The Black Friar

by S. G. MacLean

  ‘You have come to join us at last, Captain?’

  ‘Join you?’ responded Seeker levelly, the drawn-out Yorkshire inflection registering his disgust. ‘No, we’re not here to join you. We’re the four horsemen of the Apocalypse.’

  Harrison’s accustomed sneer left him and his face hardened. ‘For the great day of His wrath is come.’

  ‘Aye, it has.’ Seeker moved Acheron forward a few paces, as did the other three mounted officers, allowing their men to move around them and begin encircling the Fifth Monarchist troops in the centre. ‘Tell your men to drop their weapons.’

  Harrison shook his head. ‘Not today. The day of His wrath is come.’ Then he raised his arm and gave the command to fight.

  It was chaos. Seeker’s men had only got two thirds of the way round the yard and those of Harrison’s men not yet encircled quickly ran through the gap, some managing to get hold of pikes or axes from the weapons cache on the cart, before launching themselves at the Protectorate troops from behind. Those Fifth Monarchists left in the middle attempted to fix bayonets without stabbing their own comrades, or threw down their muskets and rests in favour of swords, daggers or fists. Beside Seeker, Daniel Proctor swung off his horse and plunged into the fray where one of their men was being set upon by three of Harrison’s. The other two mounted guards similarly dismounted, but Seeker kept his seat while Acheron, as well accustomed to the din and violence of battle as his master, stood firm beneath him.

  Through the clamour, Seeker could hear the increasingly determined barking of the hound, and was glad that Nathaniel had had the sense not to let the beast out. But his focus was on Harrison. His eyes had never left him from the moment the major-general had risen his arm in command to his men to fight, and from his elevated position, Seeker traced the man’s movements as he too attempted to reach the weapons cart. There was no sign of armour, other than helmets worn by a few of the men, amongst the Fifth Monarchists, and Harrison’s emerald coat and scarlet breeches, his hat embellished with white ostrich feather, marked him out as clearly from his dun and buff-attired troops as if he had been emitting tongues of fire. Even when he looked to have disappeared behind a knot of fighting men, a flash of red or green, a blaze of white feather, would pinpoint him exactly. Seeker held Acheron’s rein very light, ready for the moment to dismount. But when Harrison at last reached the weapons cart, Seeker instantly saw it was not to avail himself of pike, axe or halberd, but to raise himself to an elevation almost equal to that of himself. With great agility, Harrison swung himself atop the cart and found his place and balance. His hand was immediately at the leather belt at his waist and the flintlock pistol that hung there. Seeker carried no such weapon out on the streets of London, but in the time it took Harrison to unhook gun, ready the cock and begin to raise his arm, finger on trigger, over the seething clashing crowd to point the weapon directly at him, Seeker’s arm had found the horseman’s hammer that habitually hung at his saddle. Hefting the weapon in his hand, he swung it up and hurled it with all the precision three decades of hunting in the woods and moors and ten years of killing in the name of Parliament and Republic had taught him. The world around seemed to slow as Harrison continued to raise his pistol, his finger beginning to squeeze on the trigger, while Seeker’s hammer, steel pick on one side, four-sided head on the other, spun inexorably through the air to find the firing arm of the major-general. As the spike of the pick ripped through emerald velvet to tear into the muscle of Harrison’s upper arm, his hand dropped the pistol and he staggered backwards to topple from the side of the wagon.

  Seeker was already on the ground and running, driving his way past knots of writhing arms, legs and steel, pushing aside whatever human obstacle staggered into his path, regardless of whether it was one of the men of Gethsemane or his own lobster-helmeted, steel breastplated soldiers. As he was buffeted by the careering backs, arms and heads of the combatants and his senses assailed by the smells and taste of a rising mix of male sweat, blood and heat, Seeker could feel the exhilaration of his men as they got hand to hand, knife to knife with men who, unlike the printers, lawyers and newsmen they habitually rounded up, fought back.

  The clash of steel and clatter of wood as anything that might serve as a weapon was brought to bear on an opponent was drowning out the sound of the dog now, the crying of children, the habitual noise of the world outside Gethsemane, and had rendered it instead the courtyard of some Royalist stronghold or walled Irish town. As he jettisoned a final barrel standing between himself and the cart Harrison had fallen from, the thought flashed through Seeker’s mind that Cromwell would have relished this.

