Her candle was out now, and she stood with her hand still on the key and her heart pounding. Anne thought of all the things she had done to get to this place: a tiny, locked dark room in a Romish convent in a foreign country. She thought of the men she had seen only a few weeks ago, executed, torn piece by piece before the mob on Cromwell’s orders. She thought of her own friend and servant who had died such a death only three years ago, trading with Damian Seeker to spare her life. What was the worth of that life, of that trade, now? She thought further back, to her father, her brother. She must not shrink in fear from Jesuits who would infiltrate her country whilst Cromwell’s spies consigned her friends to torture and judicial murder. Straightening her shoulders and taking a deep breath, Lady Anne turned her key and walked out of Sister Janet’s secret room.
There was nobody in the corridor now, all the sisters who cared enough to deal with Assumpta already having passed. Anne was calm. She walked in the opposite direction until she reached the internal iron gate at the foot of the main stairs. Sister Bethany was on duty there tonight, obviously not long aroused from her sleep by the thunderclap or Assumpta’s screams.
‘Sister Anne?’ she said, straightening her headdress that had been knocked askew by her having slept with her head against the wall. ‘Is all well with Assumpta?’
‘She is almost calmed,’ said Anne, ‘but begs to see you.’
‘Me?’
Anne nodded, astonished, as so often she had been over these last years, by her own ability to manufacture and tell a lie. ‘She will not be persuaded that you have come to no harm.’
‘Me?’ said Sister Bethany again in genuine surprise.
‘She is convinced a lightning bolt will have come through the door grille to strike off the inner railings and smite you. Mother Superior begs that you should go to her and reassure her that all is well. I will take your place on watch here.’
‘Of course, of course,’ said Bethany, hurriedly getting up and starting down the corridor.
‘Sister,’ Anne called after her.
‘Yes, Sister?’ said Bethany.
Anne pointed to the huge lock on the iron inner gate. ‘We may well be called upon to give shelter to some unfortunate traveller on a night such as this. Had you not better give me the keys?’
‘Oh, of course, Sister, of course,’ said Bethany, hastily removing the key chain from around her waist before hurrying back down the corridor.
At another time, Anne Winter might have felt sorry at her deception of such a kindly soul, but not now. As soon as Sister Bethany was out of sight, she unlocked the inner gate, then hurried across the flagstones of the vestibule to open the door into the outer courtyard. Only now did she remember that she was still in bare feet. She hastily pulled her sandals from her sack and slipped them on. Taking a quick look out into the street through the eye-level grille in the outer door, she unlocked that door and was about to step into the street when a new and far more terrible scream rose up from within the walls of the Engels Klooster. It was the voice of a young nun, and the scream one not of fear, but of horror. While logic told Anne to flee the sound, concern for the women inside urged her otherwise. She let drop her sack and ran back into the convent.
All was chaos. The troubles of Sister Assumpta were forgotten as the women rushed once more towards Sister Janet’s cell, younger sisters forgetting their place and rushing past their elders to reach the source of the crisis. Anne outstripped all but the foremost. The screaming continued, and only after Anne rounded the corner to see an hysterical novice slapped hard across the face by Sister Bethany did it stop. And then she knew she was too late. Sister Euphemia, the gardener, was standing, aghast, in the doorway, a younger nun, her face pressed to the door-jamb, was wracked with sobs, another, slumped to the floor, howled in grief. Anne summoned her courage and went past them, gently moving Euphemia aside. Janet’s room was lit by a solitary lamp, held aloft by Sister Ignatia, her face frozen in horror. In the pool of light cast by the lamp, Anne could see Mother Superior slumped on her knees, her arms flung across the figure on the bed and repeating, ‘Oh, Janet, oh, Janet.’ And there, in blood-soaked sheets, her eyes locked open as if in surprise, lay Janet, the bolt from a crossbow lodged in her unmoving chest.
Anne stumbled out of the room, into the corridor, and fled.
