A Crowning Mercy Read online

  “Very.”

  “She would, she would,” Mrs. Swan sighed heavily. “I had sore breasts, dear, when my husband was alive, but then he was a sailor. Yes. He brought me the image of St. Agnes from Lisbon and, do you know, it worked like a charm, but then it was a charm, of course.” She was raising her voice to provoke the minister. “Mind you, dear, they were sore. And there’s plenty of them to hurt!” She pealed with laughter at the thought, her eyes unblinking on the man of God who, sure enough, reacted. Whether it was the talk of Romish saints or the discussion of breasts that had offended him, Campion could not tell. He leaned toward Mrs. Swan.

  “You are indecent in your talk, woman!”

  She ignored him and smiled at Campion. “Does she have long ears, dear?”

  “No.”

  “God be thanked for that, dear, ’cos there’s no cure for long ears except a clouting. A good clouting!” She turned to the minister, but he had already leaned back in defeat, his eyes on Ecclesiastes. Mrs. Swan tried to rouse him again. “Has she got the falling sickness?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Yes. My aunt had that, God rest her. One moment she was on her feet, the next she was flat on the floor. Just like that. St. Valentine cures that, dear.” The minister stayed silent.

  Mrs. Swan settled back on the bench. “I’m going to sleep now, dear. If anyone molests you,” and here she looked hard at the travelling preacher, “you just wake me up.”

  Mrs. Swan was her guide, her mentor, her protector, and now, as they alighted at the end of the Strand, her landlady too. She would not hear of Campion seeking lodging in an inn, though she had not been slow to make clear that her hospitality was not free. “Not that I’m greedy, dear, no. No one can say that of Mildred Swan, but a body has to look after a body.” With which gnomic words the deal had been made.

  Even though Charing Cross and the Strand were not London proper, but just the westward extension of the houses built outside the old walls of the city, it seemed fearful to Campion. The eastern sky was hazed dark with the smoke of innumerable chimneys, a haze pierced by more church towers and spires than Campion could have dreamed possible; the whole overshadowed by the great cathedral on the hill. The houses in the Strand, down which Mrs. Swan led her, were huge and rich, their doors guarded by armed men, while the street was filled with cripples and beggars. Campion saw men with empty, festering eye-sockets, children with no legs who swung themselves along on strong arms, and women whose faces were covered with open sores. It stank.

  Mrs. Swan noticed none of it. “This is the Strand, dear. Used to be a lot of gentry along here, but most have gone, more’s the pity. It’s all Saints, now, and Saints don’t pay like the gentry.” Mrs. Swan had been left money by her sea-captain husband, but she augmented her income by embroidery, and the Puritan revolution in London had lowered the demand for such decorative work.

  A troop of soldiers marched from the city, long pikes over their shoulders, their barred helmets bright in the sunlight. People were thrust unceremoniously from their path. Mrs. Swan shouted scornfully at them. “Make way for the Lord’s anointed!” An officer looked sternly at her, but Mildred Swan was not a woman to be overawed by the military. “Watch your step, Captain!” She laughed as the officer hastily dodged a pile of horse-dung. She made a dismissive gesture at the soldiers. “Just playing, they are. Did you see those boys at the Knight’s Bridge?” The coach had been stopped at the bridge in the fields to the west of London, and the soldiers had searched the travellers. Mrs. Swan snorted. “Little boys, they are. That’s all! Shave their heads and they think they can rule the world! This way, dear.”

  Campion was led into an alley so narrow that she could not walk alongside Mrs. Swan. She was lost now, confused by the maze of tiny streets, but at last Mrs. Swan reached a blue door which she laboriously unlocked, pushed Campion inside, and Campion reflected, as she settled into the small parlor, that she had reached her destination. Here, in this great, confusing city, she might find the answer to the seal which hung between her breasts. Here too was Toby Lazender, and in a world where her only friend was Mrs. Swan, he suddenly loomed large in her thoughts. She was in London at last, free.

  Mrs. Swan sat heavily opposite her, pulled up her skirts and took off her pattens. “Oh, my poor corns! Well, dear! We’re here.”

