“Agnes Profytt is an evil-tongued shrew. She will grow old before her time and live to be cursed by her children,” Joan pronounced with unwonted bitterness. “It is no surprise that she has a husband who is no better. How dare he usurp command when it was given to you by Master Fuller? If that young hag makes one remark about the event and I find it out, it will go ill with her. I shall gouge out her eyes, so help me God.” Matthew joined Elizabeth in laughing at this outburst, but Matthew deeply appreciated his wife’s loyalty. Of milder temper himself, he nonetheless had benefitted from time to time from Joan’s more forthright disposition, for despite her charges against Agnes Profytt, Joan could hold her own in any tongue-lashing, although their own marriage was nothing if not cordial.
When it was clear he was finished with his narrative of his long day’s events, she related her own activities.
“I asked you not to go abroad. The murderer remains at large and unidentified,” he said sternly.
“I went only to Alice’s house, a journey of no great extent.” “A sufficient distance for danger to befall you. You might have been seized in the street, dragged into a house before you were aware, and your throat slit for your pains. In your absence the house might have been invaded and Elizabeth attacked. You will not have a dog for the fleas that breed, so without me here there would be little help.”
“The watch did its duty,” she said. “I felt I was in no danger.”
“What am I to do with you, Joan?”
She gave no answer but smiled sweetly, and Elizabeth laughed a little to ease the tension. Then Joan deftly sidestepped the thorny issue of her disobedience by reporting all that Alice’s husband had said about Abraham Crookback’s will and the hearing about whether John Crookback was the true son and heir of the father. “Alice’s husband was there, as was William Dees, to affirm that the John Crookback murdered yesternight was John Crookback in truth and not some other.” “No one said otherwise?” Matthew asked.
“There was an inquiry,” Joan said. “Someone must have doubted.”
“He had been gone to sea for what, fifteen years? What is more natural than that his identity be confirmed by witnesses, persons who knew him?”
“As a boy, Matthew,” Joan said, “not as a man.”
“You are thinking that the John Crookback we knew was not the true son of his father but an imposter?”
“So I think.”
“But your proof is a slender reed,” Matthew said. “Fifteen years absent, there would be naturally a question, but that does not mean that John Crookback was any other than he claimed to be. Besides, this controversy as you call it may have no bearing at all on the murders, no more than do the black stones and the Italian assayer and Martin Frobisher’s voyages.” Joan considered this. She looked at Elizabeth and could tell from her puzzled expression that she shared her father’s doubt. What ground, after all, was there for her growing conviction that the roots of the murders went down so far as the question of John Crookback’s identity? Nothing more than a feeling. She had had such feelings about things before; sometimes, as Matthew reminded her, the outcome had not verified them.
She told him she had spoken to Thomas Barber too. “It was he who presided at the inquiry into Abraham Crookback’s will.”
Matthew looked at her with new interest. “Marry, Joan, you have rubbed this sore raw, have you not? And who else in town did you query about these matters?”
“No one else,” she said, somewhat defensively. “It was Barber who told me all that had happened in that time. Despite his great age, his memory is most complete. And he read from a book he kept wherein he noted all the facts pertaining thereto, who testified and to what.”
“Well, then, if Master Barber was satisfied that John Crookback was who he claimed, why should you dispute it? Barber is as honest a man as there is in Chelmsford, nor is he well known for having committed errors in the carrying out of his duties. His judgment is enough for me.”
“And for me as well,” Elizabeth said, who all this while had listened intently and only now had ventured to give her opinion.
At this Joan thought it prudent to change the subject, feeling that she was doing little if anything to persuade husband and daughter that she was right. But she resolved not to let the matter drop. Men’s lives were at stake, and also her pride. She would prove her intuition was no idle speculation but a true insight into the murders.
Agnes Profytt was first frightened to learn that it was her husband who was carried on the litter, moaning as if he were at death’s very door, then relieved that his injury was no more than it was. She sent for Martin Day, physician, who pronounced the shank bone broken cleanly—as any fool could see, she muttered to a neighbor who had come to her house to commiserate. Agnes scolded the physician for the manner in which he reset the bone, causing her husband such excruciating pain that he fainted despite being well-liquored in preparation for his ordeal. She saw that her husband was fed, cleaned, and put to bed, and then she went as soon as it was possible to her sister’s. Agnes had heard the circumstances of the misfortune from her husband, his friends in the posse comitatus, and from Master Fuller himself, who had brought Hugh to the house expressing the warmest sympathies on behalf of himself and Sir Thomas.
None of which honors lessened her anger when she understood that her husband had fallen under the command of Matthew Stock. She no sooner entered Mildred’s house but she began to heap as much abuse on the clothier—and his wife— as she could. These charges Mildred gave ear to for some time with kindly patience before she asked what Agnes intended to do.
“We are most relieved to have the murderers of our father and stepmother taken,” Mildred said. “But what of your dear husband, who would not have been injured had Matthew
Stock not ordered him to rush headlong into disaster? A prudent commander would at least have enjoined caution. Poor Hugh was doomed.”
