The Body in the Thames: Chaloner's Sixth Exploit in Restoration London (Exploits of Thomas Chaloner)

by Gregory, Susanna

  ‘I have friends,’ objected Bulteel, although there was pain in his voice.

  ‘Who?’ demanded Hannah ruthlessly. ‘And do not say Williamson, because he cultivated you for information, not affection.’

  The hinges were burning merrily now. Unfortunately, the flames had not confined themselves to the leather, and were greedily consuming the door, too. Chaloner coughed as smoke billowed over him. He indicated that Thurloe and Hannah were to lie on the floor, where the air would be fresher.

  ‘Williamson has been cold and distant of late,’ said Bulteel. ‘I let him use Griffith as a spy, so perhaps bad things were reported about me. Regardless, we are no longer close.’

  ‘Griffith plans to betray you,’ lied Chaloner, willing to say anything to open cracks in Bulteel’s defences. ‘To steal all the money you have acquired, and leave you to answer charges of—’

  ‘I thought he might,’ interrupted Bulteel. ‘Men like him do not know the meaning of loyalty, and I am still angry about the poem he wrote regarding Downing’s corruption. All my courtly training will have been for nothing if that scurrilous nonsense sees him ostracised, because I will be ostracised with him, as his so-called kinsman. I was livid when I read it.’

  ‘What did you do?’ asked Chaloner uneasily.

  ‘I slipped him some poison,’ replied Bulteel coldly. ‘He is upstairs, and when my house is destroyed, people will assume Falcon died setting the explosion. And I shall be left in peace.’

  ‘Never!’ shouted Hannah furiously. ‘Too many people know you are the culprit.’

  ‘On the contrary,’ said Bulteel. ‘No one else has guessed, and you will not be here to put the matter straight. I shall visit the Savoy shortly, and then my revenge will be complete. Everyone who has shunned and mocked me will be repaid in full. And it serves them right!’

  ‘John, please,’ said Chaloner, shocked by the venom in his voice. ‘Do not do this.’

  ‘It is already done.’

  Hannah was choking, and Thurloe struggling to breathe. Chaloner closed his eyes in despair. He had brought them to this terrible end. In a sudden fury at the futility of it all, he kicked the door as hard as he could. But the flames had done nothing to weaken the hinges, and the door was sturdy. It did no more than shudder. Bulteel sniggered on the other side.

  ‘You will never escape. There is no lock for you to pick, and you cannot break the wood.’

  Chaloner slumped to his knees. ‘You will not get away with this,’ he rasped. ‘When you are suddenly rich from your crimes, people will notice and ask why.’

  ‘This is not about money. It is about punishing the people who have been unkind to me. The English Court, the aloof Dutch diplomats, Clarendon … I shall have the last laugh over them all.’

  ‘The cost of your vengeance will be war,’ gasped Chaloner, becoming dizzier by the moment. ‘Hundreds of lives lost, and untold misery for many more. How could you—’

  ‘I do not care!’ shouted Bulteel. ‘Everyone sees me as a quiet mouse with no spine, but I am more powerful and determined than any of them. I have recruited Hectors and dangerous men like Nisbett and Griffith, and I have kept them all under my control. Everyone has underestimated me.’

  The door was now a sheet of flames. Coughing almost uncontrollably, Chaloner forced himself to his feet and kicked it again. Nothing happened.

  ‘Save your strength,’ jeered Bulteel. ‘I told you: you cannot escape.’

  Chaloner kicked the door a third time, and something cracked. His eyes were streaming so badly that he could not see, and every breath was like inhaling boiling acid. Then there was another crack, and he was aware of Thurloe next to him, pitting his own strength against the burning wood.

  There was silence from the corridor, and Chaloner knew Bulteel had gone to set his fuses. Thurloe kicked with all his might, but although the wood splintered, it was nowhere near enough, and Chaloner saw they were going to be too late. Then he saw Hannah, frightened but calm, and he felt his resolve strengthen. She was not going to die because he had made a bad choice of friends.

  Fighting the giddiness that threatened to overwhelm him, he took several steps back, then hurled himself at the door with every last ounce of his strength. It collapsed outwards in a spray of sparks and splinters, and he went sprawling among them. Smoke billowed everywhere.

