The Black Friar

by S. G. MacLean

  ‘There is a matter I would discuss with your brother. But it will wait. I’ll ask again, Mistress Ellingworth, who is this person?’ Seeker invested the word with such contempt, he might have been referring to the loathed and long-dead Earl of Strafford.

  The man answered for himself. ‘My name is Shadrach Jones. I arrived in London two weeks ago, from the town of Boston in Massachusetts. I have come to take up the position of schoolmaster, in Rhys Evans’s school at the sign of the Three Nails in Holborn.’ It was the voice of a man who expected to be challenged, and who was ready for it. Maria knew the type very well – most of her brother’s associates had learned the same attitude.

  It was not enough for Seeker, though, who loomed a little closer to Shadrach Jones. ‘So much for why you are in England – for the moment – but why are you here?’

  Maria looked at the schoolteacher, so pale to Seeker’s darkness, rich cream to heavy earth. He was almost as thin as her brother, his red hair, long, slim features and large eyes giving him the appearance of a deer ready to bolt. Nevertheless, he stood his ground.

  Shadrach appeared to watch Seeker a moment, as if trying to understand him, before answering. ‘I met in with Mistress Ellingworth’s brother five days ago, at an evening lecture at Gresham College. There is another tonight that we both wished to hear, and Elias was kind enough to say we should go together, and to invite me here to take a little supper first.’

  Seeker continued to speak to Jones, but looked at Maria. ‘So you have had supper?’

  Jones cleared his throat and Maria flung a hand towards the bare table top, annoyed. ‘No, we have not. Elias was to bring it from Wood’s cook shop on Cordwainer Street, and as you see, he is not here.’

  Just then there was the sound of whistling, and more footsteps on the stair, and a moment later, Elias Ellingworth swung into the room. ‘You would hardly credit what—’ He stopped short when he saw Seeker. ‘Oh. Trouble then.’

  ‘As if you had not trouble enough,’ said Maria. ‘You are near an hour late, and I see you have brought us no supper.’

  Elias looked down at his hands, as if expecting something to materialise there. ‘Ah, I had forgotten. But Shadrach and I will get something on the way up to Gresham. We are still in time for the lecture.’

  ‘And what about your sister?’

  Elias turned astonished eyes on Seeker. ‘Do not tell me the Council of State is concerning itself with the nutrition of London’s spinsters now? I cannot think that is why you are here.’

  Maria would not have believed Elias could have spoken to Seeker with such levity, that anyone, save herself, could speak to him with any levity at all.

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ said Seeker. ‘I have come to advise you to be careful of the company you keep.’

  ‘What?’ said Ellingworth putting down his papers. ‘Shadrach’s stomach is hardly settled from his voyage from New England. You cannot tell me he has been causing trouble already.’

  ‘Your schoolmaster friend would be well advised to cause no trouble here, whatever may have driven him from Massachusetts, although by the present company, I see he has made a poor start,’ Seeker replied. ‘But it is John Wildman I have come to speak of.’

  Elias sank wearily into one of the room’s only two chairs. ‘This again? Is every honest man to be hounded for opening his mouth? Can John Wildman not have friends?’

  ‘John Wildman causes more trouble with his pen than even you do. His writings have been behind much of the dissent in the army, and now he has been colluding with Fifth Monarchy men. If they are found to be plotting against the security of the state, they will be brought down, have no doubt of that, and all of their associates with them.’

  ‘I have no truck with the Fifth Monarchy men,’ said Elias. ‘To replace the Law of England with the Law of Moses? God help us.’

  ‘It’s not them but Wildman you should concern yourself about. He is known to have been here recently, on three different occasions. His movements and his contacts are closely watched. If he comes again, report it. Take this as a warning: disassociate yourselves from him.’

  Elias narrowed his eyes as he appraised Seeker. ‘But why now? And why should you care what becomes of us? Besides, you know threats and imprisonment will not silence me. You have had a wasted journey, Seeker.’

  But Maria understood, even if Elias didn’t. If Wildman was under close surveillance, and was known to be coming and going freely at Dove Court, their home, too, would be watched, and it would not be long before someone noted that Damian Seeker was there much more often than he had call to be.

