[Damian Seeker 05] - The House of Lamentations

by S. G. MacLean

  The English who came to Bruges tended to congregate, unless they were in the orbit of the King himself, around Seeker’s own parish of Sint-Gillis or in Sint-Jakobs, to the north-west of the Markt. None of Seeker’s enquiries there bore any fruit so he returned to the centre and worked his way along the quays and all the taverns, yards and workshops encompassed by the inner canals and bridges. Everywhere, it was the same story. No one had noticed an awkward young Englishman, looking for his sister. But then, at the bottom of the Spiegelrei, Seeker looked across to the opposite quay and saw that the drinkers outside the tavern there would have a clear view down the canal almost to the Carmersbrug, which Bartlett would most likely have crossed on his way back into town from the Engels Klooster. He went over and put his question.

  ‘Sister! Hah,’ scoffed an old soak, seated on a bench outside. ‘Looking for a woman, more like.’

  ‘You saw him?’ asked Seeker.

  ‘Aye. Trouble, he was. You could tell by his face.’

  Another man laughed. ‘Just because he wouldn’t buy you a drink, Dirk.’

  ‘No harm in being friendly, is there? Especially when you’re a stranger new in town.’

  The others grumbled their assent, and then a young apprentice from a nearby brewery spoke up. ‘He had a name though, for the girl he was looking for. Something from the Bible – Rebecca? Rachel?’

  ‘Ruth?’ offered Seeker.

  ‘That was it,’ said the boy. ‘Ruth.’

  ‘Pah! You weren’t even here,’ said the soak.

  ‘But I was, as they were leaving,’ protested the apprentice.

  ‘They?’ said Seeker.

  ‘The two Englishmen.’

  ‘It’s a lad on his own I’m looking for,’ said Seeker, about to turn away.

  ‘No, but there were two. There was the young one, looking for his sister, and the other who was taking him to her.’

  Seeker now gave his full attention to the apprentice. ‘Taking him where?’

  The boy shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I couldn’t understand what they were saying, but I heard the girl’s name a few times. The older man had his arm around the young one’s shoulder as they left. He was nodding, reassuring. I remember thinking it was good the young one had met someone who knew his sister, when they were so far from home. I wouldn’t like to think of my sister in a town full of strangers, and none to help me find her.’

  ‘Your sister? They’d throw her out of the whorehouse – she’s as ugly as you!’ called out another drunk. The boy went crimson with anger.

  ‘Ignore him,’ said Seeker. ‘Tell me about this older man. Do you know where he was taking him?’

  ‘The whorehouse,’ insisted the second drunk, leaning across to get Seeker’s attention. ‘That’s where he was taking him – where else? Probably robbed him when they got there.’

  The old fellow seemed, momentarily, to have sobered up. Seeker knew the look in his eye – a drunk’s moment of lucidity before the descent into incoherence. ‘You saw them go there?’

  The sage nodded. ‘Headed that way. House of Lamentations.’ Then he returned to his beer, the lucidity gone and the matter closed.

  The apprentice boy was still on the verge of tears of rage, and Seeker steered him further away from the other drinkers. ‘Tell me about the older of the two, the one who knew where the sister was. What did he look like?’

  The boy wiped a sleeve across his nose and made an attempt to reclaim his dignity. ‘I don’t know. Like an English soldier, maybe.’

  ‘An officer?’

  The boy shrugged.

  ‘How old? Old as me?’

  The boy scrutinised him a moment, then shook his head. ‘Younger. Shorter. Lighter hair. Longer too.’

  ‘What kind of face?’

  The boy shrugged. ‘I didn’t really see it. I hardly saw him, only when they were leaving.’

  ‘Beard?’

  The boy wrinkled his mouth as if in thought, but Seeker could see that he didn’t truly remember. ‘I think so.’

  ‘All right. Have you seen him around before – with those who hung around the Scottish King, perhaps?’

