[Damian Seeker 05] - The House of Lamentations

by S. G. MacLean

  Seeker couldn’t help but smile. ‘Oh, I know that well enough. But it doesn’t sound like this one was my friend’s sister. I don’t suppose they called here, my friend and his companion?’ He gave the cook and the scullery maid a description of Bartlett Jones, and what he’d been told of the Englishman in the grey woollen suit who’d been seen leading Bartlett off in the direction of the House of Lamentations, but neither meant anything to the women.

  As Seeker was finishing off aligning the wooden shafts of the steps, the scullery maid suddenly said, ‘The library.’

  ‘What?’ said the cook.

  ‘They’ve broken the catch on one of the cabinets for housing the books. Not that they said anything about it, but it swings open now when there’s a breeze, and bangs, and Femke is sure the glass will shatter if the catch is not fixed.’

  A few minutes later, Seeker found himself on the second floor of the Bouchoute House, in the library. No one but the servants being in the house, the scullery maid had taken him up by the main stairway. The panelled walls showed light patches where paintings had been taken down to be shifted to some new home or to be sold. A huge, moth-eaten tapestry depicting a hunt in the age of Charles the Bold dominated the landing. Seeker stopped in front of it and thought of being out of the town, on horseback, a hound at his heels. The scullery maid gave an impatient cough and he continued after her, into the library.

  The place had a musty, unused air, as if it had hardly been entered since Charles Stuart had last left it. The chair by the empty fireplace might still have borne his imprint, the volume left on the table might have lain there, untouched, since set down weeks ago by the pretended King. The room was lined with glass-fronted cabinets, most of them empty, but some showing the spines of ancient, dusty books. The cabinet with the broken catch was different, not only in that its door did, indeed, swing open, but that the books were not ancient, calf-bound tomes inlaid with gilt, the half of them in Latin and beloved only of gentlemen and scholars, but modern works, known as well to the common man as to his masters, and they were in English. Seeker cast his eye along the shelf. Nothing in it surprised him – not even to see dog-eared copies of Mercurius Fumigosus with its foul and lascivious lampoons of honest working women next to the Book of Common Prayer that had started the revolution in Scotland over twenty years ago. There too was Edwards’ Gangraena with its attacks on the sectaries who gave Cromwell as much trouble as they gave the Stuarts, alongside Culpeper’s English Physitian, which Seeker had seen even his old friend Samuel Kent pore over more than once. Seeker picked it up and leafed through its pages, for old times’ sake. His eye was caught by a favourite passage of Samuel’s where Culpeper claimed papists had bad breath from ‘maintaining so many Bawdy Houses by authority of His Holiness’. His mind went to the House of Lamentations, the brothel that had once been a nunnery, and the notes sent there by Sister Janet. The scullery maid, who’d been moving around the room plumping cushions and exclaiming on the dust, caught sight of him. ‘Please will you put that book back exactly where you got it? There’s been a to-do already, with one of the books gone missing. One of the gentlemen’s been hunting high and low, and even been down to the kitchens to ask if one of us has taken it. As if I could even read Flemish, never mind English.’

  ‘Oh, English book, was it?’

  ‘So he says. About fishing, or some such thing.’

  ‘Fishing? Would it be The Compleat Angler maybe?’

  The girl frowned. ‘Say it again.’

  He did, repeating the English words slowly, watching her concentrate.

  She nodded. ‘That sounds about right. Hmph. As if any of us below stairs have time to go fishing! At any rate, that’s the cabinet with the broken catch. I’ll leave you to it. You can find your own way down, but mind you put back that book.’

