Seeker slapped Marvell on the shoulder, ignoring Anne Winter’s look of impotent fury, and said, ‘Courage, my friend – you and I can surely tell an old length of cloth from a new one.’
Twenty minutes later, as the piles of gowns, shifts, bodices, sleeves, collars and cuffs laid out on the bed and floor of Anne Winter’s chamber grew ever higher, Seeker was beginning to regret not having brought Bridlington, or even one of the Protector’s daughter’s lady’s maids along with him. Marvell, however, had a better eye for the styles of women’s clothing than he, and only one ensemble really gave him pause for thought. There was a short linen waistcoat, a woman’s, scalloped at the bottom and embroidered with thick traceries of gold silk thread around flowers and berries of red and green, in an intricate pattern of knots and roses, paired with a red silk skirt with matching tracery. Marvell paused, laid out the garments together as if to picture the woman who might have worn them. He turned to Seeker. ‘These are over thirty years old, I would say.’
‘Exactly thirty,’ said Anne Winter. ‘They were my mother’s.’
Seeker didn’t quibble. They had struck him as familiar the moment Marvell had laid them out together. He remembered where he had seen him before – Anne Winter’s mother had been wearing them in the family portrait he had seen in her private parlour on the first occasion he’d been in this house. ‘Come,’ he said to Marvell, ‘there’s nothing here.’
Just as they were about to leave the room, the piles of clothing still on the bed and floor, Seeker noticed a button of mother-of-pearl hang loose on its white silk thread from a high-heeled cream velvet slipper.
Seeker picked up the slipper, fingered the button and the loose length of thread from which it hung. ‘Where is your sewing box, Lady Anne?’
‘What?’ She looked truly alarmed for the first time.
‘Your sewing box, where you keep your needles and threads and pins and the like for stitching and mending. When I called here two weeks ago, you had pricked your finger on the point of a needle. Where is your sewing box?’
‘I . . . I have none. I . . . it went missing at the same time as Charity left.’
‘Charity Penn was long gone before I ever set foot in this house. Do better.’
She shook her head, sat down, mindless of the cushion of silk gowns and lace she was crushing beneath her. ‘I . . . I have a few things on my dressing table there—’
Seeker walked over, picked up some trinket boxes, opened them. One was made of silver and set with mother-of-pearl, and inside it he found two needles and a dozen pins. He snorted with contempt. ‘Am I to believe that a woman so used to luxury relies on these?’ He tipped the needles and pins onto the dressing table, where they rolled towards the edge. ‘They would hardly serve for mending your handkerchiefs.’
Anne Winter watched the needles and pins roll, drop to the floor, her thoughts chasing them as if somehow they might hold the answer.
‘Perhaps the requisite implements are kept below stairs, in the servants’ hall?’ offered Marvell.
‘Oh, perhaps they are,’ said Seeker. ‘That would be likely enough, in a house such as this. Perhaps Lady Anne has simply forgotten.’
‘No, no,’ she said, more assured again. ‘It is just that I have ordered a new set from the cutlers on Ironmonger Lane, and they are not yet ready.’
‘What?’ said Seeker. ‘The girl has been gone weeks. Feeble, Lady Anne, for one of your reserves of duplicity. We will take this house apart.’
‘And you will not find anything,’ she said.
*
Two hours later, Seeker was like an angry bull whose patience was about to desert him. Marvell, having heard of him when in this humour but never before seen it, hadn’t ventured a word for nigh on forty minutes. They had searched through the whole house, from cellar to attic. They had lifted rugs, gone through trapdoors, inspected every cupboard for false backs, lifted every picture, every tapestry from the walls, in the search for hidden compartments. Only behind the new wooden wall panelling of Lady Anne’s dining parlour did they find some success, exposing cavities of good height but little depth, which she explained away as being for the hiding of valuables, although Seeker thought them ideally suited to the concealment of weaponry. Aside from that, nothing. The Rat’s room was as bare as a cell. The gardens and outhouses had been searched, the knot hedge in its middle dug out by two of the guards not quite managing to mask their disgruntlement. ‘I told you, did I not? I told you you would find nothing,’ said Anne Winter, standing at his side as he overlooked the whole garden from the vantage point of the first-floor landing window.
