The Seeker

Genres: Historical Thrillers; Historical Mysteries

Synopsis

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London, 1654: Oliver Cromwell is at the height of his power and has declared himself Lord Protector. All that is known of Damian Seeker, agent of the Lord Protector, is that nothing can be hidden from him. John Winter, hero of Cromwell's army, is dead, and the lawyer, Elias Ellingworth, found standing over the bleeding body. Yet despite the damning evidence, Seeker is not swayed. He will stop at nothing to bring the killer to justice, and Seeker knows better than any man where to search…

Release date: May 7, 2015

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 416

Sample

In 1654, England was nominally a republic. The Civil Wars of the 1640s had resulted in Parliament’s execution, on 30 January 1649, of Charles I and the establishment of the English Commonwealth. The decisive factor in Parliament’s triumph over the King had been its military superiority in the shape of the New Model Army created principally by Sir Thomas Fairfax and Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell, an East Anglian yeoman and Member of Parliament, descended from the sister of Henry VIII’s notorious chief minister, was the supreme general of the Civil Wars. A military genius, he was also prone to bouts of almost manic energy and depression, and read success and failure alike as manifestations of the will of God.

As the Civil Wars had progressed, and the control of the Stuart administration over religious practice, the army, and censorship of a new and influential press was loosened, the new liberties led to extremes of fanaticism. Parliament and, increasingly, the generals who had led its armies, sought to reassert control with an ever-greater restriction on the freedoms of the people. The Commonwealth would reach its nadir in December 1653, when Cromwell’s supporters forcibly dissolved Parliament. A newly drafted constitution, the Instrument of Government, soon afterwards appointed him Lord Protector, affording him power virtually without limits. Resident in the former royal palaces of Whitehall and Hampton Court, Oliver Cromwell was King in all but name.

As their defeated supporters awaited the opportunity to restore Charles II to his father’s throne, the remnants of the Stuart royal family maintained their refugee courts in continental Europe. Their agents were at work throughout the Commonwealth period, as were those of the Commonwealth itself. Under Cromwell’s Protectorate, a virtual secret service was operated under the direction of John Thurloe, Secretary to the Council of State. Not only Royalists at home and in exile, but radicals and dissidents who found their voice and a means to express their views in the multiple news-books and the new milieu of the London coffee house, came under the close attention of Thurloe’s agents. England in 1654 was a place in which trust could be a dangerous idea.

Sixth year of the English Commonwealth and first of the reign of Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector 1 November

Damian Seeker read the words on the paper: three words, and a date. The cypher was intended to hide their meaning, but Seeker spent many hours in daylight and more in darkness uncovering things hidden. John Thurloe, Cromwell’s Secretary of State and master of a network of intelligencers that reached to every corner of Europe, had said nothing as he’d handed him the paper. He hadn’t needed to, for there was only one matter of business between Thurloe and Seeker, only one thing of interest to either of them: the safety of the Protector.

It was late, and Thurloe, who had much business yet to attend to, did not linger; he had done what was required in this matter, and he could forget about it. A plot, one in ten, a hundred, a thousand, to unseat, remove, put an end to the Protector, but this one would die in its birth pangs, for in a world where men believed in everything and nothing and where madness walked the streets declaring itself sanity, Thurloe knew Damian Seeker believed in the only thing that mattered: Seeker believed in Cromwell.

After the Secretary had left, Seeker considered a long while. He pictured the wherry that was always waiting for him, at the foot of Whitehall Stairs, but he preferred the solid, tangible feel of stone and hard-packed mud underfoot to the dark and shifting infinity of the river. The smells of the night air told him things, the noise of closing doors, creaking shutters, the hasty snuffing out of a candle took their place in his head, waited their turn to make their revelation. He walked in his mind the streets and alleyways that would take him to the place named on the paper. Through each he heard the sound of his own boots reverberate in what passed for the silence of the city at night, he saw faces appear at windows, caught the end of whispers passing through courtyards, up stairs: take care, the Seeker is about. And tongues that might otherwise be loose would pay heed and silence themselves a while, lest they be heard by the Seeker. No, he would bide his time yet. He would send another.

He picked up the paper and passed his eyes one time more over its contents. A new cypher: every time a new cypher, for fear of mishap, discovery, betrayal. And there would always be one or the other, for men were fools. Three words this time, and a date, tomorrow’s date. ‘Again,’ he said to himself as he held the paper to the flame of the one candle that burned in his chamber. The flame consumed it carefully, thoroughly. Letter by letter, symbol by symbol, and it was gone, ashes. But Seeker did not trust even to ashes; he swept them from the table and poured water over them, grinding the grey mess into the grain of the wood under his heel.

