[Damian Seeker 05] - The House of Lamentations

by S. G. MacLean

  ‘You still do not tell me what he says,’ said Anne.

  ‘It is what he began upon the other day, out in the street. About the woman who came here on her way to the King and found herself the target of an assassin’s musket; about young women who come here for help going missing or finding themselves in brothels. He virtually accuses Sister Janet of procurement.’

  ‘He is wrong,’ said Anne. ‘I cannot speak for what happened to Lady Hildred. She was Sister Janet’s childhood friend, and although there appears to have been little love between them, Janet took her loss hard. She had instruction from Damme to pack up Lady Hildred’s belongings for sale to raise funds in His Majesty’s cause, but only today she took care to set aside a locket she knew had been dear to the old woman, for it contained an image of Lady Hildred’s estranged son.’

  George Barton looked on the point of saying something, but Anne was determined that no misunderstanding should remain. ‘And as for young girls, I cannot speak of those who were here before, but I can assure you, the young woman Glenroe spoke of whose brother he said had died – she was sent to no brothel but got away safe.’

  ‘Are you certain of this? I mean . . .’

  At that moment, Gust the stable hand came in looking for George Barton. He glanced suspiciously at Anne, as if knowing her habit and wimple were but a ruse, then spoke to Barton. ‘You will find food laid out in the guest refectory, in return for your labours.’ Then he looked at Anne, ‘And you best get yourself elsewhere, Sister. Mother Superior doesn’t hold with you women fraternising with the outside.’

  George Barton looked as if he might argue but then thought the better of it. ‘Of course. But you’ll let me know if I can be of further help shifting things for the sisters?’

  Gust nodded and George Barton, with one more look to Anne as if he would say something, somewhat reluctantly walked off in the direction of the kitchens. Anne closed her eyes. At last, there was someone she could trust.

  Sixteen

  Sister Janet Watched

  Sister Janet watched from an upper window as the man she had seen helping Gust dig out the ivy walked through the kitchen garden on the path to the street door. She would have to have a word with Gust: she did not like this coming and going of people she didn’t know. Bad enough with people she did. As she watched him approach the door, the man removed his hat and wiped a sleeve across his forehead. It was indeed a hot day, but something in the gesture, in the way he walked, seemed familiar. It was the man who had been out in the town with Evan Glenroe. There was possibly something else, but Sister Janet didn’t have the time to stand here and enquire of herself what that other thing might be. If it was indeed the man who had been trailing around Bruges in Glenroe’s wake, he should not have been at the Engels Klooster. Glenroe should have made his warnings to stay away clearer. She had warned Father Felipe that the Irishman might prove too volatile a character to admit to their enterprise, but Felipe had not been inclined to take advice from a woman, and the results of that carelessness were beginning to manifest themselves. Too many strangers were arriving at the convent’s gates these days. Strangers, and not such strangers. With every newcomer from home, Sister Janet could feel the walls of her convent, so long her sanctuary, move a little closer in on her. The man Barton passed through the door in the outer wall and Sister Janet turned away from the window, her hand going automatically to the key to her special room and tightening around it.

  *

  It was his second time inside the House of Lamentations, and this time Seeker was permitted to go alone down into the cellars to carry out the repairs he had been engaged to make. After he’d made two or three trips down the steps with tools and materials, the servants stopped paying any attention to him. He set up his workbench and sawed a couple of lengths of wood as evidence that he had begun the work he was here to carry out. He went over to the pile of barrels behind which he had found a makeshift bedchamber on his last visit. This time he was confronted only with mouse droppings and disturbed dust. Whoever had used this hideaway was clearly not expected back. He then took one of the lit torches set into the wall to help him in his work and went to the tunnel door he had discovered on his last visit here. From his bag, he took out the key that had worked in the lock last time. Soon, he was turning the iron ring and pulling the door towards himself to reveal the entrance to the tunnel.

