The Black Friar

by S. G. MacLean

  Seeker was slower in stopping, and in danger of thumping into the Exchequer Secretary himself. ‘Keep hold of him!’ he roared to Downing, whose soldier’s instinct already had Bridlington’s wrists pinned behind his back.

  Downing tightened his grip and Bridlington yelped in pain as Seeker reached them.

  ‘So, Captain, what has my young clerk here done to so rouse your ire?’

  Seeker looked in disgust at the squirming, expensively dressed nephew of one of Cromwell’s closest supporters. ‘He has been instrumental in the abduction, and possible murder, of four children, and in the assassination of a most valued and trusted agent of the Lord Protector. And he has gone by the name of Ashpenaz.’

  Bridlington, who all the while was seething and muttering something to himself, suddenly turned to Seeker. ‘My uncle—’

  Seeker stopped him. ‘Your high connections will avail you nothing now. If you cross me further I will have you thrown in a cell so deep within the Tower that neither I nor anyone else will remember where it is. Where did you take those children?’

  Bridlington evidently realised the game was up. He gave Seeker one long, last look of contempt before saying, ‘Gethsemane – we took them to Gethsemane.’

  Seeker was already halfway down the corridor when Bridlington called after him, ‘But I didn’t kill anyone, Seeker. I swear it and I’d swear it even if Cromwell himself held a knife to my throat. Whoever murdered your agent, it wasn’t me.’

  Twenty-Seven

  Imagined Friends

  The light was fading over the city, over Gethsemane, as Seeker and his men arrived. The place was silent, like the silence of Anne Winter’s house – locked up, under guard and empty of any human soul. Until dawn broke again, and the officers of the Protectorate resumed their painstaking search of every inch of the place. Thurloe himself had called in at the house on Crutched Friars, Meadowe said, on his way back from questioning Anne Winter at the Tower, to marvel at this new exemplar of Royalist ingenuity. Only a few hours ago, Seeker had stood in that house watching a marble floor open up at his feet, expecting to see the desperate faces of four missing children looking up at him. But the children hadn’t been there, in that house at the other end of this street, a few hundred yards and a world away.

  Seeker looked around him: fourteen almshouses, and they had searched every one. He listened. The sounds of the street outside continued as ever, but within, the quiet of Gethsemane, so usually a place of industry and community, was unnatural. The shutters to the one window of the prophetess’s cell were shut. Through the window of the meeting room, illuminated by a lamp in the window, he could see the girl Margaret they had left to care for the half-dozen young children of the community while their mothers kicked their heels in the Bridewell with Elizabeth Crowe. She was making a show of reading to them from the Bible. Gradually, Seeker became aware of a noise, a rhythm, coming from the loom shed.

  Nathaniel was there, cleaning and oiling the loom as the hound lay guard across the door. Daniel Proctor took up his position by it in the doorway. Removing his helmet, Seeker signalled to the hound to remain where it was.

  Nathaniel greeted him with a broad smile.

  ‘You’re making a good job of that,’ Seeker said, nodding to the loom.

  ‘Father showed me. I want to have it perfect for him, when he comes back.’ There was a question in those last words that Nathaniel clearly didn’t know how to ask. Seeker marvelled at how little love a parent might show to earn the devotion of a child. ‘It’ll be a few days, perhaps, not much longer. Once all is secure and known to be secure,’ he said. ‘The Lord Protector doesn’t wish to make enemies of those who were his friends. Their ends are the same, after all, your father’s and the Protector’s: the good of the state, the glory of God.’

  Nathaniel nodded. ‘Father said that once, something like it. Mother said he was being foolish.’

  ‘Your father’s no fool, Nathaniel, and that’s why he’ll be free soon enough.’ Seeker noticed the boy made no further reference to his mother, nor any enquiry about her.

  Seeker told Nathaniel to put down his cloth. ‘I need to ask you about the children.’

  Nathaniel glanced across the courtyard towards the meeting house. ‘I’ve been helping Margaret with them, since you took all the other women away. She lets me watch over them at their play, show them how to sort the yarns, see that they say their prayers. Dog lets them play with him. They’re good children, Captain, they haven’t done anything wrong by the Lord Protector.’

