‘Wych Elm’ fifth success for author from Maine

FACE DOWN UNDER THE WYCH ELM, by Kathy Lynn Emerson, St. Martin’s, 250 pages, $22.95.

Wilton, Maine, author Kathy Lynn Emerson has produced another intriguing Elizabethan England mystery, her fifth featuring Lady Susannah Appleton, herbalist and amateur sleuth.

This is no straightforward mystery-murder – it has more twists and turns, more subplots, than is usually to be found.

It opens with two gentlewomen charged with murder and witchery. One is Constance Crane, who once was the mistress of Sir Robert Appleton, Susannah’s husband, now deceased. So the first twist comes when Susannah decides to help in the defense of Constance and her cousin Lucy Milborne, who have been arrested and are in a London jail.

The Wilton writer populates this novel with a remarkable collection of rogues and victims, all of whom are somehow involved in the murders.

The first death that Appleton learns about is the slaying of one Peter Marsh, clerk to Hugo Garrard, under a wych elm in the English countryside. For this, Constance and Lucy have been charged as witches. But as Susannah investigates, she uncovers an earlier murder, that of Clement Edgecumbe, a gentleman neighbor of the two women.

Both of the victims, Susannah deduces, have been poisoned.

Now we meet a host of characters, and some sneaky little subplots. There is Nick Baldwin, who is in love with Susannah – and it is reciprocated, although she says she will never marry again.

Although Susannah describes herself as inheriting from her father her height, “his sturdy build, and his square jaw, as well as his love of learning,” Nick has a different view. “She was as captivating as she was unique and the intricate workings of her mind had fascinated him from the first.”

So we have a romance bubbling along even as the murder pot boils.

But there are mysterious characters to add to the mix – a “scribbler” or pamphleteer named Chediok Norden, who turns up at interesting times in the plot; Sir Adrian Ridley, a preacher with an agenda of his own, and Hugo Garrard, the owner of Mill Hall who apparently supported Constance and Lucy. Then there are Mildred Edgecumbe, widow of Clement, and her daughter Damascin who are neighbors of Garrard as well as Constance and Lucy.

And there are assorted servants who pop in and out, especially Susannah’s trusted aide, Jennet, who is part loyal guardian and part snoop.

Emerson not only provides us with stimulating specimens, but lively dialogue and description to flesh out the picture of England in Elizabethan times. For example, the older of the two cousins charged is pictured with her coif askew, “revealing scraggly strands of thinning, yellow-white hair …. The woman was trough-eyed, her left eye much lower than the right.” Trough-eyed? Hardly an appealing figure.

We are fed frequent facts about those times, too. For example, a description of Damascin (who has a whine in her voice) says “Long, blond hair flowed down her back in ostentatious proclamation that she was an unwed, innocent virgin.”

Even the religious conflicts of the time, between the new Church of England and the Catholic Church, are woven into the plot. There also is a convoluted thread involving the inheritance of property that figures in the plot.

And we are certainly treated to a virtual primer on herbs and their uses. Susannah, for example, has a “capcase” she carries when she travels; it includes “ginger for seasickness, lettuce cakes to treat insomnia, the expressed juice of adder’s tongue leaves for sore eyes, and an all-purpose salve that served for sores and abrasions as well as burns – a mixture of comfrey, St. John’s wort, calendula, plantain, and oil of lavender.”

The reader is introduced, too, to a whole new vocabulary, introduced gently so you do not have to grab the dictionary unless you really want to – words such as wimple, kirtle, flommary caudle, mazer, sallet, anchoress, grograms and mockados.

Particularly insightful is this aside about city life: “the raker blew his horn before every door on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, to remind citizens to bring their offal out into the open streets and throw it into the channels that ran down their middles, there to be washed away with buckets of water drawn from the house holders’ wells.”

Susannah doggedly moves to gather facts about the murders. In the process, she is nearly scalded to death when a laundry tub of lye is turned over as she is passing.

She narrowly misses being charged as a witch herself when Nick’s meddling mother plants a “love potion” in her room at the hostelry where she is staying for the Assizes (court sessions) at Maidstone. Nick’s mother is dead set against Susannah as a wife – or mistress – for her son.

Susannah and Jennet are kidnapped and nearly murdered themselves. And there is a smashing climax that solves the subplots as well.

With all these ingredients, these novels ought to be ripe for a TV series or miniseries. As it is, they are delightfully different. There is a minimum of action but plenty to challenge the reader’s sense of deduction.

There is a sameness to these novels, besides the characters and setting; every victim is “face down.” Surely we will read, at some point, of a victim who is “face up.”