The Bear Pit

by S. G. MacLean

  The men above him were shouting, but what they shouted Seeker couldn’t tell. The bear paid them no heed, but roared again and then swiped a massive paw, claws fully extended, at Seeker. Seeker tried to parry with his knife, but just succeeded in angering the animal further. Another swipe, and this time the claw ripped through the leather of his doublet. There was no time to move or to think before a third swipe knocked him to the floor. Seeker rolled backwards to try to cover Maria as the huge head and gaping jaw bore down on him. And then a flash, a roar, and the beast was on him.

  Epilogue

  Monday, 19 January, 1657

  Westminster

  Thurloe surveyed the benches around him and stood up. The Commons were restive, had been restive too long. It was clear to anyone with an understanding of the workings of the world, what should be done, what must be done, if England were not once more to descend into bloody civil war. There were several ready to propose it – had proposed it already, in quiet corridors and secret places, but their proposals would carry no weight until they were made here. Thurloe could not do it: for all his power, for all he held the secrets of governments and nations in his hand, in his head, they looked upon him, these generals, and commons, as but the Lord Protector’s shadow, and a man of no account. He would tell them what he had to tell them, and by the end of it, they would be baying for Cromwell to accept the crown.

  He cleared his throat and began. ‘I rise up to acquaint you with the discovery of a heinous plot, which is in part discovered, and we are in pursuit of the rest.’ He told them all of it, or nearly all. He told them about the plot hatched in Flanders, at the behest of the Spanish Court, to take the life of the Protector, because the Stuarts and the Spaniards knew that while Oliver lived England would stand. He told them of Toope, who had given up his confederates, the Leveller Sindercombe and the Royalist trooper Cecil, that Toope and Cecil had confessed, whilst Sindercombe remained mute. But Sindercombe, who had gone as ‘Mr Fish’, would be made to speak, in time. And then he told them of Boyes. ‘This Boyes is the chief agent. He is now in Flanders. It is likely that it is not his name, but he is a considerable person of the late King’s party.’ He told them of the intelligence received, of promised Spanish help to Charles Stuart in an invasion, if only Oliver were dead. When he had told them all he was inclined to, he regained his seat. Amongst the outrage, the clamour for justice, retribution, for a day of thanksgiving for so profound a deliverance, it was Mr Ashe, the elder, who first proposed to the Commons that day that Oliver Cromwell should take the crown.

  *

  Andrew Marvell had been charged with clearing Seeker’s rooms. He felt an imposter, as if at any moment the captain might walk in, roar at him for his daring, then laugh and clap him round the shoulder and bid him sit down, all in that rolling Yorkshire voice. But Seeker would not be walking back in here again, Marvell knew that. Tomorrow another officer, Walter Strickland, he had heard, would make these rooms his, and continue Thurloe’s work where Seeker had left it.

  And that’s all there was here, in truth, of Seeker: his work. There was nothing of the man. The man was in glimpses he had allowed a few others to see – an old lamed soldier in a coffee house on Birchin Lane, a badly injured girl in a garret in Dove Court, a widow woman who kept a tavern on Broad Street, and a young Yorkshireman come down to train for the law at Clifford’s Inn. Marvell looked at the empty grate in the hearth, and bent down to sweep some wiry grey hairs onto the floor. He smiled. There was the hound too, of course, nursed back to health by the Jewess and long returned to the care of the gardener’s boy at Lincoln’s Inn.

  The hound. Marvell had felt worst of all for the hound, when first he had heard. What does that say of a man, that on his loss it is his dog that you pity most? He picked up the last of the papers already marked by Seeker for filing by the clerks and surveyed the room one last time, before going to the door. The place was silent, and empty. ‘But only human eyes can weep,’ he said to himself as he turned the handle and went out.

  *

  Thomas was frozen, and exhausted. In the last eleven days, he and Rupert had eaten on perhaps one day out of two. They had been drenched more times than they’d been dry, and not slept in a proper bed once since they’d left London. ‘Like old times,’ Rupert had said, in an attempt to cheer him.

  ‘Old times for old men, Highness,’ Thomas had replied. ‘What was nothing to me to endure as a man of twenty-five is not nothing ten years later.’

