The Black Friar

by S. G. MacLean

  ‘And what of Charity, Seeker? In all your great concern to know every movement and thought that occurs in my house, have you given a moment to the fate of one innocent girl?’

  ‘I have no idea what you comprehend by the term “innocent”, Lady Anne, but I have not forgotten the child. Get up, and come to your study.’

  Not understanding what he could have in mind now, Anne Winter followed without arguing. She remembered the one time before that he had been in the house, when she had been its unchallenged mistress, and he an officer of the state whose help she had asked. Even then she had delighted in toying with him, but now, he was master and she had no option but to follow.

  He opened the shutters that were still closed from the night, and pulled out the chair behind her desk by the window.

  ‘Sit down,’ he said.

  ‘And if I prefer to stand?’ she said, summoning some of her old defiance.

  ‘What you prefer to do is hardly my concern. Sit at your desk.’

  He was in no humour to spar with her, that was clear, and here in her house, at least, she might yet influence something. From the Tower she would be able to do nothing. Lady Anne sat.

  To her surprise, Seeker took a sheet of paper from beneath the lid of the desk, and handed her a pencil from her gilt brass drawing case. ‘Draw her likeness.’

  ‘Whose?’

  ‘Charity Penn’s. I want to know what she looked like. Head and shoulders will do.’

  Her hand shaking a little from the knowledge of his overbearing proximity, the closeness with which he watched every movement of her pencil, Anne Winter drew. In a very little time, the lines connected with each other, flowed into one another, became the face, the hair of a striking young girl. She had not quite finished when she became aware of a change in Seeker’s demeanour. He leaned closer over the desk the better to see; she could almost feel his breath on her skin. And then reached out his hand and picked up the paper. All movement, all sound in the room was suspended a moment, and then he was making for the door, calling for one of the guards from the Aldgate watch whom he had left at the front of the house. Anne Winter heard but didn’t understand what she heard. ‘Send a messenger to Gethsemane, or wherever he is to be found, and bring Nathaniel Crowe to me here!’ She then watched him pace her hallway furiously, all the while raging to himself about the time it was taking the guards he had ordered from Whitehall to get here, and leaving Anne Winter wondering what on earth could connect in his mind the disappearance of Charity with a Fifth Monarchist boy and the mission on which Richard had so clandestinely departed.

  *

  Seeker at last sat down in the master’s chair in Anne Winter’s small parlour, the better to have the light from the fire and the candles burning in the wall sconces. He looked at the paper again, but he knew he didn’t really need to see it again. He was seeing, in lines and shadings of pencilled grey, what Carter Blyth had seen in living flesh and bone; he was beginning to realise what Carter Blyth had realised. He’d taken the paper from Anne Winter before she had properly finished, but it didn’t matter, because Seeker knew where he had seen Charity Penn before.

  It was another twenty minutes before the guards he had sent for from Whitehall arrived, but Nathaniel, the dog in tow, came very quickly. Something lightened in Seeker’s heart to see the eagerness in the pair, the desire to please, to earn a word or a kind look. A lighted torch in his hand, he took them down the back stairs from Anne Winter’s hall and out into her garden, where he and Nathaniel might speak more freely, where he might be allowed to soften towards them, without being observed.

  He set the torch in a bracket on the wall, above a wooden bench halfway down the garden, near to the trench Anne Winter had had dug for the planting of her new hedge. How could Seeker not have connected it before? How was it that these Royalists still believed anything they had on hand could be long hidden from the eyes and ears Thurloe had employed for him about Europe? Seeker wondered if she would have the trench filled in, now that its significance was no secret. The dog sniffed around the animal scents of the deepening night, before coming to settle at his feet.

  Seeker unfolded the sketch Anne Winter had made and showed it to Nathaniel. ‘Who do you think this is, Nathaniel?’

  Nathaniel peered through the gloom as Seeker brought the sketch into the light thrown by the torch. ‘Well, it’s Charity, who used to live here. But . . .’

  Seeker waited, let him think. ‘But it’s that woman too. The one I thought was her mother.’

