The Black Friar

by S. G. MacLean

  ‘No doubt. And what happened to him after he came through your door?’

  The preacher had begun to occupy himself with tidying the vestry, pushing benches against walls, pulling to the window shutters. He had his back to Seeker. ‘He fell in with one of our congregation. Got work, a roof over his head.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Goodwill Crowe. Clothworker up by Aldgate.’

  A clothworker. Carter Blyth had put his time in the Low Countries to good use, for Seeker knew him to have been a market gardener before the war.

  ‘Where in Aldgate?’

  The preacher straightened himself and turned to Seeker, a sour, triumphant look in his eyes. ‘That I couldn’t tell you, Captain.’

  ‘Won’t, more like,’ said Seeker. He hadn’t more time to waste on the man – he would keep, for now. Any more details he’d have got from him would like as not have been false, anyhow. There were other means of tracking down Goodwill Crowe.

  When he got back out into the churchyard, a crowd of half a dozen children had surrounded the horse. They melted backwards at his approach, all but the one he had left watching the beast, who was assured in his new status.

  Seeker tossed him a coin. ‘You did well. Now go on then, fetch your mother’s water.’

  The boy retrieved his bucket and started to make his way up the path once more, walking very straight, but Seeker stopped him again.

  ‘And pay heed to your father. Stay away from those men.’

  Coming back out the end of Soper Lane by the Great Conduit at West Cheap, Seeker inevitably glanced over to his right, towards the Old Jewry and Dove Court. For years, there’d been nothing but his duty in the army, and then the guard. His service in the wars, and now for Thurloe, for the Protector, was all he had needed. Nothing else, no human being, had been able to touch him. Until the girl at Dove Court. Until Maria. As he stood at the edge of the street, all around him, like a river round a rock, the incessant flow of people of the city passed, intent upon its own business. An ordinary man could join them, merge into them, take up a life like theirs and live it. How would it be, to be an ordinary man? But the flow of people that jostled against one another took care not to touch him. That other life wasn’t possible. The bells of St Mary-le-Bow striking two recalled him to the business in hand, and finally turning Acheron to the left, he put thoughts of Dove Court aside, and urged the animal westwards, towards Whitehall.

  Four

  The Secretariat

  When she had walked from the gates of Whitehall Palace little over two months ago, Anne Winter had thought she would not set foot back in that place until Charles Stuart had reclaimed his father’s throne. It was not that she feared for her life – she would hazard that, if the cause so required – but it made her sick to her stomach to traverse once more the courtyards and passageways at the relentlessly grinding heart of Cromwell’s rule.

  She would never have come at all had it not been for Charity. Charity. A girl who could have hoped for nothing better from Whitehall than to sleep, unnoticed, in some corner of an unused stable or storeroom, a girl who would have thought it a privilege to sweep the floors of that place. A girl who had never dreamed there could be anything beyond the walls and gates of the city. But now she was gone from the city, disappeared, and Anne Winter had exhausted all other possibilities. She should have come here in the first place.

  She knew her way, and the soldiers let her pass, too awkward in the presence of their dead lieutenant’s widow to stop her. November it had been, but seemed so much longer ago to Anne Winter, that her husband had been murdered in this very palace. It was early afternoon now, but she had no fears of finding the offices unattended. While half of Westminster and Whitehall would still be at their dinner in the taverns and cook shops of King Street or New Palace Yard, Thurloe’s men, the under-secretaries, the clerks, would be busy at their work, receiving, processing, acting on intelligence, doing their master’s bidding, watching and circling each other as they did so.

  She came at last to the end of Thurloe’s corridor, aware by now of more sets of astonished eyes upon her than had she paraded the Strand unclothed. She was surprised to see the entrance to Thurloe’s own rooms unguarded, but that might only mean the Secretary was occupied elsewhere. It was an inconvenience, but it could not be helped. She would wait for him, and she would not leave until she had seen him.