  It was simpler to reach Harrison by the underside of the cart than by clambering over it, and so Seeker dropped to his belly and scrambled the last few yards to where the stricken figure in dark-stained emerald and scarlet was struggling to get himself to his feet. Harrison had begun to pull himself up by the uninjured arm, but blood loss was causing his knees to buckle under him. Seeker stretched out his hand and pulled the man’s ankle from beneath him, bringing him crashing once more to the dirt. As Seeker dragged himself out from beneath the cart, Harrison turned a dirty and bloodied face towards him. His lip was cut and grit and dirt from the ground had stuck to the blood smeared from mouth to ear. He tried to push himself up once more on his good arm. But Seeker was by this time standing astride him and instead pulled him up by the hair, the long, luscious locks of which this most puritanical of Republicans was so proud. He turned the man round to face him.

  ‘I told you to tell your men to drop their weapons,’ said Seeker.

  Somehow, with a mouth full of blood and dirt, Harrison managed to engineer a spit.

  Still holding his captive by his right hand, Seeker pulled back the fist of his left arm and smashed it into the side of Harrison’s face. The man slumped once more to his knees like a half-filled sack. Seeker dragged him onto the cart, stood up on it himself and picked Harrison up as if the man were a scarecrow he was about to mount on a pole. ‘Drop your arms,’ he bellowed. ‘It’s over.’

  It was some time before the realisation spread through the seething mass in the courtyard that the Fifth Monarchist leader was beaten, and even then some of his men fought on, but however much they might call God to witness their struggle against the forces of the wicked, their weapons and lack of armour were no match for what the elite of Cromwell’s guard had to offer them and eventually Gethsemane was more like a cattle market than a battle scene. With an efficiency pleasing to their captain, Seeker’s men soon had the last of the Fifth Monarchists rounded up, tied in irons or put on makeshift stretchers, to be shuffled up to the Tower, or trundled there on carts like so much meat. Broken and bloodied weapons, some helmets of varying manufacture and origin, and scraps of torn clothing littered the dirt and cobbles of the courtyard. For minutes after the last of the struggles stopped, the pigs in their pen had shrieked as if on their way to Smithfield, and there was not a hen left anywhere.

  Women and children had been few and far between out in the yard when the Protectorate troops had arrived, and had swiftly barred themselves behind the doors of their almshouse cottages. Slowly, bolts were pulled back, and they began to emerge once more, Elizabeth Crowe at their head. ‘What have you done?’ she demanded of Seeker, in a voice loaded with hatred.

  ‘God’s work,’ he said, throwing the words at her over his shoulder as he strode to the caged cart in which Harrison had been placed. Harrison was Seeker’s particular responsibility – no Tower for him, yet, but one last interview with the Protector, one last plea from the man he had served so closely and for so long, that he should come back into the fold, or at least pledge to live peaceably and not disturb the Commonwealth. Seeker didn’t think the chances of success in that very high, but he was not required to think in this matter, just to do as he was bid, and transport his prisoner, his so highly ranked prisoner, back down the river to Whitehall.

  ‘You think this is all we have, Seeker?’ Harrison had man
aged to drawl as he was bundled into the cart that would take him down to Custom House quay. ‘You think we have nothing but our swords and the strength of our arms? That this is all we do to prepare for the coming of the Lord?’

  ‘Tell it to the Lord Protector,’ Seeker said, as he slammed shut the cage door and signalled for a guard to padlock it.

  ‘Oh, I will,’ said Harrison, ‘and more.’ He nodded then to Elizabeth Crowe, who was still standing at the front of the community’s group of women, guarded on all sides by armed men of Seeker’s troop. A smile more chilling than anything Seeker had seen on the battlefield was around her mouth. She started to move her lips in response to Harrison. ‘Mene, Mene, Tekel Upharsin.’ The words were taken up in a chant by the rest of the women.

  Some of the soldiers started to look a little nervous; Proctor looked to Seeker. ‘What are they saying?’

