The Winter List, page 17
part #6 of Damian Seeker Series
Grizel sniffed, ready to be offended at the very idea of her proficiency being questioned. But then she gave way to a smile and the laugh she sometimes fell into that always made Anne imagine her as the girl she must have been. ‘It was a close-run thing, but Lawrence Ingolby was too busy cursing me over a bashed shin to wonder what I was doing in the darkness, on the other side of his bedchamber.’
Anne laughed. The world thought Grizel severe, critical, humourless. Even amongst her own people, she would not let her guard slip. For a time, even with Anne, she had not let that guard slip.
‘And what of Ingolby’s business papers? What was taken from amongst them?’
But Grizel was up on her feet again, making ready to leave. ‘I must not be away too long. I told Mistress Penmore I had just to come up to fetch some stockings and a clean shift that I had forgot in the hurry last night.’ She took a pair of stockings from a pulley above their heads. ‘As to the lawyer’s papers, it seems nothing was taken but documents and letters relating to Thomas Faithly’s claim on his dead grandmother’s estate. Dry as dust, Madge Penmore said.’
‘But surely the housekeeper cannot have read them!’
‘Well, she can certainly read,’ said Grizel. ‘She keeps a pile of news-sheets and pamphlets on a shelf in the kitchen, which she has said I may borrow should I ever be at leisure.’
Anne was surprised. ‘And she has read the papers relating to Thomas Faithly that Ingolby keeps in his office?’
Grizel folded a clean shift and bundled it up with the stockings. ‘Yes. She is an uncommonly nosy woman, but her main end in life seems to be the advancement of her grandson. I believe she is in hopes of seeing Jedediah steward of Langton estate, somewhere out on the northern moors, if Lawrence Ingolby can get it back for Sir Thomas. She is very keen to get him away from “low types and undesirables” – I think she means his tavern friends.’
‘But I thought Ingolby was sending him down to the Inns of Court?’
‘There is some talk of that. There was some preparation made when they were lately at London, but for “a touch and a polish only”, Madge says. She thinks less of the Inns than she does of the lowest York tavern, it would seem.’
Anne laughed, remembering her scrapes with some of the more august habitués of those Inns in Cromwell’s time. ‘She may well have a point. But is Sir Thomas keen?’
‘Pah, I doubt Sir Thomas has been consulted. Madge means to have all in readiness and Jed will be in his employ and off up to Langton before the ink is dry on the deeds.’
‘And herself no doubt with him, to be installed as housekeeper.’
Grizel shook her head. ‘Madge is devoted to Manon Ingolby, and to the little one. I don’t think she would leave them for anything.’
And then Grizel, her boots and cloak still sodden, was out again into the streets of York leaving Anne to breakfast late and alone, before settling herself to the task of decoding this new letter.
As the door to the little house on Oglethorpe closed behind her, Grizel felt the sensation of guilt begin to creep over her like a parade of caterpillars. She and Anne had their secrets from one another but she had never before actually deceived her friend, yet she had no choice. Anne had seemed content enough to be handed one coded letter copied from the Ingolbys’ secret cache. When Grizel had told her she hadn’t had time to copy them all, Anne had not pressed her, and Grizel had allowed her to believe that she had only managed to copy one letter, that addressed to Manon Ingolby. The second letter, addressed by the same writer to Manon’s husband, remained secreted in an inner pocket of her skirts. Anne might be the expert cryptographer, but Grizel had not travelled with her for the last four years without observing, and learning. After Lawrence Ingolby, swearing about his barked shin, had sent her down to the kitchen to sleep, Grizel had not slept, but instead had lit a candle and set to work. She had not managed to establish the entire cypher, but she had got enough to tell her who the letters were from and to get some little sense of their content. The letter to Manon had been signed ‘Your loving father’, that to Ingolby, ‘Damian Seeker’. Grizel had felt a thrill of excitement. Manon’s letter, as far as she could make out, seemed to be of family and domestic detail and of little possible interest to anyone else, but in Ingolby’s there had been two recurring words of which she had had no doubt: ‘Thomas’ and ‘Faithly’. Ordinarily, Grizel would have rushed to Anne with such a discovery. But this was no ordinary time.