“He was doomed,” Agnes agreed, nodding her head vigorously and glaring at her sister as though she were somehow an accomplice in the fiasco. “And now my husband’s leg is in grave danger, or so says the physician. We shall starve, while the clothier, who is much to blame for all this, feeds his belly and prospers. Is it not enough that our beloved father and stepmother have been killed? Is it not enough that Stock tried to dissuade our honorable magistrate against pursuing the murderers? Has justice not been frustrated in this?”
Agnes’s last question was so shrill and quarrelsome that Mildred had to remind her that after all, she was not an ally of the clothier or his wife but a true sister and as much a hater of Matthew Stock and his works as was Agnes.
Miles Carew came in the door, bringing a blast of cold air with him, for which indiscretion he was immediately reproved by his wife. The young man seemed to ignore the chastisement, however, and greeted his sister-in-law and wife as though he had never committed an offense. He sat down at table with them, reaching for the flagon of wine at its center, and said almost casually, “The clothier’s wife has been to see Richard Hull, who sits all day in the tavern and tells stories about the wars.”
“And what of that?” asked Mildred.
“Only that she has been asking him about your father, that’s what. About his voyages and about his inheritance.”
The two sisters exchanged glances. Agnes pressed her sister’s husband for more information.
“Many of the men with Sir Thomas and Master Fuller are at the tavern, still talking about the pursuit and exchanging monstrous lies,” Miles Carew said.
“As men will,” Agnes said sourly. “But Richard Hull wasn’t with them. How is it he offers his story when there are better to listen to?”
“Hull holds forth with the best of them,” he said. “When one man finishes his account, Hull steps in with his own story. He’s a big man now, since he is distant cousin to your father and yourselves.”
“By God’s good grace, a very distant cousin,” Mildred said with distaste. “This wretched man trades upon our g
rief. It is monstrous. I pray, husband, you had the wit to tell him to say nothing of me or of my father. My family’s business is none of his. And I would not have my reputation sullied by association with such as he is, a notorious idler, braggart, and tosspot.” During Mildred’s remark, Agnes had sat very quietly, resting her long chin on her fist and screwing up her face as she did when she was concentrating. Her eyes were as hard as stones. Then she said, “So this is what she would have, is it?”
“Who?” Mildred asked, turning from her husband to her sister.
“Why, Stock’s wife,” Agnes said. “Richard Hull is kin, but she is not, and I am more angered by her snooping than his bragging. Why should she take such an interest in our father were she not bent on finding some means to excuse our brother and his minion from blame?”
“Perhaps she hopes to uncover some scandal, some gossip to defame us,” Mildred offered.
“She shall not,” said Miles Carew. “By God she shall not.” Mildred looked at her husband, her lips curling with scorn. “Be careful what you resolve, husband, for I shall hold you to it.”
“And so will I,” Agnes said.
Mildred looked at Agnes, her scorn fading. “What shall we do, sister?” she asked anxiously. “Shall we tell Stock’s wife to mind her own housewifery and leave these murders to those appointed to look into them.”
“We might do so,” Agnes said. “But I doubt it would do any good. Joan Stock is beyond such admonitions. She’s a self-willed harlot of a wife. Her husband is nothing more than her simpering servant, a uxorious ass. Or so I have heard it said.” Mildred said she had heard the same thing about the Stocks. “The husband is horribly henpecked, for he has more blood on his face from her pecking than remains in his whole body. I warrant she plants horns upon his head as well, pleasuring herself with his pasty-faced, bean pole apprentice, him they call Peter Bench.”
They all laughed at this joke, and Mildred’s young husband the hardest of the three. Then he said, “Give me a domineering wife and I will show you a cuckold of a husband. May their horns grow long and tall as the members that engendered them.”
He laughed again at his own wit, but Mildred chastised him roundly for the indecency of his comment, saying it was too bad an honest woman could not enjoy the privacy of a little conversation with her own sister but some man spoiled it with the crude, filthy language of the tavern.
“I will not have that woman nosing around asking questions about my father,” Agnes said in a quieter voice than she had used before. “I will not have her working to free the murderers of my father and stepmother.”
“And our dear stepbrother and stepsister,” Mildred added piously. “Oh, how shall we proceed, sister?”
Being as it was not as cold as before and the snow almost melted from the cobbles, Agnes Profytt took her time walking the quarter mile to her own house. She engaged along the way in as many conversations as acquaintances she met, for she was a woman only content when she believed nothing of import was happening beyond her notice. From such familiar intercourse she heard more accounts of the search for the fugitives. She also encountered Dorothy Barber, who was sweeping snow off the doorstep of her grandfather’s house with a broom whose handle was taller than she, and learned to her dismay that Richard Hull was not the only person the clothier’s wife had spoken to about John Crookback’s obscure history.
“And I suppose Stock’s wife learned everything she came for?”
“Oh, I don’t know why she came,” Dorothy said, furrowing her brow so that she seemed even more homely than usual. “My grandfather told her all about your own grandfather’s will. And about the inquiry when your father came back from the seas, and the names of all those who testified on his behalf. You would have been so proud, Agnes.”
Agnes said she would be proud indeed. “I never knew about the inquiry,” she said. “Tell me who the persons were who testified on my father’s behalf.”
