“Every word of it. It seemed to me a most plausible truth. The Spaniards had found gold aplenty in the Americas. Why could not an Englishman have similar good fortune in the northern climes? Is an Englishman not better than a Spaniard?” “What of the other witnesses to his identity? Did Hawking purchase their testimonies too?”
“I don’t think so. I had been his boyhood friend; the others knew him, but at a distance. I told Master Barber that the man claiming to be John Crookback was the John Crookback I had known, both because of his appearance and because he knew things that we twain had done as boys that none other could know save he was Crookback himself. The other witnesses followed my lead like sheep. What did they have but a handful of memories of a smoothfaced boy, glimpsed at work on his father’s farm? The man before them was full grown, bearded, his face beaten by sun and wind and hard experience. He insisted he was John Crookback, had information pertaining to his father, the family, the farm. If Hawking hadn’t opened his heart to me so I knew the truth, I myself might have been taken in, so great was his likeness to the boy that was.”
“But you were taken in,” Sir Thomas said.
“He knew the stones were worthless. He used me for twenty years, making me think the stones were of value. He had proved by the letter in your hand, sir. What was his name, Cavello I think? The assayer that wrote the letter. Like a fool I believed it. I mortgaged my honesty, swore Hawking was Crookback, waited for my reward. For years I waited, the more fool I.”
“But why kill his wife too and his children? Surely they were innocent of this wrongdoing.”
Dees stared dull-eyed into the fire as though he were caught up in a trance, as though all his murders he now relived and for the first time he was feeling the full burden of their horror. “I took care of the dog first—to shut him up. I knew what would happen if I didn’t. I didn’t mean to kill Hawking at the beginning, only to beat him within an inch of his life. But he fought back, with a strength that surprised me. Before I was aware, my knife was in his chest and he was dead in my arms. We had struggled in his parlor. His wife and the two children came in, saw the blood and the dead man, and started cursing me for a murderer and devil. I was beyond reason then. I had drunk deep before to build up my courage. My heart pounded. I was a crazed man. I slashed about me blindly. Only later did I realize what I had done.”
“Then you put the bodies in the well,” Mildmay said, “and got yourself to church.”
“I put the bodies in the well. There was justice in that—at least, I thought so at the time. Also a strategy. I thought to come back later in the day and fill the well in, conceal the bodies and the worthless black stones forever, but Adam Nemo prevented me.”
‘‘Why did you not kill Nicholas Crookback too?”
Dees looked up at the knight. “Because I never saw him. I reckoned he was off wandering about the farm somewhere, which he often did. Besides, he was deaf and dumb. Who would believe his report even if he were able to make one? I had no fear of him. When Burton’s servant was accused and the boy too, I thought fortune had smiled upon me.”
“Fortune will hardly smile on him whom heaven condemns,” Sir Thomas said. “You were betrayed, Dees. But your crime was the worse, and your penalty will be likewise.”
The magistrate told his servants to untie the stonemason from the chair and to prepare for a return to Mildmay Hall. Joan looked at the wretched prisoner and thought about his confession. She had always thought Dees a slow-witted, choleric man, a man perhaps too devoted to the pot and tankard. But never an evil one. And yet, she considered, was it evil, drunkenness, or just his uncontrollable anger that had turned him into a murderer? It was a hard question, one she felt was quite beyond an easy answer.
Sir Thomas looked at Matthew and said, “You have done more than yeoman’s service in this business, Matthew Stock. I promise that it will not be forgotten, either by me or this town.”
Joan’s heart swelled with pride at hearing these words, and she smiled at Matthew, but there was no smile upon her husband’s face, which seemed almost as stony with grief as Dees’s; and then Joan was suddenly ashamed that her pride had gone before her compassion, for she knew Matthew was thinking of John Crookback’s wife and young children who lay cold in the ground and for whom the magistrate’s justice would do little and come too late, and how little it mattered that he had not been Crookback at all, but Hawkins, and a wretch whose greed had overreached an honest mind.
Chapter 18
By the same time the next day, few ears in Chelmsford had not heard the sordid tale of fraud, deception, and murder. Matthew’s shop was busier than Stephen Satterfield’s tavern, with most of Matthew’s custom dispensing with any pretense that they were there to do more than gossip about Dees and John Crookback, who had not been John Crookback at all, and Agnes and Mildred, who now appeared to be the offspring of strangers and would have no claim on Crookback Farm. To Matthew were put a hundred different questions about Dees’s reasons, and to Joan almost as many. There was great interest too in the black stones. Rumor held that not a few citizens had gone to the farm to dig the stones from their mortar on the slim chance that they contained gold after all, for concerning these matters one could always hope.
In all of this no one seemed to express much sorrow for Agnes and Mildred, who were both now generally criticized for their pride and arrogance, while Agnes’s adultery with the murderer having become known—as such mischief will out at last—further disgrace was heaped upon her as an unfaithful wife. Instead, the town’s sympathy was reserved for William Dees’s wife and children, whom no one thought deserving of such a husband and father. Various persons now remembered other episodes of the stonemason’s explosive anger and shared these recollections with their friends. The next sabbath the Parson spoke upon wrath, using Dees’s murders as a potent illustration of the baleful consequences of that deadly sin.
Sawyer, beggar turned hero now turned beggar again, left town as soon as he was able, now known for the liar he was. Master Fuller, whom Matthew heard from Hubert was still convinced that Adam Nemo was at least an accomplice of the stonemason, had returned to London and his books; and Nicholas Crookback had not joined his parents and siblings in the churchyard. A suicide, he could not claim burial in consecrated ground, but was buried in some obscure place, although Matthew had no doubt the innocent lad would find more welcome in heaven than many of the so-called righteous who had been his accusers while he lived.
