[Damian Seeker 05] - The House of Lamentations

by S. G. MacLean

  ‘Hmm. Well, you’re lucky Dunt didn’t reassure you of the accuracy of his aim, that’s all I can say.’

  ‘Oh? How so?’

  ‘He’s as bleary as they come this morning. Said he couldn’t sleep, so sat up on guard half the night with his pistol pointed at the front door. If you’d come through it before he finally gave up and took to his bed, it would have been the last thing you’d have done.’

  ‘Lucky the ladies kept me late, then,’ said Glenroe, ‘for I’ve never known him miss a target.’

  Thomas waited until Glenroe had had a chance to restore himself over their breakfast of hard bread and pickled herring before saying, ‘You can make your complaints to Barton in person – I’ve asked him to join us this morning.’

  ‘You’ve what?’ said Glenroe. ‘I thought we’d agreed we should keep him away from the house, at least until her ladyship’s money is safely out of our hands and into the King’s.’

  ‘And that very thing doesn’t look well for us, Evan. I’m no more convinced than you are by his story of making his way here after the Dunes, in the hope of finding some employment in His Majesty’s cause. I think he’s been planted here by Hyde, to keep an eye on us.’

  ‘By Hyde?’ said Glenroe, through a mouthful of bread.

  ‘Think about it,’ said Thomas. He waited a moment to give Glenroe time to do so. George Barton, Sir Thomas knew, was just the type of influence Edward Hyde – the King’s chief advisor and ‘the only one of them with any sense’, as he’d once heard Damian Seeker say – would wish to encourage in the circles in which Charles Stuart entertained himself. It was a thing still unspoken, but increasingly difficult to ignore, that their exiled sovereign was not conducting himself as a monarch should. Thomas himself had watched with growing disappointment the descent of the courageous soldier prince into a state of boredom and indolence, which found its outlet in card tables and taverns and the worst sort of women. He himself had heard Edward Hyde lament the way the King spent his days and the quality of people he spent them with. Thomas looked at Ellis, Daunt and Glenroe, thought of what they had lost, and of the friends they would never see again, and not for the first time wondered if it might all have been in the cause of a man who, should he ever come into his inheritance, would hardly be fit to rule.

  Glenroe continued chewing then washed his bread down with a slurp of ale from his beaker. ‘You might be right,’ he said at last. ‘Hyde’s sent him here to make sure we’re behaving ourselves. It seems like enough. Still no reason to let him wander about the house here alone though.’

  As for Sir Thomas, he was happy enough at the prospect of George Barton’s company. Marchmont Ellis was a coiled spring of tensions, uncomfortable to be around, while Glenroe’s relentless heartiness and Daunt’s unshakeable faith in the rightness of their cause had begun to weary him. Barton, in contrast, seemed a man of pragmatism and good sense. Exactly what the King needed around him.

  There had been a time when Thomas would never have questioned his loyalty to Charles, but over the years, what he had lost had begun to outweigh for him the value of what he was fighting for. He had had one chance, only one, to claw back some of that old life, the life he had been born to on his own manor, on the North York Moors. The price had been to live in London as Damian Seeker’s spy, and in the end, for Thomas, it had been too great a price to pay. Instead, he was existing now in a house that wasn’t his, with companions he’d never have chosen, waiting to fight again in the cause of a King he was not certain was worthy of his kingdom.

  Thomas had yet to see George Barton in a flippant mood, but when the maid announced him and showed him in to the dining parlour, he looked even more serious than usual.

  ‘You look almost as grim as Ellis there this morning, George. Do you bring us bad news?’

  ‘Nothing good, at any rate, and I fear it will redound to us one way or the other.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Daunt, ready to bristle. ‘What now?’

  George glanced at Glenroe who appeared not to be listening. ‘The old English nun at the Engels Klooster . . .’ He paused. ‘She’s dead.’

  ‘Dead?’ said Daunt. ‘Old nuns die all the time. How should that redound on us?’

