[Damian Seeker 05] - The House of Lamentations

by S. G. MacLean

  ‘And that’s all, is it?’

  Ellis nodded, more confident now. ‘That’s all.’

  ‘Right,’ said Seeker, standing up and putting on his hat. ‘I’ll be off.’

  ‘But, what?’ said Ellis. ‘What about this woman?’

  ‘What woman?’ said Seeker.

  ‘The she-intelligencer, sent to uncover me?’

  Seeker shrugged. ‘I can’t help you.’

  ‘What?’ Ellis’s face was a picture of disbelief.

  Having said all that he intended to, Seeker turned away and left the inn. As he walked down the street, he was absolutely certain now of one thing: Marchmont Ellis was not to be trusted. He had given the double agent the perfect opportunity to tell him of ‘Mr Longfellow’s’ intended clandestine visit to Bruges, and Ellis had not taken it. Seeker had never entirely trusted him, and now he had evidence that he had been right. Ellis had finally crossed the Rubicon: from one who watched for Seeker he had become one who would be very closely watched.

  Seeker had work to attend to next for a comfortable English merchant, long settled near the Prinsenhof. On the way there he would have time to give thought to the other troubling revelation of this morning, his sighting of Lady Anne Winter, in her nun’s garb, emerging from the passageway behind the Augustinian priory on the arm of a Jesuit priest.

  *

  Back in the cool of her cell at the Engels Klooster, her nausea subsided, Anne Winter went over in her head what she had learned that morning, from George Barton and from her own investigations. Sister Janet was suspected in the procurement of vulnerable young women for some unidentified brothel in the city – this from Evan Glenroe who seemed particularly concerned to dissuade anyone from too close a familiarity with the Engels Klooster. The sudden appearance of Father Felipe at the very spot outside the Augustinian priory where she had lost sight of Sister Janet made her suspect that the Jesuit, who was so often at the Engels Klooster, might well be involved in whatever clandestine activities took so much of the nun’s time. George Barton had hinted that Sister Janet was suspected of involvement in the death of Lady Hildred Beaumont; the Cavaliers of the Bouchoute House had been aware that she – or at least some unidentified she-intelligencer – had come to Bruges to find out the traitor amongst them. Only one of those matters – the last one – bore any evident relation to her reason for being in Bruges, and the fact that the traitor, Marchmont Ellis, now knew the woman on his trail was in the Engels Klooster, made it even more essential that she finish this business quickly. Nevertheless, she felt herself too closely entwined with those other issues to be able to ignore them. Lady Anne’s decision was made. She got up from her cot, poured water from the ewer into the bowl on her nightstand and washed her face, then retrieved her set of special keys from the small packet of items she had secreted in her mattress. It was not likely that Sister Janet would be back yet from whatever business she had to transact down at the Augustinian priory. Anne might never have a better opportunity to find out what went on in that secret room.

  Checking that all the sisters were safely dispersed to their afternoon tasks, Anne went swiftly along the corridor and got to work with her keys in the lock. It took her hand a moment to recall the techniques it had been taught in York, but soon she felt the mechanism turn.

  The room had only one small window, high in the wall and set with a grille. Anne took a little time to get used to the poor light. To her left, two large hampers were stacked, one upon the other. They had been moved from the far corner they had been in before, when Sister Janet had brought her in here and shown her the girl she now knew to have been Ruth Jones.

  Quickly, Anne undid the leather straps of the top hamper – blankets, nothing more. With some effort she shifted it off and checked the one beneath. Old habits, wimples, veils and sandals. Anne could not see that there was anything secretive about them.

  Further back, in the corner behind the hampers, beneath the window, was an old, high writing desk of the type found in the convent’s small library and that Anne imagined might have been used in a scriptorium. The seat of the desk had been made comfortable with a cushion of familiar pattern – a match for that which Sister Janet kept for the night-watches. On a small shelf behind the desk were a selection of quill pens, a pot of blotting sand and blotter and a bundle of small red candles. Anne tried to lift the lid of the desk – as she had suspected, it was locked. After a short while working her keys there was a click, and she raised the lid of the desk. Inside, neatly stacked, was a collection of leather-bound ledgers and alongside them, equally neatly stacked if less uniform, a pile of papers tied with a black silk ribbon.

