‘What is it?’ asked Marvell from the other side.
Seeker laughed again, shook his head. ‘Ingenious, yet simple enough. We’re down in the coal cellar now, which I’d wager can only otherwise be accessed through a hatch from the back garden. If you came in through that hatch, all you would see would be a bank of sacks of coal. Should you think to shift a good number of those sacks, you would be confronted with what looks like nothing more than an old wood lining to the coal-shed wall. The whole wall this side is covered in it – untreated, dust-blackened pine – and when that door is closed, you wouldn’t even notice it’s there – there’s no handle this side. You need someone on the inside to open it and let you through, one way or the other. Oh, but they’ve been busy.’
Seeker stepped back through to Marvell’s side and slid the door closed again, but without bolting it this time. ‘Let’s see what else.’
They went back to the bedchamber, their torches before them, and examined the side of the room they had yet to look at. What their torches revealed was a long workbench with two stools set at it, and all the apparatus of a tailor’s craft. ‘Her sewing box,’ said Seeker grimly. Down one side of the darkened backland behind the wooden stairway and against the rear wall, was a series of ancient-looking chests. Seeker opened the first one. ‘I think we may have found your Mr Davenant’s missing costumes.’ The chest, like the others they opened, revealed fine and extravagant sets of clothing from a different age – clothing fit for the stage, and the players, male players all, who would command it. Dresses in the style favoured by the old Queen Elizabeth, or at best James’s Anne of Denmark, their cut scandalously low, many of them too big by far for the generality of woman. Veils, headdresses, doublets, short hose, codpieces from another age, but all of the best of quality.
‘How is it they are made so fine,’ Seeker asked, ‘that are just to be trod and paraded across a wooden stage?’
‘Ah,’ said Marvell, a sort of wonder in his eye and voice, ‘but these were not the costumes of just any wandering players: these belonged to the King’s Men – much of this would have been gifted from their own wardrobes by men and women at court.’ He wandered from chest to chest. Smoothing his hand along fine silks, luxuriant furs, satins almost as bright as when first they had been stitched together. And then he stopped, looked more closely at the chests, at the front of them. ‘They’re numbered,’ he said.
‘Probably in accordance with this,’ said Seeker, holding out to Marvell a cheaply bound and hastily written looking document.
Marvell took it and examined it by the light of one of the wall torches which they had lit. ‘It’s an inventory.’
Seeker nodded. ‘I daresay you will understand it better than I.’
As Marvell’s eyes travelled over the document, Seeker could see a kind of fascinated delight spread over his face. ‘Specific costumes identified, play by play – the same to be used for different roles in different plays, of course,’ he said.
‘Of course,’ said Seeker, suppressing a smile. ‘But what does this tell us, how does it help us?’
‘Well, some are marked as “altered to specifications” – you see here, and here.’ He indicated the notes on several pages, relating to costumes from various plays, all made in the same hand.
‘Anne Winter’s hand,’ said Seeker. ‘I’d swear to it. But altered to what?’
Marvell had moved over to the long work table. He held up his torch to reveal thin sheets of paper spread out on it, cut patterns for breeches, hose, jackets, shirts. On a sheet beside them was written a list of measurements. Marvell looked at them, his brow furrowed. ‘I am no seamstress, Captain – do you make any sense of these?’
Seeker, who had spent his childhood and youth watching his mother cut, stitch and mend every piece of clothing he, his father, his three brothers or his sister wore, knew what he was looking at. ‘These are the measurements of a very tall, slim man.’
They searched under the table, where there were more patterns stored in a long drawer – patterns for a workwoman’s dress, a guard’s uniform, a hawker, a man of law. All bore the same measurements – even the workwoman’s dress.
‘It doesn’t make sense,’ said Marvell. ‘These are all for the same person.’
‘Yes,’ said Seeker, ‘it does.’ He turned slowly to face Marvell from the darkened corner of the room they had not yet properly examined. ‘They are all for a tall young man, with long raven locks and large eyes under dark brows. He is twenty-four years of age. They say he has his mother’s sensuous lips.’
