‘All right then, you get home,’ said Sir Thomas, absent-mindedly giving the boy another coin from his pouch.
‘What is it?’ asked Elias. ‘Is there trouble?’
‘Ah, no. No, not trouble. Just something I must attend to – I think our friend Ingolby too.’
Lawrence felt himself groan, and Elias protested vigorously. ‘It’d be more than my life’s worth, if Seeker found out.’
‘I will square it with Captain Seeker,’ Sir Thomas replied, adding quietly, ‘More than mine’s worth, if we don’t go.’
And then Lawrence knew, without being told, what the note was about. ‘From Southwark?’ he asked.
Sir Thomas nodded. And so that was it then, their breeder of fighting dogs had found what they’d told him they were looking for. Ingolby checked in a hidden fold of his doublet for the purse of Seeker’s – or the state’s – money, which he’d had the presence of mind to take from Knight Ryder Street with him, and reached for his hat.
It took a few minutes to negotiate the protests of the others that Lawrence was not fit to go, and Sir Thomas himself, who appeared uncharacteristically distracted by the note, at one point seemed on the verge of joining in their protest, but Lawrence was insistent.
‘Where?’ he said to Sir Thomas as he followed him out of the Black Fox and into the street, leaving their bewildered supper companions behind them.
‘Lambeth Marsh,’ said Faithly, ‘exactly half a mile due south of the Bear Garden.’
Twenty
On Lambeth Marsh
They were hardly halfway over London Bridge when Thomas Faithly pulled up. ‘No, this is wrong. You are not fit for this. I can do this alone.’
‘What? You think I’m going to risk Seeker finding out I just handed his purse over to you? Be lucky if I ever saw you again.’ Lawrence could think of a good few places he’d rather be going on a night like this than Lambeth Marsh, but he’d taken a liking to Thomas Faithly, and wasn’t inclined to let him face whatever they were about to face on his own. Nevertheless, that Faithly surname was weighted with distrust, and Lawrence was not altogether convinced Sir Thomas’s unease and eagerness to get rid of him were entirely born of a concern for his health. ‘I’ll be fine,’ he said, giving his neck an involuntary rub. ‘I doubt they’ll be asking me to sing, any road. And these horses are pretty docile beasts – they won’t give us much bother.’
Lawrence wondered if perhaps Sir Thomas’s nerve was going, faced, as they were now, with the prospect of meeting the individuals who had control of the bear, and who had not shrunk from chaining Joseph Grindle to a wall to meet his horrific death. Before, their search for the bear’s handlers had had an air of adventure to it, but now it was becoming all too real.
‘I’ve never seen one,’ he said to Sir Thomas.
‘What – a bear?’
‘Aye. Bess didn’t hold with travelling circuses and the like.’
‘I’ll bet she didn’t!’ said Sir Thomas with a laugh. ‘Bess didn’t hold with much.’ It was a boon to Lawrence, despite the odd circumstances of their association down here in London, to have someone from home to talk to sometimes, someone who’d known the family that had taken him in, and the old Puritan woman who’d brought him up.
‘I had the back of her hand across my ear more than once,’ said Sir Thomas. ‘What a woman! The Puritans wouldn’t have needed a major-general in the north, if only they’d put Bess Pullan in charge.’
But Bess was dead now, like her husband long before her. Her ward, who had been like a sister to Lawrence, was dead too, and Matthew, the Pullans’ son, could manage his life well enough without Lawrence, whatever Matthew might say different. The ‘home’ Lawrence thought of was no more real now than was the one Thomas Faithly dreamed of getting back. And so they were natural companions for one another, he and Sir Thomas.
‘Have you ever seen one?’
‘In Germany, Spain, France – all on the ends of chains and rings on their noses, dancing to pipes or mauling a hound twice the size of that one.’ He pointed to Seeker’s dog, who was lolloping along beside Lawrence’s horse.
‘Well, I doubt the one that savaged Joseph Grindle danced much.’
‘Joseph Grindle – I’d forgotten the name.’
