Sea Change (37 page)

'Nor into disclosing anything not strictly relevant to the case, presumably.'

'True enough, Charles. But mercy was naturally my prime consideration.' Walpole blew a noose-shaped smoke-ring towards the ceiling. 'As ever.'

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

Dutch Reckoning

Spandrel spent a week of comfortable if scarcely contented solitude in the Tower of London. By coincidence, his quarters were next to those previously occupied by Sir Theodore Janssen. But though the view they commanded of the river and the wharves of Bermondsey was the same, there was an important difference ever to the fore of Spandrel's thoughts. Sir Theodore had been waiting for his case to be heard by Parliament, fearful about how much of his lovingly accumulated wealth — of land and houses, jewels and china, paintings and tapestries, horses and carriages, cochineal and pepper — he would be allowed to keep. But his life had never been threatened. He sat now at his house in Hanover Square, less wealthy but at several fortunes' remove from poverty, contemplating an old age of ease and security. For Spandrel, old age had joined a long list of experiences he knew he would never have.

Being led in chains through Traitors' Gate, loaded aboard a launch and conveyed downriver to a waiting Dutch frigate was, by contrast, an experience he had never expected to have and would have preferred to be spared. But his preferences counted for even less than they ever had. The Kampioen took delivery of its prisoner in Limehouse Reach on a dull May morning of spitting rain. And turning for a last glimpse before he was led below, Spandrel took his leave of the city — and the country — of his birth.

The day after Spandrel's unheralded departure, Viscount Townshend wrote to the Lord Mayor of London, instructing him to expel all papists and nonjurors from the city by reason of the Government's recent discovery of a Jacobite plot to overthrow — indeed, assassinate — the King.

Even as the papists and non-jurors left in their paltry hundreds, the troops arrived in their armed thousands to set up camp in Hyde Park. The King, it was announced, would not now be going to Hanover. A threat to his life, as well as his crown, was said to have been revealed in an anonymous letter to the Duchess of Kendal. Arrests, trials and executions were promised. And the London mob settled to await an exciting summer.

For Spandrel summer was less of a prospect than a memory. Not that the seasons made themselves apparent in the cells beneath the Stadhuis in Amsterdam. There the shadows were always deep and long and the days very much the same. Spandrel's cell was not the one he had been incarcerated in fifteen months before, but might as well have been for all the differences there were. Big Janus was still the friendliest of the turnkeys, bearing no grudge, it seemed, over the affray at Ugels' shop. He seemed, indeed, positively sorry to see Spandrel back, though not as sorry as Spandrel was to be there.

How and when the authorities would deal with him Spandrel did not know. Soon and summarily was his expectation. This time, he felt certain, the British vice-consul — if one had been appointed in succession to Cloisterman — would not come calling.

In that he was correct, though only because the dandily attired visitor shown into his cell a few days after his arrival was not the vice-consul. Evelyn Dalrymple, as the plum-voiced fellow introduced himself, was at pains to emphasize that he held a senior post at the British Embassy in The Hague. He would not normally endure a trekschuit journey halfway across Holland for the dubious privilege of visiting the Stadhuis cells. That he had done so was a measure of the British Government's concern for the due and proper process of the law.

'I'm not sure you appreciate how much we've done for you, Spandrel.'

'Oh, I do appreciate it, Mr Dalrymple, believe me.'

'We've specially requested that you be spared torture.'

'That was good of someone.'

'Indeed it was. But it was only a request, you understand. Throw wild accusations around at your examination — muddy the water, so to speak — and the Sheriff may seek what he conceives to be the truth by rack and screw. The Dutch are a tenacious people, especially if you try to put them right. Are you familiar with the concept of Dutch reckoning, Spandrel?'

'I don't believe I am.'

'Query a bill at an inn in this country and the landlord's apt to send it back to you with further additions. In the same way, if you protest your innocence overmuch, you may find yourself punished more harshly. Hanging can be mercifully swift, if competently done. And the Dutch are a competent people. I should look more to their competence than their tenacity, if I were you.'

'Thank you for the warning.'

