Sea Change

by Robert Goddard

  ‘Very well. I …’ Slowly, Spandrel was lowered back to the ground. His collar was released. ‘I’m sorry. I … didn’t …’

  ‘Out with it.’

  ‘It concerns …’ Spandrel took a deep breath. He was about to plunge into waters of unknown depth. ‘The cause.’

  ‘What cause might that be?’

  ‘There is surely only one.’

  ‘Hah! And so there is.’ Kelly gave Spandrel a cuff to the shoulder that nearly felled him. ‘Well, we have the cloister to ourselves. I’ll allow you one circuit to tell your tale. One only, mind. I have no time to waste.’

  ‘Nor have I, sir.’ They started walking. And Spandrel started talking. But his thoughts travelled faster than his words. Walpole had told him to speak to Atterbury. Intermediaries, however confidential, however trusted, would not suffice. Yet Kelly would know half a story for the fraction it was. He would not be fobbed off, nor easily taken in. He had to be given enough – but not too much. ‘I’m placed in a difficult position. I’m instructed to deliver an article to the Dean in person.’

  ‘Instructed by whom?’

  ‘The late Earl of Sunderland.’

  ‘And what were you to the Earl?’

  ‘Nothing. I … came to his attention.’

  ‘By reason of the article you’re charged to deliver?’

  ‘You could say so, yes.’

  ‘What is the article?’

  ‘Something that will make the people of this country cry out for the restoration of King James.’

  ‘And what is that?’

  ‘The secret account-book of the chief cashier of the South Sea Company.’

  ‘Hah!’ Kelly pulled up and pushed Spandrel back against a pillar. ‘You expect me to believe that?’

  ‘It’s true. I can give the Dean the Green Book.’

  ‘And what will that avail him?’

  ‘It lists all the people the company bribed. Up to and including … the Elector of Hanover.’

  ‘“The Elector of Hanover.” You choose your words like a man picking lice, Spandrel. What’s the meaning of them?’

  ‘The meaning’s clear.’ Spandrel looked Kelly in the eye. ‘I have the Green Book. And with Sunderland dead, no-one knows I have it. Except you.’

  ‘Why should Sunderland have entrusted such a thing to you?’

  ‘Of all people, you mean?’

  ‘Yes. Of all people.’

  ‘I’ll explain that to the Dean. I can answer all his questions. And I can give him what the King needs more than any number of loyal priests.’

  ‘What does he need?’

  ‘Ammunition. To fire a cannonade that will blast the Elector back to Hanover, where he belongs, and clear the way’ – Spandrel nodded towards the Abbey – ‘for a coronation.’

  Kelly stared at Spandrel long and hard. Then a priest appeared in the far corner of the cloister and moved along the walk parallel to the one they were standing in. Kelly followed him with his eyes. A door opened and closed. He was gone.

  ‘I must see the Dean.’

  ‘But must the Dean see you? It’s for him to say.’

  ‘And for you to advise.’

  ‘As I will.’ Kelly nodded thoughtfully. ‘Be at the Spread Eagle in Tothill Street this time tomorrow. I’ll bring you your answer there.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Be there.’ Kelly stabbed Spandrel in the chest with a powerful thrust of his forefinger. ‘That’s all I have to say.’

  Spandrel returned to Leicester Fields that evening by way of several inns other than the Spread Eagle. He fell to wishing that the matter could have been settled, one way or the other, rather than deferred for another twenty-four hours. Even then, there was no saying that his meeting with Atterbury, if he was granted one, would not be on yet a subsequent occasion. He did not seriously doubt that such a meeting would take place eventually. The lure was too strong for a true Jacobite to resist. But when would it be? And what would it yield? The un certainty gnawed at him like hunger. And, as with hunger, time only made it gnaw the worse.

  He was almost grateful to be able to spend most of the next day arguing with Crabbe, the engraver, over how much interest should be added to the long outstanding payment due for the completed sheets of the map. Crabbe drove a hard bargain, but had taken good care of the sheets and wished Spandrel well, though with a typically gloomy qualification. ‘This is no time to be venturing into the market, young man. You’ll get no subscribers till things look up. And it’d be best to wait until they do.’ He was probably right. But Spandrel could not presently see more than a matter of days into the future. And he did not care for what those days promised to contain. He thanked Crabbe for the advice and went on his way.

