A Crowning Mercy. Bernard Cornwell

‘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 afterwards, 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.

      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