The Bear Pit

by S. G. MacLean

  It took almost two hours. Seeker would never have imagined Toope to be so resilient. There was a deal of time at the beginning getting over the pretence that Toope had thought Fish, Cecil and Boyes only to want intelligence of Cromwell’s whereabouts in order that they might waylay him and plead their cause. Seeker wondered how such a specimen had ever got into the Life Guard in the first place.

  ‘And what cause would that be?’

  ‘Well,’ Toope had stuttered, ‘Fish is a Leveller.’

  ‘So our intelligence suggests, but the Lord Protector is done with Levellers, and as for Cecil and Boyes, well, I don’t think Oliver ever started with them, not unless it was at opposing sides of a battlefield, with his sword in his hand.’

  ‘I, ehm, I don’t know . . .’

  ‘Oh, but I think that you do. I think you know very well. Cecil’s a Royalist, and as for your watchmaker friend Boyes, he’s one of the biggest Royalists of them all.’

  Toope had gone even paler. ‘I didn’t know about Cecil. It’s Fish I’ve dealt with, and Cecil is of little account. Boyes is just an old clockmaker from Clerkenwell, works with his brother.’

  Seeker came around the table he’d been leaning on and looked very close in to Toope’s eyes. ‘You really don’t know?’

  ‘Know what?’ Toope was stuttering with some regularity now.

  ‘Your Mr Boyes, your old clockmaker from Clerkenwell.’

  ‘Yes?’ said Toope, attempting to shrink back from Seeker but being impeded by the wall behind him.

  ‘He’s Rupert. Rupert of the Rhine.’

  There was a strange movement of Toope’s mouth, and then it widened, in a question and then a laugh. ‘You’re not . . . Captain, Prince Rupert? What on earth would Rupert of the Rhine want with men like Cecil and Fish? Why would he walk right in to the heart of London, within a stone’s throw of the Tower and of Tyburn Hill?’ Toope shook his head. ‘I think you are mad, Captain.’

  Seeker slammed his hand against the wall behind Toope’s head. ‘It’s not your place to think, Toope, it’s your place to tell. So start telling. What information did you give them in return for that silver watch?’

  Toope held out a while longer, but eventually, as the light outside was greying and dusk falling over Whitehall, he began to tire, and to run out of the ability to maintain his silence.

  Seeker was tiring of the whole thing too. It was a waste of time, and that time would be better wasted by Major-General Barkstead and the men of the Interrogation Committee at the Tower than by himself. He opened the door, with the intention of making arrangements for Toope’s transportation eastwards when Toope said, ‘The chapel.’

  Seeker turned round. ‘Which chapel?’

  Toope glanced to the side and said in a low voice, ‘The Palace chapel. Whitehall.’

  Seeker closed the door again. Went back to stand in front of Toope. ‘What about Whitehall Palace Chapel?’

  And then Toope told him.

  *

  Seeker was running. The Life Guard of Foot, minus Toope, who was now even more securely shackled and under lock, key and close observation, was on its way to secure the person of the Protector and escort him to the river. The Horse Guard was to make its way directly to Hampton Court, where the Protector would be sent.

  Passing his own rooms in the Cockpit on the way to Thurloe’s, Seeker was waylaid by the young soldier who acted as his clerk.

  ‘Captain!’

  ‘I’ve no time just now, Robert.’

  ‘But, Captain, the lady says it is a matter of great urgency.’

  ‘I’ve no time, Robert, for ladies or anything else, now . . .’

  The boy’s face flushed. He half-stepped in front of Seeker to stop him, a thing he’d never done before. ‘It’s Mistress Wells,’ he mouthed, just as Seeker was preparing to propel him by the neck of his jerkin back through the door.

  Seeker loosed his grip on the young man. Dorcas had never once breached the gates of Whitehall to come looking for him. He felt a wave of fear in his stomach. ‘Where is she?’ he said.

  The young man, trying to rearrange his jerkin unobtrusively, led the way back into the anteroom to Seeker’s chamber. Dorcas rose as soon as they entered. She was dressed not in her town outfit, a good, plain-looking green dress and velvet jacket, but in the serviceable brown gown she wore in the tavern, with her old woollen cloak thrown over.

