The House of Lamentations

by S.G. MacLean

Genres: Historical Thrillers

Synopsis

'One of the best historical crime series out there' Crime Review 'Could challenge CJ Sansom for dominion' Sunday Times Summer, 1658, and the Republic may finally be safe: the combined Stuart and Spanish forces have been heavily defeated by the English and French armies on the coast of Flanders, and the King's cause appears finished. Yet one final, desperate throw of the dice is planned. And who can stop them if not Captain Damian Seeker? The final gripping book in this acclaimed and award-winning series of historical thrillers. Will Seeker's legacy endure?

Release date: July 9, 2020

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 496

Sample

Prologue

London

July 1658

Hate upon hate. Fear upon fear. Where was God in this? On men’s lips, but nowhere else. Lawrence Ingolby and Elias Ellingworth forced themselves to watch as men whom they had never encountered but whose politics happened to be different from their own, were untied from the sledges on which they’d been dragged through the streets from their prison. The thin shifts which were the only clothing the prisoners wore, were stained from their captivity and from the missiles thrown at them by the populace as they’d passed. Lawrence and Elias looked on as these men, Royalists of no loud repute in the world until now, taken in taverns and coffee houses while musing on half-formed plots against Cromwell, were pushed towards the scaffold on which they would die.

The two men were brought forward, the executioner begging forgiveness of each and of God before he did his work. With differing success, each victim sought to hide his terror. Lawrence remembered hearing that the late King, before his execution, had worn two shirts, lest the cold of January should cause him to tremble and the people think it fear. It wasn’t January now though, but the blistering heat of summer, and the stench of London was high enough. Their valedictory speeches, whether repentant or defiant, Lawrence didn’t hear, so full were his ears of the growing rumblings and mumblings of the people around him.

The executioner knew his business well: he knew to tie his rope short, enough to hang a man, to choke the breath almost out of him, but not to snap his neck. This expertise was clear from the first victim’s performance. Just as the legs were tiring in their thrashing, the one-time Royalist colonel was cut down. A foolish hope appeared in the eyes of his companion, already on the scaffold and awaiting his own turn. Elias saw it too. ‘Dear God, Lawrence – does he think it’s a reprieve? Can it be that he doesn’t know what’s coming next?’

If the second condemned man had truly not known, he was a short time in finding out. The executioner was at work again, tearing off the first victim’s shift, exposing his emaciated body and his privy parts for all to see. Lawrence looked away and heard Elias wince as the half-hanged man was castrated, his manhood then burned before his eyes. A boy near Lawrence fainted; a hearty drayman a few feet from him vomited, but the butchery went on. The hangman, much bloodied now, took a heated poker and seared a line down the dying man’s abdomen, along which he next plunged his knife. To the sound of bestial agonies from his victim, the executioner played his weapon in the man’s very bowels and drew them out before his eyes to throw them, also, in the flames. Only when he held aloft the vanquished Royalist’s heart was it clear that the ravaged carcass’s agonies were at last over.

‘I cannot watch another,’ said Lawrence, as the second man, shaking uncontrollably and now almost beyond the capability of standing, was dragged beneath his own noose that the ritual might be repeated.

‘Aye, but you must,’ said Elias as the crowd around them, at last disgusted and murmuring that this was surely not God’s plan, began to thin. ‘We both must. How else shall we bear witness? How else shall we say in truth that we know what England now is?’

When at last it was over, the gaping, bloodied heads of the traitors set on poles and their severed limbs thrown in a basket like so much offal, Lawrence turned away from the spectacle he had forced himself to watch. He had seen less butchery at Smithfield, and better done. The beheadings of June had been bad enough, but those, at least, had been swift. These latest though, would the stench of the barbarity ever clear?

Elias waited longer, looking on the scene as if to carve every detail into his mind. Lawrence walked as far as Seething Lane and then waited for him. Crowds filed past, returning from what they had thought might be an entertainment but now understood to have been a descent into something else.

London was subdued, disgusted. Royalists scarcely heard of, caught in some conspiracy against Cromwell that had never seen the light of day, were condemned to brutal ends by a court the Protector had had invented for that express purpose. The deaths were to serve as a lesson to any who might have been tempted to similar thoughts of treason. The look on the faces of those who passed him, the muted expressions of dismay, suggested to Lawrence it might have been a lesson too far.

