When she’d gone, Samuel was lost in his thoughts awhile, and Gabriel tidied up quietly behind him. When Samuel finally leaned on his stick and heaved himself up again, Gabriel asked, ‘Who was that, Samuel?’
‘That? That was a beautiful woman. Followed her husband to the wars, stayed on after she was widowed.’
‘A camp follower, then? I thought they’d be different.’
‘Dorcas is different,’ Samuel said. ‘Mind you,’ he added, shuffling off to fetch a roasting pan, ‘they’re all different, but a woman must eat, and there was little enough to go round in them days.’
But Gabriel wasn’t finished. ‘It’s just – I think I saw her before somewhere.’
‘Up Bishopsgate, the Black Fox, that’s her place,’ said Samuel, without turning around.
‘No, it wasn’t there.’
The coffee house door opened again, and talk and thoughts of Dorcas were soon forgotten in the measuring against Gabriel of a suit of clothes newly borrowed from one of George Tavener’s clerks.
Sixteen
The Good Woman of Gethsemane
Elizabeth Crowe felt the fear creep over her like a wave come to shore. It was the worst of times, the very worst of times, for this to have happened. Patience must know she could not leave Gethsemane at a time like this: the moment they had waited upon so long was almost arrived. Messengers had come from the localities – the Midlands, Lincolnshire, Staffordshire; from Nathaniel Rich’s regiment in East Anglia and from Vavasor Powell’s people in Wales. All was ready and they waited only on the word from Gethsemane that London had risen for the Lord.
But where was Patience? Where in this godless city had she spent the hours of darkness, seen the dawn? Goodwill had no comfort to offer Elizabeth, had rebuked her: the people needed to hear her, to be comforted, fired by the word the Lord had given her. It was not a time to consider the concerns of flesh and blood – when had family been anything to Elizabeth? He had held up to her those words of Christ: ‘He that loveth mother or father more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.’ Had she not often said it to him? Chastised him for his softness towards his child, that idiot child, a judgement from the Lord? But Patience was different. Patience had a work to do for the Lord, and Patience was hers.
She dismissed Goodwill’s rebuke and tied on her cloak, to go out into town. No one else would challenge her, and she would be back in time. Her face was set, and few thought to importune Elizabeth Crowe as she went briskly from Aldgate through Cornhill and Cheapside towards St Paul’s, and then down Creed Lane. On the streets, one or two faces she knew from her preachings dipped their heads reverently as she passed; she accorded them a brief nod, her mouth a line, discouraging further greeting or attempt at conversation.
Passing the bottom of Old Jewry, she had stepped into a doorway as she had seen Damian Seeker emerge from an alleyway onto the street. Dove Court was there. She remembered a tale Patience had told her, a few days since. She had slapped her daughter there and then, for bringing home a lie, but Patience had sworn it was no lie, no gossip, but the truth: the Seeker, and the lawyer Ellingworth’s sister. Patience knew things, she was told things now, that might be of great use to them, and so Elizabeth had believed her at last. Elizabeth had wondered how she might make use of the information, but the look on Seeker’s face was one of thunder, not of a man coming from a lovers’ tryst.
There were many other soldiers on the streets too, and Elizabeth became careful, looking behind her often to see that she was not watched or followed. By the time she reached Blackfriars Lane, the mass of Bridewell looming closer and closer, Elizabeth became conscious of the thumping of her own heart. Anger at Patience’s disappearance had long since turned to fear. Perhaps it had begun as fear. Patience was slipping beyond her control, and Elizabeth didn’t know quite when it had started to happen. What had begun with them as a work for the Lord had become something else, and Elizabeth had less and less of a grasp on what that something else was. She should not have trusted her daughter so far, she should have reasserted her control, but she hadn’t, and now Patience was missing. The fear of it weighed heavy at the pit of her stomach, and Elizabeth couldn’t remember the last time she had felt fear.
