Frobisher's Savage

by Leonard Tourney

  Also by Leonard Tourney

  Witness of Bones

  Knaves Templar

  Old Saxon Blood

  The Bartholomew Fair Murders

  Familiar Spirits

  Low Treason

  The Players’ Boy Is Dead

  Frobisher’s

  Savage

  A Joan and Matthew Stock Mystery

  Leonard Tourney

  ST. MARTIN’S PRESS NEW YORK

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  FROBISHER’S SAVAGE. Copyright © 1994 by Leonard Tourney. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N Y. 10010.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Tourney, Leonard D.

  Frobisher’s savage / Leonard Tourney, p. cm.

  “A Thomas Dunne book.”

  ISBN 0-312-11437-0 (hardcover)

  1. Stock, Matthew (Fictitious character)—Fiction.

  2. Great Britain—History—Elizabeth. 1558-1603—Fiction.

  3 Frobisher, Martin, Sir, ca. 1535-1594—Fiction.

  4. Eskimos—Travel—England—Fiction.

  I. Title

  PS3570.O784F76 1994

  813'.54—dc20 94-21754

  First edition: October 1994 10 98765432 1

  For

  Shelly Lowenkopf

  In the name of God in whom we all believe, who, I trust, hath preserved your bodies and souls among these infidels, I commend me unto you. I will be glad to seek by all means you can devise for your deliverance, either with force, or with any commodities within my ships, which I will not spare for your sakes, or anything else I can do for you. I have aboard of theirs a man, a woman, and a child, which I am contented to deliver for you, but the man I carried away from hence last year is dead in England. . . .

  —;from a Letter of Martin Frobisher,

  7 August 1577, to five men lost from his first expedition to Greenland.

  Prologue

  Coast of Greenland, 1576

  The savage was shorter than the shortest of the Englishmen by a span, and round-faced, squinty-eyed, foul-smelling, as all the savages were. His brown, leathery face peered out with shy, curious eyes from the shaggy cowl of bearskin framing his head. Behind him, mountains of ice rose in the distance like church steeples in the timorous light of the northern sun. All else was a narrow shelf of black rock, the whitecapped sea, bone-wrackingly cold and bottomless, and the sky like none of the Englishmen had ever seen in their own country; a blue so pale and soulless as to cause the heart to break with the very emptiness of it.

  Six Englishmen had come in the cockboat: Frobisher, whom the men called “the General,” and five who weren’t too weakened from sickness to endure the rowing and exposure to the open sea and the treacherous, half-submerged chunks of ice. The General had first spotted the savage making his way along the shore. He ordered the boat toward the rocks, but in the time it took for its prow to nudge the ice and the boatswain to clamber ashore, the savage had noticed the English. He stopped dead in his tracks and stood waiting submissively. Frobisher and four of the men—one having remained to make sure the cockboat didn’t float back to England by itself—approached to parley and trade.

  Frobisher had declared after the first few encounters with the savages that their heathenish tongue was too difficult even to attempt—consisting as it did of such belly snarling and squealing and mostly, he had observed, of gestures—more dumbfounding than the Welsh of his own ancestors. Perhaps, Frobisher had theorized, the frigid air had paralyzed the natural organs of speech, or perhaps it was due to some deficiency of the brain.

  “I am Martin Frobisher,” the General declared to the savage in a stentorian voice more suited to Parliament than this icy waste. “Servant of Her Most Sovereign and Dreaded Majesty, Elizabeth, queen of England.”

  He had earlier claimed the territory for her whom he served and dispensed with the ceremonial words. He was interested in the savage, however, and would have fain claimed him, but already the little man, who seemed but a youth, was backing away, fear having replaced the shy curiosity in his eyes.

  Frobisher motioned to the boatswain, who was tall and muscular, and who looked at the moment like a bear in his layers of good English wool. Without a word, the boatswain removed a long chain from the purse at his belt and extended it toward the savage.

  The chain was made of base metal and was one of a hundreds of such baubles Frobisher had providently secured to trade with the savages when he should find that northwestern passage and open it to England, let the Spaniards be cursed, but it gleamed like silver in the sun. The savage never looked at it but continued his slow retreat, never taking his gaze from Frobisher’s face, as though the General were a basilisk from whose own eyes one could not withdraw, one’s will notwithstanding.

  Frobisher said, “Take him.”

  At the sharp command, the savage ran, as though he had understood its import as well as the English had. The savage was fleet over the rock as the English were not, practiced in escaping from the great white bears. Frobisher ran as fast as the others, despite his breastplate and leg armor and despite having almost twice the years of several. Breathing heavily, he cried, “Circle round him, you slaggards. Head him off.”

  But it was not possible to advance around him. The shelf between sea and rising mountain was as narrow as a country lane. It must have a been a furlong he ran before he slipped, and the boatswain, the strongest runner and endowed with the agility of an acrobat, flung himself upon the savage, wrestled him to the ice, and straddling the little man began to pound upon his shoulders and back, cursing all the while.

  Until Frobisher caught up and ordered him to cease, although not to remove himself from the back of the savage, who was making no sound at all but lay as though already dead.