Grizel put these reflections away for the moment, to be taken up again when she should next have the opportunity to decipher more of the letter whose copy she had kept. A slight relenting of the winter frost had encouraged people back out on the street. Grizel remained alert and was glad to reach the Ingolbys’ house without incident.
Manon was anxious to get out to the haberdashers’ for some ribbons she wanted for the little dress she was sewing for Lizzie’s favourite doll, but she knew Lawrence would not countenance her going into town alone, and she didn’t like to take Madge away from her household tasks. She was glad when the new maid arrived back from her visit to Lady Anne’s house on Oglethorpe. Madge had also been waiting for the return of Griselda Duncan, ready with a barrage of pointed remarks about the length of time she had been away, and how they were not yet caught up with the work occasioned by the previous night’s ‘outrages’. Hastily tying on her kitchen apron, Griselda had apologised, confiding that her mistress was the most shocking slattern, and she really had not liked to leave the kitchen in Oglethorpe in the way she had found it – with half the dishes from last night still needing to be scrubbed. She added, throwing Manon a conspiratorial smile, that she was glad to have come to such a well-ordered household as was under the rule of Mistress Penmore.
As they walked up the street, Manon said, ‘It is truly very good of you to have come to help us, Mistress Duncan.’
‘It was Lady Anne that wanted it. She has a great fondness for you, and there aren’t many people she’s fond of. Besides, it’ll no’ do her any harm to see to herself for a few days and get an idea of all the work I do. But you must call me “Grizel”, mistress.’
‘And you must call me “Manon”.’
The Scotswoman gave a brief shake of her head. ‘No, mistress, I must not.’
The maid’s response had not been unfriendly, but in it she had made their positions clear, and Manon hadn’t argued further. They had got what she wanted at the haberdasher’s, though Grizel had expressed shock and had shared her views on parting with such an amount of money ‘for the sake of a bairn’s poppet’ all along Coney Street and much of Coppergate too, until suddenly she had stopped, her attention taken by something across the street. Manon had followed the line of her gaze and felt a sudden chill.
‘Do you know that man?’ she asked.
‘No,’ the maid replied, taking Manon’s arm. ‘I don’t. We had better be getting on. Mistress Penmore will be needing me.’
Manon didn’t argue, but she did glance back and saw that the man was watching them. ‘I’ve seen him before,’ she said. ‘He looked at me strangely then, too.’
Grizel’s response was to grip her arm the more firmly and to hurry her along the street. All the way back along Coppergate and the rest of the way home, the Scotswoman kept looking behind her, and they were hardly through the door before Grizel was demanding of Jed to know if the master was home.
‘Black hair, grey at the temples. Older than yourself – maybe forty – and about your own height. Has the bearing of a soldier. Clothes of good quality and hardwearing – greys and blacks.’
Lawrence was wearing a path back and forth in front of the fire in his office. ‘And this man was watching my wife, you say?’
‘Aye, sir. As we came back down Coppergate today. And she thought she had seen him watching her before, too.’
‘Would you know him again?’
The maid’s face had set like stone. ‘Oh, I would know him again. And I would counsel you never to let him over the door, should he ever come here.’
‘Never concern yourself over that. No stranger will be allowed into this house until I say otherwise. You did right to tell me of it, Mistress Duncan.’
Once the Scotswoman had gone back to her duties in the kitchen, Lawrence had ascended the stairs where he’d found Manon and Lizzie in the parlour.
‘This man you saw when you were out with Anne Winter’s maid today – she says he was watching you and that you said you’d seen him before. Tell me again about it.’
Manon wrinkled her brow. ‘It was the day Lizzie went missing, and that put everything else from my head. Besides, that time he just looked at me in passing, as I was about to come out onto the street from the top of Baker’s Lane. I think I surprised him. He looked as if he might know me, but then he just went on his way without saying anything.’
