The Black Friar Read online

  Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Also by S. G. MacLean

  Dedication

  Map

  One The Black Friar

  Two Carter Blyth

  Three Soper Lane

  Four The Secretariat

  Five Gethsemane

  Six Shadrach Jones

  Seven At Crutched Friars

  Eight Rose-Sick

  Nine Nathaniel

  Ten The School at the Sign of the Three Nails

  Eleven Dorcas Wells

  Twelve The Sketches

  Thirteen Suffer the Children

  Fourteen Downing

  Fifteen Looking for Wildman

  Sixteen The Good Woman of Gethsemane

  Seventeen Lady Anne Winter’s Salon

  Eighteen Elias Ellingworth’s Journal

  Nineteen At Kent’s

  Twenty A Pattern of Roses

  Twenty-One The Question of Shadrach Jones

  Twenty-Two Patience

  Twenty-Three Marvell’s Lists

  Twenty-Four A Mathematical Problem

  Twenty-Five The Jew of Malta

  Twenty-Six Ashpenaz

  Twenty-Seven Imagined Friends

  Twenty-Eight The Entrapment of Marcus Bridlington

  Twenty-Nine The Last Letter of Carter Blyth

  Thirty Threads

  Epilogue London, early March, 1655

  First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Quercus

  This edition first published in 2016 by

  Quercus Editions Ltd

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  Copyright © 2016 S. G. MacLean

  Map copyright © 2016 Liane Payne

  The moral right of S. G. MacLean to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Ebook ISBN 978 1 78429 338 3

  Print ISBN 978 1 78206 844 0

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  You can find this and many other great books at:

  www.quercusbooks.co.uk

  Also by S. G. MacLean

  The Alexander Seaton series

  The Redemption of Alexander Seaton

  A Game of Sorrows

  Crucible

  The Devil’s Recruit

  The Damian Seeker series

  The Seeker

  To Andrew

  One

  The Black Friar

  January, 1655: seventh year of the English Commonwealth and second of the reign of Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector Gethsemane almshouse, Aldgate

  Goodwill Crowe straightened himself, brushed grit and stray rushes from the front of his jerkin and his hose. Nathaniel was too frightened, Patience too astonished to say anything. Only Goodwill’s wife, Elizabeth, had something ready on her lips.

  ‘An abomination.’

  Goodwill nodded. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Idolatry. An offence to the Lord. In this house.’

  Patience glanced quickly at her brother then lowered her eyes again, before taking her lead from her mother. ‘Idolatry.’

  Nathaniel ignored his sister’s look. He was still watching his father, waiting. At last it came.

  ‘And you, boy, what did you know of this?’

  Nathaniel stammered. He could feel his mother’s eyes on him, and he knew the stammer would anger her all the more. ‘N-nothing. I knew nothing of it, F-father.’

  Elizabeth Crowe’s voice was cold. ‘You slept but three feet from him, how could it be that you did not know of this?’

  Nathaniel lowered his head and said nothing. It was better, always, when he said nothing.

  ‘He must have stolen it,’ said Patience, emboldened. ‘He had the look of a Papist, or a thief.’

  This Nathaniel could not tolerate. ‘Gideon is no thief.’

  ‘So what has happened to Mother’s bloodstone ring?’

  Nathaniel screwed up his face in sudden frustration and annoyance. ‘What?’

  ‘Mother’s bloodstone ring. It’s been missing since the day before he disappeared. Is that not so, Mother?’

  ‘You didn’t tell me of this . . .’ said Crowe to his wife.

  Elizabeth’s mouth scarcely moved when she talked. Not like those other times, when she preached, thought Nathaniel. Not like when her voice filled a room or churchyard, inflamed her hearers, stopped passers-by in their tracks. Here, in their home, about the streets of Aldgate, Elizabeth seldom spoke, and her voice, when she did, was low, her words slow and something terrifying. ‘It was a trifle,’ she said, ‘a vanity. Why should I concern you with such a thing when you are so engaged on Godly works, with the major and others?’

  ‘All worldly possessions are trifles, vanities,’ Goodwill replied. ‘But theft is a sin, regardless of the value of the thing stolen.’

