[Damian Seeker 05] - The House of Lamentations

by S. G. MacLean

  ‘I have no doubts as to your capabilities, Sir Thomas, but surely if it should become known that Lady Hildred is carrying half the Beaumont fortune to the King at Hoogstraten, a larger escort would be advisable.’

  Sir Thomas nodded. ‘You’re right, as ever, Sister, but have no fear. Sir Evan is waiting for us at the Speye Poort with all the requisite travel passes. We will escort Lady Hildred as far as Damme, where she will join a larger, and well-protected party also making its way to His Majesty. You need have no apprehension for your friend. Lady Hildred will be safe in our care.’

  Janet contented herself with a smile and murmured as she turned away from him, ‘It was His Majesty’s money I was concerned about.’

  Jakob van Hjul and the stable hand grumbled heartily about the weight of Lady Hildred’s baggage, particularly her clothing chest, and earned themselves many rebukes as they did so. Both Hildred and her maid were dressed against every eventuality of weather, although it had been a parching summer and the heat of the sun would be searing before they were many miles up the road. Hildred wore a heavily embroidered brocade cloak, pinned at her shoulder with a pearl and ruby clasp Janet had last seen on Guy’s mother, over fifty years ago. The maid had shrouded herself in a much simpler garment, a short cape of grey wool, the hood of which was up and covering most of her face. She was fearful, no doubt, that the early morning moisture would make tangle-weed of her hair. Or perhaps it was Janet she feared, for she never lifted her eyes as she followed her mistress into their carriage. It was good that she was afraid, reflected Janet. Frightened people were more inclined to do as they were told.

  Farewells were brief, with Hildred declaring she would be returning to the convent to collect the rest of her goods and chattels and establish herself in Bruges before the end of the month. Sister Janet was happy to see the small party at last ride away from the Engels Klooster. She was so happy, in fact, that she went out onto the street to follow its progress to the top of the street, and from there, to the accompaniment of the creaking of the windmills on the ramparts, she watched them draw up at the Speye Poort, and finally pass over the bridge and out of the city. Sister Janet smiled to herself, lifted her crucifix to her lips and kissed it, then turned to go home.

  *

  Thomas Faithly rode a little ahead of the carriage, with Evan Glenroe behind. Lady Hildred had treated Glenroe to some forthright views on the Irish and he, making an ostentatious bow and sweep of the hat to her, had delivered to her in Gaelic a stream of invective on the English, smiling all the while. Thomas was fairly certain Lady Hildred could not speak Irish, but just as certain that she had understood very clearly the tenor of what he had said. She had settled for giving them both a sour look and chastising her maid about the distribution of the carriage blankets. Every so often, Thomas would hear the old woman make some disparaging remark about the polder – ‘Flat as Norfolk, or the Fens’ – to which her maid would make some muted response. Thomas himself had taken a long time to get used to the flatlands and the ubiquitous water, to the nothingness of the horizon, the stark landscape broken by windmills, smallholdings, the odd, regimented line of trees. He longed for the high moorland and crashing streams, the crags and the dales of the North Riding. Glenroe sometimes spoke of Ireland as if it was a woman he had loved and abandoned. England was not a woman to Thomas, but a companion, ready for adventure but ever sturdy and dependable. It was the rock he had been cleaved from and to which he wanted to return.

  Two things drove them on now: the desire to avenge their friends, and the need to be home. Charles Stuart came third, a more distant third with every month that passed. He was the companion of their sufferings, but in Thomas Faithly’s heart at least, he was little more now.

  They hadn’t been on the road very long – the spires of Bruges were still clearly in sight should they turn their heads – when something odd about a windmill a little ahead, on the other bank of the canal, caught Thomas’s eye. It took him a moment to realise what was wrong. It was not just that the sails were not moving as they should, but one was missing altogether. Only a few yards ahead, the torn sail was lying on the road, blocking their path.

