Frobisher's Savage Read online

  “That’s this Adam Nemo’s master, is it not?”

  Matthew said that it was,

  “It’s not unlikely then that Nemo will run for cover in a place he knows. Where must he have better knowledge than on his master’s land? Although he be a savage, yet he is a cunning devil. If I mistake not, he will know every tree and hollow, if there be caves or other hidingplaces. Every inch must be covered.”

  Matthew said he thought that was right. What better place to find refuge than where one knew the lay of the land?

  “Time’s come to spread the men out, like a net,” Fuller said, holding his hands out and spreading his gloved fingers. He looked at Matthew with a slightly raised chin, as though appraising Matthew’s ability to understand and follow orders. “Since there’s but two of them and thirty-odd of us, there will be little contest if we go forth in groups of five. I’ll want you to lead one of the groups, Master Stock. ”

  “As you wish, sir.”

  “Choose four of the company to go with you. I’ll have Vernon and this stonemason Dees to choose their four. I will take four of my own and five other men will follow the road. ”

  Fuller now turned aside to give these instructions to the whole company. He spoke in a resonant, calm voice, like a master directing his manservant to find his shoes beneath the bed. The leaders stepped back from the fire and did as they had been ordered, each taking turns at selecting who would accompany them. Vernon, who was offered the first choice because he was a gentleman, chose first not a townsman but one of Sir Thomas’s servants, while Matthew chose Peter Bench, his apprentice, and Martin Grubbs, a cobbler. He chose the grocer, Abraham Pierce, too and would have had two other of his closer friends from the town had they not been selected first by William Dees and Fuller. Toward the end the selection was small, and he took Hugh Profytt, consoling himself with the thought that at least the choice would dispel the sense that he had anything against Agnes or her sister.

  When the company was divided, Fuller indicated in which direction each group should search, and there was some dispute when Vernon was ordered to cover a range of ground that looked especially difficult to travel in the snow, while Dees, a mere stonemason, was given a flat field with hardly a rock or crevice upon it. Vernon said it was a great shame that he should be treated with such scorn and Fuller said that no scorn was intended and so he was right sorry that any offense had been taken. The condition of the land had nothing to do with the choice, he said.

  No one seemed to side with Vernon in this dispute, not even the men in his own group, who like the entire company looked rather sullen-faced and joyless at the prospect of leaving the fire and setting forth again. The dispute was quickly put aside however, when one of Sir Thomas’s servants shouted that he had seen what he thought were the fugitives, momentarily, on a distant hillock.

  Before Fuller could command, the men rushed for the horses, Matthew with them. The fire was left burning with alongside a dozen good unused faggots, and within minutes the whole company was spread out on the smooth field that was William Dees’s assignment and making for the hillock, with Fuller, a heavy burden for his poor mount, following the company and Dees, who was a good rider, in the lead.

  The excursion proved to be futile, however, for the company came to the top of the rise and saw before them another stretch of snowy terrain, and nothing to be found there except a row of trees in the distance and a wide field no fugitives could have crossed from the time the alarm was sounded until the present, nor were there any sign of tracks.

  Now the men all heaped ridicule on the servant who had given the false alarm, but Fuller silenced the criticism with a sharp reproof, reprimanding them all for moving forward before he had commanded it. He said that at the very least the servant, whose name was Hopkins, had been alert, which was more he said than was true of those who were drinking wine and warming themselves by the fire with such indifference to their duty that a host of fugitives might have passed by without their observing it.

  This rebuke was delivered with such sternness that all in the company fell silent. Even Matthew felt himself reproved. A greater melancholy than before seemed to fall upon them all, as Fuller sent Hopkins back to the fire to retrieve the pack-horses and the good faggots remaining and then repeated his instructions as to who was to go where. Afterwards there was an undercurrent of grumbling among the men, who had found Fuller’s reproof too stinging for their comfort.

  Joan had told Alice to stay home that morning. Why risk life and limb by walking the slippery, treacherous street, or exposing herself to the menace of murderers? she had said. But Joan herself felt free to go where she pleased, and sometime after her conversation with Elizabeth she bundled up and set out to visit Alice, which is to say, she went to find Alice’s husband, Richard.

  Assuming that he would be home protecting his family rather than in some alehouse carousing with his friends. Assuming that even if he were home he would satisfy the curiosity of a mere woman, he having been so recently honored by gaining the ear of great gentlemen of the county and London for what he knew of a distant cousin now murdered.

  Alice and her family dwelt in the poorer end of the High Street in a small house no bigger than a kennel. It was a kind of tenement where the door of one abode was almost within a handspan of the next and each house had one miserly window to let in the light and there were two houses to every chimney. Joan had visited on other occasions, generally when her servant was ill, and so she knew she would herself be well received. As for the husband, she knew Richard on sight but couldn’t have spoken more than a dozen words to him in as many years. Once a soldier, Richard had but one good leg and had lost an arm and eye in a battle with the Spaniard in Flanders, the details of which Alice had shared with Joan and Matthew on numerous occasions to their great pleasure, for Alice was quite good in re-creating the sights, sounds, and smells of warfare, having lived with a relic of its horrors. Unable to work because of his disabilities, Richard spent his time in alehouses, where his devotion to the grape often caused his dutiful wife considerable grief.