  ‘The woman who came to Gethsemane yesterday?’

  Nathaniel nodded. ‘It is one of them, this picture, most like Charity though, because the other woman was older.’

  When the guards he had summoned from Whitehall finally arrived, Seeker gave them their instructions and read with a degree of satisfaction the short note Meadowe had sent to him. It had taken all of five minutes for the location on the south-east coast sketched out by Gabriel from memory of what he had seen of the Rat’s secret message to be identified, and their fastest riders had already been sent in pursuit.

  The last words of Meadowe’s note were, The other matter of which you spoke is in hand. The other matter. Seeker had not liked to do it, but it was necessary. He had warned Meadowe that Andrew Marvell should be closely watched, be told nothing of the discovery of the Rat’s involvement in some plot of the Sealed Knot. Playing on Seeker’s mind was the possibility that Andrew Marvell, as easily as Sir William Davenant, might have handed the embossed paper to the Rat. The fact that Lady Anne Winter had not for a moment questioned his assertion that it had been Davenant troubled him all the more.

  All arrangements for the security of Anne Winter’s house in place, Seeker said to Nathaniel, ‘Come. We are going to Bishopsgate, you and I.’

  *

  Dorcas Wells was on her hands and knees in the taproom of the Black Fox, scrubbing the floor. She was conscious of the pot boy circling her, at a distance. He’d started to say, when first he’d come upon her in that attitude a quarter-hour ago, that that was his job, but Dorcas had almost taken the head off him. Don’t speak, she thought, Don’t say anything. Her heart was as scoured as the floor in front of her; she was at the end of her tether and feared it might snap at any moment, and she did not want her furious despair to unleash itself on this innocent boy.

  She took a breath and tried to ignore his presence. She’d covered a third of the floor. She scrubbed on.

  The rhythm, like a prayer she repeated to herself over and over, was suddenly interrupted by a loud hammering at the door.

  ‘Tell them we’re closed,’ she said, without looking up.

  The boy repeated the message through the still bolted door.

  In response came more hammering and the injunction to open up in the name of the Lord Protector. Dorcas knew the voice and looked to her pot boy, scared now. He turned imploring eyes upon her and she relented. ‘Let him in,’ she said, getting to her feet and wiping her hands on her apron. She thought of the scenes of men and women being led in manacles from Gethsemane only the day before; she thought of Carter Blyth. ‘What’s the worst that can happen?’

  She’d expected Seeker to be alone, or attended by a troop of soldiers. She hadn’t expected him to be here with this boy.

  She recovered herself, focused on survival rather than despair. ‘What’s this?’ she said at last. ‘Who’s this boy?’

  Seeker walked down the steps and set his helmet on the counter, told the pot boy to fetch water for the dog. ‘No more lies, Dorcas. I have little time to spare, and I am not inclined to waste it on whatever delusions are driving you. You know well enough who he is, and he knows who you are too.’

  ‘He?’ She looked from Seeker to Nathaniel. ‘How? Did Carter Blyth tell you?’

  ‘Who’s Carter Blyth?’ asked Nathaniel.

  Seeker continued to look at Dorcas as he answered Nathaniel. ‘Carter Blyth was the name Gideon used when he was with other people, people who used to know him during t
he war. Will you tell this woman who you think she is?’

  Colour flooded Nathaniel’s cheeks. He knew this was important to the woman, and he didn’t want to lie. ‘I think she must be Charity’s mother.’

  Dorcas sank into a nearby wooden chair. ‘I don’t know anyone called Charity.’ Then her head rose. She stared at Nathaniel and then Seeker. ‘Charity?’ she whispered. She leaned towards Nathaniel, beseeching. ‘They call her Charity?’ Then she was out of her chair. ‘Where is she? Take me to where she is!’

  *

  Seeker had told the pot boy to bolt the door again against the patrons who could not understand the Black Fox being shut so early, and to build up the fire. He got Dorcas to seat herself on a wooden settle by the hearth, and sat down opposite her. He let Nathaniel stay, though over by the bar. There might be things about Blyth that Nathaniel would need to hear; it wouldn’t serve the boy well in the long run to protect him from everything.

