He examined the plastered walls, the space between window and shutter, the roof beams. Nothing. Then he looked at the table. A well-enough made thing, good English oak with solid pillar legs, and an armchair of similar manufacture with a worn russet upholstered seat, that must once have been fine. Seeker wondered from what height the Ellingworths had fallen, or had they just slipped, generation by generation, to their current plight? His attention was taken by one of his men, reaching for the old, dusty files that lay on the highest shelf, wobbling and cursing as one of the legs on the joint-stool on which he was standing gave way beneath him. His fellow guard, securing the leather ties on the first crate laughed, but Seeker didn’t. The leg shouldn’t have given way so easily, nor the stool broken as it had done. He stepped past the cursing man on the floor and picked up the stool.
‘Mortice and tenon,’ he murmured. He could almost have admired Ellingworth. He would never have suspected him capable of something so ingenious.
‘Sir?’ asked the soldier by the crate.
‘The joints. Legs are secured to the seat by means of a tenon joint drilled through and fixed with willow pegs, but you see here, this tenon is far too short, and the willow pegs are just ends, when they should be a good inch and a half long.’
His two men exchanged dumb looks with one another.
‘It’s for show,’ explained Seeker at last. ‘This stool is not for standing on or sitting on at all.’ He pulled away the remaining legs with ease, holding up the one part of the stool that was left. ‘And this is not a seat, but a box.’ Walking over to the small window, gauging the weight of the seat in his hand, Seeker held the piece up to the light and began to examine it carefully. He soon found that the bottom panel slid away, to reveal a cavity inside. And inside the cavity, secured by two wooden runners, was a small book, like a child’s commonplace book. Seeker eased the book out and glanced only briefly at its plain hide cover, before opening it to the first page. No title, but a date, in handwriting he had come to know well. This was Elias Ellingworth’s journal.
‘Should we put that in the crate too, Captain?’ asked one of the men.
Seeker flicked through the pages, let his eyes run over some of the words. ‘No,’ he said slowly. ‘This should be kept separate. I’ll give it to Mr Meadowe myself.’ He put it into his leather bag and secured the clasps as his men secured the second of the two crates. ‘We’re finished here.’
Downstairs, Meadowe had finished questioning the motley assortment of lawyers, students and younger sons of would-be-gentlemen from out of town who made up the inhabitants of Clifford’s. They all carried about them an air of either having seen better days, or having risen from humble beginnings and still intending to rise – making do with Clifford’s Inn until they should catch the right eye. None of them had been inclined to risk their position by covering up for Elias Ellingworth to the officers of the Council of State.
Meadowe was already putting on his gloves, turning towards the courtyard that would take them back out onto the street. ‘Wildman’s been in here to Ellingworth’s chamber half a dozen times these last two weeks. If anyone knows where he is, it’s our lawyer friend. We’ll have to snatch this Sparrow from his perch.’ The young Secretary had an uncharacteristic spring in his step as they walked out into the brightening morning. ‘Come, Seeker. Dove Court, is it not?’
*
Maria was singing. He could hear her as they turned in opposite the Angel and began to ascend the stairway to the Ellingworths’ attic room. It was the song he’d sung to her, his voice low and quiet, breathing it almost into her ear, as they’d lain, her head on his bare shoulder, in the early hours of the night; the song he used to hear his mother sing as they travelled through green woods and over the moors of the north. The words weaved their way down the stairway, almost to the rhythm of his men’s feet on the stone beneath them: Though I am a country lass, A lofty mind I bear, I think myself as good as they, That gay apparel wear.
On the second verse, though, the words faltered, stopped, and all Seeker could hear was what Maria could hear: a troop of the guard of the Council of State, coming to arrest her brother.
They stopped at the top landing, and at a sign from Meadowe, Seeker struck the door three times. ‘Open, in the name of the Lord Protector!’