  The boy looked down at his apron then over at his older, drunken companions. At first he appeared bewildered at the question but then his face broke into an unexpected smile. ‘What would I know of the Scottish King, or any other? Their doings are nothing to me, and mine none to them. Men are masters or they are servants, that’s all I know. This man you’re asking about, the older one, he’s a master, and that’s all I can tell you of him, and I’d warrant, should you find him and ask him, he could tell you nothing at all of me.’

  Seeker gave the boy a coin and told him to keep an eye out for the Englishman, and to get word to him should he ever see him again. The boy nodded and, deciding against the ribaldry of the older men, left to go home. The other drinkers had nothing to add to what the boy had told him, but the parlourmaid remembered a little more. ‘He wore a grey wool suit, good quality. Not fancy, but better condition than most of the Englishmen hereabout. Linen collar and cuffs. No lace, but clean.’

  ‘Slashed sleeves?’ he asked.

  She thought for a moment. ‘No.’

  ‘Hat?’

  She nodded. Black. A brown band. No feather.

  Had she ever noticed him before?

  No. Nor the young man looking for his sister either and she knew nothing of any Ruth Jones.

  It was little enough to go on, but it was more than nothing. The description didn’t sound much like any of the inhabitants of the Bouchoute House, but he would check that when he got a safe opportunity. Two of the courtiers from the Bouchoute House were absent today, on escort duty with Lady Hildred Beaumont. Ellis and Daunt had not gone with her to Damme. Seeker would have to be certain that they were all out of the house before he could search through their belongings for evidence of the good grey woollen suit. But there were dribs and drabs of other English officers still in the city too, and Seeker knew where they could generally be found: the Schuttersgilde Sint-Sebastiaan. The meeting place of the Archers’ Guild, almost within the shadows of the ramparts, was within a longbow’s shot of the Engels Klooster. It had been a much-favoured haunt of Charles Stuart. Seeker had often wished he could have climbed up the steps of its hexagonal tower, a needlepoint in the sky of the north of the city, from the windows of whose eight-sided turret the whole city and all the countryside around must be visible, but the officers of the Schuttersgilde guarded their privileges with pride and were in no hurry to open their doors to an English carpenter. He had, therefore, found it necessary to establish another means of getting information on the English patrons of the Schuttersgilde. So, now, instead of crossing over the canal into Sint-Anna, he went to his favourite hostelry in his own parish.

  The small tavern by the Duinenbrug was full of craftsmen like himself – carpenters, masons, potters, plumbers. Their homes huddled happily in the quiet backstreets around Sint-Gilliskerk, back from the busy quays and the trading centre of the town. Seeker should have felt at home here. Thurloe himself had said it: ‘Your old life, Seeker – what better cover could there be? You will slip into it like a favourite old coat.’

  An old coat that had been made for someone else. His had never been the life of a town craftsman. His had been an itinerant life, working with the seasons across woodland and moor, doing jobs in manor houses and small villages that local craftsmen couldn’t master. And when he had shed the coat of that old life, the new one offered him by England’s brutal war with itself had made him someone else. Thundering across a battlefield in the midst of a cavalry charge, fighting hand to hand through dirt and mud, marching through the corridors of Whitehall, across Horse Guards, breaking down doors in the city to haul reprobates from their hiding place: Seeker had built such barriers around himself that almost none could touch him. For good or ill, that was who he had b
ecome. What use to say to John Thurloe, though, that he did not want that old coat that he had cast off so many years before? What choice had there been? None. But Lawrence Ingolby’s news about Elias Ellingworth’s plans to shift to Massachusetts and to take his sister with him meant that the time for throwing off that old coat Thurloe had thrust on his shoulders had almost come.

  For now, he would play the role the tradesmen of Sint-Gillis had come to know him in. Amongst those whom he regularly encountered here were those engaged upon the work of the banqueting hall in the Schuttersgilde SintSebastiaan. Charles Stuart was said to have promised money for it, but Seeker could not think that Charles Stuart had any money to give. The work went on, nonetheless, and the workmen were here tonight, shedding the cares of the working day before going home to their wives and families. They had begun a familiar round of song just before Seeker entered, and they carried on with it as he crossed the room to take up a stool at the far corner from them. This wasn’t London, and John Carpenter was not Damian Seeker. As the first song came to an end and the next was taken up, an old fellow who generally listened more than he spoke left his group to seat himself on a bench a little along from Seeker. He took out a deck of cards.