  ‘But you will endure,’ Rupert said. ‘You have endured.’

  The Prince’s eyes were searching his, for something. Eleven days, and Rupert had not yet asked him, but as their boat at last came within sight of the Flemish coast, Thomas felt it was time. ‘I betrayed the King.’

  Rupert shook his head. ‘I don’t think so, Thomas.’

  ‘No, you must know it. I would have you know it. I was ready to give it up – the King’s cause. I traded letters in the hope that I might return home, I offered to spy on my own kind . . .’

  ‘But you did not, did you?’ Rupert said quietly. ‘Those exposed in the letters you traded had done nothing but make empty promises. They were no loss to my cousin’s cause. And most of all, when you saw me that night, you did not betray me.’

  Thomas saw it again, so clearly that the wave of nausea he had felt then threatened to return. He was by Lady Ranelagh’s terrace, sitting with Andrew Marvell, laughing and not quite whispering indiscretions about some of their august fellow guests, enjoying the best company he had found himself in since he had returned to England. Then he had seen him, an old clockmaker, at work on the clock in Lady Ranelagh’s hall. Thomas would not have given the fellow a second glance, had something in the movement of the clockmaker’s hands not taken his eye. That grace, that fineness of touch. How many times had Thomas seen those fingers wield a paintbrush, a tennis racquet, work on some mechanism beyond the fixing of others? And then the clockmaker had looked up, straightened himself to his full height and looked him right in the eye, and Thomas had known for certain that it was Rupert. He had never sobered up so quickly.

  ‘I tried to find you. I spent the night looking for you. God knows what Marvell thought. And then when I went back to Sayes Court and asked Clémence, she wouldn’t tell me – she denied it had been you. I don’t think she quite trusted me.’

  Rupert gave a soft laugh. ‘No, her suspicions of you were very deep. I argued that whatever else you might do, you wouldn’t betray me, but Clémence has never been prepared to leave my well-being to chance, when she has thought she could better protect me.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have betrayed you,’ said Thomas. ‘It was like a veil had lifted for me, and I saw my life, my country, for what it was. Then when I saw your handwriting on the note delivered to me at the Black Fox . . . I’d tried to persuade myself that I could make something of it, carve out a place for myself . . .’

  ‘With the girl?’ prompted Rupert.

  ‘Yes.’ Thomas’s voice was all but inaudible. Even now he could not bear to think of Maria.

  Rupert reached a hand across and gripped his. ‘It will be well with her. Seeker’s body protected her.’

  Thomas nodded, and looked out towards Flanders, and his future, but his hand in Rupert’s, his face, his heart, were frozen.

  *

  Lawrence folded the letter and put it away in his doublet when he heard Dorcas’s step on the stairs. His little room under the eaves of the Black Fox was even smaller than his chamber at Clifford’s Inn had been and would have fitted six times into the apartment he had had in Faithly Manor, but he wanted to be nowhere else. Which was just as well, for Dorcas had made plain to him that he would not be returning to Clifford’s, unless he wanted her shouting his name at its gates every day. Clifford’s was not safe, that was plain to see, and Lawrence was not safe to be let out on his own. He was not safe even to be let out in company. Even Seeker had not been able
to . . .

  And then she had stopped. Dorcas stopped, every time she tried to speak of Seeker, whereas Manon could scarcely speak at all.

  He stood and went to the door when she knocked on it. The cuts and bites on his hand and arm were healing, though the stitches in his leg and on his stomach still gave him so much pain that only the apothecary Drake’s preparations allowed him any sleep.

  Dorcas was cold, and he ushered her to the fire that she insisted he have here as he studied at night.

  ‘You’re soaked,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve never known snow like it, not in London,’ she shivered. ‘My cloak’s a puddle on the floor downstairs.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have gone tonight.’

  That fire, that anger came into her eyes. She was too easy to provoke, these days, Dorcas, her anger being all that stopped her destroying herself with grief. He wished he hadn’t said it.

