“Thanks be to God that Sir Thomas said he would bring some more experienced man to inquire into the murders,” Joan remarked as they began to climb the stairs.
“So he did, but who knows when or if that man will come. And if he does, perhaps all will be resolved by then,” Matthew said, rather hurt that his wife should think him incapable of solving the murders himself.
Agnes Profytt had asked her husband to see to the door of their house in the lower part of the High Street one more time, for she was half mad with fears, she said.
The request did not please her young husband, who had other matters on his mind. “I have twice done so within this very hour, wife, and I fain would come to bed to you, sweeting.”
“Marry, I am sure you would, husband, and do me as my good sister has been done by her husband, yet will I rest more comfortable in your arms if our repose is not to be interrupted by a howling murderer. My half brother is at large, you know.”
Her husband sighed heavily. The room darkened as he bore the candle away with him, and Agnes listened as his steps descended. Their bedchamber was much less spacious than the room she had shared with her sisters and brothers in her father’s house before her marriage, and she spent much time wishing that it might be otherwise. She had consented to be Hugh Profytt’s wife because although his means were modest he had bright prospects of increasing them. A woman whose diminutive stature belied the greatness of her ambition, Agnes wanted to live in town, not in the country; she would have preferred to live in London, a real city, and wear fine clothes and ape gentlewomen, although somehow she knew such dreams were beyond her reach.
“The house is safe,” her husband said, returning. “Will it be tonight, sweetheart?”
“Will what be tonight, husband?”
“You know as well as I. You have denied me all this week with one excuse or another. Now your head aches you, now we must rise too early, now we retire too late.”
She felt a stirring of hatred for him as he mimicked her complaints, all just cause of denial, according to her view. She raised her voice in outrage. “What, have you no feelings for me? My father, stepmother, sister, and brother have all died this day and you have so little respect for my grief that you would use my body?”
“As is my right,” he said, growing heated himself.
“You have a right to be sensitive to my grief, you do, and little more,” she returned with even greater vigor. “What, would you think any woman could be amorous when her family is slain—and by her father’s own son? Where have you laid your brain that you cannot find it in your head?”
Hugh Profytt sat down on the bed. “I think you go too far, Agnes, in that charge. We have no proof that Nicholas—” “Proof aplenty I have, sir husband, and pray you will have the wisdom to stand by me when I present it all on the morrow.”
Her husband said nothing to this. He sighed heavily with resignation, blew out the candle, and crawled into bed, keeping to his own side, as he thought she desired.
After a few minutes of silence, he heard her voice again, but now soft and wheedling. “If you do stand by me in this, husband, you will prove what I have sometimes doubted since we were wed.”
“Which is what?” he asked suspiciously.
“Why, that your love is true and not mere pretense.”
“My love is true; I am ever protesting it.”
“But see how easy it is to prove. You need only confirm what I say to the coroner. So doing, you will stand true friend to me and to Justice herself, who must not be denied. ”
“I think it is you who must not be denied.”
“Perhaps,” she said. “Promise to stand by me.”
“I promise.”
He felt her hand slip between his legs, and a thrill of joy ran from his groin to his chest. She began to knead that manliest part of him as though she were milking one of her father’s cows.
“A faithful husband must have his reward,” she whispered in a voice that excited him because it did not sound like her voice at all, but like the voice of the wench in Moulsham to whom he had lost his virginity the year before he married John Crookback’s daughter.
Chapter 4
“When Nicholas Crookback and Master Burton’s servant awake,” Matthew said over the thin gruel that was all either of them desired for breakfast at this ungodly hour, “look well that thev stay within doors. It’s best no one but the family knows that they’re here. And ask Elizabeth not to go abroad this day.”
They were in the kitchen, huddled over a lamp. The house was as dark, as quiet as the town itself. Even the cock still slept.
“Elizabeth will want to see the goings-on at the Sessions House,” Joan said.
“Let her remain ignorant,” Matthew said. “And it would be well if you too were to stay home. These murders have drawn the dregs of the county away from their beer and whoring. There will be pockets picked, poultry snatched, and houses burgled while householders gawk and gossip, I trow. I tell you, Joan, more crime will ride upon the back of this sad event than Chelmsford has seen in a hundred years.”
“Well,” she said, “don’t worry about me. I know my duties, husband. I shall do what is expedient and will be no prisoner in my own house for all the murderers in the world.”
“I say it for your safety. But be watchful, Joan. And remember what I said about our guests: while they are not formally accused of the murders, they may yet be. And while I lack good reason to put them under lock and key, yet I am answerable for them.”
After Matthew left to relieve William Dees, Joan sat by the hearth enjoying the growing warmth until about the fifth hour, when Alice, the cook, came to begin her day at the Stocks.
Alice was a large fleshy woman in her early forties, with a cheerful round face and a sturdy body. She had worked for the clothier and his wife for several years. Because her husband Richard, who had been a soldier in the wars and had come back with fewer body parts than he departed with, could not work but only drank and talked with his friends at the taverns in town, Alice was the sole provider for him and their six children, who ranged in age from five to fourteen. Her eldest son, Tom, was a lanky, long-faced lad who on this morning had accompanied Alice because, she said upon her arrival, she feared going out of doors alone. She had been tempted to wait for the full light of day—indeed, she had been so afraid that she almost did not come at all.
