A Crowning Mercy Read online

  The girl. He thought of her, wondering where she was in London, and whether she would bring him the seal. Above all he wondered whether she would bring him that. St. Matthew! He could feel the excitement of it, the joy of a long-ago plot well laid. He sat up late that night, drinking claret before the darkened river, and he raised his glass to the grotesque reflection in the diamond paned window, a window that broke his squat, heavy body into a hundred overlapping fragments. “To the Covenant,” he toasted himself. “To the Covenant.”

  Campion could only wait. Mrs. Swan seemed genuinely glad of her company, not least because Campion could read the news-sheets aloud to her. Mrs. Swan did not see the “point” in reading, but she was avid for news. The war had made the news-sheets popular though Mrs. Swan did not approve of the London sheets which naturally, supported Parliament’s cause. At heart Mrs. Swan supported the King and what she felt in her heart emerged easily on to her tongue. She listened as Campion read the stories of Parliamentary victories, and each one was greeted with a scowl and a fervent hope that it was not true.

  Not much news that summer brought relief to Parliament. Bristol had fallen and there had been no great victory by which the balance of that defeat could be redressed. There were numerous small skirmishes, enlarged by the news-sheets into premature Armageddons, but the victory Parliament wanted had not come. London had other reasons to be gloomy. In their search for money to prosecute the war, the Parliament had raised new taxes, on wine, leather, sugar, beer and even linen, taxes that made King Charles’s burden on London look light. Mrs. Swan shook her head. “And coal’s short, dear. It’s desperate!”

  London was warmed by coal brought by ship from Newcastle, but the King held Newcastle so the citizens of London faced a bitter winter.

  “Can’t you move away?” Campion asked.

  “Dear me, no! I’m a Londoner, dear. Move away! The thought of it!” Mrs. Swan peered closely at her embroidery. “That’s very nice, though I say it myself. No, dear. I expect King Charles will be back by winter, then everything will be all right.” She shifted closer to the window light. “Read me something else, dear. Something that will cheer a body up.”

  There was little to cheer anyone in the news-sheet. Campion began reading a vituperative article which listed those members of the Commons in London who had still not signed the new Oath of Loyalty that had been demanded in June. Only a handful had not signed and the anonymous writer claimed, “that tho it bee said sicknesse bee the cause of their ommission, yet it bee more likelie a sicknesse of the courage than of the bodie.”

  “Can’t you find something interesting, dear?” Mrs. Swan asked, before biting a thread with her teeth. Campion said nothing. She was frowning at the ill-printed sheet so intently that Mrs. Swan’s curiosity was aroused. “What is it, dear?”

  “Nothing. Really.”

  Such an answer was a challenge to Mrs. Swan, who could extract from nothing enough material to fill three happy mornings in gossip. She insisted on an answer, but even she was surprised that the subject of Campion’s interest was merely that Sir George Lazender was one of the Members who had not signed the new oath. Then a thought suggested itself. “Do you know Sir George, dear?”

  “I met his son once.”

  The embroidery went down. “Did you now?”

  Campion endured a relentless cross-examination, confessing to her one meeting, though not the circumstances, and ending by slyly admitting that she wanted to see Toby again.

  “Why not, dear? So you should. Lazender, Lazender. Well-off, are they?”

  “I think so.”

  Mrs. Swan smelt a customer, if nothing else, and in the last evening light before the candles were lit she bullied Campion into borrowing paper, ink and a quill from Jacques Moreau. She wrote a simple message, merely saying that she was in London, staying with Mrs. Swan (“gentlewoman,” Mrs. Swan insisted on that, and made Campion trace out the letters one by one to her satisfaction), and that she was in the house with the blue door in Bull Inn Court to which Toby would be a welcome visitor. For a moment she wondered how to sign the letter, uncertain if he would remember the fanciful name he had given her by the stream, but then she found she could not write her true, ugly name. She signed herself Campion. The next morning they both walked to Westminster. Mrs. Swan took her to Parliament itself, pushing through the booksellers of Westminster Hall, past the crowded lawyers’ offices, to leave the message, care of Sir George, with a clerk of the Speaker. Then Campion was forced to wait with even more apprehension than she felt about Sir Grenville Cony and the mystery of St. Matthew’s seal.

