[Damian Seeker 05] - The House of Lamentations

by S. G. MacLean

  ‘Dear God, it is surely Bedlam,’ said George.

  ‘I doubt even the souls of Bedlam have undergone what has been undergone here,’ remarked Seeker, lifting his candle to illuminate for a moment an iron spike, remnant of some hideous torture inflicted on those unfortunate enough to find themselves here in years past.

  George stared at the thing a moment, apparently fascinated, but Seeker had seen it all before. Ignoring the insults and outstretched hands of a dozen malcontents, he made for a small cell at the far end of the passageway. ‘How’s your Flemish?’ he asked Beaumont as he laid a hand on the bolt of the door.

  ‘Functional. I’ve let the Cavaliers believe I don’t understand any of it. Certainly, I can barely speak the language but I can more or less follow a conversation between two or three people.’

  ‘All right. You’ll have to listen hard then.’

  The door creaked open towards them and Seeker went first into the small, windowless room. A stream of curses greeted their arrival.

  ‘Mind your manners, Dirk, I’ve brought a friend for you. He’s brought a few schellings for you to invest as you wish, if he’s a mind.’

  The lump of sacking and old blankets in the corner stirred itself and rose to a sitting position. Dirk was short and rotund, and probably around Seeker’s age. He was relatively well dressed and certainly no beggar.

  ‘Dirk here has a problem with the piquet,’ Seeker explained to Beaumont, ‘and more often than not is unable to honour his obligations, isn’t that so, Dirk?’

  ‘Just another hand, another turn of the cards, and I would have won back all I owed, but you know Beertelmaans – he’s a vulture. I think he has his eye on my wife.’

  ‘Well, if you’re helpful to my friend here, I suspect he’ll be inclined to pay the warder something for your comfort.’

  Seeker turned again to George. ‘Dirk here pays attention to the world around him. He generally knows what’s going on – a useful man to know.’

  The small fat man sat up and checked the points on his breeches. ‘So what’s your friend’s interest then?’ he asked.

  ‘Tell him,’ Seeker said.

  George’s Flemish proved unequal to the task, so Seeker took over. ‘He’s employed on the business of the English gentlemen, resident in the house lately occupied by the Scottish King.’

  Dirk nodded. ‘I know them. I am certain the Irishman has his dice loaded.’

  Seeker said nothing to this. ‘They were lately escorts to a party on the way to Damme which fell under ambush.’

  Dirk nodded.

  ‘What my friend would like to know,’ said Seeker, ‘is whether anyone’s been throwing money about who doesn’t usually have any, anyone who’s handy with a musket.’

  Dirk laughed. ‘This is the Netherlands, John Carpenter, half the musketeers in Europe have tramped through this town, and they’re all looking for money. But, yes, there is someone. A fellow who was in here the other day, taken in for drunkenness and fighting. Bleeding and bandaged when he came in, worse when he left, mind.’

  ‘Why worse?’ asked Seeker. ‘Fighting in here too?’

  ‘Not exactly. He was just bragging so much Big Johann had to give him a thump or two to shut him up.’

  ‘Bragging of what?’ said Seeker.

  ‘Oh, that he was a person of standing now. That history would speak of him. That some English gentlemen had paid him a king’s ransom to shoot the Queen of England.’ To this promising information, Dirk had nothing to add. He couldn’t have said whether the braggart’s injury might have come from a pistol shot or not. They left his cell, repeating their promise to pay the warder something for his comfort.

  On their way back through the dungeon, the catcalling and outstretched palms resumed. There was scarcely an insult in Flemish or French that didn’t fly through the air on waves of laughter and invective behind them.

  Back up in the ward room, a couple of extra coins to the warder extracted at least the Christian name of the prisoner who’d bragged of killing the ‘Queen of England’ – Piet. And then they were back outside. As they reached the end of the Wollestraat, Seeker said, ‘You’ll find your own way back from here; I’ve got things to do.’

