Anne nodded her mute thanks and slipped the book into her satchel.
‘So,’ the nun continued, ‘I take it the volume you stole is what the spy on whose trail you have been set is using as the text for his communications?’
‘So we believe,’ conceded Anne.
‘And the cypher?’
‘A rare slip on the part of Thurloe’s people. It was left within sight of one of His Majesty’s agents employed at Whitehall.’
‘Thus enabling you to decipher any further communications you might be able to intercept from the same source.’
‘Yes.’
‘But why go to such lengths and take such risks as to steal the book? Given you already had your own copy. Surely you don’t think the loss of the book will make the man you are looking for throw up his hands in despair and stop sending information to his Cromwellian masters? He will simply purchase another copy.’
At last Anne felt she was on surer ground. ‘And that is precisely why I stole that one from the Bouchoute House.’
Sister Janet’s face wrinkled. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘It’s simple. If his own copy has been stolen, he will have to get another one. The day after we arrived, I went around every bookseller in Bruges, asking them to let me know whether anyone came looking for that particular edition of Walton’s book. I told them I would pay double the price of the book if they would only let me know who they had sold it to.’
‘Indeed?’
Anne was pleased to see she had at last surprised the old nun.
‘And how should they communicate this information to you?’
‘I asked that they should send it to me here, addressed to Mlle Nanette, Maidservant to Lady Hildred Beaumont. Lady Hildred’s decision to go on to Hoogstraten was an unexpected inconvenience.’
‘Which you are now rid of,’ said Sister Janet with a shrewd look in her eye.
‘I take no pleasure in how it came about.’
‘No, but your activities may well have aroused suspicion about the true purpose of Hildred’s trip. We shall have to think carefully about how you proceed from here.’
‘We?’ said Anne in some surprise.
‘We,’ said Sister Janet.
And so now, just a night after that bedraggled request for help from Sister Janet following her escape via the canal, Anne found herself attired as a nun of the Engels Klooster.
‘Liberating, isn’t it?’ commented Sister Janet, observing Anne’s smile as she looked down at her new incarnation.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it is.’
Lady Anne had worn many disguises over the last year and a half. It had taken her some time, after the death of Damian Seeker, to realise that no one was watching her any more, and then she had redoubled her efforts in the Stuart cause. Disguised as a washerwoman, an elderly spinster, a seamstress and a preacher’s wife, she had travelled between London and the coast, the coast and the north, the north and Wales, carrying information between those who actively sought the overthrow of Oliver Cromwell’s government and the restoration of the King. She had learned every manner of folding a letter so that it might not be opened and resealed without that fact being evident; she had learned the use of dyes, so that a piece of paper might show nothing but a laundry list, until held against a light in a certain way or wetted with the proper solutions. She had learned codes, carried cypher keys, hidden symbols and notes about her person. She had flattered bores and flirted with drunks, played the damsel in distress and the woman without shame, all to entice information out of those who might otherwise have kept their lips sealed. Twice before, she had travelled to the continent. More than twice, she had come close to discovery, but immediately after she felt herself encased in the habit Sister Janet had found for her, she did indeed find it liberating – truly liberating. Who, she realised, would question, or look twice at, a nun in a town like Bruges? Lady Anne Winter could not recall the last time she had felt so safe.
She wondered what Lady Hildred would have made of her current incarnation and then she remembered what, in the tumult of the last few days, she had forgotten about. Smoothing down her surplice she turned to Sister Janet.
‘There was something,’ she said, ‘that Lady Hildred said when she was here, in the convent. I had been going to ask her what she meant, but we were interrupted and then it was gone from my mind.’
‘And you have remembered it now?’ enquired Janet.
‘Yes.’ Anne thought back to the exact words. They were simple, and yet they might have meant much. ‘It was when we lay down to sleep the night before setting out on our journey to Damme. She said, “I am sure I know that fellow.” I asked her what she meant, but she only said, ‘That fellow we saw today. I have seen him before, in England. And he knew me too – I am certain of it. I will have it by morning.’