  Anne went first to the ledgers. Starting with the one at the top. On the first page was a list of names, some of them familiar to her already from her short time in Bruges. Cavaliers in the King’s service who had resided for a time or passed through the town since his exile had begun. They were all names whose origins were somewhere across the sea, in the British Isles. There, three quarters of the way down, was the name of Marchmont Ellis, and below it that of Edward Daunt. Glenroe’s name was not there, and neither was Thomas Faithly’s. Each name had a page number written alongside it. Anne turned towards the back of the book, the page with Marchmont Ellis’s number, and began to read. The script was a dainty italic such as Anne’s own mother had used and was familiar to Anne from laundry lists and duty rosters in Sister Janet’s hand. In the poor light, Anne struggled at first to make it out properly, and then she had to look again to be certain of what she was reading. Each paragraph highlighted a debauchery or some injudicious speech – the kind of speech that could leave a man with his throat slit in a dark alleyway. The nature of each debauch was communicated in curt specifics, and Anne was shocked that the old woman should ever have learned such terms as she used. At the end of each paragraph were the words ‘account verified’ followed by a woman’s name: ‘Account verified Clara’; ‘Account verified Magde’; ‘Account verified Pernilla’. What was on the facing page was in some senses much more mundane but, in tandem with what had gone before, utterly chilling. It was the name of the wife, mother or sister of the Cavalier in question, and the whereabouts in England, Scotland, Wales or Ireland, of their family estate. Anne realised what she was looking at was the work of a blackmailer. The misdemeanours of men patronising the brothels of Bruges were being reported by the women who witnessed them to Sister Janet, who recorded them in this book, with a view to threatening their exposure to the men’s families at home. But to what end? What was the bargain the old nun offered these men in return for her silence?

  Anne’s eyes travelled now to the last, broad column for each entry. She read through Sister Janet’s extremely precise record of her activities, which in each case terminated with the name and whereabouts of a Jesuit priest. And suddenly Anne knew. She knew what Sister Janet was up to, and she knew how Father Felipe was involved. Sister Janet had obtained the detailed testimony, from the prostitutes of the town, of scandalous behaviour or dangerously ill-considered words from exiled Royalists in Bruges. At home in the British Isles these men were considered, at least by friends and family, to be individuals of probity and honour. Sister Janet had presented the individuals thus caught with what she knew and made a bargain not to divulge the distasteful or dangerous details to their closest friends and family, or the wider world. The bargain was that their family should accept and shelter in their home a Jesuit priest sent to England from the Spanish dominions. These innocent family members were to hide and assist these priests, knowing that in doing so they risked exposing themselves to Cromwell’s most brutal justice. What was clear to Anne was that they did go along with it, in the main, these men whose incontinent behaviour abroad had put their families at home in jeopardy, because blackmail had no weapon quite as powerful as shame. Amongst the pages in these ledgers were the names of men whose families had been friends of Anne’s for lifetimes. For the second time that day,
she felt sick.

  Anne closed the books, returned them to the desk, shut and locked it and put the hampers back as they had been before she’d moved them. Taking nothing with her that she had not had when she’d come into the room, she went out of the door and locked it. There was no one in the corridor. For a moment’s blessed relief Anne closed her eyes and leaned back against the cool wall. And that was when the screaming started.

  Eighteen

  A Lover’s Tale

  Lady Anne stood very still, scarcely daring to breathe. Her heart was pounding. At the first outcry, she thought she had been caught. Knowing the brutal punishments meted out to the Jesuits in England and to those who harboured them, she did not doubt that any stranger here who discovered their secrets would be subjected to appropriate retribution. She looked the length of the corridor, but there was no one to be seen. From somewhere, at some distance away, Sister Janet’s voice rang around the convent’s walls, telling of breakings-in, treachery and theft. Despite the fact that she was alone, Anne felt as if Sister Janet was, in fact, standing in front of her and pointing at her. Only the arrival of a stream of novices, nuns and lay sisters, who then passed by, oblivious to her presence, shook her from this state. They were hurrying in the direction of Sister Janet’s cell. Lady Anne composed herself and followed after them.