‘And this was definitely the man you saw watching you today?’
Manon nodded. ‘I wouldn’t have noticed him, but Grizel was almost turned to stone at the very sight of him.’
Lawrence went over to kneel down in front of her, taking her hands. ‘Thank God she was with you. For all your father mistrusted Anne Winter, he trusted her to look after you, and this Scotswoman clearly knows her business.’
‘You still think Lady Anne to be an intelligencer?’
‘Down to her bones,’ said Lawrence. ‘I do believe that she would never do anything to harm you, though, or Lizzie. No doubt she’s in York to see Buckingham about some skulduggery or other. Good luck to them. But,’ he took a deep breath, ‘whatever she might be up to, I couldn’t do without you, you know that, don’t you?’
Manon nodded and Lawrence continued. ‘If this man Griselda Duncan saw is the man Andrew Marvell warned us was looking for your father, we can’t take any more risks, at all. These regicide-hunters are ruthless, they’re brigands, assassins. For all the Stuarts make a show of trials and executions under the law, the folk entrusted with hunting regicides make their own laws, and they wouldn’t scruple to use a pregnant woman or a child to get to their quarry. Now, I don’t know who this man is, and I don’t know if William Briar’s murder was anything to do with the hunt for your father, but until we have the answer to both those questions, I don’t want you leaving this house unless you’re with me. Do you understand?’
Manon lifted a hand and ran it gently through his hair. ‘Yes, Lawrence,’ she said. ‘I understand.’
As Grizel finally laid herself down to sleep on the bed in the kitchen of the Ingolbys’ house, her mind whirled, exhausted though she was. She had been unsettled enough before the episode out in town with Manon Ingolby, but at least until then she had thought she understood the nature of the danger she had to face. Now she was not certain of anything, other than that it would be to risk too much for her to tell Lawrence Ingolby that she knew the identity of the man who was watching his wife. Perhaps Manon Ingolby had been mistaken. Perhaps David Ogilvie had not been watching her at all. Perhaps Ogilvie would leave York soon. Perhaps her fears were groundless and all would be well, but for now she had made certain that Lawrence Ingolby would never allow him into the house. Trying to make herself believe this, Grizel had eventually passed into a restless sleep.
Sixteen
An Invitation
Anne had spent an afternoon at work on the copy of the letter Grizel had brought to her from the Ingolbys’ house. Using the sample cypher keys she carried with her in her travelling escritoire, she had seen straight away that the code in which the letter was written was not complex and guessed that its relative simplicity had probably been chosen with the recipient in mind. Anne knew Manon Ingolby was no simpleton, but she was not, or at least should not have been, one whose life required the skills of the life Anne had chosen to live.
Anne wished she might have seen the original letter, for sometimes the formation of the letters or numbers told her things, the curl of the pen, the slant of the hand. She worried too that Grizel, in her haste, might have made some error of transcription, but she had had to put away such thoughts because she must work with what she had in her hands.
The code, one of transposition of characters and substitution by number and symbol, had hardly challenged her. The letter itself, a page and a half long, had not taken her a great deal of time to decipher, but for Anne it had opened up a whole world. She had read in it a domestic tale, an affectionate passing of news from father to daughter, the usual anxious enquiries as to a daughter and a granddaughter’s welfare from a father many, many miles away. Anne had not read very far down when she’d suddenly sat back, realising what it was she was reading in this copy of a letter that had travelled across an ocean. She was assailed by an ill-assorted procession of emotions – shock, warmth, affection, relief and, finally, apprehension. What would Roger L’Estrange not give for the information she now held in her hands? Damian Seeker, whose whereabouts and welfare she periodically wondered about, was not only still alive, but settled in Massachusetts and, if his letters to his daughter were to be believed, making a new life as a village carpenter on which to raise a new family. ‘What will you do, Damian Seeker?’ she had once asked him. ‘What will you do, Anne Winter?’ she’d asked herself when she’d been sent to York. Not this.