*

Far away, in the heart of the town, in the garret of a house in Dove Court, between Poultry Street and the Old Jewry, the scratch of Elias Ellingworth’s pen across paper was never-ending, like the rats scrabbling amongst the rafters, night after night. Word after word, multiplying, going out into the city, running by its lanes and alleyways into homes, into mouths, into minds. Not just of the merchants and traders, the hawkers, apprentices and masters of the city, not just in the alehouses and taverns and coffee houses and across the Exchange floor, but westwards, past St Paul’s, down, swirling in and through the Inns of Court, caught in the mists rising from the river, whispering their way along and through the fine households of the Strand, of Pall Mall, and at last to the great palaces of Whitehall, and Westminster. So travelled Elias Ellingworth’s words, and there they fell like specks of dust to be swept aside into unseen corners, or caught up in the providential fury of the Lord Protector’s wrath.

It was cold, it was always cold, the warmth of their supper long since forgotten. Elias coughed and the pen juddered in his hand, leaving a streak upon the page; the rats paused in their scrabbling a moment, and through the brief silence of the city, he could hear the soft breathing of his sleeping sister.

Elias wondered what dreams Maria might have, that she slept so sound, what dreams could be left, for she, it seemed to him, had never been naïve, as he had been. He allowed himself a smile as he recalled his nineteen-year-old self, going through the portals of Clifford’s Inn for the first time, fired with all the enthusiasm of youth rather than the disillusionment of a man of near thirty. Clifford’s had not been in the best of repair even then. Weeds grew through the cracks in the outer walls, and here and there a bush seemed, incredibly, to have taken root in high corners and gutterings between the sloping tiles. Rooks lodged ominously on the roof, looking down on the young men in the courtyard below, like elderly doctors of law waiting to pronounce their judgments. And still, there was learning in these very stones, and the right principles of the law. Elias loved the place, for all its faults, for all the dankness, the stench from the Fleet, the cavalcade of poverty and sin that passed on the street outside. He would have been living there now, eking a living from teaching students, strolling with his fellows in the small garden in the evening, debating the issues of the day, had it not been for Maria. But when their father had followed their mother to the grave, Elias’s choice had been to take his sister under his care, or leave her to live on her wits. It had been no choice – for all her wits, he could not have abandoned her to the great maw of the city alone. And so, he had moved out of his homely chamber at Clifford’s, and away from its comforting fellowship, and taken his young sister to live in this garret, promising that one day he would be a great man, and that the cream of the city’s bachelors would be queuing up for her dowry.

But Elias was not a great man, and though they might pause and turn their heads in the street to look a second time upon the striking girl with the jet-black hair and eyes that might have belonged to a Castilian princess, the cream of the city’s bachelors had not found their way to the crumbling stairway of Dove Court and the proud young woman who would never have a dowry.

The rats began to scrabble in the rafters again; Maria pulled the thin blankets tighter round her as she turned in her sleep, and Elias took up his pen once more.

*

In Whitehall, it was never silent; Lady Anne Winter knew that: there were always feet marching, echoing somewhere in its never-ending corridors. Soldiers – cornets, captains, lieutenants-general – marching by twos, helmets under their arms like Roman legionaries on their way to pay homage to the Caesar of whom they had long since begun to tire. Or softer feet, quieter feet, of men shuffling in corners, doorways, looking about them for those who might listen to their words, their careful whispers, these men accustomed once to declaim in Westminster. But Westminster, with its chambers for Lords and Commons, was a place only of echoes and muted voices now, for those men had shown themselves to be ignorant of the mind of God. Indeed, only one man in this great English Commonwealth, it had appeared at last, knew the mind of God.

Anne Winter could see him now, Cromwell, far, far along those corridors from her apartments, along many passageways, around many corners, up countless steps. Across courtyards, beneath archways, through doorway after doorway until at last there he was, in all his coarse, be-warted glory: his sparse, wiry hair and ill-fitting clothes, his monstrous nose perhaps the only noble thing about him – this country squire, this rough-shod soldier, this scion of a brewer’s line who sat now where once Tudor, Stuart, had sat; this man, this Cromwell, who had taken upon him the trappings of a king.