  As it turned out, Joan found both wife and husband at home. Alice embraced her employer and expressed surprise and a little concern that she should have come, the weather being what it was, and Joan said she had come to talk to Alice’s husband. Richard was sitting by the hearth nursing a cup of what smelled to Joan like chicken broth. The aroma was savory and when Alice offered Joan a cup she did not refuse it.

  The husband, who had not been overly distracted by Joan’s arrival, seemed more interested when he learned that he was the cause of Joan Stock’s visit. Using his crutch, he struggled to his feet out of respect for her who was the source of his family’s maintenance.

  Joan urged Richard to sit down again, for she could see with what difficulty he stood upright. He was a man of rather heavy, cumbersome build, prematurely aged because of his infirmities. Joan remembered that Alice had said her husband had received his injuries when a cannon he was firing exploded; the left side of his face retained the bluish tinge of the gunpowder that had taken his eye. The right side of his face, however, showed that his features would not have been unpleasant in his youth, when he and Alice wed. His speech was rather slurred, and Joan was uncertain whether this proceeded from his war injuries or from some early morning imbibing, which she had heard was his habit.

  Richard sat down again with difficulty on the edge of the hearth, and Alice ushered Joan to a stool but remained standing herself. Joan said she had heard Richard was a cousin of John Crookback who was murdered, and Richard, smiling a little, said by God he was in truth. He seemed neither surprised nor reluctant to have the topic broached by another, although Joan imagined he had told this story many times over since John Crookback and his family were discovered slaughtered.

  Joan’s surmise was verified by the ease with which Richard Hull described the complicated connection between him and the deceased farmer, but she found his explanation difficult to follow. It seemed all a tis
sue of uncles and nephews and their children, going back several generations where the names sounded strange even to Joan, whose family, from what she understood, had been the first to lay one stone upon another in Chelmsford. Joan listened patiently, although family connection was not what she was curious about, and when it appeared that the former soldier’s account was complete, she said with artful casualness, “I am told John Crookback was also a soldier in his youth.”

  “Nay, no soldier, but a mariner,” Richard answered, turning his lips up in a rather ghastly grin as though happy to correct this fundamental error. “For he never trudged a mile nor bore a pike, as I have done in my time, but sailed with Martin Frobisher. Frobisher is now dead, I am told, but was then a great admiral upon the seas.”

  “John Crookback told you tales of his adventures?” Joan asked.

  “Not to me directly. We had little to do with each other. Yet I heard of them.” As he said this, Richard cast his eye down to where his thigh ended in a stump, as though to ask what a hale man like John Crookback would have had to do with an old crippled soldier of the wars. “From others I have met over the years, and I have met not a few who sailed with Sir Francis.”

  “Do you mean Sir Martin?” Joan said.

  “By the mass, is that not what I said?” Richard Hull looked befuddled for a moment, glanced up at his wife, and then stared at Joan again with his good eye, the bad one being so mutilated by the explosion that it was hardly more than a small hole above the ruined, bluish check.

  The man then launched into several anecdotes about his cousin’s life at sea, one of which placed him in a very hot clime rather than in the frigid wastes where Joan had been given to understand John Crookback had served. She wondered about the accuracy of these accounts. Was Richard Hull simply confused, as he had been about the names of John Crookback’s commander?

  “Did you and John play together as boys?” Joan asked, trying herself to remember the boys she had known as a girl and feeling disheartened at her failure. What a devious trick time played. Had she ever known John Crookback herself? A baker’s daughter, she had dwelt in town, not five houses from where she now lived. John Crookback had lived on his father’s farm. No image of a youthful John Crookback crossed her mind that was not mixed up with with other youthful figures of her childhood.

  “Oh we never did much together,” said Richard, shaking his head as though this was one of the great sorrows of his life. “He was older, you see, by enough years that we had different friends. The truth was that in those days I hardly knew we were cousins at all.”

  Richard gave a short snort of laughter at this irony, glanced up at his wife as though seeking her permission to continue with this line of thought, and then turned his attention to Joan again.

  “When did you find out you were kin?” Joan asked.

  Richard thought for a moment, scratching the beard that grew only on his chin. “Marry, I think it was after he had come back, after he had inherited his father’s farm. He had run off to sea, you know, as a mere boy. He and the father did not see to eye to eye on matters.” Richard nodded his head sagely, and Joan asked what were the matters on which the father and son had differed, but Richard said he did not know. Just matters, he said, such as those that regularly divide sons from fathers, making life difficult.

  “Were there other heirs?” Joan asked, although she already knew the answer to this question from Sir Thomas’s report.

  “Nary a one,” Richard said promptly with a kind of satisfaction, “although the farm is a fine one. Would that I had been closer in kin, and we should not live in such a condition of wretchedness as we do today. I should have been a farmer rather than soldier—marry, I should have kept leg and eye and my better face. Yet he owed me much, for when he came home it had been so long since he was gone some wondered if it was he at all or some other.”

  “How was that? Joan asked.

