“Cheated him,” Sawyer said after a moment’s pause while he gulped air.
“Cheated him of what?”
“He did not say, but he threatened the honest man.”
“Threatened him in what manner?”
“Why, with death!” Sawyer said, and everyone with him also looked more stirred up than before. “He said old Crookback, whom he called a very knave, would be mightily sorry for what he’d done and would do it to no man again, nay, not in this life or in hell either, where this servant swore his victim would surely go.”
“What more proof do you need, Matthew?” asked William Dees. “Will you not deliver to us these miscreants? Then let us all go to Sir Thomas and see justice done.”
“This is but one man’s testimony,” Matthew protested, looking at the witness with contempt. Did he not know Sawyer’s kind—idle, drunken sots making capital of another man’s misfortune? If he had ever heard a flimsy and malicious slander it was this.
“And you swear that you heard Adam Nemo utter these words? Will you then describe Adam Nemo to me?”
Sawyer looked surprised by the question, snorted, and said, “He is a small man—by your leave, smaller than yourself— with a round brown face like a prune and eyes that are no more than slits in his head. He speaks with a heavy tongue. Sometimes you are at pains to understand his meaning.”
Matthew had asked Sawyer about Adam Nemo’s appearance expecting that his failure to describe him with any accuracy would reveal his story to be the self-serving slander Matthew knew in his heart it was, but Sawyer had given a decent description of Master Burton’s strange servant. Perhaps Sawyer had been in Chelmsford earlier than he had said. Perhaps he had seen Adam at the inquest, or had heard him described by others. Matthew concluded that his question had been for naught. Sawyer’s answer proved nothing.
“I’ll tell you something else,” Sawyer said, smiling grimly. “The little fellow had a big knife. I saw it at his belt. A man could do a lot of damage with a blade that length and breadth, I said to myself when I saw it. And I was afraid. It’s an awful thing for a man to threaten death to an entire family.”
“I thought you said he was only threatening John Crookback?”
“Well,” Sawyer said, not losing his grim smile, “I meant all of them—the wife and the girl and the boy too. He also said he had a friend at the farm, someone who would aid him in the endeavor. To see his right maintained, or so he said, but would not say what right he meant.”
“Is this not evidence, Master Stock?” Agnes said. “Shall we not present it to Sir Thomas, and this Adam Nemo and Nicholas be taken?”
From all sides there were grumbles of assent to this proposition. Matthew thought it better to make peace with his neighbors than try to impugn their witness.
“I promise to convey all of what you have said to the magistrate in the morning. You have my word. Now, neighbors, I pray you, go to your beds in peace and let the law take its course.”
“We are content that the law take its course, so long as the law does its duty,” Dees said, looking around him for support and getting it promptly in yeas on every side. “But we must have these twain you keep within as guests if you will not carry them forthwith to the magistrate.”
“Who has been asleep this hour or more,” Matthew said. “Will you have me wake him when there is nothing he could do anyway until the morning? I know not which of us then would displease him and his lady the more, you or I. The men you speak of are in my custody and as secure here as they would be in Colchester Gaol. If indeed this man speaks truly and Adam Nemo uttered threats against John Crookback and his family, and if he truly claimed to have Nicholas Crookback as an ally in this business, then Sir Thomas will take all into consideration, and justice will be done.”
“You say ‘truly,’ as though you doubted this good man’s testimony,” Agnes said, “or dispute our words. Are the testimonies of your friends not good enough for you, Matthew Stock? Is your heart so prideful that you give no heed to what honest men declare?”
Matthew wished that Agnes Profytt’s voice was less shrill.
Certainly these accusations carried along the entire street and would be repeated among his more immediate neighbors, who, if lights in windows were any indication, had been awakened from their sleep by this uproar and would remember— and report to those not privileged to have heard it firsthand— every syllable of this conversation, embellishing the same to little credit to himself. Matthew did not feel himself above such as were assembled before him, but he well knew that this was a common and often devastating accusation to level against one who with good intentions undertook civic responsibility. Tomorrow the accusations would be all over the town, how Matthew Stock was declared to think himself better than he was because he stood in the place of the constable who was dead.
