[Damian Seeker 05] - The House of Lamentations

by S. G. MacLean

  ‘England will never accept the Jesuits, Evan.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ said Glenroe. ‘I’d warrant the ends will justify the means.’

  ‘The means? Blackmailing your friends? Killing Lady Hildred?’ asked Thomas. ‘She put her faith in us.’

  Glenroe had at least had the grace to look shamefaced. ‘She’d recognised Felipe. She all but told Janet about it. The whole thing would have blown up in our faces, and there would have been no way of keeping the priests or the families they were with in England safe then. And no one will miss her. Her own son made that plain enough.’

  ‘No one would miss me either, Evan. Is that why you never tried to entrap me with your scheme, because I have no family left to shame?’

  Glenroe attempted a smile. ‘That and the fact that the girls said you did little but drink and talk of home. But yes, with your family being gone and your estate in republican hands, it would hardly have been worth our while trying to get you.’

  They were clattering over the bridge into Damme. Since the departure of the Spaniards from the town, the gatekeepers had all but given up their vigilance over new arrivals and had let them through with only the same grumble about Englishmen as they had had from the guard on the Speye Poort in Bruges.

  ‘Seeker and the woman have definitely come through here then,’ said Glenroe as they approached the Stadhuis. ‘Beaumont too.’

  ‘But where?’ said Thomas, looking around him at the hushed buildings surrounding the market square. All appeared utterly still in the Stadhuis. Around the square, shops and booths were shut up, and the business of the taverns was long done for the night. There was something, though, about De Grote Sterre. One or two shutters not closed, a suggestion of light leaking out into the street from the stable yard. ‘The governor’s house.’

  ‘Surely Seeker would never risk it,’ said Glenroe.

  ‘He’d risk anything,’ returned Thomas, spurring on his horse. ‘Besides, the Spaniards are gone. Come on.’

  The carriage gates into the rear courtyard of De Grote Sterre were indeed open, which was a warning already that all was not right. Thomas and Glenroe advanced through them with caution. They had not got very far when they heard the sounds of some commotion and, somewhere, a clashing of swords. A torch burned in a brazier on the outer wall of the stable, the only other light coming from a window above the bakehouse. At first Thomas had trouble making out anything at all, then a noise to his left took his attention and he could hardly believe his eyes. Two women, dirtied and bloodied, were emerging from a small, splintered door at the back of the house, one clearly supporting the other. Glenroe leapt from his horse and took hold of the more injured of the two just as she was about to collapse.

  ‘Who did this?’ he demanded of the other woman. ‘Seeker?’

  She was shaking her head as Thomas drew his sword. ‘Damian Seeker never did that,’ he said.

  The less badly injured of the two women looked up at him. Through the blood and the dirt, without the wimple or the maid’s cap, he saw her at last. ‘Anne Winter!’ he said.

  ‘You must get in there, Sir Thomas. They are killing each other.’

  Thomas called over his shoulder as he charged through the shattered door. ‘Come on, Evan.’

  ‘Wait, Thomas!’ Glenroe grabbed an unlit torch from a bracket by the smashed door and ran with it to the bakehouse, whose inhabitants had clearly been woken by the commotion. ‘Light!’ he demanded of the terrified woman who came to the door. She quickly brought a candle and the torch was aflame. ‘See to these women,’ he told her, and then ran to join Thomas. ‘Right, Faithly, me first.’

  But Thomas grabbed the torch and pushed ahead of him, through the destroyed doorway and into the house. ‘No, Evan, you can have Beaumont. I’ve been waiting a lot longer for my reckoning with Damian Seeker.’

