The Bear Pit

by S. G. MacLean

  ‘Who’s that, do you think?’ asked Lawrence.

  ‘I don’t know,’ answered Thomas. ‘But the last time I saw him he was slipping out of the back door of John Evelyn’s elaboratory at Sayes Court, and people were calling him “Mr Mulberry”.’ Thomas shook his head. The vapours of the marsh, or the effects of the foul wine he had drunk in that fetid inn on Bankside must be affecting his eyesight or his wits. How could it be that one of John Evelyn’s associates would have any connection with the murder of Joseph Grindle?

  *

  ‘And just where am I supposed to keep this?’ asked Lawrence, as he brought the hound to heel on a leash wound short around his hand. ‘They won’t let me have him at Clifford’s – half of them are such milksops they’d pass out at the sight of him.’

  ‘You’re not keeping him at all,’ said Sir Thomas, who was holding the lantern.

  ‘What? I’m not turning him loose.’

  ‘No. But remember, we didn’t come out here to get a dog. We came here to find out where that bear’s being kept that mauled that old soldier to death. That fellow knows, I’m certain. The purchase of the dog was just a necessary means to that end.’

  ‘Use all the sophistry you like, Sir Thomas, but what’s on the end of this leash is a means to an end weighing a hundred and seventy pounds if it’s an ounce and strong enough to kill a man. It needs food, exercise, training, and secure lodgement. It can’t be neatly filed away in a book, “My accounts to Damian Seeker”.’

  ‘No.’ Thomas thought a moment. ‘But you’re right – it was Seeker’s money, his work we were on.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So, this beast is Damian Seeker’s problem. We’ll take it up to the Mews on St Martin’s Lane. Tell them Seeker ordered it in for Cromwell’s Master of Hounds.’

  Lawrence snorted. ‘Huh. This one would eat the Lord Protector whole.’

  Thirteen

  A Question of Strategy

  They had gone their separate ways and lain low since the debacle of Hammersmith. Boyes was in no doubt – had Damian Seeker not made the mistake of going first to the inn next door, they would have been taken for sure. And then what would Cromwell have done to him? He’d wondered sometimes what would happen, if he were caught. And then he would laugh to himself – he would have escaped, of course. But there were no ‘of courses’ now, the trampling of the law under the major-generals did not bother itself too nicely over questions of justice. Cromwell’s justice could be swift, and often had been, long before the major-generals had ever been thought of.

  As well, then, that they had escaped from the upper room of the coachman’s house, though it had been with only moments to spare. Boyes could still hear the sound of Seeker’s boots thumping up those stairs as he’d fled with Fish and Cecil out of the back door of the coach house. The loss of the shooting frame, abandoned as it had been in that upper room, had been bad enough, but the loss of the seven guns attached to it could hardly be made up without drawing unwelcome attention on themselves.

  And they were already subject to unwelcome attention. Half the city, it seemed, was on the lookout for men of their description. So, Boyes had taken the precaution of varying his appearance, removing his grey wig from time to time and putting on finer clothes when he went out and about. Today he would be a north country gentleman, should anybody ask. There was little the other two could do, or in fact would need to: so unremarkable, the pair of them, as to be anonymous, and that would be the saving of them. Two English soldiers, not worth the asking even which side they had fought on, getting on with their lives under the Protectorate. They would be his servants, come down south with him as he attended to his business in London. But if any did ask? If any should guess at the truth?

  Fish. Or Miles Sindercombe, as his mother might have known him. Leveller. Had served the Protectorate under General Monck in Scotland, until, that was, Monck had dismissed him as ‘a busy and suspicious person’, bent on ill designs. What person of any worth, nowadays, was not? Monck had advised his arrest in England, but Sindercombe had taken ship instead for the Netherlands, where he had met with other disgruntled Puritans intriguing with the Stuart court towards their mutual aim of removing Cromwell. And so here was Sindercombe, returned to England a hired assassin with a heavy purse, and going by the name of Mr Fish. Fish had then found Cecil, a former Royalist soldier with time on his hands and no taste for foreign travel. Cecil sometimes had a bored look to him, as if there was little in these peaceful times that could interest him. The money, of course, would always help. And here was he, Boyes, entrusted with seeing to it that their bungled attempts to rid England of Oliver Cromwell did not become a catastrophe.