  *

  Seeker was looking for Dorislaus. There would be little point seeking him out in his small room at the postal office, behind the admiralty chambers, at this time of day, for Isaac Dorislaus didn’t keep other men’s hours. Dorislaus would have been up half the night, having begun his work just as other men were finishing theirs. Letters delivered through the day, in innocence or unwarranted optimism, to postal drops at coffee houses, inns and taverns throughout the city and further afield, would have been sifted for suspect handwriting, address or mark of provenance, and those found of interest been transmitted to be read and translated by Dorislaus. Any new cypher discovered would be sent to the Cypher Office where Dr Wallis or one of his assistants would break the code and report it back to Dorislaus for analysis. The contents would then be simply noted or passed upwards, closer to Thurloe. Letters thus compromised would be resealed, or amended and forged, as required, by Samuel Morland, who found the world of espionage more to his taste than the arid debate of his Cambridge College. Such intercepted letters were then sent on their way to the unsuspecting recipient who, had they but realised it, could thenceforth look forward to being watched, reported upon, perhaps arrested, imprisoned by the agents and officers who enacted Thurloe’s will, all for the security of the state. It amused Seeker to think that few would give the unassuming Isaac Dorislaus a second look, should they pass him in the street, and yet Isaac Dorislaus was one of the most dangerous men in England.

  He was on his way to the junior clerks’ room, where he knew Dorislaus liked to pass a half-hour with the other young men, when he heard the sound of raised voices coming towards him up the corridor. The voices seemed to be coming from the Chief Secretary’s rooms. Seeker recognised both of them, and neither should have been there. He quickened his step, and at his approach the clerks who had been gawping outside Secretary Thurloe’s rooms suddenly remembered they had pressing business elsewhere. When Seeker reached the open door, what he already knew was confirmed by the figure of the woman standing with her back to him: plum velvet gown, marten stole with chestnut curls escaping from below the hood, and long, pale hands, fine hands, decorated only with a mourning ring: Lady Anne Winter. There were times he had been hard put to extract two words from her, but today, she was in full flow.

  ‘A fitting place indeed! A viper in a vipers’ nest.’

  ‘Madam, I would—’

  ‘I never thought to find one in here beside whom Thurloe would look the better option!’

  George Downing was bristling, fit to burst. His barrel chest was so engorged with indignation Seeker thought it might snap the fastenings of his doublet. Risen through guile and Cromwell’s favour from near-indigent army chaplain to high office within the Exchequer in a very few years, it must have been a long time since anyone had dared to speak to Downing with such open contempt.

  ‘Madam, I am aware you lack the sage counsel of a husband—’

  ‘Husband? My husband said you were not a person on whom any honest soldier would turn his back, that you would have sold a comrade as soon as a foe, if the price was right.’

  Downing’s dignity deserted him, and he leaned across Thurloe’s desk towards her, his face a snarl. ‘As you so plainly evidence before me, your husband was no judge of character. Now take your complaint to the alderman of your ward, it is none of our concern here.’

  The woman’s voice again, incredulous. ‘None of your concern? My house is watched every day and reports sent back here as fast as they can be written. There is hardly a chimney sweep nor a baker’s boy comes in at the door who is not under the surveillance of this depar
tment. Spare me your denials. I can scarce chew my food but I am constrained to spit one of your spies out onto the plate in front of me. You will not tell me you do not know where she is!’

  Seeker could not help but let loose a smile. The degree of affront to Downing was something to behold, and the man’s ego would hardly submit to such a hammering. Still, the commotion could not be permitted to continue. He walked into the room without knocking, and saw that his arrival only served to increase the burly New Englander’s irritation.

  ‘Captain Seeker, I am currently engaged.’

  Seeker surveyed him a moment, determined that the other man should know he was unimpressed by his rise in the world since the days their paths had crossed in the army. ‘Why are you in Secretary Thurloe’s chamber?’

  Lady Anne Winter had turned on hearing Seeker’s name, and the face, which had been a study of fury, softened, if only a little. ‘Captain Seeker,’ she said. ‘At last, a man with whom one might deal.’

  Wary of the impotent outrage in Downing’s eye, Seeker spoke cautiously. ‘Lady Anne. We have not seen you in these corridors a good two months. How does life in Crutched Friars?’

