Scarlet Widow (43 page)

‘Please, let me go. I promise that I will tell no one that you have been here.’

‘How can I believe
anything
you say, Widow Scarlet? You betrayed me once and you will betray me again. Because of you, I now have to flee from Sutton as a fugitive, without my calash or my horses or any of my possessions, and more importantly, without any of the money that Henry Mendum was going to pay me for acquiring so much land for him. Samuel will probably have to go back to sea and start hoisting up sails again.’

‘Better to be hoisting up sails than slaves,’ Beatrice challenged him.

‘Aren’t
you
the sharp one, Widow Scarlet! No mistake about that! But now I’m going to show you how sharp
I
can be.’ He reached across the kitchen table and picked up Beatrice’s boning knife. Its blade was eighteen inches long and she had taken it out to sharpen it in readiness for killing one of the pigs.

‘What are you going to do to me?’ asked Beatrice. ‘Whatever it is, please don’t let it hurt. And don’t harm Noah, I beg you.’

Jonathan Shooks ran the ball of his thumb down the blade of the boning knife and a thin trickle of blood ran down the inside of his wrist. ‘I intend to do something demonic to you, Widow Scarlet, since you don’t seem to think that I am worthy of being called a demon. I could cut your throat, but that would be altogether too humane. I could stab you in the heart, but that would be much too quick. For what you have done to me, I am going to suffer for years, so I believe that you should suffer, too – not for years, of course, but for as long as possible.’

Beatrice closed her eyes. She tried to imagine that she wasn’t there at all, lying on the kitchen floor, listening to Jonathan Shooks talking to her in that low, measured voice. Although he was threatening her, he sounded as if he were trying to seduce her, and that made his words even more chilling.

‘I am going to slice through your Achilles tendons, so that you are unable to walk. Then I am going to fetch down your little son and dangle him up in front of you and cut open his belly so that his bowels drop into your lap. Then I shall cut open
your
belly, too, and force him back inside you, so that mother and child can again be as one, joined as you were at the start of his life and now reunited at the end.’

Beatrice seized the edge of the table top and again tried to pull herself to her feet, but this time Jonathan Shooks kicked her in the ribs – so hard that she was winded and couldn’t speak. He pushed her on to her back and then forced her over on to her face. He grasped her right foot and raised her leg, lifting the boning knife to cut through the tendon at the back of her ankle.

‘
Please God, no
!’ she screamed, kicking and struggling and trying to twist herself on to her back again. ‘
Dear God, don’t do this
!
I’ll give you anything
!
You can have all
of my land! All of my money
!
Anything
!’

‘What good to me now is your land or your money? You have made me a hunted man, Widow Scarlet! You can pay me now only with your miserable life – that and the life of your miserable squawking son!’

Beatrice made a last effort to pull herself free, but Jonathan Shooks was gripping her foot with such ferocity that the bones in her toes crackled. He wrenched her leg up even higher, but as he did so she heard the front door bang open and footsteps rushing along the hallway and somebody collided with Jonathan Shooks so hard that he was sent sprawling across the kitchen floor, thumping his back against the iron stove.

Beatrice turned around and with a thrill of alarm she saw that the brown-cloaked figure was standing over her. Inside the kitchen he seemed even taller than he had when he was lurking at the end of the driveway under the trees. His hood had dropped back, revealing a man with wild brown hair and staring brown eyes and a bushy brown beard.

‘What? Who are you?’ was all that Beatrice could manage to gasp out before Jonathan Shooks had heaved himself up from the floor. Jonathan Shooks obviously didn’t care who the man was, only that he had violently pushed him over, and without saying a word he came stalking across the kitchen, his face contorted with anger. He was holding up the boning knife, stabbing it upwards into the air,
stab, stab, stab
, as if he were daring the brown-cloaked man to come any closer.

The brown-cloaked man feinted to the left and Jonathan Shooks caught his sleeve with the point of the knife. The brown-cloaked man tried to snatch at his wrist, but Jonathan Shooks was too quick for him and stabbed him in the back of his right hand. Blood flew in a red fan pattern across the floor, but the brown-cloaked man was undeterred and tried to grab the knife again.

