It was not a great distance from the cosy parlour of the inn on Blekersstraat to their lodging at the Bouchoute House on the corner of the Markt. The house was also now a place of empty spaces, dust and echoes. It had been different when the King had first come with his threadbare court to Bruges, and taken up residence there, and even after he had shifted to a grander house elsewhere in town, his proximity had lent a veneer of something finer to the everyday drudge of his adherents’ lives. But it had only been a veneer and had grown thinner by the day. There had been little enthusiasm amongst the Cavaliers of the Bouchoute House to remove for a summer’s sport further north, with the rest of those same tired faces that had hung about the King in his exile for years now, and so they had stayed in Bruges, for want of anything better.
The men had hardly crossed the Strobrug when the hindmost of their number, who had been fussing with his cuffs, called out that he had left his gauntlets in the tavern and must return for them. Laughing at talk of the dangers of the town at night, he refused all offers of company, and promised his companions he would join them soon in a last bottle of brandy from their cellar.
The others carried on and the straggler turned back across the bridge. He was within sight of the hostelry when a figure stepped out of the shadows from an alleyway to his left. The Cavalier stopped but he did not look round. He knew who it was. He had seen the carpenter sitting obscured from the sight of the rest of his companions, in a far corner of the parlour in the shadow of a high-backed oak dresser. As they had been leaving, he had risked a glance that way and the carpenter had lifted his head enough to afford him the merest of nods. That was why he had come back – because he had been summoned.
He followed the carpenter back into the darkness of the alley. ‘What is it?’ he asked, though he suspected he knew.
‘They’re sending someone to find you.’
‘What? They know I’ve been passing secrets to Thurloe?’
‘If they did you’d be dead already. But your Royalist friends in England know someone in your circle’s been reporting to us. They just don’t know who yet, so they’re sending someone to find out.’
‘When?’
The carpenter had started to turn away. ‘She’s probably already here.’
The Cavalier felt suddenly sick. He walked unsteadily to the edge of the canal, steadied himself on a post by the end of the bridge, and vomited up his dinner. By the time he’d recovered himself, the carpenter was gone, having left on that same post the gauntlets he’d picked up earlier from the Cavaliers’ table.
*
A short while later, in the loft that had been his home for a year and a half now, the carpenter looked again at the inventory that had come to him that day, accompanying a box of tools from a ship not long landed at Ostend. At the bottom was a note in a familiar hand.
Delivery on its way to you, but goods faulty. A chisel of English manufacture, ordered for the repair of a faulty window catch at the Lion House.
The code was a simple one, and well-suited for a recipient masquerading as a carpenter. Thurloe’s message clear enough. ‘Faulty goods’ were Royalists; ‘A chisel of English manufacture’ was an Englishwoman; ‘repair of a faulty window catch’ meant putting a stop to the leakage of intelligence; and ‘the Lion House’ referred to the Lion of Flanders, the sign by which the Bouchoute House, in which the last of the Cavaliers were ensconced, was known. Royalists in England had finally understood that their plans for uprising had been revealed to Cromwell’s intelligence services by means of a source embedded in the King’s own circle in Bruges, and they had sent someone – a she-intelligencer – to find out who that source was.
Damian Seeker carefully put the note to the flame of his candle, and just as carefully made safe the glowing ashes. He had warned their source, their double agent, and what remained was for Seeker to find this Englishwoman before she uncovered the identity of the man she had come to find, and, possibly, his own. A swift death in a dark alley was the best any Royalist caught in such treachery to his own cause could hope for, and there had been such deaths in cities throughout Europe. No more than was deserved. Seeker didn’t like double agents, didn’t trust them. Men and women who could be turned through bribery or blackmail, who’d sell out their friends to save their own skin, should be prepared to take the consequences. But Thurloe valued their services, and so, for now, must he. He’d kept an extra close eye on this one. It hadn’t been difficult. The Cavaliers who’d settled in Bruges over the last months could generally be found in one or the other of their preferred taverns; if not, between those and a brothel. It was in such places in this small, half-forgotten Flemish city that plot after plot against the Protector had been hatched before being sent out onto the wind and across the Channel to land amongst people it should not. But those plotters were being betrayed now, and they knew it. The difficulty was in remaining incognito amongst those who had once known him. The growing of his beard, the new scars from the struggle with the bear, different forms of clothing and headgear, a practised change to the way he walked and carried himself. Every morning on waking he took a moment to remind himself, to step into the persona that must now be his. Most of all, though, there was vigilance, that he should not be seen. What the Cavaliers would do should they find one of Secretary Thurloe’s own handlers also in their midst was not something Seeker was going to dwell upon.