  It had been Cecil’s idea to meet in South Lambeth. He had done right to suggest a rendezvous away from the city, where Seeker’s interest in them was still ringing around the taverns and coffee houses. So the ill-assorted companions had made their separate ways to South Lambeth, and Tradescant’s.

  People didn’t go to Tradescant’s to look at each other, but at plants, seeds, fruit, trees, or the curiosities. Furthermore, gardeners had no great interest in the doings of other people, unless a spade or a poor choice of soil be involved. As for the more crowded confines of the Cabinet of Curiosities, they would stay well away from that.

  And so here they were, affecting to examine specimens of fruit trees, whilst discussing their failure, as yet, to rid England of Oliver Cromwell.

  ‘Your source is compromised, and has taken us for fools,’ said Boyes, all the while turning in his hand a hard yellow fruit, just plucked from a Portingale quince. He bit into it. Bitter, suffering from the season. He recalled for a moment the luscious fruits of warmer climes, and the swamps, disease, unforgiving seas that were their price. ‘A good English apple,’ he said aloud, discarding the quince. ‘That’s what we need: a good English apple.’

  They waited whilst a gardener’s boy trundled past trailing a cart full of gnarled old roots, just dug up. ‘There’s nothing wrong with the English apple we’ve got,’ muttered Fish.

  ‘No?’ asked Boyes, reaching up to turn another fruit, twisting it on its stem, waiting for the snap. ‘I think the worms have got at it.’

  ‘They have not!’ said Fish with some vehemence.

  ‘Then how did Seeker find out where we were?’

  Fish kicked at a twig that had caught on the buckle of his boot. ‘I don’t know. But it wasn’t John Toope. I served with him in Ireland and in Scotland. He wouldn’t betray us.’

  Cecil, who’d said nothing since they’d passed beneath the whalebone arch into the garden, gave a soft, tuneless whistle, which Boyes was coming to recognise as the prelude to the statement of his considered opinion. ‘If this Toope, in the Life Guard, of all things, was prepared to betray Cromwell for ten pounds . . .’

  ‘He’s been promised fifteen hundred,’ retorted Fish.

  ‘Indeed. But the fact remains that he’s done it for ten. My point is, if he’ll betray Cromwell for ten, what makes you think he wouldn’t betray you?’

  ‘It’s not about the money,’ retorted Fish, his old Leveller pride bubbling up.

  Cecil pursed his lips. ‘But is it not? If it wasn’t about the money,’ he said, ‘your friend Toope wouldn’t have asked for it before he agreed to alert us to Cromwell’s planned movements. I think we must allow that he did it for the money, and that Seeker has made him a better offer.’

  Fish scoffed. ‘Damian Seeker is not in the habit of making offers.’

  Cecil gave a bored sigh. ‘I don’t mean of money, Fish, I mean of his life. If Toope would betray Cromwell, whom once he fought for, he’d surely betray you. For his life.’

  ‘We shall know soon enough.’

  There was a dangerous, slightly nervous look in Fish’s eye that Boyes had noticed there before, and it seldom heralded good news.

  ‘What do you mean, Mr Fish?’ he aske
d, as he abandoned his examination of the fruits and began to pull back on his gloves. ‘How shall we know?’

  ‘He’s coming here to meet us. He’ll be over soon, off the horse ferry.’

  ‘What?’ Cecil spun round, his usual nonchalance having deserted him. He looked over Fish’s shoulder down through the orchard towards the entrance to the garden. ‘Have you lost your mind? You have set us up to be taken!’

  Fish spat as he snapped back. ‘No. It was not John Toope gave us up; he swears it. He will be here at any time, alone. He’ll tell you himself.’

  Just as Cecil was declaring his intention that neither John Toope nor any other in Cromwell’s livery should set eyes on him, Boyes caught sight of a soldier of the Foot Guard hurrying up a path towards them, looking anxiously to the left and the right as he did so.

