The Black Friar

by S. G. MacLean

  ‘You mark me,’ whispered the alderman, turning from the coroner to his constable, ‘a monk dead a hundred years and more, his body scarce corrupted, and now that fellow called upon. There has been something unnatural here.’

  Seeker, too, was of the view that he was in the presence of something unnatural, but his thoughts had little to do with alchemy, or miracles, or talk of magic. He nodded briskly as Drake was brought into the room, and had everyone else but Proctor leave it.

  The apothecary was no more disposed to unnecessary preliminaries than was Seeker, and went straight over to the body, trailing welcome scents of bergamot and jasmine to contend with the pungent smells emanating from the cadaver that had indeed begun to decompose. Seeker followed him, while Proctor waited by the door.

  ‘Tell me what you know, and what you wish to know,’ said Drake.

  ‘This corpse was uncovered less than three hours ago, behind the wall of a building in Blackfriars long out of use, by the mason inspecting it for demolition. It was clothed as you see it now.’ There was no need to ask if Drake recognised the type of clothing; Seeker knew it was the Dominicans, the friars of the Inquisition, who had driven Drake’s family to London in the first place.

  Drake nodded. ‘The robes of a Dominican friar.’ The apothecary walked around the table on which the body had been laid, sometimes bending to inspect it a little more closely, sometimes using a thin wooden baton to gently ease clothing back from flesh.

  ‘And what is it you would know, Captain?’ he said, apparently concentrating on the bare feet that extended beyond the hem of the robe.

  ‘How old is this body? How long has this man been dead?’

  Drake turned his head towards Seeker, raising an amused eyebrow. ‘The body, I would say, Captain, is around as old as yours. Forty, forty-five years old, perhaps. Many decades younger than his clothing, which as you see,’ he said, indicating points on the sleeves and around the neck area, ‘has begun to rot in parts, and been troubled by moths and, I suspect, mice. As to how long he has been dead,’ he straightened himself, ‘a matter of a very few weeks.’

  Seeker nodded. ‘And the manner of death?’

  Drake peered closely at the man’s mouth, the tips of his fingers and toes, then lightly separated some of the hairs at the back of the man’s head. ‘Unpleasant. You see there has been bleeding, though not any great amount, from a blow to the back of the head, but the skull is not cracked and I don’t believe that is what killed him. The passage of time muddies the picture, but I believe this man died through suffocation. Deprivation of air.’

  ‘Strangulation?’ But Seeker thought he already knew the answer to that.

  Drake shook his head, and indicated the man’s neck, and the lack of chafing or bruising around it, before carefully raising one of the corpse’s hands, and indicating the fingertips. ‘You see that his neck shows no marking of strangulation, yet his fingertips are worn more than ragged – the skin has almost all been scoured away. There are traces of soot in the creases of his hands, and,’ here stooping to examine the man’s nose, ‘his nostrils. More than in the common run of things. And his nails,’ he straightened himself and brought his own index finger to the nails on the fingers of the left hand, ‘you see they are badly broken and worn down, what’s left of them filled, I suspect, with the same manner of crumbled brick and powder you will find on the wall behind which he was enclosed.’

  So it was as Seeker had suspected. ‘He was bricked up in there alive.’

  Drake let the dead hand fall. ‘That at least would be my assessment. Also, I doubt very much that this man was a wandering friar.’

  Seeker knew he hadn’t been, but was curious all the same. ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘His feet. They are not the feet of a man who has walked the world in sandals.’

  ‘No,’ said Seeker. ‘They are not. Thank you, John.’

  Drake inclined his head slightly and left without further farewell, other interests already calling him.

  Daniel Proctor approached the figure laid out on the table once more. ‘It’s him, then?’

  ‘Looks like it.’

  ‘What will Thurloe say?’

  Seeker considered. Whatever Thurloe had to say, he suspected, would go halfway to explaining why the man in front of them had been bricked up alive in the old priory of Blackfriars. ‘That is what I intend to find out.’