It was late now, and dark. He would begin his search for the Royalist she-intelligencer at first light, but for tonight, there was something else that required his attention. He set his candle carefully in its niche and drew from his leather apron the second letter he’d received that day.
This second letter had come into his hands hours after Thurloe’s missive warning of the woman spy. A shore-porter on the Langerei had handed it to him as he’d passed on his way to his vigil at the Vlissinghe. ‘You’re popular today, John Carpenter,’ the man had said.
Seeker had looked at the direction on the front of the letter, and the hand in which it was written. ‘John Carpenter, Englishman, Sint-Gillis in the city of Bruges.’
‘From my mother,’ he’d said, slipping it into the pocket he’d stitched into the lining of his buff jerkin. ‘When did it come in?’
‘Late barge from the coast. Horse-feed and ironmongery.’
Seeker had nodded and gone on his way without saying anything else.
Now, back in his stable loft in Sint-Gillis, he turned the letter over in his hands, almost afraid to open it. To anyone other than the man for whom it was intended, this missive would read as a dull account of family life from an elderly woman in a Kent village to her dutiful and far-travelled son. To Damian Seeker and to Lawrence Ingolby, however, the only two people who knew the cypher in which the letter was written, it would be something else entirely.
Seeker received a coded letter every two months from Lawrence Ingolby. Lawrence kept him abreast of many things – the rumours from the Inns of Court and Chancery that never reached Whitehall; the rumours from the lips of Sam Pepys or Andrew Marvell of goings-on at Whitehall that never reached the ears of John Thurloe; news from the North Riding, home once to both Ingolby and Seeker; news from Kent’s coffee house and of the people beneath its roof; and, most of all, news of the Black Fox, of Dorcas, and of Manon. Seeker had made it plain, through Lawrence, that Dorcas should not live her life as if bound to him, but as the free woman she was. Nothing in Lawrence’s responses suggested that Dorcas had as yet taken him up on this suggestion. And Manon; Lawrence told Seeker of Manon. Even through the cypher, Seeker could see the young man’s struggle for formality, his eagerness to give nothing away, to keep all feeling hidden. Seeker should have told Lawrence that he had decided, before he ever left London all those months ago, that he would let him marry his daughter. Not yet though. Enough for now that the infuriating, clever, stupidly courageous young Yorkshireman was there, watching over her.
This letter h
adn’t come by the usual channels, and it had come at the wrong time – he’d had one from Lawrence only three weeks since. Checking the seal and the folding pattern for any signs of tampering, Seeker opened the single sheet carefully and began to read. The contents showed every sign of having been written in haste and ill-humour, the hand was sloppier than Lawrence’s usual precise script. For all that, this letter was indubitably from Lawrence. Seeker read it through and closed his eyes, letting out a deep breath, then read it through again.
You’ll excuse what follows, but this is no time for me, you, Elias or Maria herself to keep up the pretence that no one but you and she knows of your past connections, though it appears that unbeknownst to the rest of us, they’re not in the past at all. Regardless – you should know that Elias has finally given up on hope of anything better from Cromwell and is set on taking ship, with all his family, to Massachusetts. Not only has his sister declared she will not go, she has announced her intention of making instead for Flanders. Mistress Ellingworth, it appears, is remarkably well-informed of the details of your whereabouts and the means by which you pass yourself off in your chosen place. I know for a certainty that I’ve told her no more than that you are safe and will be back, one day. How she has discovered the rest I’d warrant you’ll know better than I. Only one thing more will I say: this is trouble of your doing, and Elias Ellingworth asks in no uncertain terms that you put it right.
