[Damian Seeker 05] - The House of Lamentations

by S. G. MacLean

  But now the death of Bartlett Jones demanded more of Seeker. The fact of the young man’s body, pulled from the canal beneath the Augustinians’ Bridge, a few yards from the House of Lamentations, would force him through doors he would otherwise never have crossed. Perhaps if Seeker had not discovered that Sister Janet had sent a note to someone within the walls of that house scarcely an hour after Bartlett had presented himself at the Engels Klooster, he would have let it and its inhabitants be. But Sister Janet had sent such a note, and Seeker knew of it, so now he must find out who that note had been intended for, and what that person had to do with the death of the angry young Englishman whose trust he had been unable to gain.

  Had this been London, he would have been told to leave it alone, but here in Bruges, there was no Thurloe to tell him the drowning of naive young men in foreign towns was no concern of the state’s. Here, there was no Andrew Marvell to send to places that he himself couldn’t go, to listen to things that people might not say in front of him. There was no Lawrence Ingolby, even, to send on the murkier business, to the darker edges, where Seeker’s authority wouldn’t allow him to go. Seeker didn’t need to be in the same room as them to know what they would all have said – they would have told him to leave Bartlett Jones on the quayside in Bruges and forget about him. So here he was now, in a private parlour of the House of Lamentations, overlooking the Spaanse Loskaai and the Augustinians’ Bridge, fixing a faulty shutter.

  ‘Bit of trouble out there yesterday morning,’ he observed, as he carefully planed the edge of the shutter.

  ‘You mean the foreigner washed up on the quay? That had nothing to do with us,’ said the older woman, who seemed to have the running of the place. ‘We sleep late in the House of Lamentations. The excitement was over and the body gone before we were awake.’

  ‘Ah, so not one of yours, then.’

  ‘One of ours?’ The woman arched her eyebrows at the affront. She had forgotten to remove a black, heart-shaped spot from above her lip from the night before. Her pink fur-trimmed velvet jacket hung open, revealing emerald silk stays. Her slippers were of emerald satin, and Seeker could see that she wore no stockings. She took no trouble to conceal her profession and had no shame in it either.

  ‘Customers,’ he said, still appearing to concentrate on the wood. He could, nevertheless, see the anxious look that crossed the younger woman’s face.

  ‘We do not have “customers”, we have patrons. And no, I am assured by our laundry maid, who was the only one to witness that morning’s business, that he was not one of our patrons. When you are finished here, there is some work to be attended to in the cellars. Beatte here will show you the way.’

  And so, the desired effect achieved, Seeker was left alone with the young whore. And she was young. Too young to be in a place like this. Safer here than on the streets, though, or following some army or other.

  ‘Your mistress there takes a pride in this place,’ he began, casually.

  The girl nodded. ‘Madame Hélène answers to no one.’

  ‘Especially not a foreign carpenter who doesn’t mind his place, eh?’

  ‘She answers to no one,’ the girl repeated. ‘Carpenter or King.’

  ‘Even the Scottish King?’ That was what they’d taken to calling him, since the Scots had crowned young Charles Stuart seven years ago at Scone, after the English had dealt with his father at the edge of an executioner’s axe. Young Charles had soon learned the Presbyterian price of his crown and hadn’t much liked it. Happier in exile, probably.

  The girl said nothing.

  ‘One of his courtiers, was he?’

  ‘Who?’ asked Beatte.

  ‘The drowned fellow,’ said Seeker, nodding out towards the quay on which Bartlett’s drowned corpse had been laid the previous morning.

  The girl frowned and shook her head. ‘Not him. He was just . . .’ She stopped. She’d already said too much.

  ‘What?’ pressed Seeker.

  The girl shrugged, her face hardening a little with the lie she was preparing. ‘Nobody. Some poor fellow who ended up in the canal. As Madame Hélène said, he was no patron of ours. If you’re finished there, we should go down to the cellars. Madame Hélène doesn’t like tradesmen hanging about in the house.’

