The Bear Pit Read online

  The war was long over, but much remained of those defences, those ‘Lines of Communication’, the spirit of London’s people made manifest. Here, still overshadowing the inn, was the quadrant fort of St George’s. They’d explored it that day, he and Maria, while the dog had busied himself chasing wildfowl across the nearby ducking pond. Seeker had tried, for a while, to explain the fort’s features to her, as she’d teased and run around him and kissed him until at last he’d given the thing up as hopeless. But that had been over two years ago, in springtime, and now autumn was abandoning the land to winter, and one day what remained of the fort would be crumbled and gone.

  Closer to Southwark, the traffic increased once he turned on to the Newington Road. Carts and riders negotiated past each other with varying degrees of skill and patience as they made their way to London Bridge. Pedlars, merchants, soldiers, honest farmers and hopeful thieves, all streamed towards the city. Others were heading southwards to Surrey, Sussex, the coast, their city sojourn over or with new business to contract. Seeker wondered if amongst those passers-by was the one who had left a human being chained by the neck, helpless in the face of a savage animal. He wondered also where that beast was now, and how it was managed. The darkness of the night and lateness of the hour had not allowed for any but the most cursory search of the outbuildings at the gaming house for tracks or signs, but today he was determined he would go over every inch of the place.

  He was about to turn off up the back road to the market gardens when the driver of a cart, passing the windmill on Blackman Street, called out.

  ‘Captain! Didn’t think to see you this far south!’

  Seeker knew the voice immediately but took a moment to understand that its owner could be here, and driving that cart. ‘Samuel! Didn’t think to see you beyond Cornhill!’

  The old man was already slowing to a stop, earning grumbles from a wagoner coming behind him. Seeker turned his horse across the road and brought it alongside Samuel’s cart. Already, the moment after he had recognised Samuel, he had spotted several other familiar figures, ranged alongside and behind the old Parliamentary soldier who kept the coffee house on Birchin Lane. There beside him was Gabriel, of course, the coffee-house boy, taken in off the street by Samuel and his niece years since. Behind them, on sacks of cloth got up as cushions, were a man and two women: the lawyer Elias Ellingworth who had finally, or so Seeker had heard, persuaded Samuel’s niece Grace to marry him, Grace herself, and the lawyer’s sister, Maria. Seeker could not help himself. The sight of her, in so unexpected a place and at so unexpected a time, deprived him of the ability to say anything further.

  The movement and the grumbles of impeded travellers continued all around them, but it was as if Seeker and the occupants of the cart had been suddenly silenced and frozen in that place. Every face in the back of the cart registered shock and then awkwardness. They all knew what was said to have passed between Seeker and Maria and they knew how badly it had ended. It was Samuel who at last broke the spell.

  ‘Well, Captain, we haven’t seen you to take your draught down Birchin Lane in a good long day. Truth, we’ve hardly seen hide nor hair of you since you got back from the north, and I’m sure that must be ten months at least. Don’t tell me you’ve taken to drinking that muck I hear tell they’re serving up at the Rainbow?’

  Before Seeker could answer, Maria fixed him with a searing look. ‘Oh, no, Samuel. The captain doesn’t bother himself with coffee houses any more. I hear he prefers what’s on offer up at the Black Fox these days.’

  At this the boy Gabriel’s eyes widened, Grace blushed, and even Elias looked as if he might wish to silence his sister. Samuel cleared his throat. ‘Well, Dorcas always did keep a fine table, but I hope you know you’ll always be welcome at Kent’s, Captain, whatever else.’

  ‘I do, Samuel,’ said Seeker, forcing himself to look away from Maria. ‘But tell me, what are you doing on the road at this early hour, and so far from home?’

  Samuel beamed. ‘It’s my girl’s birthday, and as you know, she don’t make a fuss of things like that, nor near enough fuss of herself in general.’