Your friend, L. I.
Seeker put down the letter and lay back on the soft clean straw of the floor. Through the open shutter in the gable he could see over the nearby rooftops to a black sky studded with stars. ‘Oh, Maria,’ he said aloud, shaking his head and smiling. ‘Only my Maria.’
Just one time had he seen her, one time since that terrible night a year and a half ago on Bankside, when a trio of Royalist conspirators had left them deep underground in a disused bear pit, as if for dead. They hadn’t been dead, but they had been taken away to their separate places to have their injuries tended to and the world informed that he was dead. Only Lawrence, Dorcas and Seeker’s daughter Manon were to have been told the truth of his survival and posting to foreign shores. Maria absolutely was not to know it. But Lawrence had told her, only that he lived and would one day return, because how could he not?
Once. Last summer, when Seeker had been recalled, incognito, to England, to bring in person to John Thurloe the intelligence he had gathered for the commencement of the Flanders campaign. Not risking London, they had met instead in a small town near the Essex coast. Some madness, some exhilaration to be back on English soil, had made Seeker send a message to Dove Court: a piece of winter jasmine he had plucked one day in front of her in a garden in Lambeth, bound in a thin ribbon of silk she had once made play of tying around his finger. They were wrapped in a piece of paper with only the name of the town on it. Seeker should have gone back across the Channel on the next tide after Thurloe’s return to London, but he hadn’t. He’d waited, and on the second day she had come. Two days and a night they had had together, in an empty fisherman’s cottage in that little Essex town. What she had told Elias he never asked. After that there had been no more doubt, no more pretence between them. ‘I will come back,’ he had told her as they had lain together in that one-roomed cottage. ‘When my work in Flanders is finished, I will come back, and I swear I will make you my wife, even should the Lord Protector himself forbid it.’
A year had passed, and Thurloe’s promises that he would be brought back from Bruges and settled elsewhere – Ireland, or Scotland perhaps – had drifted away on the polder mists. But the news from England grew worse on every tide – the House of Lords revived, the Commons suspended, the Protector’s daughters married amongst the scions of lords and earls, generals Seeker liked and revered dismissed, for that they did not want a monarch in all but name. The worse the news was, the more likely he was to hear it first not from Thurloe, but from Lawrence, or by means of newsletters. Seeker was resolved that, come what may, John Carpenter would be gone from Bruges by autumn. Now, lying on his back, looking up at the black sky and its diamonds, he made a promise. ‘This is the last thing, Maria. I will find out this she-intelligencer, then it will be done.’ He would get this business over and done with long before Elias Ellingworth ever shifted to get himself and Grace and Samuel, never mind Maria, on a ship bound for Boston. He looked a third time at Lawrence’s letter. ‘But first of all I’ll have to get Lawrence Ingolby to make you stay put.’ He tried not to think of the complexities that might await him should his former wife, Felicity, also have made her way to Massachusetts, as had been her plan.
At last he snuffed out his candle and finally fell asleep to the distant rumbling of carriage wheels along the Langerei.
Two
The Engels Klooster
Sister Janet almost jumped out of her skin when the bell by the night door of the Engels Klooster began to clang, only a few feet from her ear. It happened every time it was her turn to watch; she drifted into sleep only to be rudely awakened at the most inopportune of times. The warmth of the fire and the comfort of the cushion that she smuggled under her habit every night made it almost impossible to keep her eyes open. She had heard the young novices giggling about it once, but at sixty-seven years of age, and thirty of them spent here at the Engels Klooster, Sister Janet feared neither novice, Mother Superior, nor the Pope himself, should he appear in Bruges and choose to take issue with her cushion.
Muttering loudly about inconvenience and lack of consideration, Sister Janet straightened her veil and shuffled towards the door. Lifting her lamp, she drew back the small wooden panel that was level with her eye and peered out.