  There was nothing more to be said, no reason for Seeker not to take his leave now. He took his helmet from under his arm and gave Shadrach Jones one more admonitory look. ‘Mind who you involve yourself with. London is not Massachusetts.’

  Maria followed him out onto the landing, on the pretext of seeing him safely gone, and shook her head at him, her mouth a firm line.

  ‘I know, I know,’ he said. ‘I will study to do better.’

  *

  Samuel Kent was pleased with himself. The reactions on the faces of his regulars, as he took the pencil from the young New Englander’s hand and made adjustments to the sketch on the table in front of him, was a sight to behold.

  ‘But Samuel,’ said Elias astonished, ‘where did you learn this? I thought you could not write?’

  Samuel smiled and handed the pencil back to Shadrach Jones. ‘Write? Who says I can write? Drawing though, that’s different. I didn’t spend all my years in the army fixing bayonets or digging latrines, you know. Do you know how many sieges I was at in the war? Bristol, Newcastle, Hull – and half the towns in the Germany before that too. Not a siege engine from Nordlingen to Newark that I haven’t seen rigged up from one side or the other.’

  The young New Englander was paying no attention to the good-natured talk around the serving table of the coffee house, so engaged was he in making refinements to his sketch according to Samuel’s suggestions. ‘Thank you, Mr Kent. That will be most instructive for my pupils.’

  ‘Dear Lord, help us,’ said a hatter not long sat down. ‘Don’t tell me you’re teaching the schoolboys of Holborn to construct siege engines!’

  ‘Ah, no, no,’ said Shadrach, smiling awkwardly as if it were something new to him. ‘It is to show them the practical applications of mathematics. Elias and I attended a most fascinating lecture at Gresham College this evening—’

  ‘And you studied at Harvard College, Elias tells us?’ interjected the merchant George Tavener. ‘You must have known George Downing there, before he discovered himself to be a sailor and a soldier and a preacher and a great English gentleman and officer of the Exchequer and I know not what. He taught for a time at Harvard, did he not? Surely you must have some tales to tell of George Downing that London would like to hear. Did he keep as mean a table then as they say he does now?’

  The young man had coloured a little. ‘What kind of table he keeps I don’t know, for he would never have invited one such as me to sup at it. Downing cultivates no one unless he thinks they will be of use to him, and when they have outlived that usefulness, he casts them adrift and never thinks a moment more about it. He would sell his own mother if he thought it politic.’

  With much murmuring in agreement, the table had entertained itself a little longer with tales of George Downing’s parsimony.

  It was just as Samuel was putting on the last pot for the night, and Grace set to work on the night’s inventory, that Samuel became aware of a new customer coming in through the door and a murmur of distaste running through the room. The man at the top of the coffee room steps surveyed the company with an unpleasant smile, crooked, almost feral teeth contending for space in a narrow, scab-marked mouth. ‘Very jolly,’ the man said. ‘Very jolly indeed.’

  Elias Ellingworth was the first to speak, in his voice a hostility that was palpable. ‘Nedham. I hadn’t noticed you creep in, or perhaps, nowadays, you prefer to slither.’ Sam
uel felt his old soldier’s apprehension of something dangerous approaching. Marchamont Nedham. If Milton was the Protectorate’s propagandist to Europe, the Empire, the Papacy, the Royalists in exile, Nedham was its mouthpiece to the masses, and he would write whatever it paid him most to write, regardless of any truth.

  Nedham was looking sourly at Elias. ‘When I find myself this far down in the world as you are, Ellingworth, perhaps to slither would be the more appropriate attitude. Anyway, I heard the Seeker was sometimes to be found here of a night.’

  At this, Ellingworth laughed. ‘You aim to tangle with the Seeker? Oh, but that would be something. I would pay any money to see that.’

  ‘You have no money,’ replied Nedham, with a satisfied contempt.

  ‘Aye, but I would lend it him,’ interjected George Tavener evenly. ‘And at no interest – to see you tangle with the Seeker.’

  It was seldom that Tavener was put out of humour, and a silence filled the room. It was Elias who broke it. ‘Damian Seeker would wipe him like shit from his shoe. He likes to keep his boots very clean, I’ve noticed.’