  ‘I know that, but I’m talking about the other children, the ones that went missing, the ones Gideon was looking for.’

  Nathaniel raised pained eyes towards Seeker. ‘Gideon never told me he was looking for any children.’

  Seeker pulled up a stool and sat down across from him. ‘The things Gideon didn’t tell you – they were for your own sake, to keep you from harm.’

  ‘But I could have helped him.’

  ‘Yes, I suspect you could have done.’ He held Nathaniel’s gaze. ‘Have you ever seen any strange children at Gethsemane, any that shouldn’t have been here?’

  The boy coloured and he looked away from Seeker.

  ‘Nathaniel?’

  His voice was very quiet. ‘Patience told you.’

  Seeker felt suddenly sick.

  ‘I still haven’t found Patience. What would she tell me?’

  Nathaniel clenched his fists, digging his fingers into his palms so that the knuckles went very white. ‘I don’t want to go to Bedlam.’

  ‘You won’t go to Bedlam, Nathaniel; they’d have to put me there first. Now, what would Patience tell me?’

  Still he didn’t look at Seeker. ‘It was after Gideon came. A boy and then a girl, nearly as old as Patience. I thought I saw them through her window, waving to me. I asked her about them the next morning. She told me there had been no one there, laughed at me for having to imagine friends for myself as I had none. When I told her I had seen them, she said that I was lying. But I wasn’t lying, I know I wasn’t, but she said then that I was mad, and that she would have me sent to Bedlam if I spoke of it again. So I didn’t say anything about it to Gideon, in case she heard of it and had me put there.’ He took a deep breath. ‘She said that was why you were coming, that first time. To take me to Bedlam.’

  Seeker cursed Patience Crowe, cursed himself.

  ‘Have you seen those children since?’

  A shake of the head.

  ‘Nor another two like them? Charity Penn, perhaps?’

  ‘No, I haven’t seen Charity since she went missing.’

  Seeker was at a loss. Gethsemane had been searched from top to bottom when Major-General Harrison and his muster had been arrested, taken away, along with Goodwill Crowe and Elizabeth. Bridlington and Patience Crowe must have moved them on somewhere. He was as far from those children as ever.

  A door across the courtyard opened, and a young boy bearing a steaming dish began a slow and careful progression from the cookhouse across to the almshouse in which the aged prophetess had her cell. But that too had been searched.

  ‘I see the old crone isn’t dead yet,’ muttered Proctor.

  ‘It’s a wonder her belly doesn’t burst,’ said Nathaniel.

  ‘Still that prodigious appetite then?’ But even as Seeker said the words he let out a roar of frustration at himself.

  ‘What?’ said Nathaniel and Proctor in unison.

  ‘You told me, only a few days since: Mother Wilkins eats enough for half a dozen. But she’s no more meat on her than a sparrow, and hardly shifts from that bed.’

  He’d already begun to move at speed across the yard, and was calling for Proctor to come with him. The young boy from the cookhouse took such fright that he leaped in one direction whilst the bowl he’d been carrying flew off in the other.

  ‘But we’ve already searched in there,’ Proctor said as he caught up with Seeker, who was hammering at the door.

  ‘Not everywhere we haven’
t,’ said Seeker, giving up his hammering to shoulder the door open so that the sound of the splintering bar could be heard across the yard.

  And there, cowering in her thin grey blankets in a bed made in the recess of the wall, was Anna Wilkins, the prophetess of Holborn. She started to mutter some prayer against them.

  ‘Spare us,’ said Seeker, cutting her short. ‘Get out of that bed.’

  The clawed hands pulled the blankets higher. ‘Get out! Lewd, unbridled . . .’

  ‘Dear God, that any man should be so desperate! Get out of that bed, you vile witch, before I throw you out.’

  ‘Is there no decency! In this godless Commonwealth, for a sick, godly woman?’

  ‘Rotten and wicked, more like,’ said Seeker. ‘Proctor, the other end.’ Taking hold of the woman’s feet through the blankets he heaved, just as Proctor did at her shoulders, so that the small, scrawny bird frame in its yellowed linen nightdress and cap tumbled, shrieking, to the floor. The dog, beyond itself with agitation, had bounded after them into the cell, and stood growling at the bed.