  Beaumont gave Seeker a curt bow and headed off back in the direction of ’t Zand, and his own lodging. By dint of a couple of turns through darkened passageways and the use of some shortcuts, Seeker soon had Hildred Beaumont’s son in view again. There was something about the man’s increasingly uneasy manner, something in the kind of questions he asked, that made Seeker even more than usually distrustful of him. His distrust was soon rewarded by his sighting of Beaumont on a street that would take him not to ’t Zand, but to the Markt.

  Keeping out of Beaumont’s sight, Seeker followed, and was not greatly surprised to see Beaumont approach the entrance to the Bouchoute House. What did surprise him though, was that the very flustered-looking maid who answered the door would not let the Englishman in. As Beaumont remonstrated with the girl, Seeker drew as close to the building as he could without being seen. Thomas Faithly was soon brought to the door, and Seeker strained to hear what he said.

  ‘Sorry . . . circumstances have changed . . . Glenroe insists . . . no admittance . . . I cannot . . . No, not tonight.’

  As Faithly shut the door on George Beaumont, Seeker stepped further back into the shadows of the neighbouring house and watched as Beaumont, fists clenched, eventually walked away from the Cavaliers’ lair and across the Markt. Again Seeker followed him. He realised with growing unease that Beaumont was walking in the direction of the House of Lamentations. Seeker felt a surprising wave of disappointment that this officer, so reputedly firm a Puritan, should show himself as morally compromised as the Royalists he had fallen among. But Beaumont did not enter the House of Lamentations, nor even approach the brothel’s door. Instead, he stood a moment looking up at its windows before turning away and tracing his own footsteps back to ’t Zand, where Seeker finally saw him enter his own cottage on Kreupelnstraat and soon afterwards extinguish his light.

  Fourteen

  The Book-Buyer of Sint-Donatian’s

  Anne supposed the garden of the Engels Klooster was as close an approximation as might be found to the poets’ view of earthly perfection. She was on her knees, weeding amongst the peas, and occasionally popping a sweet, fat pod into her mouth. To her right, a honeysuckle clambered over a brick wall, driving Sister Ignatia’s bees almost to distraction. A breeze reaching the garden from the west carried to her the scent of the lavender grown for the convent’s apothecary. This wasn’t like an English garden, like the gardens she’d known as a child and a young woman, with their knots of hedges and mannered walks, promenades for the discussion of policy, arbours for the whispering of sweet nothings or the hatching of intrigues. This was a place of industry and utility, where everything, however lovely its effect, had a purpose beyond the facilitating of leisure or the pleasing of the eye. And yet, there was something, amongst the buzzing of the bees, the flitting of the butterflies and the contented chatter of the nuns as they bent to their work amongst the vegetables and flowerbeds, that kept Anne on the alert. It was a tableau to delight the senses, and it masked something else. Andrew Marvell would have seen it for sure, would have found that something, laid it bare with his pen. But Marvell was not here, he was in London and, despite Lady Anne’s best efforts, he was still on the wrong side.

  Thoughts of Marvell brought to Lady Anne’s mind memories of past failed endeavours on the King’s behalf, of friends lost. Anne rallied herself and concentrated harder on the harvesting of the peas. She was nearing the end of a second row when she became aware of a hush descending amongst the novices and a stiffening in the posture of Sister Euphemia, who had charge of the gardens. On glancing up she saw the Jesuit, Father Felipe, emerging from the cloister walk in the company of Sister Janet. They took the path towards the orchard and as
they passed the novices lowered their heads. The Spanish priest accorded them a perfunctory nod. Father Felipe, after all, was the son of a count, and his mother a cousin to a cousin of the King of Spain. A bishop’s mitre and possibly a cardinal’s hat lay somewhere in his future; it was hardly to be expected that such a one would take novices under his notice.