  ‘Because,’ said George, glancing again at Evan Glenroe whom Thomas had noticed had gone very pale, ‘the news is running about the town that she was found dead in her bed in the middle of the night, with the bolt from a crossbow through her heart.’

  *

  Anne was beginning to wonder if she’d misheard George Barton when he’d mentioned in passing that he was lodged on Kreupelnstraat, on the southern edges of town. She had spent the night hidden in an outbuilding a few streets away from the Engels Klooster before daring to venture out at first light to try to find her way to the only person in Bruges she thought might help her. She’d been standing for over an hour now in a passageway off the Blindekenskapel, in the desperate hope that George might appear without her having to expose herself by knocking on doors. She was just about to do that when she at last saw him appear at the end of the street. Checking that there was no one else in view, she moved out of the entrance to the passageway and raised her hand. Having exchanged her nun’s habit for Ruth Jones’s old clothes, she was dressed now like a maid or a housewife, and it took a moment before George Barton appeared to realise who she was. He surveyed the street in both directions before hurrying over to where she waited.

  ‘Lady Anne,’ he said, under his breath.

  ‘I need your help,’ she said.

  He looked her up and down, took in her new clothing and nodded. ‘Come with me.’ He led her to a small white-painted brick cottage with a pantiled roof. Only once he had closed the door behind them did Anne feel safe at last. George Barton was moving around the small room, lighting candles against the shadows, finding a clean beaker and pouring into it a large measure of brandy which he insisted she should drink. He had not asked her anything yet. Even when she had taken down the hood and removed the cloak she had worn to disguise herself, he’d said nothing, although she could clearly see that the sight of her in such an ill-fitting, frayed green jacket and old brown woollen dress, in the place of her nun’s habit, had given him something of a jolt.

  She’d looked down at the garment. ‘It doesn’t even fit me – it was made for someone shorter and stouter, but it was all I had to hand when I fled the convent.’

  The truth was, Ruth Jones had been somewhat more full about the bosom than Anne was, and the dress could not disguise this. It was little wonder it had taken him a moment to cover his evident awkwardness at the change in her appearance.

  ‘I heard what happened there last night. I’m glad you were able to come away safely.’

  ‘There was too much shock and upset for anyone to notice what I did. But I suspect they will have noticed my absence by now, or even have come looking for me.’ She slumped, her head in her hands. ‘It was hideous, barbaric. Who could even think of doing such a thing?’

  ‘Investigations have already begun, I believe,’ he said. ‘Did you know that the bolt that killed Sister Janet was marked with the symbol of the Schuttersgilde of SintSebastiaan?’

  Anne shook her head, and then the full horror dawned on her. ‘The Schuttersgilde? Then it was Marchmont Ellis, and it is my fault.’

  George Barton looked astonished. ‘Ellis? Your fault? But how so?’

  ‘Because he learned from the bookseller at Sint-Donatian’s that I – at least the “she-intelligencer” charged with tracking him down – was at the Engels Klooster. He must have thought it was Janet. I have brought her to this and she showed me nothing but kindness.’

  George took a moment before he spoke. ‘It may well have been Ellis, but you cannot blame yourself for another’s evil. I’ve been at the Schuttersgilde with the Cavaliers most of the morning. The gilde’s stores were gone through, without success, for evidence of any weapon having
gone missing. But then one of the janitors, who had unearthed some tattered inventory, found a lock broken on an old, almost forgotten cupboard. It was from here, it seems, that the lethal item had recently been stolen.’ He rubbed his hands over his eyes. ‘If it was Ellis, he has shown remarkable cunning, for it’s impossible to say who might have taken the crossbow. And of course, wild rumours, contending with each other for improbability, are swirling all around town. The general opinion though is that it might have been anyone at all.’

  There was silence in the little one-roomed cottage. Anne looked down at her lap, then at the hem of her skirt, and the specks of mud that might have been blood. ‘I feared,’ she said at last, ‘that people might say it was me.’

