Maria felt herself flush. Why had she said nothing of Faithly to Elias? Did she fear what her brother would say about her having anything to do with a known Royalist? No, because Elias might condemn a man’s politics, but he would not condemn a man for believing in them.
She swallowed. ‘He would not care one way or the other.’
Grace put down her knife. ‘Oh, but he would, Maria. I have heard of this Thomas Faithly. He has spent years in the company of Charles Stuart. You know what they say of that man’s court, of the mistresses, the drunkenness, the bastards left suckling all over Europe. And Thomas Faithly is hardly out of the Tower, he will not have seen an honest woman . . .’
‘He has only offered to teach me to draw, Grace. Besides, he is at Tradescant’s as escort to the Frenchwoman we saw about the gardens on our visit.’
‘The Frenchwoman?’ said Grace. ‘Well, that is all right, isn’t it?’
‘Grace! When did you become so staunch a Puritan?’
Grace laughed. ‘When first I read your hot-headed brother’s newsletters. It was the only way I could get him to notice me, so you must allow me my views on the French. Besides, Maria,’ she added, her tone softer, ‘for all your wit and your knowledge of London’s streets, I have been further afield in the world than you. You must understand, not all men are like . . .’
‘Like who?’ said Maria, her voice barely audible.
‘Like Seeker,’ said Grace.
Maria felt herself tremble, felt the tears begin their prickling in her eyes. They had never spoken of Seeker like this, she and Grace, nor she and Elias even. She had never spoken about Damian to anyone. She struggled to find the right words. ‘You – you don’t know what happened.’
Grace put down her weights and went to take Maria’s hands. ‘I know what Elias has told me, and that it is what Seeker told him. And Elias believes him. Seeker told him that whatever passed between you was a private thing, of his own will, and yours, and no business of the state’s. He swore to Elias there was no truth in the rumour put about by Secretary Thurloe that he had only involved himself with you in order to gain information on your brother’s associates.’
Maria could not look into her friend’s face. ‘He told Elias all of that?’
‘You must know how often he was at your door, Maria, before Thurloe sent him north.’
‘And cured him of his malady,’ Maria said with bitterness.
‘Cured him?’ Grace stepped back and almost laughed. ‘You think he is cured of you? How can you think it? Did you look at him when he met us on the road to Lambeth? Did you not see his longing for you, written all across that dreadful face?’
It is not dreadful, Maria wanted to say. Her fingers had traced its lines, its scars. She had lost herself for long hours in the molten dark of his eyes and thought she would never wish to be anywhere else. It is not dreadful, it is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.
Instead, she said, ‘If that were true, he would not spend every other waking hour at the Black Fox. Half of London is talking of it, it is a wonder his Puritan masters allow it, him and that woman . . .’
‘Dorcas is a good woman,’ said Grace.
Maria wrenched her hands from Grace’s. ‘It does not help,’ she said, ‘to be constantly hearing she is a “good woman”. I would rather people damned her for a slattern and a whore.’
‘You would not,’ said Grace.
‘Would I not? Would I not rather think he would grow tired of her, disgusted, and return to me?’
‘You would only have to say the word, Maria. The man is in love with you.’
The anger fell away from Maria again and her voice dropped. ‘If he loves me, why does he go there?’
‘Because you told him you would not have him, and you have given him no cause to think otherwise since his return from Yorkshire. But more than that, despite what people say of him, I think there is a chance Damian Seeker is, at heart, like any other man. No one in this world of ours truly wants to spend their life alone. Not even him. That is why he goes to find his comfort with Dorcas Wells.’
There was silence between them now, nothing to be heard but the sounds of Samuel and Gabriel working in the serving room next door. Maria reached for her shawl and pulled up her hood. ‘Then I wish him well of it,’ she said at last. ‘For myself, I have a drawing lesson in Lambeth to go to.’
Maria didn’t know whether Samuel said something to her as she left, almost knocking over a stool that had not quite been tucked under a table, and she could hardly see Gabriel as the perplexed boy held the door open for her. By the time she reached the bottom of Birchin Lane on her way down to the river, the tears had so flooded her eyes that she couldn’t see at all.
