A Crowning Mercy Read online

  It would not move. It was simply too heavy, but the skirting board moved. Only the smallest fraction, but she knew she had not been deceived, and she hauled on it again, and again she felt the tiny movement.

  There was a small window behind her, its wooden shutter open, and she was aware that the sky was lightening. Dawn would come soon.

  She frowned, the tiredness heavy on her, as she contemplated the skirting board with its cut-out handle. It had moved, but it revealed nothing, and she tugged it again, knowing the effort to be useless, and trying to think what she should do.

  She put her hand into the hole and felt with her fingers at the back of the board. There was something cold there, something made of metal, and her long fingers explored the metal, found a ring, and she tugged on it.

  She heard the sound of a bolt sliding open. She froze, half expecting the small sound to bring Goodwife from her room, but the house was still.

  Campion’s heart was beating as it did before she went naked into the water.

  She gripped the handle again, pulled, and this time the skirting board moved easily, sliding out as the front of a shallow, secret drawer, and then the runners of wood shrilled and she froze again.

  She bit her lip, closed her eyes, as if those actions might lessen the noise, and pulled again.

  The drawer opened. She had found her father’s secret place and she knelt there, not exploring the contents, waiting to see if anyone in the house stirred.

  The first birds were calling outside. Soon, she knew, Werlatton would be busy, and the knowledge made her hurry.

  Two bundles were in the drawer. She lifted the first, hearing the clink of money, and she guessed that this had been her father’s secret reserve of cash. Most houses, even the poorest, tried to keep a little money hidden against the bad times. Agnes had told her that her mother had pushed a leather purse of two gold coins into the eave of the thatch, and this heavy bag was Matthew Slythe’s equivalent. She put the purse on to one of his shirts, then lifted out the smaller, lighter package.

  Then, holding her breath, she pushed the drawer home. There was no need for anyone to know she had been there. Her fingers found the ring of the bolt, pushed, and the chest looked innocent again.

  Somewhere a pail clanged against stone; she heard the creak and groan of the yard pump, and she knew Werlatton was about to wake up. She wrapped the shirt about the two packages, crept from the room, then went on silent feet to her own bedroom.

  There were fifty pounds in the purse, more money than most men would ever dream of owning. Fifty golden pounds, each with the head of King James on them, and she looked at the money on her bedroom table and she knew now she could run away. She smiled at the thought that the money which her father had saved against calamity would be used to take her away from Werlatton. Carefully, slowly, she placed the coins back in the purse, putting each heavy piece of gold in separately so that the noise would not alert any of the servants.

  The second packet was tied tight with string. She cut the knot with the scissors she used for her sewing, then unwrapped the old, yellow linen that hid her father’s secret.

  Inside was a pair of gloves.

  She frowned, lifting them, seeing two other things still in the package, and she saw that the gloves were made of lace, delicate and beautiful, fragile as thistledown, and as unlikely in a Puritan’s house as a drunken game of cards would be. They were women’s gloves, made for someone with long, slender hands, and Campion gently pulled one of them on and held her hand out to the window light. The glove was old and yellowed, but still beautiful. At the wrist was a ring of small, sewn pearls. Sheathed in the lace glove, it seemed to her that her hand belonged to someone else. She had never worn anything beautiful, anything pretty, and she stared at her lace-covered hand and smiled at the effect. She could not understand why something so lovely should be described as sinful.

  She carefully pulled the glove off, folding it on its partner, and picked up the second object. This was a piece of parchment, its folds crackling and stiff, and she feared that the paper might break as she opened it. It was a letter, written in an ornate and bold hand, and she sat on her window-seat to read it.

  “You have been sent the Jewell by the Jewe, tell mee if this bee not so. Thou knowest its importance. I have long worked for this, and its power bee in your disposall at least till the girl be of twenty-five years. The Covenant is secure if the jewell bee secure.