  “No one had seen John Crookback for a dozen years or more,” Richard said. “I was one that went to take a solemn oath before him who was then magistrate that it was John Crookback indeed, and that he was rightful heir, although in truth I remembered him only as a boy who was older than I and played roughly and had yellow hair. John left with nary a hair upon his chin and returned with a full beard. Yet I swore it was he, and believe so still, and others did the same.”

  “Did what?”

  “Why, swore it was he and not some other,” Richard said, opening his good eye widely. “There was an inquiry before the will was pronounced good and John Crookback named the true heir. Witnesses were brought forth and they affirmed it was he—that is, the true son. All of which gave me courage of my convictions that boy and man were the same and no other.”

  “Who were the others who verified he was the same man?” Joan asked, never having heard that there was any question of John Crookback’s identity when he assumed his father’s land.

  Richard considered this, his fingers finding their way to his beard again. He scratched slowly with the one good hand God had left him, and Joan thought, he searches for fleas, or cannot think but if he scratches. But uppermost in her own mind was the question, does he speak truth or merely tell a good story?

  “I don’t remember,” Richard said finally. “It has been twenty years after all since my cousin returned from the sea. My memory is not as good as it was.”

  No, she thought, it was true indeed. And she could hardly fault Alice’s husband for failing to remember, given his experiences, when she was faulty in that regard herself.

  Joan listened with only half her attention as Richard proceeded to tell her how his memory had failed. She was thinking about beardless boys and the men they became and how a face changed with the years and how difficult it was to discern the boy within the man. Age played the devil with a man’s face, replacing the smooth flesh of childhood with wrinkles and coarseness and the disfigurements of disease and the scars of war. With women it was no different. She thought of Elizabeth, the child she had been and the woman she now was, and could hardly believe they were the same and yet she was Elizabeth’s mother and knew they were. How might John Crookback’s maturity and hardships at sea have changed his countenance? A man’s bristling beard was like a mask.

  Some things, of course, changed not: The color of eyes and hair, tricks of speech, the slope of shoulders and the line of a jaw betrayed the lineaments of a man’s parents. But these details were not always well remembered.

  Joan resolved to ask elsewhere about John Crookback’s return. Joan herself had been unaware of that event then; but her head had been full of other things. She took no particular notice of a sailor’s return to inherit a farm. But perhaps someone lived still who remembered what had evidently made little stir almost twenty years before.

  She thanked Richard Hull and Alice for their time and for the broth, upon which she passed a judgment pleasing to Alice, and was on her way home again when she remembered who might recall what she had never known.

  Joan was glad she remembered when she did, for the house she now sought lay between Alice’s and her own and she supposed she might as well stop there as not, there being so little to do on a day when she was almost the only one to brave the streets except for a group of boys who had ventured out to hurl snowballs at each other.

  Thomas Barber was an ancient man who for many years had been clerk of Chelmsford and therefore master of all records. Nearly eighty, he rarely left his house, Joan knew, but his mind remained keen for a man of his age and he had known Joan’s father well when her father still lived. She was certain Thomas Barber would not mind a visit and was soon proven right. After much knocking and Joan’s assurance that it was she and not some murderer with blood on his mind, the door was opened by the old man’s granddaughter, a plain, rather sad woman named Dorothy who had never married and had devoted herself to taking care of her grandfather.

  Unlike Alice and her husband, Thomas Barber lived in a condition of modest prosperity, the fruit of his labors, for he
had been a busy scrivener as well as town official.

  Joan found him seated by a blazing fire, covered with a lap robe. He looked up with a quick, startled expression, as though her entrance had awakened him from his nap.

  Joan told him who she was to save him any embarrassment, but in fact he remembered her very well and immediately began to tell a story about her father, who had once been involved in a complicated legal transaction with the town. Joan listened with amazement as the old man recalled the most minute details—details that she herself had never known, since all this happened when she was a child.

  She interrupted his reminiscences to ask about John Crookback’s inheritance. Master Barber had heard about the murders, he said, nodding his head as though the event confirmed his worst suspicions about the human race, and the business of Abraham Crookback’s will he remembered. “I remember the father. Abraham was old when he begot his son upon Mary Wood, who died shortly thereafter; he had but one son living when he died himself and no other close kinfolk that I recall.”

  “Was there a question then as to whether John Crookback was indeed the rightful heir?” Joan asked.

  “Abraham Crookback’s will was as clear as could be writ. It was not the conditions of the will but the identity of the man that was in question. No one had seen him in years. He had run away as a boy because his father used him poorly, or perhaps only because he wanted to see something of the great world beyond. We wanted him to prove himself, and so he did.”

  “What evidence did he furnish?” Joan wanted to know.

  “Witnesses to his identity, and of course knowledge that none could have save it was he and not some other.”

  She wanted to know what witnesses, and the old scrivener thought for a moment and then beckoned to Dorothy, who all this time had been standing in the comer watching her grandfather with a concerned look on her face. Dorothy went to a cupboard in the comer, where she opened a drawer and withdrew a book. This she carried to her grandfather with a kind of reverence. Without a word he took it from her and began thumbing through the pages.