Lady Anne looked from her mind’s eye back to the mottled glass in front of her, and began to pull the brush through her hair. She did not know the woman looking back at her, and had not the interest in her life to enquire any further. The brush had been a gift from her mother, years ago now, ivory, with her own initials worked in silver scroll beneath the family crest. She laid it down before the glass and snuffed out the one light there was to see by. Her husband would be somewhere in this vast morass of buildings, attending night councils, taking orders, giving orders, rising, ever rising, in the service of the Protector. The night was freezing, a hard frost threatening to stop the relentless river beneath her window, and her bed would be cold again tonight, but it did not matter; she preferred it that way. She would pretend to be asleep, whenever he came in at last, making as little noise as possible as he removed his boots, his sword, all the trappings of his rank. He would touch her hair, her face, gently, and she would remain rigid, as stone. And then she would listen a while as he lay awake in the darkness, and know that in the morning some of the hurt would still be in his eyes.

*

In Samuel Kent’s coffee house on Birchin Lane, the fire beneath the roasting pan and cauldron had long gone out, and the pots been cooled and cleaned and set back upon their hooks by Grace as they were every night, but the embers still glowed in the hearth by the serving table. The walls too, infused with the smoke from coffee pan and pipe tobacco, breathed some of their warmth back into the room, carrying with it aromas of far-off places, of chocolate from the Americas, coffee from the Levant, spices from the Indies and the Molucca seas, where cold and frost were not known, and men felt the warmth of the sun on their faces. As he had lain in a Cornish ditch ten years ago, half-dead with cold and hunger and the wound in his leg, Samuel Kent had vowed that should he live, he would never be cold again.

He moved quietly, so as not to disturb the boy, Gabriel, who slept soundly on his cot by the hearth, and whose dreams no doubt swirled with the voices, the prattle of the day: endless talking, rumour, news – prices, trades, gains, losses, the catastrophes of foreign armies, the absurdities of fashion, the duplicity of courts and kings, the petty adulteries of the great and the lowly – what could they mean to a boy of twelve who had never been further than the market at Leadenhall, the dock at Billingsgate? And yet they were his world, as he scuttled from counter to table with his pot, filling, refilling, cups, bowls, pipes, passing papers and news-books from one table to another, earning his cot by that fire and the roof over his head.

*

In her small bedchamber above the coffee room, Grace listened to her uncle go about his nightly routine of calling time on another day. She was happy. For all the world that passed by on their lane, for the murders, the robberies, the violent assaults and hangings that scandalised and entertained their patrons, day to day, as they drank their coffee and smoked their pipe, none touched her here. It was a continuing story, telling its tale again and again in the city, a background sound to the world of the coffee house.

And indeed, the world did come to the coffee house. A merchant had taken the time to tell her once how the beans she roasted and ground had travelled from Arabia by way of Constantinople and over many seas. How at that very moment, the Mussulmans of Cairo, the Paschas of Baghdad, the traders of Damascus and Aleppo were sitting, cross-legged in booths in the street or on cushions in opulent coffee houses in the bazaars and the midday shade of their mosques, drinking this very same brew. He had told her how the pots and bowls, the special, delicate finians, from which her patrons drank had been shaped and fired and painted by artisans across the China seas who did not know there was such a place as London, dark, damp and miserable, where a lovely young woman turned their wares in her fingers in awe. She did not need to travel the oceans: she held them in her hands.

And every day in the coffee house, there were new people. Some stayed and became regular customers, friends, drawn in by London, to belong, as she and her uncle had been, with no thought of returning again to where they had come from. Others lingered perhaps a few days, before they moved on. Others came once and were never seen again.

There was nothing in the news of the world that Grace did not know. She had even, over the last few years behind her counter, picked up a few words of Dutch, of Flemish, of French. She did not show it, but she practised them alone at night in her bedchamber, liking the rhythm of the alien words on her tongue.

‘What would I do without you, girl?’ Her uncle said it to her every day.

‘You’ll never need to know,’ she would answer him.

They had never been parted since the day, nine years ago, he had marched into Bristol with General Fairfax’s army, having flushed Prince Rupert’s occupying forces from the city, and found her, scrubbing pots and waiting tables at an inn by the cathedral precincts. Samuel delighted to tell the story to any who asked.

‘There she was, my brother’s girl, orphaned. Hadn’t seen her since she were nine years old, but I knew her straight away and she me, and that was that. The battle for the city had done for my leg, no mending this time. A barber-surgeon tried to break the bone and reset it – near lost me the damn thing – and that girl there held on to my hand the whole time, and has never left me since.’

The battle had finished the old parliamentary soldier for fighting, but the General had seen to it that he got his back pay, and he and Grace had gravitated towards London. They’d taken a tavern first, down by Blackfriars, but Grace hadn’t liked to be so close to Bridewell and all that misery, and then they had heard of the clean living there was to be made of selling the new, mesmerising brew from the Levant. To Samuel, the coffee pot, for the life it had given them, was an object of veneration. ‘We got ourselves in here, and here we do just nicely, do we not, my dear?’ he was fond of asking.

