The Black Friar

by S. G. MacLean

  ‘These ones haven’t simply gone missing, they’ve been taken – one a few hundred yards from your own door. Are you trying to tell me you haven’t heard of this?’

  Her eyes shifted away from him. ‘I had heard something of it, but they were younger than Patience, who is not a child, and has a family and a home, where these did not.’

  ‘You know a great deal about them, it would seem.’

  This time Elizabeth Crowe’s mouth achieved what Seeker thought might pass for a smile. ‘I do not join in the gossip on the streets, but I hear it. This London you have made is not safe for children on their own.’

  ‘Nor ever was,’ replied Seeker. ‘But these were not children on their own, no more than was your daughter. Where has she gone, Mistress Crowe?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘And what were you doing searching around Blackfriars two days ago, almost from first light?’

  Now he had her. For the first time, Seeker saw something other than contempt in Elizabeth Crowe’s eyes: he saw fear.

  ‘Well?’

  She examined her hands, her voice as quiet as he had heard it. ‘I thought she might have been there.’

  ‘Why?’

  Silence.

  He took a breath, summoning his patience. ‘I’ll ask you again.’

  Still she would not look at him. ‘Because that’s where the other one was found – the man who called himself Gideon Fell, who also disappeared from Gethsemane. They found him there, did they not? Bricked up in a wall at Blackfriars?’

  ‘Aye,’ said Seeker, ‘they did. And you have known from the beginning that your daughter had not been arrested by the Protector’s forces.’

  Elizabeth Crowe’s head whipped up and she almost spat her response at him. ‘I have not! Don’t tell me your interest in Gideon Fell is what it would have been for any other travelling weaver looking for a roof over his head. You’ve had your eye on him! Do not ask me to believe Cromwell’s men have not been mixed in this somewhere.’ She clenched her fists and held her eyes shut as she tried to master her breathing. Calmed at last she looked at him again. There was calculation in her eyes.

  ‘Is Gethsemane cleared out?’ she asked him.

  ‘Of most of its vermin. The madwoman Wilkins has been left there to fester, and a girl to see to her and the young children.’

  ‘And my husband’s idiot son?’

  ‘Nathaniel is well.’

  ‘Is he still there?’

  Seeker nodded.

  Elizabeth’s lip twisted. ‘A stay in Newgate might have put some sense into him.’

  Seeker felt disgust. ‘He has sense enough, and goodness, which at Gethsemane is in short supply.’

  ‘A fool’s a fool, Seeker, and you know nothing of goodness,’ she said, and then she would not answer him one thing more. She didn’t maintain silence though – silence would have been better. Throughout his questions, even as Seeker spoke, Elizabeth Crowe intoned one chapter of Scripture after another, dwelling on the tribulations of the righteous and the terrors awaiting the ungodly, until the guard on the door thought her mouth must run dry, and long after Seeker had given up and left the room.

  But as he descended the steps from the warden’s apartments, through the festering corridors of Bridewell, its dank courtyards and back out under its gate and into the light, Seeker was certain of two things: Elizabeth Crowe truly did not know where her daughter was, and Elizabeth Crowe was scared.

  *

  Patience was cold, but she was used to cold. The wasting of coals was not approved of at Gethsemane, and kindling hard to be got most of the time. Here, in this house, there were hearths aplenty, but he had told her she must not light any, for fear of attracting attention.

  Patience had never set foot in such a place, never, in her seventeen years. They had passed by them, of course, at times when they had been travelling, her mother speaking of camels and the eyes of needles, her father enumerating the injustices, the encroachments afflicting the common lands, calling down God’s judgement on those who had broken the backs of the poor. Patience had paid lip service to their words, murmured her agreements, but in her heart she had always known that it was in places such as these, not travelling dirt roads or working her fingers to the bone carding cloth, spinning, doing her mother’s endless bidding, that she belonged.

