The Winter List, page 2
part #6 of Damian Seeker Series
Her views on the likely fate of John Thurloe were impossible to gauge. He continued to his point. ‘Thomas Scott is also in the Tower.’
Some surprise flitted across her face. ‘I thought he had fled England,’ she said, ‘got himself abroad.’
‘Yes, he had. As far as Brussels, where he became acquainted with how greatly the affairs of the world have turned.’ Scott, who had bragged of his part in the murder of the King, had been taken in the Spanish Netherlands. There he had misconceived, or been encouraged to misconceive, the meaning of the King’s language in the Act of Oblivion. L’Estrange’s voice hardened. ‘Thomas Scott was “persuaded” to return home. They’ll all be caught in the end, one way or the other.’
‘And what will happen to him?’
L’Estrange sniffed, as if he were being asked about the fate of a kitchen boy who had not come up to the mark. ‘Thomas Scott’s name is on the King’s death warrant, whereas John Thurloe’s is not. Scott seeks to bargain for his life. He thinks to obtain mercy in exchange for information, but he has spoken too often of his pride in his part in the murder of God’s anointed. His information will not save him.’
‘And yet?’
‘And yet,’ he said, ‘what has been extracted from him is of use to us.’ He indicated the paper in front of him. ‘This is a list of names of those who were in His Majesty’s circle in exile and whom Scott asserts spied for the Protectorate. Traitors , in other words.’
She glanced towards the paper but he had made sure to shield it with his arm. ‘Other than those we already knew of?’ she asked.
‘Some of those whom we already knew of were dealt with as their names were discovered. Others that were turned once have been turned again, and now spy for us. They are the fortunate ones. The names on this list, however, Thomas Scott’s list, are of those he claims have got away with their treachery to His Majesty and who have sought to blend back into a retired life, or even one of influence, now that His Majesty has returned.’
She frowned. ‘Scott may well have made it up, this list of names. Out of spite, or to gain himself time, or mercy.’
He nodded. She really was quite intelligent. ‘That is my concern. I have no desire that the innocent should be punished because of one man’s malice. I am too closely associated with powerful men to be able to go where I would need to or ask the requisite questions to establish the truth or otherwise of what Thomas Scott has said.’
He saw that she understood.
‘But I am not,’ she said.
‘Precisely.’
She put out her hand, clearly expecting him to give her the list, but he held it back from her. ‘I think it’s best that you focus your attentions on one subject at the time. You are less likely to raise suspicions that way.’ He wrote one name and a set of dates on a small piece of paper and handed it to her, along with a purse. ‘Find out where this individual was between these dates, what he was doing, who he was in contact with. Write to me when you have done so – not here, but to the safe house I have indicated. That being done, I will send you further funds, and the next name, and the location of the next safe postal drop. You do not need to come here again.’
She took the paper in one hand, glanced at it a moment then handed it back to him with a nod. The purse she put in the small bag hanging from her own girdle. She picked up her basket and went to the door. ‘Goodbye, Mr L’Estrange,’ she said.
He blew sand across the words he had just written at the top of the paper.
The Winter List
‘Farewell, Lady Anne,’ he said.
Roger L’Estrange was still looking at the list of names, wondering how long it would take her to work through it, establish the truth or otherwise of what Thomas Scott had said, when his clerk again knocked on his door.
‘What now?’ he said, with some impatience.
‘Godric Purvis is here, sir.’
‘Purvis?’ Roger inspected the clock on the wall. He had spent longer talking with Anne Winter than he had intended to. ‘Let him in.’
Purvis came in, wiping his mouth on his sleeve, a ripe peach dripping juice onto the fingers of his right hand. L’Estrange felt his annoyance kindle.
‘Where did you get that?’
Purvis glanced at the fruit in his hand. ‘There was a woman, as I was coming through the yard . . .’
