The Bear Pit

by S. G. MacLean

  Twenty-Three

  The Brother of Charterhouse and the Searcher of St John’s

  By the time Cromwell and his Life Guard had entered Hyde Park, Seeker was well along Theobald’s Road towards Clerkenwell. To his right the city spilled out from its walls to encroach on the fields and commons – Lincoln’s Inn, Red Lion, Gray’s – there were more houses being snuck up in their fields, more passageways that once had been paths, every time he looked. To his left he could still see clear over Conduit Fields, as far as the old fort at Black Mary’s Hole and almost to St Pancras. Healthier entertainments there for the townspeople than all the illicit pleasures on offer south of the river. Men could run, hunt, wrestle, swim – he did himself sometimes. Only a few months ago, he’d taken Nathaniel – the gardener’s boy from Lincoln’s Inn who often looked after the dog for him – swimming out at Parlous Pond.

  There was something about the memory that eluded him. It was as he passed over Saffron Hill that he remembered: after their swimming, they’d gone up by the New River Head and on to the fort, because Nathaniel had never seen it, and then they’d taken their supper in a tavern at Hockley-in-the-Hole. It was the name of the tavern that came back to him now: the Bear Garden. Seeker shook his head as if to clear it. The place had been there since before Queen Elizabeth’s time, and there had been no bears there since long before Pride had shot the animals on Bankside. It was just a name, and on the wrong side of London entirely, but the name was still playing on his mind by the time he got to St John’s Lane. When he got back to Whitehall, he’d send some men up to Hockley-in-the-Hole to search that place.

  He was soon at Dietmar Kästner’s shop, which Joseph Grindle had visited on the day of his disappearance, but even before he brought his horse to a halt, he knew the place was empty. The door was firmly closed, and the shutters still up on the windows. Nothing strange in that, given it was early enough for folk to be thinking about clocks. But it was a perishing cold day, fair set for snow, and no smoke came from the chimney either. Seeker dismounted and banged on the door. Nothing. He banged louder.

  A neighbour from next door stuck her head out of an upper window. ‘No one there.’

  ‘Where are they then?’

  The woman made a face. ‘Don’t know. Off to foreign parts somewhere. Anna came round yesterday morning, with some food they weren’t taking with them. Said they wouldn’t be back.’

  ‘How many went?’

  The woman looked at him as if he were stupid. ‘All of them, of course – Dietmar and Anna and those two young lads he had for apprentices.’

  ‘What about his brother?’

  ‘Brother? Well, he’d have gone as well, I suppose, wouldn’t he?’

  Seeker was back on his horse by the time the window slammed shut. His mind was working quickly. Dietmar Kästner had told him he’d been settled in London over thirty years. In all the shifting populace, the comings and goings of those years, there was one man Seeker could think of who would know everything there was to be told of London’s clockmakers. He went back up to the top of the lane and turned the horse’s head towards the Charterhouse.

  Bernard Dunn had been a brother of Charterhouse for three years now, sent there by his failing sight and the benevolence of an old patron. Dunn was not blind, but he could not see well enough any more to work on the mechanisms of the clocks he’d spent a lifetime caring for and seeking to understand.

  It always made Seeker feel uneasy, going into the Charterhouse. It wasn’t the ghosts of the monks who’d been there, or the tales of the deaths they’d suffered at Henry Tudor’s hands, for refusing to give the place up. He’d seen a few bad deaths himself, and he didn’t believe in ghosts. It was the date over the entry way: 1611. 1611 was the year Thomas Sutton had bought the old Carthusian Monastery and endowed it as a hospital for the indigent and elderly, men of good repute, who became the Brothers. It was also the year Seeker had been born. Each time he passed into the entry, beneath Sutton’s arms and that date, it was a reminder to him of time passing. But Seeker wouldn’t finish his days in a place like this. The musket ball on the battlefield, the knife in the night: those or something like them would be his end, he told himself as he passed under the archway of Charterhouse court.