“How I am called to serve by those above me has naught to do with my belief or disbelief in this man’s testimony,” Matthew said, raising his own voice and glaring at Sawyer, who stood as silent as though he were asleep with his eyes open. “This man has had much to drink this night, as have many of you. Drink clouds our reason, as is well known. It makes us easily angered, and we act before we think. You shall more prevail upon Sir Thomas in the light of day, and with clearer heads and tongues less thick with drink, than in your present state.”
“You will not give over these men to us, then?” Dees said.
“I will not,” Matthew said firmly. “And I have given you good and sufficient reasons why I will not. Now go to your homes and beds. Keep the peace, or risk the law’s displeasure on that account.”
Dees’s eyes blazed. He advanced a step, and Matthew’s heart leapt into his throat at the prospect of this assault, but Agnes Profytt held the stonemason back. “Nay, William Dees. Let good Master Stock keep his guests for the present. As for presenting this evidence to Sir Thomas, we will hold him to his word. And we will even accompany him to Sir Thomas’s manor house, bringing Sawyer with us.”
“I give my word I will go with you in the morning,” Mat-
thew said. He told them again to go home, and this time some of them complied. Dees, Agnes, and her husband were the last to leave, taking Sawyer with them.
Matthew closed the door, bolted it, and looked at Joan, whose face in the candlelight was pale and glistening. In the excitement, he had almost forgotten she was there, listening behind the door. She was shaking; he could feel it as she embraced him.
“What is it, wife?”
“I was afraid, that’s what it is.”
“They are our neighbors. It is they who are afraid, and confused too—and a little drunk.”
“Neighbors!” she snorted. “Hotheads, knaves, and troublemakers you mean, and that Agnes Profytt! There’s a rotten branch of an infirm tree if there ever was one. Her poor husband!”
He laughed. “She is something to be reckoned with.” Matthew did not tell her how relieved he was that they were gone and how frightened he himself had been, especially when William Dees, with his powerful shoulders and arms, had advanced toward him. He was too ashamed to admit the gratitude he felt toward Agnes Profytt for having dissuaded the stonemason.
“You don’t think Sawyer is telling the truth?” Joan said as they made their way upstairs.
“I think he has found a way to secure free drinks at the alehouse and make himself a name in all the ballads to be spawned from this crime. But he may do great damage to our friends before he has done.”
Our friends. He marveled at his own choice of words. At what point in these inquiries had Nicholas and Adam become that in his mind, rather than merely persons involved somehow in a murder? Was it simply because they had slept under his roof? Why was he so sure his own instincts were superior to those of William Dees, or even Agnes Profytt? As obnoxious as she was, yet she might be right. Perhaps he was harboring murderers.
He looked at Joan. She seemed as persuaded as he that this so-called evidence, the word of a notorious begg
ar and probable thief, was fabricated for ulterior motives. The pride he took in his temporary office had not blinded him to the risk of keeping the two men within his own house, had it?
“Will you take him to Sir Thomas in the morning?” Joan asked.
“I said I would, and so I must,” Matthew said, sadly, wishing there had been another way to pacify the neighbors Joan had cursed as hotheads and knaves and thinking that it would be better were Nicholas and Adam Nemo in Colchester gaol, for had it been the case, both they and the Stocks would be more secure.
Nicholas Crookback was drowned in the deepest of sleeps, that kingdom where just men go when the day is ended and reason surrenders to the powers of the night; what the English called “a little death” and what Adam Nemo’s own people called something quite different. Adam could see his friend, even in the candleless dark of the attic. But as late as it was, the clothier’s house still creaked with movement somewhere below, and he imagined Matthew Stock and wife in their kitchen conversing in that companionable way he had observed before. They were different from other English he had known, especially John Crookback and his wife, who had often fallen into prolonged silences. The marriage of the Stocks was more like the friendship he enjoyed with Nicholas, an easy and sweet companionship, a refuge in times of trouble, as now, even when one of the friends slept.