Jonathan Shooks swept the knife from side to side, cutting at the brown-cloaked man’s fingers again and again, and when at last the brown-cloaked man took a step back, holding up both of his bloodied hands, Jonathan Shooks lunged forward with a hog-like grunt and stabbed him in the side. The blade must have lodged between his ribs, because at first Jonathan Shooks couldn’t pull it out.

As Jonathan Shooks tried to tug the boning knife out of him, the brown-cloaked man seized his moment and grasped his wrist with both hands. Grunting and struggling together, they pulled out the knife, but now the brown-cloaked man twisted Jonathan Shooks’s wrist backwards and upwards and forced him to stab himself twice in the side of his neck. Blood abruptly sprayed over both of them, and as they wrestled and danced around the kitchen they began to look like life-size marionettes with their faces varnished scarlet.

Jonathan Shooks swayed violently from side to side, trying to break the brown-cloaked man’s grip on his wrist, but the brown-cloaked man was taller and bigger and younger. He forced Jonathan Shooks to stab himself in the face again and again. The boning knife sliced his right cheek open, and then cut his upper lip apart so that it looked like a harelip, and then stuck right up his nostril.

Both men were grunting, but neither of them spoke. Beatrice climbed unsteadily to her feet. She could still hear Noah crying, but the two men were lurching from side to side in front of the kitchen doorway and she couldn’t get past them. They crashed together into the hutch, so that half a dozen china plates fell to the floor and smashed. Then they stumbled into the stack of copper saucepans beside the stove, with a clatter like the bells of hell. All the time droplets of blood were flying in all directions, and the kitchen floor was becoming dahlia-patterned with bloody footprints.

At last the brown-cloaked man pushed Jonathan Shooks up against the open kitchen door. Very gradually he levered Jonathan Shooks’s arm upwards until the point of the boning knife was only a half-inch away from his right eyeball.

There was a long quivering moment when both men were straining their utmost. Jonathan Shooks was already wearing a beard of blood and whenever he grunted he sprayed blood into the brown-cloaked man’s beard.

Beatrice wanted to shout out, ‘
No
!’ but she could only watch them in horror. She didn’t even know who the brown-cloaked man was. He could be a madman. If he were to kill Jonathan Shooks, he might very well come for her next.

The moment of impasse seemed to go on and on. But Jonathan Shooks was losing so much blood that his knees were starting to sag and his head was dropping forward. With a last grunt the brown-cloaked man pushed the point of the boning knife deep into his eye. His eyeball popped, but the brown-cloaked man didn’t stop pushing. The blade slid in at least four inches and must have pierced his brain.

Now, however, the brown-cloaked man released his grip. He took two steps back, his chest rising and falling with exhaustion. Jonathan Shooks feebly raised his left hand, pawing at the air, but he was too weak now to reach the knife handle that was protruding from his eye socket. He slid sideways on to the floor, leaving a semicircular smear of blood on the pinewood door. He twitched once, and then again, but then he lay still and his left eye misted over.

The brown-cloaked man turned to Beatrice, showing her his bloodstained hands.

‘I should wash this off,’ he told her, in a voice that was little more than a croak.

‘Who are you?’ she said. ‘You’re not going to hurt me, are you?’

‘Hurt you?’ said the brown-cloaked man. ‘I thought I had just saved your life.’

He limped to the sink, holding his side. He stared at the pump but he didn’t seem to have the strength to draw himself any water.

Beatrice approached him cautiously. ‘I have seen you again and again, among the trees,’ she told him.

‘Among the trees, yes. That’s where I’ve been living most of the time.’

‘But who are you? What have you been doing here? Was it you who left me that perfume, and those wild flowers, and that message?’

The brown-cloaked man nodded.

‘You’re hurt,’ said Beatrice. ‘I’d best take a look at it. Take off your cloak.’

‘Don’t worry. I’ll live.’

‘No, I insist. Take off your cloak.’

Wincing, the brown-cloaked man lifted his cloak over his head. Beatrice helped him to pull it over his head and then she dropped it on the floor. Underneath, the man was thin and white-skinned, and he smelled as if he hadn’t washed in a very long time. All he was wearing beneath his cloak was a pair of stained white cotton britches and sandals.