  She left what he had told her was the ‘great parlour’ of the house, which for all its grandeur was a cold place, heartless in its way, and began to ascend the great staircase to the floor above. Patience was used to moving quietly. She was careful to make little sound opening the doors of the rooms on the first floor, lest someone else should be there, in spite of his assurances, but all she heard were echoes. The small room he had said she might have for herself, for now, was in the attic, where servants usually slept three to a bed, with neither drapes at the windows nor matting on the floor. It reminded Patience of her cell at Gethsemane, and although she had thanked him for it, she did not like it.

  He hadn’t come back yesterday, as he had promised he would, and the light of today was growing dim. She reasoned that she would have plenty warning of his coming, every noise in the house echoing through its three floors, amplified so that it sounded louder in her head than did the habitual drone of London that usually enveloped her. There were six doors leading off from the gallery. Patience tried them all in turn. The first was evidently a man’s room; empty, it held nevertheless a lingering smell of men, of man, of tobacco smoke, boots, steel, horse. Not him, though; it did not smell of him.

  One after another she opened the doors, revealing rooms, some fine, some plain but furnished well. The room which pleased her best was a woman’s room – for all that Patience had spent her seventeen years denied womanly things, fripperies, vanities, silks, laces, tapestries, perfumes, ointments and ornament, she knew this to be a woman’s room.

  Opening the doors of the large oak wardrobe, she brushed her hand through the winter dresses and riding habits hanging there. Her fingers lighted on a heavy green silk bodice shot through with metal threads and lingered a moment. With a little further searching she came upon the skirt that matched. The rough old bloodstone ring she had taken from her mother looked crude and grubby against the silk. She pulled it off her finger and let it fall to the floor. Patience had never worn anything that her father had not woven, nor she or her mother sewn – rough, serviceable woollen dresses in brown or black, bleached linen collars and tuckers, headdresses that heightened rather than masked the plainness of her face. Patience took a fine linen smock, also embroidered with silks and metal threads, from a chest she had opened, and put it on. Then she set to work on the bodice and skirt, agile fingers soon mastering the many hooks, ties and buttons of a rich woman’s dress.

  Patience appraised herself in the glass. She was not so foolish – she was not foolish at all, in fact – to believe that even now, like this, she might appear beautiful to him, not like the others. But then the others were not here, they would not be here, and not even he could think them lovely now. Besides, no one could have the power over him that she did, for she had the letter. Patience watched herself turn in the long Italian looking glass, ran a finger across her own bare neck and wondered where in this new box of treasures he had put her in she might find a suitable adornment.

  *

  Nathaniel and the hound were coming in from their afternoon run out by East Smithfield. The day was fading and it would soon be dusk, later by far than he was usually permitted to be out of Gethsemane, but there was no one there to chastise him for it now. The prophetess would often squawk some intimation of doom his way, but he was learning not to pay too much heed to the sharp tongue of the bedridden crone. If Seeker could remove Elizabeth Crowe, he could certainly remove Mother Wilkins, and he had signalled his desire to do so more than once.

  Suddenly, the dog tensed. Nathaniel turned and saw coming towards them down the Minories a horseman: it was Seeker. Both man and horse looked windswept, exhilarated. See
ker slowed and then brought the animal to a halt before dismounting and allowing himself to be half mauled by the joyous dog.

  ‘I needed to get out of the city, clear my head of its odours,’ said Seeker. ‘We have been riding out on Hackney Downs; I’d wager he can smell it on us – it’s one of his favourite places.’

  ‘He has missed you,’ said Nathaniel.

  ‘And I him, but I have my duty to attend to and he his. I hope he guards Gethsemane well.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Nathaniel, taking Acheron’s bridle as Seeker occupied himself with the hound. ‘But I don’t think he likes it there. He prowls the courtyard constantly, and old Mother Wilkins keeps her door shut at all times now, for every time anyone opens it, Dog is waiting outside it, watching and growling.’

  Seeker looked quizzically at the hound. ‘You don’t like the tenor of the old witch’s preaching, eh? Good boy, neither do I.’

  *

  Back at the almshouses, Nathaniel soon had a fire going in the courtyard pit while Seeker fed and watered the horse. The old woman’s door was, as was usual now, closed, and the girl who had been left to attend to her careful always to close it again behind her when she went back and forth between the prophetess and the gaggle of small children who had been left in her care, all housed now in the Master’s lodging that had been Goodwill and Elizabeth Crowe’s quarters.

