Frobisher's Savage

by Leonard Tourney

  “Why, then they’ll get away,” Agnes Profytt cried.

  Fuller turned to Sir Thomas as though to ask who this woman was, and Sir Thomas told him she was a daughter of the deceased family. Fuller made a sympathetic face and raised an admonitory hand. He spoke loudly. “Have no fear, good woman. Justice may be delayed so that it will be surer justice. When I am in full possession of the facts, I will act, believe me. Your wrongs will be made right.”

  Then Sir Thomas suggested that he and his party should proceed to Chelmsford as they had planned, and that such persons as might give any reason why there should have been hostility between Adam Nemo and John Crookback and his family might come forward. Fuller said he was most interested in anyone who might give a history of the victims, for he said that murder was often rooted in old sins and scandals. Upon which comment a number of voices were heard to say amen, and there was much nodding of heads in agreement with this sage observation.

  *

  *

  An hour later Matthew returned home again, winded from the walk out and back and chilled to the bone, for the weather had turned the more fierce and even his own great cloak, gloves, and hat were insufficient to protect him. The skies above Chelmsford seemed heavy with snow, where before they were only a pewter gray, although all those with knowledge as to how to predict the weather had been saying for the month that snow would come that year and with a vengeance for the mild winters recently past.

  He reported to Joan all that had happened on the road, warming himself by the kitchen hearth and with a great cup of hot caudle until he could feel sensation in his fingers and toes. Then he put all of his heavy clothing back on and went out.

  Master Fuller of Cambridge had set up his headquarters in the manor court house on the north side of the Market cross, with Sir Thomas’s servants posted by the stairs below to insure that the curious townspeople kept their place. All during the late morning and early afternoon a succession of witnesses went up and came down again to relate what they had been asked and answered, and then went home or stayed to wait for others who should testify. Matthew had not been invited to be privy to any of these interrogations and had to depend on what he overheard the witnesses say to others and what he received directly from Sir Thomas’s servant, Hubert, whom he liked, and who had been appointed to bear food and drink to his master and his master’s friend above and who brought back from these frequent excursions news as to who was saying what about whom.

  It had seemed to Matthew from these reports that Fuller was hearing little more than idle gossip and speculation. Matthew knew that Agnes Profytt and her sister had been with the visitor at least an hour, and he was sure they delivered to him a great earful of accusations and complaints, some of which he felt certain were about his own conduct of the case prior to his release from that responsibility. Ajnd indeed, when the women came down they regarded him with undisguised disdain and Agnes whispered so a dozen around her could hear,

  “That will show our little constable, he who thinks so much of himself.”

  The accusation stung and embarrassed him, but he said nothing in response. What was there to say?

  He stayed around the manor court house with the hardier and more curious of his fellow townsmen until late in the afternoon, during which time the skies grew so dark and the north wind blew with such violence that he wondered if the end of the world had come.

  But the worst was not the weather, but the company. Standing there in the most public place of the town, where under normal circumstances he would have been engaged in a dozen conversations in as many minutes, he found himself shunned by persons who ordinarily would have been pleased to converse with him, even in such an ill wind. What had he done but provide a roof and bed for two men who, under no official condemnation, chose to absent themselves without leave or thanks? That was no crime on their part, or on his.

  He was about to go home himself when he saw Alice, the cook, approaching.

  “Have you seen my husband, Master Stock? I believe he’s here somewhere, for they came to your house inquiring if he was there.”

  “Who came?”

  “Why, some of the magistrate’s men, Master Stock. I told them for all I knew he was at home, but they said they had been there already and he was not to be found. Then try the alehouses I said, knowing that on such a day he would want to be indoors somewhere, and with a cup of warm wine in his hand.”

  “Did these servants of the magistrate say why your husband was wanted?”

  “To tell them of John Crookback’s history, which history he knows better than any living man since he is John Crookback’s own cousin.”

  Now Matthew remembered this connection and was sorry he had not inquired directly of Alice’s husband himself. At that

  moment the man himself appeared, descending the stairs from the upper room of the manor court house.

  And then Matthew thought of the assayer’s letter, that business about stones, and what Master Fuller, who was a learned lawyer—or doctor, or cleric—had said about a murdered man’s history and how it contained the seeds of the violence against him. Crookback had been a mariner; perhaps his past had been an unsavory one, full of crimes and outrages that might all these years after have been avenged. Stranger things had happened. Men nursed grudges for years, biding their time until opportunity offered its forelock to the avenger, often as much to his damnation as his victim’s.

  Alice’s husband waved to his wife. Fuller and Sir Thomas descended the stairs behind him. Sir Thomas hailed Matthew and beckoned him to approach, but it was Fuller who spoke, addressing Matthew as though he were an underling.

  “Master Stock, I understand you are serving in the late constable’s stead until another townsman can be elected.”

  Matthew said that he was, containing his disappointment that he should not be released as yet from his temporary calling.

  “Then you must call out the watch and raise the hue and cry for Nicholas Crookback and the servant of Master Burton who is called Adam Nemo.”

  “You are persuaded then that there is sufficient evidence against them?” Matthew said.