Her tone was too certain, and she struggled to hide a note of triumph. There was something in this house, and she had begun to relax too much because she had convinced herself now that he wouldn’t find it. What had he not seen, or not recognised for what it was when he had seen it? Seeker’s forehead tightened in frustration, but he had put off the matter of Ashpenaz long enough – he wouldn’t waste any more of his time on Anne Winter today.
Without responding to her, he turned and began to descend the stairs, calling to Marvell, who was examining Anne Winter’s dining hall a third time, to go outside and tell the guards there to give off their digging. Seeker had reached the bottom step when Anne Winter, still standing at the window, spoke.
‘I think you have overreached yourself this time, Captain. This farrago will be the talk of the taverns and coffee houses before you reach St Paul’s.’
He’d stopped where he was when she started to speak, and now he didn’t reply. He was hardly listening to her. He was looking instead at his left hand, which was resting on the plain ball finial atop the intricately carved square newel post at the bottom of the banister. It was new, the old, loose newel having been replaced since his last visit here. The Baxton crest had been carved at the top of each of four faces of the post, but the finial itself was a simple, rounded hand-rest atop a slim wooden disc with a pattern of stars. Seeker had seen such work in other houses, as grand and grander than this – no one went to the trouble of having so fine a balustrade carved only to top it with such a simple head. The head of the newel post on such staircases was reserved for the most intricate and elaborate of carvings. Seeker had seen wood-carved vases overflowing with fruit or foliage, minarets, moulds of a patron’s favourite hound, but never, on such a fine stairway, so simple a rounded lump of wood. More strange was that anyone should have gone to the trouble of marking on the wooden disc on which it rested so delicate a pattern of stars. Seeker looked more closely. There were six small, carved wooden stars altogether, and each had a number of small dots, no bigger than a pinhead, leading from the centre to one of its points. The number of dots in each point of the star was different. Seeker looked at the newel post to his right, at the other side of the broad bottom step. Again, beneath the simple rounded hand-rest was a wooden disc decorated with six small carved stars. Again Seeker stooped a little, to examine them more closely. There were no dots on any of the points of these stars. He put his palm over the rounded hand-rest, closed his fingers about it, and started to turn. The newel post, from top to bottom, remained rigid. Seeker crossed back to the post on the left, closed his hand over it and again, started to turn. This time, while the post itself remained rigid, the rounded handhold started to move, and only now did he notice, carved into the bottom of its stem, a small, straight mark, a pointer. He looked at up again at Anne Winter. There was no look of triumph on her face now – it was ashen, and she had run out of lies. Still looking at her, he spoke to the first of the guards who had emerged by the back stairs into the tiled hall. ‘Take my horse, ride as fast as you can to Whitehall and get Dr Wallis out of the Cryptography Office; bring him back here without delay.’
*
Wallis carried with him a mildly distracted, benign air that fooled some into believing him absent-minded, other-worldly. Seeker knew differently: Dr John Wallis possessed one of the most astute mathematical minds in England, and from an earl
y stage had served the Republican cause in the matter of deciphering codes. He was not other-worldly, he saw into the heart, the very centre of the way the world worked, understood processes in the minds of men and the things they made that others were not aware of.
‘Seeker, they tell me you have a puzzle for me,’ he said lightly, pausing to incline his head respectfully to Lady Anne as he tramped across her black and white tiled hallway.
Seeker showed him first the unmoving newel with the unmarked stars, and then, at the other side of the stair, its less rigid, more elaborate partner. A smile spread across Wallis’s mouth as he looked from one to the other. ‘Hah! Ingenious. So simple, yet so difficult to spot. You have a good eye for these things, Seeker.’
‘I’ve made enough of them in my time,’ said Seeker. He saw the look on Anne Winter’s face: again, he had managed to surprise her.
‘Oh, aye, Lady Anne. I was no more born a soldier than you a traitor.’ He’d seen it so often in those of her background – they looked at a person and saw what they expected to see. Such arrogance had cost them dear time and again, and he was certain it was about to do so again, here in her very house.