  *

  Thurloe would not be found in his usual offices at Whitehall, that Seeker already knew. The Chief Secretary, on whom the government of England, the survival of the Protectorate, the security of the Lord Protector himself, so much depended, was ill. He had been ill for weeks, and refusing to countenance any retreat from the rigours of his office, until Cromwell himself had ordered him to betake himself to his bed, ‘And not in Whitehall, Thurloe, or I will set my dogs on you!’ Too ill to argue any further, Thurloe had left many instructions with his most trusted Under-Secretary, Philip Meadowe, and consented to remove himself as far as his old chambers in the attics of Lincoln’s Inn. Cromwell had decreed that all business meant for Mr Thurloe should be brought for the time being before Meadowe instead, but Thurloe had summoned Seeker to him before finally agreeing to leave in the litter that had been called for him.

  ‘You, Damian,’ he had said, applying all of his meagre strength to his grip on Seeker’s wrist. ‘You will come to me, if you come upon any business that is not for others to know of. You know the type of business of which I speak. You will not fail me!’

  Seeker had known. Any business so dark, so far in the murk that its outlines could hardly be seen. What had been found at Blackfriars was of this business.

  Seeker did not often have cause to be at Lincoln’s Inn, and he was glad of it. It was a pleasant place, he could see that, if you belonged in such places, but Seeker knew he did not. The gardens, with their high brick walls, their walks and arbours, their well-clipped lawns and pinned back roses were too precise, too ordered, there was no freedom in them. A place where nature was not loved but tamed, and Seeker, be he never so controlled, was too rough-hewn for such a place. Within the portals of Lincoln’s, its panelled walls, polished floors, corridors echoing with assured laughter, voices trained to expectation and ambition, the easy companionship of those who expected to get on in the world, the set of his face, the tread of his boot on a step, the very sound of his voice seemed to stop all of that in its tracks. The porter who met him didn’t even ask what he had come for. ‘I will take you to Mr Thurloe,’ he said.

  After several turnings and stairways, they came to an attic corridor, and halfway down it the porter tapped lightly on a panelled door, giving his name. The door was opened, and Seeker had to stoop slightly as he stepped into a small, overheated sitting room. The porter nodded to him and left. Seeker recognised the manservant who could occasionally be glimpsed flitting through the corridors and doorways of Whitehall, always just in the background of the Chief Secretary’s daily life.

  ‘How is he?’ asked Seeker.

  ‘A little stronger, though far from fit for business, but I have instructions that you are to be let to see him, should you come. I pray you do not keep him long.’ The man disappeared through an inner doorway and a few moments later came through it again, more slowly, behind him a man younger than Seeker, not yet forty, and younger-looking still, like a curate or nervous junior lawyer. The man would have passed unnoticed in the street, like any other clerk or city-dweller of middling stature. Short and slight of frame, only the great dome of his forehead under long, lank fair curls, matted now to that forehead, marked him out as different, somehow. ‘Such a brain, Seeker, such a brain as holds the secrets of the world in its chambers,’ Cromwell had once said to him of his Chief Secretary. ‘’Tis a mercy God gave him to our side and not the other.’

  Thurloe came closer into the light, and Seeker saw that the man on whom the Protector so depended was still gravely ill. Overwork, he thought. Thurloe was killing himself with overwork. The eyes w
ere red-rimmed and the always-pale skin as rough and dry-looking as cheap paper. The small, thin hands that held within them the invisible strings of a network of agents and informers extending to the edges of Europe and the New World were clammy, and trembling. Seeker had seldom seen Thurloe outside Whitehall, or Hampton Court, for the Secretary was rarely prepared to remove himself far from the centre, the person of the Protector, and Cromwell still more rarely disposed to spare him. It was bandied in the taverns and the coffee shops that even the Lady Protectress was constrained to go through Thurloe first, should she wish to see her husband.

