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  “I don’t know, Joan. I would rest easier if you were indoors.”

  “But look at your townsmen,” she promptly answered. “All are here in the street. You assure them on the one hand that there is no present danger and at the same time keep your own wife under lock and key? Why, what hypocrisy is here, husband? Have the courage of your own convictions. If they see me walk about free of fear, then this will encourage them to do likewise. But if I lock up the house, who then will listen to your wise counsel?”

  Matthew considered this, decided he had no effective rebuttal to her argument, and said, “Then bring yourself and your basket, for if Sir Thomas will have it so, then I will not deny myself your company. The morning will pass the quicker and merrier, despite what lies ahead.”

  Given the relatively short distance to the farm, Matthew suggested they walk, and the two were ready to start out when a handsome young man in Sir Thomas Mildmay’s livery came riding up behind them. In his hand he held the reins of a second horse, already fitted out for a rider. “Here, Master Stock. My master bids you come straightway to meet him at the farmstead and has provided this horse for your conveyance.” Matthew looked at Joan, prepared to console her in her disappointment, but her face hardly reflected any. “This, husband, is the very man who bid me join you at the farm, saying a woman’s presence would help much.”

  The handsome servant smiled pleasantly and said his name was Hubert Selby. Joan looked up at the horse he led, a goodly mare with a broad back and a long-suffering expression. She handed the basket to Hubert, then looked at Matthew.

  “Well, Matthew, don’t just stand there in a muddle. Sir Thomas has bid us come with dispatch. Already the morning leans toward noon. Help me mount. Unless I know nothing of horses, this beast is a gentle creature who will bear us both and with a good will, at least as far as the farmstead.”

  As it turned out, the mare Joan had praised for her gentleness was somewhat more spirited than she supposed, and while the ride to the farm was quick, it was also harrowing. Joan was more than a little relieved when they arrived.

  She was amazed to see the great number of men who had congregated before the farmhouse. There was Sir Thomas Mildmay, of course, who was speaking to them all as she and Matthew arrived; at least a dozen men in livery; the gentlemen who had accompanied Sir Thomas the night before; and two of the six aldermen of the town, Stephen Marks, butcher, and Allan Ingram, another clothier. There was also a group of men who stood at a little distance from the others with shovels and picks. The men were not dressed in livery but in ordinary clothes, shabby and patched; they wore battered hats or none at all, and Joan could tell they were not farmers but simply poor men with no other business who had been pressed into duty. These were men who frequented the taverns of the town while good men worked, and Joan surmised they had been sought to do digging, but digging for what? Did Sir Thomas think there were graves or treasure to be uncovered?

  As she and Matthew approached, Sir Thomas did not stop speaking but beckoned Matthew to come forward. Joan was relieved to see that her own presence among all the Chelmsford worthies was not taken by the magistrate as an offense. As they had ridden toward the farm it had occurred to her that the generosity of Hubert Selby’s invitation might not necessarily have had the approval of his master.

  Sir Thomas was speaking in a high clear voice as though he were giving a speech or sermon rather than just talking to a group of no more than several dozen men. He said his intent was to leave no piece of evidence undiscovered, for the whole country would look on these proceedings and he should be held answerable for his conduct. “Let no man say Thomas Mildmay failed in his duty, or that Chelmsford behaved in an unseemly fashion in accusing innocent persons in order to have an unpleasant matter done. Let us act prudently and with dispatch, and sweep nothing beneath the carpet.”

  Then Sir Thomas began instructing different groups of men in what they were to do. He said that his servants should search the outbuildings and the pasture, walking two by two, and that he and the aldermen of the town should take the

  house itself. He nodded toward the laborers and said they should stand by until they were ordered to do otherwise and that his servant Faulkbome, a huge, brutish-looking man, would have command over them.

  Another of Sir Thomas’s servants, a man older than the others who seemed in more authority, asked what Sir Thomas wanted them to seek in the bams and pastures.

  “Why, look for whatever seems unusual—say, a bloody knife, or a tom cloth, or whatever else might help us learn what happened here. And take care that in your search you do not trample or disturb what might be of use in this effort.”