There was only the smallest of delays, and he had raised an arm to knock a second and last time, when he heard the latch go up and the door opened inwards in front of him. She was in her simple brown woollen gown, one of the only two he had ever seen her in. She had not had the time to dress her hair, and it lay loose about her shoulders, as he had seen it a few times before. Elias was seated at the table, one boot on, the other only half-buttoned, a packed saddlebag at his feet. Facing Seeker, Maria’s eyes took in the situation in a moment, and the brief glint of hope he had seen in them vanished almost instantly.
He didn’t afford her any preliminaries. ‘Step aside, Mistress Ellingworth; our business is with your brother.’
‘Then take it to Clifford’s Inn, and he will attend you there, when he has had his breakfast.’
It was Philip Meadowe who replied to her, his voice clear and full of authority. ‘Oh, we’ve already been to Clifford’s Inn, mistress. Now step aside, before I have the captain arrest you.’
It didn’t take long: the attic in Dove Court gave up nothing but Ellingworth’s own latest scribbled pages and the lawyer himself, clearly partway through making preparations for a journey – the saddlebag revealing a clean shirt, half a loaf of bread, a lump of hard cheese and a cold leg of boiled fowl, the rest of whose carcass remained on a board on the table, and a purse filled with as much coin as Seeker thought Elias Ellingworth must possess.
Meadowe fingered the goods with distaste. ‘Where can you be going to, in such haste and at so early an hour, Mr Ellingworth?’
‘I am going to my chambers.’
Seeker snorted. ‘With the contents of your larder and every penny you own?’ He leaned closer to Elias, ignoring the glare from Maria’s eyes. ‘You’re going to warn Wildman, aren’t you?’
The denial was hardly out of Elias’s mouth when Daniel Proctor appeared at the top of the stairs. ‘Someone beat us to it. Old fellow on the ground floor says there was someone here not twenty minutes since, banging on the door and shouting about the raid at Clifford’s.’
‘Where’s Wildman?’ said Seeker.
Elias smiled. ‘Out of your reach, Seeker, that’s for sure.’
Seeker’s patience deserted him. He turned to Proctor. ‘Cuff him. Take him to Newgate. Get Colonel Barkstead to send someone from the Tower, if he hasn’t told you where Wildman is by the time you get there.’
‘No!’ shouted Maria, stepping in front of her still seated, benignly smiling brother.
‘But yes,’ interjected Meadowe. ‘And if you continue to impede the Protectorate guard you’ll find yourself in the Bridewell.’
By the time Elias was being marched down the stairs, Seeker’s guard had finished gathering up his papers and emptying out the chest that contained almost everything the Ellingworths owned that wasn’t already out on display and in use. The bells of St Mary-le-Bow rang out for eight o’clock.
‘I am to report to Mr Thurloe at eight thirty. I had better get on my way,’ said Meadowe, checking his own pocket watch. ‘Continue with the raids, and bring me any intelligence you have on Wildman’s whereabouts the minute you have it, Seeker.’
Meadowe left, and Seeker sent his remaining men to wait at the bottom of the stairs. In the sudden emptiness of the desolate attic, he could hear Maria’s shallow breathing.
‘You could have stopped this,’ she said, dully.
‘No,’ he said, stooping to right a chair that had been knocked over by one of his men as they’d dragged Elias away. ‘I could not.’
‘You could have warned us sooner.’
He spun around, truly angry. ‘No, Maria, I couldn’t. What do you believe I am? Why do you believe I do this, day in, day out? F
or entertainment? Because there is nothing else? The world you and your brother think can exist cannot. Man is not capable of the liberty you so loudly demand for him. You think all men to be like your brother? Have you been out in the world, Maria? Seen what the world can be? The brute will always rise to the surface without a greater power to curb it.’
‘And you would be that power?’
‘I would be its arm, I know that I can be.’
The anger went from her eyes to leave something more desolate.
‘And what about what I know that you can be?’
He surveyed the wreck of the room, the upturned chest, the floor strewn with clothing and bedding, the blue-painted ginger jar of which he had known her to be so fond that had got knocked and broken by the careless swing of a soldier’s arm. He felt lead in his stomach. When he spoke, he couldn’t look at her.
‘I should never have shown you.’