  As they crossed the black and white tiled entrance hall, hung on all sides with looking glasses framed in gilt, Seeker glanced upwards, past brass and crystal chandeliers to where a winding staircase gave access to the upper floors of this former convent – panelled walls and doors hiding private parlours and bedchambers where half the secrets of the city were laid bare. A fug of stale perfume, sweat and tobacco smoke that had not quite cleared from the night before mingled with the smell of baking bread rising from the kitchens. Housemaids with buckets, scrubbing brushes and mops, or bundles of linen, scurried about, never lifting their heads to look at him. The presence of a man was not quite the novelty in the House of Lamentations that it was in the Engels Klooster.

  ‘Down here,’ said Beatte, opening a door in the far corner of the hallway. Behind it was a stairway leading down to the kitchens, and then the cellar.

  The kitchens, like the hallway and stairs above, were a hive of domestic industry – fish being gutted, poultry plucked, and an abundance of fruit and vegetables that would have astonished an English housewife being prepared for the coming evening. Seeker stood aside to let pass a boy carrying an enormous cheese.

  ‘Not down here, but in the cellar, some of the shelving down there is decayed,’ Beatte said, as she carefully picked her way down a darker, narrower set of stairs, holding high her lamp. ‘Rotted with the damp.’

  It was colder down in the cellar, a long dark place whose wooden ceiling and cross beams gave off the damp smell of an old church. It had the echo of a church too, though overlaid by sounds from the kitchens above. Seeker wondered aloud at the depth into the ground of this cellar.

  Beatte shivered. ‘We’re beneath the level of the canal now.’

  He nodded towards the row upon row of barrels of different sizes that stretched down the room. ‘You’ll not go thirsty here.’

  ‘Canary wine, sweet Madeira, olive oil from Andalucia, the finest Rioja. It’s not all bad, having the Spaniards for our master.’

  ‘You’re Flemish then?’

  The girl nodded. ‘We had a farm near Ghent. One spring the Schelde flooded and we lost everything. I was sent to the city for work, but my mistress thought the master took too great an interest in me, so I ended up here.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be,’ she said. ‘I prefer it here. Madame Hélène protects us. Everyone knows what the men are here for – there is no pretence. It’s more honest.’

  ‘Aye,’ conceded Seeker. What was the good in telling her she should deserve better – she would never get it. ‘I suppose it is. So are all the girls Flemish then?’

  Beatte shook her head. ‘Some French, Dutch, Spanish.’

  ‘But no English?’ he asked, examining the joist on a shelf supporting barrels of olive oil.

  An unmistakable look of fear crossed Beatte’s eyes. ‘No. No English girls here. No.’ She wiped imaginary dust from her hands on her apron. ‘Anyhow, Madame Hélène will be wanting me. All the shelving here needs to be looked at.’

  Seeker straightened up, folding his measuring rule. ‘And in there?’ he said, indicating a door set into the wall at the other end of the cellar, near to the bottom of the stairs.

  ‘There?’ She glanced quickly across. ‘A cupboard. That’s all. It doesn’t need looking at. Only this shelving. Please do not be long.’

  As she left, Seeker saw her look over, just once, to an oddly stacked collection of barrels, just beneath a small window set high up in the outer wall, before reminding him once more not to be long.

  Seeker quickly took the measurements of the shelving to be repaired, then we
nt over to the barrels. As he drew nearer, it was evident to him that they weren’t actually set against the wall, but about two feet out from it. Behind was a straw pallet, a pile of abandoned blankets, a stove with dead ashes and the remains of a meal. Seeker tasted a small piece of a hunk of bread left on the round wooden platter. It had started to harden, but wasn’t stale. It couldn’t have been left there more than a few hours ago. The ale left in a beaker beside it was unclouded by dust, and free of floating insects. A small barrel had been set beneath the window. Seeker moved it aside and hauled himself up by the window bars to edge open the shutters. As he expected, he was looking out upon the Augustinians’ Bridge and the Spaanse Loskaai on which the previous morning he had seen Bartlett Jones’s body laid out.