  ‘Run!’ he gasped, staggering to his feet. ‘Back door.

  ’ ‘It is locked,’ cried Hannah, reaching it and giving it a vigorous shake.

  Still struggling to breathe, Chaloner dropped to his knees and inserted one of the tools he used for burgling houses, hoping it was not a new lock that would take him longer to defeat, because he could hear a furious hissing that told him the fuses were lit. Meanwhile, Thurloe picked up a chair, and in a display of power that belied his claims of delicate health, he swung it at the front window. Glass flew, and the wooden frame cracked. Hannah went to help him.

  The first explosion occurred upstairs. It rocked the house and sent a good part of the ground-floor ceiling crashing down. Chaloner stared in horror at the mountain of rubble that lay where Thurloe and Hannah had been. But then he heard Hannah screaming his name and Thurloe urging her to climb through the window. They were alive! At that moment, the lock sprang open, and he staggered through the door and into the garden, racing for cover behind a shed.

  It was not a moment too soon. The second explosion blew out all the windows, and Chaloner put his hands over his head as fractured glass rained down around him. The third blast was more of a pop, but flames started to lick through a hole in the roof.

  ‘You should have stayed where you were,’ said Bulteel softly. Chaloner raised his head, and saw the secretary armed with a gun.

  ‘Why?’ asked Chaloner, staring up at him. He no longer had the energy to bandy words.

  ‘Because it would have been a quicker death – I am not sure how cleanly these little things kill. It was a gift from Williamson. One of a pair.’

  ‘You lost the other when you murdered Oetje. She was the spy you hired to watch Hanse.’

  Bulteel grimaced. ‘Yes. And when I saw it tucked in your belt, I knew it was only a matter of time before you or Williamson worked out who had owned it. But you were both slow-witted, and now it does not matter. You will die and I shall tell people that Griffith did it, using a gun he stole from me. All my loose ends will be neatly tied.’

  ‘What will you do at the Savoy?’ asked Chaloner. ‘Kill someone else? Blow the place up?’

  ‘Nothing so dramatic.’ Bulteel indicated the parcel he carried under his arm. ‘I shall just circulate a few letters that discredit Clarendon. There will be no peace without its main supporter, and I shall have my revenge on the man I truly hate – the one whose treatment of me has been so cruel and disdainful.’

  He took aim, and Chaloner forced himself to meet his eyes. There was something unrecognisable in the once-familiar face, and had Chaloner been an impressionable man, he might have said it was evil.

  A report cracked out, loud and sharp, but from another direction. Bulteel stood for a moment, the dag still pointed at Chaloner. But then his knees buckled and he crumpled to the ground. Chaloner scrambled to his feet as Williamson walked towards him. Swaddell was at his side, blowing on the smoking barrel of a gun.

  ‘I apologise, Chaloner,’ said Williamson quietly. ‘I was wrong about Falcon running to the Savoy. Indeed, it seems I was wrong about a number of things, including the quality of my friends.’

  Chaloner stared at Bulteel’s body. ‘I think that is true for both of us.’

  Epilogue

  A week later

  London’s weather soon reverted to normal: cool, wet and windy. Its residents complained, of course, claiming summers had been better when they were children – skies had been blue, the sun kindly and it only ever rained at night. But Chaloner was relieved by the change.

  ‘Excessive heat makes Englishmen irrational,’ he told Thurloe, as they strolled around the gravelle
d paths of Lincoln’s Inn’s gardens one evening. ‘Perfectly normal men become violent, or engage in strangely uncharacteristic behaviour.’

  ‘You cannot blame Bulteel’s misdeeds on the weather, Tom. He managed those all by himself, with no help from the elements. I know you liked him, but there is no excuse for what he did.’

  ‘Yes, I did like him,’ said Chaloner sadly. ‘He was not a bad man, and deserved better than he was given.’

  ‘Not a bad man?’ echoed Thurloe. ‘Do you want me to list all the people he killed? Oetje, Hanse, Molins, White and Compton. And he would have had Edwards, too, if Wiseman had not saved him. Then there was Edwards’s guard and Compton’s soldiers, including Lane … I mean Fairfax—’

  ‘Fairfax is mending. Mother Greene told me.’ Chaloner tried to change the subject. ‘Did I tell you that he confided that it was him who burgled Downing? He was looking for evidence to tie Downing to Falcon, although he was wrong on that score. Downing was innocent.’

