according to the evidence. His body was found a week after. It had been deliberately covered with leaves so as not to be found until the spring following. Now, as I said, my aunt loved this brother and ever after mourned his death. She wanted nothing more than to know whether he was in heaven or hell. Ursula promised to conjure his spirit and put her doubts about his redemption to rest.”

“And did she?”

“According to my aunt, she did, but not at once. Ursula said conjuring was not easy work. She said that if it was an ordinary familiar my aunt wanted, then she could provide that easily enough, but a member of the family was a different matter. That took time, she said, and the performance of good works.”

“Good works?” exclaimed Matthew. “That’s curious terms from a necromancer. What good works were these?”

John Waite took another long drink and then smiled grimly. “Ursula called them evidences of good faith. She meant money, of course. My aunt was to give her money and other valuables. A silver bowl and a set of spoons and a lace handkerchief she had of my aunt, as though my uncle’s business losses were not a sufficient misfortune. Oh, it was all a gross imposture, the lot of it, but my aunt is very credulous, you see. The town sent the wench to the gallows for witchcraft, but in my book she was a common mountebank who, had she lived, would have been able to set herself up nicely in London on the ill-gotten gains of superstitious women.”

The nephew laughed bitterly, and asked the constable if he would have more wine. Matthew declined politely and reminded John Waite that all of what he had said was prologue to the tale his aunt had told, which Matthew was waiting eagerly to hear.

“Oh, yes. Forgive me. But the background is important. You see, according to my aunt, my uncle was frightened to death.”

“Frightened to death. By what?”

“It seems a ghost, sir.”

A wry smile played about the nephew’s mouth. Matthew was astonished. “Whose?”

“The girl’s. Ursula Tusser’s.”

“Ursula’s!”

John Waite nodded, wiped his mouth on his sleeve. He was about to speak again when they were interrupted by footsteps in the passage. Both men turned.

“How do you do, Aunt Margaret?” John Waite said.

Margaret Waite was dressed in a loose shift that revealed white shoulders and thin forearms. Her long, sensitive face was haggard and drawn and bore no paint or other attempt to hide her blemished cheeks and her present distraction. Her nether lip was swollen and trembling, and the dark shadows beneath her eyes were accentuated by the lamplight into whose circumference she now glided like a spirit herself.

“I do as well as any wife so newly come to her widowhood,” she said. She nodded a greeting to Matthew and then cast a fleeting glance at her husband’s body. Her brow knitted in pain.

Both men had stood at her entrance. Matthew remained standing while John Waite walked over and leaned against the mantel as though to warm his backsides by the fire. Margaret Waite sat down and invited Matthew to do likewise.

“I prayed for sleep, but my prayers went unanswered,” she said after an awkward silence. Matthew leaned forward and regarded the widow intently. She had begun to cry softly and plucked at the loose hairs about her ears and neck.

“I am most sorry for your husband’s death,” Matthew said in an effort to console the woman. “Malcolm was a good man, a just man. He will be much missed.”

“Missed?” she replied, laughing bitterly through her tears. “Missed by his wife, his sons. None other. He was ruined, Mr. Stock. You know that. By the way, did John tell you how my husband died, the horrible manner of it?”

“He said there was a . . . manifestation of some sort.”

“Manifestation indeed,” she asserted, snorting, then glancing reproachfully at her nephew as though she expected him to confute her claim. Not responding, he turned his back to her and began to warm his hands at the fire as if the apparition and the terror it had caused were the farthest things from his mind. “It was
she
,” Margaret reiterated to Matthew in a hoarse whisper.

“She?”

“The witch.”

“Ursula Tusser? So your nephew told me.”

“He
doesn’t believe me,” Margaret said.

Matthew heard the nephew heave a cynical sigh. So John Waite was paying attention, after all.

“I saw, myself,” Margaret said.

“You saw the ghost?”

“I did.”

“Where?” Matthew looked around the room.

Margaret twisted in her chair and pointed a shaking finger toward the window. She spoke slowly and with a tremor: “Malcolm and I were sitting here conversing and reading, our custom of an evening. Suddenly there came a little incessant rap at the window, like someone begging to come in. We both heard it—I first, but he, laying his book aside, rose, went to the window, and drew the curtain to see who or what thing it was there. The next moment, I heard him gasp, as though seized with a sudden pain, then cry out a most strange and ungodly scream. It was as though the air had been half sucked from him, and with what little remained he blurted out an appeal to heaven. I remember his exact words.

I never shall forget them. ‘Oh, Jesus God,’ he said. ‘It’s
she.
Forgive my treachery.’

