Frobisher's Savage

by Leonard Tourney

  “There were letters found in John Crookback’s bedchamber,” Matthew said. “Have you seen those?”

  “I have perused them with great care,” Fuller answered. “They serve to confirm what your cook’s husband has told us as to John Crookback’s service with Frobisher. The letter from the assayer, for example.”

  “The Italian?” Joan said, obviously as interested in this story as her daughter.

  “The very same,” Fuller said. “When Martin Frobisher returned from his voyage to discover the passage to Cathay, he brought home with him a large quantity of stones, as black as sea coal but heavy as metal. He knew himself not what they were, these black stones, but the chief of the investors, a certain Master Lock, believing devoutly that God had led Frobisher to gold, took a sample of this same stone all over London. Repeatedly he was told by wise men who know such things that the stone was worthless, was iron pyrites or marcasite. But he would not be satisfied until he found an assayer who would confirm its precious contents.”

  “Agnello,” Joan murmured.

  “Yes, Agnello. He claimed to have found a fine powder of gold. Since he was the only one to so confirm, even Lock was suspicious. He asked Agnello how it was that other worthy assayers had arrived at a different conclusion. Agnello said that sometimes nature needed a little coaxing.”

  “What did he mean by that?” Joan asked.

  “I don’t know what Lock supposed. Perhaps that Agnello had used some magical substance that in conjunction with the stone turned it into gold. Or perhaps he realized Agnello was simply jesting. With a man like Lock, as devoted to his money as to his idea of religion, it is difficult to tell.”

  “Who then was believed?” Matthew asked.

  “The view of the majority prevailed, but not before rumor had it that Frobisher had brought home with him the wealth of Cathay and more. Some said he had found the very mines of Solomon, from which that ancient king derived the gold for the holy temple that bore his name. Others smelled a rat in all these claims. At last an investigation followed in which Frobisher and Lock were blamed for perpetrating a fraud. Frobisher survived the scandal, winning honor later.”

  “The great wonder is that the virtue of these stones should be credited in the face of so many worthy assayers proclaiming them to be without value,” Matthew said. “Did not Frobisher suspect something was amiss?”

  “Oh, he may have indeed suspected. Frobisher was hard-headed but no deceiver. Yet it is difficult even for an honest man to turn his back on a golden opportunity. He needed money, that was the long and short of it. As for the credulity of others, that is not such a wonder as you might suppose, Master Stock,” Fuller said, resting his chin on the steepled tips of his long fingers. “While the experts in these matters cried fraud, the greater public were in an ecstasy of hope. They believed not the truth but what they wanted to believe, and who does not wish in his heart of hearts that the great El Dorado has been found, Solomon’s mines delivered up, or some other dreamed of treasure trove opened to aquisitive hands? Such is the nature of mankind. Frobisher had to beat potential investors off. Everyone wanted a share in the prospective harvest. Frobisher was appointed high admiral of Cathay and the routes leading thereto. Lock himself was named governor of the Cathay Company. Special concessions were granted. They were to pay only half the custom dues for twenty years. It was a time of golden opportunity.”

  Joan wanted to know when all this was. She said she had never heard of any of it, except of course, for Cathay. Who had not heard of that wondrous land and its riches?

  “It was in the year 1577 and thereabouts,” Fuller said, obviously pleased to have so appreciative an audience. “I remember it well. I was a young man. My own father wanted to invest, but my mother discouraged him, not because she did not believe in the stones but because she wanted the money saved for my sister’s dowry.”

  “What happened to the stones?” Joan asked.

  “Well may you ask, Mistress Stock. They were taken to the Tower of London, placed under lock and key—as though they were part of the Crown Jewels. I do not know what has happened to them since. Surely they have been cast out by now as dross. Somewhere in England there are piles of this wretched stuff, and those who pass by are ignorant that it comes from a place more remote than their imaginations can conceive.” “Perhaps someone has built a wall or chimney out of it, if it be good hard stone,” said Elizabeth. Since the arrival of Sir Thomas and Fuller and especially since Sir Thomas’s handsome young servant Hubert Selby had come indoors, she had seemed as demure as any maiden ever was around her social superiors and, as her doting father supposed, as winsome. Her mother cast her a severe glance as though to remind her that tolerance of her presence in this company did not include permission to intrude into the conversation of gentlemen.

