The Bear Pit

by S. G. MacLean

  ‘Well, yes,’ said Marvell, ‘although my interest is more in—’

  ‘Good,’ said Seeker, handing him the report of the Tradescant shipment from Gravesend. ‘Take a look at this for me then, would you? See if there’s anything about it doesn’t look right.’

  Marvell went on his way, and after receiving guarded assurances from Drake’s sister about her patients, Seeker finally went to the Chief Secretary.

  Thurloe was putting his signature to a document when Seeker appeared at his door. A mound of other papers awaited his clearance. ‘Seeker?’

  Seeker closed the door behind him. ‘It’s Rupert.’

  Thurloe put down his quill pen and gave him his full attention.

  ‘Rupert of the Rhine. He’s in London.’

  Thurloe’s head moved slightly, as if he might dislodge the information that had just entered there. ‘He can’t be. We’d have heard.’

  ‘I don’t know that we would, sir. Only last week, one of our Dutch agents reported that a Royalist could get through a Kent port for as little as twenty shillings.’

  Thurloe was utterly motionless, apart from his mouth. ‘But Rupert? He’d be recognised in minutes. He wouldn’t dare.’

  ‘I think he would,’ said Seeker. ‘Things he’s done in the past. The man that would buy a basket of apples off an old woman then walk through an enemy camp selling them to Parliamentary soldiers knows how to disguise himself.’

  ‘That was just a rumour, Seeker.’

  ‘I know good men that say it’s true.’

  ‘Even so, why would he be in London now?’

  ‘That report we had in a couple of months ago, from Stoupe in Paris, warning of an assassin named Fish who’d taken lodgings in King Street.’

  Thurloe nodded. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Fish was behind the planned attempt on the Protector from the coaching house in Hammersmith. He had two associates with him – one who kept to the chamber where the blunderbusses were rigged, feigning illness, and another who went by the name of Boyes. This Boyes was seen by a man I know. He described him as having a slight foreign accent, and of looking much younger than he purported to be. Such a man has been masquerading as the brother of a German clockmaker who I am assured has no brother, and who I have learned was an old retainer of Rupert’s family in their Heidelberg days. All are now disappeared.’

  ‘That still doesn’t mean it’s Rupert, Seeker. You’ll need to give me more than that.’

  What could Seeker give him? A woman in grey silks, with eyes like a cat’s, who Thomas Faithly had told him was in love with Rupert of the Rhine, and had ‘followed him around like a puppy’? An old crone who had watched just such a woman follow a man around Clerkenwell ‘like a little puppy’. An old clockmaker from Heidelberg who had been a closet Royalist? The name ‘Boyes’? It had been in Andrew Marvell’s report, of his evening at Lady Ranelagh’s: Thomas Faithly, in his cups, had spoken with some emotion of Prince Rupert, whose life had been loss after loss, and who had told him once, ‘I am master of none, Thomas, save this little dog, Boy. I am Boy’s master.’ Boy’s Master. Mr Boyes. Rupert was a man with nothing left to lose.

  None of it would be enough for Thurloe, and Seeker was still calculating how to persuade him when an urgent knocking on the Chief Secretary’s door heralded the entrance a moment later of a breathless Andrew Marvell.

  ‘Captain, Mr Secretary, please excuse the interruption, but I thought you would want to know straight away.’

  ‘Know what?’ said Thurloe, with an unwonted hint of impatience.

  ‘The Flanders Cherry.’

  ‘Marvell, I have enough to occupy me that I—’

  But Seeker could see that Marvell was brandishing the report of the Tradescant shipment. ‘No, sir, I think he may have something.’

  Marvell nodded. ‘Yes, indeed. It’s the Flanders Cherry. It most certainly does not ripen in December.’

  It took less than an hour for the Cypher Office to translate the coded messages Clémence Barguil had sent out to almost a dozen dormant Royalists in the north of England, explaining to them that they would not be dormant much longer. The ‘Flanders Cherry’ – the seeds of which had been planted in a Bruges inn several months before – was about to come to fruition. Each plant listed, in her handwriting, in Tradescant’s shipping order, was a code for a place – a rendezvous for those named as having ordered it, each ripening or flowering day code for the date and time of meeting.