  ‘What in the name . . .’ said Glenroe, trotting up to join Sir Thomas to inspect the obstacle. It was one of those moments when everything came together with a slow, stark, clarity, a realisation that came upon Thomas too late. This was an ambush. Thomas saw Glenroe open his mouth exactly as a loud bang and a flash emanated from a narrow window slit in the mill. Twenty yards back, beyond the rearing and panicked whinnying of the horses, came a horrified shriek and scream from the carriage. Thomas wheeled round in time to see the maid throw up her hands and spin around as Lady Hildred appeared to slump in her seat. Another shot came, the coachman struggled to control his beasts, and Glenroe’s horse was taken out from under him.

  The Irishman tumbled to the ground as his horse fell. It was fortunate that his feet had already been loose in the stirrups or he would have had slim chance of getting them free and throwing himself to the side before the animal crashed to the ground. The fall dazed him so that when he managed to haul himself to his feet he immediately keeled over again. Through the dust of road and gunshot, once he had his own horse under control, Thomas could see a commotion of blankets and cloaks and women’s skirts in the carriage.

  There was no time to lose – the attack had come from the far bank of the canal and their assailant was already at an advantage. ‘You stay with the women,’ Sir Thomas shouted to Glenroe, who was still attempting to stagger to his feet. ‘I’m going after them.’

  Glenroe nodded groggily as he extracted his pistol and checked for powder, and Thomas set off in pursuit. The canal itself was not a possibility – silted in parts, still too deep in others, he couldn’t risk the horse in it. The nearest crossing appeared to be a wooden footbridge, a good distance further up, but he had no choice. He dug in his spurs and urged the horse eastwards, further from Bruges and closer to Damme, expecting every moment to hear further gunshot, feel the hot agony of being hit, or his horse go from under him. But there was nothing, no further shot. He turned as often as he could to see what was happening behind him, but there was no approach of horsemen to the stricken carriage, which Glenroe, pistol ready, had almost reached. At one point, Thomas thought he saw a disturbance in the water, a dark shape move below the surface of the canal, but the darting of a horseman from behind the windmill forced his attention elsewhere. Thomas lifted his pistol and shot. He was certain he’d caught the horseman on the arm, but the man continued to career southwards, beyond a line of spindly trees. By the time Thomas reached the bridge, his quarry was completely gone from his sight. He had little chance of catching him now, but at least he had driven him off. Giving up his prey as lost, for now, Thomas wheeled back towards the carriage and its occupants.

  Glenroe, still unsteady and with his pistol extended, was scanning the landscape and cursing mightily by the time Thomas got back.

  ‘Are you badly hurt?’ Thomas asked the Irishman.

  Glenroe dismissed the idea. ‘Bumped, nothing more, but my horse is done for.’

  ‘Poor devil,’ said Thomas, looking down at the animal whose eyes had now glazed over and whose blood was slowly crawling from the wound in its neck. ‘And the women?’

  ‘Her ladyship was hit – in the arm, I think. The maid is attending to it – there has been much ripping of linen and some astonishing language from the old woman. I wouldn’t get too close, if I were you. The maid says the sooner we get her to Damme and a physician, the better.’

  Thomas risked a glance into the carriage where the maid was on her knees with the clothes chest open, ransacking it for linen to serve as bandages. The old woman’s colour was not good.

  ‘Are you badly hurt, your ladyship?’

  ‘Hardly a scratch,’ Lady Hildred replied testily, ‘and more petticoats than enough torn and ruined over it. They have not got my money chest?�
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  ‘No.’

  ‘God be praised. Then we must make haste.’

  ‘We can be back in Bruges within—’

  She roused herself to protest. ‘Bruges? We go on to Damme. And when I have had a surgeon look to whatever this fool girl has done to my arm, we will continue to Hoogstraten, and the King. And you can tell that Irish bog-dweller to keep his head out of this carriage, too.’ The effort of her outburst was almost too much for her, and her maid laid a calming hand on her arm. ‘You must not upset yourself, your ladyship.’

  ‘Is she fit to travel?’ asked Sir Thomas, his voice lowered.

  The maid nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said quietly, never taking her eyes from her work.

  Behind him, Glenroe had managed to climb up beside the driver, who had taken some time to calm his horses. ‘The old woman’s insisting on Damme then?’