He and Elias walked on in silence a good while until at last Elias turned in at the Rainbow. ‘I have hardly the stomach for the law, Lawrence,’ he said as he led Elias into the tavern rather than continuing to Clifford’s Inn.

‘I think the law must be engaged elsewhere today, in any case,’ said Lawrence, following him into the tavern.

The Rainbow was busy, many others perhaps wanting to shake off what they had just seen rather than carry it back with them to the business of their everyday lives. Lawrence sought a place where they might not be overheard. He knew from the look on Elias’s face what the tenor of their conversation would be.

Once they were seated and served, Lawrence said, ‘How long do you think this can go on?’

‘What, the persecution of the Royalists? Their purging from London? The suspending of Parliament in the name of the rights of the people?’

‘All of it, I suppose,’ said Lawrence.

Elias shook his head. ‘I don’t see an end. Even those who were his closest friends, his greatest supports, are cast out or worse, for that they dare question him or advise the reining in of his power, while we must call Cromwell’s children “Highness” and watch as he marries them into titles and lands and Royalists of the highest ranks who so lately supped with Charles Stuart.’

Lawrence looked around him. ‘Hush, Elias, or you’ll be up on that scaffold next.’

Elias took a long draught of his ale before speaking again. ‘No, Lawrence. I’m done with it.’

Lawrence chanced a smile. ‘You, Elias, done with sedition? Never.’

‘With sedition? Who knows? I hope so. I hope to be somewhere where sedition is not a thing that is necessary.’

Lawrence put down his own tankard and looked closely at his lawyer friend. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘England, Lawrence. I’m done with England.’

Lawrence contemplated the words a few moments, but they still didn’t make any sense to him. ‘You mean, you’ve no hopes it’ll get better?’

‘Well, yes, I suppose that means the same thing in the end, doesn’t it? I had hopes for Cromwell, for the Commonwealth, so, so long ago. But where is our freedom now, where our humanity?’ He laughed. ‘Where our parliament even? Protector or King, what does it matter to you and I, Lawrence? Those men we just saw butchered, in a different time, would you not have sat a while with them, smoked a pipe, learned something of their families, their hopes, their cares and then moved on without caring to know of their politics? My England never was, Lawrence, and I am done with this one.’

There was silence between them as the sounds of the tavern travelled all around them. And then at last, in low and very measured tones, Lawrence said, ‘What are you telling me, Elias?’

Elias looked him directly in the eye. ‘I am bound for Boston, Lawrence.’

Lawrence screwed up his face. ‘Lancashire?’ But even as he said it, he knew he was wrong. ‘Tell me you’re not talking about Massachusetts.’

Elias gave one, slow nod.

Lawrence sat back and attempted a laugh. ‘No, Elias, you can’t. I mean Grace . . .’

‘Grace is less than a month from her time, and she no more than I wants our child to grow up in the world we have made here. Whispers, lies, fear, always looking over our shoulders for who might be listening and not liking the gist of what we say. Hypocrisy everywhere.’

‘But what of her uncle, what of Samuel?’

‘He’s coming with us. Samuel can make his home anywhere, with anyone, so long as Grace is there.’

Lawrence felt like a child watching his favourite dog be sold away. The dog beside him, Damian Seeker’s dog, stirred and placed a heavy paw on his foot, as if guessing his thoughts.

‘But what about Kent’s?’ tried Lawrence, his voice trailing off hopelessly. A man who could speak with such certainty about taking his wife and yet-to-be-born child, along with her lamed and elderly uncle across the world to begin again, would hardly be put off by concern for the fate of a coffee house.

‘Samuel is giving it to Gabriel. The boy’s seventeen or eighteen now, as far as he can tell, and as able as any merchant in the city. He’ll buy and sell them all by Candlemas.’

‘You’ve decided this, haven’t you? You’ve got it planned already.’

Elias let out a long breath. ‘It was when Cromwell dissolved the Commons, in February. After two weeks of sitting. Two weeks, Lawrence. I’d had enough. And nothing that’s happened since then has made me anything but more certain. It’s taken this long to put arrangements in place – somewhere that I might practise, a suitable house, possibly the acquisition of a printing press . . .’