Lawrence regarded Sir Thomas with disbelief. Was this the difference that birth and wealth had made between them, that Joseph Grindle’s lack of them were enough that Thomas Faithly couldn’t even bother to remember his name? He wondered about Joseph Grindle too, and the kind of life that could end up like that. After a moment he said, ‘I still think we should have waited till we heard back from him – Seeker. He was quite insistent that we weren’t to set out to encounter these people without him.’
Thomas shook his head. ‘No time. Too much time was lost already, by my landlady’s boy having to come up to the Black Fox to find me.’
‘We should have sent back a message to him all the same,’ said Lawrence. ‘He’ll skin us when he finds out.’
Sir Thomas laughed. ‘You’re too much the lawyer already, Lawrence. The stakes will have altered by then. When you’ve lived the life I have, you learn to think on your feet, take your chance when it comes.’
Lawrence thought that if he’d lived the life Sir Thomas had – picked the wrong side in the Civil War, been forced into nine years of exile, been thrown into the Tower of London when he’d dared to show his face back home – he’d have been a deal less inclined to hand out advice. But that was the gentry for you, and Lawrence had long been of the view that most of them were idiots.
‘Besides,’ Sir Thomas continued, ‘tonight will just be about the arrangements for the fight, between that monstrous hound we bought the other night, and their own ursine prize-fighter. It’s the time and place arranged for that event that Seeker will want to know.’
‘It’d better be,’ said Lawrence. ‘And they’d better not get any ideas about this one.’ Despite Lawrence’s best efforts, Seeker’s dog had refused to remain at the Black Fox, to be returned to Seeker’s lodgings by Elias and Maria as he’d suggested.
Elias had argued vigorously with Thomas Faithly too, that Lawrence was in no fit state to go anywhere but to his bed. ‘If Seeker thinks you are in need of its protection,’ he said, ‘then you are quite assuredly in need of its protection. He values that hound more than most men do their wives. Should you choose to wander the streets of London tonight without it, I can only imagine it is because you do not wish to see another morning.’
And so, although neither had wanted to, Thomas and Lawrence had taken the dog with them.
The streets of Southwark were not as empty as they should have been at that hour of the night, and the taverns and brothels facing the water and the alleyways leading off from it were not empty at all. The major-generals still had a deal of work to do south of the river.
‘I like an adventure as well as the next man,’ Sir Thomas was saying, ‘but this business of Seeker’s has set back my wooing, and I could see tonight that I still have much work to do upon it. Maria paid me very little attention.’
Lawrence went over in his head again what Marvell had told him just before the message for Sir Thomas had arrived, and how he might best communicate the import of it. There was no easy way to say it.
‘I think you’d do best to set back your wooing yourself. Set it right back – in fact, forget about it. I think you must give up Maria Ellingworth.’
‘Give her up? Lawrence, what kind of man would I be to give up a woman like that for lack of a little encouragement? Maria will be the making of me, of my future, in this new England. I just need to try harder to convince her that I’m—’
‘It’s not a question of convincing her, Sir Thomas,’ Lawrence broke in, ‘but I’d counsel you, for your own sake – give it up for a very bad idea.’
Thomas’s astonishment was written over his face. ‘On wha
t grounds? Has her brother said something to you?’
‘Her brother? He has said nothing, although it might have saved some grief if he had. No, it’s Andrew Marvell that told me.’
‘Told you what?’
Lawrence heaved a great sigh, that hurt his throat as it passed. ‘About Maria Ellingworth,’ he said. ‘And Damian Seeker.’
*
The damp from the river clung to the back of Thomas Faithly’s neck and seemed to seep through his gloves to his fingers. He couldn’t remember when last he had felt so cold. He had been cold of course, very cold, many times in his life before now. When he’d joined with Montrose’s forces had possibly been the worst time, when they’d marched across Scotland through snowbound mountain passes that surely had never been meant for the foot of man. There had been the time, too, when he’d been tossed from a small rowboat into the twenty-foot waves of the Irish Sea. How he’d been saved then, God only knew. But never had he felt as cold as he did now, and the chill was at his very centre.