  The Brothers had finished their breakfast and those that were able dispersed to their tasks for the day. Seeker found Bernard Dunn in the Great Cloister, sweeping out the leaves that had blown in from the mulberry trees of the courtyard. The old man looked up as Seeker’s shadow spread over the flagstones and the fugitive, heart-shaped leaves. His face broke into a smile. ‘Captain. Haven’t seen you here in a good long while. Have we trouble here in the Charterhouse?’

  ‘None that I know of, Bernard. It’s you I’ve come to talk with, if you can spare me five minutes?’

  Dunn laughed. ‘Five? I can spare you all the minutes there are, and more besides. The sun will be round that dial on the wall and back again a time or two before anyone else needs Bernard Dunn.’

  Seeker leaned against the wall. ‘Then they’ll not mind you sitting a while,’ he said, indicating one of the stone benches that lined the cloister.

  Dunn set down his broom, sat down carefully, and waited.

  ‘There’s a clockmaker I need to know about.’

  Dunn nodded. This was his territory. The captain didn’t waste time asking you questions you knew nothing about.

  ‘Dietmar Kästner,’ said Seeker.

  ‘Ah, Dietmar. Good man, knows his craft. Best man for a German clock. If you have a German clock, you take it to Dietmar, and I even said that myself sometimes, to them that brought me theirs. German clocks can be tricky devils, if you don’t know what you’re doing.’

  ‘What can you tell me of him?’

  Dunn puffed out his cheeks. ‘Just about anything you want to know. I’ve known that man over thirty years. Not much about old Dietmar I couldn’t tell you. What’ll you have?’

  ‘Where did he come here from?’

  ‘Heidelberg,’ replied Dunn, without hesitation. ‘Came after the Habsburgs took it in ’22. He told me about it once, the things they did – the Habsburgs – when they took the city. Never spoke of it again, but then, there are some things you only need to hear the once. The castle and gardens though – he was never done speaking about them. His father had been clockmaker to the Palsgrave, and Dietmar learned his craft at his father’s shoulder. A place of wonders it was, that palace, to hear him talk of it, and the gardens especially, fountains that played music, statues that sang. I should have liked to have seen it. And of course, he loved our Princess Elizabeth, though there was plenty amongst the Germans didn’t.’

  ‘You mean King James’s daughter?’

  Dunn nodded. ‘Queen of Bohemia. Dietmar kept a portrait of her – not on show, not in these late times of ours, but before, when her brother Charles was on the throne. Always said he’d never go back to Heidelberg unless her children were restored to their inheritance – Charles Louis and Rupert and all of them. We near fell out about it, him and me.’

  ‘About Heidelberg, the Palatinate?’

  Bernard scoffed. ‘No, about the Stuarts, for I was all for Parliament, as you know, Captain. Still am. But once Prince Rupert and his brother Maurice come over here to fight for the King, well, Dietmar he declared for him too – quietly, mind, amongst his friends.’

  ‘He was a Royalist?’

  Dunn nodded. ‘On account of the Heidelberg family.’

  Seeker didn’t like where this was leading. ‘And his brother?’

  ‘Brother?’

  ‘He had a brother, lately come from Germany, who worked alongside him.’

  Dunn shook his head. ‘Dietmar never had a brother. Sisters now, he had those, but gone, all three of them at the hands of the Habsburgs. But a brother? No, Dietmar never had a brother.’

  Fifteen minutes later, Seeker was back on St John
’s Lane. It was no surprise to find Dietmar Kästner’s shop still closed, the window shutters and doors still bolted fast. Seeker looked around him for something to break down the door with, but found nothing suitable to hand. He sighed, and took an extra step back, before charging, right shoulder down. As the lock gave way and the door swung inwards, he told himself he was getting too old for this. The place was in darkness with no candle or flint to hand. Seeker was still forcing open the shutters when a terrible noise pierced the air.

  ‘Who are you? What business have you here? Robber, thief, housebreaker!’

  Seeker spun round to confront the source of the screech. An ancient woman, bent of back and missing more teeth than she retained, was standing in the doorway, a crook raised in her hand. As he stepped forward further into the light coming through the doorway she raised her crook higher but then let out a laugh, almost more disturbing than her screech. ‘You’re the Seeker.’

  ‘And who are you?’ he demanded.