Joan motioned to the table and Alice sat down, while Tom went to curl up by the kitchen fire, where he promptly fell asleep.
“My good husband is already abroad,” Joan said pleasantly, not being one to lord it over her servants. “We have two guests in the house who must be fed, but can we not spare a quarter hour for a good talk? Now, tell me about this cousin of yours, John Crookback. Him I knew in part, but you the better.”
Alice, relieved to sit after her journey from her own little house at the other end of town, began by explaining the complicated relationship between herself and the murdered farmer. As it turned out, Matthew had been misinformed: No Crookback blood flowed in Alice’s veins. The connection was through Alice’s husband, who was John Crookback’s distant cousin.
Joan knew that much about Crookback. She remembered that he had been a sailor who had forsworn his nautical career and returned to Chelmsford to inherit the farm when his father had died. Everyone knew that, but it was an easy history to forget, for John Crookback had not been one of those mariners for whom his adventures were a constant source of anecdote, at least not in public, whatever his habit in his own family, and there were no relics of his seafaring years that Joan had seen at Crookback Farm.
Alice said, “Oh I think he was a good man. Or so my husband says that knew him when young, although not so well since then. John was a quiet man, as you know, as his father was. The Crookbacks ever kept to themselves. But when a sailor he had marvelous adventures, or so my husband says, sailing to remote parts; Cathay, I think, or perhaps America. Yet he talked never a word of it after but kept all to himse
lf.’’
Joan wondered if Crookback could have been a pirate. Why would an honest seaman not be like other men, naturally boastful of his exploits? Reputation held him not so successful a farmer. His harvests were modest, and what wealth she reckoned he had was not so much in his farm’s productivity as in the value of his freehold.
“Susanna was his second wife, you know,” Alice went on, happy for an audience and obviously enjoying the fire, which was radiating a good deal of heat at last. “I don’t know the name of the first. He married her in London, I understand, while he still went to sea. She bore him Mildred and Agnes, dying in childbirth of the latter. That was in London too.”
“London,” Joan murmured, bending forward not to miss a syllable of this rambling narrative.
“Then Abraham Crookback—that’s John’s father—died, leaving all to the son who had run off to sea as a boy. Susanna, of course, is one of our own. I think he married her straightway upon taking up his inheritance that the girls might have a mother.”
Joan had known Susanna, although the two women had never been close, and had known her mother, who had died the year before, and her grandparents, who had lived two houses away when Joan herself was a child. She had played with Susanna’s brothers, rough boys, one of whom had been hanged. Chelmsford was a small town. Everyone knew everyone else and was kin to half the inhabitants of the churchyard, yet how long had it been since Joan had seen Susanna Crookback, except in church, which she undoubtedly would not have attended at all did the law not impose penalties on those who did not. Before the marriages of Mildred and Agnes, it was they who came to town on market day; after, Joan sometimes saw John Crookback there with his young children in tow. Never Susanna, however. She must have believed that the curse on her son was her own curse as well. A vision of a gaunt, middle-aged woman floated into Joan’s mind, remained momentarily in conjunction with the visage of girlish innocence, and then wisped away like the spirit Susanna Crookback’s soul now was.
“When it was discovered Nicholas was dumb,” Alice said, “Susanna was ashamed and was little seen in the town. I suppose you know why?”
Joan did not.
“Well, she was swollen as a muskmelon before she was wed, whereby everyone knew she and John Crookback were thick and all. He was as lusty as a stallion and no better than any man should be, so there they were, you know, making the beast with two backs in his father’s bam. Her father was very religious and there was a great to-do about it, all kept within doors because of the disgrace. Some say her father forced John to marry her, since she was carrying John’s child and he would have no daughter of his mocked. The children of the first wife never got along well with those of the second, as is often the case.”
Alice began to tell of another Chelmsford family plagued with such dissension, but Joan brought her back to the point. “What of Nicholas?”
“Well,” Alice said, with a great breath, “he was ever a bone of contention. Although he was dumb, yet was he the favored of the father above all the others. I suppose John looked at the infant, so much the image of himself, and loved it beyond reason, as many men love their sons. Then when he found out the boy was wrong in the head, it was too late for him to feel otherwise. Of course, his daughters by the first wife greatly resented Nicholas and the way their father loved him. They thought they should be chief in his esteem, because they were the fruit of the first wife—and because Nicholas had been cursed for their father having lain with the boy’s mother before they were wed. And they wanted no stepmother in the first place.”
“Marry, if that were a just cause of cursing, half the town would be dumb—yes, and deaf too,” Joan said. “I warrant there be some other bone that sticks in their craw.”
Joan thought about the Crookback women, recalling their shrill, accusing voices, the rage that seemed more pronounced than grief. Into what devious and mortal paths could long-simmering resentment lead?
Murder? Perhaps. But to what purpose? If the will passed the freehold on to the eldest son, as Mildred had declared, what advantage was there to hasten the day of their father’s death only that the detested half brother should enjoy his inheritance? And why should they have slain their stepmother and half brother and sister? It made no sense to her. The sisters were aggrieved, and undoubtedly greedy, too, but they were no fools that Joan could tell, nor monsters either.