  “I was not before but am now. A motive has been uncovered,” Fuller said with a note of triumph in his voice, “by which his murder of John Crookback comes within the bounds of reason. Sir Thomas has issued warrants for the arrest of both. They must be hunted down forthwith.”

  Matthew looked up at the sky. A light dusting of snow had begun to cover the ground and the light was fading fast. He was frozen stiff as it was, and the prospect of a search of the countryside in such weather was no more to his liking than the assignment to hunt down men he continued to believe were innocent.

  Adam Nemo did not know where to run, only that he must.

  Having traveled a dozen miles in darkness the night before, he and Nicholas had concealed themselves during the day in a thicket with only a thin blanket taken from the clothier’s house to cover them. Exhausted, they had lain locked in a fast embrace for additional warmth, the boy’s head on the man’s chest, the man’s hands clasped behind the boy’s back. Nicholas had slept soundly, breathing with the easy rhythm of one whose sleep is undisturbed by evil dreams or a bad conscience.

  But Adam had not slept. With the prospect of a pursuit his whole body was tense, and in his excited state, his memory quickened. His flight across the rocks and ice and capture by the Englishmen, who seemed as tall as the great white bears standing upon their hindlegs and as broad in shoulder and chest, returned to him. Again he saw the face of their leader, the man who later he learned was called Frobisher, and he remembered another man, his eventual benefactor, John Crookback, who had plucked him from harm’s way when the London riffraff had threatened him and who had seemed to want nothing for his efforts. Only he had said, later when Adam could understand the tongue of this nation, that Adam be free. But free of what? Free for what purpose?

  All these things he remembered, but his memories were disquieting, for he perceived so
me inconsistency in his memory, some as yet undiscovered gap. And he could not tell what it was or what it might have to do with the danger that faced him now.

  Adam well knew the penalty for murder. In his twenty-year sojourn in an alien land he had seen the necks of more than one quaking prisoner stretched upon the gibbet for crimes great and small. In Colchester five years earlier he had watched a man hanged for stealing a mongrel dog not worth twenty shillings. Adam did not fear death for himself. His life had been long enough and painful. But he was determined

  that Nicholas should not die, and his resolve to save his friend made him more determined to survive himself.

  And thus Adam did not sleep for all his exhaustion, but kept a close watch on field and road while Nicholas slept his sleep of innocence.

  He watched the skies too, for he had not forgotten how to read their messages. That wisdom was inbred in his nature, despite his recent years of living within doors as a household servant. He could sense rain or snow a day before it occurred, could smell it a hundred miles or so from where he was, or detect its ominous presence in the shape and color of clouds. And so he knew a storm was coming. No ordinary storm, but one of such severity that the brown earth would be covered with a deep snow—a snow so deep that it would be difficult for the warm-blooded English to move upon it. He would have the advantage then.

  Some instinct told him to head north, not south or east where London was, the great city of refuge for the rural fugitive. Pursuers would expect to find him there, where his strangeness would be less-marked in a city in which there were many foreigners. But Adam had been to London. He would not see that city again.

  Snow began to fall. He let Nicholas sleep until dark, and then man and boy set out into the very mouth of the tempest.

  Chapter 9

  As to the hue and cry ordered by Master Fuller, the cooler head of Sir Thomas Mildmay prevailed, although not without some wrangling over strategy and complaints about the threatening weather. To the debate Matthew had added his own voice, and the magistrate agreed with Matthew that there would be no useful purpose in pursuing the two fugitives in the dark.

  The spectators in front of the manor court house had all gone indoors; the market cross was empty. Drifts of snow were beginning to mount against the houses, and the blasts were so strong as to make their very foundations shake. It could not have been more than four of the clock by Matthew’s reckoning, but the heavens were so dark and the snow so thick it might have been midnight. “We shall start first thing in the morning, snow or not,’’ Sir Thomas said, to which resolution Fuller acquiesced, although not cheerfully, but then, Matthew thought, what was there to be cheerful about?

  The storm was too severe for Sir Thomas to return to the manor; he instructed his servants to make their beds in the manor court house, and because it was discovered that all the inns were full, Sir Thomas and Fuller accepted Matthew’s invitation to come home with him. “My house is no manor house, sirs,” Matthew told them, “yet it is clean and neat, and my good wife will set an ample table. There’s a goodly fire even as we speak.”

  Sir Thomas accepted the invitation graciously, but Fuller made a sour comment about the irony of Matthew’s having hunted and hunters as guests on successive nights. Which of course was true, and yet Matthew could do nothing about that. If it was irony the facts were called, then that’s simply what it was. He did not have the will or wit to argue the point.

  Hubert Selby, the servant whom Matthew liked, stayed with his master and put the horses of the two gentlemen in Matthew’s bam. Joan was surprised by the unexpected appearance of houseguests but not, as far as Matthew could judge, put out by it. Supper had been prepared by Alice before, and the table was already laid in anticipation of Matthew’s return. Joan assured them there was more than sufficient food for them all, the family and the two gentlemen and Sir Thomas’s servant too.

  During supper Sir Thomas laid out his plan.