Since the day he had met her he had built such castles in the air that an army could not have taken them. It had seemed plainer to him than almost anything in his life before: this business for Seeker would be finished and he would be granted leave to return to Yorkshire. Surely he could spy as easily for the government there as he could in London? Maria would come north with him, with her brother’s blessing or without, and he would live once more the life of a proper Englishman. The King’s cause was finished, and this was Cromwell’s England now, but it could be Thomas Faithly’s England too. Thus had Sir Thomas’s thoughts run.
But if an army couldn’t have taken that castle in the air, six words from Lawrence Ingolby had brought it crashing down around him. Thomas’s mind went to the day he had come upon them at Tradescant’s, Seeker and Maria, and he saw it all now with different eyes. He didn’t press Lawrence for any more details; he knew that it was true. His memory raced over Maria’s every gesture. She had, somehow, never been completely with him, even when there was no other living soul in the room. He had thought perhaps there was a lost love, hoped for a dead love. Never in his wildest fears had he considered it might be Damian Seeker.
Lawrence was still talking. ‘It’s what got Seeker sent north last year, apparently. To get him away from her.’
‘And it’s not over between them.’ Thomas said it as a statement, not a question.
‘Who knows? But Marvell senses – unfinished business. Give her up, Thomas. You don’t want to come between Damian Seeker and his unfinished business.’
They rode on in silence after that, the sound of their horses’ hooves their only accompaniment as they made their careful progress through the darkness and mists of the marsh. It wasn’t too long until they caught the first glimpses of the breeding kennel where they had bought the hound. Further away were the occasional glints of light from other dwellings. If anything else was moving on the marsh tonight, Thomas couldn’t see it, and all he could hear, save the sounds of their own progress, was a sort of heavy seeping, as if something large and ungodly waited, dormant, in the marsh itself.
Thomas wondered what would happen should he decide to wheel around, speed his horse back towards the river and down to Deptford, and then on to Gravesend. Lawrence Ingolby would have no chance of catching him, even should he want to. Sir Thomas had made sure that he had the better horse, and he knew that at a gallop he would be a better rider than the law student anyway. And there would be little anyone else could do about it. Thomas could be away in a boat and off to the continent before Damian Seeker even knew he was gone. But then what? Back to the Stuarts to tell them that what they dreamed of would never be, and would hardly be worth the having anyway?
And yet, there was what he thought he had seen at Lady Ranelagh’s, and there was the handwriting of the note he’d received tonight. He might be mistaken in it, but he didn’t think so. It was not the hand of a dog-breeder, but of one he knew well that had written that note. In the noise and light of the Black Fox, he had not been sure of it, but with every step of his horse further out onto the marsh he became more certain . . . Sir Thomas did not wheel around. Perhaps there was just the chance of one more adventure, of a final redemption, to come. He followed carefully in Lawrence Ingolby’s wake and waited.
It came soon enough, when they were about halfway between Bankside and Lambeth, almost at the middle of the marsh and close to the lights of the breeding kennel. It was the dog that heard them first – heard the other dogs, and then the horses. By the time Seeker’s hound had dropped on his haunches and started to growl, they could hear it plainly themselves, the determined yelping, the thunder of hooves, coming straight for them. Docile or not, Lawrence had spun his horse round and geed it towards Bankside before Thomas had even had time to think properly.
‘Come on, Sir Thomas. Our new friends are nothing of the sort. Come now, if you don’t want to be dog-fodder!’
Still Thomas hesitated. The riders were coming closer now. There was something about the way the lead rider sat his horse . . .
‘Sir Thomas!’ Lawrence yelled. But there was no time now, he’d left it too late. Thomas’s horse might be the better of the two but it scared the more easily. Thomas tried to turn it, half-tried, but he could feel the animal tense beneath him, at the barking of the dogs. Thomas saw now that they were loose and running ahead of the four oncoming riders. He knew it was going to happen even as it happened, but he was powerless to stop it. The horse reared up in panic, screaming as terrified horses in battle scream. He tried desperately to master it, to calm it, as its hooves flailed in the air. What felt like a struggle minutes long must, in reality, have lasted only a few seconds, for the next Sir Thomas knew, he was on the ground, rolling away from the flailing hooves, and the next after that there were two massive paws on his chest, and a set of teeth inches from his face, ready at any moment to rip it off.
