The Winter List, page 9
part #6 of Damian Seeker Series
Lawrence muttered an oath then went to lean against the mantelshelf, running his hands through his hair. It wasn’t like Jed to be so stupid, but then it wasn’t like him to be hung-over either and it was Lawrence that had given him the money to do it. ‘All right,’ he said at last. ‘Get off to your bed.’ Jed got up with alacrity and made for the door, but before he’d turned the handle, Lawrence stopped him and said, ‘But if anything like that ever happens again, you tell me everything , whether you think it’ll make me angry or not. Understand?’
‘Yes,’ said Jed, breathing a sigh of relief, obviously glad to be getting out of the room, ‘I understand.’
Lawrence sat by the fire in his study for a good while afterwards, nursing a goblet of wine and trying to make sense of what Jed had told him in light of the events of the day and what he and Thomas Faithly had discovered at Ralph Plowman’s house that evening, but Jed’s admission only muddied things rather than clarifying them. Then, as he stared over the top of his glass, the slight discolouration of the pink velvet on the arm of the chair opposite him caught his eye. He could picture Andrew Marvell sitting there, warning him that someone had been sent to York to try to track down Damian Seeker through him, through Manon. Lawrence closed his eyes and put his head back against his own chair. Maybe that was what William Briar had come here to tell him too. Browbeating Jed into remembering things he might never have heard in the first place would hardly help. William was dead, and Lawrence had to see to the safety of his own family. He covered over the fire and went upstairs to his wife.
Eight
Searchers
Anne Winter had woken that morning, as she did every morning, to the sounds of a psalm being sung. She had first heard these psalms in cold Scottish churches with plain windows and bare walls, where black-frocked ministers had seemed to look her in the eye and tell of her damnation. For herself, Anne had little enough faith, but she found reassurance in colour, light, golden thread on surplices, the scent of incense wafted from censers. She preferred a marble altar behind a carved screen, a reredos, the images of the saints, the marvellous polyphony of organ and choir to the starkness of a Presbyterian pulpit. Should God look down upon an Anglican church, there would be far too much else to take his eye among the obfuscation of smoke from censers and the glinting of colours through stained glass for Him to notice Anne Winter. But in Grizel’s bleak Scottish churches, there had been nowhere she might hide herself.
She couldn’t make out the words or tell which psalm it was this morning. They all sounded alike to her; they all excluded her, dead words of dead men. She pressed her fingers to her temples and closed her eyes before pushing back the bedcovers to set her feet on the cold floor. The day would not deal with itself.
‘Tell me more, then, of this Ingolby we are to begin looking for this morning,’ said Grizel after she had ladled porridge into their bowls and said the grace.
‘Lawrence Ingolby is a lawyer, a Yorkshireman,’ said Anne. ‘He was a friend to Damian Seeker.’
Grizel paused in the act of lifting her food to her mouth. ‘I thought you said that man had no friends?’
Anne wrinkled her nose, considering. ‘Not friends, precisely, but people whom he tolerated more than he did others.’
‘And what if they did not tolerate him?’
Anne smiled and reached for the honey. ‘I don’t think that was a question he ever troubled himself much over.’
Grizel made a small noise of approval. ‘And I take it this Ingolby also knows Thomas Faithly?’
‘From boyhood,’ said Anne. ‘Sir Thomas’s father came across Lawrence Ingolby as a foundling. There was a dissolute mother, I understand, but she was not long in the picture. The boy showed promise from a young age and was fostered by a wealthy Puritan family of the name of Pullan, in Faithly village, up on the moors. The son of that family is now in possession of Sir Thomas’s former home. Are you following?’
Grizel nodded. ‘So Ingolby is of the Puritan persuasion?’
Anne laughed. ‘Ingolby is of the Ingolby persuasion. Anyway, he was in London six years ago, at around the same time L’Estrange believes Sir Thomas was released from the Tower, possibly into Damian Seeker’s employ. Given their connection in Faithly village and that Ingolby is known to have associated with Seeker, it is very likely that he and Sir Thomas spent time in one another’s company in London in those days. If anyone knows what Sir Thomas was doing in those few months between his release from the Tower and his flight back to the continent, it’s likely to be Lawrence Ingolby.’