“Everyone says that John Crookback had no enemies,” Joan said.
“Well, there was never any love lost between John Crookback and Susanna’s family, but her father is long gone, and her three brothers seemed to have made peace with their brother-in-law. Besides, none of them is so righteous that he could lift an accusing finger at John Crookback, who did justly by
Susanna after all, giving her the two younger children who were whole, in addition to him who is deaf and dumb.”
And what it came to at last as the cock crowed again and dawn began to pry through the kitchen windows was that Joan, for all the Crookback lore she had garnered from Alice, had no better idea than before as to who might have killed the mariner turned farmer, much less his innocent wife and children.
Matthew had a little talk with William Dees before relieving the stonemason of his duties. The two men hunkered down by the fire Dees built outside of the Sessions House, for he refused, he said, to spend the night with the dead bodies within, yea, even if they drew and quartered him for it. Dees seemed still shaken by the previous day’s events. He said bringing those children up from the well was the heaviest burden he had ever borne and that he would remember the weight of it until the day he died. He said what a honest man John Crookback had been and ever his good friend, speaking in a hushed, reverential voice that Matthew had not heard from him before, for Dees was widely known as a surly, hot-tempered man with a foul mouth and little religion beyond what the law required of him.
“John Crookback was a good man, Stock,” Dees said, seeming to forget that he had already declared this truth. “He didn’t deserve that, nor his wife and children. It shakes my faith in the Almighty when I see such things. Believe me it does.”
“The crime will not go unpunished,” Matthew said.
“The town thinks Nicholas killed them, you know.”
Matthew nodded.
“Perhaps with the help of that little foreigner, Master Burton’s servant, him with the squinty eyes and sooty flesh and speaks with a thick tongue like a Dutchman.”
“The town wants justice in an instant,” Matthew said. “That’s understandable, but I won’t act until my mind is settled.”
“Don’t wait too long,” Dees said. “There’s a great fear in
Chelmsford—and anger. Now it’s pointed at Nicholas and Adam, but you’ll be to blame if you move too slowly. Several of our neighbors, who I will not name, broke Sir Thomas’s curfew to visit me here. They wanted to see the bodies for themselves. I said they would not, for Sir Thomas commanded otherwise. They’re hot for vengeance.”
“They’d like to suppose it was one of John Crookback’s own that did it,” Matthew said. “That keeps the danger within another man’s door. A passing stranger or band of brigands could strike anywhere.”
“That may be,” said Dees, rising with that pained look of one who has sat in one position for a long time and whose bones protest any change. “Their reasons will make no difference if their wants aren’t satisfied. I am of the same mind. My house will be as close as a keep until this matter is settled. My poor wife is beside herself with terror. She will not let the children leave the house. Yet there is none that’s truly safe, what must we do?”
Matthew sought words to alleviate the stonemason’s fear but could find none. Of course there was danger. The deaths were not the work of God but of man. They bore the imprint of man’s violence, of his inborn savagery and pitilessness. How else could one construe the murder of the children and the poor woman who was John Crookback’s wife?
Matthew was almost grateful that Dees did not insist on an an
swer to his question. The stonemason stood silently looking up into the night sky whose film of clouds concealed the stars. He shook his head at the great mystery he had invoked and saluted Matthew with a little wave of his hand.
Matthew bid Dees good night, or what was left of it. He could already see the signs of morning, a pale contrast to the intense dark of the sky above. He stared into the fire and for the rest of his watch he thought about what Dees had said.
By eight o’clock Matthew’s watch had concluded and again a great crowd had gathered around the Sessions House. He was relieved by three servants sent by Sir Thomas Mildmay, who also brought with them a letter of instruction, written, they assured him, in the magistrate’s own hand.
Joan approached, carrying a basket. “I’ve brought you another breakfast, husband,” she said. “And news.”
Matthew lifted the cloth covering the basket, saw the carefully sliced cheese, the loaf, the pewter pot of honey, and a small package containing, he hoped, some sugary delicacy. The long morning’s inactivity had left him famished, his earlier breakfast having been such paltry fare.
“What news?” he asked.
“Information about the Crookbacks that I never knew before,” Joan said in a low voice.
“I have to go to the farmstead with Sir Thomas and his men. He wants the place searched top to bottom for what he calls evidence, before the coroner’s jury meet in the afternoon. Every board unpried.”
“I know,” she said, taking his arm with one hand while holding the basket with the other.
“How do you know?” he asked, surprised. “I found this out only now with this letter.”
“Sir Thomas’s men came by the shop before coming here to you. They were confused about their own instructions, thinking you had been relieved of your watch earlier. I told them where you were and one of them told me you would be accompanying them and their master to Crookback Farm to search it. I suggested I accompany them, to which thing they made no objection. One of the men even said he thought it fitting, since a woman was among the dead and there would be a woman’s things to finger through, which he was loath to do for decency’s sake. Another said the more the better, for it was unpleasant work. He was glad to have it over with as quickly as might be.”
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