[Damian Seeker 05] - The House of Lamentations

by S. G. MacLean

  After staring at the closed panel of the door to the Engels Klooster for a good minute, Jones, shoulders slumped, began to trudge back down the street in the direction of the bridge and the heart of the town. At the top of the same street, waiting outside the Schuttersgilde of Sint-Sebastiaan, Glenroe had been paying close attention to his new young friend’s progress. Once he was out of sight, Glenroe finally knocked at the Schuttersgilde door and was let in. That at least was a relief to Seeker. He could leave Bartlett Jones to his own devices for a while, safe in the knowledge that Glenroe would be passing his idle hours at the butts, rather than leading the new and naive young arrival into all manner of vice. He waited another few minutes, to make certain that Glenroe did not reappear, then crossed the street to the Engel’s Klooster.

  Seeker went not to the main door of the convent, but to a small entrance off Speelmansstraat, through which tradesmen were granted entrance. He knocked at the gate and it was soon opened by a novice, who was quickly moved aside by an elderly nun, over twenty years his senior, a foot and a half shorter than him, and almost as wide as she was long.

  ‘Sister Janet,’ he said.

  ‘John Carpenter,’ she replied, in Yorkshire tones broader than his own, though she had not been home in fifty years. ‘I swear you’ve the nose of a bloodhound, though it looks better on a dog.’

  He laughed. ‘You’ve no care for a man’s heart, Sister.’

  The woman snorted. ‘Your heart’s as hard as your head, John Carpenter, and that head could fell a tree on its own. I know what you’re here for though. Never saw a man sniff out a full purse as quick as you. You’ll be wondering if Lady Beaumont’s looking for work done, I suppose? You might wait till she’s got her hat off.’

  ‘A man could take offence, Sister. What would I know about this Lady Beaumont or anyone else you have stopping here? I only called to see whether a young man I gave directions to earlier had managed to find his way here. He was looking for his sister.’

  The sparkle in Janet’s eyes hardened to sharp pins. ‘Well, he didn’t find her,’ she said briskly. ‘No Ruth Jones here, nor any girls of her age that haven’t been here a good long time already.’

  ‘And she’s definitely not one of them, then? This lad’s sister?’ With most people, Seeker would have had to be more circumspect in his questions, but Sister Janet loved few things better than a little innocent gossip and speculation.

  ‘No, she isn’t. The only younger woman we’ve had arrive of late was last night – Lady Beaumont’s maid, but she’s thirty years old if she’s a day. And her name’s not Ruth Jones.’

  Sister Janet’s tone made clear that the carpenter’s time was up.

  ‘Well, I’m glad he at least found his way here, Sister,’ said Seeker. ‘And you’ll remember, won’t you, to mention me to Lady Beaumont?’

  The nun laughed as she closed the door on him. ‘John Carpenter, you’re the Devil’s own Yorkshireman.’

  *

  Sister Janet’s smile lasted just as long as it took for the catch on the door to click shut. Her back once turned to the door, her mouth had become a thin line. One such enquiry would have been enough to concern her; two called for action. She was considering how she should proceed when Hildred Beaumont’s familiar voice sounded sharp through an opened upper casement.

  ‘Nan! Close that window – the breeze disarranges my papers.’

  Janet glanced up to where Hildred’s maid was standing at the window, looking out over the wall onto the street below. Her brow was slightly furrowed, as if something she’d seen confused her, but then she shook her head as if to dislodge the confusion before closing the window.

  Four

  The House of Lamentations

  The loft above the stables of the inn in Sint-Gillis had been Seeker’s home since his arrival in the town. The place was cold in winter and too warm during the summer months, but it suited him well enough. At the other side of the courtyard from the stables was the carpenter’s workshop in which he had found occasional employment. The proximity of the horses, the sounds, smell and warmth rising up from their stalls offered a familiar comfort. The inn itself was well placed, not far from the Langerei, where travellers entering Bruges by barge from the north would first alight. Just as the proximity to the quays allowed Seeker to become familiar with the stevedores and their knowledge of what was coming into and going out of the city, his place above the stables gave many opportunities to pick up information from ostlers and drivers. Often, Seeker had merely to listen to learn where travellers had come from, where they were going to, sometimes what they had talked of on their journey or who they intended to meet with now they had arrived in Bruges. Travellers by coach rarely came into the stables, riders on horseback more often, but neither riders nor coach passengers paid anything but the most cursory attention to the carpenter stooped over his workbench across the yard.