As for Adam Nemo, he was no where to be found to learn that his name had been cleared, even though Arthur Burton offered a handsome reward to anyone who could inform him of his erstwhile servant’s whereabouts.
On the third day after the stonemason was taken, the Stocks found Hubert Selby among their customers, but he was there neither to purchase cloth nor to gossip but at the behest of William Dees.
“Dees is being taken to Colchester Gaol even as we speak,” Hubert said, getting Matthew into a comer where their conversation would not be overheard. Joan, seeing Hubert, joined the two men.
“He wanted me to deliver you a message. For all the evil he did, he’s not totally without some virtuous thoughts. He prays constantly for forgiveness with as much earnestness as a pilgrim. He says he bears you no ill will, Matthew, and is heartily sorry that he tried to drown you.”
“I am right glad he’s sorry,” Matthew said. And Joan declared she was as happy as well that the stonemason failed, for she would be no widow at her young age.
“Dees has a favor to ask of you,” Hubert said. “He prays you will execute his will and look to his wife and children.”
The stonemason’s wish left Matthew speechless for a few moments. He looked at Joan and found her to be similarly astonished.
“He will have no other but you, he says,” said Hubert, handing Matthew a piece of paper. It was a testament of few words, written upon cheap, soiled paper. The ink had been frequently blotted to remove errors. The will remembered Dees’s wife and children an
d endowed them with all his worldly goods, along with his request that they forgive him and remember him for the good he had done and not the evil.
“The wretch seems to have forgotten that a murderer’s goods and chattels are forfeit to the Crown,” Hubert said. “His wife and children will be left with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Dees also asks,” Hubert added, “that you see that a monument is placed upon his grave.”
“And where would I find a monument for the man, and more, what have carved upon it?”
“Dees said you would ask that question,” Hubert said. “And he said I was to tell you to look in his workshop. He has made his own monument and engraved upon it what he thinks fit. He hopes you will find no fault in it.”
“Tell William Dees that all these things my husband will faithfully do,” said Joan before Matthew could answer for himself. “His wife and children may have nothing of his land and goods but they shall have a monument to his memory.”
In the afternoon, the weather now as mild as was typical of the season, Joan and Matthew went to the stonemason’s house. Dees’s wife, with more color in her face than she had had before and dressed in mourning as though she were already a widow, let them in, apologizing for the delay, for she feared the people, she said, that they might stain her with her husband’s disgrace. “He was never a very good husband,” she said philosophically, “and more a burden at this moment than ever he was before. Yet he is my husband, and I shall have no other in this world.”
“William has asked me to see that a stone is placed on his grave,” Matthew said.
Dees’s wife nodded and led Matthew and Joan to the shop at the back of the house.
“I know of no monument he made for himself, but if he did, it’s among the rest,” she said. She left them then, as though being in her husband’s workplace caused more grief than she could bear.
In the rear of the shop, amid a clutter of stone rubble, bricks, and lumber, Matthew found a monument covered with a dark stained apron. The monument was of unusual design and composition, made of black stones—the black stones, Matthew was quite sure, that Frobisher had brought back from his famous voyage. Dees had polished them to a high sheen and embedded them in mortar, leaving a flat surface on which he had already engraved his name and the present year and the words REPENTANCE IS NEVER BELATED.
Joan looked down at the monument as Matthew read the words aloud.
“I don’t think that’s from Holy Writ,” he said.
“No, I think not,” Joan answered, “And yet pray God in heaven it’s true what the words say, for William Dees stands in need of repentance as much as any man since Judas’s time for what he did to those innocent children and that wretched woman, their mother.”
Then she said, “It is as if he knew he would be found out, or wanted to be. See, Matthew, he has already inscribed this very year of grace. He knew, Matthew, oh mark how the man knew he would be found out.”
“Hubert was right too,” Matthew said. “Dees was a great sinner, yet not without redeeming qualities, though he tried to murder me. Well, when he is dead he shall have his monument. And may his repentance be sincere.”
“And may he have his forgiveness too,” Joan said. “For I would not deny him that, though he tried to make me a widow before my time.”
So far north, snow still lay upon the ground in patches, and at night the stars sometimes seemed as close as his hands. Sometimes now, traveling by night, Frobisher’s savage forgot his English name, which was now his old one, and the solitude of his journey quickened his memory and he remembered that which he had been called by his own people. He had said the name a thousand times under his breath until it had seeped into his brain and become one with himself.
He prayed now to the gods of those people, and when he prayed, he prayed not only for himself but for the poor hanged lad who could utter no prayers save those that the heart spoke in silence. He grieved for the boy’s loss with such passion that his whole being quaked. He would not grasp that warm hand again or stroke the smooth contours of that shoulder, as white as alabaster, or lay his lips upon that cheek as smooth and hairless as an egg.
He had no idea how far he must travel to come to some coast where he could get an English ship, or whether any ship traveled to where he wanted to go, or whether any would take him, being the manner of man he was. But he had remembered how to build a sealskin craft of the kind his own people made, light as a bird upon the water, as tight-fitting as an Englishman’s slipper, and he imagined himself constructing it and setting out alone on the high, fierce waves and coming to the steeples of ice and the seas without bottom and the skies so pale and soulless as to cause the heart to break with the very emptiness of them.
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