  “We shall need a company of good men, Stock, of which you shall be one, and we shall divide into two groups, for we do not know whether the twain have headed north, south, east, or west.”

  Matthew wondered how two groups of men could cover four directions, but Fuller explained, “They are unlikely to head to the east. Their faces would be to the marshes and the sea. They are unlikely to find hospitality among folk in that region, who are naturally suspicious of strangers but will be ever the more so of these twain. West offers no brighter prospect. They are most likely to follow the road—not travel upon it but in its general direction—heading for Norwich or for London, where it may be impossible to find them if they escape so far.”

  “I shall lead a company toward London,” said Sir Thomas, “sending a few men on before to warn the towns to be watchful of them and offering a reward for their capture. Master Fuller will lead a similar band to the north.”

  “And what would you have my husband do?” Joan said from the fire, where she was taking another turnip from the cauldron simmering there. Having sent Alice home earlier when it became clear that the storm would grow worse before it subsided, she had full management of the serving and had not taken a bite herself, so busy had she and Elizabeth been in serving the men.

  “Your husband is most necessary to this enterprise,” Sir Thomas replied, turning a little to see her. “We shall need at least thirty or more men of the town, and your husband is in the best position to call them to this duty. We shall have a posse comitatus, then. Yet they must be good, dependable men, not mere idlers looking for adventure and an excuse to brawl.”

  Matthew, who knew little Latin, did know the meaning of the phrase Sir Thomas had just used: posse comitatus, the power of the county, an ancient statute by which all men over the age of fifteen might be suddenly summoned to serve under arms to carry out the law. But he shuddered at the task, imagining himself going door to door before dawn the next morning, rousting out his neighbors that they should spend then-day—and who knew how much longer—pursuing fugitives across the snowy waste. Sir Thomas had asked for strong, dependable men; would those whom Matthew chose to pull away from home and workplace blame him for the imposition rather than be honored by the selection, while those he spared felt no gratitude but supposed he thought them inferior? It was clear to Matthew that the execution of his duty would provide him with little joy, however it came out.

  Despite the unhappy prospect of the morrow, Matthew did have the satisfaction of learning what it was that Alice’s husband had conveyed to Fuller that had made the man so certain Adam Nemo had murdered John Crookback. As Joan and Elizabeth cleared the table, Fuller told the story.

  “This man affirms of his cousin the local impression, that John Crookback was a sailor in his youth, serving with Sir Martin Frobisher, who died this past year of wounds honorably received in combat with the Spaniard. Martin Frobisher sailed to discover the passage to far Cathay and its wealth but found instead a land of perpetual ice and snow, bringing back with him one of the savages of those parts. This savage, thought to have died, was in fact stolen away by John Crookback when he returned to Chelmsford to take up his inheritance. That savage is your Adam Nemo.”

  “This is a story most amazing,” Matthew said, sitting up straight on his stool. “We knew that Adam Nemo was a foreigner and hailed from the ends of the earth, and yet how does that affirm him a murderer?”

  “Adam Nemo had cause to hate John Crookback,” Fuller said. “It was he who captured him and took him from his native place, made him an exile who might have been a mighty prince among his own people.”

  “And murdered the whole family for his hatred?” Joan interjected, not caring how the heavy load of her skepticism might offend the learned gentleman.

  “Adam Nemo is a savage, Mistress Stock,” Fuller pronounced with a strange excitement in his voice. “Good English cooking, worsted hose, and Christian baptism will not change that fact. They are different from us, which difference goes beyond those features of face and form by which they are
singular. Read the accounts of our voyagers among heathen peoples; learn how the savages massacre their enemies, sparing none, including children. Why, it curdles the blood. These depravities they visit upon their own brethren. If they can act with such cruelty toward their own, then why not toward those strangers against whom they have a long-seething thirst for vengeance?” Fuller paused and shook his head sadly. “John Crookback might have expected this, dealing as he did with a savage.”

  Fuller looked across the table at Elizabeth, who was sitting next to her mother and taking all this talk of savages and murders in with the greatest interest. Then he turned to Matthew again.

  “You are sheltered here in this pleasant countryside, Master Stock. You have not traveled, I think.”

  Matthew admitted that he had not. He had hardly been beyond the bounds of his own county; that there was a larger world beyond, peopled by heathens such as Simeon Fuller was describing with such fervor, he accepted on faith. Joan’s experience had been even more limited.

  “Master Fuller’s brother was killed by savages in Sir Frances Drake’s expedition,” Sir Thomas said reverentially. “He knows whereof he speaks.”

  “Still,” Matthew said, “It seems strange that Adam Nemo should have waited twenty years to avenge himself. That is a long boil for any pot. Would he not have acted sooner, and have made a quicker escape? Why, he reported the deaths himself.”

  “A subterfuge, Master Stock,” Fuller said, his elbows firmly planted on the table, his bald head glistening in the candlelight. “Savages may be devoid of true intelligence but that does not mean they are not cunning and devilish. Adam Nemo bided his time. A revenge delayed is no less sweet than one executed at the moment of offense. Indeed, it may be the sweeter by far, just as a wine grows the better with age.”