She had brought with her to the doorstep much of the heat of the fire and though dressed more lightly than her husband, still she did not feel the cold as much, except that in her imagination she saw the snowy waste through which he must travel, he and the other men, and she knew that although the troop would meet no resistance from the fugitives, there was grave danger in this weather. For this thrust of nature was not the usual damp of the season or dusting of white, but a blast many times more frigid and malign. The snow was heavier than she could ever remember having seen it, and in its blinding thickness calculated to frustrate the will and lure the unwise into disaster. Joan saw now that the circle of evil that had brought about the murders at Crookback Farm was still widening, that there might well be more victims dragged within its cruel circumference.
The cheering died away as she shut the door, only then beginning to feel a cold more profound than the elements. She looked at Elizabeth, who was smiling.
“Father will be well,” Joan’s daughter said in that low and melodious voice that every day seemed to grow more like her mother’s, or so Joan’s doting husband had observed. “Don’t worry, Mother. Trust God to bring Father home again.”
“Well may I worry in such foul weather,” Joan returned, moving beyond the wide-eyed replica of her own girlhood, who followed after. “A man can die in such cold as easy as not, and go to heaven if he has been just and good. That may be God’s will, yet it is not mine, and that’s what matters now. I have heard of it, what happens to those that die in the cold. Their bodies harden like wood. Their bones crack like twigs. They thaw only in their graves.”
These words spoken, Joan would have fain retrieved them: turning on the threshold of her kitchen, she saw at once the effect they had on Elizabeth, whose cheery disposition—an inheritance from her father—was no match for so grim a picture of mortality. Elizabeth seemed frightened now too.
“But you are right,” Joan said, forcing herself to smile. “Ail will be well, as you have said. Your father sat most confidently upon his horse. He showed not a whit of fear in his leave-taking. Did you not see him, and were you not as proud as I? Shall we be less courageous than he?”
“You did not cheer when he passed by,” Elizabeth said, tears welling in her eyes. “You did not wave at him or bid him Godspeed.”
“All these I did in my heart, daughter,” Joan said. “And when the heart speaks it speaks more loudly and with greater eloquence than the tongue.”
Elizabeth approached and embraced Joan, and as the girl’s cool cheek was pressed next to her own Joan could feel the wetness of her tears. She looked into Elizabeth’s eyes that were her father’s eyes, as much as the oval face was Joan’s.
“You are a dear daughter to me, Elizabeth,” Joan said. “And a good friend too. Trust in God, your father will return safe and sound.”
Alice had been instructed not to return to the house until the snow had stopped and melted, so Joan now occupied herself in the kitchen, while in the absence of Peter, Elizabeth was charged with opening the shop and setting out the goods, which were arrayed on three long trencher tables that occupied practically the whole main room of the house, together with a little table at which Matthew was wont to sit and keep his accounts.
“Who will buy cloth on such a day, Mother?”
Who indeed? Joan thought, not answering, too lost in ever present fears.
She set about to bake bread, good mind-dulling work that would allow her to make use of her time and dispel her darker imaginings. There were after all two mouths to feed, and Matthew would not be helped by his family’s starving in his absence. But she could not rid her mind of the final image of the horsemen disappearing into the whiteness as deep in its own way as the dark of night. How must her dear man feel now? He could not be a mile from town, and yet in such weather that mile must seem a hundred. She imagined the troop strung out along the road, which would be beyond discernment save for the hedgerows. She imagined the exhalations of the horses forming steam even whiter than the snow and the breathing of the men in and out and the anticipation that must quicken their pulses. All this she imagined as though she were astride a horse herself, encased in the unnatural cold and near blinded by snow.
And this thought occurred to her in a moment: If the wretched, underdressed man and boy sought in the storm were innocent of the hideous murders, was the real murderer in the company that sought them?
Elizabeth came into the kitchen to announce she had set all the cloth upon the tables but that she doubted anyone would come. She sat down on the stool by the fireplace and asked
Joan about the fugitives. She had slept under the same roof with them, and the thought of that degree of intimacy frightened her.
“They are just a man and boy, cold and frightened,” Joan said as her strong fists pummeled the dough.
“Then why are they being sought?” Elizabeth asked. “Surely Sir Thomas knows what he is about. Would he hunt them down if they were innocent?”
“Pray God no,” Joan said. “And yet even a knight may err, his knightliness notwithstanding. No man knows all truth, nor woman either.”
Matthew had told Joan everything he had learned the night before about the accusations now made against Adam Nemo and Nicholas Crookback. They had spoken of these things until long after ordinarily they would have been asleep. But they had not discussed the murder with their daughter, although after her presence at the table the night before and her exposure to all Sir Thomas’s theorizing, Elizabeth had formed her own views. She was, after all, old enough to wed and bed and give birth and govern a household and, by God’s bodkins, to say what she thought and to whom. She was, in a word, a true daughter of Joan Stock of Chelmsford. Let England beware.
Joan told Elizabeth about what she and Matthew had found at Crookback Farm. Elizabeth listened intently. When Joan had concluded, Elizabeth said, “Then you think that if revenge was the cause, Adam Nemo would have acted before, and that Nicholas was too dutiful a son to raise his hand against his father, mother, and siblings?”