  At this his niece tried to chide him, but he wouldn’t have it. ‘No, I’ll say my piece. Best thing in my life you are, child, and by your next birthday you’ll be another man’s to care for, and not mine. And who knows where I shall be then? You shall have your treat and day out, and fuss made of you, and that’s that.’

  ‘Your uncle’s right, Grace,’ said Seeker. ‘So where do you go?’

  ‘Lambeth. Tradeskin’s Ark. To see the gardens.’

  ‘And the curiosities,’ put in Gabriel. ‘Elias is going to take me and Grace and Maria round and explain them to us. They’ve got a mermaid and a unicorn and all sorts, Mr Tavener says.’ Then the boy gave a dramatic sigh and glanced furtively to his right. ‘Of course, Samuel won’t go in. Nothing in there Samuel hasn’t seen on his travels. Or so he says,’ he added in an undertone.

  ‘I doubt there’ll not be much Samuel couldn’t tell you a tale about,’ said Seeker. Before returning to join in the struggle for Parliament, Samuel had fought all over Europe in the Protestant cause, and sacked a good few towns and private strongholds in his time. Samuel loved to tell a story, but Seeker knew that Tradescant’s collection of curiosities – ‘Tradeskin’s Ark’ – was displayed on the uppermost floor of a large house in Lambeth. It was the shattered left leg, almost lost to a Royalist’s musket, and not arrogance or indifference that would keep the old man outside in Tradescant’s garden whilst his family climbed those stairs. ‘No point in paying good money to see stuff behind glass cases when you’ve already seen the real thing, is there?’

  ‘Quite right, Captain. Quite right. Besides, I doubt they’d allow the likes of me around so fine a place, money paid or not.’

  Seeker bent lower over his horse’s neck. ‘If John Tradescant or anyone else takes that line with you or yours, Samuel, you direct them to me.’

  The old man smiled. ‘Oh, I will that, Captain.’

  Seeker’s eyes drifted to Maria again. ‘You could do worse for your dinner,’ he said, ‘than the Dog and Duck by St George’s Fields. I have passed a happy hour or two there myself, though in better times.’

  The studied hostility left Maria’s eyes, though only for a moment, before she looked away.

  He didn’t know what else he could say now, in front of them all, or how he could say it. And then the opportunity was gone. ‘Oh, we’re to dine at the George, Captain, on Borough High Street,’ said Gabriel. ‘An old friend of Samuel’s, from the German wars, is come up from Sussex.’ Again he made a knowing face. ‘And then there’ll be some stories told.’

  Seeker laughed. ‘I don’t doubt there will be. And you mind and listen, Gabriel, for the next time I’m in Kent’s, I shall want to hear them.’ There was nothing more to be said that could be said there. He swallowed. ‘Well, I’d best get on.’

  Samuel nodded and set the placid carthorse in motion, and if any of them thought it strange that Seeker watched after them until they had trundled out of sight, none of them said so.

  *

  In the gaming-house yard, the men of the local watch were huddled around a brazier. They scrambled to attention when Seeker arrived. He nodded at them.

  ‘Anything?’

  The older of the two shook his head. ‘Nothing. No one’s come near the place all night.’

  ‘And round the back?’

  ‘All’s still secure. I’ve made my rounds every quarter hour.’

  ‘Right,’ said Seeker. Ignoring the disappointed looks of the men, who had thought they might be dismissed, he wrapped his sash around his mouth and nose before pushing open the door to the sound of scuttling vermin. What confronted him now was worse, somehow, than what had been illuminated the night before by the shifting yellow and red flames of his torch. In this harsh morning light, nothing could be softened, noth
ing hidden or even cast into shadow, nothing made to disappear by the simple expedient of moving his hand a few inches to the left or right, consigning the object beneath to darkness. It was all there, still, the unrelenting gore.

