The Winter List, page 13
part #6 of Damian Seeker Series
‘And his clerk and page?’
‘I left a note that they were to make their way down to the castle to attend Sir Thomas there on important business. I added that if he was delayed, they were to wait there for him.’
Anne smiled. It was a trick they had used time and again. It was surprisingly easy to get hold of an example of their target’s handwriting and signature, and even easier for Anne to copy it onto multiple pieces of paper which they might have cause to use in their investigations. She had had Thomas Faithly send round a note of receipt for her horse, lest there were any difficulties at King’s Manor stables should she wish to take it out and he not be there. She and Grizel had spent a happy morning perfecting the copying of Sir Thomas’s cursive hand and exuberant signature.
‘So, the clerk and page out of the way, all I need concern myself with is how long Sir Thomas stays out in the tavern, eating and drinking with his friend.’
‘I’ll find where they are then get back to warn you ahead of them as soon as it looks like they’re leaving.’
‘Poor Griz,’ said Anne. ‘You are a marvel.’
Grizel was not fond of compliments. ‘I’m a woman who has her health and knows how to have her wits about her. As you know well enough, it is simply a matter of walking a town till you know it.’
‘But we have hardly been here three days.’
‘And I have spent most of them walking one end of York to the other. I doubt very much that Thomas Faithly in his cups will manage to leave a tavern and wind home to King’s Manor before I’ve found my way there to warn you. But you must make haste if you are to profit by his absence.’
Anne nodded. She had often thought that Grizel must have been born in a nook and grown up in a cranny – there was no town whose topography she could not make herself mistress of. When they had had business in Edinburgh, she had moved through its closes and wynds with the practised deftness of a rat. Anne slid pistol, powder horn, flint and a candle into the special pocket sewn into the lining of her heavy cloak, then followed Grizel down the stairs and out of the door where they went their separate ways.
Grizel’s method was simple: she would enter a tavern, a small pot in her hand, and look around to see if that was the one Thomas Faithly and his friend were in. If Faithly was there, and noticed her, she would claim she had come in to get something to take home for Anne’s supper. If he was not there, she would claim to be looking for her husband, as a relative from home had unexpectedly arrived at their lodgings. It would not be long, she thought, before she was directed to whichever tavern Thomas Faithly’s Scottish friend had last been seen in.
She had begun with those places closest to King’s Manor that looked most respectable, and worked her way towards the inner streets of the town. It was in the third place she tried that she struck lucky. ‘There was a Scotsman in the Black Swan, over Peasholme Green, came in just before I left with one of the high-ups from King’s Manor. Daresay you’ll find him there.’
Grizel thanked the man then went as quickly as she could through the town until she reached Peasholme Green. She paused for a moment beneath the walls of St Anthony’s Hall the more closely to study the area, beyond which was only marshland, river and the walls. A little ahead, past the garden of St Anthony’s, she could see the parapet of the belfry of St Cuthbert’s, and over across the green was the substantial form of the Black Swan, well-placed to greet traders and travellers alighted from barges on the Foss. The snow, which had held off a few hours, began to fall again, and she crossed quickly to the inn.
Nothing but moving shapes and shadows could be seen through the pale ochre glow of the steamed-up window panes of the inn. She stepped inside and began to pass through dark wood-panelled corridors to the main taproom and parlour. She kept to the darker edges of the spaces she moved through, away from lights glowing from wall sconces or on benches. Her head a little lowered, she slid her eyes one way and then the other, taking in the features of the patrons as they moved in and out of candlelight to talk to one another or to lean over tankards.
A quick survey of those huddled close to the ingle fire failed to show any sign of Sir Thomas or his friend, but off to the side a wooden partition, its upper section divided by finely turned columns, caught her eye. Going closer, she was able to see Faithly and a companion, whose back was to her, seated there in a snug area with its own small fire. Grizel ordered a cup of hot spiced wine and settled herself on a stool close to the partition. After the serving boy had brought her drink, she moved closer still, so that she might listen without being seen.