The knife wound between his ribs was oozing blood. Beatrice wiped it and then handed him the rag and said, ‘Keep that pressed against it. I’m going to go upstairs and fetch a sheet to bind it with. Also, I have to rescue my son. He must think that I have deserted him forever.’

She dragged out a kitchen chair for him and said, ‘There. Sit down. The less you exert yourself the better.’

She stepped past the body of Jonathan Shooks and then hurried upstairs. Noah had been crying so much that his face was red and smothered in tears. Beatrice picked him up and then went to the linen chest at the end of her bed and took out one of her older sheets. She carried Noah back down to the kitchen. The man was still sitting at the kitchen table but he was looking glassy-eyed now and leaning on his elbow as if he were close to collapse.

Beatrice put Noah in his high-chair and gave him a biscuit to keep him quiet for a few minutes. Noah turned his head and looked in bewilderment at the bloodied body of Jonathan Shooks lying sideways on the floor, and then at the skinny, grubby, half-naked man with his long brown hair and his big brown beard. Beatrice tore strips off the sheet and bandaged the man’s chest as tightly as she could. While she did so, he stared at her but said nothing.

At last, when she had pinned the bandage together, she stood back and said, ‘There. Once the bleeding has stopped, I’ll apply some goldenseal tincture to it and that will guard against any infection.’

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I knew that you would know how to treat me.’

‘You
know
me?’

He nodded and then squeezed his eyes tight shut as he felt a stab of pain in his side.

‘So how is it that you know me? Who are you? Do
I
know
you
?’

‘It was all a long time ago, Beatrice. You probably never thought that I was worthy of being remembered.’

‘Should I remember you? From where?’

‘ I was very foolish then, and reckless, but in my own way I fell in love with you the moment I first saw you, and I have always loved you, ever since.’

‘You know my name,’ said Beatrice. She sat down in the chair next to him and stared intently at his face. It was then that he looked up and sideways and she recognized who he was.

‘
Jeremy
! Dear Lord, you’re
Jeremy
!’

He tried to laugh, but all he could do was cough and nod his head again.

‘But I don’t understand! What are you doing here in New Hampshire? I thought you were in Manchester, working with your brothers! Why are you dressed like that? Why didn’t you come to the house sooner? Have you been living in the woods? You’re so
thin
!’

Jeremy gave her a regretful smile. ‘You know what I used to be like. Always drunk, always thieving, never caring for anything or anybody. The only person I ever really cared for was you, and what a mess I made of that. Francis was much your better choice for a husband.’

‘But what happened, Jeremy? How did you get here, for goodness’ sake?’

‘I fell out with my brothers because I was always drunk and never did any work. In the end I decided to follow your example and come to the colonies to make a fresh start. I used my inheritance to start up a trading company in Ipswich with a fellow I knew from Birmingham. We didn’t do too badly until my partner skipped off with all of my money and left me high and dry.’

‘Why didn’t you come and ask us for help? We would have helped you!’

‘I love you, Bea! But look at me! Look at my condition! This cloak is all I have in the world. How could I approach you like this, like some cadge-gloak? I nearly came to your door but each time I lost my nerve, and in any case Francis wouldn’t have been happy about it, would he?’

‘You could afford to give me perfume.’

‘I stole it, what do you think? That’s how low I am.’

‘But you came here today and you saved my life, and little Noah’s life, too.’

Jeremy looked across at Noah playing with the crumbs of his broken biscuit. ‘Is that his name? Noah? That’s a good name. Noah, who saved whatever he could when his whole world was drowned.’

Beatrice stood up. ‘I’m going to call my labourers and have them take away this – this—’ she nodded her head towards Jonathan Shooks, but she couldn’t bring herself to say his name. ‘I’ll send to the village, too, to the magistrate, and let him know what’s happened. I will testify that you saved my life, Jeremy, don’t worry. In any event, he was wanted for murder and extortion and they will thank you rather than condemn you.’

‘Thank you, Bea.’

‘Our first priority must be for your wound to heal. We must feed you properly and make sure that you rest, and clothe you properly, too. I am sure that Francis would not have begrudged you some of his shirts and britches, even if he were still alive.’