  ‘Leave us,’ he said to his secretary, without turning to look at the boy.

  Dorcas took a step towards him, but he held up a hand. ‘Dorcas, I have not time. Lawrence is safe, he is in my chamber, but I have not the time to see you just now.’

  Her face was ashen. ‘It is not Lawrence, Damian.’

  ‘Not Manon?’

  Dorcas shook her head. ‘No. She’s safe, back up at the Black Fox, but I’ve closed up. It’s Maria, Damian. Elias came to me because he couldn’t get access to you. Maria Ellingworth went to Tradescant’s early this morning and has not been seen since. Grace Kent had been expecting her at the coffee house before three, and she never came. They’re all distraught, Damian, after what happened to Samuel’s friend, and then the attacks on Lawrence.’

  Seeker felt his blood course through his body with such force that he thought he might explode. Thoughts of the two assaults on Lawrence, the disappearance of Thomas Faithly, who had so openly courted Maria, Tradescant’s and Clémence Barguil, whirled into his head. He closed his eyes and gripped the back of the chair behind the secretary’s desk, feeling he might gouge it through. When he opened them, Dorcas was still there, her face expectant.

  ‘Dorcas, there is an attempt on the life of the Protector in preparation as we speak. I have no time, and not a man to spare.’ He put his hands on her shoulders. ‘You must go back to the city. You must rouse the constables and watch of your own ward at Broad Street and of Maria’s at Cheap. They must spread the search for her through the city. Tell them they will answer to me if they don’t. Tell Ellingworth there are searches already under way for those most likely to have taken her, at South Lambeth and across Southwark . . .’

  ‘Taken her? Dear God, Damian, what do these people want?’

  ‘They want Oliver dead, and they don’t care who else they have to sacrifice to do it. Maria has become entangled with it, all unknown to herself, through her visits to Tradescant’s and her acquaintance with Thomas Faithly. I have men looking for the culprits, but go, now, Dorcas, and rouse the watches.’

  He opened the door for her, but stopped her as she was only part way through it.

  ‘Yes, Damian?’

  He let his eyes trace her face and touched a rough hand to her cheek. ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  *

  He ran now, shouting at people to get out of his way. The sense of the commotion travelled through passageways and up stairways so that the Chief Secretary himself was standing in his own doorway by the time Seeker got there. Anxiety was written on his face.

  ‘What is it Seeker?’

  Seeker nodded into the room behind and then followed Thurloe through.

  Thurloe closed the door behind them. ‘Damian?’

  ‘A plot, to set light to the chapel during tonight’s service, when the Protector and all the Committee of State are at worship. I have John Toope under close guard, in the Foot Guard’s barrack. He has confessed to passing information on the Protector’s movements and security provisions to Mr Fish, who he says is the Leveller, Miles Sindercombe.’

  ‘Sindercombe.’ The name meant something to Thurloe. General Monck in Scotland, dismissing him from the army, had warned about him over a year ago. More intelligence that had slipped through his fingers.

  ‘Sindercombe and his fellow-conspirator, John Cecil, a Royalist, are in the pay of a man Toope knows only as Mr Boyes.’

  Thurloe’s gaze was unwavering. ‘Rupert.’

 
Seeker nodded. ‘Rupert has been behind the attempts at Hammersmith, and in Hyde Park this morning.’

  ‘This morning?’

  ‘Averted. But their money is almost done, and Rupert angered at their failures. Tonight is their last chance, it seems, before Rupert seeks other collaborators, other funds.’

  Thurloe sat down. ‘Tell me everything, Seeker.’

  Seeker spoke quickly. Bribes had been paid for access to parts of Whitehall where feet such as those of Fish and Cecil could never have hoped to tread. Rupert, of course, knew his way around the palace from his days as favoured nephew to the dead King. The door to the chapel was to be left open, to allow Cecil, Fish and Rupert to lay the long, slow-burning fuse devised by the Prince, whose expertise in munitions was well known, and who had honed his devices in the backroom of a clockmaker’s shop in Clerkenwell. Holes would be drilled through panelling and walls to stimulate draughts and encourage the conflagration. The incendiary device itself would be placed under General Lambert’s seat – it was known that the Protector’s own place was checked, but none usually made of those of his companions, and Lambert always sat close to the Protector. If the blast and fire failed to kill Oliver, amongst the confusion, Cecil would be waiting at the vestry exit, to shoot him as he was being led out. Toope was to arrange for fast horses to help the three make their escape.