Grizel had hardly been settled in the warmth long enough for the blood to come back to her fingertips when fear began to creep over her. It started as soon as she heard the Scotsman speak and it almost froze her with panic. She’d thought she had got away from all that. She’d thought she was safe. But the voice told her that here indeed was David Ogilvie on the other side of that partition, and she realised she was in more danger now than she had been for years. She should have stayed in the Low Countries, she should never have come back across the German Ocean. Indeed she would not have done, had it not been for Anne. And Anne was depending on her tonight. Grizel swallowed down some of the drink she had ordered, and made herself stay where she was, rather than slipping away into the darkness, to disappear again.
The men spoke of old days in the King’s service, of the difficulties they had known under Cromwell’s rule, and of when they had first met. Grizel learned that Thomas Faithly had been with the King when he’d landed at Garmouth, not so very far from her own home. The covenanting leaders had offered Scotland’s crown to the young, exiled Charles and David Ogilvie had been of the accompanying party that day. It seemed that despite their many differences, the friendship between him, Thomas Faithly and the Duke of Buckingham, of whom they also spoke, dated from then. But these events had taken place long years before the time Faithly had been suspected of spying for Damian Seeker, and Grizel doubted the substance of them could be of much relevance. Her mind began to wander once more to her own concerns, but then, with a jolt, she realised David Ogilvie had just said the name Damian Seeker .
Faithly’s response had been choked and was lost to Grizel, but what Ogilvie said next was not.
‘I tell you, friend, it sent a chill right through me, here on the streets of York.’
What had she missed? Had Seeker been sighted in York?
‘You must have been mistaken,’ said Thomas Faithly, still shaken-sounding.
‘Oh, no doubt about it,’ returned Ogilvie. ‘I knew it was not him, of course – could scarcely have been further from being him. And yet – the eyes, the look – to see those in the face of a beautiful young woman, it put the fear of God right through me.’
Faithly gave an uncomfortable laugh. ‘I see I am not the only one still haunted by past encounters with that man.’
Ogilvie spoke again. ‘I see him in my nightmares. I looked into those eyes at Worcester for the smallest moment, and yet it might have been eternity. Had another not shot my horse from under me, Seeker’s axe would have split my head in half. The man who fell beside me told me who it had been. To see those eyes in the face of a young woman upon the street – it was like I had glimpsed a river siren, come to land to tell me my doom.’
Faithly was dismissive, though Grizel detected a shade of nervousness in his voice. ‘You always were too superstitious, David. Your people have little else in their heads but malign spirits. You’ve had a long journey with little rest, that’s all. Exhaustion can do things to a man’s mind. I doubt very much that Seeker has taken on female form in . . . where was it exactly you saw her?’
‘She was coming out of an alleyway near to my lodgings on the Coppergate.’
‘Then you had been too long in the Three Tuns, I think.’
‘Or not long enough,’ said Ogilvie, and their conversation moved onto other things, none of which Grizel judged to be of any interest. It must have been an hour later, and Grizel thinking that Anne had had a good long time to search Sir Thomas’s apartments, that they spoke of leaving. Grizel hastily put on her own cloak, ready to get out after them, and to go ahead of Sir Thomas to warn Anne.
She waited until the men were halfway across Peasholme Green before stepping out of the doorway of the Black Swan, the hood of her cloak pulled up and a heavy muffler around her neck and covering most of the bottom half of her face. Even should Thomas Faithly turn around and notice the woman walking with her head down some way behind them, he would be hard put to recognise her from their encounter over the missing child, Lizzie Ingolby. The snow had stopped when she’d been in the inn, and the ground gleamed a sparkling pale blue beneath the frosty sky. Not only their footprints, but the men themselves were very clear to her. They were moving quickly against the cold and soon she realised that rather than cutting off at Spen Lane and returning to King’s Manor past the minster and out by Bootham Bar, Thomas was intent on seeing his friend, less familiar with York, safe to his lodgings on Coppergate before himself heading home for the night. Grizel breathed a sigh of relief and set off up Spen Lane. If she hurried, she would get back to King’s Manor ahead of him.