Marvell stood back, his chin doubling on itself as he assessed Seeker. ‘But how could you know such a thing?’
‘Because,’ said Seeker, lifting his torch so that it cast its light into the darkened corner he had just been looking at, ‘that has been made for the same man.’
Marvell’s sudden intake of breath seemed to reverberate around the stone walls of the hidden basement room. What the spreading glow from Seeker’s torch revealed was, stretched on wooden hangers suspended from hooks on the ceiling, the separate pieces of a magnificent outfit woven in black silk – the intricately stitched doublet was of the new, short fashion, its sleeves lined with golden brocade slashed to reveal the loose white shirt beneath. The breeches were wide and trimmed with black lace, a garland of golden silk rosettes at its waistband. At the shoulders was pinned a matching black, lace-trimmed cloak. The golden brocade pattern at the edge of the cloak might at first glance have been any current fashionable refrain, but it wasn’t. ‘His initials,’ breathed Marvell.
‘Yes,’ said Seeker. ‘Lady Anne has been very busy, making ready a welcome for her expected guest.’ At intervals around the base of the cloak, only an inch apart in a finely entwined golden scroll, were the letters CIIR.
‘Surely she cannot be expecting him,’ said Marvell.
‘You came close to saying it yourself, not four hours ago, more or less,’ replied Seeker. ‘A man might walk into this house a washerwoman and walk out of it a king.’
*
Half an hour later, while Seeker accompanied Lady Anne Winter on the short journey from her Aldgate house to the Tower of London, Marvell was still in her basement room, checking the rest of the inventory, on Seeker’s orders. ‘We need to know exactly what he might be wearing,’ Seeker had said.
It had been an ingenious solution, Marvell thought, to the problem of finding disguises at short notice for a tall, slim young man whose appearance and disguises were already a thing of legend. How to disguise a man of such proportions as a woman? In clothes that had been designed to be worn by men in the first place. He went through the inventories and the chests, matching outfits that were there, marking those that were missing, assessing, from the patterns under the table, what they might be altered to. The last list of characters and costumes detailed in the book was for Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta. Marvell had seen the play performed in the marketplace in Hull when he had been little more than a boy, and it had entranced him. The scheming, cunning Machivel, in particular, had taken hold on his young imagination. He remembered that the murder of one friar, made to look as if it had been done by the other, had frightened him for weeks afterwards, so that his mother had threatened he would go to no more plays. He cast his eye down the list and there they were – Jacomo and Bernardine – with the note 2 sets Blackfriars’ robes set beside it. He checked the relevant box, the last to be opened and bearing signs of having been visited by small vermin, but found only one set of robes, moth-eaten and nibbled about the hems. He checked again. Nothing. He knew that the other boxes had contained no such robes, and adjudged Lady Anne must have used the coarse black woollen garment for something and then forgotten about it. Knowing, however, of Seeker’s insistence on nothing out of the ordinary being left out of a report, Marvell noted down the fact of the missing robe nonetheless, shut his book, blew out the torches, and began to make his weary way up the stairs to the better light of the now-absent Anne Winter’s hallway.
> *
They put her in the Beauchamp Tower, Meadowe, who had arrived as quickly as he could, having opined that ‘it would do the lady no harm to reflect upon the green where other traitresses had lost their heads’. Seeker did not know that he’d ever heard the young Under-Secretary make a joke before. ‘Thurloe’s on his way, too,’ he told Seeker. ‘Even you couldn’t have pinned him down in that sickroom after he heard this.’ The order had gone out that the Rat must be taken alive, and that rather than follow him and whoever he was on his way to meet, they were to be arrested on the spot and brought to London at all possible speed and under the highest security.
‘What about Shadrach Jones?’
‘Who?’ said Meadowe.
‘The man who engineered the mechanisms concealing Anne Winter’s hidden basement. He is posing as a schoolmaster of Holborn. I sent men to arrest him, and to take him to Whitehall for questioning.’