  Thurloe looked at the paper again, as Samuel Morland, the Protectorate’s chief cryptographer, returned it to him. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Whatever their plan is, it is to come to fruition by tomorrow.’ He held the paper out towards Morland. ‘And nothing said here about the place, or time where the thing is to be done? The means even?’

  He didn’t need to elaborate on what ‘the thing’ was – they all knew, it was what they’d had intelligence of months before – the plot, involving Mr Fish, with the aim of murdering Oliver Cromwell.

  Morland shook his head. ‘These detail only what is to be done in the aftermath, not where, how or exactly when the assassination is to be carried out.’

  Thurloe turned to Seeker. ‘Have the woman Barguil taken in, and have her accomplices found, at any cost. If the stay-at-home Royalists should think Rupert of the Rhine is returned to rally them, the Lord alone knows what will happen. With the alliance Charles Stuart has made with Spain . . .’ He didn’t need to say any more. The successful assassination of Cromwell at the hands of the Royalists’ most feared general, and the promise of Spanish help, would be more than enough to embolden Charles Stuart’s supporters at home to a concerted rising, where all previous efforts had failed.

  Seeker was already halfway through the door when Thurloe called him back.

  ‘Seeker?’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Thomas Faithly. Is he with them?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir. I don’t know.’

  Twenty-Four

  The Guard Room

  Clerks and messengers moved out of Seeker’s way as he went quickly down the stairs from Thurloe’s corridor and along the passage to the Tilt Yard and then Horse Guards. He was heading across the yard to the guardhouse, and then to the barrack room where Proctor and his men rested between duties. A small detachment would be sent to Tradescant’s, and another to Sayes Court, in search of Clémence Barguil. The rest would be tasked with hunting down Prince Rupert and his accomplices. That done, Seeker had business with the Foot Guard: in all that had happened since, he had almost forgotten what had first alerted him to possible trouble centring on Tradescant’s garden – the remark by one of John Tradescant’s young apprentices that a soldier of the Foot Guard had been there the day before, talking with the man Seeker was now certain was the conspirator, Fish.

  The raised voice of Colonel Howard took Seeker’s attention as he passed the Horse Guard’s barrack.

  ‘If it’s any one of you, I’ll have you garrotted by your own innards. Truth, now, or you’re all on double duties for a month.’

  The chorus of protest and denial stopped on the instant Seeker walked into the guardroom, and Howard turned around.

  ‘Captain.’

  ‘Colonel Howard. Has something happened, sir?’

  ‘Something or nothing, Seeker. Just a suspicion of something that didn’t feel right.’

  Seeker waited.

  ‘It was this morning, on the Lord Protector’s ride out in Hyde Park. His Highness got away from us – rode off after a fine bay gelding he’d caught sight of. By the time we caught up with him, he was off his own horse and examining the other, talking to its rider.’

  ‘Who was this rider?’ asked Seeker.

  ‘I don’t know. But something wasn’t right. He didn’t have the look of a man with the means to be on a horse like that.’

  ‘The horse was bait then. Wh
ere have you got him, this rider?’

  The colonel looked like he’d rather be having his teeth pulled. ‘My only thought to start with was to get the Protector back on his horse and away. By the time I sent someone back to apprehend the fellow, he and his companion were gone.’

  Seeker felt his muscles tense. ‘Companion?’

  The sergeant now spoke up. ‘One of our men noticed him as we rode away. Watching from the woods. Saw him leave with the other fellow, by the east gate.’

  ‘The east gate? Isn’t that supposed to be locked, early morning?’

  The sergeant nodded. ‘But today it wasn’t.’

  ‘What did they look like, this pair?’ asked Seeker.

  As he had known they would, the descriptions accorded with those he had of Cecil and Fish. ‘Was either of them wearing a green felt hat?’

  The expression on the colonel’s face told him everything he needed to know.

  Seeker bit back an oath. ‘They were waiting for him.’

  ‘Looks like it,’ said the colonel. ‘And they might have done it on chance, for everyone knows Oliver likes to ride. But the matter of the gate aside, we haven’t been out in Hyde Park for weeks. They’d need to have been waiting there every day.’