  “It is important that you sende an impression of the Seale to the name I furnished you with, and I doe earnestlie require that you Marke the Seale in a Privatt way that wee bee not undone by counterfeiting. Wee have not seen the Seales of Aretine and Lopez, though they have seen oures, and this device of a Secrett Marke I have made a parte of oure Agreement. Doe not fail mee in this.

  “Guard the Jewell well. It is the key to great Wealth, and though the Other Seales are needed too, you may bee sure that One Day this Jewell will bee much sought.

  “The Gloves are of the Prescott Girl. You may have them.

  “Guard the Jewell.”

  It was signed Grenville Cony.

  Cony, Covenant. She read the letter again. “Till the girl be of twenty-five years” must, she knew, refer to herself. Isaac Blood had said that the monies of the Covenant would be hers at twenty-five, unless she was married. “The Prescott Girl” had to be her own mother, Martha Slythe, whose maiden name had been Prescott, but Campion could not imagine her fat, bitter mother ever owning lace gloves. She picked up one of the gloves, seeing the pearls hanging at its wrist, and she wondered by what mystery her mother had owned them.

  The letter raised more mysteries than it solved. “Aretine and Lopez,” whoever they were, were names that meant nothing to Campion. “You may bee sure that One Day this Jewell will bee much sought.” That had come true. Ebenezer and Scammell had ransacked the house, the strange man had come from London and thrust his leg between hers, and all for the last object in the packet.

  Grenville Cony, in his letter, had described the seal as a jewel. She lifted it, marvelling at its weight. The jewel was made of gold, suspended from a gold chain so it could be worn as a necklace, and Campion, brought up in the rigors of her father’s religion, had never seen an object so beautiful.

  It was a cylinder of gold, banded by tiny, glowing stones that were white like stars and red like fire. The whole pendant was the size of her thumb.

  On its base was the seal, duller than the gold of its setting, and she guessed it was made of steel. It had been cut by a craftsman who had made the seal into a work of art, as beautiful as the gold jewel itself.

  Light was flooding the cornfields, touching gray silver on the bend in the stream far to the north, and Campion held the seal up to the dawn light from her window.

  The rim of the seal was chased with an ornate design. In the center was an axe, short handled and wide bladed, and on either side of the axe’s handle were small letters in mirror-writing: “St. Matt.”

  This was the Seal of St. Matthew, showing the axe which legend said had cut off the disciple’s head.

  She fingered the heavy gold, wondering at it, looking at it in her hands when, just as the skirting board had moved, so now the seal seemed to give in her fingers. She frowned, tried to repeat what she had just done, and realized that the seal was in two halves, the joint concealed cunningly by one band of the precious stones. She unscrewed the two halves.

  The half of the cylinder which bore the seal of St. Matthew fell away in her right hand. She lifted the other half into the light. The jewel, on its long golden chain, held a secret.

  There was a tiny carving inside the cylinder, a carving that had been made with exquisite skill and cast in silver so that the gold cylinder enclosed a tiny silver statue. The statue shocked her. It was a symbol of such ancient power, a symbol of all that she had been taught to hate, and it had been in this house. Her father would have abominated this, yet he had kept it, and Campion stared at it, fascinated and repelled. It was a
crucifix.

  A crucifix of silver in a cylinder of gold, a seal made into a jewel, the key to great wealth. She looked at the letter again, noting once more the urgent appeal for Matthew Slythe to mark the seal. She lifted the jewel into the light and saw that her father had scratched a line across the face of the axe-blade. To stop counterfeiting, the letter said, but who was the man to whom the impression had to be sent? Who was Aretine? Lopez? Her discovery of the seal had uncovered new mysteries and she knew the answers did not lie in Werlatton.

  The answers would be in London. The letter was signed Grenville Cony, and beneath his signature he had written, simply, “London.”

  London. She had never seen a town, let alone a city. She was not even sure which was the road that led from Werlatton toward London.

