Frobisher's Savage by Leonard Tourney

In 1576, Martin Frobisher tried to find a route to Cathay, but ended up in Canada, where he abducted a local native and brought him back to England as a curiosity. Adam, as Frobisher named him (and later, Adam Nemo) was taken by one of Frobisher's men to Essex when the man went home to his family. He intended to turn Adam into a servant, but later gave Adam to another man when his wife objected to living with a savage in her own home. For 20 years, he has been a servant, and is now almost more English than anything else. He still goes to visit John Crookback's home, for he is a friend of John's son Nicholas, born deaf, dumb and mentally handicapped.

One Sunday morning, when most of the town is in church, Adam, who had been left behind took look after a maid of the household taken sick, only to find out she was faking, goes to visit John Crookback. He encounters a beggar on the way, who curses him when Adam chases him off his master's land. When he gets to John's house, outside, his hound is dead, butchered outside. The house is filled with blood, and Nicholas is crying. Nicholas leads Adam to the well, where he sees something in the water.

Leaving Nicholas after ensuring he is all right, Adam runs to church and says there is something very wrong at the Crookback farm. He convinces the other men of the town to come with him, and they find the bodies of John, his wife, and their two younger children, all badly mutilated and dead. The local lord, Sir Thomas, puts Matthew in charge of the investigation, for the sherriff is ill, and dies shortly afterwards. Matthew does his best to investigate, but people in town, along with John Crookback's two older daughters by his first wife, quickly fixate on Adam and Nicholas as the murderers, Adam because he is a foreigner, and Nicholas because of what they see as "God's Curse". Adding to the growing ill-feeling is Agnes Profytt, one of John's older daughters, who is convinced Nicholas did so to inherit John's farm, especially as neither she nor her sister were to inherit. Along with this is the beggar, who returns when hearing about the murder and spreads lies about Adam to get free ale from the men who are interested in the case.

Matthew takes Adam and Nicholas in as his guests, but when a group of townsfolk nearly break in during the night to take their revenge on Adam and Nicholas, Matthew convinces them to leave peacefully. Adam hears the commotion, and flees with Nicholas, which isn't discovered until the next day, and Matthew takes the blame for not holding them more securely. He leaves to track the two men down, along with a posse comitatus of village men and Sir Thomas, while his wife Joan, who feels that neither Adam nor Nicholas were guilty, investigates on her own. It turns out there was a comission to investigate John Crookback when he came home from the sea, as there was some question as to if he was the correct man or not. It was resolved in Crookback's favor, but Joan is not sure if he actually was the man or not.

Agnes Profytt hears of Joan's investigation and tars her as a snooper and a gossip, wanting to get the Crookshank farm for herself and her husband, since if John Crookshank was a fake, his daughters would not inherit. Matthew and company return with the fugitives, who are taken into Sir Thomas' care, and Joan and Matthew both must deal with the fallout from her investigation. Matthew is also convinced neither Adam nor Nicholas was a killer, either alone or together, and he must investigate a letter concerning black rocks containing gold that was found in John Crookback's possession. Did this have something to do with the murder?

When Matthew is attacked and thrown in the selfsame well, he must survive long enough to winkle out the facts, and find the true murderer.

Leonard Tourney is a very gifted Historical mystery writer. This was his last Matthew and Joan Stock mystery, after a series of seven others, and I hope he goes back to writing more, although this was written fourteen years ago. (1994) He gives the feeling of what small-town medieval life must have been like, with fearful, suspicious people who looked on outsiders with nothing but suspicion. (Although I'll admit it's not all that different from rural, small-town life today). With gossip and the tavern being the most anyone got to know of others, and the consequences of being shunned by others in the same town. (Since today, one can simply leave... in Medieval times, most people didn't have that option.) There was also an extreme lack of privacy if you weren't rich... people grew up living in generally the same room, and there was no "Middle Class" like we have today. Leonard Tourney brings it all to vivid life, and reminds me why it's nice to imagine living in the middle ages, but actually living there? A Nightmare for a modern person! And although he doesn't mention the stench, because his characters would be used to it, that would drive any modern man or woman nuts.

Next up, Double Contact, by James White.