The Bear Pit

by S. G. MacLean

  And that was why Seeker had turned back, every time this week that he had set out for the Black Fox. That family he was thoughtlessly making, that would inevitably be made, by his putting his only child into the household of Dorcas Wells, was a thing he could destroy as easily as he had destroyed Lawrence Ingolby’s door. Since his return to London, he had told himself to forget about Maria, but the sight of her that day, on an outing to Lambeth with her friends, had almost been enough to rip him open. And if Dorcas looked too long in his eyes she would see the truth there, and the pain that he felt would pass instead to her. He’d have found an excuse tonight, too, not to go to the Black Fox, had his growing fear that Lawrence Ingolby had made himself a target for Fish and Boyes not forced him there. Dorcas had seen in his face straight away that this was no domestic visit, and had ushered him quickly into her business room, and locked the door behind him.

  ‘What is it?’

  In a very few minutes, he had told her of the danger that Lawrence was in, because he had unwittingly alerted him to a plot to kill Cromwell, and because he might recognise again two of those involved. He didn’t tell Dorcas of the additional danger he himself had placed Lawrence in, by sending him to Bankside and out onto Lambeth Marsh in the search for the bear that had mauled Samuel Kent’s old friend to death; that was something different, and not something she had cause to concern herself with. Seeker gave Dorcas the descriptions of the men Lawrence had seen in the Hammersmith inn, but no such characters, nor anyone else, in fact, had come in to the Black Fox asking questions about the young Yorkshireman. Seeker warned Dorcas to use great vigilance, and to have her girls tell her straight away should anyone come in to the tavern asking such questions.

  And then he had allowed himself a half-hour with his daughter. Usually, her easy presence around him was enough to make him feel as if the concerns of his day were slipping from his shoulders, and that there was no great necessity of picking them up again. Tonight, however, she was more quiet than usual, and seemed preoccupied. When she did speak, it was to ask about Lawrence Ingolby, and whether Seeker thought he would always stay in London, or return soon to Yorkshire, or even travel abroad. Seeker, in response, said he thought the first the more likely, the second a possibility, and the third a very bad idea. The accompanying caustic remarks he felt compelled to make upon Ingolby’s boots, his hair, and general demeanour, in the hope of lightening her mood, fell utterly flat, to the point that she began to try to explain to him that he was wrong. And then she had said,

  ‘You know, for all you think yourselves so different, he is just like you, Father.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ he’d asked her.

  And so she had told him about the man with the green felt hat who had been in the Black Fox earlier that evening that had never been there before, and who Lawrence had been convinced was watching him.

  Now, here, in Lawrence Ingolby’s room in Clifford’s Inn, the broken glass crunching under his boot, Seeker looked down at the grey goose feather he had plucked from the crack between broken window-pane and casement in which it had caught.

  ‘It was a green felt hat with a grey goose feather, Father,’ she had said. And then with a little more prompting, she had recalled that the man had left the Black Fox very soon after Lawrence himself had done, about a half-hour or so before Seeker had arrived. Yes, she thought she had called him by his name, Lawrence, and Dorcas too, though only by his first. A little more thought, a question or two more, and Manon thought that Dorcas might well have said, aloud, that Lawrence should return to Clifford’s Inn.

  Seeker had been on his feet in seconds, so that Manon had thought she had done something wrong. ‘No, Manon, you’ve done nothing wrong, but very right, and I must go now and see to it.’ He’d told Dorcas that should the man in the green felt hat ever return to the Black Fox, she should have her cook, the massive Will Tucker, restrain him, and then send word to Whitehall to himself. And then he had left, and run the whole way through the streets, pausing for no one, until he was on Fleet Street and through the gates of Clifford’s Inn. He’d reached Lawrence’s corridor just in time to see him disappear into his room, and by the time Seeker had reached the outside of the door, Lawrence had been happily whistling. Seeker had then taken up his position in a darkened recess a few yards along that corridor, from which he’d watched all the comings and goings until all at Clifford’s had settled themselves for the night.