  ‘So will you tell it to me now?’ he said to the tavern keeper.

  Dorcas nodded. Her hands were shaking a little and she began. ‘I first met Carter Blyth thirteen years ago, when my husband joined Essex’s army, fighting for Parliament. Jude was a man of principle, and he talked of freedoms and rights. They would have called him a Leveller now, I suppose. We hadn’t been long married, Jude and I, I’d no other family, so nothing to stay behind for. I didn’t mind the marching, the living in camps with all the other followers.’ She smiled at Seeker. ‘It was a life, same as any other, and better than being apart from him. And then there was Edgehill, and Jude took a Royalist musket ball in the throat. He was dead before they got him off the field. My little girl – Liberty, I called her, because that’s what Jude wanted – she was born in a Lincolnshire barn three months later. We managed all right, Liberty and I. The other women were good to us, and I had plenty of work with laundry and mending for the officers. It was after Marston Moor things started to go wrong. Preachers started appearing in the army, men with less learning than you or I, Seeker, but that didn’t matter. In a few months they brought in the New Model Army, and the like of me was done for. The Bible, the word of Moses and the prophets, that was all that mattered to them. And a woman with a child and no husband? “Every whore calls herself a widow,” that’s what they said to me, when they took Liberty from my arms and marched me from the camp. They told me she would have a godly upbringing, and never know she had a mother.’

  ‘But how could a child not have a mother?’ asked Nathaniel.

  ‘They told me she’d be raised in one of their hospitals for orphaned children, raised in the fear of God. They took her screaming from my arms and I never saw her again. I asked everywhere, searched everywhere. That was what brought me to London eventually. No one had seen her, no one knew anything of her. But I reasoned that she might find herself here in London, one day, might just walk into the Black Fox, so here I’ve stayed. All these years, but she never did.’

  Dorcas’s large green eyes were brimming with tears. Seeker saw a pain, a rawness, that ten years had done nothing to lessen. He knew that rawness, subsumed it every day, as he suspected Dorcas had done hers, until the day Carter Blyth had walked into the Black Fox.

  ‘Tell me about Carter Blyth,’ he said.

  ‘Carter Blyth was a sergeant in one of the new regiments. He wasn’t one of the fanatics, the Bible thumpers, but he knew his trade in war, and Cromwell liked those men. He was one of the soldiers ordered to take Liberty from me and see me away from the camp. I begged them and I begged them, I was on my knees and offering them anything, but I got only stripes and curses for my pains. He was the one that took her from my arms, but I saw in his eyes that he knew he did wrong. I challenged him with it, but he wouldn’t look at me. All the way to the ford on the river nearest our camp that they made me cross and left me at, he wouldn’t look at me, but I swore I would remember him. I promised it, and I did remember him.’

  ‘You recognised him when he came into your tavern with Nathaniel here?’

  Dorcas nodded. ‘It was about the middle of December, a good month before Isabella went missing. I was coming through from the kitchen with a pot of rabbit stew and I happened to look over to that table there by the door just as the man sitting at it looked up. I nearly dropped the pot. I knew straight away that it was Carter Blyth – scarred and bearded he was, but I knew him, all right, and he knew me – I saw that in his eyes. He didn’t stay a minute after that. Just got himself and that boy there – Nathaniel, isn’t it?’

  Nathaniel nodded.

  ‘Got them both out and away before I was halfway across the room. Some stupid drunk tried to tangle with me at the door, and by the time I’d got out on the street, there was no sign of Carter Blyth or the boy. I asked, but nobody could say where they’d gone. I hunted about every day after that. Walking the streets every minute I could spare, but couldn’t find anything of them.’ She leaned forward, keen that Seeker should understand. ‘I didn’t know, you see, that he was going by a different name, or that he had got in amongst those fanatics at Gethsemane.’

  ‘And you only found out when I came to you asking about Gideon Fell?’