  ‘Where does your sister usually sleep?’ asked Seeker once they had the fire going and the girl had fetched them some ale.

  Nathaniel nodded towards the prophetess’s cottage. ‘In the room next door to Mother Wilkins. Patience pretends to reverence the old woman, but I can see in her eyes that she despises her.’

  ‘Hmm. And you have still had no word from your sister?’

  Nathaniel turned his beaker of ale in his hands. ‘I’ve heard nothing. No one has. I asked Margaret there, and she says even Mother Wilkins doesn’t know where she is.’

  ‘Are you afraid for her?’

  Nathaniel shook his head, and continued to avoid Seeker’s eye. ‘Patience will be all right. She’s a liar and a thief and cruel, and will be a match for whoever might mean her harm.’ He looked up at Seeker now. ‘I don’t wish her harm, I just don’t want to see her again. It’s better here without her.’

  Seeker regarded the boy a minute. There might be something buried deep in there, amid all the cruelties Patience Crowe had heaped upon her brother, that would point to where the girl was. ‘Tell me what kind of lies she told, Nathaniel.’

  Nathaniel scuffed his boots in the dirt of the courtyard. ‘All the usual sort – my parents would ask her to pass some instruction to me, and Patience would claim she had, and watch me be punished for disobedience when the thing was not done, when she had never given me the message at all. At other times she would steal from the larder – an apple, or an egg perhaps, and say she had seen me do it.’

  ‘And your parents always believed her?’

  Nathaniel’s lip dropped. ‘Mother did. I don’t think Father always did, but he rarely said anything. Sometimes, if they weren’t watching, he’d not whip me as hard as he might have done. Patience usually did watch though; she liked it.’

  Seeker swallowed down his anger: this was not the time for that anger – it would keep. But Nathaniel was holding something back from him.

  ‘What other lies did Patience tell, Nathaniel?’

  Nathaniel drank down more of his ale.

  ‘She started missing the preachings, saying she felt ill, and Mother would excuse her – it was a thing unheard of. If you could stand up, you went to the preaching, and even Mother Wilkins would be carried there when she felt too weak to walk. There was nothing wrong with Patience.’

  ‘And yet your mother excused her?’

  Nathaniel nodded. ‘One night I had to leave the meeting room early, to fetch the bread and ale for the people who had come to hear Mother preach. It was usually Patience’s task, but Patience had said she was unwell, and so she was given a cordial of ginger and sent to her bed. But when I was going across the courtyard to the kitchen, I noticed the light burning in Patience’s window – she was standing by it, and taking down the hood of her cloak. I knew she hadn’t been in her bed, but out in the streets somewhere.’

  ‘Did you challenge her about it?’

  ‘Not then,’ said Nathaniel glumly, ‘for I had the bread and ale to fetch and there would have been a great deal of trouble if I’d come in late with it. I told her the next morning that I knew she had been out.’

  ‘And how did she respond?’

  ‘She threatened to black her own eye and then say that I had hit her if I told anyone of it.’

  ‘So she didn’t deny she had been out, then?’ said Seeker.

  Nathaniel was miserable. ‘She laughed about it, mocked me that it was so easy for her to get out of listening to Mother’s sermons, to do as she pleased.’

  ‘Did she tell you where she’d gone?’

  ‘No, but I noticed that she did it more and more often.’

  Seeker turned his mug of ale in his hand as he considered this.

  ‘Was this before Gideon also stopped attending your mother’s meetings or afterwards?’

  Nathaniel didn’t need to think about it. ‘It was before. I . . . I think it was because of Patience that Gideon started to miss services too. I think . . .’

  ‘Nathaniel?’

  ‘I think he might have been following her.’

  Seeker had not expected this. ‘Did he tell you this?’

  ‘No, she did.’

  Seeker moved closer to the boy. ‘Why didn’t you tell me this before, Nathaniel?’

  His face was flushed and tears were brimming on his lashes. ‘Because she said horrible things, lewd things about Gideon that I knew were not true. But I think the bit about him following her might have been true.’