  Spandrel’s mother was busy interviewing candidates for the post of maid-of-all-work in her new household when Spandrel arrived home. He took the sheets into his room and sat with them in the thinning late afternoon light, casting his eye over the intricately drawn and precisely scaled patterns of parks and streets and squares and alleys – and his memory across the weeks and months of labour needed to produce them. A map, his father had once said, is a picture of a city without its inhabitants. And how beautiful it looked without them, how clean and elegant. The people who had made the city were also those who had marred it. And even a mapmaker had to live among them. He could not walk the empty ways he had drawn. No-one could.

  The Spread Eagle was one of several coaching inns serving the route from Westminster west out of the city. Its proximity to the Abbey made it a logical enough choice, even though Spandrel was surprised that a priest should nominate an inn as a rendezvous. But the Reverend Kelly was about as unpriestly as could be imagined, so the surprise was muted. Waiting in the tap-room that evening, Spandrel found himself wondering whether Atterbury employed Kelly more for the power of his arm than the depth of his piety. Perhaps, if he really was as busy a plotter as he was a preacher, he had need of such men about him.

  Sure enough, when Kelly ambled in, he looked more like a half-pay army officer than a bishop’s secretary. There was nothing remotely clerical in his dress and the set of his powerful shoulders, taken together with his swaggering gait, confirmed that humility was not a prominent feature of his character. He ignored Spandrel at first, preferring to buy a drink and exchange several guffawing words with the tapster before moving to speak to some lounging fellow in a corner. Then both men walked across to Spandrel’s table.

  ‘Good evening, Spandrel,’ said Kelly, in a genial growl. ‘This is a friend of mine, Mr Layton.’

  Mr Layton was a smaller, less imposing figure than Kelly, with quick, darting eyes and a louche smile. He had been flirting with the pot-girl earlier. Spandrel had paid him no heed. But clearly Layton had paid him considerable heed.

  ‘Mr Layton tells me you came alone and at the agreed time,’ Kelly continued. ‘That’s reassuring.’

  ‘No-one else is involved in this,’ said Spandrel. ‘I told you that.’

  ‘Indeed you did. You also told me you had an article to deliver to my employer.’

  ‘Yet you came empty-handed,’ said Layton, with a feral twitch to his smile.

  ‘You came without your employer.’

  ‘You’d hardly expect a bishop to set foot in a tap-room,’ countered Kelly.

  ‘Is he willing to see me?’

  ‘He wants to see what you have for him, certainly.’

  ‘So he can, when we’ve agreed terms.’

  ‘Terms, is it?’ Layton snorted. ‘I warned you, George. The fellow’s out for what he can get.’

  ‘Sunderland’s dead.’ Spandrel smiled gamely. ‘I’m no longer bound by his instructions.’

  ‘How much do you want?’ asked Kelly, mildly enough, as if merely curious.

  ‘I’ll name my price, when I meet your paymaster.’

  Kelly chuckled. ‘You’re the cool one and no mistake.’

  ‘Perhaps we should warm him up a touch,’ said Layton. ‘See if he punches as
well as he pleads.’

  ‘No, no,’ said Kelly. ‘Let it go.’

  ‘If you’re sure.’ Layton looked positively disappointed at being overruled on the point. ‘Shall we send him up?’

  ‘Yes,’ Kelly replied. ‘It’s time.’

  ‘Time for what?’ asked Spandrel.

  ‘Climb the steps to the galleried room across the yard,’ said Kelly. ‘Third door you come to. He’s waiting for you.’

  ‘The Dean?’

  ‘He’s waiting.’

  Spandrel could see an ostler busying himself in the stable at the rear of the yard, but there was no-one else about. It was cool and quiet, away from the bustle of the tap-room. He glanced up at the windows of the galleried rooms above him, but there was no sign of movement.

  He took the steps two at a time and marched smartly along to the third door. Through the window, he could see a fire burning, but the chair beside it was empty. He knocked at the door.

  There was no answer. He knocked again. Still there was nothing. He turned the handle and pushed at the door. It yielded.