He turned and began to walk down the stairs to where his men waited on the street. He was only halfway down when he heard her begin to sing again, quiet, almost tuneless, the song his troop had interrupted only half an hour before: ‘A garland of the fairest flowers shall shield me from the sun.’
‘Should we put a watch on the place, Captain?’ asked one of his men as he emerged at the bottom.
Seeker looked back up the stairs. ‘No. There’s nothing more for us here.’
*
In Kent’s Coffee House, Grace was reading through once more the note that had come just as her Uncle Samuel had been closing up the night before. She looked at Gabriel and shook her head. ‘You will not do.’
The boy bristled. ‘Lady Anne would not have asked for me if she did not think I would do. She says I make the best coffee to be had in London, save for Samuel himself.’
‘And so you do, but she would have you serve it too, to her guests in her parlour.’
Gabriel drew in a breath of outrage. ‘As I do here, from morning to night, and never a complaint to be had!’
Grace smiled. ‘But, Gabriel, our poor coffee room is not the parlour of Lady Anne Winter; even the grandest of our customers has not consorted with the King, as have the guests Lady Anne has invited for tomorrow.’
The boy’s chin was up. ‘I should think not, not after what that lot did, and to Samuel’s leg, too. I’ll not bow and scrape to any Royalist. And our Mr Tavener is rarely away from Whitehall, to advise with the Lord Protector himself!’
‘That’s true. Gabriel, I love you for your loyalty, but if you should go to Lady Anne’s today to this coffee party she has planned, bow and scrape is precisely what you will have to do.’
Gabriel looked a little abashed. ‘But I will not mean it.’
‘I know that. But goodness, child, it is your clothes! We will have to borrow you a suit from one of Mr Tavener’s clerks.’
Samuel had made his way over to them from stoking the fire under the first cauldron of the day.
‘Boy looks all right to me,’ he mumbled. ‘Besides, we cannot let him get too close with those people. I like the lady, and I’ll tell it to anyone, but a Royalist’s a Royalist and such a face to plot on a woman I’ve rarely seen.’
Grace left on her errand of borrowing the clothes and Samuel was whistling to himself, an old marching tune, when the street door opened. He looked up, ready to tell whoever it was that they would not be ready to serve for an hour yet, but then he stopped. At the top of the stairs stood a woman he hadn’t seen in over ten years, but whom he would never mistake.
Samuel stood up as straight as his ruined leg would allow him. ‘Dorcas.’
She smiled and started to walk down the steps into the coffee room. ‘You remember me then?’
‘How could I not? That red hair and those green eyes to break a man’s heart. Half of Fairfax’s army was in love with you, Dorcas Wells.’
‘Hmm. In love with the sound of their own voices, if I remember right,’ she said. ‘But not you, Samuel.’
‘Ah, me, I was too old for love even then, and a soldier for soldiering’s sake, though I’d go to war now if General Fairfax were to ask me.’
‘I wouldn’t say that too loud in these days, Samuel.’
‘Where’s the harm? The general’s taken himself back up to Yorkshire, tends his gardens, reads his books. Not interested in all the power, like Old Nol.’
‘That may be, but there’s plenty would like Fairfax to come back, plenty in the army are none too pleased with our Lord Protector Cromwell.’
‘I didn’t think to hear such talk from you, Dorcas.’
‘Nor will you. I’m just saying what I hear in my place, the Black Fox, around the streets. You must hear the same.’
Samuel grunted. ‘There’s that much talk and noise in here I stopped listening long since. But, here, where are my manners? You take yourself a seat there and I’ll get the boy to fetch you some chocolate, or will you take a dish of coffee?’
‘I’ve not come for that, Samuel.’
‘Aye, but you shall have something anyway. I’ll wager whatever’s brought you to my door at this hour of the morning will take more than a minute’s telling.’
Dorcas relented, and sat down on the chair he’d insisted on pulling out from behind the counter, while he roared at Gabriel to look to his work while he still had it.
‘So, tell me,’ he said at last, as he settled himself across from her.
