The Black Friar

by S. G. MacLean

  A very little time later, a small and very frightened boy was standing before Seeker, who had taken the trouble to put back on the helmet he had removed on first entering the courtyard of the Three Nails. Shadrach Jones, almost as nervous as his pupil, stood a little to the side.

  ‘What’s your name, boy?’

  ‘John Dorward, Captain sir.’

  Seeker glanced at the two registers. The boy’s name was on both lists.

  ‘How old are you, John Dorward?’

  ‘I am nine, sir.’

  ‘And are you a good boy? A truthful boy?’

  ‘Y-yes, sir.’

  The child’s face was turning a blotchy scarlet. Seeker knew the thing would hardly take another minute.

  ‘And you have been at this school since Martinmas?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Good. So you can tell me what you know of Edward Yuill.’

  The boy, who had seemed to regain a little courage at the previous question, now looked terrified. He looked to Shadrach Jones, stared at Seeker, gulped, and said nothing.

  ‘Did you not hear what I said?’ asked Seeker.

  The boy gulped again, nodded his head.

  ‘And so you will tell me.’

  ‘I – I can’t,’ the child whimpered.

  ‘Speak up.’

  ‘I can’t.’ The tears were coming now, and the child, in utter misery, his face crimson, stared at his feet.

  Seeker removed his helmet, stepped forward, and gently raised the boy’s chin. ‘Who has told you that you may not speak of Edward Yuill, child?’

  Very quiet, and still not looking up, ‘William.’

  Seeker looked to Shadrach Jones, who went to the door leading to the parlour. He then bent down a little, to look into the young child’s eyes. ‘You have done well. You must always tell the truth, you understand?’

  The boy nodded, still a picture of utter misery.

  ‘Good. Now return to your classmates. You will get into no trouble for this.’

  The child ran for the door, almost colliding with Shadrach Jones and the tall, thin boy who was following him through the door.

  Seeker regained his full height and his demeanour changed completely. ‘What is your full name?’

  ‘William Godmanson.’

  ‘And who is your father?’

  ‘M-my father?’

  ‘It is a simple enough question. If he be not dead.’

  ‘No. My father is not dead. His name is Daniel Godmanson.’

  ‘I see. And has your father ever spoken against the Protector?’

  The boy blinked. ‘Never.’

  ‘Or for Charles Stuart?’

  The blinking became more furious. Seeker resolved to remember the name of Daniel Godmanson and have it looked into.

  ‘No,’ said the boy.

  ‘And you?’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Do you ever speak against Lord Protector Cromwell? For the traitor Charles Stuart?’

  ‘N-no. Never.’

  ‘Hmm. But you tell the younger boys to lie.’

  ‘N-no, I . . .’

  ‘You have told the others they must not mention Edward Yuill, have you not? That they must forget he was ever here?’

  The boy stared at him, then his shoulders slumped, and the truth of the accusation was written all over his face.

  Jones stepped forward. ‘Why did you do this, William? Who is Edward Yuill?’

  Seeker was not generally disposed to allow others to intervene in his interrogations, but he decided to let this one play out.

  The boy simply shook his head.

  ‘Come, William. This is no game. Who is Edward Yuill?’

  The boy bit his lip. ‘No.’

  ‘What do you mean “No”?’

  Again he shook his head. ‘I cannot tell you.’

  Now Seeker stepped in. ‘Oh, but you will, William Godmanson.’

  Again, the boy said, ‘I cannot.’

  Seeker appraised him. ‘Why?’

  The boy gulped deeply, looking desperately from side to side as if for some way of escape that might present itself. His voice was scarcely more than a whisper. ‘Because he said he would hurt the other boys too.’

  ‘Edward Yuill did?’ asked Shadrach Jones, not understanding.

  But Seeker understood. ‘Somebody took Edward Yuill, didn’t they, William?’

  The boy was desolate. ‘There was a note, addressed to me. It said none of the boys should ever speak of Edward again, or they would be taken too.’

  ‘Where is this note?’ asked Shadrach Jones.

  ‘It said I should burn it.’