Lawrence felt the indignation growing in him. Not even as a child, with his slattern of a mother, had he felt hurt like this. ‘And you didn’t even tell me . . .’

Elias lowered his voice and leaned further across the table towards Lawrence. ‘I couldn’t. It’s Maria, you see . . .’

‘Maria?’ And then Lawrence did see. ‘Oh, don’t tell me,’ he said, an incredulous half-smile on his face. ‘You haven’t told her, have you? You haven’t told your sister.’

Elias flushed and looked about him. ‘We cannot talk about it here.’

*

It was several hours later, in his own chamber on the upper floor of the Black Fox on Broad Street, that Lawrence finally took up his pen. The tavern was shut up for the night, the doors locked and his landlady, Dorcas, and the girls all sleeping. Nevertheless, the sounds of the argument he’d witnessed earlier in the evening in the garret of Dove Court were ringing so loud in his ears that he wondered they did not carry all the way to Flanders.

Maria had been towering in her anger. ‘Massachusetts? I will not come!’

Elias had been equally vocal. ‘You will, Maria, for you cannot stay in London on your own!’

That was when she had gripped the edge of the small table in the attic apartment that they had shared but was now, since his marriage to Grace and to the scandal of the neighbourhood, occupied by Maria alone. She had leaned forward and eyed her brother with such contempt that Lawrence had been afraid to breathe.

‘I have no intention of staying in London.’ She enunciated every word as if releasing a predator into the room.

‘Then what?’ Elias was perplexed, though only for a moment. ‘Oh no! Absolutely not. I forbid it!’

This was when Maria actually laughed in his face. ‘Forbid it, brother? Oh, no. I don’t think so. I don’t think so at all.’

So now, in his chamber in the Black Fox, with the rest of the house and most of London sleeping, Lawrence took up his pen. In response to the pleas of Elias Ellingworth, who by rights should not have known it was possible for Lawrence or anyone else to write a letter to such a person, he began an urgent missive to Damian Seeker.

One

Bruges

The parlour of De Vlissinghe was beginning to empty, most of the inn’s patrons having at last decided to return to their own homes. Those who remained were either travellers passing the night on their way elsewhere or those with no real homes to go to. De Vlissinghe and the other inns and taverns of Bruges had seen more than their fair share of those in late days. In the far corner, their demeanour discouraging others from occupying the tables and benches close by, four Englishmen, Cavaliers of sorts, looked at a news-sheet, a week old. Not long brought from an English ship come in at Ostend, the booklet had lain on the table between them all evening. Usually, they would have fallen upon it, eager for news of home, but tonight it was as if it was a thing infected.

‘It’s true then,’ said one, at last, an Irishman. He might once have cut a figure of some style, when his russet velvet coat had not been patched and faded, the ostrich feather in his hat not grey with failure, the heels of his fine Spanish boots not ground away to nothing. Somewhere in the faces of his companions too were the traces of better days, the memory of a long-gone lustre.

Seated opposite him, Sir Thomas Faithly finally picked up the news-sheet and began to read aloud the names he found there. The sleeves of his blue velvet suit were worn and dull, lace cuffs that might once have been white now a hopeless grey.

‘Stop, I beg you,’ said a third Cavalier, thin-faced and hollow-eyed. ‘I cannot listen to another word of it.’

‘Aye, but we must, Ellis,’ said Sir Thomas. ‘They suffered and we must know it and acknowledge it.’

‘Acknowledge it?’ asked the Irishman, his voice rising in disgust. ‘We must avenge it. They were hanged, drawn and quartered, made a spectacle for the masses, all at the behest of Cromwell’s new High Commission of Justice. They were our friends, and they were betrayed and butchered for their service to the King.’

The fourth Cavalier, Sir Edward Daunt, was a fleshy, slow-looking fellow, called ‘Dunt’ by his companions, in an affectionate bow to his universally acknowledged dim-wittedness. Having until this point appeared to be in contemplation of nothing more than the stein in front of him, Daunt now looked up. ‘But how? How can it be that their plans were discovered? The Sealed Knot . . .’