  He had given orders that the carcass should not be moved from its place chained to the wall, and that no one should be allowed access to the storage house until his return. Now, by the light of the opened door and from a window giving out over the market gardens behind, he looked again at the rust-stained assemblage of rags and human remains on the earthen floor. He crouched down, still keeping his sash muffled to his face, and examined the man’s clothing. Shreds of a russet woollen coat, moss-coloured breeches, brown woollen hose. A ripped doublet of hide that had once been tan. A linen shift whose original colour could hardly be determined. Boots flung asunder that looked to have walked many miles. All good, serviceable stuff, but nothing that spoke of luxury or wealth. The clothing of a solid yeoman, perhaps, or honest craftsman. He could see no hat.

  Seeker stood, the better to survey the whole space. In the far right-hand corner, beyond what was left of the man’s head, was a dark object which he had not noticed in the night. He circled the body and stooped to pick up the item – a long, soft cap trimmed in thick fur. It had a foreign look to it. Seeker considered again the knit of the woollen hose, the stuff of the jacket: these were an Englishman’s clothes. It was the hat that did not belong.

  ‘Where did you come from, my friend?’ he asked. ‘And how did you end up here?’

  The earthen floor of the outhouse was soft in parts, and dry where the blood had not soaked into it. It bore the imprints of massive paws and claws, but they did not reach beyond the man’s head, and none were visible at the darker end of the outhouse, furthest from the door. The beast had reached its limit there. Seeker went back to the doorway to inspect the area around it, as he had not been able to do properly the night before. There, four feet from the ground, was the heavy iron link to which the animal must have been chained. He paced from there to where the prints stopped, a distance of about fourteen feet. He tried to determine how long the chain might have been, how large the beast it tethered, but gave it up. ‘Long enough,’ he said to himself. A man had been chained to one wall, an animal to the other, and they had been left to fight it out. The bear’s chain had been just long enough.

  He left, closing the door behind him. Again, the two men looked hopeful. Seeker started towards the house. ‘I’ll be back in half an hour,’ he said. The younger of the pair appeared to nudge the other.

  ‘It is well past the time for the end of our watch, Captain,’ ventured the older.

  Seeker was already halfway up the yard. He stopped and turned round.

  ‘I am acquainted with the hours of the borough watch,’ he said. ‘But this is business of the state you are employed upon, and you will wait here until two of my men arrive to relieve you. Or would you prefer to take your complaint to the major-general? He’s generally to be found across the river.’ Seeker tilted his head in the direction of the Tower and Major-General Barkstead. ‘I’m sure he’s nothing else to do with his time of a morning.’

  The two men shook their heads vigorously. By the time they had stopped apologising, Seeker was gone.

  Bankside was a different place by day. The seductive promises of easy virtue and cheap luxury from lit windows and doorways had given way to another sort of activity – the brisk work of clearing up and stocking up, making ready for another day’s profit. London might loom large across the river, its shoulders hunched as if squaring for a fight, but Bankside paid it little heed: there was the business of the day to be getting on with. Seeker could almost have approved.

  But then he turned his horse away from the river, down the side of the old Bear Garden. This was the other Bankside – half-hidden, a little beneath where decent men would walk. He made for Dead Man’s Place and then the Clink. Trickles of water crawled down walls to become rivulets amongst the cobbles, running not to the river or the city, but away, elsewhere, to elude and disappear and not be found. Southwark leaked, and the spirits of ages past clung with the moss to its stone walls and dank corners. It was a place where men could dissolve into nothingness, disappear.

  But Thomas Faithly had not disappeared: Seeker knew exactly where he was to be found. The gaoler who opened the narrow wooden door of the Clink to Seeker didn’t ask who he was there for, as he led him down the dimly lit stairs and into the narrow passageway beneath the stone arches that separated the cells. The stench here was almost as bad as at the open sewer running into the river at the end of Dead Man’s Place. Faithly and his five companions of the gaming house had been lodged in a small space at the far end of the passage. There was an almost animal shifting and grumbling from amongst the men when the warder turned the key to their cell. Thomas Faithly groaned in relief when he saw Seeker, earning astonished looks from his fellow prisoners. None of them could conceive of a situation in which they would be pleased to see Damian Seeker. Seeker shot Faithly a warning look. ‘Less of the wit,’ he said, ‘or there’ll be more of what you had last night.’ Thurloe’s turncoat Royalist agent made a show of shrinking back and turning his face towards the seeping wall of the cell.

