The Black Friar Read online

  She turned to the rat-man. ‘Captain Seeker is here at my bidding, Richard.’ She paused just long enough. ‘On this occasion, at least.’

  The man nodded to her and gave Seeker one more glance of unadulterated contempt before retreating slowly down the dimly lit corridor.

  ‘He will not have liked that,’ she said, opening the door into a small parlour and waiting while Seeker passed.

  ‘You would truly pass him off as a steward?’ Seeker said, removing his helmet as he stooped to pass into the room.

  She smiled. ‘I do not have him order my wine, or count the coals needed for the winter, but he takes care of the household all the same.’

  ‘He looks more like a cutpurse to me.’

  ‘Cut-throat, perhaps, if the need so arose, but as I said, Richard is no thief.’

  ‘A bodyguard, then?’

  She nodded. ‘A better one than you might think. No one had bested him before. Not single-handedly. He will not forgive you for that.’

  ‘I will study to tolerate the loss,’ said Seeker. ‘He’ll have crawled out of some foreign Royalist sewer, I take it?’

  She shook her head. ‘Good Oxfordshire stock – his father served mine, although I believe Richard has spent much of his adult life, ah . . . . travelling.’

  ‘No doubt,’ said Seeker, resolving to have the Rat’s background looked into. She’d lost none of her shrewdness or her nerve in the two months since she’d removed herself from Whitehall. He looked around the small parlour. There were few of the fripperies he might have expected. It was almost like a man’s room, a place of business. The walls were panelled in wood, linenfold. On either side of the stone fireplace were carved leather-backed armchairs – a great chair, for the master of the house to the left, a smaller one for the mistress, to the right. He saw the brief play of merriment upon her lips as she offered him a seat. ‘Take your pick, Seeker.’

  He had no time for her game-playing and sat in the man’s chair. ‘I can spare you a quarter-hour,’ he said.

  ‘It is more than I thought to have.’ She went to the small oak dresser by the door and poured him a tankard of ale from the pewter jug set there.

  ‘The missing girl,’ he said.

  She sat down opposite him now, folded her hands on her lap, determined not to waste the quarter-hour. ‘Her name is Charity Penn. She was a foundling, brought up in some old religious house until the masters of your Commonwealth thought to turn a better profit from it than could be had from the feeding and clothing of orphaned children.’

  Seeker could make no defence of what he knew had been done on the discovery of some law unearthed in books covered in mould and dust that had little to do with justice.

  ‘Most of my household staff is from Baxton, but, dear God, I cannot close my eyes to the poverty of this city’s children. I found Charity begging in the street, offering to do any work for a hunk of bread and some shelter at night.’ She looked to him, angry. ‘She was three steps from the stews, Seeker. How is it in this godly England that children are forced to sell themselves for shelter, and men still able to have their way? How is it?’

  ‘Steps are being taken,’ he said. ‘Those places will be closed down.’

  ‘Not soon enough,’ she muttered.

  ‘You took her in when you came here, in November?’ he asked, turning the conversation once more to the matter in hand.

  ‘Yes, at Martinmas, and never had a day’s cause for complaint about her. For all that she was so young, she was making fair to be a gifted seamstress. She learned quickly, and when she could not master a task, she tried again and again until she could.’

  Anne Winter’s hands twisted in her lap, and he noticed that her own fingers were marked with needle-pricks.

  ‘She was a good, Christian child, and if she had picked up any of the ways of the street, I saw none of them when she came here. And she was pretty, Seeker, such a pretty child.’

  Anne Winter appeared to think this a good thing: Seeker would have preferred to hear that Charity was knowing in the ways of the streets, and as plain as plain could be.

  ‘Did she have friends? Pay visits?’

  Anne Winter almost laughed. ‘A child of eleven years? I am not a harsh mistress, Seeker, but servant girls in this house have little time for callers and visits. No, Charity made her friends and her family here.’

  ‘She must have run errands, to markets and the like.’