  Seeker moved quickly. The tunnel went straight ahead, without curving, and without any passageways veering off to the side. As he had judged on his last visit, it appeared to go directly beneath the canal. Moving carefully through it, Seeker’s mind went back to the mineshafts and tunnels he had been in in sieges during the war, the fear of imminent collapse, suffocation. He could sense the weight of the water above him and was glad eventually to find himself at the other end.

  Here he was confronted by two doors. First he tried that to the left, which by means of a turning stairway and outer passageway led out onto Hoedenmakersstraat. Seeker retraced his steps and tried the other door. It was large and heavy and the ring handle rusted from lack of use, but it eventually turned. He pulled it towards him as softly as he could, the creaks from its hinges echoing around him. When he saw what was on the other side he thought for a moment that he had made a mistake and that he was back in the cellar of the House of Lamentations. The smell was the same – old barrels, spilt wine on the packed earth floor, cheeses hanging. He took a step in and raised his torch slightly and listened. The noises coming from above were of a different order from those in the House of Lamentations: lower, less hurried. A door opened at the top of a stairway at the far end of this cellar. Seeker stepped back, pulling the door almost to but leaving a small gap to look through. A light preceded whoever it was coming down the stairs. More lights were lit. A quiet, contented humming passed through the brightening room, and into Seeker’s narrow sightline came an Augustinian monk. Seeker let out a long, slow breath. The tales of an ancient passageway connecting this Priory with the former convent of the House of Lamentations were true, and not just the work of some salacious imagination. Seeker thought again of the tale the girl Beatte had told him of the nun murdered long ago by her obsessive lover-monk. He thought again of the dead body of Bartlett Jones, fished out of the canal beneath which this tunnel passed. He thought of the makeshift bedchamber beyond the door on the other side of this tunnel, the girl who Bartlett Jones had come looking for. Had he found her, or had someone else found him first? From the respective conditions of the doors, Seeker was certain that anyone using this tunnel as access to or exit from the House of Lamentations was coming not from the Augustinian priory but from out on the street.

  The monk finished filling his flagon from a barrel halfway down the room and took a quick swig for himself before retrieving his torch from the bracket where he had left it and disappearing back up the stairs, still contentedly humming. Once the cellar was again in darkness and Seeker had heard the clicking shut of the upper door, he pulled his own door the last few inches shut and made his way back along the tunnel to finish his work in the House of Lamentations.

  *

  Anne was becoming used to the mass now. The other sisters were too intent upon their own devotions to notice any strangeness in her own behaviour in the chapel. But in truth, she had learned to mimic what they did and any onlooker would have thought her little different to the rest of them. Only in the slight hesitations, the slight uncertainty about when to stand and when to sit or to kneel, when to begin the next chorused response, might anyone have suspected that Anne was not as the other nuns were, and even in those, repeated practice and exposure were making her better.

  A quick glance at the choir revealed to her that Sister Janet was not in her usual place. Previously, this would not have worried Anne, but after hearing from her encounter with George Barton the insinuations Evan Glenroe had made about Janet, not knowing her whereabouts made Anne feel ill at ease. The mass seemed to her to drag on
interminably today, and so great was her hurry to get out when it was over that she almost forgot to bless herself with holy water on leaving the chapel. The nuns in front of her seemed to be moving even more slowly than usual on their way to the refectory. On passing the small room in which Sister Janet had presented her with Ruth Jones, Anne tried the handle as discreetly as she could. It would hardly shift – the door was locked. Anne moved on, wondering whether Sister Janet would appear for lunch, and if not, how soon she might escape to go in search of her. Before they reached the refectory doors, Anne heard a noise back down the corridor and turned her head enough to see Sister Janet emerge from the locked room, quickly lock it again, check that she had done so, and then go off in the other direction, her outdoors cape tied at her neck. She had a small satchel gripped under her arm and a resolute look on her face. Anne stepped out of her place in the line and told the sister walking beside her that she had left her rosary in the chapel and would be going back for it.

