[Damian Seeker 05] - The House of Lamentations

by S. G. MacLean

  The fixing of a new lock on the bookcase was so simple a job that Seeker had it done in minutes. That job done, he quickly returned his tools to his bag. He then proceeded through the bedchambers on the upper floor, searching. In the chamber which Ellis shared with Daunt he found a bag ready-packed with items of clothing, pistol and powder, and papers. Clearly, a sudden journey was anticipated. Seeker sighed and removed the papers. He had plenty of other things to do, but he was going to have to prise this fellow from his companions today and explain to him exactly what was going to happen, and what wasn’t. Closing the door to the bedchamber softly behind him, he moved on. It wasn’t a packed bag he was looking for, but a hidden safe.

  Seeker passed with speed from one upper chamber to another. He’d long since checked the lower floors of the house for such an item and found them wanting. It was on the top floor, in a tiny room beneath the rafters, that he finally found it: a false fireplace with no real chimney. There was a strange pattern to the bricks in the back, and it was the fourth he tested that gave way to reveal a knob to be turned. At the third attempt, Seeker turned it sufficiently far in the right direction to hear the expected click. At that, the entire back of the small, false hearth swung towards him to reveal a cavity in which had been placed the locked wooden chest brought from England by Hildred Beaumont and carried back from Damme by those who had more concern for the money inside it than for the life of the old woman who had been so determined to take it to the King.

  Seeker pulled the chest from its cavity and made a swift assessment of the locks. The chisel he carried in his bag would have dealt with them in short order, but he would buy himself more time if the chest appeared undisturbed, and so he employed once more his set of special keys. Soon, he was lifting open the lid of the chest to reveal as much money as he had ever seen in one place, and a small bag containing more jewels than any one woman should have access to. From his carpenter’s bag he removed the stones he had placed there that morning, along with a soft hessian sack. Making as little noise as possible, Seeker moved most of the coins into his bag, then loosening the laces on his jerkin he began to slip as many jewels as he could down into the pockets created by the false lining. He then placed the stones from the bag in the chest and covered them up with the coins and jewels that he had reserved for that purpose. It was a simple deception, and would not bear close inspection, but it might cause some delay in the discovery of the theft and gain him some extra time, should he need it.

  His carpenter’s bag buckled, and the laces on his jerkin pulled tight again, Seeker returned the box to its cavity and closed over the false brick door at the back of the hearth. He was about to leave when he heard footsteps coming up the last, narrow flight of steps to this attic floor. Slinging the strap of his bag over his shoulder, Seeker strode to the window and forced it open, clapping his hands as soon as he’d done so. Even as the door handle turned and the door opened towards him, a cacophony of squawking and flapping of feathers broke out just outside as disturbed pigeons vented their protest.

  Seeker turned towards the door to see Edward Daunt step through it, followed by the flustered chambermaid.

  ‘Who the Devil are you?’ demanded Daunt, drawing his sword and brandishing it in the small room.

  Seeker held up his hands in a gesture of peaceful intent. ‘Carpenter, sir,’ he said.

  Without lowering his sword, Daunt looked round at the housemaid. ‘Is this true?’

  The girl confirmed that it was. ‘He was to fix the lock on the library cabinet.’ Positioned as he was, his attention all on Seeker, Daunt gave no sign of having noticed the degree of suspicion with which her small black eyes regarded Seeker as she said it.

  Seeker nodded. ‘The library window was open and a bird flew in, a pigeon. Straight out of the door and up the stairs it went, and the Devil’s own job I had getting it cornered and out at this window again.’

  Daunt appeared unconvinced, but the maid nodded at every word, and was soon off on her own tirade about her difficulties with birds getting into the house, and the mess they made. She was well into an accusation that Daunt himself was responsible for that, as he left crumbs of food in many inappropriate places, when the Cavalier silenced her with a curt, ‘Quiet!’

  Gone was the cheery, befuddled Cavalier, and in his place was a man who had spent the last sixteen years measuring the margins between life and death, and who had learned to trust no one unless he was looking at his own reflection in a glass.

