Samuel nodded. ‘Out of the blue.’
‘What was his business here?’
Samuel puffed out his cheeks. ‘Darned if I know, Captain. Joseph had been apprenticed to a saddler as a lad, kept it up whatever army we were with. He took his money home and invested in a saddler’s down there in Sussex. Don’t think it were anything to do with that that brought him up to town, but I didn’t think to ask.’
‘There was the clock, Uncle.’
Seeker felt a chill whisper across him. ‘What clock?’
‘Oh, that, yes. I’d forgotten about that. How I could have forgotten about that old clock, I don’t know. Lugged it halfway across Europe with him, I did.’
‘Tell me about the clock,’ said Seeker.
‘Well, it’s a lovely thing, still, even after all these years. It was when we took Weisskirchen.’ Samuel’s face clouded. ‘We weren’t always as disciplined as we should have been, and the burgomeister and the rest had held out so long, refused us shelter.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Some of our men were desperate. We sacked the place. Joseph found that clock in the rich merchant’s house. Took a fancy to it. I couldn’t believe he’d taken it all the way home, still had it.’ Then he went on to describe a clock Seeker could picture very well.
‘Did Joseph bring this clock to London with him?’
‘Well, yes,’ said Samuel, holding both hands out towards the table. ‘It was sitting just there, only three days since, just where you’ve put down your hat. He was on his way up to Clerkenwell with it, to a German clockmaker he’d heard tell of, to have it fixed.’
*
It was almost an hour later, after a desolate Samuel was finally persuaded by Grace to go and lie in his bed, that Seeker made ready to leave Kent’s. Down to the very hat that Grace had thought so peculiar, the long, fur-trimmed, often-mended cap that Samuel said Joseph had had off a Croat at Nordlingen in ’34, and that Seeker had found lying in the dirt of that bloodied outhouse on Bankside, there could be no doubt: the man whose savaged remains Seeker had so recently come upon with Thomas Faithly was Joseph Grindle.
‘I must go now, Grace,’ he said, when she returned from settling her uncle. ‘But I’ll be back. And do not hesitate to send for me whenever you might need me. Tell Gabriel just to come and find me wherever I am. You are sure you remember nothing more of what troubled Joseph Grindle the second time he came in here looking for your uncle?’
She shook her head. ‘Nothing. He would not say what it was, and he would not stay till Uncle returned, such was his hurry.’
‘And you are certain he didn’t have the clock with him when he came back?’
‘Certain.’
‘All right, Grace. You tell Samuel – I mean this now – you tell him: I will get to the bottom of this, come what may.’
Grace was just assuring him that she would not forget when a new hammering came at the door. Gabriel hastened to open it, to be met by a messenger sent down by Dorcas Wells at the Black Fox.
‘Is the Seeker here? I heard tell on the streets he was headed this way.’
‘What is it?’ said Seeker, getting up from the booth and showing himself.
‘Dorcas says you’re to come quick, Captain. She says the girl Manon’s brother has arrived. From Yorkshire.’
Seeker stared at the man a moment and then grabbed his gauntlets and headed for the door without stopping to tie on his cloak.
‘Captain, what’s wrong?’ asked Grace.
‘She doesn’t have a brother,’ he muttered, before heading out into the street and leaving the door to swing shut behind him.
Seven
The Man at the Black Fox
Dorcas was on edge. She’d sent a message to Seeker about two minutes after the man had come into her tavern, but there was no sign of him yet and she had no idea how long the message would take to reach him. It had been a year, almost exactly, since Damian Seeker had entrusted his daughter, his only child, to Dorcas’s care. As far as the world was concerned, Manon was Dorcas’s niece, orphaned and arrived down from the north. Seeker had too many enemies for him to risk them discovering the identity of his child. Over time, Dorcas had managed to piece together some of the truth of Seeker’s past – his other life, before the Civil War, with Manon’s mother, who had left him for an itinerant preacher, taking their young daughter with her. She’d learned of his failed searches for them, the trails that had gone cold, the false names Manon’s mother and her new husband had adopted to elude him, and their final reckoning, in Yorkshire, only a year ago. The preacher was now dead, the woman supposed to have sailed to the Americas, and the child, by her own choice, had travelled to London, to be close to the father with whom she had been reunited after eleven years. Nowhere, in all of that story, had there ever been any mention of a brother.