  ‘Me?’ the old woman asked, still cackling. ‘I’m the Searcher. The Searcher and the Seeker!’ She craned her neck further into the darkened room. ‘I wonder what we’re looking for?’

  A few minutes later, Seeker having secured the door to Dietmar Kästner’s shop, he was sitting facing the crone in an alehouse in Turk’s Head Yard. She had her own pot with her, a mark of her trade, a gift of beer being the prerequisite for her and those of her calling to do their duty. She was indeed a Searcher, one of the old women employed in every parish to view and search the bodies of the deceased. They were to establish the cause of death, and report it to the vestryman of the parish, that any pestilence or other dangerous infection might be kept under control. They were supposed to be sober and discreet matrons, and perhaps some of them were, but what sober and discreet matron, unless she be desperate, would perform a task such as that? The Searchers. Their discretion could be bought, or discarded, if the price was right, and there weren’t many households whose uncomfortable secrets they didn’t know.

  ‘A shilling,’ she said.

  ‘A shilling? Dream your dreams, old woman, you’ve had your pint of ale. Tuppence a household, you lot get paid.’

  ‘Aye,’ she said, a very cunning look in her eye as she observed him sideways whilst sipping at her ale, ‘but there’s no body there, is there? And I get paid to report on bodies that are there, not ones that aren’t.’

  Seeker reached into his money pouch with a sigh and slapped a shilling down on the table. ‘Let’s have it,’ he said.

  The shilling was whipped away in a flash, to some crevice of her filthy apron.

  ‘What would you know?’ she said, all business now.

  ‘Who was in the household?’

  She went through the clockmaker, his wife, their two apprentices, all in short fashion, and then watched him.

  ‘The rest,’ Seeker said.

  ‘What rest?’ She eyed Seeker’s pouch again.

  ‘No chance. Tell me the rest or I’ll have you in the Bridewell.’

  ‘The brother,’ she said.

  ‘That’s right. Everything you know about the brother.’

  ‘Well,’ she leaned in to him, a trusted associate, ‘big tall fellow – tall as you – although he tried to hide it with a stoop. He wasn’t any brother, not of Dietmar Kästner’s at any rate. Dietmar nor his wife – that he married after he came here from Germany, by the way – never mentioned any brother, not in thirty years, till that fellow turned up. Brother?’ She made a noise of disgust. ‘Old enough to be his son, perhaps.’

  Something Lawrence Ingolby had said came into Seeker’s head. It was about the conspirator Boyes – that he wasn’t as old as he gave the impression of being. ‘The man I’m thinking of was about the same age as Kästner,’ Seeker said, recalling the stooped, grey-headed man he had glimpsed at work in Dietmar Kästner’s back shop the first time he’d gone there to ask questions about Joseph Grindle.

  ‘From a distance, maybe, but I’ve the habit of looking at people close up, very close up, and I got myself close up on that fellow a couple of times.’ She fixed him with a raven-like eye. ‘You remember you had this from me, mind – that brother of old Dietmar’s was no more than thirty-five years old or so, though at a distance he’d pass for sixty or more.’

  ‘What else?’ said Seeker.

  ‘Had a woman.’

  ‘Woman? What kind of woman?’

  She gave her horrible smile. ‘Kind some men like. Fancy woman – all plain and proper-looking, but eyes like a cat that let them know she’s on the lookout for a mouse.’

  ‘Street-walker?’

  ‘Pah, not her. Though no doubt she knows a trick or two. No, this was a lay-dee. Went into Dietmar’s shop the first time with another lay-dee, who was all twittering and chattering about a watch that she was going to have made for her husband. Well, by the time they came out, that other lady, she was still fluttering and twittering, but your fancy one had a face like chalk, as if she’d just seen into her own grave.’

  ‘You were positioned outside Kästner’s door, I take it?’

