House of Shadows (43 page)

‘Why?'

‘Because he intends to bring down the government – the others are just silly men who want to evade their taxes. However, he has almost broken through that door, and I am not in the mood for dying today. So I shall escape instead.'

‘Escape?' Chaloner watched her clamber into the hole with astonishing agility for one so old. It was clear she had done it many times before. He heard her voice echo eerily back to him.

‘Yes, escape. Either come with me or face Parr's righteous rage. But close the panel regardless.'

When the sword jabbed through the door a third time, Chaloner abandoned it and scrambled after her, pulling shut the hatch behind him. He found himself in a narrow tunnel, so small that the only way to move forward was by crawling on his stomach. Behind him, he heard Parr's victorious yell turn to a scream of fury when he discovered the library empty. Echoes and thumps sounded as the preacher began to hunt for the secret exit. In front, Margaret was making rapid progress, scuttling along like a crab. Chaloner marvelled at her nimbleness and concluded that she was a remarkable lady. Very remarkable.

‘
You
are the traitor,' he called softly. ‘I assumed it was York, because he brought Browne and then me to Hay's meetings. But I was forgetting the message hidden in the wall.
You
are sending information to Spymaster Williamson.'

Margaret laughed. ‘An elderly lady like me? What a thing to say!'

The tunnel forked, and she turned left, opening an iron gate to emerge in a dusty chamber that looked as though it had not been used in decades. She locked it behind them, then led the way through a maze of corridors until they reached a pleasant, comfortable room that was far nicer than anything else Chaloner had seen in Bermondsey House. The woodwork smelled of honeyed beeswax, the furniture was handsome and there was glass in every window. Margaret Castell was indeed a woman of many surprises, and Chaloner knew he had been foolish not to have seen through her sooner.

‘Williamson knows a decent spy when he sees one,' he said. ‘And you have been keeping him appraised ever since your grandson first started to lend Bermondsey House to plotters and rebels.'

Flattered, Margaret's eyes twinkled as she walked to a table and poured wine into two exquisite silver cups. ‘Well, someone had to do it.'

‘I thought Hay was a dangerous dissident, but all he is doing is cheating the Treasury.'

Margaret wagged a finger at him. ‘It is still treason, and the government is partial to money.'

‘Your grandson cannot know what you are doing. He believes in Hay's cause.'

‘And that is what has allowed me to maintain my cover all this time. Hay assumes I will never do anything to betray the “rebels”, because my grandson is a fervent member of his cabal. However, I have an arrangement with the government, and a pardon was written long ago. After all, I cannot spy without my foolish kinsman's “assistance”, so it is only fair that he should be spared.'

‘You said you lease your house to government ministers who want to assassinate old Cromwellians too. Do you?'

She nodded with a smile. ‘Overzealous supporters can be just as dangerous as enemies, as
you
doubtless know. Do not pretend you do not understand what I am talking about. I recognize a fellow spy when I see one – just as you did with me. Why do you think I rescued you from Parr?'

‘He will scour the house until he finds me, and if I am discovered here he will know you helped.'

‘I do not think we should worry about that.' She sank in a chair with a sigh of contentment and gestured that he should sit opposite. ‘You see, a week ago Spymaster Williamson decided that Hay's next meeting should be his last – mostly because Parr is growing too dangerous. That vile fanatic has encouraged Hay to purchase muskets and gunpowder, which takes the “rebellion” to a completely new level. I sent Williamson a message to tell him the time of the gathering, and I am expecting him and his men at any moment.'

‘Unfortunately, Hay found it. Hidden in the cellar wall.'

She laughed. ‘Credit me with some cunning, boy! I sent Williamson
several
notes, but the letter in the wall is actually the story of Bermondsey's ghosts, as Hay will discover when he decodes it. It will give him something to read when he is in prison, and perhaps he will blame
them
for his misfortune.'

‘If Williamson is coming, then I have done you a disservice, ma'am. My actions ended the meeting sooner than expected, and some of the conspirators will have escaped before he arrives.'

Margaret grinned, rather diabolically. ‘But I am quite fond of some, and do not want them imprisoned – or worse. Williamson will catch Hay and Parr, and they are the ringleaders.
I
am happy at the way matters have been resolved, though Williamson will be less pleased, I imagine. Perhaps we should not tell him your role in
the affair – he can be a bit vengeful when his plans are foiled, and we do not want him thinking you did it on purpose.'

‘No,' agreed Chaloner fervently. ‘We do not.'