  Seeker’s voice evinced contempt. They were the words Thurloe had told him were daubed on the walls outside the Banqueting Hall on the night the attempt had been made on Oliver’s life after ‘Belshazzar’s Feast’. ‘Nothing Oliver hasn’t heard before,’ he said to Proctor. ‘ “God hath numbered thy kingdom and finished it; thou art weighed in the balances and found wanting.” And so it goes on. Let him take that to Oliver and see what response he gets.’

  ‘And what about the women?’

  Seeker looked up from wiping Harrison’s blood from the pick end of his hammer. ‘Take them to Bridewell, and put out a search for the daughter, Patience Crowe. Put her in the Fleet prison when you find her.’

  ‘I want my daughter with me,’ spat Elizabeth.

  ‘She’ll be with you on Tyburn Hill,’ said Seeker. He’d clearly given as much time as he planned to Elizabeth Crowe. Turning to Proctor he said, ‘Gag her, she’s spread enough of her foul pestilence around these streets already. She’ll have more than enough occasion to talk when the interrogation committee get to her.’

  ‘What should be done with the crone?’ asked Proctor, indicating the open door to the small room from where the prophetess, visibly weakened and in her sickbed, watched them with red-rimmed eyes and loathing on her face. She spotted her moment, and called out in a surprisingly strong, grating voice, ‘Remember, Major, tell Cromwell the Lord has spoken: Daniel eleven, thirty-two.’

  In as far as he could, Harrison inclined his head towards her, before looking at Seeker and encompassing all Gethsemane with his words: ‘Such as do wickedly against the covenant shall be corrupt by flatteries: but the people that do know their God shall be strong and do exploits.’

  Seeker looked past Harrison to the old woman watching him malevolently from her bed. He addressed his remarks to Proctor, but never once took his eyes from the woman.

  ‘Exploits. For me, I would throw the old witch in the Thames and be done with it, but the Lord Protector is over-merciful. The streets are polluted enough without we carry her through them. Leave one of the older girls here to tend to her.’

  Proctor selected a child of about twelve, with resentful eyes set in what might have been a pretty face. ‘You see to her, and if you step one foot out of this door without permission, he will run you through.’ He was pointing at a bored-looking guard whose lack of relish at being selected to stand sentry in this place was written on his face.

  The last thing Seeker had said to his men before they had entered Gethsemane that day had been to leave the boy Nathaniel Crowe be, and so they had. Goodwill Crowe’s son, the dog still at his side, had watched the unfolding of events from the window of the small cell he had shared with the man he had known as Gideon Fell. He had been there, watching his father drill with the other men, when the government troops had arrived, and only now did he slowly emerge from his doorway. His face was ashen, and he did not look at Seeker, hardly seemed to be aware of him, as he slowly walked towards the cart onto which his father had just been loaded. It had been Daniel Proctor who had taken Goodwill down, bested him at last. Seeker’s sergeant was as dishevelled as any still standing in the courtyard, the sleeve of his coat ripped and his nose bloodied and swollen, but there was a light in his eye, the light of a good fight, that Seeker had not seen there in some time. When Nathaniel reached the cart he stretched out his hand towards his father, whose wrists were shackled and pinned behind his back. Goodwill inclined his head, gave the boy a brief smile, then turned away, his face filled with sadness. Something in the exchange between father and son – the look on Nathaniel’s face, the brief shake of Goodwill’s head – gave Seeker hope. There was love there, somewhere.

  *

  Nathaniel felt like his stomach was burning. He’d been taught years ago, at the end of a birch switch wielded by Elizabeth, not to cry. But that wasn’t what stopped the tears now. He would not shame his father, whatever else might happen.

  The Seeker was walking over to him, but Nathaniel didn’t want to speak to him. He didn’t care about the rest of them, would be glad to see them gone, but he couldn’t believe the Seeker was taking his father. He felt the dog tense at his side, but it made no move towards the captain.

  Seeker seemed to guess what was in his thoughts. ‘I have to take your father with the rest, Nathaniel, but the Lord Protector is a man ready to forgive, and I know your father was a loyal soldier for many years. I will speak for him, but he must spend some time in prison, whatever the outcome.’