  Dorcas lowered her eyes. ‘No. He came back. I lied to you, when I told you I knew nothing of him. I’m sorry for it, but you wear the uniform of the man whose troops took my child from me, and I couldn’t risk it.’

  Seeker knew that now was the part he had been waiting for. ‘You couldn’t risk what, Dorcas?’ he asked.

  ‘Losing her again,’ she said, so quietly the words could hardly be heard.

  Seeker sat down at the table. ‘Tell me everything, Dorcas. If I can do anything to find your child and return her to you, I will.’

  She nodded. ‘It was a couple of weeks later, at night, just as I’d got rid of the last drinkers and was closing up. It had been a busy night, with the lectures at Gresham, a lot of young gentlemen from the Inns of Court and clerks and the like, all the way as far as Westminster, had been in. I thought I would never get to my bed. Anyhow, I was at the point of putting up the bolt on the door at last when a man stepped into the light of the street lamp and said my name. Lucky he didn’t get this in his throat,’ she said, patting the sheath of the knife Seeker had noticed she kept hanging by her waist where other women kept purses. ‘It was him, of course, Carter Blyth. He held up his hands to show me he meant no harm, asked if he could come in, said he needed to talk to me. I let him in, but sent my boy there out to get one of the watch to patrol outside, for fear of some trouble. But there was no trouble. He told me first he was sorry about what he’d done, said he didn’t ask forgiveness, because he couldn’t expect it. Then he asked me if I had ever heard what happened to Liberty after I’d last seen her. Well, that made me angry, and I’d a mind to call in the watch and have him thrown out there and then. “Should he not know better than I?” I asked him. He said again he was sorry, and then he told me all he knew was she was to be sent to a hospital for orphans and foundling children. And then, one day, walking in Aldgate, he’d seen a girl, about eleven or twelve years old, who’d struck him as familiar when she shouldn’t have been, and then he’d realised it was because she was the image of me. Of course, I wanted to go there and then, in the night, to Aldgate and find her, but he wouldn’t have it. Said he couldn’t be certain, and he thought there were some of Thurloe’s intelligence people watching her or the place she lived. He said he would come back to me when he understood better of the girl’s identity and her circumstances, but that it might take some time, for he would have to take care who he asked, for fear of arousing suspicion amongst those watching her.’ She turned again to Seeker. ‘That was the other reason I couldn’t tell you of it before, because if your men were already watching her, you might spirit her away a second time, and I might truly never see her again.’

  Seeker wondered how it could be that the Protector’s regime was so misunderstood that any could think it was in the business of stealing children, but he could hardly argue with Dorcas
Wells, whose child had been taken from her once already. ‘And did he come back to you? Did he have proofs?’

  Dorcas shook her head. ‘I never saw Carter Blyth after that night, never heard anything of him until you walked through my door asking about Gideon Fell, and telling me he was dead.’

  ‘But the salt . . .’ Seeker said.

  ‘The salt? God in Heaven, Seeker, why do you plague me with questions of that salt?’

  ‘Because it was taken from the house on Aldgate where this girl had been a servant. Before that she had been suffering on the streets, after the poorhouse she’d been raised in was shut down.’ Seeker handed her the sketch Anne Winter had made of Charity Penn.

  ‘It’s me,’ Dorcas said. ‘It’s me, is it not, more slender, younger . . .?’ Then her voice trailed away and she clamped her hand over her mouth. ‘Oh, dear Lord, dear God! Liberty. Is it my Liberty?’ She stood up, her fingers digging into the table that she clasped. ‘Take me to her, Seeker. Take me to her now!’

  *

  They were back in Gethsemane, back in Nathaniel’s little chamber. It was very late, and the night grown very cold. Seeker lit the fire. Nathaniel had been strangely silent all the way back from Bishopsgate.

  ‘Will she be all right, do you think?’ Nathaniel asked.

  Seeker pictured the desolate woman they had just left, with instructions to the pot boy to see to it that the mistress was helped to her bed, and watched. The cook, a burly rock of a man who lodged in a room across the street, he’d told to put the bolt back up on the door, and watch it.