  Campion smiled. “We’re here.” Where the mystery could be solved.

  Seven

  Campion’s behavior, before she ran away from Werlatton, had been so solitary and eccentric that her absence on the first morning provoked nothing more than grumbles and self-satisfied noises from Goodwife saying that she had always known the girl could not be trusted. By mid-afternoon the grumbles had turned to alarm in Scammell’s head and he ordered a horse saddled and rode himself about the bounds of the estate.

  Even when it was realized that Campion had disappeared, their imagination could not encompass anything so dramatic as a journey to London. On the second day, at dawn, Scammell ordered Tobias Horsnell to search the villages to the north, while he and Ebenezer went south and west. By then the trail was long cold, and that evening, in the great hall, Samuel Scammell felt the stirrings of fear. The girl was his passport to riches beyond dream and she had gone.

  Goodwife Baggerlie took pleasure in Campion’s disappearance, much as bad news will always cheer a prophet of doom. Goodwife had joined eagerly in the Slythes’ persecution of their daughter, a persecution that was rooted in a distaste for her looks, her spirit, and her apparent unwillingness to subdue her soul to the tedious boredom of Puritan existence. Now that Campion had fled, Goodwife dredged from the past an endless catalogue of trivial sins, each magnified in Goodwife’s sullen mind. “She has a devil, master, a devil.”

  Faithful Unto Death Hervey, who had joined the search, looked at Goodwife. “A devil?”

  “Her father, God bless him, could control it.” Goodwife sniffed and dabbed at red eyes with her apron. “‘He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes.’”

  “Amen,” said Scammell.

  “Praise his word,” said Ebenezer, who had never been beaten by his father, though he had often watched as his sister was lashed with the great belt.

  Faithful Unto Death Hervey steepled long fingers in front of his bobbing Adam’s apple. “‘As a jewel of gold in a swine’s snout, so is a fair woman which is without discretion.’”

  “Indeed and indeed.” Scammell searched his mind for a suitable verse of scripture so he would not be left behind in this company. Nothing came to mind except inappropriate words from the Song of Solomon, words he dared not say aloud: “Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins.” He groaned inwardly. He wondered what her breasts were like, breasts that he had yearned to fondle, and now, perhaps he would never know. She had gone, taking her beauty with her, and taking, too, Scammell’s hope of wealth. “We must watch and pray.”

  “Amen,” Ebenezer said. “Watch and pray.”

  Campion’s supposition was right. Grenville Cony was, indeed, a lawyer, only now, according to Mrs. Swan, much more. “He’s a knight, dear, Sir Grenville, and he’s so high and mighty that he doesn’t notice the likes of you and I. He’s a politician. A lawyer and a politician!” Her words left no doubt as to her opinions of both categories. Lawyers, to Mrs. Swan, were the lowest form of life. “Killing’s too good for them, dear. Bloodsuckers, dear. If God hadn’t invented sin, then the lawyers would, just to line their own purses.” She expounded further so that her life, to Campion, seemed to have been a perilous journey between the dangers of various illnesses on the one side, and the plottings of predatory lawyers on the other. “I could tell you stories, dear,” said Mrs. Swan, and proved it by doing so; many of the stories of a complexity that would have done credit to a lawyer, but all distinguished by endings in which Mrs. Swan, single-handedly, confounded the entire legal profession.

  Yet Campion could see little choice but to visit Sir Grenville Cony and here,
once more, fortune smiled on her. A neighbor of Mrs. Swan, a French tailor, knew Sir Grenville’s address which turned out to be one of the massive houses in the Strand.

  Mrs. Swan was pleased. “That’s convenient, dear, nice and close.” She was threading colored silks on to fine needles. “You tell him, dear, that if he wants any embroidery then he doesn’t have far to go.”

  So, on her second afternoon in London, Campion walked to the Strand. She dressed soberly, her hair covered with a bonnet, but even so she was conscious of the glances men gave her and glad of the company of the tailor. Jacques was elderly and fine-mannered, helping her across the busy Strand, gracious in his words to her. “You will find yourself successfully home, Miss Slythe?”