  ‘And they weren’t, I take it?’

  ‘If they were, it was never reported.’

  Because if it had been reported, they would have already been taken in and questioned, and Oliver would never have been riding out there this morning. Seeker surveyed the guardroom. ‘It’s not one of your men that’s passing on details of the Protector’s movements: it’s one of the Foot Guard.’

  Colonel Howard took a moment to process this. ‘Does Captain Strickland know?’

  ‘No. I’m going over there now.’

  Seeker strode across the yard in a maelstrom of anger. The traitor was somewhere here, under his very nose. Before he even reached the Foot Guard barrack, he saw through the door two men seated at a small table in the corner, examining some object that one of them held in the palm of his hand. As he entered, there was the usual standing to attention, but not before one of the men he had noticed snatched back the object he had been showing to his companion.

  Seeker went no further than the doorway and picked the man out.

  ‘John Toope.’

  Toope was rigid, but his gaze was shifting around the room like a trapped pigeon trying to find its way out of a cellar.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘In your hand.’

  The man looked down at his hand as if he had forgotten there was anything in it.

  ‘Now, Toope!’

  Toope uncurled his fingers to reveal an object the size of a large walnut, glinting like silver.

  Seeker put out his hand and jerked up his chin. Toope walked over like a man going to the gallows and put the object into his palm. It looked like a pill box, or some similar trinket, but it was heavy. The silverwork was very fine, the engraving of a repeating vine. Seeker clicked the catch on the side and the casing sprang open, to reveal not a pill box, but a watch, its face edged in gilt marked with roman numerals. Seeker looked from the watch back to Toope’s face, which had utterly drained of colour. Seeker gave his attention back to the watch. The nearest in quality he’d seen to this was one carried by Oliver himself. He let out a breath of appreciation and shut the casing with such a snap in the now near-silent room that Toope flinched.

  ‘Oh, I’d jump as well if I were you, Toope. Now, I don’t know much about hallmarks, but I’d be willing to stake my back pay that when I take this up to the Goldsmiths’ Hall in Aldersgate they’ll tell me that this is a finer piece than a soldier of the Lord Protector’s Foot Guard could afford in several lifetimes. And I’ll wager something else, that when I take it up there they’ll tell me that hallmark’s German.’

  Toope was trying to speak now, but nothing came out save an incoherent babble. Seeker could hardly look at him for disgust. Only a few months ago, Toope had survived a purge of the Protector’s Life Guard, and now here he was, one of a small number of men who knew in advance the Protector’s movements, showing off a valuable German watch.

  Seeker sent one of the other men to fetch Walter Strickland, Captain of the Foot Guard. When he arrived Seeker told him to have John Toope put under restraint. ‘He’s suspected of passing information of the Protector’s movements to malignant parties.’

  Strickland turned a look of loathing on Toope and ordered two of his men to put him in manacles and march him to an interrogation room.

  Toope looked as if he might protest, but Seeker stopped him. ‘Don’t bother. I’ve two witnesses saw you at Tradescant’s garden, talking to the conspirators. I’ll be back here in ten minutes and you’re going to tell me everything you know.’

  It was a little longer than ten minutes before Seeker had returned to the Horse Guard’s barrack, having issued orders for search parties that were to go out to Sayes Court, Tradescant’s, and the city, with as detailed descriptions of those they sought as could be given, including one of Thomas Faithly. He’d also warned them that Rupert would almost certainly be in disguise. ‘He’s six foot four though, same height as me, and there’s only so much you can do to hide that.’

  The captain of the Foot Guard had had John Toope secured in a small room with only one high, barred window. ‘Shall I stay, Seeker?’ he’d asked.

  Seeker looked at Toope, already attached by a manacle to the wall. ‘No, I think I’m up to managing this one. You could ask the rest of them what he’s been like this last couple of months, if he’s been acting different, throwing his money about, that sort of thing.’

  Strickland nodded. ‘Oh, I know the sort of thing.’ Then he brought his face up close to Toope’s. ‘And if I find that he’s sullied the name of my Guard, he’ll be screaming to get sent back to your tender mercies.’

