The Lying Dutchman: Mercurius is back in a thrilling historical adventure (Master Mercurius Mysteries Book 6) Read online

  THE LYING DUTCHMAN

  Master Mercurius Mysteries

  Book Six

  Graham Brack

  Table of Contents

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  A NOTE TO THE READER

  ALSO BY GRAHAM BRACK

  PROLOGUE

  Those who have followed my memoirs thus far have my thanks. Despite the pig’s ear that my clerk Van der Meer has managed to make of taking my dictation, I am pleased that I have been able to set down some of my adventures before my inevitable death, which I hope to fend off for a while yet because I still have some tales to relate, not to mention completing the second volume of my series “Concerning the metaethics of St Thomas Aquinas and their relation to moral philosophy, with some notes on the proper Christian consideration of Aristotelian eudaimonism”. Admittedly that series is not selling quite so well as my memoirs, but I have not done a lifetime’s research for nothing, so I am determined to use it.

  Old age affects men in various ways. God be thanked, my brain is unaffected. I wish I could say the same for my bladder. How I miss the days when I could pee when I wanted, where I wanted and in the direction I wanted! I am over eighty years old, and I still have most of my teeth, and if writing fatigues me at least I can still read. Van der Meer, on the other hand, despite being considerably younger, seems to be hard of hearing. He makes mistakes when I dictate to him. He claims that this is because I mumble, but I do nothing of the sort.

  I find it harder to get to my favourite inn on the Langebrug these days, particularly if the paths are icy. Occasionally I send one of the kitchen boys to fetch me a jug of their ale for old times’ sake, and in good weather I walk there and sit in my old place and think about the men I used to see there, now all gone, I fear. There is a loneliness to growing old, as your circle of acquaintances dwindles, and I remember what my dear grandmother used to say in her old age; there is no joy in being the last hen in the coop.

  Fortunately I have my memories, and you shall have them too. A while ago one of the students here in Leiden who had read these volumes remarked to me that he had no idea I had played so great a part in Dutch life, because I wasn’t mentioned in any of the standard histories; to which I replied that of course I wasn’t, because I hadn’t written my memoirs when they were compiled. It is not that I am proud — after all, it’s the tallest ear of wheat in the field that is harvested first — but one must set the record straight.

  Besides which, I have some particularly salacious gossip about a certain German bishop and his “niece” that I must try to work in somewhere. It has nothing to do with my story but that sort of thing keeps Van der Meer alert.

  I hope you enjoy this tale. If you don’t, it doesn’t matter, because you’ve paid for the book anyway.

  Leiden, St Bruno’s Day, 1721

  CHAPTER ONE

  I don’t know how many of my readers have ever seen a thing called a newspaper. The idea behind one of these is that someone has correspondents around the world who send him information which he then collects and has printed on a large sheet or two of paper and sells. It is quite an efficient way of getting news, so long as the correspondents are telling the truth and not just relating tittle-tattle.

  Most of these publications are quite short-lived, but good ones are able to charge enough to pay their correspondents properly and therefore have more reliable intelligence for which some people are prepared to pay, though they are quite expensive. There are, for example, merchants who want to know what ships have arrived and departed. As a result, coffee and tea houses buy a copy of a newspaper for their customers to read. It is a way of encouraging customers to resort there.

  This has not really caught on in Leiden, largely because we aren’t very interested in what is happening anywhere else. We are, of course, deeply fascinated in what is going on in our city, the difficulty being that those who would buy the newspaper are the very people whose doings are likely to feature in it, not necessarily to their advantage, so there is no local newspaper here. However, occasionally a passing traveller will leave a newspaper at the inn, which is how I came to be reading the Weekly Haarlem Courant in early 1685 and thus discovered that King Charles II of England was dead.

  This was simultaneously a great shock and no surprise at all. A shock, because he was only fifty-four years old, or, to put it another way, eight years older than me; no surprise, because if you had seen the sort of life he led it was astonishing that he had survived this long. He had at least a dozen illegitimate children and probably fourteen or fifteen mistresses, not to mention the scores of women of whom he had casual carnal knowledge over the years. He kept irregular hours and drank more than was good for him. He certainly suffered from gout as I had seen when I met him during a little trip to London of which I have previously written and which I do not choose to recall again. I still have cold sweats when I recall how close I came to having my throat cut on that occasion.

  If the newspaper account was to be believed, Charles was not feeling well on Sunday and went for a carriage ride rather than taking his beloved dogs for a walk. Those dogs were a great nuisance about the palace; it was a large building with rambling corridors and even if the animals were sufficiently trained to want to go outside to make their mess, it was too far for them to make it in time, so as you walked through Whitehall Palace it was as well to watch where you were stepping.