  His heart sank. ‘Tell me this is not your friend,’ he said. Rarely had he seen a man so openly proclaim his business to be clandestine. ‘He’s your informant – you see to him. I’ve not come this far to make the acquaintance of one of Cromwell’s Foot Guard, nor Cecil either. Come, Cecil,’ he said, turning to the other, ‘I am a north country gentleman, and you my steward. Let us consider what cherries we might buy for my orchard.’

  They left Fish to deal with John Toope and anyone else Toope might have seen fit to bring with him. An orchard was not a bad place to avoid notice, as Boyes knew full well, but the time of year was against them, leaves and fruit almost all gone, and bare brown trunks and branches their only camouflage. Nevertheless, he felt that as he and Cecil made their way out of the orchards and towards the glasshouses at the top of Tradescant’s land, they were unobserved. Certainly, if Toope – who was now in earnest conversation with Fish – had brought any of Seeker’s men with him, there were none yet to be seen.

  ‘You’re not, though, are you?’ asked Cecil as they climbed the slope towards the glasshouses.

  ‘Not what?’

  ‘A north country gentleman?’

  Boyes had been expecting this. There had been intermediaries, in Brussels, between himself and those who had hired Fish. And yet a man liked to know who it was that was at his side as he risked his life in a cause, this good old cause, and in Cecil he saw a love for the cause, not simply a hatred for Cromwell such as Fish displayed. Even so, if Cecil did not know who he truly was, Cecil could not betray him.

  ‘I am a gentleman,’ he said at last, ‘and I have fought for the King as I fought for his martyred father before him. I will keep on fighting for him until he is restored to his throne, or until my body draws its last breath.’

  Cecil looked at him strangely, as if he thought he might know him from some other time and place. ‘Then you shall never have cause to fear betrayal by me.’

  There followed a period examining tender plants in the glasshouse with a visit to the plantsman’s workshop. They’d waited until they’d seen John Tradescant leave with a dibber in his hand and a sack of bulbs over his shoulder. Tradescant had had charge of Henrietta-Maria’s gardens, if Boyes remembered right. He couldn’t have picked out the Queen’s former gardener, but that wasn’t to say the fellow wouldn’t remember him. Still, there was a thrill in the danger of being recognised, even by one who might wish their enterprise well.

  In the workshop, they found the plant lists and the catalogues, and it wasn’t long before Boyes could truly believe that he was a gentleman down from Northumbria, with a garden to stock. ‘Oh, I would plant some of these, Cecil,’ he said, turning the pages of the fruits catalogue with a smile. ‘Look, here, “the Bell Coronation peach”, or here, “the Grand Coronation peach”, still better. We might plant them, might we not? I think it is almost the season. I would even go so far as to allow some space for this “Queen Mother plum”, although it should certainly be kept strictly in its place.’

  Cecil gave a low laugh, but then became serious. ‘But what if another should seek to pluck those fruits before our time is ripe?’

  ‘You mean Cromwell.’

  ‘There are rumours that he aims at the crown, and that others seek to encourage it.’

  Boyes shook his head. ‘Cromwell will never be king.’ He turned a few pages until he found what he was looking for. He extended an expensively gloved finger. ‘I prefer this one for him.’

  Cecil peered down at what was written below the image of the coarse-looking, ugly round fruit. ‘The Russet Blood’. A fitting choice for Cromwell. ‘Aye, sir, I think you have chosen well.’

  ‘Well, let us make our order then.’ Boyes, watched by a somewhat mystified Cecil, closed the catalogue and called over Tradescant’s apprentice, who had been busy sorting corms at a long workbench at the far side of the room. He found he greatly enjoyed the next quarter-hour spent explaining to the young lad exactly what he would require, and was particularly pleased with his ingenuity in selecting the appropriate name and delivery address to be written in the order book. He was on the point of asking to be shown some examples of the latest innovations in gardening tools when a cough from Cecil took his attention.

  Boyes followed the direction of Cecil’s glance to see Fish hurrying up the slope towards the workshop. Assuring Tradescant’s apprentice that he would return soon to complete his order, he swept outside, followed by Cecil, to head Fish off.

  ‘Well?’ Boyes demanded when they met at the top of the path.

  Fish shook his head. ‘It wasn’t him who gave us away.’