  As they entered the vault at first Thomas could discern nothing but chaos. They were in some sort of cellar or storeroom that had a strange, damp, sweet reek from bottles and jars of preserves knocked from their shelves and smashed on the floor. Thomas almost slipped in some sticky, wet substance that oozed over the dirt floor. A door at the far end of the cellar was open, and it was clear from the sounds coming through it that the antagonists had taken their fight into the body of the house. He ran in the direction of the noise, putting the torch to candles in their sconces as he passed. Glenroe was close behind him. Each arc of light revealed the same thing: devastation. Everywhere, furniture was toppled over or pushed askew, jugs, bowls, vases knocked over and smashed to pieces, drapes pulled from tables or torn from walls. The sounds of clashing steel, of human beings colliding with walls or furnishings, sending objects hurtling across wooden floors, did not abate but each moment seemed to come from just a little further away.

  It was on the second floor that they at last came upon them. In the time it took Glenroe to shove his burning torch into an empty bracket, the two men who had been struggling near the window had approached the central stairs. Thomas readied himself for an assault on Seeker, but Glenroe pulled him back. ‘Wait, Thomas.’

  ‘What?’ yelled Thomas.

  As he did so, Damian Seeker glanced around for the briefest of moments and George Beaumont managed to swipe the point of his sword across his cheek. With a roar, Seeker lunged at him, but Beaumont parried and managed to scuttle backwards up the next set of stairs. Seeker charged after him. Thomas began to follow but didn’t know how to get amongst them and again Glenroe’s hand was on his bandolier, pulling him back.

  ‘The odds, Thomas. We’ll wait till they’ve shortened the odds.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Thomas snapped.

  ‘Just now it’s evens. Us and them. Let them fight it out and it’s two to one in our favour.’

  Thomas shook him off and continued up the stairs but didn’t make it to the next landing as Seeker’s elbow swung back and connected, hard, with his jaw, sending him stumbling backwards into Glenroe.

  ‘Trust me, Thomas,’ Glenroe gasped, steadying them both. ‘I know my odds.’

  The fighting went on, the adversaries well matched. Seeker’s bulk and strength were balanced by Beaumont’s agility and greater battle-readiness: the man who had fought the Spaniards only a summer’s season ago was more practised than the man who had played the part of a carpenter for the last eighteen months. But even as he watched, Thomas could see George Beaumont begin to lose his discipline as the momentum of the fight brought Seeker back to the height of his skill. To avoid one of Seeker’s thrusts, Beaumont jumped onto a dresser and launched himself to take hold of the brass candelabra hanging from the ceiling. Swinging forwards as the candelabra pulled loose of its fixing, he managed to connect his booted feet with Seeker’s shoulder, knocking the big Yorkshireman sideways, but Seeker quickly regained his footing and landed a blow on Beaumont’s arm, sending Beaumont’s sword scuttling across the floor.

  It should have been over then. Thomas thought it would be and prepared himself to face Seeker when George Beaumont had been dealt with. This was their reckoning, at last. The final act in the drama playing out between them for the last three years, since Thomas had first given himself up to Seeker, in Yorkshire. What a mistake that had been, to think he could get back his old life in return for becoming Cromwell’s spy! It had been a disaster that had reached its climax in a disused bear pit in Southwark and almost cost the life of Maria, the woman both himself and Seeker loved. And up until tonight, Thomas had believed it had ended in the death of Seeker himself. But here the man was in front of him, flesh and blood and fighting for his life. Thomas made ready but suddenly, Evan Glenroe had dived across the floor in front of him and picked up the sword that Seeker had kicked further out of the way. As Seeker’s head whipped round to see what was happening, Glenroe threw the sword back to Beaumont. ‘Here, George, entertain us a little longer!’

  Thomas turned in disbelief to Evan
Glenroe.

  ‘For the fun of it,’ said Glenroe. ‘Let’s see what the big fella can really do.’

  But Seeker had dropped his arm a moment on his approach to what he thought was an unarmed man. The sliver of time before he understood what was happening might as well have been an eternity, and now it was too late. George had him off balance and managed to slash Seeker across the shoulder in such a way that it was now Seeker’s sword that fell, not to the floor, but clattering down past a gap in the stairway to the storey below.