Adam himself struggled against sleep, for he knew what he would dream. And then, almost with relief, he knew there would be no dream, for he could not possibly sleep—at least not yet. He heard the hail of cobbles, the pounding at the door and the sound of men’s voices raised in angry protest, and he remembered something that he had forgotten for a long time, and the pain of it helped him to understand why.
Some of the sailors had taken him to a place where there was a great group of men, all crowded into a low-ceilinged, filthy chamber, drinking and singing and wrangling. They had gathered round him, prodding his body with staffs and knives and pulling their eyes back toward their ears to mimick the shape of his own. Then there had been a fight between one of the sailors and two of the other men, and a great noise of shouting and pushing. Confused and fearful for his life, he had dashed from the tavern, as he now knew it to be. He was running down a cobbled street with the brows of houses tipping over him and ribald laughter mixed with shouts of rage at his back. It was an unknown language, but he knew the tone of violence; weaponless and friendless and unsure of where safety lay, he ran, his heart racing, his legs weak from the long voyage he had spent with irons on his ankles. Yet sheer terror gave him speed, and he outran them, hiding in an alley amid boxes and barrels and full, like the city that seemed to have no end, of strange and to his nose putrid odors and the unpleasantly warm damp of the English spring.
Hiding there until his stomach was so empty that he would have gladly gnawed upon the staves of the barrels in his hidingplace. Hiding there until he heard a familiar voice, its naked sound not threatening but calming, reassuring, and since he was without strength and supposed the worst was death—and better that than perpetual exile—he came forth at the sound of the familiar voice and saw that it was his particular Englishmen, the tall, golden-haired men from the ship.
He prepared himself for death by their swords, but death did not come. Nor did they bind his arms or place the heavy irons on his legs but covered him in a cloak so long it dragged upon the cobbles and took him off to a chamber in a house, where the men talked for a long time.
Adam lived there in that room, sleeping on a pallet at the foot of the larger bed in which both men slept and eating the fish they cooked over the hearth and learning to enjoy the thing the men called bread. For how long? There had been no way for him to reckon tune. Long enough for him to realize that even without bonds and manacles he remained a prisoner uncertain of his offense and less certain still of his future. Long enough for the strange sounds emitted from the mouths of the men to begin to take on the shapes of words. He thought the two men must be brothers, so much alike they seemed; tall, broad-shouldered, fair-haired men with strange, light-colored eyes such as among his own people one saw only in the faces of the blind.
This time he could understand the angry voices, and he knew those at the clothier’s door had come for him and for Nicholas. Adam listened. He heard the accusations, recognized the voice of Sawyer, and understood the implication of his words. He shook Nicholas.
“Up, friend,” he said. He pointed to Nicholas’s shoes, on the floor by the bed.
Adam knew Nicholas could not hear the voices, but the boy could recognize alarm when he saw it. Adam helped Nicholas on with his shoes and then put on his own. He listened again, and through the thin panes he could hear Agnes Profytt’s shrill, hysterical treble, then the stonemason’s booming threats, and finally the clothier’s reassuring voice endeavoring to appease the crowd. Adam wished the clothier well, but he could not depend on him. Adam was like a man who falls in the darkness and is consoled only that he has knowledge of the hole into which he has fallen.
Motioning to Nicholas to follow, he made another gesture urging him to move with the greatest stealth, and the two descended the stairs and made their way through the kitchen while the clothier and his wife were at the door of the shop, inquiring into the cause of the tumult without.
Chapter 8
Matthew woke Joan to tell her their guests had vanished without a word of thanks or explanation. Their bed was empty, their clothing gone. The blanket of lamb’s wool she had made with her own hands the Christmas before had disappeared. Matthew presumed they had taken it with them, and because he knew Joan had made the blanket with loving care, embroidering it with roses and leaves so real you could almost smell their sweetness, he was more sorry for its loss than for the flight of his charges.