He’d come in, the fellow, as if he hadn’t a care in the world. Hadn’t a clue, more like, thought Dorcas. She’d seen his type before a few times, and beneath all the bravado, they were usually terrified. She’d lay money that he’d never been to London before – he was trying too hard to affect disinterest, but she could see his mind was dancing. So why had he come now? And what had brought him here to the Black Fox, asking for Damian Seeker’s daughter and claiming to be the girl’s brother? He hadn’t asked for ‘Seeker’s daughter’ though, he’d said ‘Manon’. Four people in London knew the true identity of Manon’s father: the child herself, Seeker, Dorcas and Lady Anne Winter, who had escorted her down here last year from York. And now here was this brash fellow, down to train for the law, he said, swaggering in here and asking for the girl by name, claiming to be her brother. Whether he was a student of the law or not, Dorcas didn’t know, but she was certain he was not Damian Seeker’s son.
Dorcas ran her hand over the butt of the pistol she had brought through with her from her business room. She’d got Will Tucker out of the kitchen to stand guard at the door and watch the newcomer until Seeker arrived. The worst of it was, Dorcas had been in her work room, setting her accounts, when the fellow had come in asking for Manon, and Isabella had fetched the girl without a thought, and only afterwards come in to tell Dorcas that the strangest thing had happened, because Manon’s brother had arrived, and Manon had never said she had a brother, nor Dorcas a nephew.
Dorcas had hurried into the tavern parlour, telling Isabella to send for Seeker without delay, but had stopped short when she’d got there. Manon was seated on the bench beside the man, intent on his conversation. Intent, but not quite at her ease. The fellow looked nothing like the girl, nor like Seeker either. He was tall, but as a willow is tall, as opposed to Seeker’s oak, and in place of Seeker’s craggy features, which on Manon were refined simply to a good clean bone structure, this chap’s face had the smooth lines of a deer or a fox. There was certainly something of the woodland about him. He had not Seeker’s black hair, nor the pale yellow that Manon had got from her mother, but a dull brown, like a dried, fallen leaf. He must have been about twenty-five or twenty-six years of age, too old, from what she knew of Seeker’s former wife, to be her son, so he was not even a half-brother. Why, then, was Manon going along with this pretence?
Dorcas approached the table, remembering to fix on her smile for the benefit of the other customers who sat around the Black Fox. ‘Well, well,’ she said, beaming down at the newcomer. ‘This is indeed a surprise.’
The young man beamed up at her, but Manon took a moment to respond. Finally she swallowed, and Dorcas could see the lie gave her great difficulty. ‘Yes, Aunt, I did not know my brother was coming to London.’ She looked back to the young man. ‘It is a wonder he did not warn us of his coming.’
‘Yes,’ said Dorcas, fixing the man with an unwavering gaze, ‘who would have thought it?’ She didn’t understand why Manon would play along with this evident lie.
The fellow at last had the grace to look slightly abashed. ‘Well,’ he tilted his he
ad and gave an awkward smile, ‘I thought I’d surprise you.’
*
Seeker hardly noticed what he rode past and through on the way from Cornhill to Broad Street. It was more to the horse’s credit than his that more stalls were not upset, goods trampled and carters and costermongers forced out of their way. Images of almost every enemy he’d ever made sped through his mind as he tried to think who could have sought out Manon in this way, and what harm they might mean her. By the time he reached the door of the Black Fox and threw the reins of his horse to Dorcas’s stable lad, half of the city was convinced an attempt must have been made on Cromwell’s life.
Seeker pushed through the door, his pistol already in his hand as he shouldered his way past Dorcas’s cook, a veteran of many an army mess tent and bigger of build even than himself.
‘Where is he?’ he demanded.
‘There.’ Will Tucker pointed.
Seeker surged towards the table around the snug corner, by the hearth, where he could see Dorcas sitting facing him and only the tops of the heads of Manon and a man, who were seated with their backs to him. He rounded the corner and then stopped. All three at the table looked up. Dorcas stood up, relief flooding her face. Manon looked at him, confused, as if relying on him to explain it to her. ‘Captain Seeker. My brother has arrived. From Yorkshire.’