L’Estrange wondered if he had misjudged Purvis. He preferred that his agents knew nothing of each other. Clearly, Purvis had had no suspicions of Anne Winter, but he was not confident that she would have had none of him. No matter. ‘Come in,’ he said. ‘And close the door behind you. I don’t need half of Whitehall knowing my business.’
A glint of interest appeared in Purvis’s eyes.
L’Estrange explained to Godric Purvis what was to be expected, any day now, from the King’s Act of Indemnity and Oblivion, of the debate raging in the corridors of Whitehall over whose names should be on the condemned list and therefore excepted from King Charles’s unfathomable mercy. The paltry seven names on the list to begin with had been an insult to the martyred King’s memory. But the list was growing, and if L’Estrange had any say in matters, it would continue to grow. Purvis nodded. Everyone in England knew who the most notorious regicides were.
L’Estrange took out his pipe. He did not offer one to Purvis. ‘But there were two involved,’ he continued, ‘that had a very hand indeed in the murder of the King but whose names are not known.’ He watched Purvis for a moment and saw a spark of understanding then a smile creep across the lips. He had it.
‘The executioners,’ said Purvis.
‘Exactly. Or more precisely, one of them – the one who wielded the axe.’
Purvis nodded, then started to voice his ideas. Ideas straight from the coffee houses, from the draughty alleyways around the Inns of Court and Chancery. But L’Estrange had his own idea about who had been the heavily disguised man who had swung the axe before an astonished crowd on that freezing cold January day in 1649 and severed the head of England’s anointed King from his body. He knew who it had been, he was certain of it. He told Purvis.
Purvis narrowed his brows and frowned. ‘Are you sure? Is he even still alive? I’ve heard of him all right – but no one has seen him for years.’
‘Oh, Damian Seeker is alive all right.’ He could feel it. His hatred of the man crawled beneath his skin, the years, the defeats, the humiliations, the plans he had laid so carefully that Seeker had found out. Roger would have been much further advanced in his career, stood much higher in the King’s counsels – where for the moment he did not stand at all – had it not been for Damian Seeker. ‘Others might be fooled but I am not. And wherever on God’s earth he might be, I will have him found and I will have him brought to justice.’
One
Whitehall, London
Two years later. October 1662
Samuel Pepys was strolling down King Street, musing on a ditty he had heard that morning from one of Lord Sandwich’s clerks. He would sing it to his wife tonight, when they were alone. He was considering whether he should cut down to the right and take a boat downriver, to enjoy his dinner at home as he had said he would, when a dunt on the shoulder jolted him out of his reverie and almost into the path of an oncoming butcher’s boy.
‘Good Lord!’ he said, stepping swiftly one way as the butcher’s boy deftly stepped the other and a well-set man with a close-cropped brown beard and a ruddy complexion mumbled something that might have been an apology. Pepys was still brushing at the shoulder of his jacket when something in the other fellow’s gait caught his eye. ‘William?’
The man stopped.
‘William Briar!’
Now the fellow turned and after a moment’s puzzlement, a look of recognition dawned on his face, to be followed by a smile.
‘Sam Pepys? Surely not! When in the world did you grow so fine?’
‘Or you so clumsy?’ said Sam, embracing his old friend before taking him by the arm. ‘But we are a mere step from the Dog – come, let us get a bit of dinner there and you can tell me all your news. What on earth has brought you back down to London? I thought we had quite lost you to the north.’
‘Would that you had,’ said Briar, and then in response to Sam’s look of astonishment he tapped the flap of the leather satchel that was slung across his body. ‘Business,’ he said. And then, his voice lowered, ‘With the Duke of Buckingham.’
Sam had not expected this. News touching the interests of the Duke of Buckingham was not the sort of thing a prudent man would bandy about anywhere in London, still less within the very gates of Whitehall itself. He too lowered his voice. ‘With Buckingham?’ he said, sending an involuntary glance to William’s satchel.
‘Some plans he has had me draw up, pertinent to his forthcoming duties as His Majesty’s lord lieutenant in the north,’ said Briar. His tone suggested that further talk of the duke and his business would be unwelcome.