  Thurloe made no comment as his servant helped lower him into the more comfortable-looking of the two chairs by the fire, and set a heavy woollen rug over his knees. The man then told Seeker to call him if the Secretary required anything and disappeared once more through to what Seeker supposed must be Thurloe’s sickroom.

  ‘Well, Damian,’ said the Secretary as the departing servant pulled to the door, ‘I’ll wager this is nothing good.’

  ‘No,’ said Seeker, ‘I don’t think it is.’

  ‘Tell me then,’ said Thurloe, reaching for the cordial his man had set on the small table beside him.

  Seeker handed him the glass and waited for him to swallow it down, before telling him of the morning’s find at Blackfriars, and the apothecary Drake’s assessment of the corpse.

  Thurloe listened without interrupting, saying only at the end, ‘A puzzle indeed, but I think there is something you have yet to tell me.’

  Seeker took a breath, tried to keep the challenge out of his voice. ‘It’s Carter Blyth.’

  Thurloe’s face registered something, a mild flicker, before he pursed his lips in thought a moment. ‘You are certain?’

  ‘Completely certain. As is Daniel Proctor, who also saw him.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Thurloe leaned forward suddenly. ‘You swore Proctor to secrecy?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Seeker.

  ‘Good.’

  Thurloe sank back, his bout of animation having exhausted him.

  ‘I’ve left the body covered and locked under Proctor’s guard in the coroner’s court.’

  The Secretary nodded, considered a moment before speaking again. ‘It is a bad business we have on hand here.’ He looked up at the still-standing Seeker, indicated the chair opposite him. ‘Sit, Damian. This may take some time.’

  Seeker took a plain oak chair and sat down awkwardly, his helmet in his hands, the feet of his black leather boots closer to the fire than he would have liked. He waited.

  ‘You know that Carter Blyth was one of our agents in the Netherlands?’

  Seeker nodded.

  ‘He kept a close eye on enemies of the Protectorate – Royalists colluding with foreign interests, especially the Spanish. Any Papists passing through. Presbyterians too. Radicals involved in the printing of incendiary works. Businessmen trading with the wrong people, showing an interest in the wrong sorts of goods.’

  Seeker knew what agents of the Protectorate did in foreign cities – they joined the churches, patronised inns and coffee houses, traded at the bourse, insinuated themselves into the society and trust of those who might wish ill to Oliver’s regime, and gleaned information on those persons’ contacts in England. By such means, only a few weeks since, a plot involving London’s gunsmiths and other city merchants had been uncovered, and those involved pulled from their beds and slung into the Tower before they had had time to find their slippers or bid their wives farewell. The security of the regime depended upon its foreign agents as much as it depended upon the army at home. It would not have been the first time that an agent had been found dead, having clandestinely returned to his own shores. Seeker might well have believed this to have been the case with Carter Blyth, and would not have troubled Thurloe with it, had it not been for one detail.

  ‘Carter Blyth died in the gunpowder explosion in Delft three months ago.’ He looked bluntly at Thurloe. ‘You had me attend his burial in Horton churchyard.’

  Thurloe was matter-of-fact. ‘It was necessary. For the sake of authenticity.’

  ‘Authenticity of what?’

  ‘That he was dead.’

  Seeker said nothing.

  Thurloe took a careful sip of his cordial. ‘Believe me, Seeker, it was not done to make you a fool, but because if you were there, no one would question our certainty. It suited me that Carter Blyth should be believed dead.’ He looked at Seeker directly. ‘I had other work for him to do.’

  ‘That was not an empty grave I stood by at Horton,’ Seeker said.

  The Secretary was dismissive. ‘Some nameless fellow who’d died in Newgate. More use to the Commonwealth in death than he ever was in life, and none to miss him.’

  Seeker thought of the worn-out woman who’d stood across the grave from him in Horton those months ago. ‘And Blyth’s widow?’

  A shrug. ‘She doesn’t know. Grateful for the pension we gave her and didn’t ask too many questions.’

  ‘And,’ Seeker spoke slowly, ‘should we have any idea how Carter Blyth came to be walled up alive in Blackfriars, in the guise of a Dominican friar?’