  ‘And did you?’ asked Seeker with a sinking heart.

  All the child could do was nod.

  Eleven

  Dorcas Wells

  Dorcas watched the pig turn slowly on the spit. The smell would bring them from all ways: Austin Friars, the Drapers’ Hall, Gresham. Up as far as the Artillery Yard sometimes, if the breeze was right. The Black Fox was never empty. Dorcas knew how to run a good house; neither she nor hers would ever go hungry. And they all knew that, knew they would be all right with her. That was why she couldn’t understand about the girl. But Dorcas reminded herself that girls were not to be understood – many other things, but understood, no. She’d been a girl once, and foolish. So be it. Her girl would learn, or die. Dorcas, she had learned.

  They’d had to be on their mettle, these past few days though, with the closing of Parliament. The town was buzzing, the soldiers were everywhere: Cromwell didn’t much like the sound of what Parliament had to say. Stupid, they must be, thought Dorcas: he’d been telling them long enough what he expected them to say. Surely they didn’t think he’d had himself set up as Lord Protector so that they might tell him what he could do and what he couldn’t. They knew now the meaning of the Puritans’ freedom. Like Dorcas had found out, long ago. She’d learned, and she’d remembered, and Dorcas had been careful not to make one mistake since. Not until a month ago. She’d thought she’d made a mistake then; nothing had come of it, but still she was vigilant.

  She went to the store and reached to an upper shelf for a jar of apple jelly, preserved in the autumn. Apples from the orchard in Fisher’s Folly, out past Bishopsgate. She unlocked the spice cabinet and took out a small packet of cloves. They were running low. She’d need to send the boy to Leadenhall for more. Or maybe not. She’d go herself. It might be better to be out in the town, to hear what was going on, things that others might not pay proper heed to, rumours that might die for lack of interest before they ever reached the Black Fox, where they might be better understood. And the boy would be better kept under her sight, for now anyway.

  In the kitchen, she gave instructions about the spices. It was nearly dusk, and the tavern was starting to fill already, apprentices, lawyers and gentlemen stopping in on their way up to the evening lectures at Gresham, ward militias coming back from their exercises at the Artillery Yard or at Spittal Fields, ready for any unrest that should begin as darkness fell, needing their bellies filled for watching through the night; people heading out of the city, hurrying home across the fields to Hoxton, Hackney.

  Five minutes. She would have five minutes in her private room, up the stairs. Any in London, almost any, might have come through the doors of the Black Fox and found welcome, but Dorcas allowed no one into this room. She looked around, but something displeased her: a tassel on the cord tying back her bed-curtains had slipped, and the green brocade curtain hung loose. Dorcas put it right. Even in the heat of the summer, where warm breezes rather than cold draughts found their way through the wooden frames and past the shutters on the windows, she kept those curtains closed while she slept, remembering the years under canvas, where a tent provided her only shelter from all that might watch outside, in the night. She sat down on the room’s only chair, and pushed aside her walnut dressing-box, the better to contemplate the other object on the table. What to do about it; that was the question. She reached a hand out t
o trace its delicate lines, turned it, inspected it for the hundredth time for some clue as to where it might have come from. Nothing. She gave over her examination and, as she always did at this time in the evening, opened her casement and leaned out of her window to look out over London, breathe it in. She could take what she liked from this city, but she’d never take too much: only just a little more than enough. She watched the people making their way home up and down Broad Street, along the lanes to Bishopsgate or up to All Hallows for the evening service, some of them who’d scarcely been beyond the walls, others making themselves something new, striving with every step towards some better self, some secret goal. She stepped back, and just as she was about to close the shutters for the night, her eye was taken by one particular figure making its way up past St Peter’s and the end of Austin Friars; this one she knew, but couldn’t quite fathom. She’d observed him before, couldn’t help it – her eyes were drawn to him. Something about him awakened something in her she’d thought dead and gone with her husband on the field of Edgehill. She’d watched him go about his business, his movements sure, his face without doubt, utterly contained in himself and unswayed by what passed around him. But Dorcas knew to look closer at a man, and she wondered if he was truly as certain of his purpose as all the world who moved out of his way seemed to believe. This evening she noticed him first a long way off, a head taller at least than almost everyone he passed, and clothed almost entirely in black. He didn’t vary his pace, didn’t need to, and his eyes were fixed on his present purpose. For all the sight of him quickened Dorcas’s pulse, some things mattered more and she felt dread pass through her. Her mistake would not go unpaid for: Damian Seeker was coming for her.