Thomas dared not take his eyes away from those of the snarling dog, but he knew somehow that Lawrence had turned back, to try to help him. He opened his mouth to shout to Lawrence to go, but the moment he did so the beast above him snarled more menacingly and ripped a claw across his face as if to shut him up. One of the riders shouted to another to call the animal off. The pain seared like four blades of steel ripping through the flesh of his cheek, but in the midst of it he knew that it had missed his eye. Thank God, it had missed his eye. There was a terrible whinnying and snarling and thud and then worse snarling behind him, but he dared not look back. Dear God, Lawrence, why didn’t you run? he thought, as he heard his companion’s incoherent shouts. But then Thomas heard a voice, the breeder’s, call off the mastiff that had him under its claws, and he felt himself dragged up by the shoulders and lifted on to the back of a horse that was not the one he had come on. He gripped the belt of the rider in front of him. To struggle now would be death – his flesh ripped from his bones or those bones crushed beneath the stamping hooves of the horses.
He managed to summon up the voice to shout, ‘Lawrence, go!’ but he knew, as he turned his shredded face to look behind him, that Lawrence could not go. All he could see by the light of their assailants’ torches was a writhing shape, a snarling mass of vicious mastiffs, jaws gaping and claws gouging, and Lawrence’s riderless horse galloping away. Somewhere in the middle of it all, as the rider he held fast to sped away across the darkness of the marsh, he could hear Lawrence’s cries, and the desperate barking and yowling of Seeker’s dog.
Twenty-One
Mr Mulberry
It was an old two-storeyed wooden-framed house set behind a high wall towards the north-west edges of the marsh. The roof was well tiled, with three octagonal chimneys at its centre. The iron gates and railings surrounding the property were a little rusted, as if it were not inhabited. Ivy clambered over wall and gateposts and crept up around the base of a stone statue – some Roman goddess, Seeker supposed – in the middle of the lawn to their left. To
the right, there was a pond, with a fountain at its centre, but the fountain did not run. The narrow-mullioned windows were darkened, not a hint of light glinting in their diamond panes. Grass and weeds grew on the path leading to the main door. But Seeker knew the place was not, in fact, neglected, not abandoned, whatever its inhabitant might wish any who wandered this way to think. A wisp of smoke not quite smothered drifted into the night air from one of the three chimneys, and through a narrow gateway to the side of the house he could see a well-kept path leading to orchard walks behind.
‘This is definitely the place?’ asked Proctor.
Seeker nodded. It was the house of Thomas Bushell, the banished Royalist mining engineer and alchemist who’d never actually left, but instead hidden here, until Cromwell had called him home to put his skills to the use of the Commonwealth.
‘So why keep this place secret? Why go out under the guise of “Mulberry”?’
‘Because he’s up to something that would have him right back out of favour. Something to do with a bear that should have been shot and wasn’t, and I’m determined to find out what it is.’
‘Right,’ said Proctor, who’d served under Seeker long enough to know what came next. ‘Better get started then.’
He beckoned to two of the men they’d brought with them to follow them down the path to the front door. The door-hood was supported by corbels carved into the shape of men, poised as if ready to take flight. Something in the look of them put Seeker in mind of Charles I, who’d taken flight too late. The door itself was sturdy, moulded and ribbed, good workmanship. It had probably hung there fifty years. It was a shame to damage it. The long strap hinges were newer, well-kept, no sign of rust. But there wasn’t time to unhook them from the door jamb. ‘There,’ he said, indicating to the two men with the short battering ram where the door would give most easily, and with least damage. The foremost of the two nodded. Seeker and Proctor stepped back and then the men swung the ram with all their force. The sound of the latch inside splintering from door and jamb was accompanied by shrieks from a chicken coop somewhere around the back, and the hissing of a black cat as it shot out of the gaping doorway and past them in to the night.
The Bear Pit Page 23