  Elizabeth said nothing. Nathaniel knew though, that the ring, the cheap, old ring, had belonged to his grandmother, Goodwill’s mother. Nathaniel could just remember his grandmother. She had been the last person, before Gideon Fell had walked into their lives, to brave Elizabeth Crowe’s bile to the extent of being kind to him.

  Nathaniel tried to glance at the picture his father had brought out from beneath Gideon’s straw mattress. He hadn’t lied – Nathaniel never lied – he’d never seen the picture before, hadn’t known about it. He’d seen Gideon put things there sometimes – not the picture, other things – but Gideon had told him it was better for him not to know about these things, not to ask, and so he hadn’t.

  Nathaniel didn’t like the picture; it was dark, and something in it frightened him. A dark tangle of trees, rocks and bushes. Goodwill held it facing out a moment and Nathaniel could see it better. Men sleeping at the base of a rock. Three men sleeping, but another awake. He knew then what it was. It was idolatry, a false image, a graven image, the depiction of Christ. Nathaniel knew that, he had been taught it all his life. But still he wanted to reach out to the wakeful man and say, ‘I’ll stay with you, I’ll watch with you.’ He knew what was going to happen to the man. It was the Garden of Gethsemane.

  ‘What will you do with it?’ Elizabeth Crowe said to her husband.

  ‘What do you think?’ he said. ‘I’ll keep it for now. There is a sign in this, somewhere, I am sure, or I would not have found it. I will keep it until I better understand it, and why Gideon Fell came here.’

  Elizabeth nodded, and Goodwill, rolling the canvas into a scroll, left the small almshouse chamber that his son had for a time shared with Gideon Fell and returned to his work across the yard.

  The room was still disordered from Goodwill’s search, the cot upturned and the bedding on the floor. Elizabeth surveyed the place a moment then looked to Nathaniel. ‘Clear it up,’ she said, and turned to leave, Patience in her wake.

  As she passed him, his sister paused and murmured, ‘So much for your friend, now.’

  Nathaniel had had a bellyful of her. ‘G-go to Hell, Patience,’ he said.

  *

  In Samuel Kent’s Coffee House on Birchin Lane in the heart of the city, all the talk was of Parliament. Parliame
nt holding out against Cromwell, refusing to recognise his right as Lord Protector, threatening to cut the army, wrest it from his control.

  ‘But they can’t expect Oliver to give up the army,’ said Samuel, the old soldier who ran the coffee house. ‘He can’t govern without it.’

  ‘Oliver has no intention of governing without the army,’ responded Elias Ellingworth, who’d been holding court. ‘Parliament, though, he would happily do without. It cannot be long before he claims Divine Right.’

  There was an uneasy shifting on the coffee benches at this, and a lull in the conversation that was shattered only by the arrival of Gabriel, the coffee house boy. He had been at Custom House Key, noting the day’s prices for the merchants who called into Kent’s in the course of the day, too busy to see to such matters themselves. Samuel’s niece Grace had been teaching Gabriel his letters, and he carried the worth of all the stocks of the day in his head, ready to list them on the board Samuel had hung up on the wall. Today, though, Gabriel was out of breath, having run faster than ever all the way back up to Birchin Lane from the river to be first with the news, and there wasn’t a figure still in his head when he got there.

  ‘Glory be! What on earth is it, boy?’ said Samuel when Gabriel had skidded to a halt at the top of the coffee house steps. ‘Is it an armada?’

  Gabriel took a moment to get his breath, shaking his head vigorously to emphasise the import of his news. ‘No.’ Then he hesitated, a new and terrible thought come to him. ‘But maybe . . .’

  A merchant, George Tavener, was on his feet. ‘Good Heavens, lad, take a seat and tell us what the matter is.’

  A stool was thrust beneath the panting boy, and at last he had gathered himself enough to speak. ‘A monk. Dead a hundred years. All bricked up in Blackfriars.’