  Nathaniel nodded and looked up at last. ‘He – he is only harsh for my own good, because of Mother.’

  It looked as if the Seeker was about to say something in response, but he didn’t. Instead, he gestured to the guard on sentry duty. ‘I’ll have much to do in the coming days, but I’ll return here when I can. The man on guard will be told you are free to come and go as you wish, and can have messages sent to me if need be.’ He’d half turned away when a thought seemed to strike him. ‘And should you need any other help of any sort, and have not the time to get a message to me, the house on Crutched Friars, with the green door—’

  ‘Where Charity used to be?’

  Seeker nodded. ‘That’s the one. Go there. The woman is misguided, but not wicked – I think she has a good heart somewhere – and she will help you if you need it.’

  Seeker was about to turn away when Nathaniel haltingly spoke again. ‘I – I thought I saw Charity today, only for a moment. But she was taller, and she didn’t move like Charity. Perhaps it was her mother.’

  ‘Charity doesn’t have a mother,’ Seeker said. He looked at Nathaniel strangely. ‘Do you mean Lady Anne Winter, the woman in Crutched Friars?’

  Nathaniel shook his head. ‘No. She looks nothing like Charity.’ He had Seeker’s full attention now.

  ‘Had you ever seen this woman before?’

  ‘It was the woman Gideon was afraid of, the woman from the Black Fox. She was here this morning, at Gethsemane. I saw her hurrying out of the gate just after Major-General Harrison started the drills.’

  Harrison and the few other prisoners remaining in Gethsemane were becoming restive: it was time for the Seeker to be gone. This would have to keep for later. ‘Tell no one of this, Nathaniel. All will be well, and I will return as soon as I can.’

  Nathaniel nodded, his face solemn, his eyes trying not to betray the confusion raging behind them. Seeker put a firm hand on his shoulder. ‘All will be well.’

  *

  As he watched the men and women being taken away, Goodwill and Elizabeth among them, Nathaniel wondered if he should have told Seeker about Patience. But Seeker didn’t like Patience, Nathaniel remembered, and he probably wouldn’t care where she was either.

  Seventeen

  Lady Anne Winter’s Salon

  Lady Anne Winter woke to the beginnings of the light. The heavy ochre brocade curtains of her bed were open summer and winter, and despite the sharpness of the January air, she kept her shutters open too, so that the diamond-leaded panes of her bedchamber window were often frosted over by morning. The night had been peaceful at last, after all the commotions down at the old d
rapers’ almshouses they called Gethsemane. Richard had told her the Fifth Monarchists there had been rounded up by the Protectorate guard. When she had ventured her opinion that this was a good sign, he had countered that in this England, the only good sign would be the epitaph carved on Cromwell’s tomb.

  It might be long enough before that event occurred, but there was much that might be done to hasten it along. Anne Winter sat up against her pillows, and pulled her knees up, resting her chin on her hands. She felt that excitement she had been used to feel on the morning of her birthday, waiting for her brother to tumble through the door to be followed by her scolding nurse, her little dog to jump on her bed, where he was not allowed to be on any other morning.

  But today was not her birthday. Today she would play her part in something of greater import than any other she had accomplished in her thirty-two years. She could hear the household stirring below, thought of Charity, the quiet graceful spaces where the girl had been. It had been twelve days now since Seeker had been here, and still nothing from him. Better that Seeker should not take too much interest in her home and household these next few days anyhow.

  Downstairs, in the small basement storeroom he had requested as his own, Richard too would be waking, if not already up and making himself ready. He didn’t join with the other servants in the kitchen, would not join with her in parlour or hall, but that was his choice and she would not attempt to dissuade him of it. He was not a servant, in the common run of things; neither was he a person of rank, and he resented any who pretended to overlook that fact. His preparations would be simple, she imagined: his knife, the letter, a purse no fuller than it was required to be, nothing as elaborate as those she must make, but her role today was to be a performance, an entertainment to puzzle and divert, whilst on his, with no allowance for error or unforeseen delay, everything might hang. She closed her eyes, preparing to pray, but she didn’t pray. She would not pray for Richard, would not concern herself with Richard’s mission – all that would be in his own hands. She must give full attention to her own part, and see that she played it well.