  Thurloe continued as though he had not spoken. ‘Swan and Swallow, murdered solely to put the fear of God into anyone thinking of challenging him, while Kicke and Nisbett—’

  ‘Swaddell killed Nisbett,’ objected Chaloner. ‘And Kicke jumped out of the window.’

  ‘No,’ said Thurloe firmly. ‘They died because of what Bulteel did. And let us not forget those whose names we never learned – the clerks and soldiers who were slaughtered when Kicke was ordered to invade Williamson’s offices.’

  Chaloner supposed he had a point. ‘He tried to remove me from danger, though. He offered me money to leave, and started a rumour that he thought would see me dismissed and sent away.’

  ‘And then he tried to kill you. I admire your compassion for a lonely, unhappy man, but the truth is that he was no friend to you. Your name was on the death list Bates found in the Spares Gallery.’

  ‘With a question mark,’ argued Chaloner. ‘Like Joseph Molins’s. He did not want to hurt me.’

  ‘So you say. But bear in mind that both Downing and Williamson have since told me that he fed them information to make them think you were a spy, purely to direct attention away from himself. Not to mention the fact that he tried to blow you up and shoot you.’

  ‘That was not the worst of it. You and Hannah …’

  ‘Quite. He struck at two people dear to you. He even killed his kinsman, Griffith.’

  ‘Griffith was not his cousin. The real Griffith died years ago. The impostor arrived in February, and set about convincing Bulteel that he was long-lost kin. But Bulteel saw through him …’

  ‘And promptly decided that Griffith was exactly what he needed to help him create Falcon and set the Sinon Plot in motion,’ finished Thurloe when Chaloner could not bring himself to go on. ‘However, I am deeply unimpressed with Clarendon, who spent hours “reminiscing” with the man. How could he have been so easily tricked?’

  ‘Because he had not seen Griffith in twenty years, and the impostor was good at impersonating people – as his foray inside Newgate showed. Moreover, the real Griffith shared a lot of personal information with the false one on his deathbed. Except the place where he was born, apparently. Records indicate that Griffith hailed from Bedfordshire, not Buckinghamshire.’

  They walked in silence for a while, savouring the damp freshness of the air.

  ‘I still cannot believe how close Bulteel came to succeeding,’ said Chaloner eventually, still unsettled by the whole affair. ‘I would never have guessed he was Falcon if it had not been for a phrase he happened to use – the same words as in the note pinned on Philip Alden.’

  ‘The corpse at your wedding,’ mused Thurloe. ‘And the warning was intended for White.’

  ‘White was horrified. At the time, I thought it was just shock at a murder in his church, but with hindsight, I see it was more than that. I imagine Compton and the others were similarly threatened, but they kept meeting anyway, doggedly determined to foil the danger Falcon represented.’

  ‘So Bulteel sent them poisoned gloves, although I am not surprised he became impatient when they failed to work and sent Kicke to speed matters along. People do not wear gloves in heatwaves.’

  ‘And the recipients should have been suspicious of them, anyway,’ added Chaloner. ‘Hanse’s passion was stockings, not gloves. And there is the fact that the gloves were sent while Hanse was still alive. Had one of the others thought to thank him for them, the ruse would have been exposed.’

  They lapsed into silence a second time, and Chaloner thought about the interview he had had with Williamson the day after Bulteel’s death. It had been decided that the Dutch delegation did not need to know what had really happened, lest it destroyed what feeble hope remained for peace. So a drunken thief had ‘confessed’ to killing Hanse and Oetje, and official apologies had been issued and accepted. Chaloner had agreed to the deception readily enough – to do otherwise might mean war, and it would be unfortunate if Bulteel’s plot should succeed after all.

  ‘Of course, Williamson should bear some of the blame in this unsavoury affair,’ said Thurloe, after a while. ‘He naively let himself be convinced that the Sinon Plot referred to a scheme to steal the crown jewels, when it was actually far more. Spymasters should be less credulous.’

  ‘But Falcon did intend to have the crown jewels.’

  ‘I know, but Williamson should have probed deeper.’