  No one in the room moved. Daunt’s eyes went over to the fireplace. ‘Take him down to the kitchens,’ he said to the maid. ‘And you,’ he said to Seeker, ‘go nowhere until I come back down.’

  Seeker said nothing more but followed the maid out and down the steps to the next floor. Once they had gone through the door that led to the servants’ stairs and he had shut it behind them, the girl stopped. Without turning around she said, ‘There was no pigeon, John Carpenter. No pigeon muck on the stairs, so no pigeon.’

  Seeker considered arguing, but instead said, ‘You didn’t say that to him.’

  The girl shrugged and continued on down the dark stairway. ‘I am a servant, that’s all. And I like you better than I like him.’

  They weren’t long back in the kitchen when Daunt appeared from the main hall. He must have had time to do little more than open the secret safe door in the attic wall in order to check that the chest was still there. He looked at Seeker. ‘All right, you can leave now. But don’t come back here.’

  ‘And what if further repairs are required in the house?’ asked the cook with some indignation.

  ‘You find another carpenter,’ said Daunt over his shoulder as he turned and left the kitchen.

  Seeker sat a minute longer at the bench by the door, finishing off the half tankard of beer the cook had given him, before thanking her and walking out into the yard and then out of the gate, carrying away with him in his carpenter’s bag almost all of the Beaumont fortune.

  *

  Lady Anne had spent the morning in the chapel. Any who saw her there, on her knees, head bent, would have thought her deep in prayer, but Lady Anne no longer prayed. God, she thought, was too beset by the endless petitions of Cromwell and his Puritans to have the leisure to listen to her. So Anne did not pray, but whilst the nuns intoned their prayers, their words rising and falling in centuries’ old rhythms that Anne had never heard until she came to Bruges, she thought. Marchmont Ellis. A traitor to the King and to his comrades. Anne’s problem was how to transmit this information to those who needed to know it, and then to those who had sent her here. It was to have been so simple. Lady Hildred had been spoken of amongst the leaders of the Great Trust as one whose loyalty to the King was utterly beyond question. With very little difficulty, and very little questioning on the part of Lady Hildred herself, Anne had been placed in her household and recommended as a fit companion for the Lady’s planned flight to the continent. Anne had been assured that when she had identified the traitor, she might reveal her true purpose in journeying to Flanders to the older woman She would have the ear of Lady Hildred, and Lady Hildred would have the ear of the only person who could be trusted for an absolute certainty: the King himself. As to her contacts in England, and the matter of her further instructions, Lady Anne was to have communicated through Lady Hildred’s own posts, their passage across the sea facilitated, in as far as they needed it to be, to get out of the Flemish ports by the King’s passes, or through his sister the Princess of Orange’s court in the Hague.

  Now though, Lady Hildred was gone, and with her Anne’s direct access both to the King and the lines of communication back to England that the old woman’s many connections had made possible. Now there was just Anne, holding the information she had come for, without knowing who in all of this city or the wider ranks of the dispossessed Royalists abroad she might trust. She had hoped, as she’d made her bedraggled way back to Bruges after the shooting o
n the road to Damme, that she might seek the help of Sister Janet, but Sister Janet was far too much in commune with the Spanish, whom the Stuart supporters had learned to their cost would put the slightest of their own interests against the greatest of the exiled English King. There was some tension between Sister Janet and Evan Glenroe, and Anne did not feel she could fully trust Sister Janet until she knew for certain what lay at the heart of it. Neither could Anne be certain that Glenroe, nor any of Ellis’s other comrades in the Bouchoute House, were complicit with him in his treachery and deceptions. She would have to find some other conduit for the information she now held. To make everything infinitely worse, Marchmont Ellis must now know that the person who had stolen his coded book in the first place was a sister in the Engels Klooster. Anne’s one consolation was that the bookseller swore he hadn’t told him which one.