  Thomas nodded. ‘I’d rather go back to Bruges, but we’re closer to Damme now. The sooner we get her into the care of a physician the better. As soon as we have her settled we’ll get back to Bruges to consult with Ellis and Daunt. We can decide what to do from there.’

  ‘We can start by finding whoever it is wants to kill me,’ said Glenroe.

  ‘You?’ said Thomas.

  ‘What else? The shot that got the old woman was clearly meant for me – why else would he have tried with the second? And they never went near the money either, so it wasn’t that they were after. The old woman’s a tartar, granted, but why should anyone go to such lengths to try to kill her?’

  But Thomas knew what skill it must have taken to fire a musket from a narrow aperture in a windmill at a moving carriage and still manage to hit one of the occupants. He was certain it had been the old woman, and not himself or Glenroe, who had been the target, for if they had been, they would surely be dead by now. ‘I don’t know, Evan,’ he said. ‘I truly do not know.’

  *

  It was with some relief all round that they finally arrived at the house of De Grote Sterre in Damme. Although the Spanish military governor had already set out for Brussels, the house still rang with the calls of officers and civil servants preparing to follow him. An embassy from the Duke of York to his brother the King, also bound for Hoogstraten, was already assembled in front of the Stadhuis, in expectation of the arrival of Lady Hildred and her precious baggage. The lady had grown a good deal weaker over the course of their short journey from the site of the attack, and by the time the coachman drew up at the front steps of the house, her maid was having trouble keeping her from falling into a faint. Nevertheless, Lady Hildred made it clear that her money was not to be transported to the King until such time as she was sufficiently recovered to accompany it.

  ‘That day will never be,’ murmured Glenroe, and Thomas could not help but agree. A boy was immediately sent to fetch a physician, and a sturdy young English soldier stepped forward to lift Lady Hildred from the carriage, her maid hurrying afterwards, uttering words of exhortation and consolation. Thomas accompanied the man carrying Lady Hildred into the house, and despite his urging of Glenroe to rest, the Irishman also came in, so that he might assure himself of her condition. The old woman was laid on a settle in a grand room on the first floor, where her maid hastily asked that the large empty fireplace might be set and lit.

  ‘Come on, Glenroe,’ said Thomas, as a servant began to go around the room, closing shutters against the late morning sun, ‘we can do nothing further here.’ They went out to the backyard of the Grote Sterre to supervise the unloading of the women’s belongings – other than the money chest, which they had agreed to take back, for safekeeping, to Bruges, until they should have word from the king about what should be done with it. The large clothing chest that had been loaded at the Engels Klooster had clearly been ransacked by Lady Hildred’s maid in her search for suitable linen to be torn into bandages, and many ruined and bloodstained garments still lay about the carriage floor. Thomas took a moment to throw them back into the chest – something for the laundresses and seamstresses of Damme to exercise their talents upon. As he did so, he was momentarily struck by how empty the chest still appeared to be, given the trouble the men had had loading it in Bruges.

  As he finished packing in the scattered and stained clothing, Thomas noticed the chest had been damaged – at first he thought some shot must have hit an end panel, but then he realised both ends were similarly marked, and not by chance: six holes, that he might stick a finger through, at each end, and another dozen, which he had at first thought to be studs, at the back. They looked to be recent, and he dared say the owner of the chest knew nothing of them. But he reminded himself that Hildred Beaumont had greater concerns just now than the defacing of her property, and he had not the leisure to muse on such matters. Thomas slammed the lid shut and called to the two men nearest to him to carry it into the house. Meanwhile, Glenroe had bargained the borrowing of a new mount, and they were soon on the road back to Bruges, and their comrades.

  ‘I fear for old Dunt, though,’ said Glenroe, as they discussed how they should proceed.

  ‘Why?’ asked Thomas.

  ‘He is losing his sight or his senses or something.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘That maidservant.’

  ‘The woman attendant on Lady Hildred?’

  ‘Yes, her. Dunt waxed long and lyrical over her beauty after she’d been in the house yesterday morning with the old lady. Said she was just the woman to set him on the right path. He raved of her looks – eyes like almonds, skin as rich and pure as cream – all the usual nonsense.’

  Thomas considered. ‘She has a fine enough figure.’

