But what Adam had lost in celebrity and memory he had gained in peace. There were no longer great crowds to gawk at him, to regard him as a freak of nature, only Nicholas, who listened to his stories, with his wide vacant eyes the same color as the English sky.
The opportunity to pass a pleasant morning with his friend was one that Adam could not pass up, despite the risk that Martha and Sarah might complain of his desertion to Jeroboam. He was about to venture forth when he saw the beggar crossing the lawn in front of the house.
Here was a fellow Adam recognized as a regular supplicant. A man about Adam’s age with a crutch and a surly manner, the beggar, who was by some called Marsh and by others Sawyer, was notorious in the county for his impudence when his petitions failed and widely thought to be a thief. More than once Jeroboam had threatened to set the dogs on him if he did not leave the master’s property, and seeing the beggar, Adam suspected he had waited until Jeroboam and the other servants had gone off to church and had then emerged to make mischief.
“You there, fellow,” Adam called out, almost unconsciously adopting Jeroboam’s imperious tone.
Sawyer stopped and turned to Adam. “You there, yourself, sirrah. You little dog-face. I am a free man and may walk where I please.”
“You may not walk on my master’s land if he forbids it.”
“Master Burton may tell me then to my face,” returned Sawyer. “I have been a soldier in my time, have fought Spaniard and Portugee on land and sea. I take no orders from such as you—some snivelling base groom with a face like a dried prune. Where is Jeroboam, he of the solemn countenance? Gone churchward, to plague the parson with his glower? To fiddle with his codpiece in the church pew? By God’s wounds, my curse upon you all, every one, who thinks himself better than a poor man without means or health.”
Adam had no stomach for a quarrel with Sawyer, but he knew his duty. He said, “You are known in the town, Henry Sawyer. Be off, or the constable shall know of your trespass. He shall sit you royally in the stocks. You shall have spittle in your lap instead of pennies.”
Sawyer glared and shifted on his crutch. He muttered beneath his breath and made a gesture of contempt. “Oh you are a fine Christian, you are,” he said. “May God be blind and deaf in your time of need as you are in mine. Curse your heathen heart with cancers and warts, carbuncles and gumboils.”
Adam suffered Sawyer’s curse to lie on the wind. Dismissing him with a wave of his hand, he watched the beggar turn and hobble off, then resumed the journey Sawyer’s arrival had interrupted.
He went speedily across the pasture, forded a small stream, and within minutes was on the high road, his back to his master’s house and the morning’s share of curses.
Adam was happiest when he was alone, when his mind could settle back into itself, when, waking, he could dream of ice—happiest then and in his one-sided conversations with Nicholas, when his visions were made words. They multiplied, and he was near as he could come to crossing the cruel, tormented seas and arriving again in the world of his youth.
Another league brought him within view of Crookback Farm.
Of the farms in the neighborhood Crookback’s was the largest freehold and the best situated. Here the earth was fertile and well watered, adorned by occasional copses and by the farmhouse, a double-jettied timbered structure of clay and wattle with a massive stone chimney at one end and a high pitched roof of thatch. It was a house one of the minor gentry of the shire might have coveted. Besides the house, Crookback Farm consisted of two hay bams and a large shed for cattle, a kitchen garden, a horse pasture, and a broad expanse of ground where in the appropriate season John Crookback raised wheat, barley, and rye.
The absence of signs life at the farmstead did not surprise Adam; it was the Sabbath, and he knew that Crookback and his wife and small children would already have walked the six miles to church and would hardly return before midafternoon—and perhaps not then should they decide to spend the day with one of the married daughters in Chelmsford.
He was about to call out as was his habit despite Nicholas’s infirmity, when he felt a strange and sudden tightening in his chest. He paused about a dozen yards from the house and watched.
Adam saw no movement, detected no sound, human or animal.
He called out Nicholas’s name. In all the stillness, his own voice startled him. No reply came forth. He approached the door and found that it stood ajar. Then he saw the dog.