After testing the unmoving finial once, Wallis lost all interest in it and gave his full, rapt attention to the other. He looked at it, without touching, for almost a minute, then bent a little lower to examine the carvings of the Baxton crest at the top of each side of the newel post. ‘Remarkable,’ he murmured to himself, before straightening and going back to examine the crests on the other post. ‘Careless, of course, but remarkable all the same.’
Seeker had seen Wallis at work before and knew not to interrupt him during this process of observation. Wallis straightened himself again, sniffed, and marched back to the front door, nodding at the guard there to open it for him. He glanced very briefly at the brass crest door knocker, and strode in, pointing to the plainer, unmoving post. ‘That’s definitely the real one. Real crest, marked on all four sides, but this’ – he was back at the other post, beckoning Seeker and pointing to the carved crest on one of its four sides – ‘this is the only correct one on this post, for as you can see, the quarters of the escutcheon on the other three sides have been moved around in some way.’
Seeker looked. He knew the Baxton crest well enough: the symbols depicted on the four quarters of the Baxton shield had indeed been transposed on three of the four carved crests.
‘Now,’ continued Wallis, ‘that means that this – the correct crest – is home – the direction in which each of the numbered star points must point. We must just work out the sequence. Pen and paper, if you please,’ he said, beginning to turn the disc with his left hand and throwing out his right to no one in particular, awaiting the requested writing materials. Seeker pointed Marvell towards Lady Anne’s private study, and a moment later the poet was scribbling numerals and combinations at the cryptographer’s dictation. Wallis would turn the finial head, mutter, Marvell would scribble. It went on for almost ten minutes, in which time Seeker’s eyes travelled from the odd pairing at the bottom of the stairway to the woman who was now seated on a low footstool by the empty fireplace of her own front hall. Her face was greyer than the remnants of the ashes lying at the bottom of the hearth.
Suddenly, Wallis stood up. ‘Write this down,’ he commanded Marvell before calling out a sequence of six numbers. Then he beckoned to Seeker. ‘Turn the finial head as I tell you.’ He repeated the numbers, slowly, and after each, Seeker turned the newel head as instructed. Before calling out the sixth, Wallis turned to Lady Anne, ‘Is there anyone here who should move away from where they are currently standing? Any object that you would like to have moved?’
She pointed, her hand shaking a little, towards a large, silver-mounted nautilus shell jug on the hall table set against the wall opposite. ‘Perhaps if someone could hold that jug a moment, and if Mr Marvell would like to move away from where he is standing to this side of the hall . . .’
At a flick of Seeker’s head, the nearest guard went and took hold of the jug, and Marvell, who was standing almost in the centre of the hallway, looked at his feet, thoroughly alarmed, and stepped briskly across to stand by Lady Anne’s footstool.
Seeing that all was ready, Wallis called out the sixth number, Seeker turned the post, and the final pointer clicked into place.
Twenty-Five
The Jew of Malta
It was incredible. Seeker would not have believed it had he not seen it with his own eyes. At the final turn of the post, the final click, a great whirring sound had set up, as if a beast of some sort were waking beneath their feet. A slight trembling began, the hall table against the far wall indeed beginning to shake slightly, and then the section of flooring beneath where Marvell had been standing, about four foot square in all, juddered and dropped six inches before sliding beneath the bottom of the stairway to leave a large, square opening from which a narrow set of steps descended.
Before the exclamations of surprise from the guards in the hallway had died down, or Marvell recovered his composure, Seeker had issued an order for Lady Anne to be manacled.
‘The Tower now, I suppose, is it, Seeker?’ she said with a resigned smile.
‘Not yet awhile,’ he said. ‘Will you tell us what this is?’
‘What it is? I did not know about it. Surely the previous occupant of my house had secrets to hide.’
‘I doubt it,’ he said. ‘But don’t trouble yourself. There is nothing hidden that won’t be found.’