  ‘What makes you believe that?’

  ‘I came into our room one day, the room that Gideon and I shared, and I found Patience there, searching through Gideon’s things. She was very, very angry, and said that he had stolen something from her. She said it was a book, and she wanted it back. But Patience never had a book, none of us has any book, save Mother’s Bible, that is kept in the meeting room, and that Father reads from at all our meals.’

  ‘Did she find the book?’

  Nathaniel shook his head.

  ‘And did you ask him about it?’

  Nathaniel’s reply was almost inaudible. ‘There wasn’t time.’

  ‘No time? Why not? When was this?’

  ‘That last day, when he came rushing in and wrote the hurried note and gave me the salt to leave at the Black Fox. I wanted to tell him that Patience had been searching through his things, but there was no time. After he left I looked in the secret hiding place he had that Patience had not found. The book was in there.’

  Seeker knew what was coming next, and spared Nathaniel the difficulty of telling him. ‘It was the book you gave me, the register of the school at the Three Nails, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Nathaniel, not looking at him, ‘it was.’

  *

  Acheron returned safely to his stall in the stables at Horse Guard Yard, Seeker wearily climbed the stairs to his own chamber near the Cockpit. There was a tension of waiting in the air – he knew without having to ask that the Rat had not yet been brought in. Meadowe was walking down the corridor towards him, a sheaf of reports in his hand. The man was a shadow. Seeker could not even tell at first if he had seen him, and had to speak his name twice before Meadowe answered. ‘Sorry, Seeker. I hardly know if I’m on my way somewhere, or returning.’

  Seeker nodded towards the end of the corridor from which Meadowe had just emerged. ‘Have you come from the Cypher Office, by any chance?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Meadowe, his face suddenly bright. ‘Yes, I have. And I am on my way to Dorislaus at the postal office. I think it possible our Royalist friends have overreached themselves.’

  ‘It is a habit of
theirs,’ smiled Seeker. Then he lowered his voice. ‘And Marvell?’

  Meadowe raised his eyebrows and breathed out a heavy sigh. ‘Confined to the Censor Office, and not best pleased.’

  ‘I’ll talk to him,’ said Seeker, ‘although for now, I have other business to attend to.’

  Closing the door to his room firmly behind him a few minutes later, Seeker unlocked the door of the small wooden cabinet set into the wall and took out the original register of the school at the Three Nails.

  He studied it once more, but nothing in it told him why it should have come into Patience Crowe’s possession. It seemed clear to Seeker that the girl must have got into the schoolroom at some point, in order to make the switch of the registers. What was not so clear to him was how, or why, she had done it. ‘Three,’ he said to himself, closing the book. Three young people, between childhood and adulthood – the schoolboy Edward Yuill, Isabella, the serving girl from the Black Fox, and now Patience Crowe – who had some connection to Shadrach Jones, were missing. He would have to return to the Three Nails, to question not Shadrach Jones, but the boys still in his care. It was too late tonight though – they would all be abed, and safe, Seeker hoped.

  Wherever Patience Crowe was, Seeker was beginning to think it might be she who held the key to the disappearance of the other missing children, and to the murder of Carter Blyth. He was also convinced that whatever she had done, she could not have not acted alone. Having locked the school register in the wall cabinet once more, Seeker picked up his helmet, put on his cloak, and snuffed out the candle that burned on his desk.

  Out in the corridor, he collared the first guard he came across. ‘Tell Mr Meadowe if he needs me, I will be found at Bridewell,’ and then he left for the city, leaving the pacifying of Andrew Marvell for another day.

  *

  Even in the warming glow of candlelight and the fire that had now been lit in the hearth of the warden’s room, Elizabeth Crowe looked no different than she had earlier, or indeed on any of the occasions that he had seen her: bloodless, humourless, as if the misery of the place originated within her rather than in the dirt and despair of her surroundings. Seeker had never seen a human being with eyes so dead, so devoid of life or compassion. He swore to himself that however the events of the next days or weeks might unfold, Nathaniel would not be left at the mercy of this woman.