  Ignoring the woman’s cries, Seeker pushed aside the straw mattress and remaining blankets from the platform in the wall and revealed what Carter Blyth, so busy following the trails that led from Gethsemane, had not discovered was there: a wooden trapdoor. He wrenched it open by its iron handle, and peered into the darkness beneath.

  Darkness, silence, and a strong smell of something animal. ‘Bring me a candle,’ he said to Proctor, who lit one of the torches their men had brought.

  Seeker held it to the opening of the hatch, but could see nothing but the stone floor below, covered in thin rushes. But he heard something, a soft shuffling, not rats – something larger. More than that, there was the overpowering smell, the warm smell, of living human bodies with all their odours, different from the sour decrepitude that permeated the air of the prophetess’s own chamber.

  There was no stepladder, no rope, nothing by which anyone imprisoned there might find their way up. But there must have been a means for Patience to get down. He looked at the crone who was watching him with a brittle amusement. ‘Perhaps you should jump,’ she sneered, rubbing at the arm on which she’d landed. She hadn’t, however, been able to stop her eyes flitting to the rafters of her chamber and, looking up, Seeker saw an edge of hemp protruding from an exposed wooden beam. Stretching up he brought down a rope ladder with sturdy hooks at the end, which he soon found fitted into two iron rings at the edge of the opening. As he slung the ladder down, he called into the darkness. ‘My name is Damian Seeker. I am a captain of the guard of the Council of State. I have come to release you.’ The light Proctor was holding above him became dimmer as he descended, but it didn’t matter: his eyes were good enough that they discerned in the corner of the room into which he had lowered himself a small and desperate huddle. At first he thought he had got something wrong, missed something, misunderstood something; at first he thought they were all boys, all chained together. As he stepped closer, the tallest of the children got to his knees – his shackles would allow him no further – and shuffled himself in front of the others, spreading his thin arms as wide as he could as if protecting them.

  Seeker stood where he was and asked Proctor to come down with the torch. The sergeant did so, but when he lifted it up that Seeker might better see the huddle in the corner, there was a scrabbling back and frail arms were suddenly lifted to protect eyes from the unaccustomed light. Seeker took a step forward then stopped. He could see now that only two of the children were boys, though the heads of all four had been roughly shorn, the girls like the boys forced to wear thin shirts and tattered breeches. All were barefoot. The place was damp and the air near freezing. Even in the dim light Seeker could see the sores and scabs on their skin.

  ‘Dear God,’ said Proctor.

  Seeker said nothing for a moment and then, ‘God had no part in this.’ Slowly, he unclasped his cloak and began to walk towards the children. Proctor did the same. They crouched down and put the cloaks around the thin, shivering, terrified creatures in front of them. ‘You’re safe now,’ said Seeker, ‘and we’ve come to take you home.’

  *

  It was several hours later, in the pitch black of the night, that Seeker finally lay down at the doorway of one of the almshouses, the dog stretched out beside him, and lifted the flask John Drake had brought him to his lips.

  ‘What’s in it, John?’

  ‘You don’t need to know that, but it will help rest your body.’

  ‘I don’t want some potion that will send me to sleep. I need to be awake when those children come to.’

  ‘And that will be a good twelve hours yet. Grace and Maria are sitting with them, and two soldiers at each chamber door. You’re not needed, Seeker, and they’d be in no state to answer your questions before then anyway.’

  Seeker stared at Drake in disbelief. ‘Twelve hours?’

  The apothecary smiled, attempted conciliation. ‘At most, I should think. The effects of the draught will have worn off, and they should be rested enough for you to question them further.’

  He knew there was no point in remonstrating further with Drake. The apothecary had only as much interest in the authority of the state as in knowing how to keep himself from its attention. In the treatment of patients, and of these, young and troubled patients, Seeker’s business, the pressing need that their accounts should be heard, were of no consequence. ‘They need rest, Seeker, and so do you. You’ll have your answers when they wake. I imagine you have other things to take your attention? The city has swarmed with soldiers for days. Are the Stuarts at play again?’