  That had been three hours ago. ‘I thought he’d come by the front,’ he said to Ellingworth. ‘I can’t believe what a fool I was.’

  ‘But surely that’s how he did come,’ said Elias, turning to look behind him. ‘In through that door and then out through the window.’

  Seeker shook his head. ‘It was I who came through the door, after I heard the smashing of the window. He must have moved very fast, this man in the green felt hat, and be a person of some ingenuity, to make the means of execution the means also of his escape.’

  Elias got up from his chair and came over to examine the rope. ‘Why this, and not a knife?’

  ‘Perhaps because he had it to hand. He would have needed it for the ascent of the tree and for getting away again. And a knife will not always incapacitate a man as a noose around the neck will.’

  Lawrence croaked some sound of agreement.

  Elias glanced over in his direction. ‘He can stay in the chamber set aside for me tonight, and then can come and lodge with us at Dove Court until he is well.’

  Seeker paused in his task of coiling the rope. ‘Have you actually lost your wits? Men who would murder Cromwell are after this fellow’s skin, and you would expose your sister to them? Lawrence Ingolby is coming down to Knight Ryder Street, with me, where I can keep an eye on him.’

  Lawrence began to make some sound of protest, but stopped, the knowledge of what had just happened and the realisation of what it meant sinking in at last. He nodded, gave his neck another rub, and rose to begin the painful process of dressing for the night journey from Clifford’s Inn to Knight Ryder Street. Seeker watched him struggle for as long as he could, as Elias Ellingworth went through the process of putting Lawrence’s belongings into a leather sack that had been hanging from the bedstead, and eventually went across and awkwardly helped him shuffle into his doublet.

  When he’d heard the shattering of glass come from Lawrence Ingolby’s room, Seeker had experienced a surge of dread that he hadn’t quite recognised. It had grown, become more urgent, as he’d run down the corridor and charged at the lock. In his head, he was certain he’d been praying. He shook his head now, as if to dislodge whatever it was, but he could not shift it, this anxiety that this cocksure, infuriating young man should come to no harm. He watched as Ingolby painstakingly pulled on one boot and then the other. An image of the figures he whittled as he and Manon spoke, the family she said he didn’t know he was making, came into his head. He let out a heavy sigh and picked up the bag Elias had packed for Lawrence. ‘Come on then,’ he said.

  Seventeen

  Elias Has a New Client

  The air was fresh as Seeker crossed over Knight Ryder Street next day. He liked these November city mornings – too early, too cold and too miserable for trouble-makers. They’d be sleeping off whatever debauchery or intrigues they’d been up to the night before, and only honest folk, with work to do, would brave the damp grey streets in the wake of the scavengers and the night-soil men.

  Lawrence Ingolby was sleeping it off too, although, Seeker conceded, he was only slightly to be blamed for his own misfortune in being the subject of an attempted hanging. There was an irony, Seeker thought, in Lawrence’s having survived a trip to an illegal dog-breeder’s on Lambeth Marsh unscathed, only to come so close to death in his own bedchamber in the hallowed surrounds of the Inns of Chancery. Seeker had left him in the small, sparsely furnished room, down the back passageway of the unremarkable house on Knight Ryder Street which he himself used as a r
etreat from the demands of Thurloe’s work. The dog had been happy enough to stay lying guard across the door.

  On finding that his friend Drake was not in his apothecary, but engaged on the supervision of works at Cree church, Seeker left the prescription for Lawrence with Drake’s sister, not long arrived from France. He could have done without walking all the way up to Leadenhall before he set out for Whitehall for the day, but something Lawrence had said to him earlier had resurfaced to trouble him. On Cornhill, he glanced uneasily down Birchin Lane. It was almost a week since he’d promised Samuel he would get to the bottom of the murder of his friend, but there was no time at the moment to go down into the coffee shop to explain he was a little closer to tracking down the whereabouts of the savage animal that had been used to such brutal effect. As well, perhaps, since for now all he had that might lead him to the killer were the disparate frayed ends of something that he had not worked out how to put together. Once he had spoken to Drake, though, he might be a little closer to seeing how that might be done.