“So I believe,” Joan said, pausing from her labors as much to emphasize her conviction as to rest her arms. “This blaming of Adam smacks of the wish for an easy solution. Sir Thomas wants to tie the matter up neatly, have the town go on about its business. I know how men think. They love nothing better than the stone house of certitude—even when it is founded on sand. Women, now, are different. They do not hurry in their reasoning. They look all about them and make a shrewd face, building slow but sure. Besides, ’ she said, returning to the main point, “that Adam is a culprit does not square with his behavior after.”
“When?
“When he brought the news to church,” Joan said. “Why would he trouble himself to do that, he that is thought to be so cunning, since it would only fix him with surety at the scene of the murders? To my way of thinking, were he guilty he would have fled and let the devil find the bodies at his leisure. He would have let the blame fall on the surviving son, who, loving Adam, would hardly have incriminated him even if he had the wit and the voice to do so. It was Adam who led Matthew to the well. It was Adam who prayed him look down. Believe me, daughter, I was there when the bodies of those unfortunates were brought up on William Dees’s back; I saw Adam Nemo’s face, and Nicholas’s too. May I never live to see my grandchildren if those two are guilty of this thing.”
“Then who killed the Crookbacks?” Elizabeth asked, leaning forward on her stool as though she were about to rise.
Joan admitted she did not know. “He may be among the hunters, but he is not one of those that are hunted. Perhaps it was he who set things about so that it would be thought Adam and Nicholas did it.”
“Oh, Mistress Profytt, you mean?”
The question slipped from Elizabeth’s lips. She looked at her mother curiously. Joan knew what Elizabeth thought of Agnes Profytt; Elizabeth and Agnes had never gotten along, even when both were virgins.
“No, I don’t think Agnes did this eit
her.”
Elizabeth looked almost disappointed. She said, “Nor their husbands, who wanted their wives to inherit the land and hated Nicholas because he would do so?”
“No,” Joan said, slowly, because something was forming in her mind, something large and certain, though there was no proof she could offer but her own intuition that it was true. This thing had no physical shape; it offered no picture to her eyes. But it was real and true and somehow the feeling of it clarified her mind.
“By someone who knew John Crookback years before,’’ Joan said. “By someone who may have sailed with him on Captain Frobisher’s ship.’’
The image of a great vessel in a high sea passed before Joan’s eyes. A tall man stood at the helm, surrounded by his crew. Then the ship sailed on as quickly as it had appeared. She had recognized no faces among the ghostly crew.
“But why, after all these years?” Elizabeth wanted to know. She looked at her mother appealingly, as though the answer to her question were as essential to her life as was the bread that Joan now set by the hearth so that it might rise and assume its proper shape.
They had walked all night, blinded by snow and often foundering in the drifts. With the day and a lighter fall of snow, Adam could see how little progress they had made in the confusion of the storm. He had lost his bearings. They had not gone in circles; but neither had their course been true. They stood in a field; one he knew; one that in another season would be green with barley and rye but now was as flat and barren as any waste in his own country. Only a distant row of hawthome broke the monotony of the landscape, and that could hardly be seen.
He no longer had to lead Nicholas, who seemed finally to have grasped their peril. Nicholas struggled alongside Adam now, his breath condensing in a fine mist, seemingly impervious to the cold, although having given his gloves to Nicholas, Adam now found his own hands so numb as to be past feeling.
If indeed it was the field he remembered, he knew there was a manor house somewhere near it that lightning had struck and burned the most of, leaving half standing and the rest all charred timbers and rubble. Having fallen into other misfortunes, the owner had sold his land to the highest bidder, and Adam had heard his master complain that the present owner had no use for it except for the sheep he grazed upon it in summer, which sheep he valued above the house.
Beyond the decayed manor was a forest of some extent that his master had hunted in with much pleasure. Adam had once accompanied Burton there, holding his master’s horses as the man and his companions gutted the huge buck the brace of greyhounds had brought down and squabbled over who should have the antlers. The forest was a deer park gone to ruin like the house nearby, with many trees fallen and a great many thombushes and other unruly vegetation, and the fallow deer and wild deer, Adam had heard, had now all been slain by poachers because there was no gamekeeper in his lodge and hardly a soul to complain of the thefts.
After a mile the snow ceased and the sun began to emerge weakly in the pale sky, so that Adam could see the manor rising up above the plain on a knoll, all tumbledown as he remembered it but more bleak and desolate in the snow and ice. He could see the part of the house that still stood and knew there would be shelter there and an ample supply of wood from the old fallen timbers. So they should have warmth and rest before he determined what to do next, and there would be hares, conies, and other creatures at least in the deer park, even if the deer were gone. Adam knew how to fashion a snare out of twigs and branches, placing it over the creatures’ burrows to entrap them when they emerged. He could strip the skin from the still quivering body of the creature and have it roasting almost before the little heart had stopped.