  Seeker returned The English Physitian to its place and looked more closely at the shelf. There was a gap between the last book on the row – an older book, Urania, that Seeker had seen elsewhere and knew to be filled with the kind of rubbish Andrew Marvell would write, and the end of the shelf. A channel through the dust where a book had been pulled out was clearly marked. It was just the right size of gap for the particular edition of Izaak Walton’s Compleat Angler that had been provided to Thurloe’s double agent in the Bouchoute House from which to take the coded words for his encrypted messages. The fuss made in the house about the disappearance of the book suggested it had either been lost, or stolen. The fact that the catch to the cabinet from which it had gone missing had clearly been forced suggested it was the latter. Someone knew what Thurloe’s code book in Bruges was, and it appeared that that someone had already found their way into the Bouchoute House. The question was, whether they’d been there all along, or whether the theft was the work of the she-intelligencer he’d been warned of. Checking that the scullery maid had indeed disappeared back downstairs, Seeker went out into the hall. Several doors gave off the central corridor around the stairhead. He tried the two closest to him – bedchambers, although one was devoid of any bed and filled instead with the discarded belongings of those Seeker suspected had left the Bouchoute House some time ago, expecting to come back and never had done. Each door he opened revealed a bedchamber or a linen press until he reached the door set at the far corner of the landing. It was smaller than the others, and its trimmings plain. It was the servants’ stairway. He slipped through the door and carried on up to the next floor, where he found the two bedchambers that must have been occupied by the house’s four remaining Cavaliers. In each, he searched without success for the missing book. Mindful of the tale of the Englishman in the grey woollen suit who’d been seen leading Bartlett Jones towards the House of Lamentations, Seeker also checked what clothing he came across. What he found amongst the chests and draped over chairs or hanging from hooks was a motley selection of shabby items that had been meant for and seen better days. Nowhere, though, was there any sign of a good grey woollen suit. Neither was there such a thing in evidence in any of the other rooms he’d searched.

  Seeker was leaving what appeared to be the chamber occupied by Ellis and Daunt when he heard the sound of the main door on the ground floor opening, and the voices of the four Cavaliers as they came in. He heard Glenroe lament the lack of a bootboy and declare that his feet would be the death of him if he did not get his boots pulled off this very minute. He heard Daunt calling down to the kitchens, asking about his dinner, and then he heard the voices of the other two, Marchmont Ellis and Thomas Faithly, talking in low tones as they came up the stairs. Whatever else was to be learned from the Bouchoute House would have to be learned another time. He reached the small door to the servant’s stairway just as Ellis and Faithly reached the landing of the main stairs below. The doorknob turned, then stuck. Seeker cursed under his breath and turned it again. This time he felt the click of the mechanism and the door opened at last in front of him. He cast one last glance backwards just as the top of Ellis’s hat emerged beneath the banister, then slipped quickly through the door to the servant’s stairway, closing it softly behind him.

  ‘What was that?’ he heard Ellis say.

  ‘A servant, that’s all,’ said Faithly, and then Seeker was too far down towards the kitchens to hear anything more.

  It was growing dark by the time he left by the back gate of the Bouchoute House, having promised to return later in the week with a new lock to fit to the book cabinet door. The heat of the day had been searing, and a late evening breeze had got up that would have been refreshing had it not been for the stench coming up from the canals. Usually, such things did not trouble him – all the years living in London had accustomed him to malodorous air, but tonight it was as if the breeze had got up expressly that the memory of Bartlett Jones’s corpse lying on the Spaanse Loskaai would follow him everywhere he went.

  But the tragedy of the previous morning and the odours of the stagnant water were not all that followed Seeker as he wal
ked the streets from the Markt back to his stable loft in Sint-Gillis. It was not unusual for people to be out on a pleasant summer evening, crossing the squares, sitting at canal-side taverns, taking a turn out through the quiet back lanes leading towards the city ramparts or the Minnewater. Sounds of laughter and song from the taverns, of arguments between drunkards on the quays, of religious singing their devotions in the town’s many churches or of lovers laughing as they scurried up lanes or whispered in courtyards accompanied him on his journey through the town. But there were other sounds too, and Seeker had first become aware of them as he’d turned down the Kortewinkel. The street curved down to meet the canal just by the House of Lamentations. To his right as he approached the Augustinians’ Bridge, the high walls were punctuated by candle and lamplight glowing through the brothel’s windows, but to his left was only a sharp drop and the inky waters of the canal itself. He could not have said whether he heard the noise or felt it: an echo of his own footsteps so light they might have been muffled, a sensation of a presence that was entirely focused on his own. He turned his head slightly, and a dark figure moved into the greater darkness of a coach house, just where the buildings between street and canal tapered to nothing. Seeker didn’t alter his pace but continued over the bridge into the quieter backstreets of Sint-Gillis. The sensation of being followed down the narrow streets didn’t leave him and neither did the soft echo to his own footsteps. He cut through the precincts of the church itself, the darkness deepening, and when he came out at the other end, in sight of his lodgings, he knew he was still being followed.