  Sir Thomas dismissed the men to these duties, but told Matthew to remain with him. Joan watched from a little distance, uncertain what she was to do. Sir Thomas gave some orders to Hubert that sent him scurrying back to the horses. Then Sir Thomas cast an eye in Joan’s direction; he motioned her forward.

  “You are right welcome here, Mistress Stock,” the magistrate said in a not unkind voice. “Hubert tells me you have come to offer your help in this sad business. Well, the idea is a good one, for we shall examine every piece of furniture and clothing in the house, including the dead wife’s. A woman’s presence may be useful under such circumstances.”

  Joan acknowledged this invitation with a little curtsy and looked at Matthew, who seemed happy to have his wife so honored by these attentions. But she still wondered about the diggers. Just what was it Sir Thomas expected to excavate? She did hope there would be no more corpses to bedevil her imagination with their ghastly countenances.

  Then Sir Thomas told Matthew and Joan to inspect the upstairs, while he and the other townsmen would search the down. “Cover every inch, open every drawer, stir up the rushes to see that nothing is hidden beneath, and if there be false doors or the like, take note. This farmhouse is old and may contain secrets as yet undiscovered.”

  Relieved that she had not been appointed to the parlor with its bloodstained walls and other evidence of violence, Joan followed Matthew up a narrow stair to the upper floor of the house. Here she found a single large room that by its furnishings she knew had been the Crookbacks’ bedchamber. At one end stood a canopied four-poster bed, a tall cabinet, a dressing table, and two chairs with curved backs.

  It was not what Joan would have called a pleasant room. Its low, dark-beamed ceiling must have been annoying to John Crookback, who had been a very tall man; the small windows admitted too little light, and with no fire in the hearth below it was even more frigid than the out-of-doors, which at least had the benefit of what sunshine there was. But Joan was struck by the quality of the furnishings. Few farmers, no matter how prosperous, could afford so handsome a bed, one that might have served in a gentleman’s house, if not in the master’s chamber then at least in one afforded his most desired guests. The two chairs were also well crafted, with ornate designs on their backs and cushions of down and embroidered cloth seats of excellent workmanship.

  She turned to look at Matthew, who was taking all this in too, and said, “Well, husband, where shall we begin?”

  It took Adam Nemo a few minutes that morning to realize where he was. The bed was soft and comfortable; it had the faint smell of female flesh, a scent like decayed roses. A strange bed then, not his familiar straw-stuffed pallet at Burton Court but a mattress filled with soft goose down. Nor did the familiar sounds of Burton Court at break of day meet his ears. He stretched out his hand and felt flesh—an arm, delicately boned and downy. It was Nicholas then. The soft murmurs of his friend’s sleep and the familiar feel of Nicholas’s body assured him that wherever he was, he was not alone.

  In the gloom of the attic, Adam could just make out Nicholas’s face against the other bolster. The boy’s eyes were shut, and with his yellow hair in a tangle about his face he slept the sleep of a man devoid of grief or guilt, who neither tosses nor turns nor wakes in fits as the images of his loss or his wickedness dance in his brain.

/>   But Adam slowly remembered what his profound sleep had obscured, and with the memory came the dull ache of fear. He sat upright, wiping the sleep from his eyes. From somewhere below him he heard a young girl singing. It was a childish song, adorned with rhyme and a derisive lilt, and for a moment his heart almost stopped, for it seemed to him to be little Magdalen Crookback, Nicholas’s sister, come alive again.

  But then he remembered where he was, and that this must be Elizabeth Stock he heard, the clothier’s daughter, whose small, dark features and curious expression—which seemed to ask, who, Father, is this strange man brought home and treated as a guest in the house?—he had briefly glimpsed the night before.

  Magdalen had been a beauty, even at her young age; a radiant laughing angel, even when she mocked him, as she often did, because he was her brother’s friend. Adam remembered how she had once come across him and Nicholas in the smaller bam at noonday, warm and secure. Finding them there, arms around each other’s shoulders, she had stood looking puzzled; then a slow, mischievous grin spread across her face. She threatened to tell her father where they were.