  The space he had claimed as his own was at the far gable end of the loft from the stepladder leading down to the stalls. Shutters in the gable opened over a little canal that ran along behind the inn, allowing loading and unloading of hay and wood direct from the barges. In the summer months, and sometimes in winter, Seeker slept with the shutters open. Even in sleep, he was alert to noises that were not of the everyday. He was not the hunter in Bruges, but a man more like to be hunted, should his identity be discovered by those on whom he reported. He would wake in the morning to the shifting and soft whinnying of the horses in their stalls as they waited for the stable lad to bring them their breakfast, and remind himself that only vigilance would see him through to the next morning.

  In the simple wooden chest that also served him as table and desk, Seeker kept copies of the news-sheets that found their way to Bruges from London. In them he read things that might have been true, things that might have been lies and things that Thurloe never told him. At such a distance now from Whitehall and Milton’s censor office, he took time to consider what amongst them might be truth, and what lies. And of late, with every new month, if not week, things that had not seemed possible before became more likely, and sometimes certain. In the beginning, Seeker had never questioned why Thurloe chose to withhold certain information from him; he had never questioned Thurloe’s view that it was not relevant to Seeker that Cromwell had considered long and hard before reluctantly refusing the Crown, or that Cromwell’s daughters and Fairfax’s daughter were marrying themselves to aristocrats and Royalists almost as quickly as the banns could be read. Neither did Thurloe think it Seeker’s concern that minor players in the royalist intrigues were hunted down, given show trials and publicly executed, whilst senior figures were increasingly tolerated and intrigued with by the Protectorate authorities. Thurloe didn’t tell him of such things because he did not regard such things as being Seeker’s concern.

  Seeker opened the chest, lifted out a paper, and lit the lamp he kept hanging from the crossbeam of the roof. The news-sheet he held out beneath it was the one abandoned the night before by the Cavaliers in the inn on Blekersstraat. It was one that rarely found its way to Bruges, for the Royalists had little interest in the ramblings of a former Leveller. And yet they should have, thought Seeker, they should have, for in The London Lark Elias Ellingworth called Cromwell’s government more thoroughly to account than any of the papers supporting the Stuarts ever could. If Seeker had still been in London, he would have been shutting the thing down. He would have broken Elias’s presses and gone to Dove Court to arrest the lawyer and face the wrath of Elias’s sister. But if Lawrence Ingolby was to be believed, Elias’s presses would soon fall silent, and the wrath of Maria Ellingworth directed not at himself, but at her brother.

  Each night before he slept the last thing in his mind’s eye was her face, as they’d lain together for untold hours in that underground cavern on Bankside, him holding her, she scarcely knowing he was there. Over them had been the half-ton carcass of a bear shot dead at the last, desp
erate moment, by Rupert of the Rhine. Had it not been for the warmth of the near-immovable beast, they might both have died of the cold. As it was, Maria, badly injured by her fall from the gallery above, had been almost lifeless when the soldiers under Colonel Pride had at last found them. For himself, a twisted ankle, a broken arm and a row of gashes from the first tear of the bear’s claws down the side of his face had been all the harm that had come to him. He’d been covered in blood though, not only from his own wound, but from the shot animal, and the soldiers who had first come upon him had thought him dead. It had been Colonel Pride, bending down to feel the pulse at his neck, who had declared that he was, whilst taking a moment to bend closer and caution him, in a whisper, to silence. Pride had himself carried Seeker up from the pit, assisted by Seeker’s own sergeant, John Proctor. By the time they emerged from underground, a crowd had gathered to see what the commotion at such a time of night could be. When he was satisfied that enough of them had witnessed Seeker being carried as if lifeless from that pit, Pride had covered Seeker’s face and pronounced him dead.