  Across from Hartshorn Alley, Seeker turned up past St Katharine Cree. This was the London Cromwell wanted, the London Cromwell had made. Along the lane, beyond the church, a group of people were busy at work on a house. There was an industry to them that said they needed no overseer; this was their house. Seeker waited as two labourers passed him carrying a ceiling beam, a good twelve feet long, to replace one that had rotted, then he crossed to where Drake was standing, watching a slater begin the leading of the roof.

  Seeker followed the line of his gaze, gave a nod of approval, then let his eye travel further down, to where a jutty was being erected over the street. ‘They’ll need to watch that,’ he said. ‘The aldermen don’t like anything that narrows the common passageway.’

  The apothecary laughed. ‘That is what the aldermen are for, is it not? Not liking things?’

  Seeker started to explain the need for good government and regulation of the city wards, but soon saw his friend was baiting him. ‘Well, anyway,’ he finished, ‘they’ll need to watch it, all the same.’

  ‘Do you wish to see inside?’ asked Drake.

  Seeker shook his head. ‘I’d only see things that would annoy me – work not done right, that sort of thing, end up wanting to sort it myself.’

  Drake appraised him a moment. ‘I forget sometimes that you were a carpenter, in another life.’

  ‘Not when you wanted shelves put up in your elaboratory, you didn’t,’ said Seeker. Drake laughed and then his face became serious. ‘But I think you have not come here as a carpenter today?’

  ‘No, I’m here about something else.’

  ‘About our synagogue?’

  ‘What? No. You’ve Cromwell’s say-so for this – no one’ll touch you. You’re not getting any trouble, are you?’

  Drake shook his head. ‘No.’ As he did so, Seeker noticed that the pendant he had always worn beneath his shirt he now wore openly. He’d seen it properly only once before, when he’d been helping Drake with the carpentry for the fitting out of his stillroom. Hanging from the links of the gold chain around the apothecary’s neck was a ring, large enough for a man’s finger, and wrought with exceptional intricacy. Vines of gold twined around tiny pearls and painted enamel flowers to meet at a small structure at the top, in the form of a tiled roof. When Seeker had asked him about it, Drake had opened the roof, to reveal a Hebrew inscription beneath. ‘It is from the Song of Songs,’ he had said. ‘This was my wedding ring.’ Drake’s sister and his nephew had come safe at last to England, but Seeker knew that his friend’s wife never could.

  Today, though, Drake was taken up with thoughts of the present and the future. ‘And we have secured an old orchard too, out at Mile End, for our burials. The people at St Katharine’s here have offered to lend us their pall, and to toll the bell for our burials. You cannot know what it means, Damian, to have somewhere we might call home. But come, tell me, what is it that has brought you here?’

  Seeker put his hand on Drake’s elbow and guided him down the small passageway leading from the street-front of the house to the overgrown garden behind. He brushed the debris from a weather-worn bench beneath an old pear tree and sat down, gesturing to Drake to do likewise.

  ‘It’s to do with the murder of an old soldiering friend of Samuel Kent’s.’

  Drake nodded. ‘I heard of it. Abominable savagery.’

  ‘Aye. Well what I need from you is whatever you know about the scientific lot that hangs about John Evelyn.’

  A look of astonishment crossed Drake’s face. ‘You cannot think John Evelyn is involved in this.’

  Seeker’s shoulders sank. ‘No. But one of his friends has been keeping some very bad company.’ He went on to tell Drake of Thomas Faithly’s two sightings of the shadowy ‘Mr Mulberry’.

  Drake considered. ‘I’ve never heard of this Mulberry,’ he said at last, ‘but I’ll wager that this fellow, who is so anxious to avoid being recognised, has a greater interest in the – old – science than the new.’

  ‘Alchemy, you mean?’

  Drake shrugged. ‘There is a fine line between what you would call alchemy and I science, but there are some practitioners of alchemy who are prone to err a little on the – how should I put it . . .’