He was not certain that they were being pursued, but he thought it likely, given the mood of the crowd outside Matthew Stock’s house the night they left. He looked behind him from time to time, relieved that the snow covered their tracks within a few minutes, but then the snow had turned to sleet and the hard crust that was formed thereafter left clear imprints of their footprints. He could do nothing about that, but he hoped it would snow again, or the sun would come out and melt it all. Somehow he knew neither was to happen.
He had become conscious of the men some time before they appeared coming out of the sea in their little craft, which rode high and proud upon the water and which they caused to advance with flat-ended sticks they pushed and pulled with their hands. When he saw them, he stopped and waited while they approached, curious, even fascinated by their appearance. They were the tallest men he had ever seen, with skins that were pale like the undersides of fish and their upper lips, jaws, and necks covered with hair like beasts. They made barking noises with their mouths, sound without meaning, and their eyes seemed full of confusion and anger. He had not accepted what they offered in their outstretched hands, knowing somehow it was dangerous to do so. Among his people gifts were to be accepted with caution. A man never knew what was expected of him when a gift was given.
The English had made the first sudden move, but his own response came before he had had a chance to plan it. He was running over the ice, the cold air searing his lungs, he running faster than he had ever run. He would not have been caught had he not lost his footing. And then he was on the rock, with the man pressing his knee into the small of his back, pinning his arms and grinding his face into the rock The man started to pound him on the head and shoulders. Adam endured the blows without crying out, but his eyes were full of tears and he could taste blood in his mouth and feel a searing pain in his cheek. He was powerless to free himself from the tremendous strength of the Englishman, who kept screaming the sounds that conveyed nothing but rage and whose body and mouth smelled vilely, a strange odor Adam had not smelled before.
And then the man who was their chief, he who was called Frobisher, ordered Adam’s attacker off, making the noises Adam could not understand. Adam’s face had been bloody; his back and shoulders ached where he had been repeatedly struck. They had taken him into their boat and then into the larger craft, larger than any he had ever seen, the length of the village of his people and with almost as many men but none of their women.
In his mind’s eye he saw the attacker’s face—the image suddenly came to him, in every detail, the face he had not been able to remember but which now was as vivid in his memory as though the incident had happened a few moments before and the field of snow through which he passed was the very icy slope on which he had been captured twenty years before. Yet he still could not remember the words, which had had no meaning to him then. Was he ever to know the thing Frobisher had said to Ralph Hawking to keep him from killing the savage beneath him?
Chapter 11
After about an hour’s march, during which by Matthew Stock’s reckoning the company could hardly have proceeded more than two or three miles from the town, the snow ceased and the morning assumed a startling, almost impudent clarity. But if anything it became more bitter cold and the forced merriment that had characterized the company’s departure vanished with the realization that this hue and cry was no holiday sport, but a hardship to be endured and a mission with mortal consequences. Japes, gossip, and bawdry gave way to complaint, and then to a grim silence, as the men bent forward to preserve the heat in their bodies and the horses struggled to maintain their footing in the snow, which was covered now by a thin layer of ice.
Then Fuller called the column to halt, saying the animals needed rest. He ordered William Dees and Sawyer to dismount, remove the faggots borne by the two packhorses, and set about to build a fire beside the road. This the two men did with dispatch, and soon Matthew stood with the rest of the company around the fire, watching it spread from the kindling to grow into a generous bush of flame. The woodsmoke caused his eyes to bum, he stood so close. He took solace in the crackling and snapping of the dry wood, in the opportunity to give his poor buttocks a rest from the saddle. He breathed a prayer of relief for the reviving heat and thought of Joan, hoping she would have the wisdom to stay indoors, to lock the ho
use, to keep safe until the actual murderer or murderers were found.
Sir Thomas’s servants had brought wine in leather bottles, and the bottles were passed around the group, who, warmed both inside and out, now became more companionable again. Some of the men talked of what they would do when the fugitives were caught, but most refused, talking about the weather and how unusual it was, as though even to mention the danger to those they’d left behind would have the effect of making it more grave. There was a general agreement that this was the worst snow they had seen. There was much discussion of what it portended, oddities of nature not being without their meaning.
During their rest, Matthew talked to Hugh Profytt and then to William Dees, and then to both together. Nothing was spoken about the murder or the men accused of it; rather the talk was of their horses and their relative merits. It was a strange conversation, Matthew thought, under the circumstances, this talk of horseflesh when somewhere ahead of them—or behind, who really knew?—there were two poor wretches, hungry, cold, and surely frightened to the quick, and there was the danger to the families in town.
The men warmed themselves and talked, but not their general. Fuller remained aloof, stiffly conscious of his command. A bulky figure and bearlike wrapped in his great shaggy cloak, he remained a little farther from the fire and drank none of the wine but seemed to be concentrating on some issue in his own mind, screwing up his brow iike a mathematician considering how a fortification should be laid out. After a while, beckoning him to his side, he asked how Matthew did with unwonted friendliness and then how he thought the other men were bearing up.
“I think they do right well, Master Fuller,” Matthew replied, casting his eye over his companions, some of whom were standing so close to the fire as to be practically aflame themselves.
Then Fuller asked him whose land they traveled by. They were on a rise, and Matthew pointed out each farm and where Master Burton’s land lay to the north and west.
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