The skeleton key she carried with her had allowed Anne entry into Thomas’s locked chambers at King’s Manor. It hadn’t taken her long to find the bloodied satchel Grizel had spoken of, and Anne marvelled again at Thomas’s naivety, in that he had trusted to the old lock on his door to keep the contents of his rooms safe. She set her candle on his desk and laid out on it the plans she had found in the satchel. There had been no locking mechanism on the satchel itself – it had simply been a question of unfastening the buckles. There had been no special folding of the document inside, either. Anne wondered whether it was worth spending any time on it at all. But then there was the question of the blood. There would surely be some interest in that. She had already spent a short time looking over the official papers that were filed or left piled on Sir Thomas’s clerk’s desk in the outer room of his chambers and all appeared to relate to his present public duties in advance of the Duke of Buckingham’s arrival. In his personal apartments, few of his own belongings, other than his clothing and some plate with the Faithly family crest, had yet been unpacked, but the satchel had taken her attention as soon as she’d entered the room. Unfolding the documents inside and laying them out on the surface of Sir Thomas’s desk, Anne began to study them.
At first glance, even to the trained eye, they might have appeared to be nothing more than the plans for a substantial town house, of two storeys with attic and two short wings coming out from the central range. A second more careful glance might draw the attention to a greater than usual number of stairways in a house of that size. A third even closer survey would begin to suggest, to the trained eye at least, a number of features that really ought not to be there. Anne felt a little prickle of excitement. This was certainly something she would have to lay before Grizel, that she might see what those sharp eyes made of it.
From the pocket in her cloak, Anne removed two of the sheets of blank paper she kept there, along with a draughtsman’s pencil. Quickly, she copied the broad outlines of the plan, not worrying too much about exact scale or dimensions or technicalities with more obvious purposes. It was the unusual features of these plans that most intrigued her, and to these that she gave most especial care. That task completed, she folded the originals away again and returned them to the satchel, the buckles of which she made sure to refasten, exactly as they had been. Then she turned her attention to Sir Thomas’s small library of books.
She wasn’t greatly surprised to find that his reading matter was almost equally divided between manuals on military tactics and on arboriculture and animal husbandry. Only the military manuals appeared to have been much read. There was no politics, very little history, a volume comprising gathered sheets, in differing hands, of poems. She recognised one or two in Andrew Marvell’s hand amongst them. She had not realised that he and Faithly were acquainted. A pamphlet on arboriculture had been annotated and signed to Sir Thomas by John Evelyn and dated at around the time L’Estrange wished her to look into his movements – the autumn and early winter of 1656, shortly after Sir Thomas had been released from the Tower. This was the period during which L’Estrange suspected Faithly of having been in the pay of Damian Seeker. It was difficult to imagine now that the cerebral Royalist Evelyn and the blunt Republican Damian Seeker had once existed in the same place, at the same time, circling each other’s worlds, and quite intriguing to think that those worlds might have overlapped in the person of Thomas Faithly. The curious thing for Anne was that she knew them all, and she could imagine Faithly more at ease in Seeker’s company than he would be in the sanctimonious Evelyn’s. That was hardly enough to condemn him, though, even now.
But there might be something here, in this room, that would be. Anne didn’t like the thought – but why should she treat Thomas Faithly any differently from any other traitor, if she found evidence that he had betrayed the King as others had done? She told herself that she might just as easily find proof of his innocence. With that reflection, she set about her business once more.
Faithly’s letters, which looked to have been stuffed, haphazard, in a trunk with old belts, boots and a fine set of prints of Flemish towns that he had not yet got framed, were of no great age. It seemed that his practice was to keep his private correspondence no longer than it might be relevant to whatever business or news he might have on hand. A large pile of correspondence, more carefully stored, related entirely to Sir Thomas’s legal travails. She looked over them long enough to see that they were mainly concerned with his efforts to gain access to the small estate of Langton, left to him by his grandmother and sold by Cromwell’s regime whilst Thomas had been in exile. In light of her own experience of such matters she concluded that Lawrence Ingolby was nothing if not thorough, and that there might be worse men to have on your side in a battle through Chancery. Nevertheless, these papers told her nothing of what she wanted to know.