  Thurloe seemed to sink further into his seat. ‘At the very heart of the palace, in the very centre of government. That it has got so far . . . we had warning from a source in Holland that Charles Stuart had placemen nearer the Protector than we imagined – but in his own Life Guard?’

  ‘I think we must act now, sir.’

  Thurloe shook himself and straightened. ‘Yes, Yes, of course, Captain. Now, let me see: the service is to be at ten tonight.’

  ‘That’s two hours,’ said Seeker. His heart was pounding faster with every moment’s delay. ‘They might still be there. I’ll take some men and . . .’

  ‘Yes of course,’ said Thurloe again. ‘Go. I will see to the rest.’

  *

  As Seeker was storming out of Thurloe’s room and back down the stairs, the Chief Secretary was already sending messages to Major-General Barkstead at the Tower, and making arrangements for extra men to be put on every gate and roadway out of London and Westminster, and at every river port. He was just leaving his room to warn Cromwell, when Andrew Marvell appeared again at his door.

  ‘Marvell. I have not the time!’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Thurloe. I was told I would find Captain Seeker here.’

  ‘You’re too late. What message do you have for Seeker anyway?’

  Marvell swallowed. ‘That the men he sent out to the Bear Garden tavern at Hockley-in-the-Hole have returned and report there is clear evidence of a large animal having until very recently been kept in an old cellar there. One of them swears the scrapes on the door of the cellar are too large and deep by far to have been made by a dog. There are five grooves. He says they are the claw marks of a bear. He swears he can still smell it.’

  Thurloe looked at Marvell as if he had lost his mind.

  ‘Bears? Go home, Andrew. Go home and rest. You are of no use here.’

  Twenty-Five

  The Chapel

  Rupert had never seen the chapel from this perspective before. In countless others he had taken refuge, found a hiding place, somewhere to rest for the night, for England had made itself a land of defaced, abandoned churches. The sacred had fled, beauty was banished: there was only the Word. Rupert had respect for the Word, and he had respect for beauty, but his uncle Charles’s passion for the elaboration of the sacred had not quite been to his taste. Still, though, there must surely be something blasphemous in the desecration of places dedicated to the worship of God that the Puritans had inflicted on England.

  Their progress concerning the chapel had been less difficult than he had feared it might be. Most of John Thurloe’s resources and Seeker’s search parties were focused on the city, and around Lambeth Marsh. The money paid to Toope to meddle with the palace guard duties had done the rest. Those who should have been guarding the chapel had been bribed by Toope to take themselves elsewhere. Rupert had told Fish and Cecil to wait in the outward vestry, on the pretence that he needed a moment alone to think clearly, to select the best places for the drill holes and the devices. But Rupert did not need to think; he already knew. He had a sketch of this place in his head, precise as by the best of draughtsmen. Fish and Cecil seemed unaware he had any existence in London than when in their presence, any other acquaintance but them. He had made a plan, of course, from his memories of his own attendance at services in this chapel. Twenty years ago, himself seventeen years old and already baptised into war on the battlefields of Europe, his brother Maurice just a year younger. They had had nothing in their heads but adventure and the promises of life. All had seemed possible then – they would return in triumph one day to their lost inheritance of the Palatinate, and England, under the benevolent rule of their uncle, would be to them a second home. Rupert stood where the altar had been, and looked down the body of the chapel. If he closed his eyes he could see it all now: his uncle the King, rapt in devotion, his cousin Charles struggling to hide his boredom, the other, younger ones, doing better. The Queen, of course, was seldom there, preferring her Romish chapel at St James’s, which Inigo Jones had started for another princess and finished for her. Rupert’s mother might have let them stay in England then, but for her great fear that Henrietta-Maria’s popery was infectious. Rupert could see it so clearly, that twenty-year-old tableau, in all its majesty, and he had made his sketch, his first sketch, accordingly.