‘And did she?’ asked Sister Janet, busy packing away threads and pins back into her workbox.
‘I forgot to ask her,’ said Anne. ‘I was so taken up with my night visit to the Bouchoute House, I forgot to ask her.’
Eleven
New Friends, Old Enemies
Thomas Faithly looked out over the Markt. Bruges was a nice enough town, as towns went, but he craved the openness and hidden places of his own country. Here, in this town house, at the very centre of a city itself encircled by ramparts and water, and pressed on all sides by the flat polder, Thomas thought he might suffocate. It had been a stiflingly hot summer, and the heat of the day became more oppressive by night; Thomas didn’t know when he had last truly slept. Sometimes he thought he would either suffocate or go mad. He had gone mad, almost, at the Battle of the Dunes. When the Spanish had fled in the face of their English and French foes and the Duke of York had rallied his forces to a last charge, Thomas had insisted on being at the front, hoping his final moments would come at the end of a fellow Englishman’s pike. Somehow, as comrades fell around him, he had survived. Glenroe it had been, who, almost as mad as himself, had pulled him away when all was done, and disconsolate, they had dragged themselves back here, to Bruges.
They didn’t know, Glenroe, Ellis and Daunt, what Thomas had done when last he had been in England. All they knew was that he had left the King’s court in Cologne over three years ago to slip back to Yorkshire in the hope of stirring up an English rising. The hoped-for rising had never come to be, and Thomas had reappeared in Bruges eighteen months ago with Prince Rupert, their venture failed and Oliver Cromwell still ruling England with an iron fist. That was what they thought they knew, Ellis, Daunt and Glenroe, but they were wrong. Thomas had returned to England because he was sick of life away from it. ‘Heimweh’ – homesickness – Prince Rupert had called it, who had never had a home. As the price of his return to England, Thomas had agreed to spy for Cromwell’s regime and he had reported directly to Damian Seeker. The arrangement had brought them all near to disaster, and only his desperate flight from England with Rupert had allowed him to escape it. Damian Seeker was dead, because of him. Many thousands had already died in the wars and their aftermath, and Thomas shouldn’t have cared that Seeker had joined them. But when all was said and done, there was a part of him that had liked his fellow Yorkshireman. There had been something of an England he had understood in Damian Seeker, and there was little of it here.
Should any of this become known to his companions in the Bouchoute House, Sir Thomas would be able to count his breaths thereafter in minutes rather than hours. There would be no mercy for the man discovered to have acted the double agent, and he would deserve none. Moreover, Thomas knew that should the truth of his own past activities come to his friends’ ears, he would swiftly be pronounced to be the spy whose treachery had lately consigned their comrades at home to their barbaric deaths. But Thomas knew he had not been that traitor, that he would never again be a traitor to the King’s cause. As the bells of Bruges, the interminable bells, rang out from every p
art of the city, he wondered which of the three men with whom he had sworn brotherhood and revenge was the viper in their midst.
As he was about to turn away from the window, Thomas saw a man approaching the front door of the house. Something in the way the man walked held his attention – he was looking neither left nor right, but clearly set on the front door of the house. Something in the manner of his walk, the sash he wore, his boots, had the look of an Englishman and a Cavalry officer.
By the time Thomas got downstairs, the newcomer had been let in by the housemaid, behind whom lurked the old Flemish cook, who regarded the visitor with a degree of disdain very familiar to Thomas. The man was tall and slim-built, but wiry, and for all his gentleman’s dress had the look of a battle-hardened soldier. Beneath a weatherbeaten face the skin was pale. The hair and lashes were like washed-out straw. The light green eyes were disconcertingly unblinking. A killer, then, but Thomas didn’t know when last he had met a man who was not.
Before addressing the newcomer he turned to the housemaid and said, in Flemish, ‘A visitor, Femke?’
It was the cook who answered. ‘Another English beggar.’
‘He doesn’t have the look of a beggar,’ said Thomas.