III

The unveiling of a wicked plot at Bermondsey House was written up with glee in the newsbooks and gossiped about in every tavern. Chaloner was startled to read that its ringleader was the Rector of Bermondsey, who had hanged himself before the spymaster's troops could catch him. There was no mention of Hay's involvement, though Chaloner did hear a few weeks later that the Hay's Wharf Company had offered to finance the building of new offices for the Treasury Department – the old ones, he said, were terribly cramped for the poor auditors. Despite public interest, most of the conspirators were never named. The following year, however, several wealthy Bermondsey merchants admitted to substantial losses on their annual profits.

Chaloner met Hannah at Jamaica House and told her all he had learned about Browne's murder. She listened carefully to his explanation, then nodded her acceptance of it. She was distressed to learn about the dislike her husband had engendered among his crew but vehemently denied that he would have cheated Walduck over prize money. Chaloner knew she was right, and he supposed Walduck had allowed hatred to blind him when he had grabbed the stone and brought it down on his captain's head.

‘So justice
was
done when Walduck was hanged,' concluded Chaloner. ‘He thought he could convince people that your husband's death was an accident due
to falling masonry, but no one believed him. And those who did believe him – you and York – misjudged him. In desperation, he claimed he was in his cups, because he thought there was a chance that drunkenness might grant him a reprieve. He was wrong.'

‘He was wrong,' echoed Hannah softly. She took his hand in hers. ‘Thank you, Thomas. And now I have something to tell you. Captain York has asked me to marry him, and I have accepted his offer for my children's sake – I cannot let them starve, and we have no money of our own. He says he feels guilty about what happened to John and wants to make amends.'

‘I see,' said Chaloner noncommittally, supposing that the offer of marriage did not also come with a confession of York's role in losing the Browne family fortune.

Hannah was lost in her own thoughts. ‘He is not John, but he will suffice. Besides, he will be at sea most of the time.'

Chaloner hoped so, for both their sakes.

The following week he went to visit Margaret Castell. In recognition of her services to the king, she had been rewarded with a fine house near Winchester Palace. Further, her grandson's debts had been paid in full, on condition that he joined the navy. He had recovered from his ‘accident' and was serving under York aboard
Rosebush
, where the captain taught him the proper way to load guns. Unhappily, York's attempts to educate his new lieutenant were wasted, because a few months later he drank too much dinner wine and fell off the back of the ship. His body was never recovered.

‘Everything worked out very well,' said Margaret, walking with Chaloner in her new arbour. It was a fine summer day, not too hot, and the garden was pleasantly shady. ‘Spymaster Williamson was annoyed not to catch a few merchants red-handed, but they were my
friends, and I am grateful to you for precipitating their escape. I could not have managed that alone.'

‘Right,' said Chaloner uneasily, hoping she had kept her word and left Williamson in ignorance about the role played by the Lord Chancellor's spy.

She read his thoughts. ‘Do not worry – your secret will go with me to the grave. Williamson is not a man you want as an enemy – and not one I want, either, which is why I elected to accept this house and retire from intelligence work. He is too devious for his own good, and I no longer wish to work for him.'

Chaloner agreed with her assessment, but was not so rash as to denigrate one of the government's most powerful officials to a woman he barely knew. ‘I am surprised Hay did not reveal your friends' identities when Williamson questioned him,' he said instead. ‘He did not seem the kind of man to sacrifice himself to protect others.'

‘He did betray them,' said Margaret. ‘Of course he did – apparently Williamson's clerks were hard-pressed to write fast enough once he started to bleat. But there was plenty of time for me to visit my friends first and tell them the best way to extricate themselves from their predicament.'

Chaloner regarded her askance. ‘What did you suggest they do?'

‘Offer Williamson a percentage of their back taxes,' she replied with a grin. ‘He is as corrupt as the next man where large sums of money are concerned.'

Chaloner started to say he did not believe her, but realized he was being naive. They were talking about the government, after all, an organization in which money spoke louder than justice or truth. ‘What about Parr?' he asked instead. ‘Did he really commit suicide?'

Margaret adopted a pious expression. ‘I happened to find documents that proved he had been cheating
the Treasury for years. He said he could not bear the shame of being exposed as a regular sinner, and took the easy way out.'

Chaloner frowned. ‘Where are these documents now? No one has mentioned them before.'

Margaret's face was cunning and rather malevolent. ‘Perhaps they never existed. But he was a wicked fellow, and I shall not lose any sleep over his demise. As I said, everything worked out very well. Very well indeed.'