  ‘Well, of course she did.’

  ‘She could have met anyone there and on the way.’ He raised an eyebrow at her. ‘Even the lower orders do, you know. Maybe she was not as happy here as you like to tell yourself.’

  She opened lips that had become tightly pursed. ‘I have questioned the others and they have assured me that she never showed nor spoke of any desire to leave.’

  ‘Church services,’ he said.

  ‘What about them?’

  He shrugged. It was obvious to him. ‘The girl must have come from Puritan stock. How many of your sort are called “Charity”, after all?’

  ‘She attended St Katherine Coleman’s with the rest of the household.’

  Seeker thought of Gethsemane, only one of several gathering places for religious independents of one sort or another within easy walking distance of this house. ‘Prayer meetings? Women preachers?’

  Anne Winter shook her head. ‘She was godly enough, but did not go beyond the bounds of what was required.’

  ‘Like yourself, then?’

  Now she did laugh. ‘I think your pot is as black as my kettle, Seeker. You scarce go through the formalities, as I recall. Cromwell must concern himself much over your soul.’

  ‘The Protector’s concerns are of greater moment than that, I assure you. This girl’s family may have come back and found her.’

  Again Anne Winter shook her head. ‘She had been in hospitals and poorhouses for as long as she could remember. She knew no family.’

  Seeker looked round the small parlour again. It struck him that nothing here was for show: it was for utility, or because Anne Winter liked it. The three miniature oval portraits hanging on a length of black velvet ribbon by the chimney breast must, he supposed, have been of her mother, father and brother. None then, of her dead husband, John Winter. The parlour faced onto the street, and her desk, with candle in a pewter stick that matched the jug on the small sideboard, quill pens, ink, a silver gilt pounce pot and paper, was set facing the mullioned and transomed window. Through its diamond panes, she must have seen half of London pass but a foot or two in front of her.

  ‘You can see everyone who comes in or leaves at the door from here,’ he said.

  ‘Yes. That is how I come to know Secretary Thurloe’s assorted spies so well. They are not really so difficult to spot, once you know what you are looking for. Especially the new, young ones.’

  Seeker thought of Marcus Bridlington with his well-made clothes and his startled look: he would have stood out like a sore thumb trying to blend into the streets of Aldgate. Little wonder she had recognised him so easily in Whitehall the previous day. Thurloe liked nepotism no more than did Seeker, particularly when it touched on those employed in his own service, but when it was a question of finding a place for the nephew of Cromwell’s cousin, one of the Protector’s closest confidants, then there was little that captain of the guard or Chief Secretary could do.

  ‘And do the servants go in and out at this door?’

  ‘If need be.’

  ‘Which others might they use?’

  He saw her hesitation. Anne Winter was not about to detail for one of the Protectorate’s officers all the exits and entrances to her home. Seeker surmised that there were more, in that case, than there should be. Too near to the river and to the city gates, this Royalist’s house. Too easy to arrive unnoticed and slip out unseen.

  She had calculated what it suited her to tell him. ‘There is a door from the kitchens into the back garden, and another from the basement storeroom.’

  ‘A
nd no one saw her come or go from one of these the day she disappeared?’

  ‘No one.’

  He drained his mug of ale and set the empty mug down on her desk, not concealing that he was looking at the papers on top of it as he did so. ‘She cannot have been taken from here against her will. She would have been seen or heard by the other servants, or by one of our watchers. I will look into it. But you should know that servants run from their masters and mistresses every day in this city, for any number of causes.’ He considered the good quality of everything he had seen so far in this house; a question that would usually have been his first came to mind. ‘Did anything else go missing from here at the same time?’

  Anne Winter became indignant. ‘Charity is not a thief. That was just a coincidence, I am certain of it.’

  He had picked up his helmet, been preparing to leave. He put it down again. ‘What was a coincidence?’

  She had said something she’d not meant to, but now it was too late, his interest had been pricked. Her shoulders sagged. ‘Oh, very well. I’ll show you.’