  It seems that Charles woke around seven o’clock on Monday morning and emitted a terrible cry before sinking back into his pillows and starting to convulse. Over the next few days he suffered very much, not just because of his illness, but because of the treatment given him by his doctors. He was repeatedly bled, given enemas and emetics and blistered with hot poultices applied to his skin. My colleagues in the Faculty of Medicine here told me that this was all unexceptionable and in line with the best medical practice; to which my answer is that there must be a very fine line between being a physician and being a torturer. Anyway, Charles finally died on the Friday morning, and news of this had just reached Haarlem when the newspaper was published.

  I wondered idly whether our Stadhouder, William of Orange knew this. The chances are that our Ambassador in London would have written to tell William as a matter of urgency, because William would be affected by the change of monarch.

  Trying to explain Charles’ family tree is complicated, but this story won’t make much sense unless I do. William’s mother was Charles’ sister. But it doesn’t end there. Charles had no legitimate children, so the throne passed to his younger brother, James, Duke of York, who was therefore William’s uncle; but because William had married James’ daughter Mary he was also James’ son-in-law.

  Charles and William were both Protestants, though Charles was believed to have Catholic sympathies, but James had gone the whole hog and converted. Not only that, but he was an ardent Francophile. Charles had come to realise that the British people would not stand for a pro-French, pro-Catholic policy, and had therefore married Mary to William as the best guarantee that, even if James succeeded, the throne would revert to a Protestant thereafter. James had, I am told, some excellent qualities, among them personal bravery, but extreme intelligence was not one of them. Their father, Charles I, had believed in the Divine Right of Kings, that kings are appointed by God and answerable only to Him, and that, broadly speaking, a king could do what he wanted without question. This had ended badly when his own parliament cut his head off. You might have thought that this would have given James pause for thought, but as I said, if brains were candles you would barely have seen a flicker behind his eyes.

  Anyway, as a result of the story in the newspaper James was now King, and it remained to be seen what sort of success he could make of it. If I were a betting man, which I am not, I would not have bet a bent duit on his success, but I comforted myself with the thought that I was not in England and had no plans ever to be so again. One trip to that ungodly place in a lifetime was enough for any man. It wasn’t quite as awful as France, but there wasn’t much in it, and the food was better in Troyes.

  William’s interest was that his wife was next in line to the English throne, and since a man and his wife are one in the eyes of the church, to William that meant that he was shortly to be king. After all, James was fifty-one years old, his brother and sister had died young, and although he had a younger second wife, they had been married for over eleven years without producing a living child.

  Have you noticed that sometimes people’s precautions bring about the very thing that they were worried about? Charles had an
illegitimate son, also called James, who was Duke of Monmouth, and a staunch Protestant. I had met him at The Hague the previous year, where he was in exile and trying to solicit William’s help to claim the throne if and when Charles died. So far William had avoided committing himself, but now he would have to make a decision.

  A group of plotters in England had decided not to wait for Charles to die, but planned to give him some encouragement by kidnapping the King and his brother when they went to some horse races and killing them both before putting Monmouth on the throne. It all went wrong, and, even worse from the plotters’ point of view, James received a lot of public sympathy that he had been the subject of such a foul design. He was in the unusual position of being popular. As a result, it was by no means sure that the English were very exercised one way or the other about their King’s religion.

  Now, I happened to know, having spoken to Princess Mary during one of William’s “little jobs” that he liked to impose on me, that William had no intention of helping Monmouth because if Monmouth took the throne, Mary (and therefore William) would never occupy it. On the other hand, he didn’t want to upset Protestant sentiment by openly opposing Monmouth’s plan. He therefore found himself pursuing a devious policy in which he gave Monmouth every kind of assistance short of actual help. If Monmouth asked for money, he got it, but never quite enough; William let him recruit in the United Provinces but told important people not to sign up; and, most crucially of all, William sent the British troops stationed on our soil back to England without waiting to be asked.

  We had some kind of treaty which placed British troops at William’s disposal but on the understanding that King Charles could have them back whenever he needed them. By sending some back, William was giving Charles a coded warning that he might need them; and although Charles railed against William for giving shelter and support to his enemies, he quite liked the arrangement because he knew that William would feed him intelligence like a good nephew. William and Charles were not close; Charles liked wine, women and song, whereas William liked fighting, money and prayer, leading Charles to describe his nephew as the dullest youth in Christendom. However, you could rely on William to know where his interests lay, and at present they lay firmly with keeping Charles or James on the throne and keeping Monmouth off it.

  While I had no doubt that William liked James even less than he liked Charles, he must have been relieved that James had, it seemed, succeeded to the throne of Great Britain without any drama or upset.

  I returned the newspaper to the landlord and wrapped myself up well before venturing out to make the journey home. While it was not nearly as cold as the previous winter had been — how could it? — it was still very nippy when the wind whistled along the canals. It seems to funnel between the buildings somehow, and when there is a northerly wind it blows straight down the Rapenburg past the Academy building with barely anything to interrupt its flow.