*
Clémence stopped on the first-floor landing to admire the French striking clock, perhaps a gift to Tradescant’s father from Robert Cecil. Cecil had been to old Queen Elizabeth what Thurloe was to Cromwell; he had been more, in fact, almost what Richelieu had been to Louis XIII. All that power gone, so many lives destroyed over intrigues long-forgotten, and yet this clock ticked on. She reached out a hand towards its face, wishing she could turn time back. But how far back would she turn it? A year and a half, to when Rupert had still been at the King’s court in Cologne, content to let her be in his company, to watch him at his work and at his leisure, to catch an unexpected glimpse of him sometimes? Or would she turn it back further, fifteen years, to before the English War began? No, thought Clémence, because then she would be sitting in Brittany or Paris, with nothing to do but attend to the flattery of foolish women. She had another destiny. Clémence withdrew her fingertips from the brass face of the clock, and continued up the stairs, to the Cabinet of Curiosities.
A visiting merchant and his family were there before her, just through the door, exclaiming upon the sights that greeted them. The father was explaining to his wife how the barnacle goose grew like a tree from the ground in the wild wastes of Scotland. The older son, his eyes gleaming and his hands waving in the air, terrorised his younger brothers and sisters with tales of the items on display coming to life at night, when the ghost of the King of Virginia would don his cloak and headdress and take up his tomahawk once more, in search of English children.
Smiling, Clémence went past the noisy family towards the alcove at the far end of the room, where she spied the blue-velvet-clad back of Thomas Faithly. Thomas appeared to be bent over a table, examining something very closely. As Clémence drew nearer, she saw that a young woman, originally obscured by a wall of shelves, was standing to the right of him, watching intently as he sketched the lines of a feather.
‘Thomas?’ she said.
He straightened himself and turned around. ‘Ah, Clémence. Are you finished so soon? Let me introduce you to Mistress Ellingworth, whose brother is the editor of The London Lark news-sheet. Perhaps you know it?’
Clémence smiled at the striking-looking young woman, who was dressed in a somewhat faded yellow linen gown whose hem had frayed and been mended a good few times. The girl looked slightly wary of her.
‘It has not been my good fortune to have come across that publication.’
As the women watched each other, Thomas pointed with his pencil to the feather. ‘Mistress Ellingworth is composing articles for the interest of her brother’s readers, on the many curious items to be found in Tradescant’s collection.’
‘And your brother’s readers will be interested in the Duke of Buckingham’s feather?’ asked Clémence, picking up the item and holding it towards the window, so that its jewels sparkled in the late morning sunlight.
‘Only that it has been plucked, madame,’ said Maria.
Clémence could not help but burst into laughter at this. ‘Oh, Mistress Ellingworth, I think you will be a tonic. I have not heard such forthright views since I left the King’s court.’
The young woman coloured
at this, and Clémence held out her hand. ‘If you are Sir Thomas’s friend, I hope you will be mine,’ she said.
The blush went deeper. ‘Sir Thomas has offered to teach me to draw.’
‘And he has a fine hand for it.’ Clémence turned to Thomas, whose handsome face was lit by a broad smile. ‘I see now why you attired yourself in your fine blue suit today, Sir Thomas. If Mistress Ellingworth does not mind keeping you an hour or so longer, I have some commissions for friends in the country that I have promised to fulfil from Mr Tradescant’s glasshouses and seed stores.’ She returned her gaze to Maria. ‘Mistress Ellingworth, I hope you will keep an eye on Sir Thomas for me. He has a talent for getting into scrapes when left to his own devices, and there are far too many items in this Cabinet of Curiosities that he could cause havoc with.’
And finally she was rewarded with a smile. ‘That is in fact how we met. I will see to it that he tampers with nothing more perilous than a feather, madame.’