  The woman missed Seeker’s note of sarcasm and merely took another swig of her ale before shaking her head. ‘Opposite. Bell Cullen’s cookshop. Bell’s got a nice little bench outside, brings me a scrap of this and that to eat now and again, and I make sure everyone roundabouts knows no one ever got ill from eating at Bell’s cookshop.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Seeker imagined the grim delights that would be on offer in such a place. ‘You saw this woman again, this “fancy woman” you’d seen at the clockmaker’s?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Very next day, and the day after that. She’d pretend she was looking in some other shop window, but she never went into any of them, just always kept one eye on the clockmaker’s door. She was watching so hard she didn’t notice me, watching her. Third day, back she came, in her furs and her grey silks. And then out he came . . .’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The clockmaker’s brother, of course.’ The old woman was annoyed to have her narrative interrupted by so stupid a question. ‘He come out, doing that old man walk of his, and she waited a moment, then followed him down the street.’

  ‘Did you go after them?’

  The Searcher was astonished. ‘Go after them? Why should I have done that? None of my business where they were going or what they were doing. My business is St John’s, what happens anywhere else is none of my concern.’

  Seeker sat back against the wall of the alehouse taproom and screwed up his eyes in frustration.

  ‘Followed him back, too.’

  He opened his eyes.

  ‘Followed him back. Went on for days – her following him around like a little puppy. Then one day he came out of the shop, unexpected. Went right over to her, had urgent words.’

  ‘Warning her off?’

  The woman shook her head. ‘No, just urgent. Like there was a worry. He even forgot to walk old. After that, I never saw her again.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you remember when that was?’

  ‘Oh, but I do. It was the day Aubrey Goode’s wife died. Used to be the feast of St Jude, before you lot decided such things weren’t allowed.’

  The feast of St Jude: the 28th of October. The day before Grace Kent’s birthday. The day Joseph Grindle had taken his clock to Dietmar Kästner’s shop.

  But the Searcher remembered nothing of Joseph Grindle. Old soldiers were ten a penny around London nowadays, surely Seeker knew that? Back then to the clockmaker’s brother and the strange woman.

  ‘You didn’t hear what they were saying?’

  ‘I heard all right, heard every word.’

  Seeker felt his hopes rise. ‘And?’

  The woman shrugged. ‘Who knows? Everything they said was in French.’

  *

  Seeker stormed up the stairs of the Cockpit and into the cler
ks’ room.

  ‘Where’s that report?’ he demanded.

  ‘Which one?’

  Why was he forced to deal with idiots? ‘The one from Gravesend. The plants shipment from Tradescant’s.’

  The frozen clerks suddenly broke into motion, and a moment later he was back on the stairs, the required report in his hand. It didn’t add up to very much: a list of north country gentlemen for whom Clémence Barguil had ordered plants, a list of the plants ordered for each client, along with Mlle Barguil’s notes on planting, blooming and fruiting times. All were now in transit, the ship for Hull having weighed anchor the previous day. Seeker studied the names and recognised a good few among them: all Royalists of one colour or another. He looked up from the paper in time to see Andrew Marvell coming out of the anteroom to his own chamber.

  ‘Ah!’ said Marvell, the startled look with which he perennially greeted Seeker upon his face. ‘Captain. I have been just visiting your rooms – I heard about the terrible events of last night. Poor Ingolby is in a bad way. Has there been any word of Sir Thomas?’

  ‘I’ve been out the last two hours. Nothing this morning, I take it?’

  Marvell shook his head.

  ‘How are they all in there?’ asked Seeker, nodding towards his own door.

  ‘Drake has sent more medicines, and Lawrence and your dog are both asleep. The lady tending to them is vigilant, and full of hope.’

  ‘Good,’ said Seeker. ‘Very good.’ Perhaps that hope might see them through. ‘Tell me what you know of last night.’

  And so Marvell did, in detail – other than his awful discovery of the object of Thomas Faithly’s affection – down to the point at which the note for Sir Thomas had arrived at the Black Fox, prompting him and Lawrence Ingolby to leave soon afterwards.

  ‘And they never sent a note to me, nor a messenger?’

  Again Marvell shook his head. ‘Not unless they did so after leaving the tavern.’

  ‘All right. You can go.’

  Marvell was about to continue down the stairs and Seeker about to check on Lawrence and his dog, when another thought struck him. ‘No, wait, Andrew. You know all about flowers and gardens and things, don’t you?’