‘None of you do,’ muttered the cook, ‘but you all turn up under this roof, expecting to be fed just because His Majesty slept under it.’
‘I think you have no cause to complain of your wages, Vrouwe Mytens.’
‘No, but of the butcher’s bill and the dairymaid’s and the candlemaker’s – of those I have grounds for complaint. Complaints about those you may have with my compliments.’
Thomas was glad the newcomer did not appear to be fully able to grasp the details of their impoverished existence in the Bouchoute House. He now turned to him and changed to speaking in English.
‘I bid you welcome, sir, but am curious to know your business here.’
The man gave the very slightest of nods, not quite an inclination of the head and certainly not a bow. ‘My name is George Barton. I was in Newburgh’s regiment at the Dunes. The coast is crawling with Cromwell’s men and the French. I came to Bruges in the hopes of joining with other officers in the service of the King.’
Sir Thomas relaxed a little. It was a familiar enough story. Another English Royalist abroad, with nowhere to go. Thomas took a few steps closer to George Barton and gestured for him to move further into the light. Closer up, it struck Thomas that there was something familiar about the officer. ‘Have we met before?’
The man shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. The women’ – here he indicated the housemaid and cook, still observing the exchange they could not understand – ‘would not tell me the names of the officers domiciled here.’
Thomas introduced himself and named the others. Barton shook his head. ‘They are but names to me. I cannot say I know them, although we will have shared a battlefield. I was in a dungeon in Edinburgh for three years after the defeat of Glencairn’s rising. Until I joined Newburgh’s regiment, I had not been on the continent in nearly ten years, since I left it with the Marquis of Montrose.’
‘Days of hope and better men. Much blood spilled since then.’ As he said it, Sir Thomas saw Barton glance involuntarily to a not-quite-healed gash on his right hand. The man looked almost ready to fall over, as if he had hardly slept or eaten in days. Thomas felt suddenly sickened by himself and the suspicions every new face aroused in him. He turned to the housemaid, reverting to Flemish. ‘Femke, get this man some food before he drops.’ Then he settled the Englishman in the dining hall and went to fetch the others.
He found them upstairs, in various states of indolence. Glenroe was in the library, and Thomas called the others there. Ellis opened a window, to let in some air, and the sudden draught caused a door in the bookcase to bang. Daunt tried to close it and then complained that the ‘damned catch’ was broken. ‘Even the house is coming apart around us,’ he said. No one asked him what else he referred to.
Thomas told them about the new arrival. Glenroe was sceptical. ‘He could be anyone, Thomas, and we can’t take in every Englishman that turns up in Bruges. We’ve hardly enough to keep body and soul together ourselves.’
‘He’d have to pay his own way,’ said Thomas. ‘I think he’s just looking for some companions and some shelter until such time as we are called upon to fight again.’
‘Still,’ said Ellis, ‘we must be cautious. The servants claim the house was broken into but three nights ago.’
‘Nothing was taken,’ interjected Daunt.
‘Can we be certain?’ continued Ellis. ‘It can hardly be coincidence that the very next day Lady Hildred Beaumont was shot, dead, in the course of a journey planned in a room downstairs.’
‘But the fellow wasn’t even here then,’ protested Daunt. ‘Might as well say it was one of us!’
The stony silence that followed this remark was broken by Daunt awkwardly clearing his throat. ‘Well, it may be a coincidence, but I cannot for the life of me see what the connection is.’
‘The money,’ said Ellis.
The others nodded, even Daunt eventually seeing it. ‘They were after the lady’s money chest, and they thought she was keeping it here.’
‘Which we weren’t,’ said Thomas.
‘No, but we are now,’ said Ellis. ‘If anything should happen to that chest now, who do you think will fall under suspicion?’
‘I’ll tell you right now, and for nothing,’ said Glenroe, ‘the Irishman, that’s who. The rest of you need never worry, for they’ll never look at any of you so long as there’s an Irishman to blame.’
‘Is it any wonder?’ said Daunt. ‘I am convinced those stockings you are wearing . . .’
