A Crowning Mercy Read online

  BERNARD CORNWELL

  AND SUSANNAH KELLS

  A CROWNING MERCY

  For

  Michael, Todd, and Jill

  Matthew, Mark, Luke and John,

  The bed be blest that I lie on.

  Four angels to my bed,

  Four angels round my head.

  One to watch, and one to pray,

  And two to bear my soul away.

  THOMAS ADY

  CONTENTS

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  The boat slammed into a wave. Wind howled in the…

  Part I

  The Seal of St. Matthew

  One

  She first met Toby Lazender on a day that seemed…

  Two

  The leather belt cracked on to her back.

  Three

  “You must be happy.” Goodwife’s words before breakfast sounded to…

  Four

  “Apoplexy,” Dr. Fenderlyn said.

  Five

  Campion began that same evening, announcing that she would tidy…

  Part II

  The Seal of St. Mark

  Six

  Sir George Lazender, Toby’s father, was a worried man.

  Seven

  Campion’s behavior, before she ran away from Werlatton, had been…

  Eight

  For two days, it seemed, they did nothing but talk.

  Nine

  Campion was shown into a spacious, empty room. It was…

  Ten

  James Alexander Simeon McHose Bollsbie knew, as did Sir Grenville…

  Eleven

  Thomas Grimmett waited for Scammell in the hall. He was…

  Twelve

  The best way to approach Lazen Castle was from the…

  Thirteen

  Campion thought sometimes of the stream where she had first…

  Fourteen

  London was not a happy city that Christmas. The King’s…

  Part III

  The Seal of St. Luke

  Fifteen

  March 25, 1644, New Year’s Day, was bright and cold,…

  Sixteen

  The Roundheads were not gone by the end of May,…

  Seventeen

  Campion’s cat, Mildred, usually woke her before dawn, pacing to…

  Eighteen

  This was the moment she had feared, yet somehow it…

  Nineteen

  “‘Man, that is born of a woman, hath but a

  Twenty

  Sunlight almost blinded Campion. She cried out, dazzled by the…

  Twenty-one

  All was not well with Faithful Unto Death Hervey. Ambition…

  Twenty-two

  The day before Campion’s execution dawned gray and wet, rain…

  Twenty-three

  Colonel Joshua Harries was an aide to the Earl of…

  Twenty-four

  The bells of St. Mary’s rang eleven. From across the…

  Twenty-five

  London was in uproar. A witch had escaped, taken from…

  Part IV

  The Gathering of the Seals

  Twenty-six

  Morning. The seagulls were screaming over the fish market at…

  Twenty-seven

  Expect nothing, Vavasour Devorax had said, yet hope as she…

  Twenty-eight

  “The rain,” Lady Margaret announced from the window, “will delay…

  Twenty-nine

  Ebenezer Slythe’s offer of a reward to anyone who could…

  Thirty

  Persuading Sir Grenville Cony was not quite as simple as…

  Thirty-one

  Sir Toby Lazender was tired. He had spent a fruitless…

  Thirty-two

  Toby and Campion left Oxford the next day, travelling alone.

  Thirty-three

  Through the broken roof and windows came the forlorn sound…

  About the Authors

  Other Books by Bernard Cornwell

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  1633

  The boat slammed into a wave. Wind howled in the rigging and brought water stinging down the treacherous deck, driving the shuddering timbers into the next roller.

  “Cap’n! You’ll take the bloody masts out of her!”

  The captain ignored his helmsman.

  “You’re mad, Cap’n!”

  Of course he was mad! He was proud of it, laughing at it, loving it. His crew shook their heads; some crossed themselves, others, Protestants, just prayed. The captain had been a poet once, before all the troubles, and all poets were touched in the head.

  He shortened sail an hour later, letting the ship go into irons so that it jerked and rolled on the waves as he walked to the stern rail. He stared through the rain and windspray, stared for a long while at a low, black land. His crew said nothing, though each man knew the sea-room they would need to weather the low, dark headland. They watched their captain.

  Finally he walked back to the helmsman. His face was quieter now, sadder. “Weather her now.”

  “Cap’n.”

  They passed close enough to see the iron basket atop the pole that was the Lizard’s beacon. The Lizard. For many this was their last sight of England; for too many it was their last sight of any land before their ships were crushed by the great Atlantic.

  This was the Captain’s farewell. He watched the Lizard till it was hidden in the storm and still he watched as though it might suddenly reappear between the squalls. He was leaving.

  He was leaving a child he had never seen.

  He was leaving her a fortune she might never see.

  He was leaving her, as all parents must leave their children, but this child he had abandoned before birth, and all that wealth he had left her did not assuage his shame. He had abandoned her, as he now abandoned all the lives that he had touched and stained. He was going to a place where he promised himself he could start again, where the sadness he was leaving could be forgotten. He took only one thing of his shame. Beneath his sea-clothes, hung about his neck, was a golden chain.