  ‘Well enough,’ the woman replied, ‘as you might no doubt know if you would consult this person’s files.’ She treated Downing to a look of contempt that Seeker in all his dealings with her had never seen. Calm, measured, aloof: those were the words he would have used to describe Lady Anne Winter, had anyone cared to ask. None of these epithets could be applied to her now.

  Nevertheless, there was little point in dissembling. ‘You can hardly be surprised that your house is watched, Lady Anne. You have made no secret of your continued adherence to the cause of Charles Stuart, or of your contempt for the Protector. If it had been left to me, I would have had you out of London, never mind just this palace.’

  To Downing’s evident astonishment, Anne Winter now actually smiled. ‘Still honest then, Seeker. Perhaps there is hope yet, if there is still one honest man in this nest of vipers.’ She let the emphasis of that ‘one’ fill the room a moment. ‘I know my house is watched, and you are right, I would expect nothing less.’

  ‘And so?’

  ‘He,’ – still she would not accord Downing the courtesy of his name – ‘will not tell me what he knows.’

  Seeker shrugged. ‘Why should he?’

  ‘Because one of my housemaids, a good child of great promise, has disappeared. You know as well as I that the movements of everyone who sets foot in my house, or leaves it, by back door or by front, are watched day and night.’ She stared at him and, receiving no response, flung a hand towards the rows of shelves behind and to the right of Thurloe’s desk. ‘It must be somewhere there, in those books, or in the countless others in this place. It will be written down.’

  Downing, not quite mastering his anger, sought to regain control of the interview. ‘As I have told this woman—’

  But Anne Winter ignored him, continuing to address herself solely to Seeker. ‘She is not twelve years old, an orphan from the streets. She’d been passed from one foundling hospital to another, until the last, some old religious house, was closed down, for that the title was found by your Commonwealth’s lawyers to be insufficient, and the property allocated to others better inclined to the regime. She was put out onto the streets, Seeker. She is not a knowing child, and too trusting.’

  Downing sneered in contempt. ‘Trusting? A girl of the streets?’

  Anne Winter whipped back round towards him in a fury. ‘She would not have been on the streets had your—’ Then she stopped, as a young man, dressed like most of the clerks in Thurloe’s service, although his clothing of better quality, passed by the open door. ‘You!’ She went after him. ‘You, you have been there, you have been one of them.’

  The young man turned around, trying to make sense of the woman accosting him, and turned startled eyes on Downing, who along with Seeker had followed her into the corridor.

  ‘I, your ladyship, I do not know—’

  Seeker put up a hand to stop him. He had noticed this young man around the corridors lately, or in the clerks’ rooms, always looking as if he had somewhere more important, more interesting to be. He carried about him an air of indolence which did not sit well in a place of such industry. ‘Who are you?’

  Looking at Downing as if for confirmation of his own identity, the young man straightened himself, stood on ceremony a little. ‘My name is Marcus Bridlington, Captain Seeker. My mother is a cousin to Major-General Goffe. I have been in the Secretary’s service for—’

  Again Seeker stopped him. The boy, by links of kinship and friendship, was but a few steps from Cromwell. ‘Lady Anne, though she might not realise it, has no call to know this. Go about your business.’

  As the young man inclined his head and continued down the corridor, Anne Winter opened her mouth to protest, but Seeker gave her a warning look. ‘I will look into this matter when I have the leisure, Lady Anne. For the child’s sake, not yours, but you will importune Mr Downing no longer. He has greater matters to attend to than the business of absconding servants.’

  Anne Winter, he knew, was an intelligent woman, and he saw an understanding flit across her face. Downing was not a person of whom to make an enemy. She nodded slowly.

  ‘All right. Yes. All right.’

  She offered Downing a cursory dip of her head, and went past them both, more composed now than when she had arrived. Seeker took her by the elbow and steered her away from Thurloe’s door, and towards the end of the corridor. ‘You would do well not to make an enemy of George Downing, Lady Anne.’

  ‘Downing? Why should I fear him? I know all about him and where he came from. A penniless preacher arrived not ten years ago from Massachusetts with hardly a coat to his back. John told me of him. Had Colonel Okey not taken him on as chaplain to his regiment, he would like as not have died an infantryman. He came from nothing.’