Sam did not need a second hint and it was with some relief that he led the way through the door of the Dog. ‘But it is quite marvellous to see you again, William,’ he said, when they had secured a table in the snug. ‘I had all but given you up for dead.’
‘I have been in York little more than a year, Sam.’
‘Indeed. Which is a year longer than I could stomach it, I am sure.’
William took a moment to send a glance from Sam’s fashionably shod feet to the lately purchased hat on his head. ‘I don’t doubt it. You appear to have become a man of fashion.’
‘Oh, hardly that,’ said Sam, colouring, ‘but one must take care to secure one’s position, and much depends on the face one presents to the world.’ Then pausing a moment to take in the sober brown suit of his companion, he coughed. ‘In London, at least. For my actual self, I am as I ever was.’
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said William, great warmth in his brown eyes.
They were a good hour and a half in the Dog, washing down their dishes of bacon and beans with first one and then another bottle of sack. Sam relayed which plays he had been to see lately and warned William most strenuously against A Midsummer Night’s Dream . ‘Do not even consider wasting your time on it – not two lines of sense together in the whole thing.’
William interjected that he had no interest in the theatre, and was determined to be on a boat for Hull the very minute his appointments in London were finished. Sam shook his head in dismay, then prattled on, of his service for my Lord Sandwich, of his prospects at the Navy Office, of his happiness and tribulations with his wife. And then he stopped.
‘Oh, my dear fellow, I am so sorry. I have let my tongue run on so, where I should not.’
Briar smiled. ‘It does me good to hear of your happiness, Sam.’
‘And yet, it was thoughtless of me, and I hope it will never be said of me that I would cause pain to a friend.’
William shook his head. ‘Never.’ He pushed a solitary bean around his now empty wooden platter. ‘I see you have heard my history, though. I suppose it has been round all the offices.’
Sam did not attempt to deny it. William Briar’s betrothal to the pretty daughter of a York cooper and then her jilting of him at the altar in favour of another man had been news amongst the offices of Whitehall for a day, two even, until new and better wonders had taken its place.
‘And she did marry this other fellow, I suppose?’ ventured Sam.
William nodded.
‘Then may she long rue her folly.’
William gave a tight smile. ‘Don’t say that, Sam. All in all, he’s a decent enough sort that she has married. Honest. A stonemason.’
Sam pushed out his lip. ‘You’re a better man than I, William. I would have had her up for breach of promise.’
‘Oh, I thought of it, at first. Threatened all sorts, but my lawyer persuaded me that none would benefit from such a course but him, and so I thought better of it.’
‘An honest lawyer?’ said Sam. ‘Then I would counsel you to stay in York, for you will find precious few of the sort in London! Ah, wait. Of course – Lawrence Ingolby.’
William smiled. ‘I have lost a wife but found a friend, and over time I think I may have done better by the bargain.’
‘But he is in town just now too – I took my dinner with him only the other day.’
‘I know. I had hoped to travel back up with him, but His Grace’s business made me miss other appointments, and now I must wait an extra day to make them up before I can return to York.’
William’s other appointments being at Custom House quay, at the eastern end of the city and not far from the Navy Office, Pepys suggested they might take a boat together from Scotland Dock. They had got perhaps halfway across Scotland Yard when a figure emerged from the back door of the small house Sam knew to be occupied by Roger L’Estrange. He felt his mouth contort at the very thought of the man and was about to express his views on the journalist to William Briar when he realised that William had stopped and was staring after the figure who’d come out of L’Estrange’s house.
William called after the person now going quickly down the passageway towards the gate leading back out onto Whitehall, but aside from a momentary glance and a brief hesitation in the step of the other, his calls appeared to go unheard. He called again, but this time there could be no doubt that he was positively ignored.
‘What’s the matter?’ Sam asked of William who was now in a state of some consternation.