  Elias Ellingworth, the lawyer, looked at the child quizzically. ‘That’s hardly news, Gabriel. There’ll be lots of old Dominicans buried there. There are places still in London where you’ve a good chance of digging up a monk’s skeleton every time you put a spade in the ground. A few are bound to be turned up now and again at Blackfriars.’

  But Gabriel shook his head all the more emphatically. ‘Not a skeleton. Fresh as you or Mr Tavener there. But dead, and all bricked up there since old King Henry put his Spanish queen to trial in Blackfriars to get rid of her, before he could get rid of the monks too.’ His voice became quiet with terror. ‘Now they’re coming back, to get their revenge, Dan Botteler says.’

  ‘Dan Botteler!’ said a haberdasher, tutting as he put on his gloves ready to go back to his shop. ‘Dan Botteler’s mother dropped him on his head long ago, and he hasn’t spoken a word of sense since.’

  The others, having similarly lost interest in the boy’s story, went back to their coffee and their pipes.

  ‘But what if it’s true?’ Gabriel looked around him, beseeching.

  ‘You’ll not need to worry about it, true or not, if you don’t get back down to the quayside double quick, to get the prices of Mr Tavener’s stocks.’ Samuel Kent brandished his stick threateningly. ‘Better take your chances with Queen Catherine’s ghost!’

  The boy was up and out in the streets again before the laughter from the coffee drinkers had died down.

  ‘Strange, all the same though,’ said Elias. ‘A body to lie uncorrupted so long. There are ways, I have heard, of preserving them, but behind a wall? I cannot fathom that.’

  ‘Don’t trouble yourself over it,’ said Tavener, ‘it’ll be all over the Intelligencer by Monday, with every lurid theory you could want.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Elias, gathering up his papers for his business in the courts, ‘and never a word more said about Protector or Parliament.’

  *

  In the depths of Blackfriars, Damian Seeker looked upon it. Walled in alive. Dead now. Very thoroughly dead.

  The stonemason was prattling, never taking his eyes from the recess he’d unwittingly revealed in the far wall. ‘Heard of it before, mind, in bogs and suchlike, on the moors, bodies kept perfect, hundreds of years. Never seen it. Not till now.’ The man was rooted in the doorway, reluctant to move any closer to the corpse, as if fearful the black-robed figure was not quite dead.

  Seeker stepped impatiently past him into the small, roofless chamber that, many incarnations ago, might have served as private chapel to the priory, but was now scarcely fit for the stalling of pigs. The stonemason continued to babble, addressing himself now to Seeker’s sergeant, Daniel Proctor.

  ‘Lack of air, I suppose, that preserved it that long. I mean, the Blackfriars haven’t been hereabouts for a hundred years or more, have they? Lack of air.’ He nodded confidently, rubbing his arms in an attempt to stop the shivering. ‘Or a miracle?’

  Proctor shot him a warning glance. Talk of miracles was not to be encouraged, and would certainly not improve Seeker’s mood. The man shut up.

  Seeker called Proctor over to him. ‘Take a look, Sergeant,’ he said, before glancing over his shoulder at the stonemason. ‘And you, wait outside.’

  Once the fellow had gone, Seeker took his knife from its sheath and carefully used the flat side of the blade to draw the cowl back from the face of the dead man. There was a slight tug as the black worsted reluctantly came away from the dried blood stuck to the man’s hair. The light in the chamber was poor, but sufficient for their purpose. Daniel Proctor was no stranger to the sight of corpses in varying states of decay, but he took a step back from what Seeker’s knife revealed. ‘It isn’t possible.’

  Seeker nodded slowly. ‘It shouldn’t be possible, yet it is.’

  ‘But how can it be?’

  ‘That I don’t know. But here isn’t the place to find out. Guards!’ he shouted, and four of his men came quickly into the dilapidated chapel. ‘You two, get a cart and covering to take this body up to the coroner’s court at Old Bailey. You, fetch the alderman of Farringdon Ward, and tell him to get himself up there.’

  ‘What will you tell him?’ said Proctor.

  ‘That the body was preserved through lack of air. That it is being moved under guard for fear of some pestilence. That will keep the curious well back.’

  ‘And if the people start to talk of miracles?’

