Frobisher's Savage

by Leonard Tourney

  “I pray you are not mistaken in this,” Sir Thomas said to Matthew as they rode. “I am loath to look the fool to my friends in the county.”

  “I have not misled you,” Matthew said, and he exchanged glances with Joan beside him. “You’ll find the murderer you seek within the hour and be lauded for it. No one will think about Adam Nemo’s escape.”

  “Pray heaven they do not, for I feel to blame enough as it is.”

  It was nearly midnight before they arrived in Chelmsford. Only a few houses showed any light, and the house of William Dees, stonemason, was not one of them.

  There was no sound from within for a while at least, and then they heard a gruff masculine voice Matthew recognized as Dees’s demanding to know who it was who knocked at such an hour.

  “Sir Thomas Mildmay, and Master Fuller,” the magistrate called. “Also some of your neighbors.”

  The men stepped back from the door and waited. It was a moment before it opened, and then but a crack. Dees peered out. Despite the hour, he was still dressed. “What is it you want?” he said, looking startled, as though he had only half believed what Sir Thomas had said before.

  “To speak with you. May we come in?”

  “My wife is sick abed, Your Honor. My children are asleep.”

  “We ll speak quietly,” said Sir Thomas in the same casual voice.

  Dees nodded and opened the door. “May we go to my workshop? It’s in the rear of the house. We won’t disturb my wife, then. Pray you wait, honorable sirs. I’ll fetch a lamp.”

  Sir Thomas told Hubert Selby and his other servants to wait outside, and he, Fuller, Matthew, and Joan went in. They passed through the larger room where the fire in the hearth was in its last stages and giving off a ruddy glow, which lit the disorder of the home of a man with children and a sickly wife, then through a passage into the shed at the rear of the house. Here there was a great store of stone of every sort, equipment, a variety of monuments, most unfinished, and the smell of rock dust. Matthew had been in Dees’s shop before, but he had not realized how much of his business was in gravestones.

  They formed a little circle around the lamp. Sir Thomas said, “I see you are still dressed, William Dees. Could you not sleep?”

  “There was a fire in the town, sir,” Dees said. “I fought it back with the others. You know how it is, sir. After such labors, one finds sleep with difficulty.”

  “I didn’t see you at the fire,” Joan said. “I watched from the beginning until it was sodden ash and not a lick of flame. I never saw you.”

  “Well, I was there,” William said. “It was dark. There was much confusion, Mistress Stock. How could you see everyone?”

  “And afterwards?” Sir Thomas asked.

  “Afterwards I was visiting the Profytts. I wanted to see how my good friend Hugh Profytt did. May I ask the purpose of these questions, Your Honor? I served faithfully in the hue and cry. My honesty in the town is well allowed. Wherefore am I visited at this hour and subjected to these strange queries when I never was so mistrusted before?”

  “Master Stock was attacked this night,” Sir Thomas said. “He went out to Crookback Farm to look around. Someone came out of the darkness before he was aware, struck him on the head, and then pushed him down the well.”

  “If that happened,” Dees said, turning to Matthew with a sympathetic face, “I am right sorry for it. But it wasn’t I that did it. I was in town all the night.”

  “Fighting the fire,” Joan said, “and visiting a bedridden friend.”

  “So it was, Mistress Stock,” Dees said, smiling a thin little smile and nodding at Joan. “Besides, how would I know that your husband was at the farm—a strange place for a man to go after dark, given what happened there?”

  “When my wife visited you earlier this evening, she spoke of a certain letter,” Matthew said. “I found it in a chest in John Crookback’s bedchamber. You knew what letter she spoke of. You wanted to see if the letter remained there. You didn’t expect to find me at the same time.”

  The stonemason looked around him. His voice trembled a little, and he seemed to stand less erect than before. Matthew noticed these signs and was encouraged by them, for he feared Dees’s flat denials would cause Sir Thomas to turn from his resolve.