Twenty
St John’s Hospital
Seeker didn’t know which was worse, the smell of the Oude Steen first thing in the morning, before the night slop buckets had been emptied out, or later in the day, when the heat had warmed the fetid air trapped below ground and brought new flies to antagonise the guards. He reasoned that last night’s storm should have improved things one way or the other and took a chance on early morning.
He turned through the narrow opening on Wollestraat and exchanged a few grumbles with the upper guard before descending the stone steps. The heavy lower door of the Oude Steen was firmly locked, and he rapped hard on it. The disgruntled doorkeeper eventually shot back the iron cover on the eye grille and grunted, ‘You again? Why not take a cell here and be done with it?’
‘I prefer my landlady’s housekeeping, thank you. Now are you going to let me in, or shall I take my money elsewhere?’
The guard snorted and began the process of unlocking the door. ‘What you here for this time?’
‘There’s a fellow ran off that owes me money. Thought Dirk might know where he was.’
‘Fair enough.’ The guard unlocked another door and jerked a thumb in the direction of the dungeons. ‘You’ll know your way by now.’
Seeker took a breath and stepped into the cavern of misery that was the Oude Steen. Some of the faces and shapes gurning or shifting as he passed were the same as on his last visit, some different. It was one of those places a man was glad there wasn’t much light: dark stains on the walls, like rust that wasn’t, bore testimony to centuries of incarceration and interrogation. All the ingenuity of man to torture whatever he wanted out of his fellow man had had its day in the Oude Steen.
Dirk was snoring like a shire horse when Seeker entered his cell. He was the only person in the whole prison to have a space to himself – there were plenty others as well as Seeker who were prepared to pay him for information. He’d once asked a guard why Dirk didn’t just buy himself out of the Oude Steen. ‘Because living with his wife is worse,’ had been the response.
Seeker shook Dirk a couple of times by the shoulder, but making no headway reached for the jug of tepid water on the floor and splashed most of it over the slumbering man’s face. He stood back and waited for the expletives to run their course.
Dirk finally shambled to a sitting position, coughing as if nothing but heaving up his lungs would set him up for the day. Seeker took a couple of steps back and waited for the performance to be over.
‘Aah, that’s better,’ said Dirk at last when he had projected sufficient phlegm onto the dirt floor. He then took to scratching. ‘So, what is it this time, John Carpenter, that’s so important you rouse a man of business at this ungodly hour?’
‘I’m sorry to intrude upon Your Excellency’s rest,’ said Seeker, ‘but it was you who sent me a message, if you recall. So if you could accord me a moment out of your busy morning I’d be most grateful.’
‘How grateful?’ asked Dirk, leaning forward and remarkably wide awake now.
Seeker produced a coin from his pouch. ‘That do?’
Dirk went back to a mild scratching. ‘Not for what I’ve got for you.’
‘Which is?’
‘What you were here asking about the last time. That old Englishwoman killed on the road to Damme. ’
‘Go on,’ said Seeker.
‘Might have heard something more,’ speculated Dirk, eying Seeker’s pouch.
Seeker took out another coin, a little greater in value than the last. ‘That’s all there is. Take it or leave it. I haven’t the time to waste.�
��
Dirk shot out a grubby hand and took the coin. ‘Vagrant in here yesterday – said he was a soldier, might have been . . .’
‘Get to the point,’ said Seeker.
‘As I am doing,’ protested Dirk. ‘Anyhow, this vagrant, soldier, whatever he might have been – he’d been in a fight at a tavern up by the Speye Poort. Fight started when another ne’er-do-well fell over, knocking over a whole table of beers, hit his head on the floor, clean out.’
‘Go on,’ said Seeker, resigned to having to let Dirk tell it his way.
‘Well, this one that had passed clean out had got a wound in his shoulder that he’d been telling people he’d got falling onto a broken bottle. But my new soldier-vagrant friend – call him what you will – says it was a lead ball that did that, from a flintlock like as not. Badly cut out by someone that didn’t know what they were doing. Says he’s seen it plenty before and seen them putrid too. Now, weren’t you telling me the fellow you were looking for might have been hit by a pistol shot . . .’
‘Where is this soldier?’ asked Seeker, looking back towards the other cells.