H
ISTORICA
L
NOTE

Bermondsey Abbey was a victim of the Dissolution. Most of it was demolished then, although three gatehouses and sections of wall were spared, and Bermondsey House eventually rose in what was the inner courtyard. The mansion survived into the seventeenth century, although it was in a state of serious disrepair by the 1660s and its owners were unlikely to have lived in it. They would have rented it to tenants, although its shabby condition indicates they would not have been very grand ones.

John Browne, captain of
Rosebush
, died in April 1663, and contemporary records indicate he was killed by one of his own sailors, who lobbed a stone at him while drunk. The previous year, Browne had also quarrelled with his purser, Thomas Strutt, which had resulted in Strutt leaving
Rosebush
in a huff. William Hay owned the Hay's Wharf Company, which operated on the south bank of the Thames, opposite the Tower of London. William Castell was a Bermondsey shipwright; his wife was named Margaret. Captain Richard York (died 1665) was commemorated on a tablet in Bermondsey's old church, as was the cooper Edward Walduck. Richard Parr was Bermondsey's rector in the
mid-seventeenth century, famous for inflammatory sermons. Finally, Joseph Williamson was in charge of the government's intelligence network from the early 1660s and was credited with suppressing a number of rebellions, some of them small and ill-conceived, like the fictional one at Bermondsey House.

June 2004

Faces peered down from the upper decks of the red buses that ran along Tower Bridge Road, beyond the wooden hoardings that shielded the excavations from the common gaze. At one point they looked almost straight down into a large hole, the passengers unaware that they were just crossing the cloister and frater of the old priory and abbey. Around the rectangular pit, a brace of archaeologists were moodily contemplating the damage done to their earlier meticulous excavation of the vault that must have been beneath the original cellarer's building.

Edward Asprey pushed back his safety helmet and wiped the sweat from his forehead. He was a short man with a mop of black hair and a wispy beard. The summer sky was filling with ominous thunderclouds, and the oppressive afternoon was becoming too hot for comfort.

‘Bloody JCB!' he muttered to his blonde assistant, Julia Masters. ‘The damned place is cursed! I suppose now we'll have those officious sods from Health and Safety crawling all over us.'

She had to agree that this area of the rescue dig seemed to have a hoodoo on it. Three weeks ago, one of their student volunteers had slipped into the cellar excavation and broken a leg – and two days ago, an
almost new mechanical digger had crashed into it when the end wall had unexpectedly given way. It was a miracle that the driver escaped serious injury, but all work had been halted until this morning, when a mobile crane arrived to hoist the damaged machine out.

They looked around the rest of the site, where low walls of dark stone stood exposed below ground level, like stumps of rotten teeth jutting from the brown earth and grey rubble. Built over repeatedly for almost a thousand years, the area was a confused mass of foundations from a score of previous ‘developments', and only the painstaking work of the archaeologists had separated the many and varied eras of construction. Soon, a huge complex of offices, shops and apartments would rear into the sky above the remains of Bermondsey Abbey, but underneath it all would be preserved the roots of the monastic settlement that was an important part of England's heritage. But time was pressing and the cement-mixers and pile-drivers were champing impatiently, eager to put another new silhouette on London's skyline.

‘Better get down there and see how much damage that digger has done,' sighed Asprey. He waved to two other assistants and a couple of graduate students from University College, who were on the other side of the hole. They all went gingerly down the laddered scaffolding and gathered on the floor which they had so laboriously cleaned of infill before the toppled machine brought down more stones and rubble. Walking to the far end they contemplated the collapsed wall, where it abutted on the side of the former chamber. Julia Masters looked dubiously at the ancient masonry.

‘That looks really unsafe, now that the top courses of stone have fallen in,' she said.

‘It was a lousy bit of masonry to start with,' agreed Edward Asprey.

‘Must have been yet another later alteration, as the other walls have much better stonework.'

The cellar was due to be filled in level with the original ground surface before construction work began, though all the other exposed walls were to be carefully preserved underneath the huge buildings that were to be built above. Even the piles needed to support the new edifice were to be placed where they would not damage the old foundations.

The small group went closer to the place where the JCB had fallen in and picked their way through the old stones and mortar that were strewn about the floor. Julia Masters looked up at the wall and saw that most of the top half had been thrown down over a length of about five yards, leaving a large bite-like defect that came down to chin level. She made her way close to the wall, wishing the liner of her yellow helmet was not so tight, as sweat was sticking it to her head.