  Jumping down, he went quickly over to the door of what Beatte had claimed was a cupboard. It was locked. In England, he would simply have kicked it in, or had his men batter it down, but now he lived the life of an agent, not a handler or army officer. Now he had to work clandestinely, cover his own tracks. At his tool belt, never having drawn remark, was a set of keys, designed before he’d left London by a blacksmith out past Limehouse. Seeker had yet to come across the lock to which one or other of these keys didn’t hold the solution. He set to work at the lock with them and it was only a moment before the door was open.

  Seeker bent down to pick up the lamp Beatte had left with him and held it up to reveal what was beyond the door. At first, what he saw didn’t make sense to him. It certainly wasn’t a cupboard. Instead, it was a structure of curved stone walls, as if he was stepping beneath an endless arch. He was in a vault, whose far end he could not see. He held out the lamp with one hand and reached the other into the darkness beyond to test the depth. Nothing. He took a step, and then another and then another, trying again each time, lifting the lamp each time. Nothing. There was no back wall, this was no cupboard, room or recess – he was in a tunnel. He reached out his arms and soon touched walls on either side. It was not quite as broad as the span of his arms. He summoned in his mind an image of the house, the street outside, the bridge, tried to position himself and where he was now in all of that and realised this tunnel could only be in one location – underneath the canal.

  He was but a few feet in when he heard the sound of the handle at the top of the cellar stairs turn. He was back out of the tunnel and relocking the door within moments. By the time the hem of Beatte’s skirts appeared at the turning in the steps, he himself was at the bottom of them.

  ‘Finished?’ she asked, as he pulled close the buckle on his carpenter’s bag.

  ‘Finished.’ He told her his price, and she said she’d inform her mistress and let him know whether he was to have the work.

  ‘If your mistress has any doubts, tell her to ask Sister Janet, she’ll vouch for me, I’m sure.’

  ‘At the Engels Klooster?’

  ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Sister Janet at the Engels Klooster.’

  He didn’t ask her, for he was certain she wouldn’t tell him, how it was that a fifteen-year-old Flemish brothel worker could know a seventy-year-old English nun who rarely ventured out of her convent. Instead, he told her where his workshop was to be found. Beatte opened the door of the House of Lamentations for him, and he stepped once again into the heat of the bright day.

  *

  It was only when she was locking the door behind him that Beatte realised, too late, that she probably shouldn’t have let the English carpenter know she knew who Sister Janet was. Madame Hélène had warned them all that no word of the connection between the House of Lamentations and the Engels Klooster should ever escape their lips. Any who transgressed would merit a visit from Father Felipe, and there were few things Beatte dreaded more than the sight of the Jesuit priest.

  *

  At the Engels Klooster, after the departure of Lady Hildred for Hoogstraten, life had returned to its peaceful pattern of performance of the daily offices, work, and quiet companionship. Nevertheless, Sister Janet had pleaded a surfeit of flatulence, blaming Sister Marjory’s overuse of parsley in almost every dish presented to the sisters from the convent kitchens. Mother Superior had hastily granted her permission to observe the hours and to take her meals that day alone, in her cell. In the course of the day, as her community dutifully measured out their time from lauds to compline, Janet had gone over another day, in another place, over fifty years ago.

  They had lived in the same household, Beaumont House, she and Hildred, learning the duties and expectations of an English lady of good family. At Oxford, Janet’s brother had been the bosom companion of Guy Beaumont, younger son of the house. Janet’s own mother being many years dead, it had swiftly been agreed that Janet should receive her education from Guy’s mother. Hildred, a distant cousin to the family, had already been there. Guy loved nothing better than to hunt and then to dance and sing, and very soon, Janet had come to love nothing better than Guy. Every sight of him had delighted her heart. Guy’s older brother, Edmund, was a fish of a distinctly different flavour, already in the service of Lord Cecil, and known to the King. Whilst Janet had been enchanted by Guy’s gaiety, Hildred’s only interest had been that as his older brother Edmund rose at court, she should rise with him.