  Instantly, Seeker had his knife out, but there was no chance that he could get close enough to George Beaumont to bring it to bear. Thomas’s heart was racing. His eyes swept between Seeker and Beaumont as if he was watching a bout between a favoured fighting cock and a new-arrived, unwanted interloper. They had reached the top floor proper of the house, the wooden steps which Seeker had begun to back up leading only to a loft beneath the rafters. The trapdoor above Seeker’s head was closed, but one forceful thrust of his arm had it springing up and open. As he disappeared through it, he kicked out at the advancing George Beaumont, but Beaumont ducked his head in time and then lashed out with his blade, ripping the leather of Seeker’s boot. Then George continued up into the darkness.

  And that, Thomas realised, was George Beaumont’s mistake, because it would be the advancing predator and not the hidden prey that needed light in the last act of this struggle.

  ‘Come on,’ said Glenroe, putting his foot on the bottom rung of the stepladder.

  ‘No,’ said Thomas, ‘wait.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘To even things up, Evan.’

  Glenroe gave a snort of derision and started up the steps anyway.

  *

  Seeker had studied the building as he and Anne Winter had approached it less than an hour earlier, run his eye over it, front and then back, for points of likely entry and exit. He had not intended to find himself at the very top of De Grote Sterre, directly beneath the roof, with three men coming up behind him, intent on killing him. As he’d finally heaved himself backwards through the hatch at the top of the stepladder, still trying to kick out at George Beaumont, Seeker had swiftly recalled how the top of the house had looked from the back. Beaumont’s sword proved almost as great an encumbrance to the man himself in progressing up the stepladder and through the hatch as it had done to the toe of Seeker’s boot, and it afforded Seeker a vital opportunity to get to the back of the room, and the wall. He stood about a foot and a half out from it. He would like to have been further back, but this loft room was not deep enough for him to go any further. He didn’t have long to wait before Beaumont began to emerge through the hatch. The time of the wait was a matter of a few breaths, but it was enough for Seeker’s eyes to start to make something of the gloom. The blade of the sword came into his sightline first and then the man holding it. Seeker was ready. The pain in his right shoulder from where George had slashed it was intense, but his aim with his left was not so certain. It would have to be the right arm.

  Beaumont came slowly through the hatch, looking about him in the darkness, trying to sense Seeker’s presence, expecting him to be close. Seeker began to raise his arm. Something in the movement took Beaumont’s attention, and he turned his head in the direction of the sound. Seeker let fly. He could only see shapes, forms in the darkness. He couldn’t see the look on the man’s face, in his eyes, as the dagger flew through the air with all the force he could muster to embed itself in George Beaumont’s forehead.

  And then there was only a short, strange pair of sounds before George’s body started to crumple and fall back down through the hatch – the contact of blade with flesh, through bone, and the astonished gasp of the dying man. Then, as the body collided with Glenroe, coming up just behind it, and the Irishman called out in alarm and confusion, Seeker bounded across the floor to take the sword that had fallen from George Beaumont’s grasp. He paused only to slam shut the trapdoor, before making straight for his only escape route – the wide window hatch that looked out onto De Grote Sterre’s courtyard, over thirty feet below. As Seeker fumbled in the darkness with the catch on the shutters, it seemed that Evan Glenroe had at last managed to wrestle George Beaumont’s body out of the way and was pushing up the trapdoor.

  ‘Evan, wait!’ Seeker heard Thomas Faithly cry.

  ‘What for? I’d swear even that Devil hasn’t another knife on him.’

  And then Glenroe was in the loft and Faithly close after him. Seeker braced his left forearm and finally smashed the shutters open. And there, as he’d seen when he and Anne Winter had entered the hof not an hour ago, was the rope. Seeker silently blessed the Flemings that built their houses thus: broad windows with hooks above by which to haul goods up to any floor of their house. Glenroe and Faithly were coming for him as he launched himself through the window to grab hold of the rope. He travelled downwards with tremendous speed, the shouts of the other two men still in his ears as he hit the ground. He quickly ran to the coil of rope wound round the winch at the foot of the wall and sliced through it with George Beaumont’s sword so that Faithly and Glenroe could not replicate his exit, then he started to run towards the stable. And then he stopped.