  “But the mistake was detected?” Matthew asked.

  “Shortly thereafter, and believed to be a fraud perpetrated by Frobisher and Lock. There was an investigation and a great scandal. The investors were enraged, believing that they had been duped. They cared nothing for Frobisher’s higher purposes. What was charting unknown seas or discovering unknown peoples to them who wanted only gold and silver and something better than ten or fifteen percent? They suspected Frobisher knew the stones were worthless and was merely trying to conceal the fact that he had found nothing on his journey but ice and savages and had brought back of any value only some sealskins. Later, Frobisher redeemed himself, showed he was as duped as any, but the venturers lost their shirts. It’s a wonder he was not murdered by one of them.” “How did John Crookback obtain this letter, do you think?” Matthew asked.

  “I don’t know. But the fact that he had it in his possession confirms what your cook’s husband has said. Other persons told me stories too. His daughters and this stonemason.” “William Dees?”

  Fuller looked at Sir Thomas, who nodded back and said, “Yes, that is his name. He knew John Crookback from his boyhood, had heard all the tales of his exploits and had a vivid memory of them.”

  “Which he rarely spoke of to anyone else, then,” Joan interjected.

  Fuller’s eyebrows rose at her comment. “Some men are secretive,” he said. “Perhaps John Crookback was ashamed of his past. But the stonemason affirmed that Crookback had been one of Frobisher’s crew, had brought back to Chelmsford the savage they called Adam Nemo, and had arranged to have him employed as servant to Master Burton.”

  “I wonder he did not keep him to work on his own farm,” Matthew said. “Wouldn’t that have made more sense?”

  “Dees said Crookback’s new wife didn’t want him around. She was afraid of him, his strange looks and language—for he could hardly speak the queen’s English then, Dees said—and gave her husband the choice of his savage or her. One can hardly blame the woman for that. That she was marrying a man with two children by another wife was already enough of a burden. Besides, she was already with child by John Crookback when she married him. So that meant a husband and three children, for a woman who was then, what? perhaps eighteen or nineteen. Not many years older than your daughter here.”

  Everyone looked at Elizabeth, who blushed furiously at this sudden attention and especially at the attention of Sir Thomas’s young servant Hubert, who had been sitting in the chimney comer, his eyes fastened on Elizabeth, since he had come indoors.

  “And was she to have this heathen lurking around the house?” Fuller went on. “She wondered what her family would think of it, and what the neighbors would think. ”

  Joan said she supposed that would be quite a handful for any woman. Matthew agreed. The town had not been easy on Nicholas Crookback and his infirmity as it turned out later; would it not have been worse if John Crookback had kept Adam Nemo about his farm? Would not the decent Christians of Chelmsford have concluded that the pitiful condition of his son and heir was somehow the result of his keeping a heathen about to practice upon an innocent child God knows what witchcraft learned in remote parts where the devil rei
gned?

  “It was all easier at Burton Manor,” Sir Thomas said, picking up the thread of the narrative from Fuller, who used this as an opportunity to drink deep of the wine at table. “A gentleman’s servants aren’t quite so public, and his reputation is harder to impugn. According to Jeroboam, the steward at the manor, Adam Nemo, although a savage, learned quickly to speak English, conducted himself shrewdly, caused no trouble among the women of the house, and made himself as inconspicuous as possible. Doubtless he was anticipating vengeance all the while. Jeroboam never knew where he came from. Perhaps Master Burton did, but Jeroboam says his master fancied him, especially when Adam was a young man.”

  “Thus this Burton nourished a viper in his bosom,” Fuller said. “He was fortunate that it struck another before it could strike him. We shall find the viper and pluck out its fangs.”