  ‘A hand of something, John Carpenter?’ he asked.

  ‘Lansquenet?’ suggested Seeker.

  They often played cards in here of an evening, John Carpenter and Berndt, and most nights their game of cards was simply a game of cards, but sometimes it was not. Seeker took the pack from Berndt and began to lay out the cards for Lansquenet, the old mercenaries’ favourite. Berndt, appearing to pay close attention to his cards as they were turned, waited.

  ‘The Schuttersgilde . . .’ began Seeker.

  ‘Yes,’ murmured Berndt, laying his stake beside his first card.

  ‘Anyone new there of late?’

  Berndt frowned and shook his head. ‘Not since before the Dunes.’

  ‘You’re sure? A few years younger than me, bit shorter, longer hair, maybe a beard. Dressed in a good grey wool suit?’

  Berndt gave a good-natured laugh as Seeker’s card was matched. ‘They’re all younger than you, John Carpenter, all got longer hair, all a bit smaller. Not many good grey wool suits, but you can give or take the beard.’

  ‘Any grey woollen suits?’

  Berndt thought a minute longer. ‘No. Still hanging on to their fine silken rags and shreds of velvet, most of them, leastways when they’re up at the Schuttersgilde.’

  Seeker grunted his acknowledgement. Berndt knew nothing of anyone fitting the description of Bartlett Jones either. ‘This young fella wasn’t travelling with that old woman, was he?’

  ‘What old woman?’ said Seeker, pausing in his gathering up of the stake he had just won.

  ‘The English one, that left the Engels Klooster today.’

  ‘No,’ said Seeker cautiously. He himself had watched from the deck of a barge only a few yards away as Hildred Beaumont’s party with its escort had passed through the Speye Poort that morning. ‘He wasn’t of that party.’

  ‘As well for him, then,’ said Berndt, suddenly smiling and laying down a winning card.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because sometime this afternoon,’ the old stonemason said, ‘a good while after I’d had my dinner, two of your Englishmen came tearing along back the way they’d left by this morning. They almost fell from their horses such was their haste to dismount. One of them was wounded.’

  ‘Who?’ said Seeker.

  ‘The one who is always drunk or fighting. Dark red hair.’

  Glenroe, thought Seeker. It was hardly worth explaining to the Flemish stonemason that Glenroe was no more English than was the Infanta in the Escorial.

  ‘And the other?’

  ‘The one with the long fair hair, that arrived here with Prince Rupert last year.’

  ‘Thomas Faithly,’ said Seeker.

  ‘Aye,’ nodded Berndt. ‘Him.’

  ‘Not wounded?’

  ‘Not that I could see,’ said Berndt.

  ‘Those were the two men that left Bruges this morning, escorting the old Englishwoman bound for Hoogstraten.’

  Berndt took a draught of his ale and wiped his lips. ‘I know. And she’ll never see it.’

  Seeker paused in the act of laying down the queen of spades. ‘Why’s that then?’

  ‘Ambush, they said. Somewhere on the road before Damme. The red-headed one had his horse shot from under him and the old woman was killed.’

  Seeker thought again about the party that had left Bruges by the Speye Poort. ‘And the other one?’

  ‘Who – Sir Thomas?’

  ‘No,’ said Seeker. ‘The other woman – the maid.’

  ‘Maid?’ Berndt seemed not to have considered the question. ‘No one said anything about her. The money’s all right though, that this old woman was carrying to Hoogstraten. Redhead and the other one took it back from Damme, after they’d left the lady at the Grote Sterre. Everyone seemed more concerned about that than they were about the old woman. God rest her soul,’ Berndt added, in pious afterthought.