‘The Sealed Knot is finished, Dunt,’ said the Irishman. ‘Thurloe has unravelled it and it is done, and the Great Trust broken.’

‘But how? How could he discover plans first laid here, amongst the King’s own friends?’

His companions made no response, other than to look at their friend as a fond mother might regard a simpleton child.

It was perhaps an hour later that they finally left the inn, taking the reek of their tobacco smoke into the warm night air, to mingle with all the other aromas rising over the scarcely moving waters of the canal. Their boots sounded loud on the cobbles, and their voices had a dismal echo in the near-empty streets. Bruges had become a place of echoes and absences. It was hardly three weeks since they, fighting alongside Spain in the name of Charles Stuart, had been defeated at the Battle of the Dunes by an unholy alliance of Cromwell’s forces and the French. The fugitive King himself had removed his rag-tag court for the summer from Bruges to Hoogstraten, while the rest of his supporters were dispersed throughout Europe, genteel beggars living on long-exhausted credit.

It was not a great distance from the cosy parlour of the inn on Blekersstraat to their lodging at the Bouchoute House on the corner of the Markt. The house was also now a place of empty spaces, dust and echoes. It had been different when the King had first come with his threadbare court to Bruges, and taken up residence there, and even after he had shifted to a grander house elsewhere in town, his proximity had lent a veneer of something finer to the everyday drudge of his adherents’ lives. But it had only been a veneer and had grown thinner by the day. There had been little enthusiasm amongst the Cavaliers of the Bouchoute House to remove for a summer’s sport further north, with the rest of those same tired faces that had hung about the King in his exile for years now, and so they had stayed in Bruges, for want of anything better.

The men had hardly crossed the Strobrug when the hindmost of their number, who had been fussing with his cuffs, called out that he had left his gauntlets in the tavern and must return for them. Laughing at talk of the dangers of the town at night, he refused all offers of company, and promised his companions he would join them soon in a last bottle of brandy from their cellar.

The others carried on and the straggler turned back across the bridge. He was within sight of the hostelry when a figure stepped out of the shadows from an alleyway to his left. The Cavalier stopped but he did not look round. He knew who it was. He had seen the carpenter sitting obscured from the sight of the rest of his companions, in a far corner of the parlour in the shadow of a high-backed oak dresser. As they had been leaving, he had risked a glance that way and the carpenter had lifted his head enough to afford him the merest of nods. That was why he had come back – because he had been summoned.

He followed the carpenter back into the darkness of the alley. ‘What is it?’ he asked, though he suspected he knew.

‘They’re sending someone to find you.’

‘What? They know I’ve been passing secrets to Thurloe?’

‘If they did you’d be dead already. But your Royalist friends in England know someone in your circle’s been reporting to us. They just don’t know who yet, so they’re sending someone to find out.’

‘When?’

The carpenter had started to turn away. ‘She’s probably already here.’

The Cavalier felt suddenly sick. He walked unsteadily to the edge of the canal, steadied himself on a post by the end of the bridge, and vomited up his dinner. By the time he’d recovered himself, the carpenter was gone, having left on that same post the gauntlets he’d picked up earlier from the Cavaliers’ table.

*

A short while later, in the loft that had been his home for a year and a half now, the carpenter looked again at the inventory that had come to him that day, accompanying a box of tools from a ship not long landed at Ostend. At the bottom was a note in a familiar hand.

Delivery on its way to you, but goods faulty. A chisel of English manufacture, ordered for the repair of a faulty window catch at the Lion House.

The code was a simple one, and well-suited for a recipient masquerading as a carpenter. Thurloe’s message clear enough. ‘Faulty goods’ were Royalists; ‘A chisel of English manufacture’ was an Englishwoman; ‘repair of a faulty window catch’ meant putting a stop to the leakage of intelligence; and ‘the Lion House’ referred to the Lion of Flanders, the sign by which the Bouchoute House, in which the last of the Cavaliers were ensconced, was known. Royalists in England had finally understood that their plans for uprising had been revealed to Cromwell’s intelligence services by means of a source embedded in the King’s own circle in Bruges, and they had sent someone – a she-intelligencer – to find out who that source was.