  Even the diversions of London could not erase the expectations from her heart. Mrs. Swan insisted on showing her the city, but every minute Campion was away from Bull Inn Court was a moment during which Toby might call, and she might miss him.

  On the second evening after they had delivered the letter, they went to Jacques Moreau’s house where three households had gathered together for music. The French tailor played the viol, his wife the flute, and it should have been a happy evening, but Campion was racked with apprehension. Perhaps he would call this evening, when she was not in the house? Then she wondered if he would bother to call at all. Perhaps he would not remember her, or if he did he would dismiss the letter with a laugh, pitying her, and in those moments she wished she had not written to him. She convinced herself, listening to the music, that he would not come, so she tried to persuade herself that she did not want him to come. Then she wondered, if he did come, whether she would still like him. Perhaps it would all be a terrible, embarrassing mistake, and she tried once more to believe she was indifferent to his response. Yet every time there were footsteps in the Court she would look anxiously out of the window.

  Perhaps, she thought, he was not in London. She invented a hundred reasons why he could not come, yet she still waited for the footsteps; she hoped, she feared, she waited.

  She had met him once, only once, and in that one meeting she had fixed on him all her hopes, her dreams, her imagination of the word “love,” and she knew it was foolish, yet she had done it, and now she was frightened that he would come and she would discover that he was ordinary after all. Just another man who would stare at her as the men in London stared.

  The next morning her hopes faded. So much time seemed to have passed since the letter was given to the clerk at Westminster, and it was impossible for her hope, fear and apprehension to stay at the same pitch. Campion was helping Mrs. Swan’s maid in the small kitchen, plucking two scrawny chickens that had been bought that morning. She plucked with short, hard tugs while the maid was drawing the first bird, her hand plunged up to the wrist in entrails. There was a knocking on the door. The maid went to rinse her hand in the bucket, but Mrs. Swan called that she was by the door and would answer.

  Campion’s heart was racing. It could be just a customer, come to fetch a cushion cover or curtain square, and she tried to calm her hopeless expectancy. He would not come. She tried to persuade herself of that. There were voices in the hall but she could make out neither the words nor the speakers.

  Mrs. Swan’s voice grew louder and most distinct. She was talking of the chickens bought that morning. “Prices, dear! You wouldn’t believe it! I remember when you could feed a family of eight on five shillings a week, and good food too, but now you couldn’t give a man a square meal for that. Oh dear, my hair! If I’d known you were coming I’d have worn a cap.”

  “My dear Mrs. Swan, you beauties obviously attract each other.”

  It was he! The voice crashed on her with such sudden familiarity that it seemed she could never have forgotten. It was Toby, and she could hear him laughing, and Mrs. Swan offering him the best chair, refreshment, and she hardly heard his reply. She had been pulling at the last, obstinate small feathers on the chicken and her apron was fluffy with the small wisps. She took her bonnet off and her hair hung loose. She knew she was blushing. She brushed desperately at the small feathers, twitched her hair transferri
ng the feathers to her head, and then there was a shadow in the doorway. She looked up and he stood there, grinning at her, and the grin turned into a laugh, and in that one moment she knew it was all right. She had not been wrong about him, she would never be wrong about him again.

  She wondered how she could ever have forgotten his face with its easy smile, its curly red hair falling either side of the strong lines of jaw and cheek. He looked her up and down. “My little feathered angel.”

  She almost threw the chicken at him. She was in love.

  Eight

  For two days, it seemed, they did nothing but talk. Mrs. Swan was an easy chaperone, always ready to put her feet up and “let you young things go on without me,” though if anything truly interesting was promised she was assiduous in accompanying them. On the second evening they went to a play together. The theater had been banned by the Puritans, but dramas were still privately staged in some large houses, and Campion was astonished by the experience. The play was Bartholomew Fayre, and there was an added spice to the occasion for they could all have been arrested simply for watching the actors.