‘Well? Who is it that disturbs the peace of an honest Christian woman tonight?’
The response was in Flemish, and the voice instantly recognisable. Jakob van Hjul, the carter. ‘Well, Jakob,’ she demanded, also in Flemish, ‘and who have you brought to me tonight?’
‘I think it is surely your sister, for never have I come across a more disagreeable woman, unless all Englishwomen of your years be the same.’
She tried to peer out beyond him but could make out nothing. ‘I never had a sister save those called to God in this house, you rogue. Have you come from the coast tonight?’
‘Aye, and a troublesome journey I’ve had of it.’
Sister Janet slid back the bolt and opened the door. ‘When did you ever claim anything else? You are paid well enough for your trouble. Now step aside and let the lady come in.’
As the carter went to see to his cargo, Sister Janet saw that not one but two women were perched up on the driver’s bench. She took a step out onto Speelmansstraat, and then another, then held up her lamp, very close now to where the women sat. The younger of the two, clearly a maidservant, was readying herself to get down in order to help her mistress alight, as the carter was showing no sign of doing so. Like most people, Sister Janet paid little attention to maidservants, and craned her neck a little to see past her to the mistress. What she saw almost made her drop her lamp. The woman looked back at her and favoured her with that well-remembered crooked smile.
‘Well I’ll be damned,’ said Sister Janet at last.
‘Yes, Janet,’ returned the woman. ‘I’ve no doubt you will.’
*
It was a good half hour and a great deal of grumbling from the carter later that Lady Hildred Beaumont was finally settled beside the fire in the little guest parlour of the Engels Klooster, Sister Janet’s cushion at her back. The stable boy who looked after Mother Superior’s horse had been roused and commandeered into assisting the carter in unloading Lady Hildred’s possessions from his cart. The lady herself had watched as every item was lifted down and had charged her maid with accompanying it to the empty cell Sister Janet had proffered as storage. The last item, evidently a framed painting of some sort, was padded and bound in several linen sheets, and that the maid herself was charged with carrying.
Sister Janet had looked from the maidservant with her burden to Lady Hildred. ‘Guy?’
Lady Hildred nodded. ‘Though I am sure he was never so tumbled in sixty years on horseback as he has been on the back of that donkey-cart.’
By the time the maid had finished preparing the beds in a guest room for herself and Lady Hildred, Sister Janet had readied a spiced caudle to warm the two women.
‘You have grown fat,’ said Lady Hildred, watching the nun bustle about the small room.
‘And you old,’ said Janet.
Lady Hildred laughed. ‘I’ve missed you, Janet. No one in fifty years has dared to speak to me the way you do.’
‘Well, I have not missed you,’ said Sister Janet. ‘Why are you here, Hildred?’
‘Ever to the point. Good. You know that Guy is dead?’
‘Yes, I do. fourteen years ago, at Marston Moor. And sorry I was to hear it.’
Lady Hildred nodded. ‘He died as he lived, without compromise. He died for his King.’
‘Well, he certainly didn’t compromise when he married you. He could hardly claim he hadn’t been warned.’
Hildred snorted. ‘He was pleased enough with his bargain.’
‘More pleased than the Parliamentary troops that descended on Beaumont House after he’d gone, I hear. Did you truly take a crossbow to them yourself, from the battlements?’
‘Only when I ran out of shot for the guns. I’d promised Guy before he left that I’d be in my grave before they took Beaumont House.’
Sister Janet narrowed her eyes. ‘And yet you are not in your grave, Hildred, but you are not at Beaumont either.’
For the first time since they had left England under cover of darkness from a tiny Norfolk beach, Lady Hildred’s maid saw her mistress’s shoulders sag.
‘Why are you here, Hildred?’ the nun repeated.
‘Because England is finished. Cromwell would have himself made king, and those of our people left at home who have the courage to try to stop him are betrayed and butchered. I’ll have no more of it until the King is returned to his throne. I’ve sold everything I could not carry and come to wait upon His Majesty.’
[Damian Seeker 05] - The House of Lamentations Page 2