After that, Anne Winter made no further comment, and ensuring she had guards on either side of her, Seeker, a flaming torch in his hand, descended the stairs, followed by Marvell. Wallis, whose interest had faded by the time the section of floor had slid fully out of sight, pleaded much business back at the Cryptography Office and again making his cursory bow to the lady prisoner of the house, left.
The glow of light from Seeker’s torch spread out in a golden and widening circle as he descended. Marvell had also lit a torch, and when he gingerly joined Seeker on the ground floor of the secret chamber he let out a low whistle. ‘Astonishing.’
‘Yes,’ murmured Seeker, but unlike Marvell, he wasn’t looking around the long, narrow chamber in which they found themselves, but upwards, at the gap in the ceiling they had just come through. The detached section of floor – whose tiles, he had noticed only while passing down through the space, were of a much more thinly cut marble than those surrounding it – had been carefully and securely balanced on a set of runners, attached to a pulley, which was itself attached to a system of cogs and weights and a chain disappearing up into what he suspected they would find to be the inside of the newel post of the stairs. It was an ingenious piece of work, and he could admire it. He had already admired it, in fact – not made up like this, in three dimensions, a functioning machine, but as part of a scorched drawing rescued from a dying fire. He ran up the narrow stairway and stuck his head through the opening at the top. Looking to his men he said, ‘I want two of you to go up to Holborn now. The school at the sign of the Three Nails. Arrest the master, Shadrach Jones, and take him to Whitehall. Tell Mr Meadowe he is to be kept under lock and key until I return.’ Turning to Lady Anne, he added, ‘It was a clever game you played, your ladyship, but the game is up.’
She smiled valiantly. ‘Perhaps we have just played but the first hand, Seeker.’
‘Perhaps but, if that be so, it will not be you who deals the second.’
*
Returned to the chamber he began to examine what was down there: a bed, narrow, but made up with the finest of linens topped with an intricately embroidered silk coverlet. A washstand, the bowl and ewer good Bristol gallypot, new and not yet used, by the look of them. Beside the washstand was a fine walnut chair, with sturdy arms and upholstered in black leather, the legs elaborately turned and carved. It was set with an embroidered cushion he thought he might once have seen in her apartments at Whitehall, and was of better quality even than any she had in in her public dra
wing room. Behind the first door, nearest to the chimney shaft, they found a garde robe, the wooden seat and lid looking freshly planed and treated. Seeker lifted the lid and peered down the brick shaft; they could hear running water from a conduit below. Sniffing, he replaced the lid. ‘Never used,’ he said. Marvell also having satisfied himself of the condition of the water closet, they closed the door, and turned to examination of the small, narrow writing desk with stool, paper, ink, quill pens and pounce pot ready and waiting. If the implements from Anne Winter’s own writing set had been fine, these were finer still.
‘For whom?’ asked Marvell, for this was evidently not intended for her Rat, nor, thought Seeker privately, the prison of a missing child.
‘I have an idea,’ said Seeker, ‘but it seems too fantastic even for that woman.’ He held up his torch to lighten the long, dark backdrop to this strange bedchamber. ‘Let us examine further back.’
The room seemed to have no end, but to narrow into a long corridor, its ceiling so low that both Seeker and Marvell were constrained to stoop. The floor of the corridor also seemed to slope downwards. At the end of it, they came upon a strong oak door, bolted on the inside.
‘That will open easy enough,’ said Marvell, slipping the bolt and about to take hold of the iron handle.
‘No, wait,’ said Seeker, holding up a hand and leaning closer to examine the edge of the door and the jamb. ‘It is not hinged.’
Marvell also examined the door more closely. ‘Then how?’
Seeker handed him his torch and leaned in towards the iron handle. Grasping it firmly, he pushed sideways, to his left, and the door slowly slid into the wall.
Marvell’s mouth was still gaping open when Seeker stepped through the opening to the very narrow space on the other side. He could smell coal dust in the air, and was facing a stack of bulging hempen sacks. He told Marvell to slide the door halfway back, so that he could examine it from the other side. He turned to look at the sacks and again at the door, before letting out a short laugh of grudging admiration.
The Black Friar Page 28