  Campion had never seen a play and did not know what to expect. Her father had preached that such things were spawned of the devil and the performance was not without moments of sharp guilt for her. Yet she could not but find it amusing. The audience, unsympathetic to London’s new masters, revelled in Ben Jonson’s mockery of the Puritans. Campion had never known that the mockery existed, that people despised and hated men like her father, yet even she could see that the character Zeal-of-the-land Busy was both typical and ridiculous. The audience roared their approval when Zeal-of-the-land Busy was finally clapped in the stocks, and for a moment Campion was appalled by the hatred she sensed around her. Then the actor who played Zeal-of-the-land Busy made such an amusing face, one that reminded her of her father’s scowl, that she laughed out loud. Toby, who was sensitive to her moods, relaxed beside her.

  Campion was luckier than she knew. Toby’s father, who was a sensible man, often thanked God for his fortune in his only son. Toby Lazender was someone to be proud of. He had inherited his mother’s independence and spirit, but he had also taken his father’s intelligence and sympathy. Toby knew that his parents would disapprove of Campion, his father would say Toby must marry money, for the sake of Lazen’s roof, and preferably well-born money, while what Lady Margaret would say, Toby could not predict; his mother being a lady difficult if not impossible to predict. Campion’s parents, her birth, her station, all conspired against Toby, yet he would not give her up. To his own mind their first meeting had seemed as fortuitous and miraculous as it had to Campion, and now on this second meeting it seemed instantly that they had shared a lifetime, so much did they have to say. Even Mrs. Swan, who was rarely short of a word, marvelled at their loquaciousness.

  Toby would inherit Lazen Castle with all its fertile lands in the Lazen valley and its flocks in the higher land to the north. He was twenty-four now, more than ready for marriage, and he knew that his mother kept a memorized list of girls suitable to take her place in Lazen Castle. Toby now dismissed them all. It was foolish, he knew, wildly impractical, yet nothing now would deflect him from the Puritan girl he had met beside a summer stream. He had fallen in love with all the unexpectedness, suddenness and impracticality that love is capable of, and Mrs. Swan, observing it, was delighted. “It’s like Eloise and Abelard, it is, and Romeo and Juliet, and Will and Beth Cockell.”

  “Who?” Campion asked. They were alone in the house, late at night.

  “You wouldn’t know the Cockells, dear. He was a baker in St. Sepulcher’s and he took one look at Beth, he did, and his yeast was up for life, dear.” She sighed romantically. “Very happy they were, too, till he died of the stone, poor man. Broken-hearted, she was. She went a week later. Said she couldn’t live without him and she just took to her bed and faded away. So what did he say to you today?”

  They were in love, and the hours when they were not together were like endless nights, while the hours they shared flew like minutes. They planned a future that took no notice of the present, and they talked of their lives as though they would be spent in an eternal summer beneath an unmarred sky. In those days Campion discovered a happiness so great she thought her heart could not contain it, yet reality was remorseless in its pursuit of them.

  Toby spoke of her to his father. As he expected, but with a force that was quite unexpected, Toby had been told that Campion was unsuitable. She would not do, she must be forgotten, and Sir George would not even agree to meet her. His opposition was absolute. There was more. Toby had to leave London, on pain of possible arrest and imprisonment, three days before Campion’s appointment with Sir Grenville. Toby shook his head. “I won’t leave.”

  “You must!” Campion was terrified for him.

  “I’m not leaving without you.” He was adamant. “I’ll wait.”

  Mrs. Swan, with her gossip-sharpened acuteness, quickly divined that Toby was of Royalist sympathy. She liked him for it. “I remember Queen Bess, young man, and I tell you they were good days. Ah me! They were good days!” In truth Mrs. Swan had been a toddler when Queen Elizabeth had died, though she claimed to remember being held up in her father’s arms to see the royal coach go by. “There weren’t so many Saints then, I can tell you. A man prayed in his bedroom or in his church and there wasn’t all this caterwauling in the streets and gloom in the pulpits. We were happier then.” She sniffed in disapproval. “The country’s got drunk on God since then, and it don’t make for happiness.”