  “Wherefore should he care, little mistress?” Adam called after her. “He knows I am here.”

  His question caused her to stop in her tracks. Turning, she said, “Will you give me a ride on your shoulders if I keep my peace?”

  “You may do as you like,” he had said, then, “but I will give you a ride if that is your wish.”

  He had lifted her up on his shoulders and could feel her strong smooth legs around his neck, pressing into the sides of his face until he had to bid her cease.

  “Forbear, I am no beast of burden,” he protested, wincing with discomfort and humiliation.

  Above him he heard her laugh derisively and sing new words to a taunting song she was wont to sing about the farm:

  "Nicholas is cursed and cannot utter.

  Adam is his minion, more than brother. ”

  There were more words to the song, suggesting that there was something untoward about his friendship with Nicholas, and he remembered thinking that she must have practiced it, for it had come so quickly to her lips. Had she shaped it in her nimble brain or was it the work of one of her older half sisters, who always regarded him with such hostility?

  Now that mocking voice was stilled; those sea eyes were shut. He would no longer be mocked by her, but he knew the farmer’s older daughters lived to be his enemies. Had he not seen the malice in their faces, heard their filthy slanders, felt the heavy weight of suspicion upon him? John Crookback, were he alive, might have spoken on his behalf, said what a good and decent friend he was to the cursed son who had no friends otherwise. Who would defend him now? Not Nicholas, who could not speak even for himself. Never since he had been brought to England had Adam felt so strongly the bitterness of his exile, the alien feel of English soil.

  Henry Sawyer, who was indeed bom Henry Marsh of Colchester yet he used the name Sawyer as often as not, was five towns toward London when the news of the Crookback murders caught up with him while he was asking charity of the patrons of the Maidenhead, a shabby roadside tavern and brothel not too select in its guests.

  The deliverer of this news was a man he knew and on any other occasion would have shunned, the earnest Jeroboam of Burton Court.

  As Jeroboam explained it to the curious crowd at the Maidenhead, he was bound posthaste to London to acquaint his master with the appalling events of the week. His deep thirst and desire to be the center of attention along the way made it convenient for him to stop at regular intervals to relate the news, which he had done with such fidelity that by the time he arrived at the tavern he was thoroughly besotted and did not recognize Henry Sawyer as the notorious beggar and suspected thief of Chelmsford.

  From the garrulous and inebriated steward, Sawyer also learned that suspected of the crime was the eldest son of the deceased farmer and his friend, a word Jeroboam pronounced with ill-disguised derision. That friendship, Jeroboam said, just in case any in his audience of swillers, whoremongers, and other riffraff missed the point, was “something more than was decent in God’s eyes.”

  “Do you catch my meaning?” Jeroboam asked, casting a worldly-wise eye in Henry’s direction.

  “Oh, I do, indeed I do,” said Sawyer, with the sad resignation of one who truly understood into what depths of depravity the world had fallen. “And the ‘friend’ the other man who is accused—now, good sir, I would fain know who he might be.”

  “Why one of my master’s own servants by the name of Adam Nemo, a sort I have never trusted, for who can trust one with so filthy a visage and the eyes of snake? When the murderers were discovered, I sent word to where he was that he should not return to Burton Court. I took it upon myself to send him off, trusting that my master would approve most readily. Why, there are some honest wenches in the house, and of those who are not honest, they hardly deserve to be butchered for their wantonness. Two of the dead were female,” Jeroboam said in the hushed tone of one conveying a terrible secret, apparently forgetting that he had communicated this information to Sawyer and others several times during the previous quarter hour.

  Sawyer let out a little scornful laugh. “By God’s precious blood, I think I know the very man! Short is he, small-built like a boy, with a face round like a rotten black Essex cheese? Hair coarse like horsehair, and he speaks with a bedeviled tongue, like a foreigner?”