  “I can do nothing more than repeat myself,” Dees said. “I never left town. Save when I fought the fire and visited the Profytts, I have been here with my wife and children—to which they will attest if asked—just as you found me. I’d have no reason to hurt you, Matthew, but account you a friend. ” Matthew said, “Where are your boots?”

  “My boots?”

  “You’re not wearing them.”

  Dees looked down at his feet and shrugged. Although still fully dressed he was wearing soft slippers. “I took them off when I came in. My wife’s distressed when I muddy up the house.”

  “Let’s have a look at them,” said Sir Thomas in a stem voice that brooked no denial.

  When Dees hesitated, Matthew said, “Surely you remember where you put them?”

  “They’re in the bedchamber where my wife lies. As I said, she is sick. I hope you won’t disturb her.”

  “We will not disturb your wife,” Sir Thomas said.

  Dees led the way back into the forepart of the house and into a small, low-ceilinged room with an unpleasant smell. His children were asleep there on pallets upon the floor next to the larger bed that was occupied by the wife, who seemed in so deep a sleep that the intrusion did not even cause her to stir, much less awake. The boots were at the foot of the bed, placed closely together.

  Sir Thomas nodded to Matthew, who picked them up and carried them back into the parlor, where they all assembled. He asked Dees, who held the lamp, to hold it over the boots.

  “The boots are neither wet nor are there signs of ash, as there would be were you fighting the fire,” declared Matthew. “Isn’t that so, William?”

  Dees said, “I cleaned and dried them after.”

  “You would have to have placed them near the fire, else they would not dry,” Matthew said.

  “They were never very wet,” Dees said.

  “I imagine they were not,” Sir Thomas said, eyeing the boots.

  “I say only that I was never at Crookback Farm, but in town rather,” Dees said.

  “Visiting Hugh Profytt and his wife,” Matthew said.

  “We shall see,” Sir Thomas said. “Master Fuller, will you please tell one of my servants to go to the house of Hugh Profytt and bring him and his wife hither that we may confirm the good stonemason’s word.”

  “Profytt cannot come, Thomas,” answered Fuller, who up to this point had said not a word, but had been as watchful as a cat. “His leg is broken.”

  “And so it is. I quite forgot,” Sir Thomas said. “Then have my servant fetch the wife. She’ll have to do.”

  The magistrate sat down upon the chamber’s one good chair, sighing as he did so that it was the longest night he had ever spent, with so much going on. Joan and Matthew took up seats upon a bench by the hearth, but Dees remained standing, his powerful arms hanging by his sides and his mouth set in fierce determination.

  The Profytts’ house was only a short distance from the stonemason’s, so it was only a few minutes before Agnes Pro-fytt appeared. She wore a heavy cloak and her face had the haggard, disputatious look of someone wrenched unwillingly from sleep. A shrill demand to know why she was wanted at such an ungodly hour had heralded her arrival, but when she saw that it was Sir Thomas and Master Fuller who were the authors of her summons, she made a little curtsy to each of the gentlemen and composed herself.

  “I am told William Dees was at your house earlier this night, to visit your husband in his extremities,” Sir Thomas said.

  The question evidently took Agnes by surprise. For a moment she stood frozen, then turned her gaze from the magistrate to Dees as though she would ask him something but could not speak it. Finally she said, “Whoever says so speaks falsely, though it wer
e my own sister who claimed it. I have been at home all the night tending to my poor husband’s needs and whims, as a good wife must. I do not remember when William Dees was last within my door, if he ever was. But it was not tonight.”

  “Tell the truth, Agnes,” Dees said in what was hardly more than a whisper. “It was I who confessed it, not your sister.”

  “Yes, tell the truth woman,” Sir Thomas said “Let there be no liars here. If the stonemason was in your house this night, I must know it.”

  “I am a good wife, Sir Thomas, and a virtuous woman,” Agnes said, lifting her chin and looking straight ahead as though she were proclaiming this fact to an unseen presence in the room. “I do not keep company with men in my house at night, save he is my lawful husband.”