  Crossing herself in imitation of the nuns around her, Anne finally got off her knees and followed the other women out of the chapel. As they went off to their various duties, Anne hung behind to observe Sister Janet. She had noticed that, every day after morning mass, Janet went straight away to the room in which she had first presented Anne with Ruth Jones and the instruction that she was to help smuggle the young woman out of Bruges. Sometimes, when Sister Janet emerged from this room, her fingers would be stained with ink. Once or twice, Lady Anne had seen tiny blobs of melted red wax that had evidently been spilled onto Sister Janet’s robes without the nun having noticed. Always, always, Janet took care to lock the door after she came out of that little room, and always, always, she made a point of checking twice that she had done so. Anne had deduced two things from this. Firstly, that Sister Janet was writing something in that room, and secondly, that she absolutely did not want anyone else in the convent to know what she was writing. Anne had tried to recall exactly what she had seen the one time she had been permitted access to the place, but all she could remember were boxes, old habits, and then her own astonishment as she was presented with the terrified young woman with the badly scarred face whom she was enjoined to smuggle to Damme.

  Whatever Sister Janet was up to in that small room, if Anne was left with only the old English nun to trust in, she would have to be certain that she could. And if it turned out that Sister Janet did have access to clandestine channels of communication, all the better. Given Janet’s frequent meetings with Father Felipe, there was a risk that those channels of communication were run by the Jesuit order. Though far from desirable, this was a risk Anne would have to take. She glanced at the lock to Sister Janet’s special room as she passed on her way to the gardens, where she was again to work for the morning. The lock did not appear to be complex, and her lessons from a York locksmith during her exile in that city had provided her with certain skills. All that was required was the opportunity.

  The sun had risen far enough in the sky that much of the convent’s garden was already in its glare. The older sisters were assigned work in the shade of the walls and the younger out in the open. Anne herself had been assigned weeding duties along the herb borders, where she would do ‘least harm’. Sister Euphemia was night and day alert to anything that might ‘do harm’ to her gardens, and the more recently a new arrival had come to the convent, the greater the harm of which they were suspected to be capable.

  Smiling as she thought of this, Anne bent to her pleasant task. One day she might have her own herb garden, when the King was on his throne and the world had at last been set back on its right footing. A short while later her attention was taken by the unexpected sound of male voices at the far end of the garden.

  Anne looked up and saw that two men had begun to dig around the roots of a stubborn old ivy known to all familiar with Sister Euphemia’s views as ‘the work of the Devil’. Sister Euphemia would have no truck with ‘choking, creeping things’ and had at last persuaded Mother Superior to sanction the removal of what was, to her, a very old enemy. The man directing operations was Gust, who had charge of the convent stables; the other had his back to her and only when he turned slightly did she realise that it was the man she had seen in the street the other day in attendance upon the Irish Cavalier, Evan Glenroe. Anne didn’t know what to make of this. She bent her head again to her work, her mind working furiously at the question of whether she might trust this man.

  She worked her way the length of the path, keeping a wary eye on the new Englishman and considering the problem of Marchmont Ellis, and what her next steps in the matter should be. She knew, of course, what would happen in the end – Ellis would die. Ellis deserved to die, he had betrayed countless friends and comrades and consigned them to barbaric ends, so Anne had no qualms as to his ultimate fate. What she was not certain of, and what she had not thought would be required, was that she was capable of doing it herself. The plan had been simple, so it had seemed. She would report her findings to the King and the King would appoint those who would serve justice on the traitor, but just like her means of communication, her access to the King was gone. Even if Sister Janet was to be trusted, how could she expect an old nun to know where an assassin was to be found? Anne realised she would either have to kill Ellis herself, or persuade one of the other inhabitants of the Bouchoute House to do it for her. This brought her thoughts again to the new Englishman, and then, as if her thoughts had summoned him, she became aware of his shadow over the path in front of her. She looked up. Again, as she had the first time she’d seen him, she felt a wave of something, as if she knew him from somewhere else.

  ‘I have startled you, Sister,’ he said.

  ‘Not at all,’ she replied, wiping her hands on her apron,

  The man looked a little awkward. ‘I . . . I wanted to apologise.’