  Grenville Cony was in London, whoever he was, and Toby Lazender was certainly in London, and Campion looked at her table and saw the heavy, leather purse with her father’s hoard of gold. That could take her to London! She gripped the jewel in her hands, stared at the flooding of the summer light into the valley, and she felt the excitement rise within her. She would run away, away from Ebenezer and Scammell, from Goodwife and Werlatton, from all the people who wanted to crush her and make her into what she was not. She would go to London.

  Part II

  The Seal of St. Mark

  Six

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

  He had friends who thought him always worried, gnawing at problems when the meat was long gone from the bone, but, as August ended in 1643, Sir George had real reasons for concern.

  He had hoped to forget his worries for a morning. He had taken a boat from the Privy Stairs and landed in the city. Now he was in the precincts of St. Paul’s Cathedral indulging his passion for books, yet his heart was not in it.

  “Sir George!” It was the bookseller, coming crabwise behind his stall. “A fine day, Sir George!”

  Sir George, ever courteous, touched the brim of his hat in response to the bookseller’s greeting. “Mr. Bird. You’re well, I hope?”

  “I am, sir, though trade is bad, indeed it is, Sir George. Very bad.”

  Sir George picked a random book from the table. He could not face a long discussion of the new taxes which Parliament had imposed and for which, as a member of the House of Commons, he was partly to blame. Yet it would be discourteous to ignore the bookseller, so he waved at the cloudless sky. “The weather is on your side, Mr. Bird.”

  “I thank God it’s not raining, Sir George.” Bird had not even needed to bring out the canvas shelters for his tables. “Bad news from Bristol, Sir George.”

  “Yes.” Sir George opened the book and stared, unseeing, at the pages. Even less than he wished to discuss trade did he wish to discuss the war. It was the war which was his chief worry.

  “I shall let you read, Sir George.” Mr. Bird, thankfully, had taken the hint. “That copy is a little foxed, Sir George, but still worth a crown, I think.”

  “Good! Good!” Sir George said absentmindedly. He found he was reading Harington’s translation of Orlando Furioso, a book he had owned for twenty years, yet by burying his nose in the poetry he might escape the greetings of his many friends and acquaintances who used the bookstalls at St. Paul’s.

  The King had taken Bristol and that, in a very strange way, worried Sir George. It worried him because it suggested that the Royalists might be gaining the upper hand in the Civil War, and if Sir George changed sides now, then there were many men who would say he did it out of fear, deserting Parliament in a cowardly attempt to join the winning side, and that was not true.

  Sir George wanted to change sides, but his reasons had nothing to do with the fall of Bristol.

  War had begun the previous year and Sir George, as a loyal Parliamentarian, had no doubts then. He had been offended, deeply so, by King Charles’s use of illegal taxation, and the offense had become personal when the King had forced loans out of his richer subjects. The loans, Sir George knew, would never be repaid and he was among the men who had been robbed by his monarch.

  The argument between King and Parliament had drifted almost imperceptibly into war. Sir George continued to support Parliament for its cause was his cause; that the kingdom should be ruled by law and that no man, not even the King of England, was above that law. That doctrine pleased Sir George, made his support of the rebellion firm, yet now he knew that he was changing sides. He would support the King against Parliament.

  He moved to one of the great buttresses of the medieval Cathedral and leaned against the sun-warmed stone. It was not, he thought, that he had changed, it was the cause that had changed. He had entered the rebellion convinced that it was a political fight, a war to decide how the country should be governed, but in opening the gates of battle Parliament had released a plague of monsters. The monsters took religious shapes.

  Sir George Lazender was a Protestant, stout in the defense of his faith, but he had little time for the Ranters, the Fifth Monarchy Men, the Anabaptists, the Familists, the Mortalists, or any of the other strange sects that had suddenly emerged to preach their own brand of revolutionary religion. Fanaticism had swamped London. Only two days before he had seen a stark naked woman parading in the Strand, preaching the Rantist sect, and the extraordinary thing was that people took such nonsense seriously! And with the religious nonsense, that might be harmless, came more insidious political demands.