‘Mmm,’ said Grizel, agreeing. ‘And by what means do you think we should approach him?’
‘We must get you into his household. Specifically, we must make you acquainted with his servants.’
Grizel nodded. They had done this sort of thing before. ‘But that may take a little time – to engineer a meeting in the market place, or at their preferred church.’
‘No.’ Anne picked up their empty bowls and set them down on the dresser. ‘That will not be necessary on this occasion. For I know Lawrence Ingolby’s wife.’
Manon had waited until Lawrence had left for an early appointment at the coffee house off Stonegate, then she had kissed Lizzie on the forehead and quickly said to Madge, ‘I’m just popping out for a little while. I won’t be long.’
‘Out?’ the old lady had said as if she had never heard of such a thing. ‘But Master said I was to keep an eye on you and make sure you took your rest. Whatever can you be needing to go out for?’
Manon smiled at Lizzie and put a finger to her lips, then said, ‘It’s a secret.’
‘Secret? Master would not approve of anyone in this house having secrets, specially you!’
‘I’ll be gone no time. And he’ll approve this secret when he discovers it. Remember it’s his birthday soon.’
‘Ah,’ said Madge. ‘Not a word will pass my lips.’ But as Manon pulled up the fur-trimmed hood of her heavy blue woollen mantle, the housekeeper added, ‘But Jedediah must go with you.’
Manon stopped. She did not mind Jed, but she found his company a little dour and oppressive to her spirits, and she’d been looking forward to this small adventure of fetching Lawrence’s present for some time. She looked over to where the young man was seated by the hearth, employed in the cleaning of Lawrence’s second-best boots and looking no happier at his grandmother’s suggestion than she was. ‘Jedediah has his own work to attend to,’ she said, ‘and my husband would not be best pleased if he came back for his dinner and found tasks he had left him not done. I’ll hardly be an hour.’ And then she was gone before Madge could raise any further objections, out of the front door, across the street and into Cheat’s Lane.
Manon preferred to stay away from the main thoroughfares. She was not indifferent to the mess that could be thrown up by passing animals and carts, but neither was she indifferent to Lawrence’s warnings of the night before. He’d come back a good while after suppertime having been up to see Thomas at King’s Manor when they got the terrible news about William Briar. Manon could hardly believe yet that William was dead – he’d been a quiet, solid sort of person, serious but kind, and she had liked him. She could hardly think that anyone would want to kill him. But as Lawrence had emphasised to her, they should act with caution. Whatever he had discovered while out with Thomas, he had been even more troubled by the time he’d come home than he had been before he’d left, and seemed certain that the murder of William was tied up in some sort of threat to themselves. Manon could hardly see why this should be the case, and Lawrence had flatly refused to tell her, only repeating that she must trust him. Before at last coming to bed, he’d made extra checks on the doors and windows of their home, and this morning he had changed his plan to take Jed with him about his business in town and instead told him to stay at home keeping guard on the house, and to let no stranger in.
As these thoughts wafted about in her head, Manon knew that Madge had been right – Lawrence would not have been happy about her going out into town on her own. She felt that her husband sometimes forgot how she had had to fend for herself for long periods during her childhood with a neglectful mother and malicious stepfather, before her own father had found her at last. But Manon was Damian Seeker’s daughter, through and through, and she could look after herself, whatever her husband might think. Besides, no harm could come to her in broad daylight, and no stranger would know their way as she did round the snickets and ginnels between her home and the shop of the silversmith on Coppergate that she had commissioned to make Lawrence’s gift.
Picking her way carefully up Cheat’s Lane, it wasn’t long until she was turning into Bakehouse Yard, where she was known to all the shopkeepers. She had almost stepped out onto Pavement when she was forced to step back to let a man going quickly along the street pass by. He nodded to her as he pressed on, his hand to the brim of his hat, but then the movement seemed to be arrested by what he saw, by herself. He paused for the slightest moment and she thought he was about to speak but instead he bowed his head slightly before looking away again and continuing, more slowly, on his way.