  The workings of religious orders and the relationships between them were still largely a mystery to Anne, and yet, that the priest should be so often at the Engels Klooster struck her as strange. Stranger still was the fact that most of the Spaniard’s interactions seemed to be not with Mother Superior, but with Sister Janet. She knew, from what Janet herself had told her and what she had gleaned from others in the convent, that the English nun’s exile so many years ago, in the reign of King James, had been occasioned by her father’s imprisonment and execution for the harbouring of Jesuits. Anne had at first wondered whether there might be some family connection between Janet and the priest, but then the nun must have left England many years before Felipe had been born, and Anne could not see that she could have any connections with the harbouring of Jesuits in England now. Besides, the doings of a Spanish Jesuit were not the reason she had come to Bruges: all her focus must be on the uncovering and removal of Thurloe’s double agent.

  As they walked along the path to the convent orchard, the priest occasionally inclined his head slightly, as if to catch something said to him by the English nun. On one such occasion, Sister Janet broke off from her narrative and turned her head to look directly at Anne. Father Felipe followed suit and looked at her too, and it seemed to Anne that something in what he saw displeased him.

  She was still pondering what Sister Janet might have said about her to the priest when one of the novices brought to her a note that had been delivered to the convent gate.

  The note was in Flemish, but its contents easily understood.

  Two gentlemen have come to me asking about the book you were recently enquiring about. If you are of a mind to fulfil our arrangement under the terms already proposed, you should come this afternoon to me at my shop by the entrance of SintDonatian’s. I have asked the gentlemen in question to return at 4 o’clock. Balthasar van der Velde, Bookseller.

  At last, her tour of the booksellers of Bruges on that first day in the city, when Lady Hildred had been recovering from their journey from England, had borne fruit. Anne only managed to stop herself from cursing out loud at the dilatoriness of the convent gatekeeper. The bells of the Engels Klooster had sounded three o’clock some time ago. She abandoned her trug of pea pods, hastily undid the strings of her apron and ran to wash her hands at the garden pump. Sister Euphemia was all astonishment but couldn’t get her words out in time to ask Anne what she thought she was doing. Quickly, Anne went to her cell and took her money bag from the small case that Sister Janet had permitted her to keep there.

  Anne Winter had spent almost all of her time since she had heard of the death of Damian Seeker moving as quickly as possible, on horseback or on foot, from one part of England to another, whilst trying her best to attract no attention. In that sense, Bruges was no different to her than anywhere else. She arrived at the Burg just as the great bells of Sint-Donatian’s tolled four. Quickly, she threaded her way through the crowd of booths and booksellers clustered around the steps of the cathedral and positioned herself to the side of a stall selling devotional tracts and gruesome German woodcuts. The bookseller, engaged in attending to an elderly Flemish matron, smiled broadly on noticing her and lifted a hand to wave. With tightly pursed lips and a firm shake of her head she tried to communicate to him that he shouldn’t draw attention to her. How could she have been so careless as to forget to impress on the bookseller that her identity should be kept secret from the man looking for a copy of Walton’s Compleat Angler?

  She didn’t have long to berate herself for soon she saw two of the men from the Bouchoute House – the Englishman Ellis and the Irishman Glenroe – approach the bookseller. Minutes later they were stepping back out on to the square, each with a package under his arm.

  Once they were safely lost in the crowds of the square, Anne hurried over to the booth. ‘Well,’ she demanded of the slightly startled man, ‘which of them was it?’

  The man blustered for a moment, protesting that one Englishman was much like another to him. Anne realised that to distinguish an Englishman from an Irishman would be utterly beyond him. ‘The red head or the thin one?’ she said at last.

  ‘Oh.’ He smiled, on surer ground now. ‘The thin one.’

  ‘You did not tell him where you had got the book?’

  The smile disappeared. ‘Only that it was from a sister at the Engels Klooster.’

  Anne felt a chill go through her. She paid the bookseller what had been agreed between them for keeping her informed and began to make her way back to the Engels Klooster, feeling somewhat shaken and nauseous. After crossing the bridge at Molenmeers she stopped and forced herself to consider what she had just learned. The man whose treachery had led to the deaths or imprisonment of so many of her friends in England was Marchmont Ellis, and the unthinking bookseller of Sint-Donatian’s had just told him where he might find her.

  *

  As Anne had been crossing back over the Molenbrug, she had been too taken up in her thoughts to notice the carpenter crossing over from the other direction, but he had noticed her.