  ‘Damian would have done it, and he’s not here to do it so I shall. How can Elias nurse the girl? He’d hardly the wit to keep her fed and warm when she was in health, and how should he do so now? Grace does what she can, but she has enough to do with the coffee house and poor Samuel near enough broken, and no one but that boy to help her. He speaks of America. America – Samuel! He and Elias, as soon as Maria is mended, they say, they’ll be done with England.’

  Done with England, Lawrence thought. How was England ever to be fixed if those who might do so would not stay? ‘And will she be mended,’ he asked quietly. ‘Maria? How was she today?’

  Dorcas looked into the fire. ‘Her body, perhaps, I think so. I had her up today, and she managed a couple of steps. Elias wept at the triumph of it. I almost wept myself. But – I think her soul’s gone.’ Dorcas nodded to herself, as if it were almost a relief to say it aloud. ‘Her soul is gone, Lawrence. But I told her – she has to do it for her brother, and for Grace and Samuel.’ The anger was going out of her, as it always did. ‘And she has to do it for Damian, for what else can we do for him?’

  Lawrence watched her sink back in her seat, her eyes closed and her head raised to the heavens. No one else ever saw Dorcas like this. Least of all Manon.

  He reached out a hand to pat her awkwardly on the knee, and then retracted it. ‘There’s Manon too, though. We can do that for him, we can look after Manon.’

  She sniffed and straightened herself and smiled. ‘Bless you, boy, the idea of you looking after anyone when you can’t even look after yourself. But you can make the girl smile, and there’s no one else in the world can do that now.’

  Lawrence didn’t mind that Dorcas thought him so helpless; if it made her feel stronger to have so many others to take care of, then so be it. But Lawrence wasn’t helpless, and he’d have been here even if Dorcas hadn’t insisted upon it. He’d have been here, looking after them in ways they wouldn’t have guessed at. Because he wanted to, and because he’d been trusted to. It was all in the letter. There was money, with an agent, in Liverpool, if ever it should be needed, and there was a safe house, an address, only to be used in case of danger, which in these days, in England, might never be far off. And there was another address, in a code which John Thurloe himself had shown him, to which he might write, when the need arose.

  It had been ten days ago that Thurloe had come into Seeker’s chamber in Whitehall. Michal, the apothecary Drake’s sister had been there, nursing Lawrence and the dog, and Thurloe had asked her to leave them alone a while. When she had left and Seeker’s clerk been ordered away from the anteroom, Thurloe had shut the door, and locked it. Then he had told Lawrence, and he had explained to him the code, and given him the letter. ‘Wait ten days,’ the Chief Secretary had said. But as to Maria, Thurloe had been very clear: for fear of her brother’s associations, she could not be told.

  Ten days. Dorcas declared herself warm enough and stood up to leave.

  Lawrence looked up. ‘Dorcas? Can you fetch Manon? She’ll not be sleeping yet, I don’t think.’

  ‘Manon? At this time of night? Whatever for?’

  Ten days. More than long enough they’d suffered, and now he could tell them. He felt the edge of the letter as it pressed against his shirt beneath his doublet and smiled. ‘I think there’s something that you both need to know.’ And after he’d told them, Lawrence would be going to Dove Court, Thurloe or no Thurloe, and he’d be showing Maria the other letter that had come to him, just today, from Bruges dated only five days ago, and written in Damian’s own hand.

  *

  At Sayes Court, John Evelyn and his friends – Wenceslaus Hollar, Samuel Hartlib and Robert Boyle – were once again gathered in the elaboratory. But tonight, the furnace was cold, the stove was not lit, and alembics and funnels sat idle. Tonight, the talk was not of the new science, nor yet of philosophy, politics or religion. Tonight, all the anxious talk between these four learned gentlemen concerned what was to be done about their friend, Thomas Bushell, who appeared to have lost his wits. For, as Evelyn explained to the others, for ten days now, since Clémence Barguil had been found by Colonel Pride’s soldiers, hiding in his old house on Lambeth Marsh, poor Bushell had been telling anyone who would listen that the last bear in London had been shot, dead, by Rupert of the Rhine.