Manon hesitated at the top of the steps until he was lost to view, wondering whether she should turn back and go home. She was near to certain that she’d never seen the man before, but that of course didn’t mean he’d never seen her. She told herself not to be foolish and stepped out onto the street of Pavement.
Thomas Faithly rolled the orange in his fingers. He had a flash of memory, of being in Seville, and of reaching up to pluck a fruit from an overhanging bough. He closed his eyes and thought for a moment of the late afternoon sun on his face, the sound of the cicadas’ incessant chirruping, the smell of heat rising from honey-coloured walls. But he remembered too that he had plucked the orange from the tree because he had been hungry. The orange, when he had got it, had been bitter and he had longed for nothing more than the taste of a crisp English apple.
That had been the start of it, that bitter Seville orange. It was as if amongst its pips had been the seeds of his discontent with a life in exile. He had travelled France, Spain, Germany, Flanders in the service of the exiled King. No matter what he had tried to do, he hadn’t been able to wash that taste of bitterness from his mouth, and the longing for home had grown. It had not been Spain that had been the problem, nor the Low Countries, nor France. It had not been Germany either, but it had been there, one day over six years ago in Cologne, that he had decided he could bear his exile no more and had slipped away from the King’s court to make his way up the Rhine to Rotterdam, and at last, in the company of some Flemish sailors, had found a passage home.
He had put his faith in Fate, and Fate had soon manifested itself in the six-foot-four form of Captain Damian Seeker, a fellow Yorkshireman seconded to the service of Cromwell’s Major Generals. Thomas was still tormented by the knowledge that he had offered himself up as a spy for Cromwell. His entanglement in Seeker’s investigation into a string of conspiracies against the Lord Protector had soon revealed to him that one of the conspirators, living incognito in London as ‘Mr Boyes’, was Prince Rupert of the Rhine. Thomas’s loyalties to Charles Stuart might have been waning, but to Rupert they never would. He’d reported nothing of this to Seeker, and when the plots had failed, he’d fled England, alongside Rupert, back into exile.
He told himself, again and again when he heard of old treacheries being uncovered, that he had given Seeker nothing. But sometimes, in the cold dark of the night, or when he had been alone for too long, Thomas remembered that that was not true. On that first flight from Cologne he had taken with him a list of names of ‘well-affected’ Royalists in England who’d been in the early stages of planning against Cromwell. Those plans had withered and died as had so many before them and the men named on the list had simply been watched by the Republican authorities, but the knowledge of what his treachery might have cost them sometimes kept Thomas awake at night. It wasn’t a thing he could talk of to Lawrence. Lawrence had never compromised himself that way, never hazarded and lost all for a belief, a cause, never risked losing what little he had left by turning his back on it.
After he had finally parted company with Lawrence Ingolby the previous night, Thomas had gone to meet with David Ogilvie and, in his cups, come close to unburdening himself of his guilt. Ogilvie at least knew what it was to fight and risk all in another man’s cause. He wasn’t sure what had stopped him – a sudden flash of sobriety, of discretion, or perhaps a wish that this old friend who had known him before he turned traitor would not think badly of him.
Or perhaps it was because of what Andrew Marvell had travelled secretly from abroad to tell Ingolby – that someone had come to York on Seeker’s trail. Thomas knew that wherever Damian Seeker might be, that trail might lead first of all to himself. As he had lain in his chamber at King’s Manor, watching through the night, he had sensed a new and heavy load of snow, travelled down from the north and looming over York. He could smell it and he could feel the weight of the snowbound heaths pressing on this city, hemming them all in. By the time dawn at last started to send a little light beneath his shutters, and the noises from the anteroom next door suggested his young page and clerk were beginning to stir, he was filled with a sense of foreboding. He needed to see Ingolby again, learn whether the hours of the night had given his friend any clarity on how best they might meet this threat.