  They were gone, though, those people he could see here when he closed his eyes. His uncle, murdered by the usurping Cromwell; his cousin Charles, a wandering refugee denied his crown; Maurice – but Rupert wouldn’t believe that his brother was truly gone. Had he not twice been told that Maurice had died in battle, only to find later that it was not so? It had only been four years since that storm at sea. Men had been found alive after more than four years. Rupert would not give up searching until Maurice was found. And then he would tell him of this night, when, in this very place, he had blown Oliver Cromwell to eternity.

  Of course, when Rupert opened his eyes, the chapel he looked upon told a different tale from that in which he had worshipped twenty years ago. Since Cromwell and the generals had taken up residence in the royal palaces, countless treasures from the King’s collections had been sold, churches stripped, their organs torn out and put in taverns, windows smashed. The windows had not been smashed in this one though, and the organ remained – for the Lord Protector, it was crowed, as if the fact somehow made him a gentleman, had a great love of music. Nevertheless, much had been altered here, much was gone, beauty removed, its very memory all but erased. But Rupert had known that the plan he’d made of the chapel would need some amendment before it could serve their present purposes. Consequently, he had taken his sketch to one of his other acquaintances in London, a loyal supporter of the King, and she had taken up her own pencil, and marked for him where alteration would have to be made.

  Lady Anne Winter was less than a year returned to the capital from enforced exile in the north. Contacts on the continent had given him her name as one who could be utterly relied upon, and one who knew the design of Cromwell’s Whitehall. Since her return from the north, she’d lived very quietly, respectably, so as to give no cause for concern to the agents and watchers employed in Thurloe’s service. Rupert had gone to her lodgings near Lincoln’s Inn when first he’d realised that they might indeed need to implement this, their most dangerous and audacious scheme. When Lady Anne had got over her shock at realising who he was, this clockmaker who had called at her door on the pretence of returning a mended clock that she knew for a certainty she’d never put in to his shop, she had said at once that she would do whatever was required of her. She’d ta
ken care, she said, to let the authorities see how well she had learned her lesson, and that she had finally learned to behave, so that they might not notice when she did not. So quietly had she lived that even Damian Seeker seemed to have given up watching her. ‘A pity,’ she’d said, ‘for I miss our old game.’

  She’d understood straight away what Rupert required. She could easily see where the differences were between Rupert’s plan of the chapel and the way it was under Cromwell. In her time living at Whitehall Palace, the wife of a high-ranking Republican officer, she had been obliged at times to attend church services in the presence of the Lord Protector. So bored had she been by the Puritan dronings of Oliver’s preacher, that she had taken great interest in the design and furnishings of the chapel.

  Rupert had found himself thinking occasionally about Anne Winter since that afternoon in her lodgings. Something in her beguiled him. At another time or in a different place, perhaps their interest in each other might have been different. But they lived here, now, and they both had the one, higher priority: the restoration of the King. Anne Winter had altered his sketch, and he, for such things did really interest him, had taken out his little case of instruments and shown her some of the tricks the old clock he had brought with him could be made to do. It was the most pleasant hour he had spent since returning to London.

  But the clockmaker’s days were over, for now, and time was pressing – the guards bribed by Toope would soon be replaced by others less amenable and more curious. In the chapel, Rupert looked into his bag, the carpenter’s bag that he had carried right through the streets of London, out at its gates and on into Westminster and then Whitehall Palace itself. He took out the auger, and the brace and bit, and called for Fish and Cecil to come in. To Fish, he handed the auger for boring holes into the panelling and beneath seats, in order that the resultant draughts of air would perform the work of bellows once the fire was started. Cecil began to unscrew the back panel of General Lambert’s seat, behind Cromwell’s own. Rupert reached again into his bag and brought out the device he had spent so many hours in the back room of Dietmar Kästner’s shop working upon. It really was a well-made piece, quite ingenious, and it was a pity neither Cecil nor Fish had the knowledge to understand its mechanisms. He had wondered about showing it to John Evelyn, or even Robert Boyle, who delighted in ingenuity, but Clémence had counselled him very strongly against it. He checked that the necessary parts were in contact with one another. He also checked that the powder was properly dry, for it had begun to snow again as they’d made their way down the Strand. Then he affixed the device, as planned, to the underside of Lambert’s seat.