The word had not been long in finding its way onto the streets from Kent’s coffee house to the gates of Gethsemane: children had been taken from their homes, their place of service, and never seen again. Damian Seeker, they said, was looking for them, but however great her fears, Elizabeth would not ask Seeker to find her daughter. As she got deeper into the damp tangle of lanes and the maze of old buildings, her lips began to move in imprecation, her eyes scarcely flickering, her voice low and doom-laden, as if she were threatening God himself.
By the time the bells of Bridewell across the Fleet tolled a mournful nine, Elizabeth Crowe understood that God was no longer listening to her. She had come to the right place, but she had come too late. The rag in her hand, the linen torn from a headdress that she herself had watched her daughter sew, told her all she needed to know. She had warned Patience, but Patience had not heeded her. So be it. Elizabeth dropped the piece of torn linen back onto the dirt in which she had found it and began to make her way back to Gethsemane.
*
Nathaniel had been out early, running the dog at Houndsditch, keeping out of the way. ‘Stay out of the way’; ‘Get out of my way’; ‘Keep out of my way’. He’d heard it all a dozen times before breakfast. Many who had passed through Gethsemane these last few months had returned; the almshouses were full, and Nathaniel knew these men were here for more than prayer. Major Harrison had addressed them last night, late, and Elizabeth had prayed long over them, until Nathaniel could see one or two of them weary and swaying on their feet. Nathaniel didn’t know how anyone could think of sleeping when his mother spoke, such had been the relish with which she detailed the torments promised in the Book of Revelation. Nathaniel had not slept all night for visions of two hundred thousand lion-headed horses issuing from the bottomless pit to breathe fire and smoke and brimstone on those not marked with the seal of God. He had been glad when the hour had come at last to rise from the cold bed of his lonely cell.
As he and the hound came back through the entranceway into the courtyard of Gethsemane, he couldn’t see his mother anywhere. Usually, Gethsemane was a happier place for Nathaniel when Elizabeth was gone from it, but not today; her absence from their breakfast table had made his father angry, and Goodwill had been angry already, because of Patience.
No one had seen Patience since before supper last night, no one but Nathaniel. The light had been fading into a final greyness before the dark. Nathaniel had been watching a strange stone, but when Patience had stepped almost silently from the wool store, the stone had fled: a rat.
The movement had caught her eye, and she’d noticed Nathaniel and the dog. She hesitated a moment before turning and walking towards them. She bent down low, to reach him where he was sitting on the ground. The dog snarled, but Patience was not frightened. She brought her face very close to Nathaniel and said, her teeth almost gritted, ‘If you tell anyone where I am going, I will poison your dog.’
‘But, I don’t kn-know where you’re going, Patience,’ he had said.
‘One word that you have even seen me, and I will mete to it a slow death of the greatest agony. You know that is no empty threat.’
Nathaniel nodded. He knew very well. He had seen her once, slowly wringing the neck of a sparrow, for no other reason than that he had taken pleasure in watching it hop about. Another time she had trapped a butterfly, held the terrified creature out towards him, and as he’d reached out to take it, laughed before grinding its beautiful wings to mush between her fingers. But what Patience didn’t know was that there had been no need to threaten him: he would never tell where he had seen her go, or who he had seen her on the streets with. Even this morning, with his mother frantic, his father angry, and the old prophetess declaiming o
n the fate of Jezebel, Nathaniel had not told. He didn’t lie, but they hadn’t asked him the right questions. The truth was, he didn’t know where his sister was, and no, she had not told him where she was going. She hadn’t had any bundle with her that might have food or clothes in it, she hadn’t looked like someone leaving without any thought to return. They asked him nothing else. Which was as well, for Nathaniel didn’t care if Patience was never found at all.
*
Dorcas Wells had left the instructions for the morning with her cook. She had no worries there; she’d seen Will Tucker feed half a regiment on sheep’s innards and a chicken carcass, and a man that could stab a Royalist scout through the eye without giving off the stirring of his pot was not likely to let a kitchen boy slip out of his sight long enough to fall into whatever danger had befallen Isabella, not now that they knew to be watchful.
