The Strange Death of Mistress Coffin Read Online Free Page B

saucy boys, malapert boys, rascally and jackanapes boys. There were persons brought up for failure to train or attend meeting; for stealing and vandalizing cocks of hay; for making an uproar in the street (wives as well as husbands); for theft of apples, petticoats, and money; for “second drunks,” selling strong waters without a license, excessive drinking, vain mirth and singing with frequent oaths, lascivious songs and gestures; for suspicion of adultery; for sleeping in time of public ordinances and breach of Sabbath; for beating wives, husbands, or neighbors.
    One wag was sentenced to the whipping post for saying he intended to join the church to have his dog christened. There was a group of young husbands presented for going into the woods with liquors to sing and shout at an unseasonable timeof night, thereby occasioning their wives and some others to go out and search for them. Another wife told the Court to kiss her arse.
    Amidst all of this Browne had found Higgins v. Coffin for slander and Coffin v. Higgins for defamation, raising an evil report of his deceased wife, and breach of a promise to carry his wife in a canoe to market, yet not bringing her up in the canoe again. And he had discovered, eventually, three preliminary depositions relating to the case.
    But it was Shaw’s deposition alone that Browne paid the clerk to copy for him at the end of the day, promising to return in a fortnight for it with the remainder of the clerk’s fee. Browne was due to return to Robinson’s Falls the next day.
    His notes bundled in his bag, Browne hurried in the cold, murky evening to the ordinary where he had also been able to engage a room through the keeper’s wife. He thought of his supper by the fire, of a bowl or two of sack, of his bed and warming pan.
    Later, his belly full, his body relaxed from the drink and the fire, Browne lay curled up in his bed under thick bedclothes, squinting by dim flickering light one last time at his documents list, hoping for some hint of an unseen pattern, or some missed connection between the players in the Higgins-Coffin drama.
    He saw the labor before him. He now found a certain pleasure in trying to tease out meaning and order. He saw that he would have to cast a wider net of interviews. He would have to probe Coffin and Goody Higgins far more than he had, come to know them and draw out all the implications of their stories, and compare their stories more closely with others’. All the implications, all the hidden turnings of past actions, seemed to demand of him some resolution now. And the missing Jared Higgins seemed to beg for pursuit. That was the major task his benefactor Cole had set him to, just over a month ago.
    He knew well enough that despite his friendship with Cole, any outsider had to demonstrate his usefulness to a settlement, any newcomer would be accepted only after scrutiny. Yet the violent death of this woman had already begun to take on a force of its own in his mind. Here was something worthy of his solution. Each interview and document, however unrevealing, deepened his fascination with these people, their circumstances, their relations. He felt intuitively just now that the solution would be shockingly simple, like some soon-to-be-grasped mathematical principle still teasing about the portals of a theoretician’s mind.
    Browne snuffed out the lantern and slid deep into the warm bedclothes. His drift toward sleep glowed with wine-touched confidence. Find the woman’s husband. And the truth. The very thing to do.
    After all, he had seen his family’s fortunes squandered in considerable measure on New World ventures, had journeyed to reclaim his losses from the hands of incompetents or, worse, thieves, and had failed to recoup a single loss yet had resolved to begin remaking that fortune in a world free of the props and limitations of homeland and family. He, therefore, upon his arrival at a remote plantation in mid-winter