  As he entered, a figure moved in the corner of the room, detaching itself from the shadow of the chimneybreast.

  ‘So there you are, Spandrel.’ The voice was not Atterbury’s. Nor was the bearing. Nor yet the face. ‘About time.’

  Spandrel could neither move nor speak. He stared at the figure advancing upon him in a paralysis of disbelief.

  ‘What’s wrong with you, man?’ said McIlwraith. ‘You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.’

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Back From the Dead

  ‘WHY DON’T YOU sit down, Spandrel?’ said McIlwraith, gesturing to one of the two chairs flanking the fireplace. ‘Before you fall down.’

  ‘Captain …’ Spandrel sat unsteadily down and gaped at the gaunt but otherwise unaltered figure of James McIlwraith. ‘You’re not dead?’

  ‘Not unless you are too and Lucifer’s decided to entertain himself by making us think we’re alive.’

  ‘I don’t understand. Cloisterman said he left you for dead.’

  ‘Left for dead and being dead aren’t quite the same thing.’

  ‘But you said … yourself … that you were dying.’

  ‘I thought I was.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have left you if …’ Spandrel shrugged helplessly. ‘If I’d thought you’d live.’

  ‘I’ll do you the honour of believing that.’ McIlwraith smiled. ‘Have some brandy.’ He poured a glass from the bottle standing on the mantelpiece and handed it to Spandrel, who gulped some gratefully down. ‘Let me tell you it tastes even better when you’ve thought you might never taste it again.’

  ‘How did you survive?’

  ‘I don’t know. I just did. It surprised that Bernese doctor even more than me. Must be the pure Swiss air. Or my long years of clean living. It was touch and go. Very nearly go. In the end, though, I came back. Maybe my immortal soul didn’t care to leave so much business unfinished. That ball Wagemaker put in me hasn’t gone, by the by.’ He slapped the left side of his chest and winced. ‘Still in there somewhere, they tell me. And still capable of killing me, if it lodges in something vital. So, if I drop dead in mid-sentence, you’ll know the cause. But if I were you …’ He moved to the back of Spandrel’s chair and closed a crushing grip on his shoulder. ‘I wouldn’t count on it.’

  ‘Count on it?’ Spandrel looked up into McIlwraith’s hooded eyes. ‘I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you alive, Captain. You surely don’t think …’

  ‘That you’d rather I’d stayed dead?’ McIlwraith chuckled. ‘Well, if you don’t now, you soon will.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  McIlwraith walked slowly across to the other chair and sat down. ‘I’ve thrown in my lot with the Jacobites, Spandrel. With Atterbury and those two fellows downstairs: Kelly and Layer.’

  ‘Layer? Kelly introduced him as Layton.’

  ‘A clumsy alias. His name’s Christopher Layer. He’s a lawyer. And a plotter. Not that there’s a lot of difference.’

  ‘But the Jacobites? You? Why?’

  ‘Ah well, that’s the question, isn’t it? You see, it took me months to recover. By the time I was fit to leave Berne, there was no point going on to Rome. I knew the chase had ended long ago by then, one way or the other. So, I started back for England, by slow boat down the Rhine. I wasn’t up to riding. And I was in no hurry. If I had been, I might have reached Cologne sooner. Which would have been a pity, because then I’d have missed Cloisterman.’

  ‘You met Cloisterman?’

  ‘I did. He was on his way south.’

  ‘To Constantinople?’

  ‘Aye. Constantinople. An embassy, no less. His reward … for services rendered.’

  ‘What did he tell you?’

  ‘Everything, Spandrel. Everything you and he did in Rome.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Do you now?’

  ‘I can repay … the money you gave me.’

  ‘It wasn’t my money. It was the committee’s. And they’ve disbanded. So, don’t worry your head about the money. We’ll let that pass. Breach of faith, now. That’s a different matter.’

  ‘I …’

  ‘Why don’t you tell me you never meant to sell the book? Why don’t you say Buckthorn and Silverwood intervened just before you were planning to spring some sort of a trap on Mrs de Vries?’

