Read Familiar Spirits for Free Online Page B

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