  She led him up the wooden stairs in the corner of the hall.

  ‘That newel post is loose,’ he said, as he took the second step.

  ‘I’m waiting for a carpenter to turn me a new one, in keeping with the rest.’

  At the landing, he could see out of the arched paned window over the back garden. It was somewhat neglected, he thought, and in need of a good clearing. As if she saw into his mind, she said, ‘I have been taken up with the inside of the house. The outside has had to wait. I have hired gardeners from Southwark, who will begin upon it this week.’

  ‘Aye, before the spring comes,’ he murmured, thinking, by the various newer-looking wall panels, wall hangings in gilded leather or tapestry that they had passed, that she had made herself very busy indeed in this house over the two short months since she had been forced to move from her apartments at Whitehall. He would have liked the chance to look between, behind those hangings. Some other time, he thought to himself.

  She stopped on the second floor and, taking a key from the silk-embroidered purse hanging from the cord at her waist, she unlocked the panelled oak door to her left. She stepped in and pulled open the shutters on the deep casements. The room was a different order of place from the small parlour down below, and yet it was of a type with it too. This room was larger, grander, made for comfort as much as utility, and in places perhaps, for show. The one quality, though, in which it was at one with that other, was unmistakable.

  ‘This is an Englishman’s room,’ he said.

  ‘Or woman’s,’ she replied, pleased at his reaction. ‘But what did you expect? Do you think that English blood runs only in your Republican veins? In Cromwell’s? We are as English as any of you, Seeker, however Mr Milton might try to claim our birthright for your side alone.’

  What should he have expected? Gilt? Fripperies? Too much lace, too little modesty? Some parody of the lost Stuart cause, of Henrietta-Maria’s Parisian exile at St Germains? Somewhere a man would hardly know where to sit? Ostentation beyond the grounds of decency? But no, here was good English oak, a long, well-made dining table and chairs that he would have been proud to have made himself. A dresser displaying fine Staffordshire plate. What was of foreign provenance in the place was there for the quality of it, not the fashion. Italian glassware, Flemish cloth, tapestries that her grandmother must have worked when Elizabeth was on the throne. Again, at either side of the fire were armchairs for master and mistress, English hunting scenes embroidered on the cushions. Who played role of master in this house? wondered Seeker. Not the Rat, that was certain, but then who?

  The wide stone fireplace was finely done, but not overly elaborate, a picture frame built into the overmantel. Set in the frame was a family portrait, father, mother, son and daughter, at table.

  ‘Before the war,’ she said, ‘in the small dining room at Baxton.’

  He observed that family who had not known what was about to happen to them. ‘You are very like your mother,’ he said.

  ‘She was a better wife,’ she said, almost matter-of-factly. ‘But it’s that I mean to show you.’ She indicated the setting of the table in the painting, and the silver salt in the middle of it. ‘It was a wedding present to my grandparents, seventy years ago. It was made here in London, on Goldsmith’s Row – you cannot see the maker’s mark in the painting, of course, but if you look closely, you can see our crest engraved on the side, and a model of my grandfather’s favourite hound, serving as handle on the lid.’

  Seeker stepped closer to the painting, the better to see. ‘Have you an eyeglass?’ he said, without turning to her, and in a moment she had fetched one from a drawer in the sideboard. The salt was a beautiful thing, about eight inches in height if the artist had scaled it right, in silver gilt, and the hound on top so delicately worked, so sleek, Seeker could imagine it bounding across ditch and stream in pursuit of its young master’s prey over the fields of Oxfordshire.

  Anne Winter was caught up in his wonder. ‘My husband managed to find the soldier who had looted it when the house was taken. The paintings and much else had already been hidden away, but we were still using the salt.’ The simple folly of it seemed to amuse her for the moment. ‘I kept it locked away at Whitehall, but I took it here with me. It stood there.’ She pointed to the large oak table in the middle of the room.

  ‘And it disappeared at the same time as Charity Penn?’ That was it, then. The girl had stolen it and absconded.