  The door closed, leaving only Seeker and his ashen-faced prisoner in the room,

  Toope tried to take a step forward but was checked by his chain. ‘Captain, there’s been a mistake . . .’

  ‘There certainly has,’ said Seeker, ‘but you and me are about to put that straight. First off – the watch.’

  The answer came too quick. ‘A gift from my father.’

  Seeker feigned admiration. ‘Oh? A wealthy man your father, then?’ Toope was opening his mouth as if to confirm this, but Seeker carried on talking. ‘’Cause last I knew he was an ostler in Sarum.’

  Toope ran a tongue across his lips, his eyes following thoughts across his mind and away. ‘He . . . it was . . . a grateful patron.’

  ‘Grateful indeed, that gave him a solid silver cased watch.’ Seeker turned the watch over, opened it, smoothed a finger across its face. ‘German was he, this patron?’

  Again, Toope sought to moisten his lips.

  Seeker held the watch up. ‘I’ll ask you once more: where did you get this watch? And don’t give me any more rubbish about your father, or I’ll have him fetched here and ask him myself.’

  ‘I bought it.’

  Seeker snorted. ‘On your wages? You’ll never earn what this is worth till your dying day.’ He held the watch up again and let the sound of its ticking take over the small room. ‘You are running out of time. Who gave you this?’

  Toope kept his eyes fixed on the watch but said nothing.

  ‘You got this from a clockmaker in Clerkenwell, didn’t you?’

  Toope began to deny it, but his words tripped over themselves and fell into a heap of nothing.

  ‘Didn’t you?’ repeated Seeker.

  Toope shook his head. ‘Never went to Clerkenwell. Never went near it.’

  ‘So how did this watch, which your whole troop put together couldn’t afford, come into your possession? Who gave it to you?’

  ‘Don’t know. Don’t know him.’

&nb
sp; ‘Do you not? Oh, but I do,’ said Seeker. ‘I know him, and when I get him he’ll give you up faster than your friend Cecil’s horse was galloping this morning.’

  At the mention of Cecil, Toope’s eyes widened in fear, and then his shoulders sank.

  ‘That’s right,’ continued Seeker. ‘That green hat of his. And your lumpy little friend, Fish, waiting in the woods. Hirelings, that’s all they are. Ten a penny, the pair of them. And it probably won’t take as much as that to get them to put all of this on to you.’

  Toope began to shake his head, to pull on his manacles. ‘It wasn’t me. I just gave them a tip or two. The planning was nothing to do with me. It was all them.’

  ‘Fish and Cecil.’

  Toope was panicking. ‘Yes. No. Not them. Boyes.’

  ‘Boyes was running it?’

  Toope nodded. ‘Boyes was master of all.’

  ‘The man who gave you that watch?’

  ‘Fish gave it to me, but he got it from Boyes.’

  ‘They’d run out of money?’

  Toope nodded dumbly.

  ‘To pay you to tell them when the Lord Protector would be riding in Hyde Park.’

  Toope looked as if he would say something, but then Seeker could see that a new thought had crossed his mind. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said, a little too eagerly, ‘for the foreknowledge of His Highness’s ride in Hyde Park.’ A kind of relief flooded Toope’s face, and relaxation seemed to spread through his body. It was as if Seeker had gifted him something that had shown him a way out of all his problems. And that was when Seeker knew that Toope was hiding something worse.

  Just then, a hard knock came on the door and the sergeant of the Foot Guard walked in. He gave Toope a look that would have shrivelled most men, then turned to Seeker. ‘There’s a message from your chambers, Captain. A lawyer, Elias Ellingworth. Come to report someone missing.’

  Missing. Twelve hours at least since they’d come upon Lawrence Ingolby half-dead in a ditch on Lambeth Marsh and only now did Ellingworth, in whose worthless care he’d left him, report him missing. ‘You can tell him I know all about it,’ said Seeker. ‘I haven’t got time to see him just now, but when I do, he’ll have more of my attention than he could ever wish for. As for now though, no more disturbances, not unless it’s Mr Thurloe or the Lord Protector himself that’s asking for me.’