Damian Seeker carefully put the note to the flame of his candle, and just as carefully made safe the glowing ashes. He had warned their source, their double agent, and what remained was for Seeker to find this Englishwoman before she uncovered the identity of the man she had come to find, and, possibly, his own. A swift death in a dark alley was the best any Royalist caught in such treachery to his own cause could hope for, and there had been such deaths in cities throughout Europe. No more than was deserved. Seeker didn’t like double agents, didn’t trust them. Men and women who could be turned through bribery or blackmail, who’d sell out their friends to save their own skin, should be prepared to take the consequences. But Thurloe valued their services, and so, for now, must he. He’d kept an extra close eye on this one. It hadn’t been difficult. The Cavaliers who’d settled in Bruges over the last months could generally be found in one or the other of their preferred taverns; if not, between those and a brothel. It was in such places in this small, half-forgotten Flemish city that plot after plot against the Protector had been hatched before being sent out onto the wind and across the Channel to land amongst people it should not. But those plotters were being betrayed now, and they knew it. The difficulty was in remaining incognito amongst those who had once known him. The growing of his beard, the new scars from the struggle with the bear, different forms of clothing and headgear, a practised change to the way he walked and carried himself. Every morning on waking he took a moment to remind himself, to step into the persona that must now be his. Most of all, though, there was vigilance, that he should not be seen. What the Cavaliers would do should they find one of Secretary Thurloe’s own handlers also in their midst was not something Seeker was going to dwell upon.

It was late now, and dark. He would begin his search for the Royalist she-intelligencer at first light, but for tonight, there was something else that required his attention. He set his candle carefully in its niche and drew from his leather apron the second letter he’d received that day.

This second letter had come into his hands hours after Thurloe’s missive warning of the woman spy. A shore-porter on the Langerei had handed it to him as he’d passed on his way to his vigil at the Vlissinghe. ‘You’re popular today, John Carpenter,’ the man had said.

Seeker had looked at the direction on the front of the letter, and the hand in which it was written. ‘John Carpenter, Englishman, Sint-Gillis in the city of Bruges.’

‘From my mother,’ he’d said, slipping it into the pocket he’d stitched into the lining of his buff jerkin. ‘When did it come in?’

‘Late barge from the coast. Horse-feed and ironmongery.’

Seeker had nodded and gone on his way without saying anything else.

Now, back in his stable loft in Sint-Gillis, he turned the letter over in his hands, almost afraid to open it. To anyone other than the man for whom it was intended, this missive would read as a dull account of family life from an elderly woman in a Kent village to her dutiful and far-travelled son. To Damian Seeker and to Lawrence Ingolby, however, the only two people who knew the cypher in which the letter was written, it would be something else entirely.

Seeker received a coded letter every two months from Lawrence Ingolby. Lawrence kept him abreast of many things – the rumours from the Inns of Court and Chancery that never reached Whitehall; the rumours from the lips of Sam Pepys or Andrew Marvell of goings-on at Whitehall that never reached the ears of John Thurloe; news from the North Riding, home once to both Ingolby and Seeker; news from Kent’s coffee house and of the people beneath its roof; and, most of all, news of the Black Fox, of Dorcas, and of Manon. Seeker had made it plain, through Lawrence, that Dorcas should not live her life as if bound to him, but as the free woman she was. Nothing in Lawrence’s responses suggested that Dorcas had as yet taken him up on this suggestion. And Manon; Lawrence told Seeker of Manon. Even through the cypher, Seeker could see the young man’s struggle for formality, his eagerness to give nothing away, to keep all feeling hidden. Seeker should have told Lawrence that he had decided, before he ever left London all those months ago, that he would let him marry his daughter. Not yet though. Enough for now that the infuriating, clever, stupidly courageous young Yorkshireman was there, watching over her.

This letter hadn’t come by the usual channels, and it had come at the wrong time – he’d had one from Lawrence only three weeks since. Checking the seal and the folding pattern for any signs of tampering, Seeker opened the single sheet carefully and began to read. The contents showed every sign of having been written in haste and ill-humour, the hand was sloppier than Lawrence’s usual precise script. For all that, this letter was indubitably from Lawrence. Seeker read it through and closed his eyes, letting out a deep breath, then read it through again.