  Once back in the stables, he spoke softly to the horses in their stalls as he did every night, but instead of continuing up the stepladder to his loft, he stepped behind the door, and waited. He didn’t have to wait long. The footsteps coming through the yard were clearly audible now, and then Seeker could hear the man breathing. He felt the other’s presence in the doorway little more than two feet away from him, and then a dark shape started to move past him. Seeker, who had unsheathed his dagger before crossing the Augustinians’ Bridge, waited until the man had his foot on the second rung of the ladder then stepped quietly behind him and touched the point of his blade to the side of the man’s neck. With the other hand, he removed the sword hanging at his mysterious visitor’s left-hand side. ‘Now, friend,’ he said. ‘If I were you, I’d turn around very, very slowly.’

  Without attempting anything foolish, the man did as he was bid. Seeker couldn’t make out much in the darkness – a tall, slim-built man of about thirty, short hair under a plain green hat, brown buff coat, dark doublet, hose and boots. ‘Damian Seeker,’ the man said. A statement, not a question.

  Seeker advanced the tip of his knife a little closer to his visitor’s neck. The signal was swiftly understood.

  ‘My name is George Beaumont,’ he said. ‘I’m a soldier in the service of the Lord Protector. My mother was lately murdered on the road to Damme. I need your help.’

  Ten

  George Beaumont

  Having directed Beaumont up to his stable loft, still at the point of his dagger, Seeker indicated a pile of sacking his visitor might sit himself down on whilst he himself lit a lamp. As the glow of light spread out across the loft, Seeker saw that the man claiming to be Hildred Beaumont’s son was dust-covered and looked weary near to exhaustion. That he had a look of Lady Hildred was beyond question. Beneath the hat, which he had asked permission to remove, was pale red hair, close-cropped at the sides and with a stubborn wave at the front, recalling the traces of auburn that even in her last days could be discerned in his mother. His cheekbones, beneath the pale skin, were a softened version of hers, his eyes, when the light caught them, a paler green. Everything about him was like a diluted version of Hildred Beaumont. An observer who knew nothing of him might have said her arrogance had been replaced in him by diffidence, hesitance, but Seeker knew better: George Beaumont had a reputation as uncompromising as any soldier in Cromwell’s army. The voice too, in the few words he had spoken, recalled the Beaumonts’ native Leicestershire. Seeker was satisfied that this man was who he said he was, and that being so, he had taken a considerable risk in coming to Bruges.

  Seeker sat down to begin removing his own boots. ‘Well, Major Beaumont, you’d better start talking.’

  *

  It took the best part of an hour. George Beaumont had been part of the New Model Army’s expeditionary force which had allied with the French against Spain and the Duke of York’s Royalists at the Battle of the Dunes. One hundred Protectorate army losses to a thousand on the Spanish and Royalist side. Ten days later, Beaumont had been one of the first English officers to walk into Dunkirk following the town’s surrender. It had been at Dunkirk, early yesterday, that news had reached him of the attack on his mother on the road to Damme, and of her subsequent death.

  ‘How did you come to hear so quickly?’ asked Seeker.

  ‘The French had an agent embedded with the Spaniards at Damme. He had just been recalled and was in no hurry to stay amongst them. When he arrived at Dunkirk, he passed the information to the army council as something of note but, he imagined, little consequence. I had to hear him through twice before I understood that the woman he was talking about was my own mother.’

  ‘You didn’t know Lady Hildred had come to the Netherlands?’