  ‘He was hardly likely to say otherwise,’ said Cecil.

  ‘No, but it was not him. He said the Lady Protectress and her daughter were already in the coach, and Cromwell expected any minute, to commence their journey to Hampton Court by way of Hammersmith as planned, when Damian Seeker came storming into the palace courtyard and told the Horse Guard to go by another route. Toope made enquiries – for he knew we would suspect him. He has some friends in the Secretariat who have no fondness for Seeker, and who make it their business to know his whereabouts. Seeker was known to have come in haste from the Black Fox, on Broad Street. He had been in conversation there with a young Yorkshireman, and left of a sudden at something the Yorkshireman said. Toope believes it is this Yorkshireman that gave our plan away.’

  Boyes felt something cold strike him.

  ‘Who was this Yorkshireman?’

  Fish shrugged. ‘How should I know, or Toope for that matter?’

  ‘There was no Yorkshireman,’ said Cecil with scorn.

  ‘Oh, but there was,’ said Boyes. ‘At the inn in Hammersmith, one morning, two days before our planned attempt.’

  Fish and Cecil took a moment to consider this information. ‘And how should he have known what was planned?’ asked Fish, before a thought appeared to come to him. ‘Unless you told him.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ But then the scene from that morning in the parlour of the inn in Hammersmith played out once more in Boyes’s mind. ‘Seeker was already looking for a man called Fish by then – I had a report he had been asking questions around your old lodging on King Street. And that morning, in the breakfast parlour, the landlady called after you by your name.’ He could see the blood drain from Fish’s face. ‘You should have taken another, as I told you to,’

  ‘Ach,’ Fish spat in frustration. ‘False names, secret lodgings, changing of wigs, waiting for instructions from overseas – let the thing only be done!’

  Boyes looked at him coldly. ‘You’ll be dead before it’s done if you don’t use greater caution than you have employed thus far.’

  ‘We’ll all be dead,’ said Cecil. ‘But I daresay our chances would be improved, were we to remove this “witness” – this friend of Seeker’s who told him of our whereabouts. He has seen both of you, and Seeker will have him primed to recognise you, should he set eyes on either of you again.’

  ‘We haven’t time,’ said Fish. ‘Our priority is Cromwell.’

  ‘True,’ said Boyes,
thinking carefully now on what Cecil had said. ‘Our next attempt may be a few days in the preparation. It would not be wise to call attention upon ourselves, particularly if this Yorkshireman is known to Seeker. It would do no harm to find out where he is, but anything more definitive might risk exposing us further and endanger our enterprise.’

  ‘We need to see to his silence.’

  Boyes knew Cecil was right, but he did not like it.

  The elderly couple who ran the inn at Hammersmith were discounted as a threat, for that she was of such poor eyesight that she could hardly see her hand in front of her face, and he had never ventured close enough to take a look at their guests.

  The matter of the Yorkshireman was left to Cecil’s discretion and they proceeded to discussion of their next attempt on Cromwell.

  ‘Toope said something that has given me an idea,’ said Fish.

  The others waited.

  ‘It is known that the Lord Protector is a great judge and admirer of horseflesh.’

  ‘Go on,’ said Boyes.

  ‘He rides out in Hyde Park every morning that he has the chance.’

  Cecil was dismissive. ‘This is hardly news, Fish. We’d never get near him, for the Horse Guard all around him.’

  Fish shook his head, a sly smile crossing his face. ‘Cromwell doesn’t let them hem him in, out in the park – likes to ride free, likes to show them what he’s got. The colonel doesn’t like it, Toope says, but who’s going to tell Oliver Cromwell what to do on a horse?’

  Boyes was getting interested, and he could see that Cecil was too. Fish nodded, encouraged.

  ‘Toope says if a fine horse catches his eye, the Lord Protector’s off like the wind after it, for a closer look. Of course, he has the finest mounts himself, and he can still out-ride any of his guards.’ He looked now to Cecil, who had been no mean cavalryman in his day. ‘One good fast horse. One thrust of a knife, and that’d be it.’

  ‘I’ll do it,’ said Cecil.

  ‘The risk would be great,’ cautioned Boyes.