It would be no small thing for Dorcas to walk into Gethsemane. She knew their sort, those Fifth Monarchists. They’d thought they would have it all their way, once the Royalists had been defeated and the king gone. God’s Kingdom here on earth. She knew about the workings of God’s Kingdom, the Law of Moses, on earth. Hell, more like, Hell for anyone that wished a life worthy of the name. They hadn’t reckoned on Old Nol taking a liking to power, though. Good for him – Dorcas wouldn’t have a word against him in the Black Fox. As long as he was there, Lord Protector of whatever he willed, the world would be properly settled; Dorcas’s life would be properly settled. She knew the rules and she kept to them, and Damian Seeker and his crew made sure everyone else did too, and the likes of her, and Samuel with his coffee shop, and the young men that ran up and down the road to Gresham and talked of understanding the workings of the world, could just get on with their lives and leave God to others. Dorcas wasn’t afraid of much, but the sight of that almshouse gateway filled her with terror. She remembered what her husband used to say to her whenever she’d been frightened. ‘What’s the worst that can happen?’ Dorcas knew now, because the worst that could happen had happened long ago; whatever awaited her through that archway could not come close to it.
Dorcas steeled herself, straightened her shoulders, and went through the gates, but the sight that greeted her was something much different from what she’d expected. No prayer meeting, fervent psalm-singing, not even the thump and rattle of the shuttle across the loom in this place of weavers, but a muster, a muster of armed men, and Thomas Harrison, the most fervent of the Fifth Monarchy men, leading them. Dorcas knew enough to know that no such muster should be taking place in the almshouse courtyard of a group of weavers in the city of London. They were marching on their commander’s words, wheeling, fixing bayonets, their backs to her. The certainty, the cold venom in Harrison’s voice as he barked out his instructions, sent a chill through her, as did what she could see through the opened door of one of the almshouses: a stockpile of arms, hundreds of them. Dorcas knew her guns from her days following the army. She wasn’t close enough to tell exactly what they were – English- or German-made, both probably – but she could see enough to know there were matchlocks, flintlocks, muskets and pistols. The men drilling in the yard were already wearing powder belts, but at Gethsemane was an arsenal for a far greater number of men. Closer to where she stood, beneath the canvas that had been partially lifted from a cart in the corner, she could see things that made her stomach lurch for the memory of what she had seen such do: cavalry swords, quillon daggers, old pikes, crossbows, axes and maces that could rip out a man’s innards, pierce his skull or gouge out his brains.
Dorcas was not a fool: today was not the day to do what she’d come for. She stepped quickly backwards into the shadows of the archway, but not before she knew she had caught the eye of the boy, the big, soft boy Carter Blyth had had with him at the Black Fox, and who was standing, with a huge dog by his side, watching not the infantrymen, but her. And he wasn’t watching, he was staring. Without knowing why she did it, Dorcas put a finger to her lips and shook her head. The boy inclined his head, as if he understood, and Dorcas slipped back out of Gethsemane, unseen by any but Nathaniel.
Out on the street, she thought quickly. What she had just seen was no simple training exercise, but preparation for insurrection, and one that was imminent, by the look of it. But who to tell? The watches of the city wards, the Trained Bands, how could she be certain they wouldn’t be among the insurrectionists? Who was to be trusted? Dorcas hurried along Hart Street and up Mark Lane until she came, breathless, to Fenchurch Street. She hailed a passing carter bringing coals from the docks at Wapping to Cheapside, and pulled herself up to sit beside him, careless of the black dust. ‘Leave me at the top of Birchin Lane,’ she said. It had been the same everywhere, since Dorcas had been thirteen years old: if she asked a man to do something, he would do it, apart from that one time, ten years ago, and Carter Blyth was dead now, anyway. The carter cracked his whip and his pair of horses took up a fine pace through the throng of traffic and people on Cornhill, stopping, in what seemed like no time at all, outside the door of Kent’s.
Dorcas was down and through the coffee house door in a moment. The girl behind the counter stepped out and came towards her.
Dorcas looked around her, distracted. ‘Where is Samuel?’
‘My uncle is at the market on Grasschurch Street. What’s wrong?’