Dorcas took a deep breath. ‘When you were in the army, Samuel, did you ever know a man named Carter Blyth?’
‘Carter Blyth? Can’t say I did. Which regiment was he in?’
‘Manchester’s Infantry, under Crawford.’
‘Ah.’ He nodded. ‘We were with them at Marston, but there wasn’t much time for making acquaintance that day and I never knew any Carter Blyth.’
Samuel saw the disappointment in Dorcas’s eyes. ‘What’s this Carter Blyth to you then, my dear?’
She looked away. ‘He did me a wrong once, him and others.’ Then, catching the look on Samuel’s face she said, ‘No, not like that, never laid a finger on me, nothing of that sort, but he did me a wrong all the same, and he knew it. I saw it in his face then and I saw it in his face again the day six weeks ago he walked into the Black Fox. But he wasn’t calling himself Carter Blyth then, he was calling himself Gideon Fell.’
Something, a recognition of the name from somewhere, stirred in Samuel and Dorcas Wells saw it.
‘You know him?’ she said eagerly.
Samuel shook his head. ‘No. But I heard that name somewhere before, I’m certain of it. I can ask around, though, discreet like, see if anyone knows where he’s to be found.’
Dorcas’s voice was bitter. ‘Oh, he’s been found already, but too late.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Samuel, very much trying to.
‘He’s dead.’
‘How can you know that?’
‘Damian Seeker told me.’
‘The Seeker? But . . .’ Samuel looked pained. ‘This is too deep for me.’
‘He knew Carter Blyth had been to the Black Fox, but called him by his other name, Gideon Fell. I told him I didn’t know him, Samuel – got my own reasons for that and better not to ask, the way things are in these days – but I did. Carter Blyth thought he could help me, right the wrong of those years past, said he might have discovered something but wasn’t yet sure. Now someone has murdered him, and I only have one chance to find out what it is he thought he knew.’
Samuel, seeing her desperation, said, ‘And what is that chance, my dear?’
‘A boy. A simple boy he had with him. Well, a man, perhaps, by the height and size of him, but he had the face of a boy, and the manner too. Kindly, simple. He wore an apprentice’s cap. Someone said they thought they had seen him about Aldgate sometimes, but there aren’t many I can ask, Samuel, not many I can trust not to ask me too many questions in return, frighten him off if they know him.’
Samuel nodded, confirming something to himself. ‘I think I know such a lad.
I think he has been in here.’
She leaned forward, her eyes alight, grabbed his hand. ‘Samuel!’
‘Ah, but wait, my dear, wait, and I shall see if I can tell you more. Gabriel!’ he called to the coffee house boy.
‘Yes, Samuel,’ said Gabriel, coming quickly over, losing no time in his curiosity to know what this strange early morning visit might be about.
‘That lad the Seeker had in here the other night, the one he took to talk to in the private booth there . . .’
‘Nathaniel?’ ventured Gabriel.
‘Aye, that was the boy’s name, Nathaniel. What do you know of him?’
‘He’s a weaver, lives up at Gethsemane with the Fifth Monarchists. But a bit soft – no harm in him and the boys on the street all like him. Mother’s a witch.’
‘Gabriel!’
‘Well, she’s one of them preacher-women. Shrivel your heart just listening to her. Funny thing, though, that big dog that used to run after Maria all the time trails everywhere after him now. They’re always out and about together, on the streets or out on the earthworks beyond Houndsditch, I hear, and the dog won’t let no one near Nathaniel.’
Samuel might have ventured some views he was forming on the ownership of the dog, but Dorcas Wells was already standing up, retying the ribbon on her green velvet cloak, picking up her embroidered suede gloves.
‘You’re not going up to Gethsemane now, are you, Dorcas? Those Fifth Monarchists are a fierce lot, and your lovely hair alone’ll be enough to set them off. Best speak to the Seeker again.’
‘No, I don’t want the Seeker to know. Don’t you worry about me, Samuel. There’s nothing they can do to me. I’ll find the boy when he’s by himself somewhere, just him and his dog.’
The Black Friar Page 17