‘Watch those stones; they look loose,' warned one of the students, pointing to the upper row of the remaining masonry. Julia carefully clambered up on to the debris at the foot of the wall, interested to see how thick it was. ‘That's odd, Edward,' she called over her shoulder. ‘There seems to be another wall just behind it.'

He stumbled up to where she was perched and raised himself on tiptoe to look over the edge. ‘A twelfth-century cavity wall! We'll be finding polystyrene insulation here next!'

His attempt at levity was ignored as Julia, almost a head taller, peered over the upper line of stones. ‘There's a good eighteen-inch space here, running right across the width of the vault,' she announced. ‘Anyone got a light?'

As one of the students was dispatched to their site cabin to fetch a torch, there was a rumble of thunder and a few large spots of rain plopped down, but after a few moments it ceased, though the sky was now heavy with purple-grey clouds. When the torch arrived, Asprey handed it to Julia, who craned her head over the shattered stonework as she shone the light downwards.

‘We'd better get the rest of this wall down straight away, Edward,' she said sombrely.

 

An hour later a mini-digger had pulled away the remaining lower courses of masonry, and the archaeologists were crowding around what was revealed at the bottom of the cavity. The group was augmented by Mary McGowan, a burly middle-aged anthropologist who had been examining the bones from burials in the adjacent cemetery.

‘One male, probably under twenty-eight by the look of the inner ends of his collar bones and the edges of his pelvis,' she announced as she squatted alongside a heap of rusted metal and brittle, brown stick-like objects. ‘And a young woman, almost certainly late teens.'

‘What about the skulls?' asked Asprey, shaken in spite of many previous finds of skeletal remains.

‘Nothing wrong with the chap's head,' said Mary. ‘But the poor girl has what looks like a massive head injury.' She pointed to the skull, which lay upside down, in colour and shape like an old coconut. ‘Deep depressed fracture high up above the left ear.'

‘Could it not be damage that occurred long after death?' objected Julia. ‘We've all seen those due to rock falls or even just a stone resting against it for years.'

Another rumble of thunder failed to drown out Mary McGowan's emphatic denial. ‘Not this one, love! See
that crack passing right across the base? That's a sure giveaway for a whack on the head!'

‘What about those chains?' asked Asprey, pointing to the rusty links.

‘That's your department, not mine, Eddie! I'd get 'em photographed straight away, before you try to move them. They'll disintegrate at a touch.'

She pointed with a pencil towards the corroded iron. ‘Extraordinary! There are shackles around the lower ends of both forearm bones of the fellow, but her ribs are inside his arms…and that other, longer chain passed under the lumbar vertebrae and pelves of both of them.'

‘What does that mean, Dr McGowan?' asked one of the students respectfully.

The anthropologist rocked back on the heels of her sensible shoes.

‘The bloke's wrists were chained together around the girl's back – and another chain must have gone around their waists, so that they were clamped together, face to face. She must already have been dead, with a massive skull fracture like that – but there's no reason to think he wasn't still alive!'

There was a shocked silence, broken only by a clap of thunder.

‘Bloody hell!' whispered Edward. ‘Walled up alive, chained to a corpse!'

Mary McGowan shrugged. ‘This has to be hundreds of years old, by the state of the bones. Those loose rosary beads and that silver cross suggest it goes back at least until before the Dissolution of the Monasteries.'

‘We'll have to tell the police, surely?' said Julia.

‘I doubt they'll be interested in a centuries-old homicide!' snorted Mary. ‘Neither will the coroner, if he considers it to be older than sixty or seventy years.'

Edward Asprey climbed to his feet. ‘I'll have to tell
our director straight away and see what he says. The press will be all over this when they find out.'

Large spots of rain began to fall and there was a loud clap of thunder and a flash of lightning over towards the river.

‘Let's get back to the hut and use a phone,' suggested Julia, and as the rain began to come down in torrents they hurriedly ran for shelter.

Just as they reached their Portakabin, there was a tremendous sizzling flash of lightning that almost blinded them and an almost simultaneous crash of thunder that sounded like the end of the world, as a strike lanced down into the excavation site. A smell of burning assailed them, and a wreath of smoke rose from the cellar pit, as the rain stopped as abruptly as it had begun.

When the sky cleared and they hesitantly returned to the large hole in the ground, they found that the two skeletons had been vaporized and the rusted chains were now blobs of fused, magnetized metal. All that was recognizable at the foot of the ancient wall was a scatter of amber rosary beads.