  “You’ve been very kind.”

  “No, no, no. It is not every day that I walk the streets with such beauty. You have given me pleasure, Miss Slythe. This is it.”

  Cony’s house was not as large as some on the Strand, not to be compared with Northumberland or York House, but it was impressive nonetheless. It was built in dark brick, its stories rising to a high, stone balustrade with carved beasts guarding the corners. The tall mullioned windows were masked by velvet curtains. The door to the house was guarded by an armed man, a pike at his side, who smirked at Campion and was rude to Jacques Moreau. “What do you want?”

  “The lady has business with Sir Grenville.”

  “Business, eh?” He looked Campion up and down, taking his time. “What sort of business, eh?”

  She had come determined to be humble, a favor seeker, but the man’s attitude annoyed her. “Business Sir Grenville would not want discussed with you.”

  It was evidently the right answer, delivered in the right tone, for he sniffed, jerked his head toward the side of the building, and spoke with a little more respect. “Business is down the alley.”

  She said farewell to the tailor on the corner, then went into the narrow, high alleyway. It ran to the river, and she could see the sheen of the sun on the water and, beyond it, the dreariness of Lambeth Marsh.

  A small porchway was two-thirds of the way down the alley, close enough for her to smell the river, and she presumed this was the door where those with business visited Sir Grenville Cony. There was no guard here. She knocked.

  No one answered. She could hear voices from the Strand, the sound of wheels on stone, and once there was a splash from the river, but the house seemed to exude silence. She was nervous suddenly. She felt the seal beneath her dress, and the touch of the gold on her skin reminded her that this house might hold the secret of her future, the secret of the Covenant that might free her from her father’s stranglehold imposed by his will and marriage settlement. Emboldened, she knocked again.

  She waited. She was about to knock a third time, indeed was looking back into the alley for a loose cobble-stone that could make more noise on the wooden door, when a tiny shutter banged up.

  “Don’t you know there’s a bell?” a voice demanded.

  “A bell?”

  “To your right.”

  She had not seen it in the shadows, but now she saw an iron handle hanging from a chain. The irritation of the person behind the tiny shutter seemed to demand an apology, so she made one. The man was slightly mollified. “What do you want?”

  “I want to see Sir Grenville Cony, sir.”

  “To see Sir Grenville? Everyone wants that! Why don’t you watch him pass in his coach, or in his private barge? Isn’t that sight enough?”

  She could not see the man to whom the petulant voice belonged, she could only make out the glitter of one eye and the half shape of a nose pressed against the iron grille that barred the small opening. “I have business with Sir Grenville, sir.”

  “Business!” The man seemed never to have heard of the word. “Business! Put your petition here. Hurry!” The eye and nose were replaced with fingers reaching for her petition.

  “I don’t have a petition!”

  She thought the man had gone, for there was silence after the fingers disappeared, but then the glittering eye came back. “No petition?”

  “No.”

  “Does Mr. Cony know you?” The question was asked grudgingly.

  “He knew my father, sir.”

  “Wait!”

  The shutter dropped with a smart click, leaving the house in silence again, and Campion walked back into the alley and stared down at the river. A heavy barge was crawling across her narrow view, propelled by long, wooden sweeps that were rowed by men standing on its decks. One by one, three heavy cannons came into view, lashed to the barge’s deck, a cargo going westward to war.

  The shutter snapped up. “Girl!”

  “Sir?”

  “Name?”

  “Dorcas Slythe.” This was no time for fanciful, self-adopted names. She could hear the scratch of quill on paper.

  “Your business?”

  She hesitated, provoking a tut from the grille. She had half expected, having been told to wait, that she would be invited into the house, and so she was not prepared with a message. She thought quickly. “The Covenant, sir.”

  “The what?” There was no interest in his voice. “Covenant? Which one?”

  She thought again. “St. Matthew, sir.”

  The quill scratched beyond the door. “Sir Grenville’s not here, girl, so you can’t see him today, and Wednesday is the day for public business. Not this Wednesday, though, because he’s busy. Next Wednesday. Come at five o’clock. No. Six. In the afternoon,” he added grudgingly.