  He had been the enemy of one king and the friend of another. He had been called the handsomest man in Europe and still, despite prison, despite wars, he was impressive.

  He took one last, backward look and then England was gone. His daughter was left behind to life.

  Part I

  1643

  The Seal of St. Matthew

  One

  She first met Toby Lazender on a day that seemed a foretaste of heaven. England slumbered under the summer heat. The air was heavy with the scent of wild basil and marjoram, and she sat where purple loosestrife grew at the stream’s edge.

  She thought she was alone. She looked about her like an animal searching for enemies, nervous because she was about to sin.

  She was sure she was alone. She looked left where the path came from the house through the hedge of Top Meadow, but no one was there. She stared at the great ridge across the stream, but nothing moved among the trunks of heavy beeches or in the water meadows beneath them. The land was hers.

  Three years before, when she had been seventeen and her mother dead one year, this sin had seemed monstrous beyond imagination. She had feared then that this might be the mysterious sin against the Holy Ghost, a sin so terrible that the Bible could not describe it except to say it could not be forgiven, yet still she had been driven to commit it. Now, three summers later, familiarity had taken away some of her fear, yet she still knew that she sinned.

  She took off her bonnet and laid it carefully in the wide, wooden basket in which she would carry back the rushes from the pool. Her father, a wealthy man, insisted that she worked. St. Paul, h
e said, had been a tentmaker and every Christian must have a trade. Since the age of eight she had worked in the dairy but then she had volunteered to fetch the rushes that were needed for floor-coverings and rushlights. There was a reason. Here, by the deep pool of the stream, she could be alone.

  She unpinned her hair, placing the pins in the basket where they could not get lost. She looked about her again, but nothing moved in the landscape. She felt as solitary as if this was the sixth day of creation. Her hair, pale as the palest gold, fell about her face.

  Above her, she knew, the Recording Angel was turning the massive pages of the Lamb’s Book of Life. Her father had told her about the angel and his book when she was six years old, and it had seemed an odd name for a book. Now she knew that the Lamb was Jesus and the Book of Life was truly the Book of Death. She imagined it as vast, with great clasps of brass, thick leather ridges on its spine and pages huge enough to record every sin ever committed by every person on God’s earth. The angel was looking for her name, running his finger down the ledger, poised with his quill dipped in the ink.

  On the Day of Judgment, her father said, the Book of Life would be brought to God. Every person would go, one by one, to stand before His awful throne as the great voice read out the sins listed in the book. She feared that day. She feared standing on the floor of crystal beneath the emerald and jasper throne, but her fear could not stop her sinning, nor could all her prayers.

  A tiny breath of wind stirred the hair about her face, touched silver on the ripples of the stream and then the air was still again. It was hot. The linen collar of her black dress was tight, its bodice sticky, the skirts heavy on her. The air seemed burdened by summer.

  She put her hands beneath her skirts and unlaced her stocking tops just above her knees. The excitement was thick in her as she looked about, but she was sure she was alone. Her father was not expected back from the lawyer in Dorchester till early evening, her brother was in the village with the vicar, and none of the servants came to the stream. She pulled her heavy stockings down and placed them in her big leather shoes.

  Goodwife Baggerlie, her father’s housekeeper, had said she should not dally by the stream because the soldiers might come. They never had.

  The war had started the year before in 1642 and it had filled her father with a rare, exalted excitement. He had helped to hang a Roman Catholic priest in the old Roman amphitheater in Dorchester and this had been a sign from God to Matthew Slythe that the rule of the Saints was at hand. Matthew Slythe, like his household and the village, was a Puritan. He prayed nightly for the King’s defeat and the victory of Parliament, yet the war was like some far-off thunderstorm that rambled beyond the horizon. It had hardly touched Werlatton Hall or the village from which the Hall took its name.

  She looked about her. A corncrake flew above the hay-field across the stream, above the poppies, meadowsweet and rue. The stream surged past the pool’s opening where the rushes grew tallest. She took off her starched white apron and folded it carefully on top of the basket. Coming through the hedged bank of Top Meadow, she had picked some red campion flowers, and these she put safely at the basket’s edge where her clothes could not crush the delicate five-petalled blossoms.

  She moved close to the water and was utterly still. She listened to the stream, to the bees working the clover, but there was no other sound in the hot, heavy air. It was the perfect summer’s day; a day devoted to the ripening of wheat, barley and rye; to the weighing down of orchard branches; a day of heat hazing the land with sweet smells. She was crouching at the very edge of the pool, where the grass fell away to the gravel beneath the still, lucid water. From here she could see only the rushes and the tops of the great beeches on the far ridge.

  A fish jumped upstream and she froze, listening, but there was no other sound. Her instinct told her she was alone, but she listened for a few seconds more, her heart loud, and then with swift hands she tugged at her petticoat and the heavy, black dress, pulled them up over her head, and she was white and naked in the sun.