“I jumped up and ran to my husband, who had fallen back in his chair. He was muttering incomprehensibly. His eyes were rolling in his head. He didn’t seem to recognize me. I went to the window. Without a thought of danger to myself,

I pulled the curtain back to see what he had seen. Oh, horrible! It was the face—the girl to the life. Her visage, pressed to the pane, was pale and ghastly. The lips were curled in a vengeful smile. Too terrified to scream, I turned again to my husband and saw now that the vision had been the death of him.”

Margaret broke off her narrative and hid her face in her hands, while her nephew, who was now pacing the room, stopped long enough to pour her a drink and encourage her to regain control of herself. Matthew walked over to the window to peer out into the darkness. He started at his own    
¹

reflection, a wide, fleshy face with deep-set eyes. He shaded the light and could see dimly. The Waites’ barn loomed beyond the garden.

“Her face appeared at this window?” Matthew asked. Margaret nodded. “I
saw”
she repeated.

“Aunt Margaret, Ursula Tusser has been dead a month, six weeks,” said John Waite in an impatient tone of voice.

“Had she been dead a year or twain, a century or more, yet she was at the window this night,” Margaret pronounced solemnly. “My husband saw her and the sight killed him. His last words seared my soul. Her face was as it was while she lived, her hair long and lank about her shoulders, like flax on a distaff. And her eyes, so accusing.”

“By now her body is food for worms,” John Waite said matter-of-factly. “How could she then appear as she was? What—did she appear decayed?”

“She appeared as I have said,” his aunt replied firmly. “As I and my husband saw at the window. Oh, poor dear husband. What shall become of me now?”

The nephew made a gesture of exasperation and resumed pacing. Matthew asked some more questions about what the couple had been doing when the ghost had appeared.

“Strange it was,” said Margaret, drying her eyes with a handkerchief her nephew had provided her with, “but we were speaking of Ursula about that time. We testified against her at her trial, you know. My husband and I. My husband encouraged me. He said if we did not, the town would believe we were witches too. I complied with his wishes. But he too regretted it afterward. When this last week her brother died, we thought the guilt of them both confirmed. My husband was happier. Then the ghost.” She shuddered and ceased to speak.

“Isn’t it possible, Aunt Margaret,” suggested the nephew, pausing again in his course, “that your very converse on this topic invited the apparition? Often the thought provokes the vision itself. So say scholars.”

“Scholars may say what they will. I know what I saw,” Margaret said, casting a reproachful glance at her nephew. “Had you seen her, Mr. Stock, you would know that no idle fancy or trick of thought could project upon that glass a visage such as I and my husband saw there. What, will the

fancy kill as her horrid shape did? Never believe it. The specter was real, as real as my own flesh. Had I then the courage to open the window, I could have reached out and touched her face.”

“Spirits have no flesh, so says the Church,” corrected the nephew in his caustic vein. “After the resurrection, yes— before, the body grows to dust where it was planted. If you did see something at the window, I am of the mind it was a trick of your own overheated imagination and your vain regret for having testified against the girl. Consider now what you yourself have admitted. You were discoursing upon her. Suddenly she appears. Reason tells us the ghost was in your brain.”

“In my husband’s brain too—in both brains at once? Nephew,
your
reason is addled,” Margaret said shortly. “My husband, if you must know, was reading the Scriptures. See, there on the floor they lay still, where he dropped them in his fright. Some passage he came upon awakened a thought. A passage concerning bearing of false witness. It was that which brought Ursula to mind. As I have said, after the trial we had second thoughts as to what we had testified to at the trial, thinking that we might have kept silent or, like my sister and her husband, spoken in the girl’s behalf to mitigate her crime. But Andrew Tusser’s wondrous death laid all our fears to rest. So we thought.”

Margaret had spoken of her sister and her husband, and the Crispins, as if by summons, now appeared. Their expressions of sadness made it evident that someone had apprised them of Malcolm Waite’s death.

“Oh, sister, thank God you’ve come!” Margaret said.

Without a word, Jane Crispin, a tall, attractive woman in her mid-thirties with smooth, pale complexion and striking blue eyes, moved forward to embrace her sister. For a few moments condolences were offered, then Margaret repeated her story of her husband’s death. She omitted no detail from her earlier version; the Crispins listened intently but noncommittally. When Margaret had finished, Jane said, “You poor dear,” and then, casting a glance at the dead man, suggested

•
3 8

that it was high time the body was removed from the parlor and that the men might perform this duty while she ushered Margaret upstairs. “My sister is exhausted,” she said. “She must rest.”

When the women were gone, the three men moved the body to an adjacent room, a small office that during the days of Malcolm Waite’s prosperity, he had used daily. There was a table there, cluttered with papers, which, when cleared, provided a place for the body. Waite was very tall. His legs hung over the table end. John Waite found a coverlet; a candle was placed at the dead man’s head. Then the three men went out, shutting the door behind them.