  Anne Winter shook her head. ‘The night before.’

  ‘She might still have taken it, secreted away somewhere before she was ready to go herself. It is not so large a thing, would be a simple thing to hide.’ As simple, he thought, as a child, in London.

  She sat down wearily in the larger fireside chair, ran her hand over her forehead. ‘I cannot believe that, Seeker; that she was a thief, or that she chose to run away. But we have searched everywhere, asked everywhere for more than two weeks. Nothing. I thought your people, who watch the house so closely, might at least be able to cast some light on what has happened to Charity.’

  He had never seen her so vulnerable. He knew in his head how the thing would most likely end – a dead child in a ditch or lost to the hands of some beggar chief or brothel-keeper, and yet a few hours of his time might help save this one child, as Anne Winter had tried to save her. ‘I want you to write for me a description of the people who have been watching your house.’

  ‘Shall I send it to you at Whitehall?’

  He considered. This was not the concern of Whitehall. ‘No. Call up your man.’

  Little over a minute later, the Rat was standing in front of him. He had guessed right that the man couldn’t read. That was good, for a start. He described to him the old woman who lived down a short alleyway at the back of a narrow old house on Knight Ryder Street. ‘You will give your mistress’s paper, under her seal, to this woman and no one else.’ The Rat understood – well-used, Seeker suspected, to such missions.

  ‘Don’t put my name on it anywhere,’ he said to Anne Winter. ‘And you,’ he said, addressing the Rat, ‘you tell her it is instructions for the carpenter, do you understand?’

  The man, whose resentment at having to take orders from Seeker was written on his face, nevertheless nodded, and left.

  ‘And now,’ said Seeker, ‘I have work of my own to see to.’

  Anne Winter accorded him a small curtsy, which she appeared amused to see only aggravated him, and led him back down the stairs. As they descended, a familiar aroma, but one that he had not smelled in any private house before, came to him.

  ‘You brew your own coffee?’

  ‘Gabriel brings me the beans, and has taught my cook how it is done. We don’t do such a good job as Samuel, but we do well enough.’

  Gabriel, the boy from Kent’s on Birchin Lane. Seeker stashed the information away as useful, and walked out into the bright morning, putting Anne Winter’s troubles away in th
eir place as he cut through the flow of people from Aldgate down Crutched Friars.

  *

  Daniel Proctor was already waiting beneath the stone archway to Gethsemane when Seeker got there. The look on his face told Seeker his feelings on the long morning ahead of him, questioning all the known associates of Gideon Fell. Proctor was no keener on religious fanatics than was Seeker; each man kept his views on the workings and wants of the Almighty to himself, one reason, Seeker thought, that they functioned together so well.

  As they walked into the almshouses’ yard, they could see the women of the community through an open door, at work making butter. ‘I’ll tell you, Captain, if that woman Crowe starts sermonising me . . .’

  Seeker laughed. ‘First Timothy, chapter two, verse twelve, that should shut her up a good two minutes at least.’

  Proctor looked at him quizzically.

  ‘ “I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.” ’

  Proctor was still testing the words on his tongue when they got to the loom shed where Goodwill Crowe and his son were already at work. A smile flickered over Nathaniel’s face, quickly followed by an anxious glance towards his father. Seeker waited until they had finished a run of the shuttle.

  Crowe didn’t look at them. ‘You heard everything I have to say about Gideon Fell yesterday. I have work to do.’

  Seeker might not have heard him, for all the reaction he had. He took a list from Proctor and handed it to Crowe. ‘Have all these people assemble in the yard. Sergeant Proctor will be questioning them, one at the time. Have your wife find him a room.’

  Crowe scanned the list. He mentioned one or two who were elsewhere, ‘at their godly and lawful calling’, and not expected back at Gethsemane until suppertime. Proctor noted the names, and where the individuals would be found.

  ‘I’ll want your boy too,’ said Seeker, indicating Nathaniel.