  “Oh, Agnes,” Dees said, speaking in a normal voice now. “This has naught to do with what we did or did not do, but where I was this night. Speak truth, I pray you. My life depends on it.”

  A look of confusion passed over Agnes’s face. She stood looking puzzled. Then she said. “He was at my house. Even as he has said.”

  “So you lied before.”

  “I lied, Sir Thomas.”

  “Why?”

  “I thought it might have disgraced me. After all, my husband is asleep most of the time. All the world knows what he suffered,” she said, casting Matthew a baleful look as she said this. “For a man to visit a woman not his wife, late at night— you know whereof I speak, sir. People will gossip. I would not have my reputation dragged through muck. I am no common whore.”

  “So you lied to save your precious reputation,” Sir Thomas said.

  “I did.”

  “You first supposed your sister had claimed that Dees was at your house. Was she there as well?”

  “She was, Your Honor.”

  “And would she attest to the truth of your words?”

  “I trust she would, Your Honor.”

  “So both you and your sister would affirm that Dees was at your house earlier this evening. What of your husband?”

  “He was asleep, sir. He knew nothing but what he dreamed.”

  “Is there other proof? If I find you are lying now it will go very badly with you. ’ ’

  The threat seemed to alarm Agnes greatly. She looked around her and noticed the boots that Matthew still held in his hand. She pointed to them. “Why, William Dees wore those boots into the house. I remember them well. He left filth upon the carpet I lay upon the rushes next my bed, for which I upbraided him, and I had to clean the boots myself.”

  “What manner of filth was it?” Sir Thomas asked.

  Agnes let out a little nervous laugh. “Cow dung. Upon my word, it was indeed. The bottoms and sides of his boots were all beshitten, so that I forbade him to enter before he had cleaned them thoroughly, but he said if it must be done, then I must be the one to do it.”

  “But there was no ash.”

  “Why, no, sir. He was visiting me while the fire raged. Whoever says otherwise lies in his teeth and I hope he may bum in hell for it.”

  Matthew turned quickly from Agnes to Dees to see how he was taking this curse, only to find that the attention of the stonemason had been seized by another. At that moment a rustle was heard, and everyone turned to see that Dees’s wife had come into the room. In her white flowing shift and with her pale face she looked the very image of a ghost, and Matthew felt a chill at her appearance.

  The woman looked straight at her husband, and seeming to ignore the presence of so many visitors in her house, she said, “What, husband? Have you come back from Crookback Farm already? I dreamed such a dream in which you were hanged by the neck, and I wept and wept but could do nothing to save you.”

  A great stillness fell upon the room at this. Then Agnes spoke again, looking directly at Dees. “Five pieces of plate of considerable value were taken from my father’s house. I would know if you have them, William.”

  “I have them,” Dees said in a voice quite unlike his normal voice. “They are hidden under my bed. You would have found them anyway.”

  “Thank you,” Agnes said.

  Sir Thomas sent Agnes Profytt home, saying he had no more need for her at present but not before chastising her for her lies, of which he said she seemed little repentant. Agnes left as she had come, mumbling and complaining about being awakened, protesting that her reputation was as pure as the driven snow, and that she and the stonemason had done nothing more but converse as honest neighbors might. But at the same time she roundly cursed William Dees as thief and murderer, with more heat expressed at his thievery than at his homicide, if Joan was any judge.

  When she had gone, Sir Thomas called Hubert Selby and another servant in and said the stonemason should be bound. Matthew and Joan watched all this, careful not to usurp any of the authority that the magistrate was now wielding with such grim determination. The fire had burned very low in the grate, and Sir Thomas ordered it stoked. Joan would have gladly gone home to bed for the lateness of the hour and yet would not have left even if her comings and goings had been under her own power. She felt it was she herself was in a little cell preparing to endure the lash of the magistrate’s tongue. But she was determined to stay awake and not miss a word of the confession she knew the magistrate was preparing to extract from the now much humbled stonemason.