John Crookback’s huge mastiff lay on his side in the moist dirt just beneath the low-silled window. The dog’s head and neck were matted with blood.
Adam’s heart began to race. He was sorely tempted to back away from the house. John Crookback had loved his dog beyond reason; Adam knew he would not have left his corpse unburied. And he did not like the looks of the dog’s wound. Then he heard a whimper from within the house.
He pushed the door open and went in. The lower floor of the house consisted of one large chamber used as both kitchen and parlor, and two smaller, one a bedchamber for Nicholas and the other for the younger children. Crookback and his wife slept in a larger room upstairs. In the parlor everywhere there was blood, blood on the floor and on the walls, but there were no signs of the body or bodies from which this grim torrent had come.
Adam heard the whimper come again. He backed slowly toward the door, his eyes fixed on the wall. Then he heard the sound again, like no human sound but no animal’s either.
Had it not been for the sound his eyes would have deceived him into thinking the little mound in the comer was nothing more than bedclothes carelessly strewn upon the rushes, but the movement confirmed what the voice suggested.
Adam said, uselessly, “Nicholas, It is I, Adam.”
He did not bother to repeat himself; his own sounds were no more effectual than silence. He approached the huddled figure of the youth, bent down, and raised him up.
Standing, heaving with sobs, John Crookback’s eldest son looked at Adam with a stricken expression, his eyes barely visible through the matted yellow hair that he wore long upon his shoulders since he could not abide to have it cut and his father was willing to humor him.
“Where’s your father? Your mother?” Adam asked.
The expression of the boy did not change. It was not clear to Adam that he was even recognized. There was something terrible in Nicholas’s face. The house had been visited by death. Why had Nicholas been spared? And where were the brutalized bodies of which the blood gave evidence?
Adam used signs, gestures that he had invented himself to communicate with his friend. He made the circling motion with his hand to indicate his surroundings, and then put on a puzzled, anxious face. Nicholas sighed heavily. Tears streamed down his cheeks, ordinarily as rosy as a girl’s but now pale as milk. He would not stop shaking, and his chest, which was shallow for one of his height, heaved like a bellows.
Nicholas led Adam out of the house into the yard and from there around the rear of the house toward the bam, the door of which stood open. On the dead branch of a nearby tree, two ravens sat watching. John Crookback kept a pair of milk cows, but the creatures were not grazing in the pasture as they were wont. The earth was damp here, and Adam saw footprints and the marks of something dragged. How many of them had there been, Adam wondered, and why was he so sure they had gone but were not far away?
Adam thought Nicholas was taking him to the bam itself, but it was not so. He followed the boy around to the rear of the bam, where there was a well with a stone wall. Nicholas pointed.
Adam went toward the well and looked down into it. There was blood upon the stones, blood upon the black rock that lined the shaft.
The well was deep. Adam had once heard Crookback give it a good, round cursing, had heard him say the water was sweet but it must be painfully fetched since the well itself went all the way to hell.
Adam could see no glint of water reflecting the sky above, and from the depths came no sound to give hope that anything yet lived below.
&
nbsp; Adam Nemo raised the alarm at the church, interrupting the service to the general disapproval of the congregation, who looked forgiving only when they grasped from all his stammering and wild gestures the burden of his report. He had brought
Nicholas in tow, not willing to leave him behind at the farm, and the truth was that Nicholas had shown no desire to remain alone there.
Two dozen men and six or seven of the hardier women, together with two dogs, followed him on foot and horseback the six miles to the farm. Among these was Master Stowe, the parson, Jeroboam, and Matthew Stock, the clothier of Chelmsford. Stock’s wife came too.
‘ Damn you, Adam,” said Jeroboam. “If this is but an idle tale you tell, you shall answer for it.” He railed at Adam as the company progressed along the road, until Master Stowe told Jeroboam to be still. Matthew Stock said there was time enough for raillery when the story proved a fable, and Adam was relieved to see no disbelief in his face. Matthew Stock was much respected in the town and had often spoken kindly to Adam when he had come into the clothier’s shop.