  Nedham lost patience with being the butt of their humour. ‘It’s information I want from him; I’m no more fool than you are, but Whitehall has gone very quiet on his whereabouts since he found a hundred-years-dead Dominican bricked up in Blackfriars. No one there claims to know anything about it.’

  The eyes of the coffee boy grew wide at this, until old Samuel flicked a cloth at him. ‘You get on with your work, now, Gabriel. I’ll not have Grace up half the night, listening to you wailing about dead monks and ghosts and all sorts.’

  Grace smiled fondly at the young boy, who was not to be daunted.

  ‘But I told you, Samuel—’

  ‘And I’ll tell you,’ said the old man with the best semblance of menace he could muster, ‘get out to that yard and fetch in more coal, and no more of your nonsense, or I’ll put you to Blackfriars!’

  ‘I heard about that,’ said the hatter. ‘Plague. They say the men that carried it away were in masks. Buried it deep out at Bedlam. I wouldn’t go near the Seeker for a while.’

  A draper next to him assured him with a shiver that he was not in the habit of going anywhere near Damian Seeker but added, ‘The apothecary Drake was called, I hear, to cast spells over the corpse.’

  ‘There you go, then, Nedham,’ said Elias. ‘Plague and spells. Exactly what you came looking for. Much better the people read about that, than about Cromwell trampling all over their parliament again, just like Charles Stuart used to.’

  Nedham drained his dish of coffee. ‘Mock if you want, Ellingworth, but I’ll be the one writing your gallows speech when you’re dangling from a rope.’ And then he was gone, back out into London, to sniff out whatever malodorous tales he thought might divert the masses, please his masters and line his pockets.

  ‘Strange, all the same,’ said Tavener after Nedham had left, ‘that Seeker should be involved in the disposal of some old corpse like that in the first place. You’d have thought Thurloe would have enough on hand for him, with the Stuarts and their friends so busy polishing their sabres. But they obviously won’t let Nedham have the merest scrap of what it’s about.’ He called over to the counter: ‘Has he said anything to you about it, Samuel?’

  ‘The Seeker?’ The old soldier paid close attention to the coffee pot he was polishing. ‘Hasn’t been in. Don’t say much when he does come in in any case. Takes his drink, gets a warm, goes out again. Doesn’t bother me with his business.’ He held the pot up to a candle, to examine his work. ‘Makes for a nice change,’ he murmured, smiling.

  *

  It was many hours later, and far into the dead of night, that Shadrach Jones at last snuffed out his candle. It had been a long enough walk from Birchin Lane, and he had been distracted by almost every shadow.

  The last echoes of the lecture had faded, Elias’s eager talk and the good-humoured exchanges of the coffee house drifted away, leaving Shadrach with the reality of the thing.

  He had heard of the Seeker long before he had ever set foot in Dove Court, or in England, indeed. Old soldiers who had fought with him spoke well of him, but those who had crossed him, who had fallen foul of the Protectorate, who had found as much to flee in Cromwell’s England as they had in Charles Stuart’s, would utter some oath when his name was mentioned and pray that God would keep him on the other side of the ocean. The Seeker found people, they said. People who did not wish to be found. Shadrach had thought it might be a simple thing to hide himself in this teeming city in a way it was not possible to do in that sparsely peopled world, that vast wilderness of New England. Here, you might hardly notice a man who passed within two feet of you; there, you knew soon enough if another had passed within two miles. He had been here little over two weeks, enjoying the anonymity in his schoolmaster’s role, far from the likelihood of ever being spied by George Downing. He had even begun to make acquaintance, friends perhaps, of like mind but little note, and to do what he had come here to do unremarked upon, unnoticed. And as the hour that evening in Dove Court had stretched, he had even begun to wonder if he might find something more in this city of London; but then the heavy step had been on the stair, and into his world had walked Damian Seeker.

  Seven

  At Crutched Friars

  The morning was crisp when Seeker woke. He stretched out a hand to ruffle the head of the ever-hopeful hound. ‘We should be out in the woods, boy, should we not, catching hares, eh? Hares to send to Maria’s pot, while that shiftless brother of hers lets her starve.’