  And so it had gone until that day, that terrible day. Early in the morning, a rider had arrived, near dead, after riding for days on end from Janet’s own home in Yorkshire. Her father had been taken, arrested, on the charge of harbouring in his household a Jesuit priest. Janet must lose no time in fleeing to Yarmouth, where a passage to the Netherlands awaited her. It came back to her now as if the years in between had never been. She remembered the fluster, Lady Beaumont’s anxiety at the taint that might attach to her own house and distress for what might await the young woman she had grown so fond of. She remembered Guy’s indignation at the idea she should be sent away at all, his determination that he would go with her as escort. She remembered his brother Edmund’s absolute forbidding of such a move. And most of all, what she remembered was the look on Hildred’s face as she, Janet, had left Beaumont House for the last time. The gardener had been her only escort, leading her on a ragged pony that no one would miss, with all the earthly goods that remained to her in a bundle at her side. The look on Hildred’s face had been one of quiet triumph, and Janet had seen something of that same look on it just the other morning, when she had found Hildred lurking outside the room in which she had met with Father Felipe.

  It must have been five or six years after her flight from England, but still a good while before the Engels Klooster had ever come into being, that another refugee of their faith, fleeing England for the sanctuary of the continent, had stopped for a night at her convent near Antwerp. It was then that Janet had heard the truth of it. It had been Edmund Beaumont, Guy’s brother, a guest oftentimes in her father’s house, who had spied upon and betrayed her family to Robert Cecil; Edmund Beaumont who had consigned her father to a traitor’s hideous death and her to this lonely exile, all for his own advancement. The worst of it then was that Janet had been unable to do anything with her new knowledge, aside from nurse her private anger and despair; Edmund Beaumont had died of a quatrain fever, not six months after his treachery had forced her flight from England. And on Edmund’s death, Guy had become the Beaumont heir. Janet wished she could have been more surprised to learn that he had been married off to Hildred before the twelvemonth was out. ‘You knew, didn’t you, Hildred?’ she said to herself, as she looked at the shadow of the crucifix spread across the bare white wall of her cell in Bruges over fifty years later. ‘You knew what was going to happen to my father and to me. I could see it in your face the day I was sent away. You knew because Edmund had already told you, and you never said a word.’

  Eight

  News from Damme

  In all of his researches into any Englishwoman who might have appeared of late in Bruges, the only name which Seeker had so far come upon was that of Lady Hildred Be
aumont. He had sent word to Thurloe’s agent at Hoogstraten that Lady Hildred was on her way there, under escort, and had also sent a message to Chief Secretary Thurloe in London, to inform him of her movements and intended destination. He had reported that although Lady Hildred had visited the Bouchoute House, there had been nothing to suggest that she had identified their double agent whilst there. Lady Hildred was gone from Bruges and his work in that respect was done, for now. He had included in his missive to Thurloe a request that he might return to England. Separately, he had told Lawrence Ingolby that he must communicate to Maria, in no uncertain terms, that under no circumstances was she to come to Bruges, but to wait, in London, for his return. For now, until he received Thurloe’s response, he could concentrate on the matter of Bartlett Jones.

  After going back and working at the carpenters’ yard in Sint-Gillis, Seeker returned in the afternoon to the vicinity of the House of Lamentations and the Augustinians’ Bridge. He had pondered Jones’s most likely route from the quiet environs of the Engels Klooster, just within the outer canal and ramparts of Bruges, to the busy Spanish quay at the trading heart of the city. It offered as close to a straight line as was to be had here and would ask not much more than a quarter-hour’s walk from a sturdy young man. But Bartlett Jones might have taken a hundred turns on such a journey, gone anywhere in the city, before finally finding himself out of turns and options, and thrown helpless into the canal, there to drown. What Seeker really needed to discover was where Bartlett Jones had gone and what he had done between the last time he’d seen him alive and yesterday morning, when he’d come upon him dead.