He had awakened before her, troubled by dreams of dangerous encounters with vicious dogs and their truculent masters. Had climbed to the attic on some premonition that something was amiss.
“Where?” She asked, sleep still heavy upon her.
“Just gone,” he said. “They’re not in the house, or about it. I have looked in the barn and outbuildings and walked the length of the High Street. They’ve fled, god only knows where. They may have gone hours ago.”
She wondered aloud if the two men might have heard the unruly company at the door and been afraid. Why should she have thought anyone could have slept through that, the impertinent pounding, the hail of cobbles, the accusations and threats? Was not Agnes Profit’s peremptory treble alone sufficient to wake the dead?
“If they heard,” Matthew said. “I cannot blame them for fleeing. The evidence mounts against them. I would have been obliged to fulfill my promise, to convey them to the magistrate along with Sawyer as a witness.”
“But Nicholas has no ears to hear.”
“No, but Adam may be more proficient in making his young friend understand than we have supposed, and than he was able to demonstrate at the inquest. In any case, it is I who am in the maw of difficulty now, for when our earnest neighbors have learned I have allowed our guests to escape they will say I had a hand in it, warned them of the coming danger, and perhaps even know of their present whereabouts.”
“Oh, I doubt they would do that,” Joan said, climbing out of the big four-poster bed. She went to her wardrobe, opened the door, and began searching among her clothes, of which as a successful clothier’s wife she had a goodly store. “Your honesty is well allowed. None will believe you had any hand in their disappearance.”
“Honesty is only well allowed until it is impugned, as a pail is only held to be sound until it leaks.”
He watched her while she unlaced her nightgown in the candlelight and laid it carefully on the bed. In the soft light of the taper, her bare body was plump and pleasing to his eye, round like the smooth contours of a lute. Fifteen years of marriage and Matthew was still fascinated by the sight of it, but he was too preoccupied now to be stirred to amorous thoughts. “Consider what Agnes Profytt will make of this,” he continu
ed. “What she will say to Sir Thomas, to whom she will go as soon as she learns that Nicholas and his friend have fled. Their flight will confirm their guilt. It will raise doubts about my wisdom in not putting the two into chains from the begin-
ning. Where Agnes had only a handful of hotheads at her beck before, the whole town will now rise up to complain of me.” “Well,” Joan said, plucking at the sleeves of the gown she had put on and taking the long taper to her mirror to see how her face showed at such an hour, “this burden was not chosen by you. You are not constable of the town, only a substitute. Why should you be blamed? You were given no charge. My house is no jail for miscreants. Never did Sir Thomas or Master Vernon say, ‘Here are your prisoners, guard them well.’ Marry, you were not even cautioned. The jurymen declared that there was no evidence to accuse any person. In sum, our guests were guests, not prisoners of this house. And cannot a guest come and go as he chooses? Then if you are blamed by Agnes Profytt or anyone else, the blame is theirs, not yours, and so be quit of your worry, husband.”
“I shall be quit of my worry when this matter is settled,” he said, “the murderers identified, apprehended, and hanged, as is proper. I doubt my quittance shall come before that.”
The cock crowed; Matthew heard the church bells sound five of the clock. Despite Joan’s encouragement, he could find little cause to hope that the disappearance of his two guests would not be taken badly—and by just about everyone concerned.
Matthew decided to make no voluntary report of the flight of the two men. Why should he, since as Joan had reasoned in her commonsensical way, he had not been charged with being their jailer? But he was hardly surprised when within an hour of his conversation with Joan in the bedchamber, he was visited by an even larger contingent of townspeople than had come on the previous night. This time, although Agnes Profytt and William Dees were notably present and a more sober Henry Sawyer, the leader of the group was Master Vernon.
“We have come for Nicholas Crookback and his companion,” Vernon announced as soon as Matthew opened the door
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