  ‘That was partly Compton’s fault. He knew what the Sinon Plot entailed, but did not tell Williamson, because he did not trust him to thwart it. Unfortunately, he, Hanse, Molins, White and Edwards were amateurs, and their bumbling efforts almost ended in disaster.’

  ‘Well-meaning amateurs,’ said Thurloe. ‘They thought they were doing the right thing – that by foiling the plot quietly, they were giving peace the best possible chance. But to return to my original point, if Williamson had possessed an ounce of competence, none of this would have happened.’

  Chaloner smiled. ‘You would have seen through it, but he is not you, and never will be. Do you think the King will dismiss him?’

  ‘No. The man is a survivor. Besides, he did save your life. He told me afterwards that it was one of the most difficult things he had ever done.’

  ‘What was? Saving me?’

  ‘Ordering Swaddell to shoot Bulteel, especially as he had not been party to the confession that had gone before. He saw only Bulteel pointing a gun at you, and had to make a quick decision. Thank God he made the right one. He is not all bad, Tom. Perhaps this business will see an easing of relations between you.’

  ‘It might,’ acknowledged Chaloner. ‘Although I doubt it will last. Clarendon is sending me to Tangier tomorrow, to investigate a major mismanagement of public funds, and I have a bad feeling some of Williamson’s spies are involved. We shall soon be back to our usual state of animosity.’

  ‘You seem to attract the dislike of unpleasant men. Downing, for example.’

  Chaloner grinned. ‘He is in a lot of trouble at the moment. He recruited two spies in the Dutch delegation. One was Ruyven, who was next to useless, but who is demanding a lot of money that our government will have to pay in order to avoid embarrassment. And the other was Zas.’

  Thurloe frowned. ‘Zas? But I thought he was spying on us. For the Dutch.’

  ‘He was, and Downing lost far more secrets than he gained – Zas was too clever for him, and led him a merry dance.’

  ‘So, to summarise,’ said Thurloe, ‘Ruyven, de Buat and “Griffith” were spying for England, Zas pretended to be Downing’s man but was actually Heer van Goch’s, and Bulteel was in the middle, confusing everyone.’

  Chaloner grinned. ‘Yes. It makes me quite nostalgic for my days as an intelligencer.’

  ‘Espionage can be a very dirty business,’ said Thurloe, not smiling back. ‘Especially when men like Downing are involved.’

  ‘He slithered back to The Hague before Clarendon could examine his expense accounts.’

  ‘Good! Peace stands a better chance wit
h him gone. He is hardly what I would call a dove.’

  ‘Which is precisely why His Majesty wanted him here, of course. The King stands to make a lot of money if we acquire the States-General’s trading routes – he wants war.’

  ‘Everything seems to boil down to money in the end,’ said Thurloe in distaste. ‘Although it was not Bulteel’s motive. I heard him say so myself.’

  ‘He was lying. He owned a house in Chelsey, which I visited with Williamson two days ago. He said he had inherited it from an uncle, but the truth is that he bought it with the money he made from blackmailing people – which he must have been doing for months, because I have never seen so much treasure in one place. He was fabulously wealthy.’

  ‘What will happen to it all?’

  ‘Williamson will return it to Bulteel’s victims. He offered me a finder’s fee, but the whole affair was sordid, and I wanted nothing to do with it.’

  ‘I heard you discovered else that was unpleasant, too.’

  Chaloner nodded. ‘The body of the original “Falcon”, who plotted in the Feathers tavern with Swan and Swallow. Griffith rescued him from Newgate, but then Bulteel ordered him killed.’

  ‘Why? I thought he was one of Bulteel’s minions – the one who would actually steal the jewels.’

  ‘He was, but Bulteel must have decided he was too great a liability with his curses and his sinister stares. His real name was Edward Pocks.’

  ‘The name on the death list!’ exclaimed Thurloe. ‘But I do not blame him for preferring to be called Falcon. I might change my name, too, had I been burdened with Pocks.’

  ‘The “Falcon” we hunted was an amalgam of characters, which was why he was so difficult to find. He was an unsettling felon, a master of disguise and a cunning intelligencer. In other words, he was a combination of Pocks, Griffith and Bulteel. Falcon did not exist in one sense, although the damage he did was real enough.’