Five minutes later, with Manon and Dorcas in the kitchen, on the excuse of preparing a special dinner for the far-travelled arrival, and Will Tucker guarding the top of the steps to the small parlour with instructions to let no one else pass, Seeker was leaning in very close to Lawrence Ingolby’s face. He hadn’t seen the steward of Faithly Manor in the North Riding for a year, and had not expected to be seeing him now. He enunciated every word as if he was spitting out a nail.
‘And what, exactly, are you doing here?’
Ingolby, as ever, was infuriatingly unperturbed. ‘Matthew sent me. Wants me to learn a bit of the law, now that he’s taken over the estate – help him to protect his rights against undesirables, any Faithly cousins slithering out of the woodwork, that sort of thing.’
Matthew Pullan, once a Levelling soldier, was Commissioner for the Peace for the villages around Faithly Moor in the North Riding. Following the sequestration, and death in a York prison, of Edward Faithly, brother to Thurloe’s newly turned agent Thomas Faithly, Matthew Pullan had taken over their ancestral home and estate, which had been in debt to him for years. Lawrence Ingolby, a young, bright lad brought up in Pullan’s household, had been put into Faithly Manor as estate manager by Matthew several years ago as a condition of the mortgage. Whatever Pullan might have told Lawrence about why he was sending him to London, Seeker suspected it was nothing to do with Matthew needing help to run his estate, and everything to do with giving the young man opportunities in life he would never have up on the moor. Seeker kept this thought to himself though.
‘Hmm. The law. Just what England needs – another clever lawyer.’
Ingolby grinned the grin Seeker remembered well from his late visit to Yorkshire, and in spite of himself he felt the old liking for the young man start to creep in. He sought to quash it.
‘You’re not staying here.’ It was a statement of fact, not a question.
‘What?’ said Lawrence, somewhat taken aback. ‘Oh, here? No, Matthew’s set it up for me to lodge at an Inn of Chancery.’
Seeker was conscious of a sinking feeling. ‘Which one?’
‘Clifford’s. Off Chancery Lane.’
‘Clifford’s. Of course it would be,’ said Seeker, his tone grim.
‘Why? What’s wrong with Clifford’s?’
‘Oh, nothing,’ said Seeker. ‘Might as well be there as in amongst some other pack of scoundrels.’ It was hardly to the point, and none of Ingolby’s business, that Clifford’s was also the Inn of Chancery out of which Maria’s brother Elias practised, and from where until recently he’d sent out his incendiary pamphlets against Cromwell’s regime. But Elias was claiming compliance with the authorities now, or at any rate making a show of behaving himself, and it might do no harm for Seeker to have a set of eyes and ears in Clifford’s to report on whether he continued doing so.
‘So much for London, then, but what are you doing here?’
Lawrence looked around him, confused. ‘But I’ve just told you. Matthew sent me down—’
Seeker went back to the nail-spitting. ‘What are you doing here, at the Black Fox?’
‘Oh,’ said Lawrence. Sitting back, ready to be expansive, and then remembering that in conversations with Seeker discretion was usually better. ‘Well, you see, I thought it would look strange if I didn’t call upon Manon.’
Seeker felt his hand digging in to the butt of his pistol again. ‘You thought what?’
Ingolby leaned in, his eyes checking the empty room in conspiratorial manner. ‘With her being supposed to be my sister and all.’
‘Your sister? Aye, so I hear. What in the world made you think she was supposed to be your sister?’
Ingolby frowned. ‘Well, it was you—’
‘Me?’ Seeker wondered if the boy had gone mad.
‘Aye. You. Manon writes to Orpah, you see.’
‘Orpah? The Pullans’ servant girl?’
‘Yes. That few days you left her at Matthew’s house last year, they got to be friends. Manon writes to Orpah now and again to tell her all her news from London and Orpah writes back to tell her all the doings of her little world.’
Seeker was surprised. ‘I didn’t know Orpah could write.’
Ingolby raised an eyebrow knowingly. ‘Ah, well, that’s it, you see: she can’t. Can’t read either. She brings Manon’s letters to me to read out to her, and then her and me work away a while at telling Manon all the news of the world of Faithly Moor.’