Anne got up from her desk to put more coals on the fire. She was about to call for Grizel to bring up some of Madge Penmore’s bread pudding that she had brought that morning, but then remembered that Grizel had already gone back down to the Ingolbys’ so went and fetched it herself. She poured herself a good glass of claret from the jug on the dresser, and took it to her armchair by the fire where she read over her transcription of the letter once more. Massachusetts. A family. A new life, and he was living it. Her old adversary, who had always played her fair, in as far as fair play might be possible in their great game. The contentment she felt was tinged with a little sadness. She missed him sometimes. Thurloe had said it to her – John Thurloe of all people! – when she had gone to visit him in the Tower after the King’s restoration, ‘You were worthy of one another.’
The light came in the window from the north-east and penetrated to her little sitting room in grains of grey. The greater height of the Treasurer’s House backing on to the stable yard over which her window looked, and the looming city walls about Monkgate Bar both cast shadows where on clearer days there might have been sun. Anne lit another candle and considered what she had read. She could not help but smile, laugh a little even. But did Manon Ingolby really believe it all? Probably. The child – Anne could not think of her as anything else – believed everything she was told, for she could not conceive that others were not as open-hearted as she herself was. But she surely knew her father well enough to wonder whether he would really be content to pass his days on the edge of a forest in the New World, a farmer and carpenter? Oh no. Anne could not see it. How long had he managed it, she wondered, before the inadequacies and misjudged familiarities of his neighbours had become too much for him? A year perhaps, or maybe six months? Would he have managed six months? And as to Maria Ellingworth that Thomas Faithly had somehow made a sketch of, how long might she have managed the life of a contented housewife? Not even six months, surely not even three. With what regularity, Lady Anne wondered, would Seeker have to extricate the ink-stained hands of his wife from trouble she had managed to scribble herself into?
And a child there was, too, a boy. Anne could picture him – a wild thing, strong and troublesome, surely. In such a happy reverie about her old opponent, Anne fell asleep. When she woke, her candle was far burned down and the coals in the fire near to ashes. Had Grizel come in she would have tutted that the shutters were not closed and the night outside black. If any watched Anne from that blackness, they were well hidden. She closed the shutters and made ready for bed. She lay in the darkness, picturing that homestead in Massachusetts, hearing the rumble of that old familiar voice as finally she fell asleep.
It would be another two days before Anne answered the door of the little house on Oglethorpe to find Grizel standing there again.
‘Griz! I thought you had forgotten me!’
‘It’s not as easy for some of us to come and go as the fancy takes us as it is for others,’ muttered Grizel, stepping briskly past her to make a point of surveying the condition of the kitchen. Anne could not help but smile; left to her own devices, she kept almost as tidy a house as Grizel did, so many years of having to move on swiftly and with little warning having taught her the virtues of neatness and good order.
‘Mmm,’ said Grizel, disappointed of any fit object for her disapproval. She sat down. ‘You’ll have been out and about, I suppose?’
Anne had. She had made a point, for a start, of visiting her horse both morning and evening at the King’s Manor stables, and in the course of doing so had learned much about Thomas Faithly’s habits. He rode out of town at every possible opportunity and his most frequent conversation was on the matter of his plans for his own stables at Langton. There did not appear to be a woman of especial importance in his life, although it was known all around York that should he wish, Sir Thomas might have his pick of whoever took his eye, from kitchen maid to countess.
‘I was sure to look suitably shocked at this disclosure, of course,’ said Anne.
‘Aye, no doubt,’ said Grizel.
If Sir Thomas rode out for pleasure rather than on official duties, he most often went alone, but if he should take anyone with him, it was most often the lawyer, Lawrence Ingolby. More than one groom had expressed the view that they would rather have Sir Thomas as lord lieutenant than the one that was coming. Anne had casually tried a few names out around the stables, of men in Yorkshire who were suspected of being less loyal to the King than they should be, but none were taken up as having been seen or heard of in company with Thomas Faithly. In sum, there was not a single word to be heard against him.