  Parliament claimed that it fought only against the King’s advisers. That, Sir George knew, was a nonsense, but it gave Parliament a shred of legality in its revolt. The aim of Parliament was to restore the King to his throne in Whitehall, a throne that was meticulously maintained for his return, and then to force him to rule England with the consent and help of his Parliament. There would, of course, be great changes. The bishops would have to go, and the archbishops, so that the Church of England would appear a more Protestant church and, though Sir George was not personally offended by bishops, he would sacrifice them willingly if it meant a King ruling a kingdom according to law and not whim. Yet Sir George no longer trusted that Parliament, if it defeated the King, could control the victory.

  The fanatics were fuelling the rebellion, changing it. They spoke now not just of abolishing the bishops, but of abolishing the King as well. Men preached an end to property and privilege and Sir George remembered with horror a popular verse of the previous year:

  Wee’l teach the nobles how to crouch,

  And keep the gentry downe.

  Well, Sir George was a gentleman, and his eldest child, Anne, had married the Earl of Fleet who was a noble. The Earl of Fleet, a good Puritan, believed that the fanatics could be contained, but Sir George no longer did. He could not support a cause that would, in the end, destroy him and his children, and so he had decided, reluctantly, to fight against that cause. He would leave London. He would pack his precious books, his silver, his pewter and his furniture, and he would abandon London and Parliament, to return to Lazen Castle.

  He would miss London. He looked up from the Harington and stared fondly at the cathedral precinct. This was the place where unemployed house servants came to look for new employers, it was where the booksellers could set up their stalls, and it was where virulent sermons were preached beneath St. Paul’s Cross. It was a place of life, color, movement, and crowds, and Sir George would miss it. He liked the sense of life in London, its crowded streets, the never-ending noise, the long conversations, the feeling that things happened here because they were forced to happen. He would miss the politics, the laughter, and the house near Charing Cross from which, on the one side, he could look into green fields, and from the other into the smoky heart of the great city. Yet London was the heart of Parliament’s rebellion and he could not stay if he changed sides.

  “Sir George! Sir George!” The voice called to him from the direction of Ludgate Hill. “Sir George!”

  Reluctantly he put the book back on the table. This was a man he could not
brush off by pretending to read. “My dear John!”

  Only minutes before Sir George had been thinking of his son-in-law, the Earl of Fleet, and now the Earl, red-faced and sweating, pushed his way through the midday crowds. “Sir George!” he called out again, fearful that his father-in-law might yet escape.

  Sir George was fifty-five, counted an old man by his colleagues, yet he remained alert and spry. His hair was white, yet there was a liveliness to his face that made him seem younger than his years. The Earl of Fleet, on the other hand, though twenty years Sir George’s junior, had the burdened face of a man old before his time. He was a serious man, even, Sir George suspected, a tedious man. Like many other aristocrats he was a confirmed Puritan who fought for Parliament. “I thought I might find you here, father-in-law, I’ve come from Whitehall.”

  He made it sound like a complaint. Sir George smiled. “It’s always good to see you, John.”

  “We have to speak, Sir George, a matter of utmost importance.”

  “Ah.” Sir George looked about the precinct, knowing that the Earl would not wish to be overheard in such a public place. Reluctantly Sir George suggested that they share a boat back to Whitehall. It was odd, Sir George thought, how no one minded being overheard by watermen.

  They walked down to St. Paul’s wharf, down the steep street that was noisy with trade and shaded by washing strung between the overhanging upper stories. They joined the queue waiting for the watermen, keeping to the right for they needed a two-oared boat and not the single sculls that sufficed a lone passenger. The Earl of Fleet frowned at the delay. He was a busy man, preparing to leave in a week’s time for the war in the west country. Sir George could not imagine his portly, self-important son-in-law as a leader of troops, but he kept his amusement to himself.