  By the time Anne turned the corner into Sister Janet’s corridor, the onslaught of curiosity that had sent streams of religious from all parts of the convent had been brought to a halt, frozen where it stood, by the wrath of the old Englishwoman. The women, now for the most part clearly wishing themselves elsewhere, flanked the walls, immobilised. Standing within the doorway of her small cell, Sister Janet was a bundle of cold fury, quivering as she spoke.

  ‘Who has been here?’

  There was silence.

  ‘I’ll ask one more time, and you’ll all be on night floor-scrubbing duties in the crypt if I don’t have an answer. Who has been in my cell?’

  Still no one spoke. Anne surveyed the faces of the nuns trying to dissolve themselves into the walls. The younger women seemed to be in various stages of terror, the older were, in the main, enjoying the situation immensely. None of them, however, appeared to show the slightest likelihood of having violated the inner sanctum that was Sister Janet’s cell. Lady Anne made up her mind and stepped forward. ‘If we might talk alone, Sister.’

  Janet pierced Anne with a shrewd look. ‘Sister Anne,’ she said slowly, laying emphasis on the last word. ‘Of course. The rest of you, be about your duties, for I assure you they are not to stand and gape.’

  A moment later, the corridor was empty, save for the convent’s oldest sister shuffling away. Anne followed Janet into the cell and waited while the door was closed behind her.

  ‘Well?’ demanded Janet. ‘What were you doing in my cell?’

  ‘I wasn’t in your cell.’

  ‘Then why . . .?’

  ‘I wasn’t in your cell. What has been stolen?’

  ‘How do you know anything has been stolen?’

  Anne had difficulty in not laughing. ‘Sister, you have been shouting it to half of Bruges these last ten minutes.’

  Janet stared at her and pursed her mouth, but no suitable riposte came. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘is it to be wondered at? Never, not once in all my sixty-seven years, has the privacy of my cell been so violated, my belongings so . . .’

  ‘But you are not permitted personal belongings . . .’

  ‘Do not think to mock me, Lady Anne. There are some things, over a long life, that are not easily to be dispensed with. One day, for good or ill, you may learn that for yourself.’

  Anne could have told her of the many things she had had to dispense with over a shorter life than Janet’s, but she held back. She knew enough to know that this woman had lost at least as much as she had. It was a conversation that could have gone on a long time and done nothing but open old and painful wounds.

  ‘I’m sorry, Sister. What has been taken?’

  Janet crossed over to her bed and folded back the blankets to reveal a box. The box was of old red leather and lined in blue velvet. It was perhaps the length of Anne’s hand, but not quite the width. The clasp on it had been broken and the box was empty.

  ‘Lady Hildred’s locket.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Janet, her voice flat.

  ‘You said you were setting it aside from the things that were to be sold.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Sister Janet.

  ‘I supposed you meant to return it to England, for her son.’

  To Anne’s surprise, Janet was indignant. ‘Hildred’s son is a traitor to the King and to the cause his own father died in. Hildred would never have allowed anything of value, anything that might otherwise be used to further His Majesty’s purposes, to be returned to her son. Better by far to sell them and send the proceeds to His Majesty. That would have been Hildred’s wish.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Anne. ‘But if that is the case, why did you separate the locket from the other items that were to be sold? The locket should not still have been here for a thief to find in the first place. What was it really doing in your room, Sister?’

  Sister Janet sat down on her bed and ran a hand over her face. A straggle of grey hair came loose from beneath the crown of her wimple. For the first time, Lady Anne saw her look almost defeated. She stepped a little closer and touched her hand to the box. ‘I saw Lady Hildred open the box sometimes, you know, and run her finger over the locket. I only saw her open the locket itself once. It was as if she was fearful it was too fragile to be opened or worn.’

  Janet shook her head. ‘No. It was that she feared what was inside would break her heart. Even Hildred had a heart, you know.’

  ‘The portrait of her husband?’ asked Anne.