  Hubert and the other servant bound Dees to a chair. His face was turned away from the fire and toward the bedchamber door, where his wife stood obstinately on the threshold despite Sir Thomas’s urgings that since she was in such a poor state of health she return to bed. But now the woman had grasped the direction of things and would not be commanded, continuing to look upon her husband as though he were a man she had never truly known.

  “Now Dees, speak the truth,” Sir Thomas said. “Your mischief at the farm has been proven by the words of your own wife as well as Mistress Profytt. Explain this letter.”

  From his cloak, Sir Thomas had withdrawn the assayer’s letter. He pushed it beneath the stonemason’s nose as though asking him to sniff at it as well as explain its importance.

  “I know nothing about this letter, sir,” Dees said.

  “You would have killed your townsman, Matthew Stock, to have it,” said Sir Thomas. He started to read the letter, complained about the dim light, and asked Fuller to read it, which the gentleman did.

  “I know nothing of black stones,” Dees said when Fuller had finished.

  At this denial, Sir Thomas turned to Matthew and nodded. Matthew said, “These stones you are ignorant of are the ones that form the shaft of John Crookback’s well. You know this. You laid the stones yourself. I recognized your handiwork.” “How should I remember what stones were used?” Dees said harshly. “That’s been twenty years if it’s been a day.” “You should remember because you used those same stones in order to hide them,” Matthew said, “thinking that they were of great worth and not wishing them to be discovered. You knew John Crookback was not who he claimed to be, but a fraud, the Ralph Hawking to whom this letter is addressed.”

  “Why would I do such a thing? I am no liar.”

  “Your conduct this night has proven you are,” Sir Thomas interjected. He nodded to Matthew to proceed.

  “For a share in the gold, you did it,” Matthew said. “Because Ralph Hawking, who was John Crookback’s bosom friend and knew the facts of his life as well as John Crookback did, offered you a share of it if you would attest to his identity.” Dees snorted with disgust but said nothing. For a few moments the room was silent except for the pops and cracks of the fire. The stonemason’s wife remained in the door of her bedchamber, as though she were guarding it, and Joan felt a great pang of remorse for the poor woman whose fearful dream would soon become a reality.

  “Crookback—in fact this Ralph Hawking—kept the gold hidden all those years because he feared Frobisher would find him out. At least that’s what he told you who had helped him to his present condition. Then you made a discovery of your own—that Frobisher wa
s dead.”

  “I hardly knew of the man.”

  “On the contrary,” Matthew said, “you knew a good deal about Frobisher. Hawking had told you the stories, had persuaded you that the stones were of great value. But all those years he knew they were worthless. He didn’t tell you that because he depended on you to keep his secret, which revealed would have meant prison or worse for him, disgrace and poverty for his children. Then you heard in some tavern that Frobisher was dead. You went to Hawking. You told him what you heard, expecting him to receive the news joyfully, to dig up the well and have at the gold. You were used, Dees, gulled by your own greed.”

  Matthew paused. During the last few moments Dees’s breath seemed to be coming faster and faster, as though he were struggling to climb a steep hill. Now he suddenly relaxed. His lips curled in the semblance of a smile, but there was no joy in it, only a bitter resignation.

  “Hawking was a liar and a plotter,” Dees said. “When he came to Chelmsford he came first to me in secret—knowing from Crookback who I was, how Crookback and I had been friends, as boys you know, as close as brothers. He spoke plainly to me, told me Crookback was dead and that he and Crookback had been shipmates; told me that if I swore he was Crookback he’d let me have a share of gold, wealth beyond my dreams, he said. But we must wait he said, wait.”

  “Wait for what?” Sir Thomas asked.

  “Wait for Frobisher to forget or be forgotten, so there’d be no question about whose gold it was, he said. Hawking admitted he stole the stones, you see. He needed a place to conceal them until the furor died down. He said people would forget in time, and then it would be safe.”

  “Who thought to use the stones in the well?”

  “Oh that was my thought, Your Honor. Better than burying them, I told him. For in the meanwhile they would have a practical use. And who would think to look in a well for gold?” “And you believed all he said about the stones?”