  “But now we must to bed, Master Stock,” Sir Thomas said, rising from the table. “The hour is late, and I want to be in pursuit of our quarry by dawn. You must rise the sooner to begin the hue and cry.”

  All at table had stood with Sir Thomas’s rising, and Matthew assured Sir Thomas he would do as the magistrate bid and offered to show his guests to their beds, which involved a general shifting of sleeping arrangements, with Matthew and Joan’s bed going to Sir Thomas, daughter Elizabeth’s to Simeon Fuller. Sir Thomas’s servant would sleep at the foot of his master’s bed, while the clothier and his family would make beds for themselves in the attic, where Adam Nemo and Nicholas had lain before their escape. It was another irony not lost on Matthew Stock.

  At the other end of Chelmsford was an alehouse of very bad reputation. There the host, Mattias Killigrew, was reaping the fruit of the recent human and natural disasters—to wit, the Crookback murders, which had brought a great number of visitors to the town, and the sudden storm, which had prevented the same visitors from leaving. The upper chamber of his establishment, ordinarily reserved for the use of himself, his wife, and their five children, he had rented out at an exorbitant sum to six men—or perhaps there were seven after all—gentlemen, by their clothing and airs, who had come all the way from London and were desperate to have a warm place to lodge for the night. They and a good twenty or thirty other men, most rough fellows and some unemployed, were crowded before a huge fire in the lower room, drinking up Killigrew’s stock—the price of which he had reluctantly raised, or so he proclaimed—and listening to the accounts of Henry Sawyer and William Dees.

  Sawyer had given a stirring description of the malicious statements of Adam Nemo, whom he now referred to as

  “Frobisher’s savage,” although there was little evidence that many in the room had ever heard of Frobisher or his deeds. The edification of his audience as to the identity of Frobisher, and John Crookback’s connection to him, had fallen to William Dees, who, having received an enormous amount of attention and not a few toasts and free drinks for the telling of his descent into the well to pull out the bodies of the Crookbacks, was now every bit as drunk as Sawyer. Every time Dees told the story the well got deeper, the sides more slippery and treacherous, the air below fouler and more unwholesome, the bodies more hideously disfigured.

  “I would kill such a one, even when first I saw him,” swore one listener to Sawyer’s account after Sawyer had described the bloody wounds in the face and chest of little Magdalen Crookback and her brother Benjamin. Although John Crookback’s wounds had been more terrible, descriptions of them had not aroused equal sympathy. “Such a vicious savage should not be allowed to walk God’s earth,” said another in the room.

  A chorus of approving voices came from all sides at this assertion. Sawyer grinned, pressed his elbows down on the table, and ran his tongue around his lips to moisten them. He motioned to Killigrew to refill his glass. He had a prodigious dry mouth, he said, with all this talk and the heat of the fire, which indeed was intense.

  “By Christ, hanging will be too good for them when they are caught,” said Dees, including the farmer’s son in the indictment. This statement was also well received, and some of the men said it was too bad that justice must wait upon the law when so many honest men and true were firmly convinced of the guilt of the fugitives. Why could action not be taken more quickly? Did no one have a stout rope?

  “Will you sacrifice your life to this pestilent storm?” asked Dees of the scrawny little man who had suggested this action.

  “With luck both the savage and the dummy will freeze stiff. God will not be mocked,” said another man.

  “It would be better were they caught and hanged,” Killigrew inserted, not content to leave the issue to his patrons. “They then can serve as an example—first to savages coming to our shores, then to sons overly eager to inherit their father’s lands.” He looked about the room, taking in the faces of his guests, as though he expected more than one he saw to be either savage or patricide and perhaps both.