‘The thing is,’ said Ellis, ‘we cannot just invite a stranger into the house. The fellow could be anybody. The ambush in which the old woman was shot . . .’
‘It’s not him,’ said Thomas. ‘I saw the marksman ride away, remember? Different shape. Different man.’
‘Of course,’ said Glenroe, idly flicking a coin up in the air and catching it, ‘it could always be the one our friends in the Great Trust sent over here in order to discover which one of us is the traitor. How would it look if we were to send him away then?’
No one had any response to this. Glenroe caught the coin a final time then tossed it to Daunt. ‘For the rent of your stockings, Dunt. Now what say you all we don’t let this fellow sleep under this roof, but we befriend him all the same, just to keep an eye on him until we know for certain who he is?
As they drifted out of the library to head down to the dining hall to inspect their new companion, Glenroe leaned closer to Sir Thomas. ‘Have you really no worries, Thomas, that this new friend of yours has been sent to Bruges to spy upon us?’
‘I have nothing to fear from that, Evan. Do you?’
‘Me, Thomas?’ murmured Glenroe. ‘Oh, no. Nothing at all.’ And he followed Daunt down the stairs, whistling a tune he usually reserved for the night before battle.
*
It was a good deal later that afternoon, in a modest tavern near George Beaumont’s own lodging, far from the haunts of the Cavaliers, that Seeker met the officer for the second time.
‘I was expecting you earlier,’ said Seeker.
A look of irritation flitted across Beaumont’s face. The senior officer of the two, he’d clearly never been spoken to this way by a subordinate. Seeker decided it would save a deal of wasted time to make clear to the major that here, in Flanders, on Thurloe’s business, it was he, Seeker, who was the senior officer, and Beaumont the subordinate. The explanation didn’t take long and at the end of it Beaumont turned up his palms in conciliation.
‘Of course, Captain. I will study to adapt to my new circumstances.’
‘Good,’ said Seeker. ‘So – what kept you?’
‘In a word? Glenroe.’
&nbs
p; ‘Go on.’
Beaumont sniffed and arranged himself more comfortably on his stool. ‘For all his bonhomie, I don’t think he trusts me – or rather “George Barton” – one bit. I’ve met enough Irishmen of his sort to know that. You know the kind of thing – a laugh, a wink, a twinkle in the eye and a slap on the back, and all the time they’re watching you – sharp as a razor and twice as deadly.’
Seeker nodded. George Beaumont’s assessment corresponded almost exactly with his own. ‘And the rest of them?’
‘His companions at the Bouchoute House? An ill-assorted quartet, if ever I saw one. The fat Kentish one, Daunt, isn’t quite as stupid as his fellows would have him believe. I’ve seen it before – there’s a kind of safety in feigned stupidity. People don’t ask you to do so much, when they think you stupid. And sometimes they underestimate you so far that they make the mistake of trusting you.’
Seeker doubted many people made the mistake of underestimating George Beaumont for that reason.
‘Still,’ continued Beaumont, ‘I don’t doubt Daunt can be relied upon, from time to time, to be remarkably stupid.’
Seeker laughed. ‘And the other two?’
Beaumont furrowed his brow. ‘Ellis. Ellis is a different proposition. He has the look of a lawyer, or a clerk, or a scribbler of news-sheets. A clergyman even. One of those thin, sour-looking people who takes care over what he says, and looks you over as if calculating how much he might get for selling you.’
‘And Thomas Faithly?’
Beaumont looked surprised that he should ask. ‘I’d assumed Faithly reported to you. I mean, wasn’t he on Thurloe’s payroll around the time of the attempts on Cromwell last year? Wasn’t it him that gave away the plotters?’
‘No,’ said Seeker, struggling not to grind his teeth. ‘It wasn’t. And he doesn’t report to me. I’ve taken very great care that he shouldn’t even know I’m here, and we’ll be keeping it that way. Thomas Faithly is a desperate man, and there’s no telling what a desperate man will do.’
[Damian Seeker 05] - The House of Lamentations Page 13