  The look George Barton gave her, awkward, as if taken unawares and not knowing what to say, told her everything she needed to know: some people were saying it was her. He cleared his throat. ‘We’ll talk more of this, but first you should refresh yourself a little,’ he glanced at her worn dress with its mud-spattered hem, ‘and have something to eat.’ Then he left her alone a few minutes, while he went to draw fresh water from the pump at the end of the street.

  When he was gone, Anne looked around the small lodging. It was modest, and even in the glow of candles that struggled to enhance the light coming through the apartment’s one mean window, it seemed devoid of ornament or colour. Anne wondered what sort of home a man of George Barton’s evident upbringing had come from – a better one than this, that was certain. But then, so many men of his sort had had to live hand-to-mouth for years in the King’s service, with the comforts of their former life only a memory, and she herself no longer had any home at all. The place was sparse, and clean, and tidy – an empty grate, a bed, a simple table with the chair on which she sat, a stool and a small travelling chest. Nothing to tell her anything more about George Barton than she already knew – a gentleman in the King’s service, well-ordered in his habits and serious of purpose.

  When he returned she said, ‘It must make for a pleasant sanctuary, this.’

  Barton looked around him and gave a rare smile. ‘I have come to conceive a sort of affection for the place. It puts me in mind of home. Not my father’s manor house,’ he added, seeing her surprise, ‘but it’s not unlike the cottages in which some of our servants resided. Some of them were very kind to me. There was a dairymaid, very pretty, when I was a young boy, who would tease me that when I was older I must marry her. I was fervently in love.’

  Anne smiled at the image.

  ‘But then of course, I could hardly marry a dairymaid, could I? No doubt she lives in a cottage such as this now, with a stout husband and a brood of children. Or perhaps,’ he continued, his voice hardening, ‘her husband was killed in the war and her children too, of hunger or disease, and she is a hag from overwork and poverty.’

  Anne felt any warmth or comfort go from the room, but George appeared not to have noticed anything strange in what he’d said. ‘Anyhow,’ he said, ‘to business. Tell me what happened.’

  As she had done in her own head a dozen times already that day, Anne went through for him what had happened as she’d been leaving the convent the night before. It took her some time.

  George listened carefully, nodding from time to time and not interrupting. ‘But,’ he said at last, ‘why were you trying to leave the convent in such a manner and at such an hour in the first place?’

  Anne moved what was left of the food and drink he had given her aside before opening her bag. As succinctly as possible, she told him of Sister Janet’s secret room, and of what she had found there. ‘These are the papers and ledgers,’ she said, ‘of Sister Janet’s activities in placing Jesuits in the homes of English Royalist families. This column lists the names of the men who have compromised themselves, this the families and estates on which Jesuit priests have subsequently been foisted.’

  George was astonished. He lifted a candle and bent over the table to look properly. Then something in his demeanour changed. There was a sudden alertness, an air of excitement. His lips started to move.

  ‘What is it?’ she said.

  He lifted a finger and indicated an entry halfway down the page. She followed with her eyes and read out the names of the family and estate noted there, before looking up at him for some further explanation.

  ‘They’re in Leicestershire,’ he said, quickly adding that he had grown up in neighbouring Warwickshire. ‘I’m almost certain that that estate borders the Beaumont lands. Lady Hildred very probably knew that family well.’

  Anne looked again at the entry and then ran her eye across the page to its accompanying entry. ‘Father Felipe,’ she almost whispered.

  ‘Is that not the priest from Sint-Walburga’s?’

  Anne nodded. ‘He confesses Sister Janet and others amongst the sisters. He is rarely away from the convent.’

  George studied the entry. ‘Father Felipe was the Jesuit placed in that house from,’ he bent lower over the page with his candle, ‘1653 to 1656.’

  He put the candle down on the table and looked at Anne. ‘Do you realise what this probably means?’