  ‘Because …’ It had been bad enough to break his word to a dead man. Spandrel had often consoled himself with the thought that he would never have to account to McIlwraith for what he had done at Estelle’s bidding. She had been worth it, after all. But she was lost to him now. And he did have to account to McIlwraith. ‘Because it wouldn’t be true.’

  ‘No. It wouldn’t be true. Nor would whatever you were intending to say to Atterbury, would it? Cloister man delivered the book to Walpole, not Sunderland. He told me so. He was pleased to tell me. And he wasn’t lying, was he?’

  ‘No. Walpole has the Green Book.’

  ‘And he has you, in his pocket.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He set you on Atterbury.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In the hope that the Green Book could be used to tempt the Bishop into betraying himself.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you had little choice but to do his bidding because otherwise he’d have handed you over to the Dutch authorities.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Who don’t know that de Vries was murdered not by you but by his secretary, with the connivance of his wife.’

  Spandrel sighed. ‘I should never have come back to England.’

  ‘No more you should.’ Then McIlwraith also sighed. ‘And neither should I. They’d all given up by then, you see. Brodrick, Ross and the other members of the committee. They’d thrown in their cards. They’d abandoned the struggle. Walpole was cock of the dunghill. The Green Book was a dead letter. As for me, well, General Ross made it obvious I was an embarrassment to them now the game was up. They had to look to the future and make … accommodations … with their new master. I was politely encouraged to vanish. And so I did. As far as they were concerned. But when you’ve come as close to death as I have, when the Grim Reaper’s brushed the hem of his cloak across your face and you can still catch the cold, grave-damp smell of it in your nostrils, you don’t see things as other men do. You’re not interested in accommodations. You can’t be sent away. You won’t be stopped.’

  ‘Jacobitism is treason, Captain.’

  ‘High treason, Spandrel. As high as Tyburn gallows.’

  ‘You’re really one of them?’

  ‘Sworn and enlisted.’

  ‘But why? You’re no Jacobite. You were trying to stop the Green Book reaching Rome.’

  ‘The case is altered. I won’t let them win.’

  ‘Won’t let who win?’

  ‘Walpole and his cronies. I’ll have them yet.’ There was a look in McIlwraith’s eyes Spandrel had never s
een before. His brush with death truly had altered him. Determination had become obsession. ‘By hook or by crook, I’ll have them.’

  ‘It’ll mean blood in the streets.’

  ‘Then let it flow. I swore to make the truth known. No matter that those I swore to have sheathed their swords and slunk away. I still mean to make it known.’

  ‘You won’t succeed. Walpole knows everything. He has Sunderland’s papers.’

  ‘But he’s biding his time. Because he thinks he has plenty of it. He doesn’t know about me. If he did, he’d never have sent you to Atterbury. That’s his mistake. And he’ll pay for it, I promise you.’

  ‘You can’t win.’

  ‘Oh, but I can. Not by listening to fools like Layer or waiting for instructions from Rome. They have some crazy plan to assassinate the King – the Elector, as they call him – on his way to Hanover. And they still mean to go through with it, despite Sunderland’s death. But there’s no need. There’s another way to snare our fat Norfolk Robin. A surer way, by far. The Green Book, Spandrel. You saw it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘My fellow plotters have persuaded themselves that Walpole destroyed it. But I never fell for that notion. He didn’t get where he is by destroying the secrets that come his way.’

  ‘You’re not thinking of …’

  ‘Stealing it back from him?’ McIlwraith caught Spandrel’s eye. ‘No. It’s a tempting thought, but a fatal one. Orford House is well guarded. And where would we look? He’s not likely to keep it wherever you saw it. He’d like us to try, no doubt. A few of us shot down as common housebreakers would suit his purpose very well. It’d look bad for you, of course. Who but you could have told us he had it there? So, you’ll be glad to know I have no intention of blundering into that trap.’

  ‘What do you mean to do?’

  ‘Nothing that you need worry your head about.’ McIlwraith rose from his chair with more of an effort than he would once have needed to exert and leaned against the mantelpiece. ‘You have more than enough to think about already. Such as what you’re going to report to Walpole.’

  ‘What can I report? I’ve failed.’

  ‘No need to tell him that. I won’t tell. Say Atterbury’s agreed to meet you, down in Bromley, at his palace, next week.’