As Clémence was descending the stair, she reflected that it might be no bad thing for Thomas Faithly to have a distraction. The girl was evidently capable of looking after herself, and Clémence knew Thomas to be profligate in love, rather than wicked. And in love, a man was less cautious. For all she was fond of him, there was something in the tale of Thomas’s return to England that had never struck Clémence as quite right, and perhaps if he were less on his guard, she might find out what it was.
*
After Clémence had gone, Maria found herself looking into the crinkled dark blue eyes and travel-worn face of Thomas Faithly. She had known him for a Royalist the minute she’d set eyes on him: he walked like a Royalist, smiled like a Royalist, dressed like a Royalist and he had a charm to him that most of her brother’s associates thought it beneath their dignity, and hers, to employ. She hadn’t known, until Grace had told her, that Thomas Faithly had been a close associate of the King. Even then, it had not really seemed to matter. But here, now, where the rose-scents of the Frenchwoman who could speak with such familiarity of the King’s court still lingered, Maria felt that she was somehow losing her footing. The ground beneath the floorboards of this house in South Lambeth seemed to shift a little, and the certainties of her life – the garret in Dove Court, Elias and his news-sheet and his rooms at Clifford’s, the coffee house, the city streets – receded. Thomas Faithly was standing in front of her as if stepping momentarily off the stage, or from a painting. He had fought on the side of the supreme enemy, the Stuarts, for years; he had visited all those royal courts that to Maria were just gilded names in a story that was not hers to read, and he had laughed with and danced with and kissed the hand of the King.
He reached out to touch her lightly on the arm. ‘Mistress Ellingworth? Maria? Is everything all right?’
Maria recalled herself to the present. ‘Yes, yes. Everything is fine, but I think perhaps we should not continue these lessons.’
His face fell. ‘Not . . .? But why ever would we not continue them?’ He pointed to the sketch alongside his own on the table. ‘Look at the progress you have made already this morning. But a few more lessons and you will have perfected it.’
Maria didn’t want to look at him. ‘We are from different worlds, you and I, Sir Thomas. I think perhaps it is not . . . fitting, that we should continue.’
There was a silence, and then she felt him take her hand. ‘Will you look at me, Maria?’
She looked up. The sparkling blue eyes that were usually dancing with humour were not sparkling now; they were intense and serious. She hadn’t looked at him properly before. His smile made him seem younger than she now saw he was. He must have been about thirty-five years old, not as old as Damian, but a year or two, perhaps, older than her brother. And she saw in his face that he had lived a life that was more than dancing and gaming and intriguing in foreign courts. A thin silver scar ran from beneath his left eye to just above his jaw, and the pallor of the Tower overlay the ingrained colouring she had noted before in men who had fought and travelled much of their lives.
‘I promise you, Maria, I intend you no dishonour, and I would not have you or any other believe that I do.’
She would have said something, but he carried on. ‘You tell me your brother is a lawyer?’
‘Yes,’ she said, not knowing why that should be of any relevance.
Thomas straightened. ‘Then I will present myself to him, just like any other gentleman should. And I will engage him on some business I have had in mind for some time now. And your brother will allow that I should give you drawing lessons, and then no one else will have any ground for argument.’
Maria laughed. Sir Thomas’s eyes were sparkling again and his smile returned, and it seemed strange indeed that anyone should apprehend anything bad of him. It would be to little purpose to tell him that her brother would not think of disallowing her anything she judged for herself to be right. ‘But you know,’ she said, carefully extracting her hand from his, ‘my brother is a very particular sort of lawyer. His only dealings with professed Royalists have been as their adversary.’
‘Then we shall cure him, and he shall make no quibble about our drawing lessons. But oh,’ he said, holding the feather once more up to the light, ‘you see how the coral on this feather is almost the exact match for the shade of your own lips? How is such a thing to be captured on paper? How is such a thing to be rendered in words? How does a man express his apprehension of a beauty that can only have been created by God?’
Maria could still hear the noisy family as they flitted excitedly from cabinet to cabinet, but the sound of them was muffled now. She was conscious that Thomas Faithly was inclining his head a little closer towards hers. She was caught in time, on the cusp of something. A wave of uncertainty went through her, but then the moment was broken by the sudden, loud arrival of three small children who, shrieking, were running from their brother. Thomas drew back, himself a picture now of uncertainty, a grown man as bashful as a schoolboy. Maria bent her attention once more to the feather and after watching her for a long moment afterwards, he did the same.