  ‘Apologise?’ she asked.

  ‘For the behaviour of my – associate – towards you and the older sister the other day.’

  Lady Anne was standing now. ‘I fear His Majesty’s subjects will spend a great deal of time apologising if they take the behaviour of all of their comrades upon themselves. Sir Evan’s behaviour came as no surprise to me, and I’d warrant he’s not the worst that Sister Janet has encountered.’

  ‘I am sorry for it all the same, but,’ he hesitated and looked around, before lowering his voice, ‘for all Glenroe can be coarse in his manner, you would do well to pay heed to what he says.’

  ‘What in particular?’ said Anne, not quite liking the peremptory tone he had used.

  The man looked about him again. ‘That a woman coming to the Engels Klooster and associating with Sister Janet would need her wits about her. That women who have come here for help have ended up in the brothel . . .’

  ‘Brothel!’ exclaimed Anne, only remembering at the last minute to lower her voice. One of the younger sisters looked up. ‘Yes, thank you,’ said Anne in a louder voice. ‘If you come to the stable block, I will show you the one I wish you to move.’

  The man understood immediately and followed Anne across the lawn and out of the gardens to the stable yard.

  Checking first that they were not seen, Anne said, ‘Who are you?’

  ‘My name is George Barton,’ he said. ‘I’ve been fighting for some time in the forces under the Duke of York. I came to Bruges masquerading as an officer looking to add my services to those of His Majesty’s subjects in Bruges.’

  ‘Masquerading?’ said Anne, feeling an increasing sensation of fear.

  George Barton took a half-step closer to her. ‘It has become known, amongst the Duke’s adherents, that there is a traitor in the circles attendant on the King. Information which can only have emanated from those surrounding him in Bruges has been reaching the ears of Cromwell’s intelligencers, and good men are dying because of it.’

  Anne felt such a wave of relief go through her that she sank down on a bench by the stable door, took in a long breath and said, ‘Thank God!’

  George Barton gave a puzzled smile. ‘You are not shocked?’

 
She shook her head. ‘I am surprised, I think, but not shocked. This is the best news I have had since I came to this city.’ And then she told him of her own identity and, careful to leave out the names of those who had sent her, her own true purpose in Bruges.

  ‘I had begun to suspect as much,’ he said.

  ‘What? But how?’

  He hesitated. ‘I fear you are suspected. Faithly, Ellis, Daunt and Glenroe, they know – I cannot tell how – that a she-intelligencer has been sent to find out the traitor in their midst. They each wish to find out her identity – though of course, with different reasons. For myself I have found little welcome, only mistrust among those who should be comrades, and suspicion of everyone else. I think you must look out in particular for Evan Glenroe.’

  Anne shook her head. ‘It is not Glenroe, unless of course, he is in league with him.’

  ‘With whom?’

  ‘Marchmont Ellis. He it is who has been passing details of our friends’ plans to Thurloe’s people. Whether he is working alone or not, I don’t yet know, but I mean to find out.’

  George Barton’s face registered his shock. ‘Ellis? I would never have guessed it. Have you communicated this information to our friends at home?’

  Anne shook her head and explained to him the difficulties that had been caused her as a result of Lady Hildred’s death. ‘I cannot tell you of my relief to have encountered you.’

  ‘Nor mine at encountering you,’ he said. ‘I think you will have saved me a great deal of time and difficulty. The question is how should we proceed from here?’

  ‘Tell me about Evan Glenroe,’ she said. ‘I am not altogether certain that he is not in some way involved. He was with Ellis when he picked up the book.’

  ‘The book?’

  She flicked the question away. ‘It doesn’t matter for now but tell me again what Evan Glenroe said. Tell me what has made you suspicious of him.’

  George Barton appeared to choose his words with care. ‘Well,’ he began, ‘he is clearly determined on discouraging too great a familiarity with this convent and appears deeply suspicious of Sister Janet in particular. So wild are his accusations that I would say Glenroe exaggerates or imagines sinister events that never happened, but I feel I should warn you of them at any rate.’