  Seeker helped him out. ‘You’re talking about magic.’

  Drake was hesitant. ‘I don’t speak of witches and warlocks, and spells, but everything in the science of the natural world is magic, until we fully comprehend its properties and what action upon them causes them to change. I accept as science only what I can demonstrate and explain. Others do not.’

  ‘And you think this Mulberry is one of those others, who dabble in darker things?’

  ‘If he is anxious not to be seen, and fears accusations of witchcraft, that is certainly possible. Let me make some enquiries – discreetly. I’ll let you know what I discover.’

  Seeker stood up, making to leave, when Drake coughed and, with some awkwardness, introduced a new subject. ‘Ahem, I was at Tradescant’s last week, in South Lambeth.’

  Seeker made a face. ‘You an’ all? Seems half the world’s got nothing better to do than go south of the river.’

  ‘John Tradescant keeps the best supply of herbs and simples within miles of London. I frequently go over there, when I have the leisure. Last week I had a little time to spare, and I was glad of it, for I was able to accompany Maria.’

  ‘Maria?’ Seeker asked before he could stop himself. ‘But she was only there the week before. What was she doing going back?’

  Drake explained to him the planned articles for Elias’s news-sheet, and the sketches she was attempting to make to go with them.

  ‘Well, I suppose it’s better than all that seditious rubbish he used to spread in his old paper.’

  Drake laughed. ‘Let us wait and see. I think Maria is as driven as her brother and can find seditious things to say about the most innocuous of objects. I was treated to a long harangue on our journey back into the city about a pair of hawking gloves in Tradescant’s collection that had belonged to Henry VIII. Maria was able to extrapolate a great deal of outrage from their very existence.’

  ‘Was she?’ Seeker felt something loosen in himself, fall. He thought of the times he had watched her, as she’d worked herself into a fury of righteous indignation over some injustice she had seen, remembered how it had felt to pull her close and gently soothe her, trying not to let her see how amused and enthralled he was by her passion.

  Drake must have seen it in his face. He put a hand on Seeker’s shoulder. ‘She is unchanged, my friend, you know. Behind the anger, there is . . .’

  ‘More anger, for me,’ said Seeker.

  ‘No. There is hurt, and fear, and determination to protect herself from it. And it is all because, behind it all, there is love.’

  Seeker regarded the dusty toe of his boot for a while. �
��I don’t know how to break through, John. I don’t know if I can. And besides – there’s Dorcas.’

  Drake said nothing.

  ‘But,’ Seeker said, raising himself to his feet, ‘I am glad her halfwit brother at least has the sense to have you keep an eye on her, rather than let her travel the roads and the river alone.’

  Drake frowned. ‘I think that was a fortunate coincidence. Elias does not attend to her welfare as much as he ought. He puts too much faith in her own good sense and her disposition. But sometimes, her good instincts are misplaced. That day at Tradescant’s, when I went to see to the purchasing of my simples, I left her in the Cabinet of Curiosities, taking her notes and making her sketches. I was gone perhaps an hour. When I returned there was a man . . .’

  ‘Bothering her?’

  Drake wrinkled his brow. ‘She said not. She claimed he was offering to teach her to draw.’

  Seeker could feel the blood begin to pound in his chest and down his arms. ‘To draw?’

  Drake made a calming gesture. ‘It’s all right, I warned her. And I made it quite clear to Elias: good-looking Cavaliers with fine blue velvet suits and battle-scarred hands do not befriend young women in order to teach them to draw. I told Elias he must not allow her to go to such places alone, no matter how respectable those places might seem.’

  But Seeker wasn’t listening any more to what Drake might have told Elias. He felt that his mind had slowed to a state of the barely functional. Tradescant’s. The blue velvet suit, the scarred hands. ‘This Cavalier,’ he managed at last, ‘did you discover his name?’

  ‘Faithly,’ said Drake. ‘His name was Sir Thomas Faithly.’

  *

  Maria dropped the small earthenware pot containing the last of their salt. It smashed to the floor. ‘Damian?’