Anne lifted her candle a little so that she might see the clock on the wall. She felt her stomach tighten. Surely it could not be long until Grizel came to warn her of Thomas Faithly’s return? The strange house plan she had found in the bloodied satchel was of interest, but aside from that she could see nothing that might conceivably have any bearing on her own investigation, save the pamphlet gifted and dated to Thomas by John Evelyn at his house at Deptford, showing he had indeed been in London over the period that L’Estrange suspected him to have been colluding with Seeker.
Anne closed her eyes and sat down on the bed for a moment. She was tired and feared she would miss something. Thomas Faithly might trust too much and in too many, but he would not be such a fool as to leave lying around anything which might condemn him to a traitor’s death. If there was any such thing here, it would be very well concealed. She dared not light another candle, but holding the one she had up a little, she saw that every wall of Thomas’s bedchamber was panelled in light oak. There might be a loose panel amongst the rest. Weary, she made to get to her feet again, but as she did, she felt her hand press hard on something beneath her. With care, she pulled back the bed coverings and sheets then pressed down on the mattress. It was goose down, but not very thick. There! An object of some form beneath the mattress offered definite resistance.
Anne got down on her knees and with one hand lifted the mattress a little above its frame whilst sliding the other hand underneath. Her fingers closed on the boards of a book. She pulled it out and sat back against the bed, bringing her candle closer. The binding was rough, and there was no tooling on the cover. She opened it, and then she understood: it was a sketchbook. Most of the sketches were of things across the sea – palaces, houses, towns, bridges, towers – that might have been made as a record of Charles Stuart’s wanderings around Europe. There was the palace at St Germains, there the mighty cathedral of Cologne, there some small castle clinging perilously to a cliff above the Rhine, there a windmill on the polder. There were scenes of life too, characters that had caught Sir Thomas’s eye. He had a good eye, and some of the figures he had sketched made her laugh. She could see the life in them. Each drawing was dated. Anne would have liked to take more time over the book, but time pressed and she flicked through the pages looking for any dated 1656. Suddenly she lighted on an image that caught her breath – it was of herself, in the Flemish town of Damme, in August of 1658. The legend beside it read, ‘Unknown woman’. Anne felt a curious jab of pain at the description. Thomas Faithly had known very well, certainly by the time they’d encountered one another in Damme, who she was. Methodically, she began to work back through two years of sketches and soon she came to what she was looking for – a drawing dated September 1656.
Faithly had made a sketch of the garden and building works at John Evelyn’s home of Sayes Court, by Deptford. Anne had since visited the place and could see how much had been achieved in the six years since he had been there. The next drawing was of a clockmaker’s workshop in Clerkenwell, with an affectionate sketch of a strange old man bent over the bench. Finally, there was a drawing of a young woman, surrounded by curiosities – shells, stuffed animals, even an old pair of boots. Unlike herself, this woman was given her own name, or part of it, by Thomas Faithly – Maria. Anne could supply the rest. Ellingworth, Maria Ellingworth, who was long gone from London, from England. Gone across the Atlantic Ocean, to make a new life in the Americas, along with her brother and his young family. Maria Ellingworth, sister of a lawyer who had fallen foul of Damian Seeker almost as often as Anne herself had and in whose chambers at Clifford’s Inn Lawrence Ingolby had trained. Maria Ellingworth, with whom Damian Seeker had reputedly once been in love.
Anne felt her pulse quicken. Not only did this picture tie Thomas Faithly to London and to Lawrence Ingolby at the precise time L’Estrange wished to know of his movements, it was a link, faint and frayed but a link all the same, to Damian Seeker. Anne didn’t know yet how this might help her in her task of establishing the treachery or innocence of Thomas Faithly, but it was unlikely to hinder it. Carefully, she loosened the picture from its binding, tearing out also the blank page further on through the book to which it was attached, then she closed the sketchbook and slipped it back carefully under the mattress where she had found it.