  It was her walk. It had bothered Damian Seeker the day he’d had a brief glimpse of her crossing the Markt in the company of Lady Hildred Beaumont, and it bothered him now. It had bothered him then because he hadn’t been certain why it had caught his attention, but now he knew, and it hit him like an iron bar to the chest. Anne Winter. Lady Anne Winter, dressed first as a maid, and then gone missing, and now back in Bruges and dressed as a nun. Seeker stopped in his tracks, astonished. It was all he could do not to lay hold of her there and then and ask her what she thought she was up to.

  But he didn’t need to ask. Seeker knew precisely what Anne Winter was doing in Bruges, and he could not believe he hadn’t guessed it before. Who else would they have sent? Was there a more brazen Royalist in the whole of England? What was Thurloe thinking of, to have taken his eye off her just because he, Seeker, had gone to Bruges?

  Seeker was so out of countenance he almost walked into a group of three old women on their way to mass at Sint-Annas. The old women apologised and got quickly out of his way. The near collision had brought him back to his senses. He had been halfway to deciding to go and pound on the door of the Engels Klooster and demand to know what was going on. But then his game would have been up before Sister Janet even had her wimple straight, and once it was discovered who he was, the odds were not good that Damian Seeker would depart this city’s gates alive.

  Anne Winter, Hildred Beaumont, the Engels Klooster, Ruth Jones, Bartlett Jones. It was to the first three that he should be giving his attention, yet his thoughts constantly returned to the young Englishman who’d survived little more than an afternoon in Bruges. That Anne Winter had been Lady Hildred’s ‘maid’ he had no doubts. But Seeker knew better than most how many aliases an agent might go by. Whether Anne Winter was also the ‘Ruth Jones’ that Bartlett Jones had gone to the Engels Klooster in search of was another question.

  Seeker had spent much of the afternoon walking the parts of the town where he knew the remnants of the English soldiery to be billeted but found no one who answered the description of the man in the fine grey woollen suit. It would have suited his purposes, quite wondrously, if the man he sought turned out not to have been a man at all. Certainly, Seeker didn’t regard Anne Winter as a woman. To him, she was neither male nor female; she was simply a person capable of great deviousness and someone who was constantly to be watched. Even so, while she might successfully have passed herself off first as a lady’s maid and then as a nun, he doubted very much that she would be able to disguise herself as a man.

 
In London, Seeker would simply have marched to Anne Winter’s house and arrested her. Never, since he had come to Bruges, had he so much regretted the power that he could not wield. He took great care, usually, not to come within sight of those whose paths he might have crossed in England. That Anne Winter had not recognised him was a chance that he could not rely on occurring again. Sister Janet’s new suspicion of him was already making visits to the Engels Klooster more dangerous. The information with which Mother Superior’s stable boy could provide him was useful, but limited. Seeker had almost reached the carpenter’s yard in Sint-Gillis and was just considering whether he might need to send to the agent at Dunkirk or Hoogstraten for help to further infiltrate and investigate the Engels Klooster, when he saw the solution to his problem crossing the street ahead of him.

  George Beaumont had a haunted, anxious look to him, much as he had had before when he had turned away from the House of Lamentations. Now he was plainly headed towards the inn above whose stables Seeker lodged. Seeker called over to him. Beaumont looked up quickly but seemed to take a moment to realise who was addressing him. He straightened his shoulders and summoned the expression he more habitually wore, but Seeker wondered if what he had just seen was a man more affected than he would wish to admit by the death of an uncaring mother.

  ‘Are you looking for me?’

  Beaumont nodded. ‘Something has—’

  Seeker stopped him. ‘Not here.’ A short while later they were stooping beneath the doorway of De Garre. It was a place generally patronised by local craftsmen, and they were unlikely to be observed or overheard by English soldiers. Seeker selected a bench on the ground floor, from where he could keep an eye on the doorway from the narrow alleyway and any new arrivals. He waited until the tavern maid had filled their tankards and left.

  ‘Well?’ said Seeker.

  ‘I’m finished at the Bouchoute House.’