  Seeker took a moment to reply. ‘That may well be, my lady, but what you and your like will not understand, and what has been the defeat of you all, is that men who come from nothing need not end as nothing.’

  ‘How we end, Seeker, God will decide.’

  ‘Perhaps. But in this place, it’s for the Lord Protector to say how we live.’

  ‘And George Downing has insinuated himself into the right circles, taken a woman of good fortune and high breeding to wife—’

  ‘Whether you like him or not, Lady Anne, Downing’s skills and talents have made him very useful to the Protector.’

  ‘Does Oliver not have preachers enough?’

  ‘I think you know that isn’t what I mean.’

  ‘Oh, I know. His skills lie less in the salvation of men than in the observation, the manipulation of them. John told me: Downing taught Oliver the virtues of a spy.’

  Seeker didn’t argue with her. Downing’s facility for the gathering of intelligence in the field, and for showing others its value, had seen him rise quickly from a chaplain in the now-disgraced Okey’s regiment to Scoutmaster General of the army in Scotland, charged with gathering and tracking any intelligence that was to be had. But Downing’s rise had not stopped there, and by the time Oliver had appointed the New Englander, a rich and well-connected wife on his arm, to a lucrative post in the Exchequer, he was already well on the way to forgetting he had ever been a penniless preacher.

  Before he handed her over to a guard at the end of the corridor, to be escorted from the building, Seeker turned Anne Winter to face him. ‘A man that has risen from nowhere to almost the heart of government, who finds himself at the Protector’s dinner table, who has half of London clamouring for his favour, is not one to be taken lightly, or slighted. You have enemies enough, Lady Anne. I would counsel you to make no more.’

  Back in Thurloe’s room, Downing, his colour subsiding, was nonetheless shaken. He sought to assert his authority. ‘How did that woman get in here, Seeker? I had heard before that she was mad. She should not have got in here. This place sh
ould be better guarded.’

  Seeker did not respond other than to call for a guard. While the man was running down the corridor, Seeker picked up Downing’s hat from the chair on which it had been set and handed it to him. ‘Your office is in the Exchequer. You have no business in Secretary Thurloe’s rooms when he is not here.’

  Downing bristled. ‘I think you forget who it is that you talk to, Seeker.’

  Seeker looked at him, any hint of deference he had adopted for Anne Winter’s benefit gone. ‘I forget nothing, Downing. Not the merest detail. And I take my orders only from the Council of State. Get back to your Exchequer.’ He turned then and ordered the guard to have Secretary Thurloe’s rooms locked and watched. ‘And see that no one, no one but Mr Meadowe, Secretary Milton or the Lord Protector himself is given access to these rooms without the written permission of Mr Thurloe.’

  *

  Seeker was still thinking about George Downing when he reached the ante-room where the clerks and under-secretaries were prone to gather. Marcus Bridlington, the young man accosted a few minutes earlier by Anne Winter, was not there, but Dorislaus was, and with him Andrew Marvell, who was intermittently to be found trying to secure preferment in one Secretary’s service or another. Passed over more than once, by men less able than he but more amenable to making themselves liked, or by others, like Marcus Bridlington, better connected, Marvell nonetheless had established himself in Whitehall like moss on a neglected step. In order to make ends meet, the young poet found himself constrained every so often to take the position of tutor to the children of wealthy and increasingly powerful men – recently the daughter of General Lord Fairfax, and now a ward of Cromwell himself. His duties would take him away to Yorkshire, Eton, overseas sometimes, but always he found his hopeful way back to Whitehall, and the moss grew back on the step. Seeker knew, because he had taken the time to read Marvell’s file, that his younger compatriot had travelled on the continent, as far as Spain, had dallied in Madrid, attended literary gatherings there in the homes of the affluent and influential, yet little in the way of social graces seemed to have rubbed off on him. Only John Milton, blind Milton, saw something in him that others did not. ‘It is because Milton doesn’t have to look at that sullen face,’ Seeker had heard one of the clerks mumble to another once. Yet for all Marvell’s sullen face and quick temper, something in Seeker warmed to his fellow Yorkshireman. You’ll never get on in Whitehall, though, he thought.