  *

  Almost two hours later a heron, illuminated by the moonlight and reflected on the still surface of the Minnewater, dived suddenly into the lake to emerge a moment later with the fish it had been watching. ‘Skilfully done,’ murmured Seeker, who’d been watching from the shadow of a small boathouse. The surface was still again by the time the man he’d been waiting for at last appeared, emerging out of the darkness at the far side of the Wijngaardplein and coming towards him.

  Seeker stepped out of the shadows. ‘I’ve been waiting an hour,’ he said.

  The other man looked about him, as if checking he was not followed. ‘What? You think it was easy to get out of the Bouchoute House tonight?’

  ‘Why should tonight be different from any other?’

  The man stared at him. ‘You have surely heard what happened on the road to Damme today? Why else have you called me here?’

  Seeker loomed a little closer to him. ‘Oh, I’ve heard, all right, but not from you.’

  A sudden look of fear crossed the man’s face.

  ‘I – I . . .’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘I was struggling to . . .’ he paused, ‘fully understand what had happened.’

  ‘Oh? The way I heard it, there was an ambush, an old woman and a horse were shot, the culprit never went near the money but rode off and didn’t get caught. Did I miss anything?’

  ‘No . . . but . . . you must understand, Seeker, everyone is watching everyone else now. It is no easy matter to leave the Bouchoute House without some explanation. And to get out without one of the others in attendance is almost impossible.’

  How was it that Thurloe had considered continuing to retain this man to be a worthwhile exercise?

  ‘So they were after the old woman?’

  The man held up his hands. ‘I don’t know.’

  Seeker was coming close to losing his patience. ‘Well, they never went after the money, did they? And they attacked the horse as a distraction, to buy them time. They hit Lady Hildred in a moving carriage from the other side of the canal because they meant to hit her.’ Sometimes Seeker wondered how Charles Stuart’s forces had managed to put up any kind of fight at all during the last wars. ‘Were you behind it?’

  ‘What? Me? Seeker, why would I—’

  ‘Because I told you I’d had word there was a royalist spy, a woman, being sent to Bruges to find the source of the leak in intelligence from Charles’s circle in the Bouchoute House – to find you, in other words – and Lady Hildred showed up in Bruges that very night. It wasn’t long before she found her way to the Bouchoute House, and then this morning, she set out for Damme under the escort she’d got from there. Now she’s dead. So I’ll ask you again, and don’t even consider wasting my time b
y lying to me: are you behind it? Did you hire someone to kill her?’

  ‘No, Seeker, I did not! But if I did, what of it? If she was the spy, surely to kill her would have been to protect—’

  ‘And if she wasn’t?’

  The man stopped. ‘What?’

  ‘If she wasn’t the spy? You think Mr Thurloe would give you the authority to murder an old woman simply because you thought she might be a Royalist agent?’

  The man sank down on a bench at the side of the boathouse. ‘Might? Who else could it have been, Seeker?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  The man shook his head, his frustration scarcely kept in check. ‘I don’t know! All I know is that if it is found out that I have betrayed the King—’

  ‘That you have informed on traitors to the Lord Protector,’ corrected Seeker.

  ‘Aye, that,’ the man almost spat. ‘When that is discovered, they will not wait for darkness or a lonely alley to slit my throat in. They will do it in broad daylight, before all who care to watch, in the Markt.’

  ‘I think that would be the best you might hope for, should your services to Mr Thurloe become widely known. Given the justice meted out to those you have informed upon.’

  ‘What?’ The man looked at Seeker in disbelief. ‘It was you who brought me to this, and yet you judge me?’

  ‘You brought yourself to it, and I have no respect for any man who’d betray his friends to save his own skin. Or kill a woman on the off-chance that she was a spy.’

  ‘I did not kill her. But if not her, who, Seeker? Where is this spy?’

  ‘Where’s the maid?’

  ‘The maid?’ The man screwed up his face. ‘What’s she got to do with it?’

  ‘That remains to be seen. Now where is she?’

  The man threw up his hands, dismissive. ‘Damme. She stayed there to see to the old woman’s comfort in her final hours, to see to the making decent of the body, and . . .’