  Colonel Pride. Illiterate. A brewer by trade. Pride understood men, how their minds worked. When he had explained his idea to Thurloe, the Chief Secretary had been charmed by the simplicity of it. A plot, hatched in Bruges, to murder Cromwell, had been brought by Seeker to its bloody and ineffectual end in a Bankside yard. Soon the main conspirators and everyone else would believe Seeker dead. But Seeker was not dead, and when he was recovered, he would go to Bruges, and there observe the Royalists at their centre. No plot against the Protector must ever again come so close to success as had that lately put into action by Rupert of the Rhine.

  And so it had gone. Seeker, quickly recovered save for a slight limp that he soon put to good use in adopting for himself a new walk, had been got away to Bruges, found employment and given a roof over his head where Cromwell’s enemies, believing him dead, would never think of looking. Thurloe’s plant amongst Charles Stuart’s courtiers at the Bouchoute House had soon learned he must pass his coded messages to Damian Seeker and that it would be more than his miserable life was worth to think of giving Seeker away. And now both their lives were endangered by the arrival in the city of an unknown Englishwoman.

  Hildred Beaumont had been a name to him up until now, a story that had almost become a legend. The kind of legend soldiers joke about, when they’ve got far enough away from it, and that ordinary people don’t really believe. Seeker hadn’t believed it himself when first he’d heard it – this woman, well beyond middle age, standing on the battlements of her house, shooting a musket alongside the old men and young boys left on her estate, and finally wielding a crossbow and bolt when the shot ran out. But he’d heard it from so many who said they had been there and seen it with their own eyes, that he’d come to believe it to be true. The news that the real flesh-and-blood woman had appeared in Bruges had turned the legend of Hildred Beaumont into something that Seeker couldn’t ignore.

  There had been an unfamiliar look in Sister Janet’s eye when the subject of Hildred Beaumont had come up, a shadow of something colder behind the usual irascible good humour, and Seeker couldn’t tell whether it was himself or the woman in question Sister Janet was displeased with. She could hardly have known Hildred Beaumont – he had had it from the old nun herself, and from others, that Janet had fled England fifty years ago, when her father’s crypto-Catholicism had come to light. There had been rumours of the hiding of Jesuit priests. Those had not been the days to be a Catholic in England. The smoke of Guy Fawkes’s attempt on Parliament had still been in King James’s nostrils, and there had been little sympathy for more Catholic Yorkshiremen. Janet’s father had died a traitor’s death, and she herself had only escaped overseas with the help of good friends. Old troubles from other days. Seeker would go back up to the Engels Klooster tomorrow, to see what he could learn.

  *

  It couldn’t have lasted for ever. Ruth Jones had known that, and yet she had begun to feel safe in the House of Lamentations. Ruth opened the shutter a few inches and looked out over the Spaanse Loskaai – the Spanish Quay – and the canal. Darkness was encroaching on the town. Soon, the night-light men would go through their parishes, lighting lamps over bridges and along canal sides. Ruth wasn’t afraid of the night: it was the daylight she feared. It was in daylight that she had run from her tormentor – broad daylight – and he had watched her run and laughed and said it hardly mattered, for he would find her before nightfall.

  But night had fallen many times now, and still he hadn’t found her. She welcomed the advent of the night-light men more than any other. She didn’t know when last she had been out in daylight. She had gone from one sanctuary, that was not a sanctuary, to another, that was. The women of the House of Lamentations had taken one look at her damaged face and understood that Ruth could not earn her keep as they did, by night, when the House came to life. It was an irony indeed that his marking of her had served to protect her from being subjected to other men. And so by day, as the other women of the house slept, Ruth swept, and washed and scrubbed, cleaned out fires and set new ones, peeled vegetables, dressed meat and gutted fish. When night came Ruth would go to her own little room, out of sight behind a wall of old herring barrels stacked one upon the other, in the cellars of the House of Lamentations. She would take the pole she kept for the purpose and prod tentatively at the pile of warm blankets piled on her straw mattress, for fear of rats. And then, reassured, Ruth would take from beneath her mattress the pot of salve of prunella and briony root she had been given, and rub it into the sores on her flesh, as she had been shown. Finally, before snuffing out her candle, she would take the concoction of wine with melancholy thistle that had been urged upon her to stave off the melancholy and fear that had become her constant companions. Then Ruth would pull her blankets up around her and go to sleep to the sound of the bells of the Augustinians as the business of the House of Lamentations began.

