‘So what next?’ he asked.
‘You still wish to help?’
‘Very much.’
‘I am glad.’ She smiled. ‘Then I see two courses of action. One – we find North. We are certain he is around London. Two – we find the paintings regardless of him. The sale of the King’s art was a huge affair in the fifties. We ask about dealers. We seek out rumours. If the Section was smuggled out of the country, we find out how and to where.’
Nicholas scratched his stubble. ‘I might be able to help with that.’
She inclined her head. ‘Oh yes?’
‘Let’s just say that when you’re on the ships, you never assume you’ll get paid by legitimate means.’
‘You have dubious connections, you mean.’ Mercia looked intently at him, then laughed a loud, mirthful laugh that made Nicholas smile too.
‘If I didn’t, I would have starved long ago. I’ll ask around.’
‘And I will try to trace North.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Do not pull that face, I will not pursue him alone, merely make some enquiries of my own. Try to find out where he may have been hiding these past several years, for one. Then let’s meet again. Is the day after tomorrow sufficient time?’
‘Yes. I can speak to some people tonight, tomorrow at the latest.’
‘Excellent.’ She was animated again, back to her enthusiastic self. It was time to accelerate this investigation into the next phase.
Chapter Twelve
The sailing ship drifted past, one of several magnificent vessels plying the river, obscuring Mercia’s view to the houses and wharfs of the Southwark side. Shouts of the men on board brought a discordance of gruff slang to the riverbank. Just down from London Bridge, this was as far as such ships could travel before their passengers were forced to disembark or transfer their cargo onto smaller barges to be sent upriver.
She had spent the morning at her father’s Lombard Street goldsmiths, discussing the safekeeping of her small inheritance of gold with Mr Backwell himself. Now outside the London customs house, she was hoping an assiduous clerk could help her track James North’s movements, if he had ever left England for abroad.
Her luck started well. The clerks were being especially diligent at present, the King desperate for any fresh news of the men who had authorised his father’s execution. Many of the so-called regicides had already been hanged, drawn and quartered in that cruellest of deaths her father had been spared, but others had fled overseas, surely, she thought, never to return. Their portraits were pinned on the office wall, their names scribbled beneath – Edward Whalley and William Goffe, John Dixwell and John Lisle. England’s most wanted.
‘So what is it you are looking for?’ asked a periwigged, middle-aged clerk, eager to help. Wobbling in a rickety chair he had pulled up for her, Mercia was turning on all her charm to elicit fast results.
‘I am seeking information on a man who left the country around the time of the battle at Worcester. Not long after, perhaps.’ She smiled, employing a lie she had devised. ‘He is my cousin. Our grandmother has left him money in her testament, in the hope he can be found to claim it. I appreciate this may be a fruitless request, but I wonder if there is any record of his departure?’
‘Worcester was – what? Twelve, thirteen years ago?’ The clerk wrung his hands as though washing them, a habitual gesture Mercia was trying to ignore. ‘But fortunately we do keep records. Are you certain he would have left from London?’
‘No, but I think ’tis likely, given where he was last known to be.’
‘I will look. But I pray you are not too disappointed if I fail to discover anything of use. What was your cousin’s name?’
She straightened the sleeves of her dress. ‘James North.’
The clerk sat sharply forward. ‘Not a tall fellow, black hair? A bit … aggressive, if I may say so?’
She stared at him, holding her breath. She could not be this fortunate. ‘You recall him?’
‘Indeed I do, but not from thirteen years ago. James North is the name of a fellow who arrived through this port but five, maybe six months since.’
‘Five months!’
The clerk scratched his forehead. ‘But if this is the same man, why has he not thought to contact you?’ He frowned. ‘I thought he was family?’
She coughed, recovering herself. ‘He might not want to. There were … words said. He will not know about the bequest.’
‘It could be a different North, of course.’ He wrung his hands. ‘Perhaps if you could describe him?’
It was clearly a test. Fortunately Mercia had a star piece of information. ‘He was certainly tall,’ she agreed to convince him. ‘And if you met him you must have noticed – such a source of shame for us – the brand on his thumb?’