Dirk shrugged. ‘Don’t know. His woman came and got him out.’
Seeker let out a sigh of exasperation and made for the door.
‘But,’ continued Dirk, ‘before she did, he told me where the other fellow went, the one you’re looking for.’
Seeker stopped. ‘Where?’
Dirk raised his eyebrows and nodded towards Seeker’s pouch.
‘This better be worth it, or I won’t be coming back.’
‘Oh, but it will be, John Carpenter. Trust me, it will be.’
Seeker drew out one last coin but held it out of Dirk’s reach.
Dirk nodded. ‘The man you’re looking for, that arm of his was putrid, and when he came round from his fall he was raving. Something about shooting the Queen of England. They took him to Sint-Jans.’
A moment later, Seeker was headed back through the dungeon to the guardroom, with the sound of Dirk’s voice calling after him, ‘Tell that lazy fellow I need someone to run over to the Swaene for a jug of its finest, and there’s a penny in it for him if he looks quick about it.’
The brother on duty at the entryway to Sint-Janshospitaal opened the eye grille at Seeker’s banging in a state of some alarm. ‘What is it? Pestilence? A fire?’
‘No,’ said Seeker, ‘but I have urgent need to see one of your patients.’
‘And who are you, that has such an urgent need?’
‘My name is John Carpenter.’
‘English?’ Even through the grille, Seeker could see the monk’s mouth pucker in distrust.
‘Yes, but loyal to His Majesty King Charles’s cause. I beg you will give me admittance. I have heard that an old comrade of mine was brought here yesterday, fevered, of a wound from a pistol shot.’
‘Hmm,’ said the monk, only partially convinced. ‘Such a one was brought here yesterday, but he is not long for this world. I doubt he will even know you. Father Anthony has already administered the sacrament.’
‘Well, that’s a comfort, at any rate,’ said Seeker. ‘But it would do me good to see him one last time, even if it can do nothing for him.’
The monk relented and drew back the bolt on the smaller door that was set into the larger one. He handed Seeker a candle and led him down the stairs and behind the chapel before knocking on an inner door to the hospital proper. A small, elderly nun answered.
‘A visitor, Sister, for the unfortunate who came in yesterday, with the shot wound.’
‘Piet?’ she asked.
The monk looked to Seeker, and Seeker nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘Piet.’
The woman leaned towards Seeker in sympathy. ‘I’m afraid your friend has little time left in this world.’
Seeker lowered his voice. ‘Might I see him, Sister, all the same?’
She inclined her head. ‘Of course, if you will follow me.’
Seeker went after the small, shuffling figure. He did not like hospitals. ‘Hospital’ to him meant something other than a place where the sick might be tended. To him, it meant somewhere that friends, comrades, were brought to die. ‘Musket shot, right through the head, that’s what you want,’ an old army surgeon had once told him, ‘or a cannon ball taking it clean off.’ He hadn’t needed to say what Seeker did not want: half a leg, crushed beneath a horse, half his brain blown away and the rest left, his face burned back nearly to the bone, some small wound that, ill-tended, would fester and slowly turn his living body putrid.
Never before had he had cause to visit Sint-Jans. The place was one vast space broken only by row upon row of stone columns twenty feet in height supporting the massive oak beams of the ceiling. To one side, a series of archways formed a cloister, leading to the hospital chapel. Seeker felt that he might indeed have been entering a cathedral, save that for where nave and aisles might be expected, rows of cots covered the marbled floor, and around and between these cots glided nuns, carrying trays or with strips of dressings and clean linen hanging from their arms. The smells of the sickroom were there, the groans of the sick, but nothing like what he had known in field hospitals or what he had expected to find here.
The nun came to a halt by the foot of a cot around which a screen had been placed. ‘Your friend is here. May God grant him rest,’ she said, before shuffling away.
Seeker drew back the screen and immediately flinched from the odours it had been holding back. All the rosemary and lavender and balms in the world could not have outdone the stink coming from the man’s rotting shoulder. Many of the patients Seeker had passed were housed two to a bed, but the nuns had taken pity on this Piet’s fellow sufferers, and no one had been condemned to share a cot with him.