  Hovering at the chapel door until all the sisters had filed after Mother Superior into the refectory, Anne swiftly went to her own small cell to put on her own outdoors cape and then left through the garden door. It didn’t take her long to spot Sister Janet’s lumpy little frame making its way down Carmersstraat. Anne wondered if Sister Janet might be going back to St Walburgakerk, to commune in some way over she knew not what with Father Felipe, but instead of turning left at the bottom of the street, she carried on straight over the Carmersbrug and began to make her way along Gouden-Handrei. She lost sight of Janet briefly, only to catch sight of her again bustling across the Augustinians’ Bridge. Anne pulled back and concealed herself behind some greenery overhanging the canal. Once over the bridge, Sister Janet continued along by the side of the Augustinian priory.

  Carefully, taking pains to conceal herself amongst groups of people on the street, Anne watched Sister Janet pass along beneath the walls of the priory. And then she disappeared. It was ridiculous. Anne had been watching her the whole time, and Janet had not paused to knock at a door or gate. Not caring now for her visibility or otherwise, Anne hurried over to the other side. There was no door in the Augustinians’ wall where Janet had disappeared, but a little further on from where Anne had last seen her was the opening onto a dark, narrow passageway. She was about to step into the passageway when a hand caught her arm lightly from behind.

  ‘Really, Sister, I would not advise you to go down there. It is no place for a respectable young woman. Come, let me escort you back to the Engels Klooster.’

  It was Father Felipe.

  Seventeen

  Jesuitical

  Lady Anne Winter had endured many discomforts over the last sixteen years, since the wars between King and Parliament had unleashed themselves upon England, but the walk back up to the convent from the Augustinian priory in the company of Father Felipe was one of the most difficult. That the Spanish priest spoke flawless English made it all the more so, for she could not hide behind difficulties of language to avoid his insinuating questions.

  ‘I fear you have got lost, Sister,’ he had opened with, once she had conceded to herself that there was nothing to do but go along with him.

  ‘I think I may have done. I had meant to go to the Markt but must have taken a wrong turn somewhere. I thought I saw Sister Janet turn up this street. I hoped she might help me find my way. I must have been mistaken.’

  ‘Yes, I think you must. Sister Janet, as you know, rarely stirs from the Engels Klooster and the precinct of Sint-Anna. I would advise you to follow her example. There are still a few soldiers in the town, and the English ones, as I am sure you know, Sister, are of the most desperate sort.’

  ‘I have not found the soldiers of one nation to be any more dreadful than those of another, Father,’ she replied.

  ‘For which we must indeed be thankful,’ he said, touching his crucifix to his lips, while never taking his eyes from her. Something in the way he looked at her made the hairs on her arms stand up, and her scalp prickle. Not even on her wedding night to John Winter, whom she had not been able to love, had Anne felt as exposed in the company of a man as she did with this Jesuit priest.

  Anne turned as if to cross the Augustinians’ Bridge, and so go on to the Markt, but Father Felipe stopped her by raising his voice ever so slightly. ‘I don’t think it a good idea either, Sister, that you should go alone to the Markt, or indeed wander anywhere in the town. Whatever it is that you require I’m sure can be supplied at the convent.’

  ‘I intended to browse the booksellers’ booths,’ she answered.

  Although he could scarcely have been any older than she was, Father Felipe assumed the concerned expression of a disappointed uncle. ‘That, most of all, I would counsel you against. The convent library is more than adequately provided with devotional works approved by Mother Superior and myself.’

  Anne did not trust herself to respond, and the rest of their journey up to the Engels Klooster was made in silence, save for the frequent times it behoved Father Felipe to acknowledge a sycophantic greeting or to dispense a blessing. The further from the inner canals and their summer odours they got, the more Anne became aware of the aroma of citrus and sandalwood that habitually surrounded the priest. It contrasted with the heavy garlic and wine of his breath which was offensive even in the open air. An image she could not banish presented itself to her mind of the Spaniard applying the fragrant oils as he dressed in the morning. It was with the greatest relief that she finally passed through the doorway into the convent garden. She thanked Father Felipe as briefly and as politely as she could, and made to go, but for the second time that afternoon he placed a hand on her arm. This time, the touch was not light.