The clerk rippled his nose. ‘I remember it vividly. That and the gruesome finger.’
A shiver went through her. This had to be him. ‘Yes, I think it was cut off at some time, the poor man.’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t mean the stump. I mean the bones round his neck.’
‘I do not understand.’
‘Didn’t you know?’ The clerk jutted out his chin. ‘He kept the finger after his accident, attached the bones to a cord as some kind of odd memento. Or so he claimed. We saw no reason to confiscate it so we let it pass.’
She pulled herself closer, the leg of her chair screeching as it scraped on the hard floor. ‘Forgive me – are you saying he wore his finger bones around his neck?’
‘Ha! You should see what else we get, Mrs Blakewood. People who travel abroad can be very strange.’ He glanced at a walnut cabinet in the corner. ‘Just last week, someone returned from the Indies with a foul thing, a shrunken head.’
‘But my cousin?’ she urged, cutting through his prattle. ‘If he is back, did he leave any address?’
‘He mentioned something about Buckinghamshire, I think, but nothing precise.’ He clapped his hands on his knees. ‘Now, do you still want me to check the records for ’51?’
‘If possible. We never knew where he went, you see, and I suppose he may return there.’
The clerk rose from his chair. ‘I probably should not, but for you I will. Though I can tell you now that last year he arrived from Amsterdam.’
While she waited she looked around the vaulted office, the steady drone of chattering clerks helping to distract her thoughts from North and his macabre necklace. Then the walnut cabinet caught her eye, and she turned to imagining what its closed doors might be hiding. Perhaps if she opened them, the shrunken head would gawp out at her, thousands of miles from home.
‘Mrs Blakewood.’
The clerk had returned, a peculiar expression on his face. ‘I do not recall your cousin’s accent,’ he said, ‘and ’tis evident you are not yourself, but he wasn’t Scottish, was he?’
In truth she did not know, but being with Cromwell’s army it was unlikely. At Worcester most Scots had fought with the Royalists. ‘No. Why do you ask?’
He lowered himself into his seat. ‘I can find no reference to a James North leaving the country when you say. But there is a record of a ship called the John and Sara that sailed from here two months after Worcester. It transported some of the captured Scottish prisoners to a life of indentured servitude in New England.’
She inclined her head. ‘What does this have to do with my cousin?’
The clerk smirked, wearing the excited expression of someone with a secret they cannot help but tell. ‘There is no James North in the list of prisoners. But there is a Jamie Thorn.’
‘What of it?’
‘Ah, Mrs Blakewood.’ He smiled. ‘Criminals often change their identity on starting a new life. Well, Jamie is James, anyone can deduce that. But ’tis fortunate I have such a trained eye for detail.’ A self-satisfied look burst across his face. ‘Thorn, do you see? ’Tis an anagram of North.’
That night she dreamt of James North, filling in the scarce description she knew of him with ever-changing
imaginations. At first his face was scarred, lined with age, but later it was fresh and young, his eyes a deep red, his hair black. Once he was dressed in rags, leering against a dirty inn, and once standing on the terrace at Whitehall, resplendent in furs, offering her a necklace of bone. She protested, fighting him, and jumping over the parapet she flew low across the river, landing in the garden at Halescott Manor. Nicholas led Daniel and Nathan on her horse Maggie from a ship moored in the grounds, while Lady Markstone looked down on them from a rain-lashed window, although the sky was blue. Then North emerged from his hiding place in the branches of an oak tree, bearing her uncle’s face in place of his mysterious own, before he morphed into a snarling creature with twenty bony fingers writhing along its back. The black beast charged towards her but she was unable to move, four Royalist soldiers laughing at her feet.
Her eyes flicked open. It took a moment to remember she was in London, alive, no trace of fantastic creatures in sight. When her breathing calmed she realised sunlight was flooding into the room. She had slept for hours.