'Don't mention it.' Dalrymple glanced around at the four dank walls and up at the ceiling — though he scarcely needed to, given how close it was to the crown of his hat. 'It's not too bad here, is it?'

'No, no. A regular home from home. I can't think why I wanted to leave it.'

Dalrymple looked at him sharply. 'I shouldn't recommend sarcasm at your examination, Spandrel.'

'I'll remember that.'

'I have to ask you… if you'll require the services of a priest.'

'Won't that question arise only after I've been condemned?'

'I suppose so.' Dalrymple shrugged. 'But there's no harm in looking ahead.'

'In that case… no.' Spandrel forced out a smile. 'A priest might muddy the water.'

In London, muddied water was available by the bath-load. Hardly a day passed at the Cockpit without the questioning of one or more specimens of unpatriotic riff-raff. But where were the serious plotters, where the genuine conspirators? Ten days after the papists and non-jurors had been sent packing from London, an answer seemed to be supplied by the arrest at his lodgings in Little Ryder Street of George Kelly, secretary to the Bishop of Rochester.

It soon became common knowledge, however, that Kelly had been able to hold the arresting officers at bay for some time, thanks to his distinctly unsecretarial skills as a swordsman, while most of his presumably incriminating correspondence burned merrily on his sitting-room fire. Walpole, it was said, would make someone suffer for such bungling, not least because he was bound to suffer for it himself.

'We'll have to release him,' was Walpole's conclusion when he and Townshend met two days later to consider the Deciphering Department's report on those papers of Kelly's not consumed by the flames. And it was a conclusion that clearly pained him. 'There's nothing here.'

'But if we can't touch Kelly

'We can't touch his master. I'm well aware of that, Charles. Damnably well aware.'

'What's this about… Harlequin?'

'Atterbury's dog, damn his paws. Half Europe seems to have been writing to Kelly enquiring after the cur's health, obviously as a cipher for the vitality of the plot. But we can't prove that's what it means.'

'How are we to proceed?'

'Stubbornly, Charles. That's how. Stubbornly and tirelessly. We can't dig this fox out of his hole. But he'll have to come out of his own accord eventually. And when he does… we'll be waiting.'

At the waiting game Walpole knew no peer. For Spandrel, however, waiting was a game he could only lose, though one he was nevertheless forced to play. While in London the First Lord of the Treasury and the Northern Secretary pored glumly over the Deciphering Department's report, in Amsterdam Spandrel was taken before Sheriff Lanckaert for examination.

Lanckaert himself said very little, and that in Dutch. His English-speaking deputy, Aertsen, conducted the brief but pointed interrogation. He and Spandrel had last met on the occasion of Spandrel's escape from custody, an event to which neither of them referred directly. In short order, however, the long dormant evidence of Spandrel's association with Zuyler that had emerged just prior to Mcllwraith's dramatic intervention at Ugels' shop was cited as confirmation that Spandrel and Zuyler had conspired to rob Ysbrand de Vries and had ended by murdering him. The even hoarier accusation that Spandrel was a secret agent of the government of the Austrian Netherlands was not revived, due, Spandrel assumed, to some subtle change in the balance of political expediency. Instead, Aertsen invited him to admit that he had killed de Vries when discovered by him in the act of breaking open the chest in his study in search of the money and valuables Zuyler had told him he would find there.

'No,' Spandrel hopelessly declared. 'That's not so. Zuyler tricked me into sneaking into the house so that I'd take the blame for his murder of de Vries. I told you the truth last year and it hasn't changed.' No more it had. But he knew more of the truth now. He knew it all. Yet there was nothing to be gained by telling it. 'You should be looking for Zuyler and Mrs de Vries.'

'We have looked for them. But we have found only you.' They had in truth not even done that. Spandrel had been served to them on a plate, lacking only a sprig of parsley by way of garnish. Zuyler was dead, but they did not seem to know it. And Estelle de Vries had transformed herself into Mrs Davenant, mistress of Phoenix House and Robert Walpole, for which information they would probably not be grateful. 'We have a sworn statement from an elderly servant of Mijnheer de Vries that you killed his master, Spandrel. Against that all your denials and allegations count for nothing.'

'I didn't do it.'