  Glenroe scowled. ‘What? You too?’

  ‘Well, I saw little of her at the Bouchoute House and even less this morning, such pandemonium were we all in. Her hood billowed out a time or two, and I saw nothing to disconcert me, for all that I looked.’

  ‘Well I did,’ said Glenroe, ‘and “skin as pure as cream” is about the last way I would choose to describe her face. She has a scar, as livid as a burn, from above her right eye, across her nose, to below her left ear, and another that must have split her lip. It is as if someone had once taken a belt to her with the end of removing her face.’

  Thomas stared at him. ‘Glenroe – your fall, the bump on your head . . .’

  Glenroe was exasperated. ‘I’m telling you, man. I saw it not twenty minutes since, as clear as I’m seeing you. That girl’s face is ruined.’

  Thomas tried to make sense of what Glenroe was saying. ‘There was only one maid with Lady Hildred, was there not?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Glenroe, ‘and it was that one. I saw her with my own eyes get out of the carriage at Damme after her mistress was carried out, and not another soul left inside.’

  Thomas spoke slowly. ‘Glenroe, I saw her only briefly, and hardly bothered to look, but the woman I saw follow Hildred Beaumont into that carriage at the Engels Klooster in Bruges this morning had no scar across her face, and the carriage they got into had not another soul in it.’

  *

  Back in Damme, in a shuttered room in De Grote Sterre, while a physician and a surgeon tried and failed to save the life of Hildred Beaumont, Ruth Jones put a finger to her own scarred lips as if exhorting herself to secrecy. It was a blessed thing, the secrecy of women. From Sister Janet in the Engels Klooster who had first given her sanctuary, to Madame Hélène in the House of Lamentations who had ordered that any man coming within the walls of the brothel, as her brother’s murderer had done only last night, and asking for Ruth Jones should be told that no such person had ever been there. And now, the last act of a dying English noblewoman was to keep Ruth’s secret. Ruth had woken in the early hours of this morning a scullery maid in a brothel. Yesterday’s dawn had shown her the body of her brother, hauled from the canal to lie on the quayside just a few feet from her window, and now, with the blessed dusk of to
day still many hours off, she was maidservant to a woman who would soon be dead. But it would be all right. She was out of Bruges, and she was safe.

  Seven

  Sanctuaries

  Seeker felt the women’s eyes on him as he reached up to fix the shutter back in its place. The light did the older of the two no favours, but the shutters couldn’t be fixed properly when they were closed. The house itself was not made for brightness, but for darkness, where the glow of candles might rest for a moment on a length of silk, a velvet cushion, a heavy drape, and then move on, leaving hints of shadows and secret places. What must have looked luxurious, enticing by night, looked shabby and worn, dusty past its time by day. They called it a clean house, the House of Lamentations. As soon as a girl showed any sign of the pox she was out – cast off to try her luck in Amsterdam or Rotterdam or one of those other places where foreigners and sailors, too drunk to look properly or to care, might pay them.

  He’d spotted the shutter weeks ago, old and green, the paint flaking, and so swollen with damp it didn’t close properly. He made it his business to note such things, as he went around Bruges. The habit served him well. If there was a house of particular interest, a house that he might want in to, to take a closer look at, he could present himself, the jobbing carpenter, offering to fix something he had noticed needed fixing. It didn’t matter that what he’d noticed was on the outside – they’d always have other things, behind their otherwise closed doors, that needed fixing too. And so it was with the House of Lamentations.

  He’d avoided entering this place until now. Like so many places in Bruges this last year and several before it, the brothel was a hive of exiled Royalists, some of whom had cause to remember having crossed paths before with Damian Seeker. Instead, he’d made acquaintance of the servants of such places – they could always be met with somewhere in the town’s marketplaces, taverns or churches. Each parish within the ramparts and the ring of canals was its own community, with its secrets and hatreds and certainty of its right to know each other’s business. It rarely took as long as a morning or afternoon to find someone who knew what Seeker needed to know. Taverns were the best for garrulous servants, the marketplace for observing clandestine encounters masquerading as something else, the church to watch without being noticed, and to observe others try to do the same.