  ‘On the one side, yes, there was a likeness of Guy, when he was young.’ She smiled. ‘I remember when the original it was copied from was painted. He would hardly sit still for the artist, so anxious was he to be out on the hunt. To be anywhere but cooped up inside, in fine clothes with his hair freshly trimmed.’

  ‘Was it her son on the other?’ asked Anne gently.

  ‘What?’ said Janet, as if she had forgotten Anne was there.

  ‘The other side of the locket? Was that of their son?’

  ‘Oh, I suppose so. It was of a young man, dressed in more recent fashion. No doubt it was their son. He had Hildred’s colouring, at any rate.’

  ‘And nothing else was taken?’

  ‘There was nothing else to take.’ Sister Janet looked around the bare white walls, adorned only with a crucifix above the bed. ‘What was in that box was the only thing of any monetary worth in this little cell. I suppose someone will get money for the silver, for the portraits will mean nothing to anyone else, now that Hildred is gone.’

  Anne didn’t want to ask again for she was fairly sure she knew the answer. She lowered her voice and asked as gently as she could, ‘But I still don’t understand why it was here, Sister, in your room.’

  Janet smiled, vulnerable as Anne imagined she might have been as a young girl, many decades before. ‘Oh, it’s a very simple tale. I loved Guy, you see. And he me – he told me so. We would have married, and we would have been very, very happy. But then there was the King’s fear of Catholics, and Guy’s brother’s ambition. And Hildred’s malice. And so we did not marry. I left England at sixteen and I never saw Guy again. Hildred took everything I thought would be mine. I thought I might at least have his portrait, now that she is gone at last, but someone has taken that from me too.’

  There was nothing Anne could say by way of comfort, and she reminded herself that she was not here to put right past wrongs, but to uncover the rotten elements at the heart of the King’s cause in Bruges. This business of Hildred Beaumont’s locket was but a distraction. Anne had come here to expose the treachery of the double agent,
Marchmont Ellis, and in doing so she had uncovered the Jesuitical activities of Sister Janet. She had begun to form a plan for dealing with the first problem, but she had no idea whatsoever what to do about the second. What she did know, though, was that her time at the Engels Klooster had run out. Father Felipe had made it perfectly clear that he would be returning to the convent tomorrow, and that his ‘confessing’ of her would take the most abhorrent form. Anne could not wait here until tomorrow. Promising Sister Janet she would tell no one of the locket and of its particular significance for the old nun, she left.

  She was supposed to return to her duties in the convent garden, but instead she took herself to the library, which also served as a scriptorium for the convent’s records and correspondence. ‘I have some transcribing work to do for Sister Janet,’ she said in response to Sister Olivia’s enquiry as to why she needed pen, paper and ink.

  Anne returned to her own cell and shut the door. She moved the room’s small table against the door and drew up the stool, to make for herself a functional, if uncomfortable, writing desk. From beneath her mattress, she took out her own copy of The Compleat Angler. Then, with some awkwardness, she removed the small silk pouch that hung from her neck from its hiding place beneath her habit. Inside was the cypher key she had been given before leaving England, and that she had been careless enough to let Janet discover. She laid out the key on the tabletop, sat down on the stool, and began to write.

  *

  His working day as a carpenter over, Seeker had taken an early supper at ’t Oud Handbogenhof and taken himself to the Jeruzalemkapel. He had often met Marchmont Ellis here, when the need arose. He had occasionally done work for the Adornes family, and it wasn’t unusual for him to stop in at the end of the working day to have a friendly word with the inhabitants of their almshouses before making his evening devotions in the chapel. The place was well situated for Ellis to wander into on his way back into town from an afternoon at the Schuttersgilde, without attracting adverse notice. But it wasn’t Ellis he was meeting here this evening. By his failure to inform Seeker of the mysterious Mr Longfellow’s impending clandestine visit to Bruges, Ellis had shown himself to have outlived his usefulness. Seeker couldn’t abandon him completely to the fate that awaited him when his Royalist companions discovered he had betrayed them, but he wasn’t going to act to remove Ellis from the scene quite yet.