  “The very man,” Jeroboam drawled, resting his head on the counter and seeming to prepare himself for sleep. “If you know aught of his crime, you would be well to tell it to Sir Thomas, who is magistrate there. I have no doubt that even as we speak the man is in bonds, he and the son, Nicholas. Sir Thomas has sent to London for a learned friend experienced in the detection of crimes.”

  “Well, then,” Sawyer said to himself after a few moments of reflection, “I think my fate bids me spin like a top, for where I was bound for London I see my fortune now awaits me in the place where I began.”

  “Have you information to impart then?” asked Jeroboam, suddenly alert with curiosity.

  “Information? Well, we shall see,” said Sawyer with a broad grin. “I warrant you, sir, if I have no information about me at this moment, yet I will have aplenty by the time I return to Chelmsford. Say, good sir, the way is long and the day as cold as a witch’s teat. Could you for justice’s sake spare me the cost of a good horse? I will have the wherewithal to pay you later twice over, or I am not Henry Sawyer himself.”

  Chapter 5

  Fingering another woman’s things was not to Joan’s liking, be the woman dead or alive, friend or foe, and it was only her sense of duty that gave her the stomach for this impropriety, although it seemed to her that Matthew’s engagement in the same enterprise with John Crookback’s belongings somehow lessened her own offense.

  The relics of Susanna Crookback’s mortality were found in the cabinet, which opened, exuded the smell of sweet pomander and rotting apples. A carpenter wise in the needs of women had built it with two sides, one with shelves, the other open for the hanging of garments. Here Joan found two gowns of good broadcloth, well woven, both in the drab colors and with the plain stitchery Susanna favored, several petticoats, a kirtle, a wool cloak, and other garments suitable for the life of a woman living on a farm. Joan removed each item and, laying it on the bed, inspected every inch of cloth and every fold, uncertain just what Mildmay thought she might find but determined not to be faulted for having overlooked anything.

  Bloody spots, perhaps. Yet did the cocky little magistrate so full of his authority suppose massacre had been so regular a feature of the Crookbacks’ life that all their garments should be blood-spattered? The gowns were well worn, and one mended in the sleeves. Joan chose the best of them to bury Susanna in, which would be done after her neighbors had had their fill of the gory spectacle at the Sessions House.

  On the shelves opposite the gowns Joan found divers pieces of linen, bone laces, shoes, both a good pair and a poor, a open b
ox of ribbons, thread, laces, needles, a painted bobbin, thimbles, and buttons. On the upper shelf was a little coffer. Joan removed it and took it to the bed, where she opened it and laid out the contents. Now her heart quickened with guilt and anticipation, for surely these were Susanna Crookback’s most intimate possessions.

  Joan was further moved by how small a store was here to represent the sum existence of a woman who could not have been much younger than she. There was a gold chain, several pairs of earrings, an ivory whistle that might have belonged to one of Susanna’s children, two neatly folded damask handkerchiefs of intricate design, a little hand mirror with a silver handle, and a leather purse. She untied the purse strings and poured the contents out on the bed. There were twenty shillings in white money, three gold pieces, and a silver ring with a jewel of some kind mounted in it.

  “Come see, Matthew,” she said, drawing him away from his work. “If what gossip says is true that the Crookbacks were rich beyond seeming, then surely the wife shared little of it. Her possessions are less than what one would have expected of a prosperous farmer’s wife.”

  “And yet it is sufficient to prove, I think, that theft was no motive for these murders,” Matthew answered, surveying the store of goods before him. “What housebreaker with the sense of a goose would risk his neck to invade a goodman's house and not pillage cabinets and chests? What’s here?” He sifted through the coins. “A paltry sum in all, but here’s a treasure, a portugee—the great crusado. A rarity indeed.”

  “Now where might she have got that?” Joan asked, looking at the inscription, which was in some language she could not read. As a hearty youth thirsty for adventure, John Crookback had sailed the tumultuous seas; perhaps he had given the coin to his wife for a keepsake. She looked at the coin’s face and the curious lettering, Latin or Portuguese, she could not tell. Then she placed the coins in the purse again.