A Crowning Mercy. Bernard Cornwell

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, transferring 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.

8

      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 theatre 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 wellborn 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 memorised 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 Sepulchre’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 parlour. ‘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