  Having arrived at the University I was standing just inside the door shaking off the rain and trying to unfasten my cloak when I was called by a very recognisable voice.

  ‘Mercurius! May I have the pleasure of an interview? Now!’

  I glanced up to the top of the staircase and, as I had expected, found myself looking at Professor Lucas Schacht, Professor of Medicine and Rector Magnificus of the University. Schacht was a muscular man with the most luxurious long brown hair. I wanted to ask him what pomade or dressing he used to make it so glossy, for many a maid would have been jealous of its sheen. He wore, as always, a crisp white jabot at his neck. He must have been responsible for the bulk of the University’s starch bill, because it was always magnificently pressed.

  Schacht was a man known for plain speaking. When he gave a diagnosis, he did not dress it up with fine words or circumlocutions. It must be mildly disconcerting when you go to a doctor with what you think is a mild indigestion only to be asked “Have you made your peace with God?” I found myself hoping that he had not diagnosed something about me from a hundred paces away.

  As I entered his office and bowed I could see why I had been summoned. A letter bearing an all too familiar seal was being waved at me.

  ‘I was beginning to wonder if we would ever see you again, Mercurius. Have you been in tavern company once more?’

  ‘I have been to a tavern, yes, Rector, but I was solitary there.’

  ‘Well, that’s something I suppose,’ he sniffed. ‘This came for you today. It appears to be urgent, and the covering note tells me that I must expect you to be away for some time. The Stadhouder has graciously offered to cover your salary during your absence, with a little extra for the University for the inconvenience. If you will kindly give me a note of your teaching commitments before you leave, Mercurius, that would be appreciated.’

  I gulped. I appeared to have no say in the matter.

  ‘We may need your room so perhaps you would pack your personal items ready to go into store if necessary.’

  I did not like the sound of that. It was almost as if the possibility of my resumption of my duties was being utterly discounted.

  ‘As you direct, Rector,’ I murmured.

  ‘Stop looking so po-faced, man! I am only being practical. We look forward to your triumphant return in due course as usual. I am well aware that your efforts have redounded to the credit of this University, and that you have done much to ensure the Stadhouder’s favour. We do not want to finish up like Nijmegen.’

  No, we did not. The University of Nijmegen, founded to great acclaim in 1655, had recently been shuttered again and was not expected ever to reopen. It had been associated with unorthodox religious views and found its best staff tempted away by other universities. When the French invaded in 1672 and found a university teaching the theories of the detested René Descartes, which were thought to be highly uncatholic, they lost no time in closing the place down and scattering the staff. It tried to reopen in 1674, but finally gave up. It had become of so little account that nobody was quite sure when it had closed, but by 1682 every student and every lecturer had gone. Nobody in high places had championed its cause. The thought of it was bound to make any Rector shudder.

  I accepted the letter with half-hearted thanks and made my way to my room with heavy tread, opening the door and staggering to the bed where I flopped down inelegantly. If only I had been as completely useless as an investigator as I thought I was. I never believed that I was any good at it, the only saving grace being that since nobody else was doing it at all the Stadhouder had no comparison to judge me against. Unfortunately I somehow kept succeeding despite my failings and imperfections, which I shall not list here. [No, Van der Meer, I will not, despite your coaxing. And no, you may not guess.]

  If there was a silver lining to this particular cloud, it was that I recognised the handwriting of the letter as that of Bouwman, the Stadhouder’s personal secretary. At times of urgency the Stadhouder was wont to write his own letters in his abominable scrawl. I have seen three-year-olds who formed their letters better. Be that as it may, the fact that Bouwman had written it indicated that there was no immediate panic. Against that, the willingness of the Stadhouder to reimburse the University for my salary suggested that this was a greater task than, for example, finding his lost slippers.

  I pinched the corners of my eyes alongside my nose, sighed, and sat up to read this missive of doom. It began in the usual flowery way:

  To our trusty and well-beloved servant, Master Mercurius, of the University of Leiden, greeting!

  We find that we have need of your inestimable services once more. It would be appreciated if you would come to The Hague at your earliest convenience to attend to a matter of the greatest national importance.

  His Excellency William of Orange,

  Stadhouder.

  Given this day at our palace at The Hague, the 28th day of February, 1685.

  The dignified and composed nature of the epistle was marred to some degree by William’s scrawled postscript.

  Get your arse here now! Please. W.

  I felt an overwhelming desire to bang my head against a wall until blessed unconsciousness supervened, but I resisted the temptation. Instead I dragged myself to the stairs and walked into the refectory to take my farewell of the blessed Mechtild, hoping that this angel of the kitchen would have some small consoling pastry for me.