  “Great God in heaven,” the boatswain gasped, ruddy-faced and sweating. “He smells so. Like betwixt the legs of a Bank-side whore. Like a dog’s vomit. Like a—”

  “To him you may smell no sweeter,” Frobisher said, huffing and puffing and filling the air with the fog of his breath. The other Englishmen came up and circled the prey, laughing and pointing. The strenuous exercise had warmed them and dispelled their melancholy. It was a small victory for largely disappointed men.

  Frobisher said, “Bind him. We’ll take him back to the ship. Since he will not trade our chain for his gold, we shall take him with us to show those at home how far from England these northern climes be.”

  The savage had a name as had any Christian soul, but none of the men aboard ship could pronounce it, and some were afraid to try. He had already declared his inhumanity in eating his meat raw, in stinking so abominably, in staring at the Englishmen with the leaden eyes of a dead man. Frobisher himself had had some little intercourse with the savages. He had seen how wretchedly they lived, “very strange and beastly.” His crew, sons of the sea, were by nature superstitious and would no sooner have polluted their tongues with a heathen word than have pissed into the wind. Both tempted fate.r />
  So Frobisher named the savage Adam, because the savage was the first man of his kind to whom Frobisher had given a name, and the strangest he had observed in all his career as mariner and shipmaster, freebooter, pirate, and now, praise be God, the queen’s good servant. And so the name stuck like the tongue to frozen steel.

  “ ’Tis a great shame he shall have no Eve to be his helpmate,” Christopher Hall, master of the Gabriel, observed wryly after the name had been bestowed. Another present speculated as to whether the savages mated like normal folk. “Nay,” quipped Hall, “no doubt like the Italians, rather.”

  “Or the beastly French,” said the boatswain, who had been given credit among his shipmates for subduing the prisoner. The boatswain gyrated his hips and ran his hands down his flanks provocatively.

  All the men laughed, but the savage, who, having been examined in Frobisher’s cabin, as naked as his namesake on the day of creation, and found to have parts corresponding exactly to the Englishmen’s, stood as still and curiously staring as in the moments preceding his capture.

  “He shall dwell a singular man in his new Eden,” Frobisher said. “And Eden our England shall seem, after this barren waste where neither God nor the devil can abide for glare or cold.”

  The men murmured in agreement and were very merry. All knew the capture of the savage meant it was likely they would be returning to England soon, despite the ship’s condition.

  Until far into the night aboard the Gabriel there was more good-natured railery at him Frobisher had named Adam. But the savage endured this mockery with the patience an old Stoic Greek would have approved and continued to regard the Englishmen with a mixture of curiosity and loathing, even after they had become preoccupied by a common black stone, which each examined in his hand over and over as though it were a thing of considerable worth.

  Chapter 1

  Essex, England, 1595

  Years after his capture, long ago having given up hope of returning to whence he came, Adam, who had been given the surname Nemo, both in ironic jest and so that he could be like other men with family name as well as Christian, and who had nearly forgotten the name by which he had been known by his own people, still dreamed of ice. He dreamed of the restless, green sea, of the glistening mountains of perpetual snow, and of the sky without clouds and the earth that was forever frozen and knew no change, either in fact or in his memory. He dreamed of his parents, his brothers and sisters, all as vague in his waking life now as the ghostly presences in the big house at Burton Court—except in his dreams, when they were more vividly remembered than Matilda the cook or James the hostler, or the long-faced solemn steward, Jeroboam.

  This was after his short-lived career as a human aberration, after Frobisher’s voyages were thought to be a stale jest, a notable fiasco and scandal for having yielded no gold, after Adam himself had all but disappeared into obscurity and become no more than a servant, curious in appearance, known to be some kind of foreigner, perhaps a gypsy or Muscovite. Thought to have died, even. Which Frobisher had supposed, and a notion Adam had done nothing to disabuse any man of, for he was profoundly grateful to the Englishman, John Crookback, who had freed him from the staring of curious Londoners and brought him to where he could at least have a modicum of peace.

  Adam Nemo was of indeterminant years; his own people had not fussed about such matters. A youth when taken, he reckoned he was now forty or thereabouts. Compact and muscular, he had filled out with age and the more provident English diet of beef and grains. In English jerkin and hose, he did not seem so great an anomaly. Yet his round face, swarthy skin, and Asian eyes betrayed him as no native of English soil. That and his speech, which was colored with a curious accent. Now he was a servant in a great house, Adam, the first man—at least, of his race—in the green, fertile land that was England.

  Still he dreamed of ice, even in Essex, even in the great house of Master Arthur Burton, where he was one of thirty or more servants kept around the estate to prevent the sprawling, chimney-sprouting house from falling into a more abject decay while its absentee lord spent all of his time in London, attending plays and currying favor at court.

  Adam worked six days a week, like the other servants, and on Sunday attended church under the stem supervision of Jeroboam, the solemn steward who ruled the lower servants with an artful diversity of scowls and threats.