  Killigrew’s remark was punctuated by a frigid blast of air and snowflakes as the door opened and then was shut firmly by one so completely wrapped in a heavy cloak and his face so shadowed by his hat that he hardly seemed human at all. Killi-grew gasped with surprise and a little fear, for during the past two hours no one had arrived to show that the storm permitted such journeying. Conversation among the other men had stopped during the stranger’s arrival. All watched as the newcomer, cursing under his breath, unwrapped himself, revealing himself at last to be the coroner, Vernon. Master Vernon, his teeth chattering so vigorously that Killigrew could hardly understand the man and his face as white as the snow piling up without, asked Killigrew if there was room to be had, because his horse had fallen in the snow two miles from town and died there. He had had to walk the distance and was nearly frozen.

  “Then you must have a hot caudle and a place by the fire forthwith, Master Vernon. My humble house, such as it is, is at your honorable disposal.” Killigrew waved his hand around the room. The attention of the company was still fixed on the newcomer, and some had stood out of respect.

  Killigrew ushered Vernon to one of the tables, motioning to its previous occupants to make room, and seated his distinguished guest. Already having estimated what Vernon’s appearance might be worth in public recognition of his establishment, he went at once to pour a cup of the steaming liquid, bringing with him a plate of cheese and other dainties that he had hoped to use, after all others had gone to bed, to placate his wife for the dispossession of her house.

  As the talk in the room resumed, Vernon slumped in the chair and seemed almost asleep, but Killigrew woke him with a companionable nudge, called him sir, and placed the plate and cup before him. He waited at hand like a household servant while Vernon sipped at the cup, pronounced it good, and then began stuffing pieces of the cheese into his mouth without complaint, although Killigrew, having sampled some earlier, thought it was aged almost beyond redemption.

  While Vernon was restoring himself, the men in the room slowly gathered around the table at which he sat, as though expecting that upon finishing he would deliver to them as readily as Sawyer and the stonemason had done some further intelligence of the inquest or the gathering of evidence that had followed that day. But Vernon sat as stiff as a stone, as though the cold had reached so far down into his being as to freeze his heart. After a while, however, he seemed improved, and looking around him, he motioned Killigrew nearer and told him he had something to say to the entire room.

  “Now give ear all of you,” Killigrew bellowed, and he repeated this injunction until all that could be heard was the wind blowing the snow against the windowpanes and the crackle of the immense fire. “Master Vernon would have a word with us. Therefore give heed.”

  Vernon, who was not a tall man, stood slowly, leaning forward on the table to brace himself. “You men must know that a warrant has been given for the securing of two persons of this town, namely one Nicholas Crookback and him they call Adam Nemo. These men are now fugitives, and it behooves any man who knows where they might be to say so or himself fa
ce the strictures of the law.”

  As Vernon pronounced this, he raised his head slightly to have a better view of the room and then waited a few moments.

  It was very quiet still, but no one volunteered information. Vernon nodded and continued. “Tomorrow morning the hue and cry will be sounded. Any able-bodied man above the age of fifteen may be summoned to duty, and perhaps all of you. Sir Thomas Mildmay will lead a posse comitatus.”

  “Shall we bring our pikes and staffs, Master Vernon?” asked William Dees.

  Vernon turned to see who had spoken, recognized Dees, and said that Sir Thomas would instruct them all on their duties.

  No one said anything about the storm and whether that was to make some difference. Killigrew thought about tills, surveying the assembly, most of whom seemed eager to be summoned and even more of whom seemed so far in their cups it was anyone’s guess as to whether they understood what they might be getting themselves into.

  Then Sawyer called out, “Master Vernon, is Master Stock to accompany the posse?’ ’

  “I think it likely,” Vernon said.

  “Well, then, finding the fugitives will be the harder.”

  Several of the men wanted to know why Stock’s being along should hinder the expedition.

  Sawyer laughed as though the question were a ridiculous one. “Why, don’t you know Stock? He’s your little clothier with the shrewish wife, he who thinks so much of himself because he’s richer by the year while some of us who are no less honest grow the poorer for his advancement. The miscreants we seek were in his very house, eating and drinking and making merry, as the Scriptures say. Yet Stock let them go without even so much as securing permission from Master Vernon here or Sir Thomas. Now then, if Stock’s to be with us, I say we have more than the raw elements against us. ”