'Then why did you flee when you had the chance to prove your innocence?'

'Because I had no such chance. As this examination demonstrates.'

'That is enough.' Aertsen glared at him. 'That is quite enough.'

There was a lengthy conferral in Dutch, then a rambling pronouncement of some kind by the Sheriff, of which Aertsen supplied a brisk translation.

'Your guilt is established, Spandrel. Formal judgement and sentence will be passed tomorrow. Do not expect leniency.'

Aertsen's parting warning had hardly been necessary. Leniency did not feature in Spandrel's expectations. He tried, as far as he could, to harbour no expectations at all. A future governed by the forces pressing in upon him was unlikely to be either long or relishable. The authorities had to bend over backwards to avoid confronting the inconsistencies and contradictions in the case they had made against him. But it was clear that bend they would. And equally clear that Spandrel would be the one to break.

Back in his cell, he thought, as he often had of late, of Mcllwraith, and wondered what that indomitable champion of lost causes would do in such a situation as this. Try to escape, perhaps. But the solid walls and thick bars of the Stadhuis would probably prevent him. Proclaim the truth as he knew it in open court, then — the whole truth, Green Book and great men's greed and all. But that would only win him hours of useless agony in the torture chamber. He would be as helpless as Spandrel to avoid the fate that lay in wait.

Between the bars of his tiny window, Spandrel noticed a spider spinning a web. He half-remembered some legend of Mcllwraith's homeland, in which Robert the Bruce had been inspired by the indefatigable spinnings of a spider. But, more clearly, he remembered a superstitious saying of his mother. 'A spider in the morning brings no sorrow; a spider in the afternoon brings trouble on the morrow.'

Was it still morning, or had the afternoon already come? For a few moments, Spandrel struggled to decide. Then, irritated with himself for making the effort, he stopped. What difference did it make? Morning or afternoon, he knew what the morrow would bring.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

The Wheels of Justice

In the Stadhuis of Amsterdam, two flights of stairs were all that separated the cells from the civil chambers. The short journey between them, which Spandrel had never previously undertaken, was a bewildering transition from gloom and squalor to opulence and grandeur. The Magistrates' Court was a vast and glittering chamber, the magistrates themselves a sombrely clad half-score of solemn-faced burghers arrayed beneath pious paintings and allegorical friezes. Sheriff Lanckaert directed proceedings, with occasional interventions from one of the magistrates who seemed to outrank the others. Aertsen perched mutely at a desk to one side. Spandrel, guarded by Big Janus, was required to do nothing but stand and listen, understanding none of the words spoken but having a shrewd idea what they would amount to.

It was not long before the chief magistrate was intoning a formal verdict, a translation of which was helpfully muttered into Spandrel's ear by Big Janus. 'Guilty, mijn vriend.' It was no surprise. But somehow, until that moment, Spandrel had half-believed it would not happen. It had been the purest self-deception, of course. It had been bound to happen. Telling himself otherwise was merely an indulgence in one of the few comforts not denied him. But even those few were being stripped from him now, one by one. And soon there would be none left — none at all.

Spandrel was marched back down into the bowels of the building, which he thought strange, since no sentence seemed to have been passed. An explanation of sorts was supplied by Aertsen, who led the way and glanced back over his shoulder once to say, 'The Chamber of Justice is on the other side.' Spandrel took him to mean the other side of the Stadhuis, an indirect route to which was presumably used to spare any wandering city fathers a distressing encounter with an unwashed prisoner. Any figurative significance to Aertsen's words Spandrel dismissed as improbable.

Re-emerging in a hall yet vaster than the court and glimpsing a gigantic statue of Atlas supporting a star-spangled globe at the far end, Spandrel was taken into a marble-lined chamber where the Sheriff and the magistrates, accompanied this time by a pastor, were waiting for him. He was tempted for a moment to object to the. pastor's presence, having told Dalrymple he had no use for one, but he supposed Dutch law insisted a pastor be there and to the insistences of Dutch law he was clearly a slave. With little ado, the chief magistrate pronounced sentence on 'Willem Spandrel'. And there really was no need for Big Janus to tell him what it was.