  She nodded. ‘Lady Hildred recognised him. I should have guessed it before. She almost told me herself, that last night we were at the Engels Klooster: “I’m sure I know that fellow.” It was someone she said she’d seen before, in England. Anne closed her eyes and swallowed. ‘I didn’t ask her. In the morning. I was too taken up with other things. If only I had asked her—’

  George dismissed her thought. ‘What could you have done? The man seems to have the whole convent in his thrall.’

  ‘Some have no choice. He made it clear he had plans for me. It’s why I left when I did.’

  ‘Plans?’ Then she saw the realisation in George Barton’s eyes. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘So he is at least a man, after all.’

  Anne bit back her expression of shock. This matter of the Jesuits was enough of a distraction from her true purpose in Bruges without her falling out with her one confidant over it. She said instead, ‘I couldn’t risk being detained by him, when I had other business of such importance on hand.’

  ‘Which is to expose Marchmont Ellis,’ he said.

  ‘I need to meet with him.’

  George paused in his pacing and stared at her. ‘Meet with him? You cannot meet with him. The man has been prepared to send his former comrades to the scaffold. He as good as murdered them. If you are right in thinking it was he who killed that nun last night, what do you think he might do to you?’

  Anne was unmoved. ‘I am not a defenceless old woman, sleeping sound in her bed. I will be ready for him. Some of those he betrayed were my friends. I need to be certain it is him and to find out if others are involved.’

  George made no further effort to dissuade her. ‘How do you intend to go about it?’

  ‘It’s why I had planned to come to you anyway – even before the horrors of last night. There is a letter I need you to deliver to him in the Bouchoute House. It is written in the code I know him to have been using. It will draw him out, and any who might be acting with him.’

  George nodded. ‘I’ll deliver it. But when do you propose to meet with him?’

  ‘At eleven tonight,’ she said.

  ‘You’ll need somewhere safe to stay in the meantime.’ He glanced around his cramped quarters and at the ladder to the attic. ‘They will be hunting for you high and low after last night’s events at the convent.’

  ‘I’ve been told of somewhere that I might find sanctuary for a few nights.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘There is a place halfway across the town between here and the Engels Klooster. Just across the bridge from the Augustinian monastery. They call it the House of Lamentations.’

  George Barton’s face paled and he leaned closer to her. ‘Lady Anne, you cannot go there. It is a—’

  ‘I know what it is,’ sh
e interrupted, ‘but I have been assured that I can find shelter there until I have accomplished what I came for.’

  His eyes searched hers. ‘But who would give you such an assurance – not Evan Glenroe? Surely you will not—’

  ‘It wasn’t Glenroe,’ she said. ‘The young woman with whom I exchanged this dress, who took my place in Lady Hildred’s carriage after the ambush on the road to Damme, had sheltered there a while. It was Sister Janet herself who had sent her there.’

  George stared at her for a moment then stood up. He looked truly shaken. ‘If you must,’ he said at last. ‘And is that where you plan to meet with Ellis?’

  She nodded.

  ‘I’ll be sure to be near at hand then,’ he said.

  Twenty-One

  News of Mr Longfellow

  Thomas Faithly pushed away his trencher and wiped his mouth. It had been an excellent supper, and the Vlissinghe was as pleasant a place as any to pass the hours until the time came for them to meet with Mr Longfellow. Daunt was arguing with Glenroe over the virtues of German as opposed to Italian gunsmiths when Thomas saw George Barton walk into the hostelry’s courtyard. He shifted along the bench to make room for him.

  ‘We hadn’t expected to see you again this evening, Barton,’ said Glenroe.

  ‘Your housekeeper told me I would find you here. I wondered if you had any more news of the Engels Klooster?’

  ‘What?’ said Daunt. ‘More news than that an old nun was shot in her bed? Surely you cannot wish for more news from that benighted place?’

  ‘I heard that another nun had gone missing,’ said George.

  ‘What other nun?’ asked Glenroe.

  ‘The one who was with her that day we encountered them outside Sint-Walburgakerk.’