  ‘You are but lately arrived in Bruges, Sister, and it is understandable that life in England has not prepared you for the proprieties expected of a religious in His Majesty of Spain’s dominions, but you must take care that you do not do anything to jeopardise your place here. As you know, I am confessor to Mother Superior and several of the more senior sisters. I sense that you also would profit from my counsel. I will return tomorrow, to hear your confession.’ He leaned a little closer to her and she could feel his warm, wine-soaked breath on her. For a very brief moment, Father Felipe’s supercilious mask slipped, and she was confronted by a man barely in control of his lust. ‘Tomorrow, Lady Anne, you will know the benefit of unburdening yourself to me.’

  Anne only just reached the latrines before vomiting. One of the novices, a slight, fair girl whose father had sent her here for lack of any better idea, appeared behind her, offering her a ladle of water from a jug taken from the well. Anne accepted the water then wiped her mouth on the edge of her cloak. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ said the girl, leaving without lifting her head. ‘Father Felipe confesses me too.’

  *

  Seeker could feel the anger rising in him as the time passed. He had told Ellis to be here by two and no later. It had taken him the best part of the morning to complete the repairs to the cellar shelving in the House of Lamentations, and those hours of thought had done little to make clearer to him what might have befallen Bartlett Jones. He was in no mood to be kept waiting by someone of Ellis’s degree of insignificance. Every hour wasted was an hour longer before he could begin his journey back to England. The bells of Sint-Gillis had already struck the quarter hour when Ellis finally appeared in the back courtyard of ’t Oud Handbogenhof, the hostelry just a few minutes’ walk from Seeker’s own lodging.

  ‘You’re late,’ said Seeker as Ellis took up a bench next to his.

  ‘I was at the Schuttersgilde,’ said Ellis. ‘It is not an easy thing to get away.’

  ‘It’s as easy as putting down your bow and walking away,’ said Seeker.

  Ellis looked at him with an expression he had not quite managed to banish in his dealings with Seeker, an expression of some social superiority that he still did not under
stand counted for nothing in their present relationship.

  ‘There are modes of behaviour, civility . . .’

  Seeker put up a hand. ‘Spare me,’ he said. ‘The only mode of behaviour you need concern yourself with is the one that says when I whistle you come running, understood?’

  Ellis flushed red but said nothing.

  ‘Right, then. I want you to tell me what’s going on at the Bouchoute House.’

  ‘The . . . what? Nothing.’

  ‘Nothing? Don’t try telling me you all sit there reading your prayer books waiting for Death to come knocking.’

  Ellis was alarmed. ‘Death? Why – no. I mean, there is nothing out of the ordinary “going on” at the Bouchoute House. Our efforts to find the killer of Lady Hildred have come to nothing, as you yourself predicted they would. We exist from day to day on whatever we can beg or borrow, wait for news of home, take what exercise we can, allow ourselves what entertainments we can. There is talk of moving on.’

  ‘You’ll move nowhere without my say-so,’ said Seeker.

  ‘But here we have scarcely enough to keep body and soul together,’ protested Ellis.

  ‘I’d weep for you if I’d nothing better to do.’ Seeker drained his tankard and leaned forwards. ‘But are you certain there’s nothing out of the ordinary going on? There seems to be a lot of bustle and toing and froing amongst the servants for nothing out of the ordinary.’

  Ellis attempted to meet Seeker’s eyes. ‘I don’t know. They’re clearing things out, I suppose. Selling unwanted furniture, perhaps. The housekeeper doesn’t tell much to tenants behind with their rent.’