Seeker gave an amused grunt. ‘That’d make for interesting reading. But none of that explains why you thought fit to show up here claiming to be her brother.’
Ingolby narrowed his eyes and spoke through gritted teeth. ‘Because it was you told everyone down here her name was Manon Ingolby. She told Orpah, her first letter: she was to direct any replies to Manon Ingolby, at the sign of the Black Fox, Broad Street, Bishopsgate, because that was the name you’d given her so’s no one would know she was Caleb Turner’s daughter.’
Seeker stifled a curse. He’d been determined that Manon should be associated neither with the deeds of her stepfather, the Trier Caleb Turner, nor with his own. It was a moot point whether he or Turner had garnered more enemies over the last ten years and he was determined his daughter should not suffer on account of either of them. And so, when asked, he’d said the first name that had come in to his head. Ingolby. He let out a long breath. ‘It was the first thing that came in to my head.’
Ingolby nodded, self-righteous. ‘Aye, well. Maybe you should have thought twice. But what’s done is done. If she’s down from the North Riding calling herself Ingolby, and I’m down from the same, calling myself the same – which is my name, after all – then folk down here aren’t going to believe we’re not related. So,’ he took another good draught of his ale, ‘here I am, her brother.’
Seeker consoled himself with the thought that if Manon had had to have a brother, he might have been a lot worse.
Ingolby turned his tankard in his fingers, appearing to inspect it very carefully. ‘She’s come on a bit, mind.’
Seeker felt himself bristle. ‘What do you mean, “Come on a bit”?’
Ingolby raised his eyebrows. ‘Well, you know – got pretty, bloomed, whatever it is women do.’
‘She’s a child,’ said Seeker, through gritted teeth.
‘She’s sixteen past.’
‘Still too young for you,’ said Seeker, dangerously close to leaning over and hauling Lawrence Ingolby out of the Black Fox by the scruff of the neck.
Lawrence stretched out h
is palms. ‘Oh, oh yes, of course. But I’m just saying – I mean it won’t be long, you know – her mother’s a good-looking woman after all, for all her poor taste in husbands.’
‘Manon is not her mother.’’
‘No, no.’ Ingolby puffed out his lips. ‘No. That one needed watching, no mistake. Manon’s much nicer. But I’m just saying – obviously you don’t consider such things yourself – she’s very pretty, and she’s – nice, you know. There are plenty of girls married at that age: it won’t be long till the lads come calling.’
Seeker was in the process of explaining to an open-mouthed Lawrence Ingolby precisely what such ‘lads’ could expect should they start bothering the inhabitants of the Black Fox when Dorcas and Manon reappeared with a tray piled high with the finest the kitchen had to offer.
Manon sat down opposite Lawrence and looked at him.
Dorcas placed a hand lightly on Seeker’s shoulder. ‘Come, Captain, shall we leave Manon and her brother to catch up on all their news? I’ve got a plate ready for you through the back.’
Seeker was reluctant, but the tavern was becoming busier, and he didn’t want to call more attention to Lawrence and his daughter than was necessary. ‘All right,’ he said, getting up, before turning to Lawrence and saying, ‘I’ll be calling on you. Clifford’s Inn. And don’t you forget what I said.’
‘About?’
‘Lads,’ mouthed Seeker.
Lawrence’s eyes were still wide. ‘Oh, no, Captain. I won’t forget.’
Back in Dorcas’s business room, Seeker sank back against the door and rubbed a hand over his eyes. ‘Thank God,’ he said. ‘Thank God it was him. When I heard there was someone up here claiming to be her brother, all manner of things ran through my head.’
‘And mine,’ said Dorcas. ‘It’s a good thing that message found you at Kent’s or I’d have had that young fellow tied up in the cellar by now.’
Seeker laughed. ‘He’d be no match for you, Dorcas, that’s for sure.’ It didn’t take long for Seeker to fill in the gaps between what Manon had told Dorcas in the kitchen. ‘He’s a decent lad,’ he said at last. ‘Far too pleased with himself, but that’s not a bad thing if he’s to make his way amongst these reptiles.’
The Bear Pit Page 8