Chapter 2
It took the better part of an hour to bring the bodies up out of John Crookback’s well. The stonemason, William Dees, because he had the strongest arms among them, had been prevailed upon to clamber down a rope. Afterwards, he brought each body up upon his shoulders, cursing and blubbering all the while that he had come from the depths of hell, so awful it was and foul below, until Master Stowe, who stood with the others observing these grim proceedings, reproached him for his profanity.
Dees said he could not help himself if he wept and cursed. “They have all been stabbed and drowned dead, like kittens in a bag. Who would do such a thing, for Christ’s sake?”
Matthew Stock asked himself the same question. He had never seen the like, nor heard either, except perhaps in soldiers’ tales of war. Nor had the slowly growing company of townsfolk who had come to the farm throughout the afternoon to observe these horrors for themselves.
Nicholas Crookback sat on the ground against the bam, his head resting on his knees. He was as pale as a corpse himself but dry-eyed, which thing caused some comment among the townspeople, who thought he should be overflowing with tears since it was his mother and his father and his sister and brother who lay lifeless. No one could remember anything like it—a murder that was more than the bitter fruit of a tavern brawl—and the memory of a dozen or more of the onlookers went back fifty years.
Matthew Stock had taken charge of the proceedings because Simon Hunt, who was constable of Chelmsford for that year of our Lord, had been sick abed for a month. As one of Chelmsford’s most prosperous tradesmen, Matthew was considered by his neighbors a suitable substitute for the ailing Hunt, whose usual, simple duties of arresting drunks and collecting taxes were not thought to exceed his competence. Murder was another matter altogether.
A short, plumpish man with a square, honest face, Matthew was amiable but shrewd, qualities he shared with Joan Stock, his wife of fifteen years. Matthew did business in the High Street, where he and Joan lived with their daughter Elizabeth above the shop. Joan ran her house with the same managerial competence that her husband did his shop, which was furnished with the finest cloth England produced and at the fairest prices. Matthew had an apprentice named Peter Bench, a cook named Alice, and occasionally one of several young girls from the town as maids, although Joan was generally too fastidious in her housewifery to endure another female’s hand at those labors. The couple exuded an air of prosperity and were generally thought destined, in God’s good time, to occupy an even higher rung on the social ladder.
Matthew had ordered the bodies laid out in a row upon blankets brought from the farmhouse. It was now late afternoon, and everyone was still dressed for church. Master Stowe’s sermon that morning had dealt with the Resurrection, and Matthew supposed that not a few of those present would be contemplating the corpses in that glorious light. Would these pitiful dead, being good Christians, not rise at the first blast of the trump? And when they did, would they not name and denounce their murderer, crying out for vengeance to the God of Justice?
In the meantime, their vindication was in mortal hands.
Matthew assumed these supervisory duties with characteristic unassertiveness. He did not believe himself to be a leader among men, and he was not deceived in his belief. He was mild of temper and soft-spoken, and it was his custom to negotiate rather than dictate. Conducting an inquiry into these deaths was not a task he would have chosen for himself, but the parson had made it clear that the burden fell upon his shoulders and on no other’s.
“Hunt is grievous sick,” Master Stowe said, pulling Matthew aside as soon as the bodies had been discovered. The parson made a sad countenance as though he were already practicing for Hunt’s funeral. “He may not live, Matthew. Nor is Tobias Whitworth of sufficient mettle to handle this. It must be you, or these horrid crimes will go unavenged, to the disgrace of the town. Should not such an event bring the curse of God upon us all?” The parson quoted chapter and verse and stared at Matthew with sad and accusing eyes.