After struggling to remember, Dorothy told her the names.
“That’s most interesting,” Agnes said, wishing Dorothy well and hurrying on her way.
Now Agnes was nearly beside herself with curiosity and rage at this newest discovery of Joan Stock’s nosiness, so much so that she forwent the next five opportunities to talk to her neighbors and went straight home to confer with her husband, whom she hoped had come sufficiently to himself that she could have the benefit of his ear for the plan she had in the making.
Before arriving, however, she had one final encounter that put the finishing touches to her design. The weather having caused virtually all business to cease, the taverns had become the gathering place of most of the men of the town, who if they had not had the distinction to be part of the hunt were taking vicarious delight in hearing about it from the mouths of the actual participants. Among the most sought after witness to the events of the day was William Dees, whose capture of the fugitives had made him more celebrated than had his good fortune in finding the bodies of the murder victims.
As her luck would have it, Agnes encountered Dees, whom she accounted a friend and ally for his hostility toward her stepbrother and Master Burton’s servant, as the redoubtable stonemason was making his way from one tavern to the next. He greeted her with a cheerfulness that both flattered Agnes and assured her that the tale of his exploits had been well received at the establishment from which he had just come.
“A very good day to you, Mistress Profytt.”
Blushing at this courteous salutation from a man who on other occasions could hardly bring himself to nod, Agnes responded in kind.
The stonemason expressed his sorrow at her husband’s injury and asked how he did.
‘‘As well as any man might, given that his poor leg was almost yanked off and there was a deal of blood. The physician said he had never seen so pestilent a break of bone in his life.”
Dees murmured sympathetically and made a movement suggesting his intention to continue on his way, but Agnes prevented it with a hand on his arm. “One question, if you please,” she said.
Dees looked annoyed at being detained but Agnes ignored that.
“I understand you were a witness for my father when his inheritance was disputed.”
The stonemason’s face showed his amazement at this knowledge. “Why, I was indeed. But how should you know that? You were hardly more than an infant in those days.”
“Very true,” Agnes said, bowing a little at what she took to be the stonemason’s flattery and thinking him a more handsome man than she had remembered. “Then I understood little of my father’s business, other than that we had come to my grandfather’s farm to live. Matters of law were beyond my comprehension. No, it is from Joan the clothier’s wife that I had this news, for she has been looking into the history of my family.”
“And why should she do that?” the stonemason asked.
“What but the curiosity of a woman, I suppose,” Agnes said.
“Curiosity? Surely there are other matters to be curious about,” Dees said.
“There are in fact,” Agnes said, curling her lips into a smile. “But you know neither she nor her husband are persuaded Adam Nemo and my stepbrother murdered my family. I think she would point the finger of guilt elsewhere.”
“Oh, would she,” said Dees. “Where would she point the finger?”
“I can’t begin to imagine,” Agnes said. “But surely her long nose will make trouble for someone. And i’faith, I think it a great shame that your worthy service in this cause should come to nothing, as it undoubtedly will if it is proved you have brought in them who are innocent.”
She let this point settle in the stonemason’s mind for a moment before proceeding, and to good effect, she thought with great satisfaction, for Dees said nothing in response but stood there, his large, whiskery face a mask of confusion and vexation as he stared down at his boots.
“Now if some man were to speak to Sir Thomas ...” she offered.
The name of the magistrate brought the
stonemason out of his reflections. He looked up quickly. “Speak to Sir Thomas?” “You know how men are, Master Dees,” Agnes said, moving a little closer to the stonemason and adopting the sweet voice she reserved for wheedling and temporizing. “They give heed to each other but to a woman’s complaints not at all. If, on the other hand, some prominent man of the town—”
“If you mean me, Mistress Profytt, I am hardly a prominent man of the town, but no more than a simple—”
“Why, it was you who brought the fugitives in,” Agnes said, drawing even closer to the stonemason and peering up at him, for he was a tall man and she a very small woman. “If, I say, some prominent man were to let the magistrate know how hurtful it is to the cause of justice that Stock’s wife should go around stirring up old grievances and controversies and disputing Sir Thomas’s actions. Especially since the mystery has been resolved and the malefactors are in his charge. Does it make much more than trouble where trouble has been eased?”
Dees agreed that it made trouble, this nosing around in family histories not one’s own. “For what has it to do with anything?” he said, his eyes flashing with a sudden anger. “If Stock’s wife is fishing for gossip, she shall not fish in my stream.”
“Or deprive you of any honor you deserve,” Agnes added.
“Trust me, I’ll speak to Sir Thomas,” Dees said. “And he’ll talk to her husband straightway, I am sure of it. For Sir Thomas wants the matter done and over with. ”
Agnes expressed her gratitude to the stonemason, and continued on her way, speaking to three other men of the town before reaching her own house and declaring to each that Joan Stock had been asking questions about his family history. She told them as well that the clothier’s wife disputed the consensus of the townspeople that the true murderers of John Crookback and his family were now held prisoner by the lord of the manor. Each expressed a predictable dismay at the invasion of his privacy and resentment that a hue and cry so happily and heroically concluded should be disputed by one who thought too well of herself as it was.
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