‘We do, Uncle,’ she would reply.

She had come close, once, to telling Elias the rest. But what good would it do to pass on to another the burden of her secret? Soon, she was sure, the words on foreign tongues, the gifts of far-flung worlds, brought on the winds to her uncle’s door, the smells and sounds of the coffee house would be all that was real to her, and all else become but a fable.

*

Downstairs, Samuel carefully put up the bolt on the coffee house door and snuffed out the candle above the sleeping boy, before ascending the wooden stair to his own chamber, his left leg dragging a little, as it had done last night and would tomorrow, for tomorrow would be little different from today, or so Samuel Kent thought.

But Samuel did not know of the ashes lying at the base of a candlestick somewhere else in the breathing, creaking darkness of London, ashes, cold now and ground to wet muck, that only an hour ago had been a note bearing three words, in cypher, that spelled out to its careful reader: ‘Kent’s coffee house’.

2 November

Seeker was awake long before the first fingers of grey dawn light had begun to make their way through the cracks in his window shutters. It was not some tension, some anxious anticipation of the day to come and what it might hold that had woken him, but the desire to rein in his mind from its night-roaming. Awake, he could reassert his will over those things that, if they could not be forgotten, could at least be pushed for a few hours to where his thoughts had not the leisure to consider them.

In the daytime hours, and those of darkness when Thurloe’s business, Cromwell’s business, occupied him, he was surrounded by people: in the city, in his rooms at Whitehall, on horseback at the head of his troop, and yet none, not even Daniel Proctor, his trusted sergeant, could breach the defences he had set round himself. Few tried, none more than once. But here, in his own room, in his sleep, faces, voices from the time before he had known to set that barrier around himself, came to him. He woke, sometimes, to the sound of his own voice trying to call out, but he was determined that he would master that too, eventually.

*

On the Shoreditch road, two Scotsmen left their inn early. As ever, there were many travellers on that road, and few took the time to notice that the tall young man clad in a worn but well-cut suit of Flemish cloth and his older companion, who was dressed entirely in black, were wrong, somehow. The older man, thin and sallow-skinned, might have been a man of learning. The younger carried what luggage they had in two packs upon his back, like a soldier, and indeed, he had something of the air of a soldier, for he was certainly not a servant. Zander Seaton did not walk as a servant would, did not address the other as a servant might his master.

Something of the city had begun to seep into them long before they saw it. By the time they approached the Bishop’s Gate, they could feel the heat and the noise, the stench, of the great metropolis rise from its walls, past fields where women dried their linens and windmills turned, carrying the odours of every shade of humanity towards them on the breeze. Seaton glanced at his older companion. From their first sight of the sea of spires piercing the sky, and the naked steeple of the great church of St Paul’s rising on its hill above the rest, Archibald Campbell had not spoken, had not taken his eyes from the panorama unfolding before them. Only once, as they passed the crumbling, morose walls of a place called Bethlem, beyond whose gates they could not see, did the minister’s step falter, and a momentary shiver as of intense cold seem to possess him.

‘What is that place, do you think?’ he said at last.

Seaton knew. He had seen other such places in France, in Germany, Holland, Spain. God help them. ‘It is a hospital for the lunatic, the distracted, the sick of mind.’

The black-clad Campbell regarded it a moment before turning his eyes back to the road ahead of them. ‘I do not think so.’

And indeed, half an hour later it seemed that the madness was within the gates of the city and not without. In all his travels, Seaton had never known a place of such constant movement and noise. Smiths, carpenters, butchers, groaning and shrieking beasts, the calls of hawkers of every conceivable ware, and everywhere, the ringing of bells. The babble grew louder the further in they got, delivering themselves to a swarm of streets and alleys and strange cacophonic voices. Seaton listened to the great beast of the city that awaited him and thought how in its very bowels he might find his revenge.

*

The aromas from Samuel Kent’s roasting pan were already snaking their way down Birchin Lane to meet and mingle with those coming from Pasqua Rosee’s coffee house in nearby St Michael’s churchyard. Others ground their beans and heated their brew in The Rainbow on Fleet Street and The Postern by Moorgate. Samuel knew it did not matter: there was trade for them all, as merchants and traders from the Royal Exchange, lawyers from the Inns of Court, printers, booksellers, pamphlet-writers around St Paul’s, physicians, apothecaries, poets – all felt themselves compelled each day to their favoured coffee house, to take their dish and pipe and hear all the news and rumours of the world, arrange their trades, increase their business, practise their wit, have themselves seen, know what was to be known in London that day. There were those who thought the new beverage to be an abomination, the Devil’s drink, that the dark and smoky serving rooms were but precursors of the Hades to which their patrons would inevitably be consigned; they complained about the noxious smells and clouds of smoke from fire and roasting pan and pipe that enveloped the streets and lanes around a coffee house, warned of the sedition harboured within. Kent paid them no heed: most men were drawn there, eventually.