  She moved swiftly, crouching low, and the water closed about her cold and clean. She gasped with the shock and the pleasure of it as she pushed herself into the deep place at the pool’s center, giving herself up to the water, letting it carry her, feeling the joy of fresh cleanness on every part of her. Her eyes were shut and the sun was hot and pink on them—for a few seconds she was in heaven itself. Then she stood on the gravel, knees bent so that only her head was above the water and opened her eyes to look for enemies. This pleasure of swimming in a summer stream was a pleasure she must steal, for she knew it to be a sin.

  She had found she could swim, an awkward paddling stroke that could take her across the pool to where the stream’s swift current tugged at her, turned her, and drove her back to the pool’s safety. This was her sin, her pleasure, and her shame. The quill scratched in the great book of heaven.

  Three years ago this had been something indescribably wicked, a childish dare against God. It was still that, but there was more. She could think of nothing, nothing at least that bore thinking about, that would enrage her father more than her nakedness. This was her gesture of anger against Matthew Slythe, yet she knew it to be futile for he would defeat her.

  She was twenty, just three months from her twenty-first birthday, and she knew that her father’s thoughts had at last turned to her future. She saw him watching her with a brooding mixture of anger and distaste. These days of slipping like a sleek, pale otter into the pool must come to an end. She had stayed unmarried far too long, three or four years too long, and now Matthew Slythe was finally thinking of her future. She feared her father. She tried to love him, but he made it hard.

  She stood now in the shallow part of the pool and the water streamed from her, making her hair cold against her back. She brushed water from her breasts, her slim waist, and she felt the touch of the sun on her skin. She stretched her arms up and then her body, feeling the joy of freedom, the warmth on her skin, the sleekness of water around her legs. A fish jumped.

  It jumped again, then a third time, and she knew it was no fish. It was too regular. Panic swept her. She waded to the pool’s edge, scrambled desperately on to the bank and fumbled with her petticoat and dress. She pulled them over her hair and down, forcing the heavy, stiff material about her hips and legs. Panic was coursing through her.

  The splashing came again, closer now, but she was decent, even if dishevelled. She removed the wet hair from within her collar, sat down and picked up her stockings.

  “Dryad, hamadryad, or nymph?” An easy voice, full of hidden laughter, came from the stream.

  She said nothing. She was shivering in fear, her wet hair obscuring her view.

  He smiled at her. “You have to be a nymph, the spirit of this stream.”

  She jerked her hair away from her eyes to see a smiling young man, his face framed with unruly dark red curls. He was standing in the stream, but curiously bent forward so that his hands and forearms were beneath the water. His white shirt was unbuttoned, tucked into black breeches that were soaking. Black and white, the colors of a Puritan’s sober dress, but she did not believe the young man to be a Puritan. Perhaps it was the fineness of the linen shirt, or the hint of black satin where the breeches were slashed, or perhaps it was his face. She decided it was his face. It was a strong-boned, good face, full of laughter and happiness. She should have been frightened, yet instead she felt her spirits rise at the sight of the stooping, wet man. She disguised her interest, putting defiance into her voice as she challenged the trespasser. “What are you doing here?”

  “Stealing Slythe’s fish. What are you doing?”

  There had been something so cheerful in his admission of poaching that she smiled. She liked his face. It was crossed by the odd reflections of the sunlight from rippling water. She saw that he had no rod or net. “You’re not fishing.”

  “You’re calling me a liar!” He grinned at her. “We Lazenders don’t lie. At least, not much.�
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  A Lazender! That made everything more fitting somehow for this private place where she defied her father. Sir George Lazender was the Member of Parliament for the northern part of the county, a great landowner, a knight, and a man of whom her father had a low opinion. Sir George Lazender supported Parliament in its war against the King, but Matthew Slythe believed that support to be lukewarm. Sir George, Matthew Slythe believed, was a man too cautious in the great fight. There was worse. Sir George, it was rumored, would keep the bishops in a Protestant church, would keep the Book of Common Prayer for its services, and Matthew Slythe believed both to be the works of the Papist devil.

  The young, red-headed man bowed clumsily in the stream. “Toby Lazender, nymph. Heir to Lazen Castle and stealer of fish.”

  “You’re not stealing fish!” She was hugging her knees.

  “I am!” He proved it by slinging a bag from his back and showing her a half dozen trout. Yet he had no fishing gear with him.

  She smiled. “How?”

  He told her. He waded to the bank, lay on the grass a few feet from her, and described how to catch fish with bare hands. It was, he said, a slow business. First he immersed his hands and forearms in the water and left them there until they had chilled to the temperature of the stream. Then, very slowly, he walked upstream still keeping his hands under the water. He explained that trout were lazy fish, lying in the thick weed and swimming only enough to hold their position against the water’s flow. He said she could creep into the weeds and, moving slow as thistledown, feel with spread fingers for the presence of a fish. He grinned at her. “You don’t feel the fish, at least not at first. You just feel the pressure of it.”