  Beaumont’s mouth narrowed and he looked away. ‘My mother and I had been estranged a long time, Captain Seeker.’

  ‘And you’d no one keeping an eye on your interests in England?’

  Beaumont shrugged. ‘I wasn’t interested in the house or the running of the estate after my father’s death – I was too taken up with the business of our great struggle to worry myself over one modest family estate. My mother might well have wished to disown me, but I had no desire to render her homeless. I drew what I needed from Beaumont Manor and trusted my father’s factor to continue to manage it. Which I must say, he has done.’

  ‘Up to the point when your mother sold everything that wasn’t hammered down.’

  Beaumont gave a humourless laugh. ‘She sold a good deal that was as well, by all accounts.’ He paused and ran a hand through his short hair. ‘The establishment of our authority in Dunkirk and Mardyke has demanded my every waking hour. Information that should have reached me from England hadn’t done. A letter from a well-affected neighbour, written over a month ago, had lain unopened amongst the posts.’

  ‘Aye, that sounds like enough.’ There was little there that Seeker couldn’t have guessed. ‘But what do you want with me?’

  Beaumont straightened himself and all the diffidence was gone. ‘You’re Thurloe’s best tracker-dog, or at least you were. I thought you were dead until a returning agent told me differently, yesterday.’ Beaumont named the man – a protectorate agent in Bruges up until the previous year. A few weeks’ acquaintance had persuaded Seeker that he was utterly useless as a source of intelligence, or for the planting of false information.

  Beaumont made to reassure him. ‘He only told me after I’d made it clear I was coming to Bruges regardless of the danger. He hardly needed to warn me what would happen if I was found out by the Royalists here, after what happened to our agents in Madrid and elsewhere.’

  He didn’t need to elaborate. There were men in the Protector’s service whose blood had long dried across the cobbles of Europe.

  Beaumont continued. ‘“Filleted in the street”, I think was his best prediction about what would happen to me should I be discovered. When he saw I wasn’t to be dissuaded, he told me to ask for the English carpenter and find my way to you.’

  Seeker cursed. The agent would have to be shut up or half of Flanders would know who he was, and where. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘so much for how you come to be here. What about why?’

  ‘There’s no great mystery to it, Captain: I need to find out who killed her. For all that we were estranged, she was my mother. And even were I a
man devoid of all feeling, which I am not, no man could let such a thing pass. I intend to make him pay, whoever he is.’

  Seeker could tell there was something else. He waited, and Beaumont continued.

  ‘And once I’ve done that, I intend to get my money back. Letting my mother live off it for her last few years was one thing but handing it all over to Charles Stuart to use as he pleases is another thing entirely.’

  This sat better with the man across from Seeker than the idea that he had breached Royalist lines in order to avenge his estranged mother. ‘Fair enough, but you should know that whoever killed your mother made no attempt to get at the money during the ambush of her escort.’

  Beaumont got the point. ‘You mean it was her rather than her money they were after?’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘Probably?’

  Seeker unfurled his bedroll on the straw and sat down on it. ‘I’ll help you, Major Beaumont, but with due respect to your rank, there are aspects of my business – Mr Thurloe’s business – that you’ve no call to know. You’ll be told what you need to be told, and nothing else.’

  Beaumont nodded slowly. ‘All right.’

  ‘Good. Well, the first thing I would do is take a good look at the escort charged with getting her to Damme.’ He told George Beaumont about his mother’s visit to the Bouchoute House and the men resident there. Seeker ran through the names. Beaumont knew something of Faithly and Glenroe, but had never met either of them, and the names of Ellis and Daunt were entirely new to him. ‘They’re a mismatched crew, thrown together by their own ill fortune and no idea what to do next. You’ll need an alias if you’re going to infiltrate them. You might not have heard of them, but you can be all but certain they’ll have heard of you.’ It didn’t take long to flesh out a background for Beaumont as a cavalryman in the Royalist armies, serving in different parts of the country, under different commanders to the men of the Bouchoute House.