Meadowe shook his head. ‘That’s the first I have heard of it. You had better get up there yourself. There are people here aplenty to deal with Lady Anne.’
‘You think?’ said Seeker dubiously. ‘I’d sooner deal with a sack of ferrets.’
He could still hear Meadowe’s laughter as he descended the steps from the Beauchamp Tower out onto the green where the scaffold for Henry Tudor’s queens had stood. A guard was waiting there, holding the bridle of a newly fed and watered Acheron. Swinging himself up into the saddle, Seeker spurred the horse out of the Postern Gate and urged him on the way to Holborn. He should have felt adrenalin coursing through him, but despite the magnitude of what they had discovered in the long narrow room, cunningly concealed between the other basement cellars of Anne Winter’s house, he had a leaden feeling in the pit of his stomach that he could not shake. When first that section of marbled hall floor had begun to slide beneath the rest, he had hoped for a fleeting moment that he was about to discover, alive, those four missing children whose disappearances had so occupied Carter Blyth. His haste to get to Holborn was not only to check that Shadrach Jones had been secured by his men, but also so that he could question the boys again, without Jones being present, before he unleashed himself on the false schoolmaster back down in Whitehall. The school in Holborn connected Edward Yuill with Shadrach Jones; Patience Crowe’s possession of the Three Nails’ register connected her to Shadrach Jones; Elias Ellingworth’s diary connected the girl Isabella from the Black Fox with Shadrach Jones; and now, the mechanical works in Anne Winter’s house on Crutched Friars connected Charity Penn with Shadrach Jones. All four children had disappeared. The Three Nails, Gethsemane, the Black Fox, the house on Crutched Friars – movements around all four had been tracked by Carter Blyth, posing as Gideon Fell, and Carter Blyth was dead. And then there was the gardener’s boy from Lincoln’s Inn – the only one who appeared to have no connection to the Holborn schoolmaster. None that Seeker could yet discern, at any rate. He spurred Acheron faster through the streets of the city, not pausing to warn people to get out of his way, driving himself on towards the Three Nails and the answers he was certain awaited him there.
Twenty-Six
Ashpenaz
At the Three Nails, William Godmanson gathered the other boys around him and tried to pretend that he wasn’t terrified. They’d heard Seeker’s soldiers coming before they’d seen them. They’d been in the middle of an arithmetic lesson, and Mr Jones, whom William had heard come in just as it was time for the younger boys to be wakened, had been in a good humour, though very tired from his night wanderings, which William had taken care not to mention to the others. But then they’d heard voices outside the haberdasher’s shop at the entrance to the yard, and two pairs of heavy feet come in unison towards the school door. The boys had stopped listening to Mr Jones, and he’d stopped talking. There had been no knock on the outer door – they heard it crash open without introduction or apology. By the time the door to their classroom itself was being forced open in similar manner, Mr Jones had dropped his pointer and jumped over the nearest bench, clattering one of the younger boys in the eye with an elbow as he did so. He was struggling at the catch of the small back window giving out onto the yard, before smashing it with the same elbow that had caught the schoolboy – it didn’t matter; it was too late anyway. One of Seeker’s guards had him by the neck of his worn black worsted waistcoat and hauled him backwards. Mr Jones took a flailing swing in response, but he was no fighter, that was plain to see: William could have bested him himself. The guard wasted no further time, but drew back a huge fist and smashed it into the side of Mr Jones’s jaw. Blood and teeth splattered out of his mouth as he went down.
‘Right, then. This’ll be Shadrach Jones?’ said the guard to the nearest boy.
The boy nodded vigorously, momentarily struck dumb.
‘Well,’ said the other guard, ‘it’ll be a holiday for you lot for the rest of the day. The Seeker wants this one. See you don’t make a nuisance of yourselves.’ Hooking an arm each under Shadrach Jones’s shoulders, they dragged him out of the schoolroom, out of the Three Nails altogether, before slinging the rambling New Englander over the back of one of their horses, and calling behind them that if anyone was asking for Jones, they should enquire of Damian Seeker, at Whitehall.