‘That fellow, I know him from York, but he’s ignoring me.’
‘So it appears,’ said Sam. ‘Perhaps he owes you money?’
William made no reply, and looked to be on the point of following after the other when another acquaintance came upon them and assured William that whoever it was he thought he might have seen, the man’s name was Godric Purvis, and certainly not that which William had been calling.
Two
Northumbria
Anne Winter sat by the turret window of the house high on the cliffs. Below her, the cottages and inn clustered about the harbour braced themselves against the malevolent storm. The wind rattled the panes in the windows, hurling bullets of hail against them with such venom that it was a wonder to her they didn’t splinter in her face. Far beneath, grey waves crashed against rock, breaking, only to fall back and come again.
Anne’s fingers were cold, a bloodless white to their tips. If Grizel came in, she would chide her and ask what point there was in her having set and lit the fire if Anne would not sit by it? The discarded core of an apple lay browning on the small console table by her empty armchair and the letter arrived in the night from London lay open on the hearth where she had left it. She took a long drink of her wine and set the glass down again to watch its red surge and fade in the crystal where the candlelight caught it.
In her mind, she went over again the words of L’Estrange’s letter. He had opened with a commendation of the report she had lately sent him from Edinburgh and his satisfaction with the outcome of her investigations there. Anne took no pleasure in his praise – the more pleased he was with her information, the worse it would be for someone else. The icy tentacles of his interest found their way to the far reaches of His Majesty’s kingdoms. Edinburgh had not been far enough away for his targets to escape him, just as Northumbria was not far enough away, and still less was York, and to York she must now go. There, on the hearth, appended to his paragraph of praise, was the name of the next man L’Estrange would have her investigate. Anne had known this name would be added to her list, eventually. She had had her own suspicions, long before now, but she had stashed them away, and hoped she would never have to confront them. Thomas Faithly.
York, England, some nights later
The flames of the fire Lawrence had made amongst the ancient broken tombs gave off a good warmth, but as darkness had fallen the sky had begun to dot with stars that signalled a hard frost. On the last few miles of his journey northwards, he had increasingly detected the smell of snow in the air. He tightened his arm around his wife’s shoulders.
‘You sure you’re warm enough?’ he asked.
She lowered the pewter cup of burned wine from her lips and laughed. ‘That is the fourth time you have asked me.’
‘I know,’ he said, ‘but if you should catch cold or take a fever . . .’ He gestured towards the swell of her stomach, visible beneath her heavy wrappings.
‘I will not,’ she said. ‘This is a Yorkshire child, through and through. Were you and I not both raised on the moors? The cold is its birthright. Just think – there is no child heartier than our Lizzie.’
‘That’s true,’ he said, ‘but Lizzie was a summer bairn.’
She put up a hand to stroke his face. ‘This winter child will be even stronger. I know it. Besides, these furs you have brought me from London would keep me warm on the top of Mickle Fell.’
He grinned. ‘They’re good, aren’t they? London is awash with furs since the Russians came to town. Sam Pepys is full of talk of the great spectacle they made.’
She laughed. ‘Sam is always full of talk, about everything.’
Lawrence was silent a moment and she gave his hand a squeeze. ‘Do you miss London, your friends?’
He shook his head. ‘Nah. This is the place for me. I’m in London plenty, anyway, though I hope to be there a good deal less once Thomas’s case is done with. And I have friends enough to do me here – Thomas, William Briar . . .’
‘I thought William might have travelled back from London with you.’
‘He’d hoped to, but there’s that much building going on at Whitehall it was taking him much longer than he’d planned to see the people he needed to see. He was as keen as me to get home, but Buckingham’s business held him up. He was planning to get the next boat for Hull.’
‘And what about Jed Penmore – did he truly like the town?’
‘Oh, aye. No worries there. Knows what an opportunity looks like, that one. He’ll make his mark. Took to the place like a native.’
‘And you think he’ll do well at Clifford’s?’