  *

  An hour’s further questioning had got little more that was coherent out of William Godmanson. Edward Yuill had been the oldest of the boys at Rhys Evans’s school, and the one who’d been there longest. His father was overseer of a plantation in Virginia and his mother was dead. It had been understood that when his schooling was finished he would join his father. He had been a quiet boy, but gifted, too gifted, Dr Evans had said, when he had still been in his senses, to waste his life and talents in the godless swamps of Virginia. An Oxford College at the least should have been his goal. He had been a handsome boy too, William had added shyly. A few weeks before his disappearance he had taken to going out often by himself, saying he was walking in the fields beyond the school or at St Giles’s. William Godmanson had become curious, and eventually had followed him. He’d lost sight of him for a time, and when he saw him again, it was with a man in a hooded cape, who seemed to be teaching him archery. Edward had begun to go towards them, but the man, catching sight of him, had stood and held the bow in such a way as to leave no doubt that he meant to shoot directly at him. William had run straight back to the Three Nails, and Edward had soon appeared behind him, with a warning that he should never follow him again, nor tell anyone what he had seen. It was not long after that that Edward had disappeared. On the day of his disappearance he had walked out to the fields after dinner, as had become his habit, and he had not returned. In the night, the letter addressed to William had been pushed under the dormitory door of Rhys Evans’s school, warning him never to mention Edward Yuill again, and to instruct the younger boys likewise, for fear they might not live to regret it.

  And so neither William, nor any of the other boys, had ever mentioned Edward Yuill from that day to this. He’d known nothing of the register, which must have been taken and replaced that same night – it had always been kept in Dr Evans’s desk. He didn’t recognise the writing on the new register, and his description of the man he’d seen with Edward that day on Conduit Fields was wavering and inconsistent. Had he appeared to be scarred, burn-marked? William couldn’t say – he’d been too far away, and the man had kept his hood up. And this had all happened before Mr Jones ever arrived to teach at the Three Nails? Yes.

  Knowing there was nothing else to be had of the boy for now, Seeker had warned Shadrach Jones to bolt the doors and windows of the Three Nails securely, and not to let any of the boys wander abroad alone. Seeker had left Holborn a deal more troubled than he had been when he’d arrived, and the next few hours spent on raids on suspect pamphleteers and other such had seemed like honest business against whatever Carter Blyth had involved himself in, which became murkier by the minute.

  It was evening before he was able to pursue Blyth’s business again, and this time he was resolved to discover what had taken Carter Blyth, with Nathaniel, to the Black Fox, and what it was about the woman innkeeper that had so much discomfited Thurloe’s agent. He pushed open the door, in no mood for the kind of dissembling he’d had to deal with all afternoon. It was the same everywhere: he’d walk into an inn or tavern or coffee house and all fell silent. Good. It saved time.

  ‘Where is your mistress?’ said Seeker to the elderly man dispensing ale from behind the short counter.

  ‘Here,’ came a voice from behind him.

  She’d stopped halfway down the narrow wooden stairway that led directly from the upper floor into the tavern’s parlour. It was clear to him that she’d been standing there, watching him since he’d come in. He had a sudden feeling that he’d noticed Dorcas Wells around the town before, without knowing that he had. Nathaniel’s description had been accurate, as he was coming to understand it would be. She was a trim, well-built woman only a few years younger than himself – not yet forty, perhaps. Clean and strong-boned, her dark auburn hair showing only a little grey where it was pulled up under a plain linen headdress. Her dress was serviceable wool, dyed a dull rust, the shift beneath it well bleached. She had large, clear green eyes, and strong hands, like a farmer’s. She commanded her property with the assurance of any man, and he doubted that many customers troubled to get on the wrong side of Dorcas Wells more than once. Yet there was nothing manly to her, and it occurred, fleetingly, to Seeker that some might call her beautiful.