  She nodded, appalled at the time she would have to wait for any answer. The man grunted. “Of course he may not want to see you, in which case your time will have been wasted.” He laughed. “Good day!” The shutter snapped down, abandoning her, and she turned back to the Strand and to Mrs. Swan.

  In the house she had left, in a great comfortable room that overlooked the Thames, Sir Grenville Cony stared at the barge which lumbered away from him around the Lambeth bend. Guns for Parliament, guns bought with money that had probably been lent by Sir Grenville himself at twelve percent interest, but the thought gave him no pleasure. He felt his belly gingerly.

  He had eaten too much. He pressed his huge belly again, wondering if the small pain in his right side was simple indigestion and his fat, white face flinched slightly as the pain increased. He would summon Dr. Chandler to the house.

  He knew his secretary was at the House of Commons so he walked himself to the clerk’s room. One of the clerks, a weedy man named Bush, was coming through the far door. “Bush!”

  “Sir?” Bush showed the fear that all the clerks felt of their master.

  “Why are you away from your desk? Did you seek permission to wander through the land on my time? Is it your bladder again? Your bowels? Answer me, you beast of Belial! Why?”

  Bush stuttered, “The door, sir. The door.”

  “The door! I heard no bell! Correct me, Sillers,” he looked at the chief clerk, “but I heard no bell.”

  “They knocked, sir.” Sillers dealt laconically with his master, yet never without respect.

  “Who knocked? Strangers at my door, dealt with by Bush. Bush! Who was this lucky man?”

  Bush stared in fear at the short, fat, grotesque man who stalked him. Sir Grenville Cony was grossly fat, his face had the appearance of a sly white frog. His hair, white after his fifty-seven years, was cherubically curly. He smiled on Bush, as he smiled on most of his victims.

  “It was not a man, sir. A girl.”

  “A girl!” Sir Grenville feigned surprise. “You’d like that, Bush, wouldn’t you? A girl, eh? Have you ever had one? Know what they feel like, eh? Do you? Do you?” He had backed Bush into a corner. “Who was this slut who has put you into such a fever, Bush?”

  The other clerks, fourteen of them, smiled secretly. Bush licked his lips and brought the paper up to his face. “A Dorcas Slythe, sir.”

  “Who?” Cony’s voice had changed utterly. No longer flippant and careless, but suddenly ha
rd as steel, the voice that could ride down committees in Parliament and silence courtrooms. “Slythe? What was her business.”

  “A Covenant, sir. St. Matthew.” Bush was quaking.

  Sir Grenville Cony was very still, his voice very quiet. “What did you tell her, Bush?”

  “To come back next Wednesday, sir.” He shook his head and added in desperation, “They were your instructions, sir!”

  “My instructions! Mine! My instructions are for you to deal intelligently with my business. God! You fool! You fool! Grimmett!” His voice had been rising, till his final call became a shrill scream.

  “Sir?” Thomas Grimmett, chief of Grenville Cony’s guards, came through the door. He was a big man, hard-faced, utterly fearless in his master’s presence.

  “This Bush, Grimmett, this fool, is to be punished.” Cony ignored the clerk’s whimpers. “Then he is to be thrown out of my employment. Do you understand?”

  Grimmett nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  “Sillers! Come here!” Sir Grenville Cony stalked back into his room. “Fetch the papers on Slythe. We have work, Sillers, work.”

  “You have the Scottish Commissioners to see, sir.”

  “The Scottish Commissioners can bubble the Thames by farting, Sillers. We have work.”

  The punishment was administered during Cony’s dinner, so that Sir Grenville could watch while he ate. He enjoyed it. Bush’s squeals of pain made a better sauce for the lamb, chicken, prawns and beef than anything his kitchen could provide. He felt better afterward, much better, so he no longer regretted that he had forgotten to summon Dr. Chandler. After dinner, when Bush had been taken away to be hurled into some gutter, Sir Grenville graciously allowed the Scottish Commissioners to see him. They were, he knew, all fervent Presbyterians, so he prayed aloud with them, praying for a Presbyterian England, before settling to his work with them.