Samuel poured out a dish of coffee for the pale and shabbily dressed lawyer, Elias Ellingworth, who was laughing good-naturedly with a wealthy-looking merchant twenty years his senior.

‘We’d given up seeing you here again, George, when we heard you’d gone to Hull. How did you find it?’

George Tavener, another regular at Kent’s, grunted as he accepted a pipe from the coffee boy. ‘Miserable as one of Mistress Cromwell’s dinners and damned if I could sell the place.’

Ellingworth and Will Fiddler, a packman, laughed, but Grace, behind the serving counter, looked up warily. ‘You know we are to call her the Lady Protectress,’ she said quietly.

George Tavener looked about him. There were some new faces in the coffee house this morning, and you could never tell who might be a spy for the Council of State, sniffing out signs of sedition. ‘Aye, you’re right, Grace: this tongue of mine will land me in Newgate one of these days.’

‘More like the Tower for your treason,’ said Ellingworth.

‘Then we’ll hunker down together, Elias, for I don’t think Old Nol much likes the tenor of your pamphlets.’

‘Then he should remember what was fought for, and stop aping the king so many died to be freed of.’

‘Elias . . .’

‘Well, where is our liberty of conscience, our free parliament, equal access to the law?’

‘Elias,’ Grace cautioned again.

‘What? Did your uncle lame himself in the war that we might bow and scrape to a Huntingdon housewife?’

‘Ach,’ said Samuel good-naturedly as he lifted the grill pan from the fire and poured the beans into a pestle for the boy to crush, ‘I lamed myself because I was too stupid to do anything else.’

Tavener shook his head. ‘You have never been stupid, Samuel, although,’ and he took his pipe from his mouth and pointed with it to something on the wall a little behind Samuel’s head, ‘the standard of decoration in here gets no better.’

Samuel looked again at the landscape of ancient church and churchyard that he had hoped might lend the right degree of gravitas to his establishment. It had pleased him on sight: the huge skies and desolate moor beyond had reminded him of his native West Country, as had the poor fellow who’d sold it to him.

‘You don’t like it?’

Tavener snorted. ‘If you had wanted something for the walls you should have come to me. I have boats in and out to Amsterdam every other week, and I know every dealer in the place. I tell you, Holland is brimming full with poor fellows who would sell you a masterpiece for the price of those daubings, is that not so, Mijnheer?’ His appeal was to the soberly dressed Dutchman who had come in but half an hour earlier, and with whom, in the way of the coffee house, he and the packman had already made it their business to become acquainted.

Jakob Hendricks attempted diplomacy. ‘Perhaps a Dutchman would not have painted an English scene so well.’

‘What?’ scoffed Tavener. ‘When Dutchmen have so thoroughly painted our kings!’

Hendricks looked uncomfortable and bowed his head to the merchant. ‘I am a mere scholar. I know little of art.’ He turned his attention away from the painting, and engaged the packman in a conversation about where certain books he sought might be found at the best prices, while Tavener regaled the rest with his thoughts on the relative merits of van Rijn and van Dyke, of de Hooch and Vermeer.

Samuel Kent smiled as he bent once more to fill the roasting tin. All was well: George Tavener could always be trusted to turn the talk of the coffee house away from the path of sedition. The regime had eyes and ears everywhere, in the very court of the exiled King even, it was rumoured, so that a man might barely speak free with his neighbour. This hard-won liberty was a fearful thing.

And there were other strangers in the coffee house today. When the door opened in from Birchin Lane, Samuel knew the two newcomers for Scotsmen at a glance. He had seen their like in the War, though not, it struck him, on the same side. No matter: his war had been over nine years now, and it did no good to dwell on the past. The Scotsmen seated, their penny paid, Grace saw to the preparation of their coffee and the boy Gabriel began to fill their pipes.

Samuel noticed Tavener regarding the older of the two curiously. ‘You have travelled far I think, Mr . . .?’

‘Campbell,’ answered the other. ‘Far enough.’

‘Scotland is it?’ joined Will Fiddler, the packman.

A nod.

‘And what has brought you to London?’

‘My own two feet,. . .