  If his arrival unsettled her, she didn’t show it. ‘You have the look of a man on business.’

  He nodded. ‘I’ll take a plate of that pork, though, while I’m here.’ He put some coins on the counter. Seeker always paid his way. Most tavern-keepers sought to gain favour by trying to refuse his money. Dorcas Wells didn’t.

  ‘Bring food for the Seeker, and ale,’ she instructed the pot boy. ‘Through here,’ she said, leading Seeker to a small room above her cellar. There were brooms in the corner, and a half barrel fashioned into a basin, in which a good number of tankards waited to be washed. Against a side wall was a stool, a deal table, and writing materials – where she did her accounts, no doubt. A door in the back wall led out to the tavern’s courtyard. The trap door to the cellar was open, the top of the ladder visible.

  ‘Dangerous, that,’ he said.

  ‘Useful,’ she replied.

  ‘And that?’ He pointed to the flintlock pistol hanging on the wall behind her. It looked to be of recent English manufacture, simple, with little embellishment.

  ‘Also useful,’ she said. ‘What do you want here, Seeker?’

  There would be no beating about the bush, then. Good.

  ‘What do you know of a man named Gideon Fell?’

  He saw just a flicker of recognition, of surprise, in the eyes of Dorcas Wells, and then saw her glance towards her pistol box.

  ‘I’ll ask again, mistress. What do you—’

  She cut him short. ‘I know no Gideon Fell.’

  A knock on the door was followed by the entrance of the pot boy bearing a tray with a wooden trencher piled with slices of fresh-roasted pork, covered in a spiced gravy and hot stewed apple. A large hunk of bread and a jug of ale were also on the tray the boy shakily placed on Dorcas’s work table. He had almost tripped over his own feet, in his attempts not to stare at Seeker.

  ‘Next to useless,’ muttered Dorcas. She pointed to the barrel of dirty plates and tankards. ‘Get that lot outside and washed. There’s hardly a clean dish in the house.’ />
  ‘I know, Dorcas, but since Isabella run off—’

  She fixed him with a look that would have frozen milk. ‘Just get it done.’

  The boy coloured, but held his tongue as he dragged his burden out into the yard.

  Dorcas Wells bolted the door behind him, and stood against it a moment, sighing, weary. She motioned to the stool at the table. ‘Sit, eat.’ Seeker could feel her eyes on him as he took a knife to the meat, speared it into his mouth. After he had had a few mouthfuls, she said, ‘Everyone’s jumpy tonight, with Parliament and all.’

  ‘Any trouble here?’ he asked.

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t allow any trouble here.’

  Wiping up some gravy with a piece of bread, Seeker considered the tavern keeper. There was something she wanted to know of him. Something in particular. Well, it would come if he left it long enough. He hadn’t eaten since morning and the smell of the pork had first reached him not far past the Drapers’ Hall. He had time. He took a draught of the ale and continued eating.

  She began to move around the small room, affecting to examine objects that could have been of no interest to her – a cracked flagon, an inkpot, a coney muffler hanging from the door. ‘So,’ she said at last, her voice more light than was natural, ‘who is Gideon Fell?’

  He swallowed down a hunk of bread drenched in gravy. It was the finest meal he’d eaten in a long time. ‘A dead man. Of no concern to you. If you didn’t know him.’ He looked up from his food to meet her intense look. ‘You’re sure you didn’t know him?’

  ‘I never knew any Gideon Fell.’ Another silence, then, ‘So what’s he to do with my tavern?’

  Seeker wiped his mouth and stood up. ‘Nothing, it seems.’

  He nodded down to the empty trencher. ‘More work for your boy.’

  Her face finally softened. ‘I’m too hard on him sometimes. Not his fault about the girl.’

  ‘What girl?’ said Seeker, starting to put on his gauntlets.

  ‘A girl I had helping me, Isabella. She’s gone now, and everything falls on Tom.’