William had been very firm with the other boys, to stop them from crying, and had set them tasks, as if the events of the morning, the events of the last few weeks, and months even, since the onset of Dr Evans’s dotage, were nothing out of the ordinary. But their normality was like a thin thread that had frayed and slipped through so many fingers that now it felt to William he was the only one left holding it.
The glass from the broken window had been swept up and the boy from the cook shop on Holborn had just left after bringing the pot of mutton stew round for their dinner. William had tidied Dr Evans, brought him from his room, and set him in his usual seat at the top of the table. One of the younger boys had just about finished stumbling his way through a Latin grace and William was readying himself to begin ladling out the stew when they heard the horseman come in under the archway of the Three Nails and dismount in the backyard. William ordered the next oldest boy to dish up, and taking a poker from beside the fire, went to stand beside the bolted door as Dr Evans muttered some sort of repeated imprecation in Welsh. Three harsh knocks on the door were followed by three others, and a command that they should open up.
*
A quarter of an hour later, Seeker had heard everything about Shadrach Jones’s night-wanderings that William Godmanson had to tell. It wasn’t just by night, but at odd times of the day and evening too, that the under-master had absented himself from the school. He would claim he had a friend to see, some ‘business’ to put right, a lecture to attend, but always, whenever he went, he took his bag of drawings and measuring instruments with him. William had looked in the bag once when Mr Jones had been at the close-stool in the yard, and seen sketches of some fantastical machine, and a canvas belt holding many compasses, rules and other mathematical instruments William didn’t know the use of. Mr Jones had brought back a second bag with him this morning though – William had seen him carry it into his chamber.
A search of Shadrach Jones’s chamber soon revealed, hastily and ineffectively concealed beneath his flimsy washstand, a bag of tools – tools whose use Seeker understood very well, for they were those of his own trade before he had abandoned the life of an itinerant carpenter to become a soldier. Jones had not just designed the moveable floor and secret chamber beneath Anne Winter’s hall, he must have executed the design, performed some of the necessary carpentry and engineered much of the work himself. It was an astonishing feat. Seeker’s mind flitted back to Kent’s, the time he had taken Nathaniel there, and Nathaniel had declared Jones to be a carpenter. The boy had obviously noticed what no one else had – Shadrach Jones, his bag of tools to hand, slipping into or out of Anne Winter’s house on Crutched Friars. It would have saved a great deal of time, and perhaps some trouble, had Seeker paid as much attention to
Nathaniel’s casual comment as Nathaniel did to the details of the world around him.
But Jones’s activities at Anne Winter’s house were not what most interested Seeker at this moment. He told William to take his dinner and then come through to the schoolroom.
‘We should bring Dr Evans as well,’ said William. ‘The other boys are not so able for him as I, and he might get past them and out.’
Seeker nodded, and helped the old Welshman take his dinner before manoeuvring him through to the schoolroom also. The old schoolmaster thanked him, in Welsh, and promised to look into the matter of his lost sheep.
When they were at last settled, Seeker said, ‘I want to ask you about a girl who may have been here, and any man that might have been with her.’
William relaxed a little. ‘No girls are permitted here, Captain, only sometimes Joanna, the girl from the cook shop across the street, but she is only seven, and only comes to help her brother fetch the pots back sometimes.’
‘The girl I’m talking about is a young woman – about sixteen or seventeen years of age. She is very plain – sharp of feature, with small eyes and not at all pretty. She dresses very plain, too, but clean. Black dress and simple white cuffs and collar, her hair always covered by a plain white linen cap, tied under her chin, and perhaps a black-brimmed hat. Did you ever see such a girl with Shadrach Jones?’
‘No, I never saw her with Mr Jones.’
‘Oh,’ said Seeker, ready to follow up with more questions, but William Godmanson wasn’t finished.
‘It was before that, before Mr Jones came from Massachusetts. Not long after Dr Evans started his wanderings. There was one of those Fifth Monarchist women, preaching up in St Giles’s Fields. Dr Evans had got that far before Edward and I realised anything was amiss.’
The Black Friar Page 29