Thomas swung himself out of bed and, swiftly dressed and breakfasted, he was soon out through the wall in the abbey gardens and into the heart of the town. The folk of York, hunched in on themselves, moved carefully through the streets and no one seemed inclined to impede his progress down to the Ingolbys’ house, but as soon as he crossed from the end of Colliergate to turn down Fossgate, he saw that all was not well.
There was some sort of commotion in the street outside the house with the green door. The door stood open, and a gaggle of people were gathered outside. Thomas hurried down and pushed his way through the assembled neighbours and into the house where he followed increasingly audible sounds of female distress to the kitchen.
Lawrence’s housekeeper was standing over her grandson and giving the young man a thorough and almost incoherent tongue-lashing. Jed was seated, hands gripping his knees, eyes glaring and mouth pursed as if it was all he could do to keep his composure.
Thomas closed the kitchen door firmly behind him, and both Madge and Jed jumped, shocked to see him there. ‘What’s going on here?’ he demanded. ‘Where’s Lawrence?’
Madge stared at him, her mouth agape, but it was her grandson who seemed to recover himself first. He stood up, and patted down his hair, which Thomas now noticed was sodden. ‘He’s out looking,’ he said.
‘Out looking for what?’
Jed hesitated and a distraught Madge broke in, ‘The babby! He’s out looking for the babby!’ Then she was sinking, howling, into her kitchen chair and wiping eyes and nose with the apron which she had thrown up over her face.
Thomas felt dread like a lump of lead in his stomach.
‘Lizzie? Little Elizabeth? Where has she gone?’
The housekeeper blew her nose loudly and rubbed again at red and swollen eyes. ‘Well, we don’t know, do we?’ and then she collapsed into howling again.
Thomas turned back to Jed. ‘Tell me what happened.’
The young man took a deep breath and rubbed his hands over his eyes, as if looking for time to find the right words.
Thomas lost his patience. ‘Out with it, for God’s sake!’
The voice was low and sullen. ‘I didn’t know she’d followed me.’
‘Followed you where?’
‘Into the yard, out the back gate when I went to put the waste out for the night-soil men. I didn’t see her – she must have toddled out behind me when I wasn’t looking and . . .’
‘And what?’ demanded Thomas.
‘I didn’t know she’d gone out into the back lane after me. When I came back into the yard, I closed the gate behind me.’
Thomas’s sense of dread grew. ‘And how long till it was realised she was missing?’
Madge glanced towards the clock hanging on the wall. ‘Hardly half an hour,’ she said. ‘Not much more than a quarter even.’
It was a moment before Thomas could master his anger enough to speak. ‘And Lawrence has gone to look for her?’
Madge nodded. ‘Jed went for him the minute the mistress came back from being out to the silversmith’s and we realised little Lizzie was gone. Stone mad, the master was. He’s that distracted this last couple of days, Sir Thomas – I think he’ll kill someone.’
Thomas looked about him. ‘Manon? Where is she?’
Jed swallowed. ‘The master had me fetch a physician. He’s with her now.’
Thomas made to head for the stairs, then stopped. ‘And you,’ he demanded of the clerk. ‘Why aren’t you out looking too?’
Jed’s grandmother answered for him. ‘Master said he’d to stay here, protect the household and the mistress.’
It was all Thomas could do not to take the clerk by the scruff of the neck and throw him out on the street. ‘Protect the household! The street door was wide open to the world. I walked straight in here,’ he waved a hand at his sword, ‘armed. I might have been anybody. I might have slit the throats of the lot of you.’ He brought his face close to Jed’s. ‘Get out and help your master find that child, and don’t show your face back here till you’ve got her. You can tell Lawrence that I am here, and that Manon is safe.’
Thomas had hardly finished speaking and Jed was gone. Then Thomas turned his attention to the housekeeper. ‘Lock the doors, front and back, and don’t let anyone but your master in without my say-so.’ The woman had one last blow at her nose and nodded. ‘And for pity’s sake, will you shut that dog up!’ An incessant yapping from Madge’s malign terrier ringing in his ears, Thomas went up the stairs to Manon Ingolby.