  Sometimes, Ruth would wake with a start, fancying she had heard the turning of the heavy iron ring on the door at the far end of the cellar. The women of the house had assured her she had nothing to fear by it – and indeed she knew she did not. On the other side there was only a tunnel, old beyond memory, running from behind the cellar wall beneath the canal into the cellars of the Augustinians’ priory on the other side. None but themselves and those who wished them well knew of the tunnel. An old tale told of a doomed love between an Augustinian monk and a Carmelite sister of the House of Lamentations when it had known more respectable days. The monk, driven mad by his obsession, had murdered the nun. But that was just a tale – Ruth should not fear ghosts. Flesh and blood and the smell of one man’s sweat and warm breath were what Ruth feared. Whenever she woke, thinking she heard the ring on the tunnel door begin to turn, Ruth would take the knife from beneath her mattress and watch until her ghosts retreated into the darkness.

  Tonight though, as she closed the shutters to the tolling of the Augustinians’ bells and the carillon from across the city, Ruth Jones already had her knife in one hand, and a crumpled piece of paper in the other. She had read the note on the paper so often since its arrival two hours ago that its contents were burned into her brain. A man had come to Bruges, and gone to the Engels Klooster, asking about her. The man had claimed to be her brother. Ruth would not be lying down to sleep tonight.

  Five

  The Bouchoute House

  As the carillon from the Belfort across the market square ricocheted around his skull, Sir Thomas Faithly cursed himself for not having pulled close the shutters of the window when finally he had tumbled into his bed in the early hours of the morning. After the despondency of two nights ago, when they had read of the butchering of their friends on Cromwell’s scaffold, they had gathered last night at SintWalburgakerk, to listen to the mass Glenroe had insisted on having said for the souls of the dead men. Faithly had little time for the mass, still less for the Jesuit Felipe, in whose thrall Glenroe a
ppeared to be, but he had been able to offer no alternative means to mark the passing of their comrades. They should have left it at that, but then Dunt and Ellis had insisted on further honouring their friends, and they had all but drunk Bruges dry. Glenroe had not even made it into his bed, but was still prostrate on the floor, his head turned to the pewter bowl some thoughtful soul amongst the servants of the Bouchoute House had placed there. Sir Thomas wondered for a moment whether he should check that the Irishman was not dead, but a first attempt to lift his own head from his pillow produced only agonies.

  A groan from the floor reassured him. ‘Dear God, Faithly! The sun, for mercy’s sake put out the sun.’

  Thomas made another effort, this time rolling over on to his side and gradually sliding down to the floor. This had been the last time – they all knew it. Glenroe, in fact, had been adamant: one more carouse and then revenge! And Then Revenge. By the end of the night, which was in truth the early hours of morning, that had become their motto and they four, who had hardly known each other a few weeks earlier, were a band of sworn brothers.

  At last Thomas hauled himself to his feet and, shielding his eyes from the searing sunlight, he lurched towards the window. When he undid the catch and threw open the window to take hold of the shutter, all the warmth and sounds of the Markt below came flooding into the room, as if they had been waiting there on purpose. The world had been up and about and going about its business a good while, whilst Thomas and his companions had been sleeping off the previous night’s adventures. Thomas breathed deep. Across the wide-open square, the breezes from the polder brought a hint of salt air. The sea. Always a channel of escape for him before, but now, with the Protectorate’s navy controlling the Channel, it hemmed him in. His choice, such as there was a choice, was to remain here or to go further into Europe. No choice at all.