‘I need to get a message to Damian Seeker, and quickly. I need a swift messenger who can be trusted.’
The skinny boy of about thirteen who’d served Dorcas chocolate the last time she’d been at Kent’s emerged from behind the storeroom door. ‘I’ll find the captain, and you can trust me, Mistress Wells, for he does himself.’
Grace was hesitant. ‘You know he said we should not let you out in the streets alone.’
‘But I can run like the wind,’ pleaded the boy, ‘you know it – there’s not a single boy in the city runs faster than me, not from Aldgate to Farringdon and all in between, not one. No one will catch me.’
Grace looked to Dorcas Wells. ‘Is it really so important?’
Dorcas nodded.
‘Fetch pen and ink, Gabriel, and we will write this message down.’
‘No,’ Dorcas shook her head. ‘You must tell him: at Gethsemane, on Aldgate, Thomas Harrison is drilling sixty men and has arms for two hundred more.’
She didn’t need to say it twice: Grace knew who and what Harrison was, and so did Gabriel. He had his apron off and Samuel’s old buff coat and his cap on in seconds.
‘Lose no time,’ said Grace, ‘and make sure you give your message only to Captain Seeker, or one of his men.’
Gabriel nodded, almost bursting with the importance of his mission, and was gone before Grace could tell him to tie up his coat.
*
Since coming away from Dove Court, they had carried out raids on two printers and another pamphleteer known to consort with the radical Wildman, but neither the brutal efficiency with which their work had been carried out nor the ease which the terrified printers had given up all they knew had been enough to assuage Seeker’s mood. He had almost broken his fist smashing through the door of the second printer’s shop before his men could ram it, and still it had not helped. After what had passed at Dove Court, he could barely contain his rage. ‘Should I ask to be allowed into Ellingworth’s prison cell,’ he had said to Daniel Proctor, ‘don’t let me. I would kill him.’
It was when they’d just finished smashing the presses of a known Fifth Monarchist printer off Ave Maria Lane that the ragamuffin coffee boy from Kent’s on Birchin Lane had come careering through the crowd of awestruck bystanders to declare that he had an urgent message for the Seeker. One of the guards had tried to stop the boy, but Seeker had ordered him to let him pass. A minute later and a messenger had been sent on horseback, at full speed to Whitehall, to order reinforcements to Gethsemane. The set of Seeker’s face as they turned and made for Aldgate told all in his path that there would be no compromises.
They could hear the sounds of Harr
ison’s drill before they even reached the end of Hart Street. Their way was clearer than expected because word had begun to seep onto the streets about what was on hand at Gethsemane, and those with no wish to die that day or end it in one of the Protectorate gaols had left off their lawful business and usual social congress and retreated to their homes. In a very little time, Seeker and his leading men had rounded the head of Woodruffe Lane and were drawn up before the gates of Gethsemane. Seeker raised a hand to bring his men to a halt behind him, and signalling to the other three mounted men of his guard, passed below the archway into the court.
Harrison’s men had just begun a musket drill. Seeker remembered how when first he had joined Parliament’s army he had practised it and practised it, all twenty movements, until he could have performed it in his sleep. Some of the other men had laughed, for a while. And then there had been the first battle, the carnage at Marston Moor: none of them had ever laughed at Seeker again. And long after he had been assigned to the cavalry, Seeker could have gone through that drill as well as any sergeant on the field. Not like these men before Harrison – those at the back knew what they were doing, but Seeker could see that already the front three rows were out of time. Their timing disintegrated altogether when they noticed the four mounted guards of the Council of State come to a halt beneath the archway of Gethsemane. Harrison was standing at their head, with his back to the entranceway. His tirade of reprimands was brought to an end by a signal to the major-general from one of his men.
Slowly, Harrison turned. His eyes didn’t rest on Seeker, or Proctor, or the other two mounted guards, but on the phalanx of men who had come to a halt behind them, beyond the archway and out in the street beyond. Harrison was counting: Seeker could see it in his eyes.
Evidently still weighing the odds, Harrison turned his attention to Seeker.
The Black Friar Page 18