Stretching her arms she got out of bed, pulling on a robe and looking through the window at the rooftops opposite. Soon Bethany would be leaving to visit her niece who worked in service in town, and she would have the house to herself until she went to meet Nicholas. She was looking forward to the time alone, hoping to think through the questions that were absorbing her. Where was James North now? Were he and Jamie Thorn one and the same? It was an intriguing possibility that would fit her theory that North had left the country all those years ago, but it was just supposition, and it raised the further question of why he had done so in amongst a shipload of Scottish prisoners of war. But if that was conjecture, one thing was undeniable: for North to have returned, he must previously have left.
A small movement across the cobbles below drew her attention, another rat sniffing its way along the road. Queen Street lay in one of London’s more upmarket areas, but rats thrived throughout the city. She screwed up her face, wishing someone would empty their foul buckets into the gutter and wash the long-tailed pest away.
And then, like the rat scurrying through the dirt, a memory shifted deep within her mind, stirred by the vivid interconnections of her dream. She thrust out her hand on the window pane in shocked recollection, the stinging of her palm the final jolt she needed to remember. A whisper in the midst of her acute grief, a tale of rats washed up in a terrible flood. And something else too, much more interesting than vermin.
‘It was Nathan,’ she said as a nauseating stench hurried them past the bear pits on the south bank of the Thames. ‘At the – execution. He was speaking to Sir Jeremy Princeton about last December’s flood.’
‘That was a ferocious storm.’ Nicholas barged through a row of muttering touts, all boasting they could find them the best spots to watch that afternoon’s fight. ‘People are still talking of it, that’s certain. In some parts things are only just back to normal.’
Mercia nodded. ‘When I saw that rat this morning it made me think of what Nathan said. Rats being swept up, a horse too I think.’ She glanced at him. ‘And a finger bone on Lambeth Marsh.’
‘By God’s truth!’ He came to a halt. ‘So that’s why you’ve got us marching down here. You don’t think it was North’s?’
A group of laughing boys ran past, swiftly pursued by an angry tout. ‘Think about it. Finger bones are made up of three small parts. For anyone to have recognised it as a finger bone after such a violent flood, the individual pieces must have been connected somehow.’ She looked at him. ‘Like on a cord, perhaps?’
He grinned. ‘Oh, very good.’
She set off again. ‘’Tis April now. According to the customs clerk, North arrived in London five or six months ago, which means he was here before that storm. And Lambeth Marsh is just the sort of place a criminal would hide away. The people there have a reputation.’
‘That’s one way of looking at it.’
‘I think North lost his morbid necklace to the flood, then when the waters receded somebody else found it not knowing it was his. ’Tis just a guess, but it fits what we know.’
Nicholas quickened his pace. ‘We have to get to Lambeth now.’
Her experience around Cow Cross had persuaded her of the need to blend in better to the London streets. She had spent her supposedly quiet morning at one of the less disreputable pawnbrokers, handing over good money for a coarse woollen dress that made her itch. Nicholas had laughed at the pitiful garment when they had met, making her turn away in embarrassment before succumbing to the comedy and laughing herself.
She walked him westwards as they talked, past the tenements on the site of the black and white Globe playhouse that had briefly delighted audiences before its demolition twenty years earlier. Along Banks Side the number of dwellings gradually diminished until they passed onto the thoroughfare of Upper Ground. The dusty road stretched its long reach ever further from the city, the clanging and sawing of timber yards replacing the houses and inns, until under a slowly turning windmill the road petered out into open fields on the northern tip of Lambeth Marsh.
On the spur of land where the river bent south, a small collection of makeshift huts for the timber workers and their families sat raised above the dangerous marsh amidst specially dug furrows. Much of the land round about belonged to the Archbishop of Canterbury, his grand Lambeth Palace being very close, but the workers here, locals from Southwark or the Lambeth Marsh hamlet to the south, were not a godly sort. Straight across the river sprawled Whitehall Palace. Whores and thieves of a different type lived there.