  The torch on the wall was still lit and illuminated a woman, Anne Winter, standing there with one hand on the bridle of a horse, the other outstretched, holding a pistol. Seeker’s heart was thumping, his lungs almost bursting in his chest. Now. This was it. After all he had been through, all he had done, this was it. A stable yard in a small town in a country very far from home. And for what? What was any of it worth? The cause he had so long fought for was in its death throes, its values betrayed, and he would never see Manon or Maria again.

  Anne Winter appeared to be very calm. ‘Where is George Beaumont?’ she said.

  He gave a short flick of his head back towards the loft.

  ‘Dead?’

  He nodded.

  She looked at the pistol in her hand. ‘I doubt he’ll be mourned.’

  ‘No.’ Seeker nodded to the pistol. ‘Best be done with it then, Lady Anne.’

  She looked at him in confusion and laughed. ‘Done with it? No, not like this. You saved my life tonight, twice. You saved Ruth Jones’s too. This is not the reckoning I want, and I will not live in your debt.’ She took another step towards him and put the pistol into his hand. ‘There’s powder and some of the King’s money – enough to get you away – in Glenroe’s saddlebag. His is the best horse. I’ve loosed the others. They’ll not have wandered far, but it will give you a start. I’ve kept the rest of Lady Hildred’s money for the King, of course.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said.

  The shouts of Faithly and Glenroe coming down through the house were getting closer.

  ‘For God’s sake, get away,’ she said, exasperated.

  For once, Seeker had no idea what to say to this woman, and so said nothing. She shook her head as she hurriedly passed him the rein of Glenroe’s horse, and there was just the glimmer of the old spark he knew in her eyes. ‘A gentleman to the end. A “thank you” would have done, you know.’ Then she began to walk away. ‘Be gone now. For the love of God, Damian Seeker, be gone.’

  Epilogue

  England was there. A beacon glowed from the hill fort, lights twinkled out of the darkness, the moon was silver on the water as the prow of the ship advanced up the estuary. Seeker felt something surge inside him: England was there, still, and all that England held, all that mattered to him.

  The storm of their first night at sea was now so abated there was hardly sufficient breeze to take them into harbour, and yet inch by inch, it seemed to him, the lights of Harwich came closer. Inch by inch, what had passed in Flanders was further behind him. All round him, the crew made ready for docking and Seeker stood out of their way, watching. The journey from Damme to the coast had been short, but there had been times when he had thought he would not see Englan
d again. Faithly and Glenroe had been after him in no time, Glenroe at one point coming so close that Seeker could have reached out his hand and gripped the Irishman’s ankle. But the heifer behind which Seeker had been lying in that Flemish barn had not encouraged further human intrusion, and after a brief inspection of the place, Glenroe had left. Worse had been the moment Thomas Faithly had rapped on the door of the fisherman’s cottage only moments after Seeker had stepped into it. As Faithly made his enquiries of the fisherman’s wife, to whom Seeker had just shown a handful of coins from Lady Hildred’s fortune, he himself had stood a mere few inches away, obscured only by cottage’s opened door. But the promise of money, as it had a tendency to do, had done the trick. The fisherman had assisted Seeker to Ostend, where he’d finally made contact with Thurloe’s agent and obtained a pass to travel back over the sea, home.

  Such a storm had raged on that very first night that Seeker had wondered whether he would see another morning. The superstitions and omen-reading of the seamen were such that Seeker himself had begun to wonder if God was indeed expressing his wrath, but when dawn had brought some respite and he found he was still alive he knew they had survived the worst.

  Or so he’d thought, but the worst was waiting for him in Harwich, on the boat slipping out to meet them and guide them into dock. The town they were drawing closer to had a quiet to it, a stillness, that did not fit a naval port. Seeker felt as if they were coming upon a vigil. Debris from the late storm floated on near-still waters and gathered around piers and boats at anchor in the harbour. The sky, grey clouds giving way to darkness, lowered over all with a heaviness that the lamps being lit in windows could do nothing to alleviate.