  ‘The Stuarts are always at play.’

  ‘And our mysterious Black Friar? You have traced his story by now, I am sure.’

  ‘No, Drake,’ said Seeker, almost grinding his teeth. ‘I have not. But when these children awake from the potion you have fed them, perhaps I will be a little closer to doing so.’

  Drake smiled, his calmness at last washing over Seeker, who nonetheless poured the draught on the dirt floor. The apothecary shook his head. ‘Will you not sleep, my friend? If you can do nothing till morning, why lie awake?’

  Seeker’s voice was low. ‘There are . . . other things that play on my mind. An hour or two’s thought will put them in their place.’

  Drake glanced towards the doorway of the cell in which the two freed captive girls, Charity Penn and Isabella, washed, fed what they could manage, properly clothed and dosed with medicines, had been put to sleep. He laid a hand on Seeker’s shoulder. ‘She will come to understand, my friend. Only time, not you taking thought, will bring that about.’

  But Seeker knew Maria understood well enough already. He’d known it the minute he’d seen her face, as she’d hurried with Grace, Nathaniel having been sent to fetch them, through the entranceway to Gethsemane. Thurloe’s tale had begun to leak out already, and had reached as far as Dove Court: Damian Seeker had used Maria Ellingworth to gather information on her brother and his associates, and that her purpose having been served, he had discarded her. The hurt was like a wall separating them, she on the one side, he on the other. ‘Better this way,’ Thurloe’s voice said in his head. ‘Better,’ Seeker repeated in his head. Better this one hurt, and then it was over.

  He’d gone over to them, a captain of the guard of the Council of State and nothing else. ‘There are four children in those houses in a desperate state. An apothecary with physician’s skill is on his way, but he will need help. We have started warming water. Will you wash them?’ He’d softened his voice then. ‘They need kindness, and gentleness. They have known none for many weeks, and I could not think of any others I could ask.’

  Maria had avoided his eye, but Grace had put out a hand and lightly touched his. ‘We will do whatever is needed,’ she said, and then Nathaniel had taken them to where the rescued children were.

  The filthy clothes were soon burning in the fire pit in the centre of the yard, new and clean garments having been fou
nd in chests in other cells. Food, beef broth and oat bread was brought from the cook shop on Woodruffe Lane.

  Seeker would have sent word to Dorcas Wells, but Drake had counselled him to wait. ‘The shock for both of them will be very great, however joyful. Let the child wake, and be prepared a little, and let me talk to Mistress Wells.’ William Godmanson, though, had been brought from the Three Nails, overjoyed to hear his friend was alive, and allowed to sit with Grace and watch over him. ‘I don’t understand,’ he’d said in a kind of wonder, glancing over to the other bed too, where the gardener’s boy from Lincoln’s Inn was sleeping, having at last understood that no more harm was to come to his companions.

  ‘Nor do I yet, entirely, but, when they wake,’ Seeker pointed to the small table at which he had had paper, pen and ink set, ‘I want you to write down every word they say.’

  No, Seeker didn’t understand. He didn’t understand how the pursuit of these four children had brought Carter Blyth to be entombed, in the habit of a Dominican Friar, in a decayed priory a mile from here. And neither did he understand, yet, what had become of Patience Crowe.

  *

  She’d retreated at last to the kitchen, where the servants would be, if there were any servants. But there were none here now, had not been in the six days since he’d brought her here. She’d had to do everything for herself, and there was hardly anything left now in the larder. She’d tired, eventually, of wandering upstairs from empty room to empty room. The heavy embroidered silks had become uncomfortable on her skin, she did not like the paintings, and the books in the library were dull – more dull than the Bible, even – and mostly written in tongues and even letters Patience couldn’t understand. By yesterday, a fine rash had come out at her wrists and neck, where the lace cuffs and collars she had chosen chafed, and so she had taken them off, and put on her usual plain woollen gown. But still the skin itched, and she could find no ointments anywhere in the house, and she could not make a poultice: he had warned her against going outside, and it would be the wrong time of year to look for garden anemone or thyme anyway.