  At the mention of the name, the dog had stood up, alert, but Seeker shook his head. ‘Not today, boy. She’ll have to shift for herself today.’ He looked at the animal, and a thought came to him. ‘Besides, I have other work for you.’

  In a little time, they had left Knight Ryder Street and were on their way to Crutched Friars. The matter of Anne Winter could be got over and done with before he started on the more important business of the day. The dog kept its distance, always ten yards or so behind, when Seeker was on the business of the state. It was only when his master walked through London as a carpenter that the animal knew he might acknowledge him. Only the apothecary Drake, who lived not far from Seeker, beyond the street door of the old Physicians’ Hall, had noticed. ‘You fear that people will think you soft, Seeker, to see your attachment to the beast?’

  Seeker had shaken his head. ‘I fear they would harm him, if they should learn he was mine.’

  He should have read the watchers’ report on Anne Winter and her household before setting out there. Usually he would have done, however great the inconvenience of going first to Whitehall to call it up before having to turn around and make for the eastern reaches of the city again. But this wasn’t Thurloe’s business he was on, no matter of import to the state but a petty domestic concern. In truth, Seeker wasn’t certain why he’d agreed to look into it at all. For peace. To get Anne Winter away from George Downing. For the missing girl’s sake. For the feeling, which he could find no logic in, that he owed the woman something. It suited him better, though, to believe – and he would record the purpose of the visit as such – that it was because despite the best efforts of Thurloe’s best men, they had not yet managed to get an agent behind that green door at the top of Crutched Friars to see what this most blatant of Charles Stuart’s adherents had on hand there.

  He’d gone up Fenchurch Street and down Northumberland Lane to come to the house by way of Poor Jewry, rather than pass by Gethsemane at the other end. He would get this thing over and done with first, before he set his mind fully to the business of Carter Blyth. The hound settled himself at the corner of Northumberland Lane, where a chestnut-seller with his brazier was setting up for the day, and Seeker rapped loudly with the wrought-iron knocker on Anne Winter’s door. There was something familiar in the base of the knocker: the Baxton crest. When he stepped back and cast his eye over the fine batten-work panels of the door, he noticed the new-looking hoodmould
above the doorhead – the same crest again, carved into the spandrels on either side. Her father’s crest, from their seat in Oxfordshire that had been forfeit to the Commonwealth. Cromwell, out of love for John Winter, had gifted the place to his widow on Winter’s death, but if the Protector could show tenderness of feeling, Anne Winter had not. She had sold Baxton before her husband was buried, and instead bought this house, here, almost in the shadow of the city walls and Aldgate. She would have done better to return to Oxfordshire and live quietly, as so many of her sort now did – there were plenty that had advised her so; but no, she had instead brazenly set herself up here with her father’s crest. No one, not Cromwell, not Thurloe, and not Seeker, yet knew why.

  He heard footsteps and then the door swung inwards away from him. It wasn’t a housemaid nor a footman who was revealed there in the dim light, but a rat-like man of some indeterminate age between thirty and forty years, enquiring what his business was.

  ‘My business is with Lady Anne.’

  ‘I didn’t ask who it was with, but what it was,’ intoned the rat, the voice unwavering, a hint of something foreign in it.

  Seeker was not accustomed to having to ask twice. ‘Fetch your mistress,’ he said. He caught the slightest flinch of the man’s hand as it went for the dagger hanging from his tan leather belt. Seeker had him by the throat and against the inner corridor wall before it could get any further. He heard a woman’s voice, descending the stairway towards them. ‘Dear Lord, Seeker, can you not come through a door like any other man? Would you let my steward go!’

  ‘Steward?’ said Seeker in disbelief. ‘I had thought him rather a thief or assassin crept in here to do his worst.’

  He let go his hold of the man’s neck, and was rewarded with the look of an enemy made for life.

  ‘Oh, Richard’s worst would be very bad indeed, I grant you, but he is most certainly no thief,’ said Anne Winter, emerging into the light from the bottom of the staircase. She was dressed for a morning at home, like the wife of a wealthy merchant, who had no greater concerns than the supervision of the kitchen and the counting of linen. He did not believe the picture for a minute.