  Author’s Note

  In the foregoing story, the tale of the murder of Joseph Grindle, and Seeker’s subsequent investigation of it, are entirely fictional. The Bankside Bears were shot in February 1656 by a firing squad led by Colonel Pride, and the mastiffs used in the baiting shipped to Jamaica. The catalyst for this event appears to have been the death of a young child who had fallen from viewing scaffolding into the arena in September of 1655. The arena was soon demolished and the site redeveloped. Bear baiting may in fact have continued in another arena near Islington (there was a Bear Garden tavern at Hockley-in-the-Hole), prior to being permitted again at the Restoration.

  The clandestine exchanges I have located at Tradescant’s Garden in South Lambeth are also fictional, but the Gardens, and the Cabinet of Curiosities gathered by the John Tradescants were very much in existence, both as business and public attraction. The remains of the amazing collection of curiosities built up by father and son, the credit for which was appropriated by Elias Ashmole, can be viewed in Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, of which it formed the original collection. The Tradescants’ tomb can still be seen at the Garden Museum in the former St Mary’s church, Lambeth.

  While the tale of Joseph Grindle is fictional, that of the attempts by Boyes, Fish and Cecil in the autumn and winter of 1656 to assassinate Oliver Cromwell, is not. By 1656, Cromwell’s many enemies had begun to coalesce. Royalists and disgruntled Republicans alike came to believe that their only hope lay in the removal of the Lord Protector. These disaffected groups inevitably crossed each other’s paths in exile in the Low Countries. The Leveller Edward Sexby, for instance, a former colonel who had once been close to Cromwell, became increasingly disaffected with the Protectorate. He began to forge links with Royalists abroad, and in 1655 met the cashiered Parliamentary soldier Miles Sindercombe (alias ‘Mr Fish’) in the Netherlands. Sexby commissioned Sindercombe to murder Cromwell, giving him £1500 to make the required arrangements. Sindercombe returned to England as ‘Mr Fish’, took up residence in King Street, Westminster, and hired former Royalist soldier John Cecil and another mysterious Royalist – ‘Mr William Boyes’ – to assist him. He also took John Toope, a member of the Protector’s Life Guard, into his pay. Toope was able to pass on information about Cromwell’s planned movements, and to pay off guards and servants at Whitehall Palace when the occasion required. One of Thurloe’s intelligence sources on the continent picked up on rumours of the threat from ‘Mr Fish’, but Thurloe, overwhelmed with responsibilities and the endless flow of intelligence from abroad, delayed acting on the matter.

  As in my story, the group made their first attempt at the State Opening of Parliament in September 1656, but were hampered by the crowd th
at surged around the Protector when he left Westminster Abbey. Their second attempt was from the upper room of a coaching house in Hammersmith, where they had rigged seven blunderbusses to fire simultaneously. The Protector’s carriage took another route. The third attempt was on horseback, at Hyde Park. Accounts of its failure differ – either Cecil’s horse took ill, or Cecil himself took fright; either way, the planned assassination did not take place. Their last was a desperate effort to murder Cromwell by blowing up Whitehall Palace with explosives set in the chapel. Toope’s bribery activities allowed them to get as far as setting and lighting the fuse before being discovered, still in the chapel. In the struggle that ensued, Cecil was quickly taken, Sindercombe (Fish) overwhelmed, losing the tip of his nose in the fight, and Boyes escaped. Thurloe later confirmed to Parliament that it was Toope who had informed them of the conspirators’ plan. The depiction in The Bear Pit of how Toope’s confession came about is my invention.

  Cecil and Sindercombe were interrogated by Thurloe, Cecil corroborating Toope’s version of events, Sindercombe maintaining his silence. Both were tried at Westminster Hall in February of 1657 and sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered. On 13 February, Sindercombe committed suicide in the Tower of London, taking arsenic smuggled in by his sister. Clarendon suggests that Sindercombe’s refusal to name his associates and his evasion of the Protectorate’s final justice only served to increase Cromwell’s paranoia. Such was Cromwell’s rage on learning that Thurloe had had advance intelligence of ‘Fish’s’ activities and not acted on it, that he almost dismissed him. Toope, astonishingly, remained on Thurloe’s payroll as an agent until the end of the Protectorate.