  ‘Right,’ said Seeker. ‘Up, the lot of you. I have something to show you.’

  The men looked at each other, a mix of panic and confusion on their faces, but none of them dared to speak.

  The spectacle of several well-dressed gentlemen, their fine clothes stained and stinking, emerging bleary-eyed from the Clink was hardly a novelty, and yet it gave pleasure to many honest folk by the riverside that morning, to say nothing of targets for the street urchins and apprentice boys spying the chance of a moment’s amusement. Jeers, catcalls and not a few malodorous missiles accompanied the party as it made its way from the prison to their gaming house back along Bankside. Seeker saw no need to come to the defence of individuals so profitless to the state.

  The confusion of the prisoners increased as they were marched into the gaming house and out again at the back door. The grumbling men of the watch had now been replaced by two of Seeker’s own men. The man at the front, his fine green velvet suit already streaked with vomit and other things that Seeker did not wish to determine, blanched even further and started to babble, digging his heels into the ground like a stubborn cur.

  ‘No! We did nothing more than have a hand at cards, throw some dice a time or two. You cannot shoot us for that!’

  ‘Keep moving, idiot, you’re not worth the powder,’ growled Seeker, as one of his men pushed the terrified Cavalier onwards.

  At the bottom of the yard Seeker stood in front of the door to the outbuilding. He had sworn Faithly to secrecy over what they had discovered there. ‘Were any of you down here last night?’

  There was much head-shaking. Seeker looked closely at each of Faithly’s five companions; none looked as if he was lying.

  ‘Or at any time before?’

  Again outright denial.

  ‘And did you witness anyone, perhaps leading a beast, enter this outhouse at any time yesterday?’

  Denial this time was accompanied by a degree of curiosity.

  ‘Right,’ said Seeker. ‘I want you all to go in there, take a look at what you see, and then tell me what you know of it, whether anything about it is familiar to you.’ He turned to one of his men, whom he had known many years and knew to be of a strong stomach. He’d already told him what waited inside. ‘You come in with me, Gerald.’ To another he said, ‘Give us one minute and send them all in in a line, after us.’

  Inside, he asked Gerald to pick up some sacking from the corner. ‘We’re going to shield the body from their sight, and then, once they’re all in, reveal it.’

  Gerald didn’t ask, ‘Why conceal it at all?’ but Seeker could see the question pass briefly over his face.

  ‘I want them all to see it at once. I want to get
their reactions. See if any of them looks less surprised than the others.’

  But the actions of five of the men were all of a kind: shouts and groans of horror followed by retching and a dash for the door. The sixth man, Thomas Faithly, had come in last and averted his eyes as Seeker and his man lifted the sacking. He was the first to be back out of the door. Outside, his face was as grey as any of the others.

  Seeker waited a while until they’d finished vomiting, until the shaking had lessened, and then told them he wanted them back in, one at a time. Disbelief briefly displaced disgust on their faces.

  ‘I want you to look at his face,’ said Seeker.

  ‘Has he even got a face?’ said the one in green velvet.

  ‘Enough of one. Come on, you first.’

  The man looked as if he might protest but then took a deep breath and offered no further resistance as Seeker led him back into the small building. And so it went on, five men brought in one by one, forced to look, taken out again. Five men denying they had ever seen the victim of the previous night’s atrocity. Thomas Faithly was the sixth. Once inside the small stone building and with the door closed, he turned his back on the body on the floor.

  ‘What was said last night?’ asked Seeker.

  ‘Nothing of any use – a lot of cursing about damnable luck and even more damnable spies, who’d sell a man out for a grubby coin.’

  Seeker couldn’t help but smile at that and Faithly’s eyes flashed anger. ‘I am talking about seedy wretches in taverns or street corners, reporting on innocent—’