You’ll excuse what follows, but this is no time for me, you, Elias or Maria herself to keep up the pretence that no one but you and she knows of your past connections, though it appears that unbeknownst to the rest of us, they’re not in the past at all. Regardless – you should know that Elias has finally given up on hope of anything better from Cromwell and is set on taking ship, with all his family, to Massachusetts. Not only has his sister declared she will not go, she has announced her intention of making instead for Flanders. Mistress Ellingworth, it appears, is remarkably well-informed of the details of your whereabouts and the means by which you pass yourself off in your chosen place. I know for a certainty that I’ve told her no more than that you are safe and will be back, one day. How she has discovered the rest I’d warrant you’ll know better than I. Only one thing more will I say: this is trouble of your doing, and Elias Ellingworth asks in no uncertain terms that you put it right.

Your friend, L. I.

Seeker put down the letter and lay back on the soft clean straw of the floor. Through the open shutter in the gable he could see over the nearby rooftops to a black sky studded with stars. ‘Oh, Maria,’ he said aloud, shaking his head and smiling. ‘Only my Maria.’

Just one time had he seen her, one time since that terrible night a year and a half ago on Bankside, when a trio of Royalist conspirators had left them deep underground in a disused bear pit, as if for dead. They hadn’t been dead, but they had been taken away to their separate places to have their injuries tended to and the world informed that he was dead. Only Lawrence, Dorcas and Seeker’s daughter Manon were to have been told the truth of his survival and posting to foreign shores. Maria absolutely was not to know it. But Lawrence had told her, only that he lived and would one day return, because how could he not?

Once. Last summer, when Seeker had been recalled, incognito, to England, to bring in person to John Thurloe the intelligence he had gathered for the commencement of the Flanders campaign. Not risking London, they had met instead in a small town near the Essex coast. Some madness, some exhilaration to be back on English soil, had made Seeker send a message to Dove Court: a piece of winter jasmine he had plucked one day in front of her in a garden in Lambeth, bound in a thin ribbon of silk she had once made play of tying around his finger. They were wrapped in a piece of paper with only the name of the town on it. Seeker should have gone back across the Channel on the next tide after Thurloe’s return to London, but he hadn’t. He’d waited, and on the second day she had come. Two days and a night they had had together, in an empty fisherman’s cottage in that little Essex town. What she had told Elias he never asked. After that there had been no more doubt, no more pretence between them. ‘I will come back,’ he had told her as they had lain together in that one-roomed cottage. ‘When my work in Flanders is finished, I will come back, and I swear I will make you my wife, even should the Lord Protector himself forbid it.’

A year had passed, and Thurloe’s promises that he would be brought back from Bruges and settled elsewhere – Ireland, or Scotland perhaps – had drifted away on the polder mists. But the news from England grew worse on every tide – the House of Lords revived, the Commons suspended, the Protector’s daughters married amongst the scions of lords and earls, generals Seeker liked and revered dismissed, for that they did not want a monarch in all but name. The worse the news was, the more likely he was to hear it first not from Thurloe, but from Lawrence, or by means of newsletters. Seeker was resolved that, come what may, John Carpenter would be gone from Bruges by autumn. Now, lying on his back, looking up at the black sky and its diamonds, he made a promise. ‘This is the last thing, Maria. I will find out this she-intelligencer, then it will be done.’ He would get this business over and done with long before Elias Ellingworth ever shifted to get himself and Grace and Samuel, never mind Maria, on a ship bound for Boston. He looked a third time at Lawrence’s letter. ‘But first of all I’ll have to get Lawrence Ingolby to make you stay put.’ He tried not to think of the complexities that might await him should his former wife, Felicity, also have made her way to Massachusetts, as had been her plan.

At last he snuffed out his candle and finally fell asleep to the distant rumbling of carriage wheels along the Langerei.

Two

The Engels Klooster

Sister Janet almost jumped out of her skin when the bell by the night door of the Engels Klooster began to clang, only a few feet from her ear. It happened every time it was her turn to watch; she drifted into sleep only to be rudely awakened at the most inopportune of times. The warmth of the fire and the comfort of the cushion that she smuggled under her habit every night made it almost impossible to keep her eyes open. She had heard the young novices giggling about it. . .