The Strange Death of Mistress Coffin by Robert J. Begiebing Read Free Book Online Page B

his consort?”
    â€œI’m a Christian, Sir. But I’ve been held over the pits of Hell, and have watched my children begin to tumble into the pits. Do not the Liberties of New England allow a tormented, innocent man to save himself and his own?” He hesitated, looking from Browne to Shaw. “I am no Separatist, no Opinionist, no Sectary of any color. I am a poor planter like so many others who has lived by his skill, Mr. Browne, and who has now found the fur trade to be good.”
    â€œBut through necromancy, Higgins? Through black arts and heathens? One need not be a Separatist nor even bound under the Liberties of Massachusetts Bay, as we all now are, to see the dangers that way. If you would speak of the terrors of Hell’s Pit, speak of maleficence, speak of the battles of necromancers.”
    â€œTantpasiquineo has applied his powers in my behalf. That is all,” Higgins said. “To do so is what he has chosen. And there seems some relief in it.”
    â€œYet nothing is resolved,” Browne said. “Still less the circumstances of your abandoned family. Your wife grows distracted, Higgins. With good cause. Might we not rejoin you and them and seek some Christian solution to these trials? Even granting there are black arts against you—which I do not—surely we could search them out.”
    â€œYou would take that chance now? Have me take it?” Higgins asked. “I would not.”
    â€œMr. Cole would bring in whatever pastors or teachers or physicians are necessary to relieve your burdens.”
    â€œMr. Browne, I don’t know you. But I believe your purposes honorable. I trust Mr. Cole’s judgment of you. And Darby’s.But I mean to stay here for now. I don’t know when I may return. Too much dear to me is at stake. And there’s an end of it, Sir. I have to place myself in your hands also. I trust you to speak to no one of this meeting. No one. Else the blood of others is upon your hands. Exile under Tantpasiquineo has saved me and mine. Pray, do
not
cross me now.” He rose to indicate that the interview was over.
    That night Browne’s sleep was punctuated by wakefulness and dreams.
    â€œWas there someone in the wigwam with us last night?” he asked Shaw the next morning.
    â€œNo. I sleep hard, but I wake if someone comes near. Who?”
    â€œI don’t know. He stood by the dying fire, and but for one slice of moonlight in the smokehole, that spark was the only light. I saw a black shape; arms like wings. There seemed to be someone with him, behind him, a woman white as the moon.”
    â€œA dream,” Shaw said, pulling his leather jacket over his head. “I saw nothing.”
    â€œPerhaps. What chance do you think we have of convincing Higgins to leave with us?”
    â€œNone. But that’s something he must decide for himself. We’ll give him a week, as we agreed.”
    Throughout that week Higgins never came any closer to leaving, and Browne never met Tantpasiquineo. The undersagamores were, however, completely accommodating.
    It was on their journey home that Browne began to understand Higgins’ position. There was a certain logic to his adamancy, if one accepted his version of events. That version, of course, shed no light upon Mistress Coffin’s death. Were he, Higgins, the guilty party, there would be reason enough for his flight from his own people and law, to become one of the lost or dead. But was Browne to discount the deaths of children, or even these accounts of sinister dreams?

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    Jonathan Cole was a large, competent man who had risen from a long line of commoners. Unlike Browne or Coffin he had not been a university man, but had started as an apprentice and journeyman printer in London, had taught himself French and Latin, and had ultimately bought a printing shop, which he sold in middle life to go on an adventure to the New World with a new, and first, wife. Not unlike