  Toby smiled. “And the sun always shone on good Queen Bess?”

  Mrs. Swan knew she was being teased, but she liked being teased by good-looking young sons of the gentry in her own parlor. “It’s a funny thing, Mister Toby, but it did. If that doesn’t show God approving of us, I don’t know what does.” She shook her head and laid her work on the table. “We used to have such fun! Tom and me went to the bear baiting, and the plays, and there was a puppet man in the Paris Garden who could make you roll on the grass! He really could! There was no harm in it. There were no Roundheads then, telling us what we could and couldn’t do, not when the Queen was in London. I don’t know why they don’t all go to America and leave us in peace. They’re welcome to America! They can all be gloomy there and let us be happy here.”

  Toby smiled. “You could be arrested for saying that.”

  Mrs. Swan snorted in derision. “From what you say, Mister Toby, you could be arrested just for showing your nose in the street. I don’t know what the country’s coming to, I really don’t!”

  Toby did not leave London on Sunday, nor on Monday. He would wait till Campion had seen Sir Grenville Cony, for Toby, like Campion, believed that in some way the lawyer would point her toward freedom. They speculated endlessly about the seal, the letter, even the pearled gloves, but in all their speculation they did not find a solution that convinced them. Sir Grenville Cony had the answer, if any man did, and Toby would not leave London till he had learned it. He would not, he said, leave Campion either. Together they planned their improbable, impossible future as if love could conquer everything.

  Yet Toby was wanted. A description had been circulated to the watch, to the soldiers in the city, and Campion was appalled at the risks he took. He walked openly in the streets with her, his dark red curls obvious beneath his wide-brimmed hat, and on the Tuesday, the day before her appointment with Sir Grenville, he came close to being caught.

  They were walking from St. Giles, both soberly dressed, though Toby insisted on having black satin beneath his slashed sleeves. He was laughing at some joke he had made when a burly man stepped into their path. The man raised a hand to Toby’s chest. “You.”

  “Sir?”

  The man’s face was twisted with anger and inner hatred. “You’re him, aren’t you? The Lazender scum!” He stepped back, raising his voice. “A traitor! A traitor!”

  “Sir!” Toby’s voice was just as loud. People were watching, rea
dy to side with the burly man, but Toby made them listen. He let go of Campion’s arm and pulled up his sleeve, pointing to a great white scar that ran ragged on his left forearm. “I took that wound, sir, last year on Edgehill field. Where were you, sir?” Toby stepped a pace forward, his right hand now dropping to his basket-hiked sword. “I drew this sword for the Lord, sir, and I did not have you at my side when the forces of evil surrounded me!” Toby shook his head sadly. “Praise the Lord, brothers and sisters, for He delivered me, Captain Scammell, from the Papist hordes of that man Charles. A traitor, am I? Then I am proud to be a traitor for my Lord and Savior! I have slain for the Lord, brethren, but was this man with me?”

  Toby’s imitation of the Puritan rabble-rousers was so convincing that the small crowd were now all in sympathy with him. The burly man, taken aback by Toby’s pious vehemence, was eager to offer apologies and beseeched Brother Scammell to kneel in prayer with him. Toby, to Campion’s infinite relief, was magnanimous in victory, declining to pray, and pushing his way through the dispersing crowd with many expressions of piety. Once they were clear he grinned at her. “I got that scar two years ago, falling off a horse, but it comes in useful.”

  She laughed, but there was a desperate worry in her. “They’ll find you, Toby!”

  “I’ll put on a disguise, like those actors.”

  “Be careful!”

  Toby was taking some precautions, however. He had stopped sleeping at his father’s house, using instead the rooms of a friend in the city itself, but the experience with the angry man in St. Giles had worried him. “There’s only tomorrow.”

  “Then what?”

  They had paused outside Mrs. Swan’s house. He smiled down at her; the gentle, amused smile she liked so much. “Then we’ll marry.”

  “We can’t.”

  “Why not?”