Free The Strange Death of Mistress Coffin by Robert J. Begiebing Page A

is leaving within the month. Then it will be just me and cook. And that old widow, Goody Hastings, grows more deaf and blind, more the crone, each day. We’ll make a prettycouple.” He laughed and shook his head, as if imagining two invalids hobbling about the house like damaged crows.
    â€œTo what extent did your wife know Higgins before you hired him to take her to market?” Browne asked quietly.
    â€œI can’t remember much anymore. Oh, I remember old times, way back, clear as yesterday. But yesterday itself? Or recent events? Even an hour ago? And I forget so many small things now. You’d think me eighty, rather than approaching the half-century.” He laughed. “Crabwise, to be sure, but approaching.” The woman entered again with two servings of cider. Coffin thanked her and added in the same breath: “I am tired, of many things. But as to your question, forgive me. Yes. Yes, she knew him. How well? That is more difficult. I am perhaps among the least to answer it. May I let it go at that for the moment? May I enlighten you further on that point later? Let’s consider these other questions first that you spoke of, Mr. Browne.”
    â€œMy other questions depend on your answer to my first, so we will return to it as you say. But let me ask you this, Mr. Coffin. Why did you hire Higgins? Why that man?”
    â€œHave I not told you at a previous interview that Higgins is an able man, a skilled man? He is widely respected. There are few men anyone would hire before Higgins for river travel as much as for building a shed, or fencing, or judging the worth of planting grounds, or any multitude of things.”
    â€œThere is no other reason?”
    â€œNot in the main. I knew him, as here everyone does.” He paused, waved his hand and fixed Browne with his eyes. “Kathrin knew him.” He paused, then continued. “I am tired to the bones, Mr. Browne, so let me come to the point. I wish to show you something, in secret trust, something I discovered after her death.” Coffin rose slowly and left the room.
    While he was absent—perhaps some quarter of anhour—Browne rose and paced nervously. He walked into the library, a room which on an earlier visit he had seen only superficially, and looked at the table covered with papers as well as writing and drawing implements. His glance passed over a flat, ornately carved, open box on the table. Within the box were delicate measuring instruments and several small round stones of a kind he had seen once before and now immediately thought of as oriental bezoar stones. He looked at Coffin’s books. There must have been nearly twenty in folio and more in quarto, many bound in good leather and stoutly corded. A few in quarto seemed to have been stitched and bound, some in parchment, by their owner. He pulled a few free and discovered considerable polite reading: Virgil, Lucan, du Bartas, Jonson, and the like. But there were many more works of a speculative and investigative turn: various herbals from Dodoens, and Gerard, to Parkinson; and there were Pliny, Gesner, Clusius, Alpinus, Monardes, and Cornuti. It was, in all, a curious mixture of polarities, of the quaint and the philosophically advanced—Paracelsus the shelf neighbor of Galen, Harvey of Valentinus. He quietly discovered some of those bound in parchment to be transcribed, perhaps by students, perhaps by Coffin himself. These were shelved as bound manuscript copies of older books. There were trunks of books as well, but hearing Coffin calling to him, he did not look into these. He returned to the parlor where they had been sitting.
    â€œRemarkable library!” Browne said upon entering. Coffin managed a smile and said: “As you know, Mr. Browne, my library is at your disposal. Perhaps some time we may discuss more pleasant topics?”
    â€œIndeed,” Browne said, but then he noticed that Coffin held a small, red, leather-bound book. As