With his own simpler theology, Matthew was not sure that he agreed with the parson’s premise. He could not hold that God would punish a town because it could not discover the cause of such heinous murders, but his own strong sense of justice found the idea that such malefactors should go free a thing not to be suffered without a zealous effort being made to ensure the contrary.
“I will do what must be done,” he said. “According to my ability.”
The clothier and the parson discussed whether the bodies were to be borne into the town to be examined by the coroner or whether the coroner should be brought out to the farmstead, and when either should happen. They agreed that leaving the dead exposed to public view was a shameful thing. Malefactors were so treated as a public example, their bodies left to rot in the sun, but there was no purpose in so dishonoring a yeoman farmer and his family, who had done no wrong to any man or woman. The parson was insistent on that point Matthew agreed the bodies should be taken to town. The coroner could examine them there, what examining needed to be done. The cause of the deaths was plain to the eye, he said: all four had been repeatedly stabbed, Crookback most brutally. But his wife and the two children also bore wounds, although it was not clear whether they had died of them or by drowning. “They shall in any case be buried in the churchyard—they shall be borne hence sooner or later, better sooner than later.”
Since Crookback had no wagon suitable for such conveyance, Matthew sent the blacksmith back into Chelmsford to bring his. “Ask Peter Bench to give you a sable cloth large enough to cover the bodies. Don’t stint as to the quality.” Then Matthew spent the better part of an hour persuading the onlookers to go home, finally threatening them with the power of the law if they did not. Aside from the indignity of the spectacle, the crowd had trampled all over the ground, destroying such evidence as there might have been. Heightened curiosity had driven many into the bam and into the farmhouse itself, where they observed the bloody rushes and walls, commented on the quality of the furnishings, and examined with finger and eye the most private possessions of the deceased—and carried off God only knew what valuables for their small pains.
Joan Stock, without any more authority than her own stem gaze of disapproval, had taken up her station there. To discourage thievery, she said, willing to call a thing what it was and being no mincer of words. Some of them in the house were total strangers who had heard rumors of the deaths. When Matthew came in and asked them all to leave forthwith, they wanted to know why Joan was permitted to remain. Was the clothier’s wife better than they that she should be so privileged? Didn’t the whole town have a natural interest in these crimes?
“It is an interest that will be better served if you leave,” Matthew said. “Go, if only out of respect for the dead. ”
After that, the townsfolk began to disperse.
“Matthew, this is a dreadful thing,” Joan said. “The murders are bad enoug
h, but that these folk should show so little respect for the dead, or for the law.”
“They will be setting up stalls and charging admission next,” Matthew said.
“Since Simon Hunt is sick, what is to be done? Who is to look into this?” she asked.
“Your husband,” he said.
She took this in, then looked at him very directly. “Godspeed you then, husband. But I would wish it upon some other shoulders than yours. Why, where would you begin to unravel this business?”
He was sorry she asked this question before he had any answer. He wanted to begin with Nicholas Crookback, but knew because of the youth’s infirmity that questioning him would be futile. Then he thought of Adam Nemo.
Matthew knew the servant only slightly; thus he had no opinion as to his character, whether he was honest or otherwise. Adam had come into Matthew’s shop at times, sent by the steward, or Master Burton on those rare occasions when the latter was in residence at Burton Court, to buy cloth for household furnishings. Matthew had also seen Adam at church, but had only spoken to him a few times over the years. He reckoned the strange little fellow to be older than himself, but who could really tell?
He asked Joan if she would continue her vigil in the house and she said she would. “I have no fear of blood,” she said. “Being that it is innocent blood.”
He found Adam and Nicholas sitting side by side, their shoulders almost touching. Matthew squatted beside them and looked back toward the bodies, trying to decide what to say to Master Burton’s servant and thinking that Adam was a strange sort indeed with his narrow eyes no more than slits and his round face the color of tanned leather.
“When you came to the farm, did you see anyone about?” “I did not,” said Adam, speaking in a voice so low that Matthew had to ask him to repeat the answer.
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