Nicholas walked ahead, pointing out the muddiest patches for Mercia to avoid. As they came in amongst the huts the wind rose up, whipping across the marshes and chilling her face even under her hood. She pushed stray locks out of her eyes, straining to hear him speak through the biting wind.
‘What do we do now?’ he was shouting. ‘I don’t think we should just ask for him.’
‘No.’ She pulled the hood closer round her face, the fresh scent of newly sawn wood floating over on the wind. ‘If he is here, I don’t want him to run away, or for anyone to tell him later we were looking.’
‘That won’t be easy.’ He nodded at a hut doorway where a man and woman were standing watching them. ‘I don’t think they get many visitors round here, other than men looking for something cheap and discreet.’
They made a quick tour of the improvised settlement, but not many people were about, most of the men presumably at work. Outside one of the small huts, two young girls were jumping over barely intelligible numbers etched into the dirt. The wind was calmer here, making it easier to talk.
‘Playing at scotch-hoppers?’ Nicholas asked, but the girls just stared. Two dogs ran barking from the hut, a squat teenage boy emerging close behind.
‘Get away from them,’ he growled.
‘We’re no harm,’ said Nicholas.
‘That’s what everyone says.’ He picked up a long plank of wood. ‘Get out of here.’
From the corner of her eye, Mercia saw the couple who had been watching walking over, the woman carrying a tiny child swaddled in a dirty blanket, the man, much older than his companion, dwarfed in an oversized, hole-ridden coat.
‘Off to work, Luke,’ said the woman, her eyes on Nicholas.
‘But—’
‘Get on.’
‘For fuck’s sake.’ Luke threw down the plank but did as he was bade. He stormed off, kicking the dogs back into the hut. The girls returned to their game.
‘Now.’ The man folded his arms, looking between the newcomers. His face was riddled with creases, the wrinkles around his eyes eating into his skin. ‘What’s your business?’
Mercia pushed back the front of her hood. ‘We are interested in finds from December’s flood,’ she improvised, hoping news of the finger would lead her to North. She could see Nicholas frowning, but she carried on. ‘We heard a bone came up here, on the marsh. We would like to speak with whoever found it.’
The couple looked at each other, clearly uneasy. The man moved his hands to his sides, fingering a small knife that was tucked into his belt.
Nicholas stepped forward. ‘There’s no need for that.’
The man ignored him. ‘Lad gave that bone up last winter. Harmans weren’t interested then, so why are you here now?’ He drew his knife, waving it at Mercia. ‘Constables, love. And you’re not one, that’s certain.’
‘Will this help?’ She felt inside her pockets for a shilling, holding it up in her fingertips.
The man stared at the coin, sucking in his cheeks.
‘You just want to ask a question?’ He glanced at his companion, but she shook her head. ‘Emma,’ he pleaded. ‘We could use that.’ But the woman just closed her eyes.
‘Wait.’ Mercia swapped the shilling for a silver half-crown, worth two and a half times as much. The man bit his fingernails and looked again at the woman; this time she nodded, her eyes flicking to the baby. Replacing his knife, the man grabbed the coin and walked off.
‘He’s half-seas over on sack,’ whispered Nicholas. ‘I could smell it on his breath. You think that coin will go on the baby?’
Mercia watched Emma gently rocking her child. ‘Some of it, I hope.’
They waited in silence, a cold marsh breeze caressing their cheeks. Soon the man returned, dragging a protesting boy by the arm. His grip was tight: the boy was going nowhere.
‘This is the arsworm found the bone.’ He smirked. ‘Give me another coin and you can do as you want.’
Mercia folded her arms. ‘You have enough.’
The man grumbled but he kept his word, shoving the boy towards Nicholas who caught him by the wrist before he could flee. He was around twelve years old, his pale face red and wet as though it had just been scrubbed. Timber dust still speckled his unkempt hair.
Nicholas marched the boy along a walkway towards the windy marsh, out of earshot of the watching couple. He stopped at a small leat that ran parallel to the Thames. As Mercia caught up, he bent to stare into the boy’s face, still holding his wrist.
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