  Through his weakness, Thurloe smiled. ‘As well I have never needed to use you in diplomacy, Damian. I fear we have some work to do yet on your subtlety, but yes, you have come to the point. I can tell you what Blyth was doing back in London, but as to the rest? That I will require you to discover.’

  It was over half an hour later that Thurloe finished. ‘You may have Proctor to assist you, but no one else is to know what you are about.’

  ‘So who else does know, apart from the generals?’

  Thurloe shook his head. ‘Not the generals, not Oliver himself. Only me, and Blyth, who is evidently dead, and now you. This could touch to the very highest ranks of the army, and to the Council of State. I am not certain yet of who is to be trusted. It would play right into the hands of Parliament to see the army so divided against itself, and the Protector so under threat. They think that Cromwell cannot rule without the army, but they have yet to comprehend that should Cromwell not control the army, God himself would be hard put to do so.’

  Seeker knew that Thurloe believed as vehemently in Oliver’s providential right to rule England as did the Protector himself. But there was a line, a gulf now, between what such as Cromwell and his circle believed, and what many who had fought alongside him in the army had understood to be the end point of their struggle, their revolution. The Levellers, who had fought for equality amongst men, and been told clearly by the generals eight years ago at Putney that there could be none, had begun to make their voices heard again, and now they had been joined by those of the Fifth Monarchists, who were not satisfied that any should rule England but Christ himself, on whose return they waited avidly, and for which they actively prepared. Those men that thought they had been fighting for equality and the rule of Christ were not content that a captain of horse from the Cambridgeshire fens should sit upon the throne of England.

  ‘The army is under control now, surely?’ said Seeker. ‘Overton, Ludlow, Alured, Saunders, Okey – they have all been cashiered, court-martialled, imprisoned.’ Five senior army officers, amongst them the Protectorate’s seconds-in-command of Scotland and Ireland, caught in three separate conspiracies against Cromwell in the course of the autumn and winter, all of them known to have plotted with the notorious Leveller pamphleteer John Wildman. Wildman was still at large.

  ‘They were but the head,’ said Thurloe, ‘and when we cut off the head we set the rest of the beast to writhing.’

  Seeker chose his words with care. ‘That has a flavour of the Fifth Monarchy men to it.’

  ‘More than a flavour,’ said Thurloe, in a manner that told Seeker they had come to the heart of the matter. ‘It was about the time the conspiracies had come to light and the trials of the colonels begun, that Oliver held a dinner at Whitehall Palace for the members of his Council and other key figures he can rely on, to discuss how the army was properly to b
e brought back under control, how the threats to his power from the Levellers and Fifth Monarchists within it were to be addressed. The usual number of guards had been posted within and outside the banqueting hall, and by the end of the dinner it seemed that nothing was amiss. But when the guards within opened the doors for the Protector and the rest of his party to leave the hall, they found their fellows gone from the other side, and words daubed onto the walls in blood. Animal, possibly,’ Thurloe added as an afterthought.

  ‘What words?’ asked Seeker.

  ‘Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin.’

  ‘ “God hath numbered thy kingdom and finished it: Thou art weighed in the balances and found wanting,” ’ said Seeker.

  Thurloe nodded. ‘Belshazzar’s Feast.’ From the Book of Daniel, the favourite text of the Fifth Monarchists who had believed their struggle against England’s king to have been but a step on the way preparing for the imminent bodily return of Christ to rule on Earth. They it was who had urged with the greatest determination the trial of Charles Stuart, attended with the greatest relish his execution. The next step was to have been the march on Rome and the Papacy, that Whore of Babylon. Cromwell’s settling of himself instead onto the throne of Charles I had rendered those who had been his most fervent supports the most implacable of enemies.

  For a moment, the crackling of the logs on the fire and the occasional gust of laughter from elsewhere in Lincoln’s was all the sound between them. Seeker spoke hesitantly. ‘But following the feast, Belshazzar was slain in the night.’