Twelve
Dead Man’s Place
Stained red lips on a chalk-white face split open to reveal the remains of two rows of yellowed teeth. A hand shot out and pawed his arm, whilst a knife delved towards the thong that held his pouch. Lawrence spun about and caught his assailant so hard by the wrist that the knife fell from the cut-purse’s hand and clattered to the ground. Lawrence kicked it away and watched the small boy go scurrying after it. The stained red smile of the watching foul-breathed doxy collapsed into a scowl.
‘Forget it, Grandmother,’ Lawrence said. Most of the useful lessons in his life had been learned from Digby Pullan, the North Riding merchant into whose home he had been taken at the age of nine. But some had been learned before then, from a dissolute vagrant mother and a childhood spent wandering across the moors from manor to manor, village to village, begging his bread and stealing his clothes, as his mother plied her trade at the inns and hovels in between. Lawrence doubted there was much that the denizens of Southwark could teach him.
London Bridge though, had been a revelation. Lawrence knew for certain he wouldn’t be able to shut an eye at night in a house perched teetering four storeys high over the relentless waters of the Thames, and yet hundreds did, living and working suspended in the air with half the world rumbling past them in wagons, clattering by on their horses, or slinking by on foot, and the other half speeding along beneath in barges and wherries, and never looking up.
‘Watch you don’t get nipped by a Winchester Goose,’ one of the fellows had said to the accompaniment of much bawdy laughter, when Lawrence had expressed his intention of going to visit an old acquaintance in Southwark. ‘You’ll be diving for the mercury then!’ The ribaldry around the table had saved him the trouble of asking what a Winchester Goose was, and now he could see them, craning their necks from hooded doorways, pree
ning their feathers in the upper windows of taverns or as they promenaded along Bankside. He could hear them too, cackling and hissing at one another as they spied a tasty morsel or rich pickings with which to feather a nest. Lawrence batted away their blandishments as easily as he would have done an importunate hen in the courtyard of Faithly Manor.
Passing by what had once been the Bishop of Winchester’s Palace, growing moss-green and damp as if born of the Thames itself, Lawrence soon found himself outside the main gate of the Clink. It didn’t take much to end up in a place like that, he thought – bad luck, poor choices. Most human misfortune came down to the one or the other in the end. Lawrence wasn’t sure the one wasn’t consequent on the other. At any rate, he didn’t intend to become in any way familiar with this Clink. He moved on. Across the water, London loomed larger and closer than he could have believed from the other side. Judgemental, imperious. And yet the sounds and movement of the place where he was now, the night scents of roasting meat, the snatches of song and raucous laughter, all said that Southwark cocked a snook at London. Lawrence smiled. Perhaps there was something to be said for it after all.
The lights and sounds of the taverns stretched on a good way, tracing the curve of the river where it ran round from past Lambeth, but Lawrence turned left. ‘Dead Man’s Place,’ Thomas Faithly had said. Lawrence came upon it, a lurking, leaking kind of place, winding away from the river, just past the Clink. He made a point of walking down the middle of the road, not just for the sake of keeping his feet from the gutters that ran to the river, but to keep a distance between himself and whatever might be waiting to manifest itself from the unlit walls and doorways as he disappeared deeper into Southwark.
Lawrence wasn’t one to seek out trouble, but he wasn’t easily frightened, either. Nevertheless here, the knowledge of the death of Joseph Grindle, which across the river had been nothing more than the albeit gruesome cause of the investigation Seeker had involved him in, wrapped itself around him like a cloak. He was glad after about fifty yards to come to the sign of the Bear. The tavern, if such it was, was as unpromising a hole as he had seen in all his twenty-six years, and not the kind of place he would usually think of setting foot in, but he suspected Southwark might well harbour worse. He ducked his head and went in.
The Bear Pit Page 13