Seeker went to the opposite side from the offending arm and crouched down. The man’s face was the colour of grey flagstones and covered in a sheen of moisture. His head twitched slightly, and he seemed to be murmuring something. Seeker leaned in, bringing his lips close to the man’s ear. ‘Piet.’
A jerk, a panicked ‘Wha . . .?’
Again. ‘Piet. You must listen to me.’
Another jerk, the eyes still not opening. More mumbling. ‘Who?’
‘I’m your conscience, Piet.’
The man let out a cry and, clutching at the thin linen sheet over him, tried to move away, across the small bed.
‘You can’t hide from me, Piet,’ Seeker said, ‘you know that. That priest has mumbled the last sacrament over you, and yet I’m still here.’
Another cry, muffled this time.
‘Your last chance to redeem yourself, Piet, to choose between Heaven and Hell.’
Now it was a whimper.
‘That’s better,’ said Seeker. ‘Now, the old woman you shot on the road to Damme . . .’
Again there was an attempt to move further across the bed. ‘That’s right, Piet, you stood at that windmill window and you shot her with your musket, don’t deny it!’
Another whimper.
‘But it wasn’t your fault, was it? It was his fault, he paid you to do it. You say his name aloud now, and you’ll be freed of the blame of it.’
Seeker was aware of a desperate rallying of strength in the dying man. He managed to muster one word. ‘English.’
But Seeker knew that already. ‘Not enough, Piet. Remember: Heaven or Hell. Now, the name?’
There was a rustling of distress. ‘Don’t know.’
‘Come now, Piet . . .’
‘Don’t know!’ the man repeated more forcefully. ‘Other one. Was another one there that shot me.’
‘He was there, when you were shot, this man who paid you to kill the old Englishwoman?’
The man managed a slight nod.
‘But it was his companion who shot you?’
A small noise of relief that his poi
nt had been made, and Piet was beyond further effort.
‘All right,’ said Seeker, getting up to walk out. ‘All right.’ It had been known all around town that Thomas Faithly had got in a shot at the man who’d killed Lady Hildred. And now Seeker knew that the man who’d hired the assassin in the first place had been Faithly’s companion that day on the road to Damme: Evan Glenroe.
Seeker left by a different door to that he’d come in by, averting his eyes from paintings on the wall that depicted various stages of the crucifixion. The ghoulish idolatry turned his stomach more than the smell of Piet’s gangrenous arm.
He was through the courtyard and almost out in the street when a figure he thought he recognised went rushing past him, only to collide with a young nun who’d just emerged from the dispensary carrying a tray of ointments. To the sound of the young woman’s cry was added the smashing of ceramic pots and the clattering of her wooden tray on the cobbles. The racket brought others, monks, nuns and lay-workers, from doors around the courtyard.
‘What in Heaven’s name is the cause of such a commotion?’ demanded a grizzled monk whose gown still bore the marks of a recently spilled breakfast.
‘Terrible news!’ panted the young man, whom Seeker now recognised as a stable lad from the Engels Klooster. ‘Terrible, terrible news!’
*
In the Bouchoute House, Evan Glenroe was swearing. ‘This damned heat, Faithly. I tell you, another night of it and I’ll be hurling myself into the nearest canal.’
‘I’ll alert the quay porters. Anyhow, you can hardly blame the weather for your lack of sleep. It was almost light by the time I heard you come stumbling up the stairs, crashing into everything that couldn’t get out of your way.’
Glenroe turned up his hands in appeal. ‘Ah, Thomas, you know how those ladies at the House of Lamentations are – they wouldn’t let me away. I had practically to sneak out in my stocking soles when they finally consented to sleep.’
‘Indeed,’ said Thomas dubiously.
‘It’s true,’ protested Glenroe. ‘And anyhow, you must shoulder some of the blame – coming home here as soon as you’d had your supper and leaving me – you and that long streak of English misery George Barton, that wouldn’t set foot in the place, not even for a song. Can you believe it? So it was left to me to reassure the ladies of their charms.’
[Damian Seeker 05] - The House of Lamentations Page 22