  On this Sunday in February, however, Adam stayed home. Two of the serving girls were sick abed with some mysterious fever, and besides, Jeroboam insisted that there be a man about the house in his own absence. James the hostler was normally chosen for this purpose, he being tall, broad-shouldered, and a clear match for any sturdy beggar who chose God’s Sabbath to beat upon the door and perhaps steal if his begging proved futile. But James had been sent off to Chelmsford to visit a dying father, and as Jeroboam lamented, there was nothing for it but to appoint Adam to the task.

  “Let no one in, save him you already know,” Jeroboam said. “Give a firm nay to beggars. As for the wenches, if they be sick indeed, let them keep to their beds and not dance for glee that they are excused from the parson’s sermon.”

  Adam nodded, his usual reply to Jeroboam’s instructions to beware of housebreakers, of whom the glowering steward had a terrible dread. Adam had over the years ingratiated himself with Jeroboam by ready compliance to every order, no matter how arbitrary. Since the other servants were sometimes insolent, Jeroboam being regarded by them—behind his back, at least—as a stolid, self-righteous knave and fool, Adam enjoyed a position of esteem in Jeroboam’s eyes. Adam noticed that over the years his duties had been slowly lightened. The other servants had likewise observed these favors and resented them.

  It was a mild day for the season. Rain had sweetened the earth, and the smooth fields of Essex with their occasional copse and hillock offered a pleasant prospect even in the depths of winter. Adam walked down the high road from his master’s house, mindful that his abandonment of his station would put him in poor stead with the steward but confident he could complete his errand before Jeroboam returned from church with the other servants and delivered his long, tedious recital of the parson’s sermon to those who stayed at home.

  He had left the sick wenches behind him, having confirmed the steward’s opinion that their sickness was nothing else but a ploy to allow them to sleep late. He had roused them from their slumber in their attic quarters only to find them well enough, teaseful young harlots in their loose-bodiced shifts and their white breasts wagging at him provocatively. “You shall be Adam, but we shall be no Eves,” taunted Martha, the older of the two, laughing lustily.

  “By God’s little body, Martha,” cried Sarah, the younger, who was thin-hipped and as fair as a lady and had had two children begot upon her body by the master’s unruly son, Harold. “You are so ripe for a husband to plow your furrow that you will have even Adam here for a tiller. Yet he is as black as a Moor and his eyes seem sewn half shut.”

  “Nay, I shall not,” pronounced Martha, standing atop her bed with her arms akimbo as though she was queen and not a simple servant girl. “For I doubt me he has a plow, and it must needs cut a wide swath to pleasure me.”

  Accustomed to such bawdy talk, Adam made no answer. He turned his back on the two women and went downstairs, satisfied that he had no caretaker’s office to perform for these two but was at liberty to do what he willed. He had known no woman in his life, either she of his own people or of the English and had never desired any, and the household females, having perhaps sensed as much, generally treated him as third thing, neither male nor female, and sometimes went half naked in his presence, leering at him with wanton eyes and making salacious gibes, fearless of his manhood and confident of his discretion.

  But Adam did have a friend, the young son of the man who had brought him to Essex out of horrid London years earlier. This was Nicholas. Deaf and dumb, Nicholas was nineteen or thereabouts, and because of some crippling disease that had damaged his brain, unable to do much mor
e than feed and milk his father’s cows or shell peas. He made gestures, wagged his head, looked simpleminded as well as inarticulate. Nicholas’s virtue, in Adam’s mind, was his acceptance of Adam. From Nicholas came no cruel jibes, threats, or references veiled thinly or otherwise, to his dusky complexion, exotic eyes, or thick black hair. But he and the boy would find a tree somewhere off by themselves, and under its canopy Adam would tell his friend—who might well have been born without ears or tongue, for all the good they did him—stories from his childhood in the land of endless winter where the sea knew no bottom and the sky no end, and the whiteness of the ice was intense enough to strike one blind.

  For years, Adam had regarded his obscurity as a blessing. He had not spoken of his origins, although perhaps the master knew of them and was too uninterested in anything but his own ambition and lechery to care. Adam’s history had been one of frequent transfer. Frobisher had turned Adam over to one of his lieutenants, and the lieutenant had offered him to another son of the sea to repay a debt. Adam had found his way at last into the custody of John Crookback, quondam mariner, now yeoman farmer, and finally to the house of the Burtons of Burton Court. Under the auspices of Master Burton, Adam had shed his public identity as an infidel. He had submitted to Christian baptism. He could recite the creed, knew when to stand and kneel, could write his name and could cipher too. He had become just another servant, virtually invisible and contemptible by definition.

  John Crookback did not take his son Nicholas to church, for Nicholas would always croon in a high-pitched voice when the congregation sang, much to Crookback’s mortification. To have such a defective son could only be construed as a sign of some evil on Crookback’s own part. There was a wife, Susanna, a younger son named Benjamin, and three daughters, the two elder from the farmer’s first wife. They both had married and lived in Chelmsford with husbands who kept shops in the High Street. The last of the daughters, Magdalen, was eleven. Like the rest of the siblings, she was ashamed of her oldest brother, a blot on the family escutcheon, had the family been of sufficient birth to have enjoyed one.