  Seeker looked again at the face of the man revealed by the cowl. ‘Let them. Better talk of miracles than the truth.’

  ‘Whatever that might be,’ said Proctor quietly.

  ‘Aye,’ agreed Seeker, ‘whatever that might be.’ He moved closer, the better to examine the man’s face. ‘I could do with Drake’s view on this. Bring him to me at the coroner’s.’

  ‘What should I tell him it’s about?’

  It hadn’t occurred to Seeker that Proctor didn’t know Drake’s discretion as he did. ‘He won’t ask. Just bring him.’

  Once his sergeant had gone, Seeker went to stand in the doorway of the old chapel, blocking off the sight inside from curious eyes. The stonemason and his apprentice had been taken for questioning, but Seeker knew enough of masonry to know that the brickwork masking the body had not been left undisturbed near a hundred and twenty years, since the Dominicans, the black-robed friars, had roamed freely from this place that still bore their name.

  Seeker turned his back to the corpse in the wall and surveyed what Blackfriars was now. Derelict, damp, its walls gradually falling into the stinking Fleet. How was it this had ever been a place of God, a parliament, a court for Henry Tudor’s queen? No pleasant gardens left around the crumbling cloister, no richly robed ambassadors of foreign kings to be flattered and painted here, no angelic voices rising from the choristers of the Chapel Royal. It was as if the depravity of Bridewell facing it across the Fleet had crept along King Henry’s gallery, dragging with it the spores of an irresistible decay.

  ‘Pull it all down, best thing for it,’ Daniel Proctor had said when they’d arrived, summoned by a sharp-eyed constable who’d guessed there might be more to the stonemason’s macabre find than met the eye. Stamping his feet to fend off the chill of the fre
ezing January morning, Seeker had grunted his agreement. Whatever had drawn the Dominicans to this site on the Thames four centuries ago was long disappeared, violated, built upon and built upon again. At the last it had been a theatre, shut up for years now, a place of nuisance and debauch, until the Commonwealth had put an end to it. London needed cleansing, and sometimes the only way to do that was to pull down and begin again.

  Two

  Carter Blyth

  Before the cart bearing the covered corpse had even cleared Ludgate, rumour as to what lay beneath the heavy sacking had begun to run. It was the last friar, bricked up for that he had refused to leave; it was the princes, starved to death in the Tower by their uncle of Gloucester, their poor young bones found at last; the thing had no head – a lover of Anne Bullen; it was Plague. That last they liked the least; that last kept them further from the cart than the others had done; there was no good story to be told if the thing beneath the sacking was that last.

  Up at Old Bailey, there was a great deal of low murmuring amongst the officials of the coroner’s court. They should be given their place: this was not a matter for the army. But any protestations the alderman of Farringdon Ward or the coroner of Middlesex had considered airing died on their lips when they saw Seeker follow his soldiers, bearing their burden, into the building. Lawyers and ward officers stepped further into the shadows, grateful not to be noticed, wary already about what might lie beneath the covering of the stretcher. ‘Dear God,’ murmured one, ‘is it not enough that he pursues the living?’

  The arrival a few minutes later of the apothecary John Drake did little to quell the air of apprehension growing in the corridors and doorways.

  ‘Drake. Why have they called him? What need has a dead man of an apothecary?’

  The coroner regarded the alderman with a mild contempt. ‘You believe Drake is an apothecary? Have you ever been into his place on Knight Ryder Street? Do you know anyone who has? Whatever alchemy he practises there, there is nothing honest in it.’

  The men stepped back as Drake moved quietly past them. He was tall, and his sweeping black robe did not quite mask an unnatural thinness. A slight stoop further shaded his already shaded eyes from the curiosity of observers. His sallow skin and long black curls caused many to declare him a Greek, and Drake was happy enough to let the assumption pass: there were too many still in Cromwell’s England who did not share the Lord Protector’s desire to readmit the Jewish people from their five-hundred-year banishment. Even without the distinctive cap and robe of his craft, Drake carried about him an air of mystery, and there were those who suspected his alchemical practices owed more to old magic than to the new science.