A Crowning Mercy. Bernard Cornwell

      For you, she was saying, I might even change the loyalty in which I was reared.

      She was a Puritan girl, protected from the world, and she had never been allowed more than four miles from home. She had been raised in the harsh morality of her father’s angry religion, and though he had insisted that she learn to read, it had been only so she could search the scriptures for salvation. She was ignorant, kept deliberately so, for the Puritans feared the knowledge of the world and its seducing power, yet not even Matthew Slythe could rein in his daughter’s imagination. He could pray for her, he could beat her, he could punish her, but he could not, though he had tried, stop her dreaming dreams.

      She would say later that this was love at first sight.

      It was, too, if love was a sudden, overwhelming urge to know Toby Lazender better, to spend time with this young man who made her laugh and feel special. She had been walled in all her life, and the result had been that she dreamed of the wild world outside, seeing it as a place of laughter and happiness, and now, suddenly, this emissary from beyond the wall had broken in and found her. He brought happiness and she fell in love with him there and then, beside the stream, making him the object of all the dreams that were to come.

      He saw a girl more beautiful than any he had seen before. Her skin was pale and clear, her eyes blue, her nose straight over a wide mouth. When her hair dried it fell like spun gold. He sensed a strength in her that was like fine steel, yet when he asked if he could come again she shook her head. ‘My father won’t allow it.’

      ‘Do I need his permission?’

      She smiled. ‘You take his fish.’

      He looked at her in astonishment. ‘You’re Slythe’s daughter?’

      She nodded.

      Toby laughed. ‘Dear God! Your mother must have been an angel!’

      She laughed. Martha Slythe had been fat, vengeful and bitter. ‘No.’

      ‘What’s your name?’

      She looked at him, sadness in her. She hated her name and she did not want him to know it. She thought he would think less of her because of her name’s ugliness, and as she thought that, so the realisation struck her that she would never be allowed to meet him again. Her name could never be Toby’s business.

      He persisted. ‘Tell me?’

      She shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

      ‘But it does!’ he exclaimed. ‘More than the sky, the stars, the heavens, more than my dinner tonight! Tell me.’

      She laughed at his ridiculous ebullience. ‘You don’t want to know my name.’

      ‘I do. Otherwise I shall just have to invent a name for you.’

      She smiled as she stared over the stream. She was embarrassed. Perhaps the name he would invent would be worse than her real name. She could not look at him as she spoke it aloud. ‘My name’s Dorcas.’

      She expected him to laugh, but there was silence, so she turned a defiant stare on him. ‘Dorcas Slythe.’

      He shook his head slowly, looking serious. ‘I think we must find you a new name.’

      She had known he would hate her name.

      Toby smiled, then leaned over to her rush basket. He picked up one of the pink-red campion flowers and slowly twirled the blossom in front of his eyes. He stared at it. ‘I shall call you Campion.’

      She liked it immediately, feeling as if all her life she had waited for this moment when someone would tell her who she was. Campion. She said the name over and over in her mind, Campion, and she savoured it, liking it, and knowing it was a hopeless dream. ‘My name is Dorcas Slythe.’

      He shook his head, slowly and deliberately. ‘You’re Campion. Now and forever.’ He drew the flower towards his face, staring at her over the petals, then kissed it. He held it towards her. ‘Who are you?’

      She reached for the flower. Her heart was beating as it did before she swam. Her fingers trembled as she took the stalk, shaking the petals, and her voice was low. ‘Campion.’

      It seemed to her, that moment, as if nothing existed in all creation except herself, Toby, and the fragile, beautiful flower.

      He looked at her, his own voice low. ‘I shall be here tomorrow afternoon.’

      The hopelessness rushed in to spoil the moment. ‘I won’t,’ she said. ‘I can’t.’ The rushes were cut only once a week, and she had no other excuse for visiting the stream. The thought reminded her that she was late, that she must hurry.

      Toby still watched her. ‘When will you be here?’

      ‘Next week.’

      Toby sighed. ‘I’ll be in London.’

      ‘London?’

      He nodded. ‘My father’s sending me to learn some law. Not much, he says, just enough to know how to avoid all lawyers.’ He looked up at the sky, gauging the time. ‘I’d rather be fighting.’ He was twenty-four and men much younger were fighting.

      ‘Would you?’

      He sat up. ‘It will be a dull place if the Puritans take over.’

      She nodded. She knew. The Puritans already controlled her life. She pinned her hair up. ‘I’ll be in church on Sunday.’

      He looked at her. ‘I’ll pretend I’m a Puritan.’ He made a grim, glum face and she laughed.

      He had to go. He had come to the next village to buy a horse and the horse was being shod for him. It was a long journey back to Lazen Castle, but he would do it swiftly with a dream in his head of a girl he had met by a stream.

      ‘Till Sunday, Campion.’

      She nodded. Even talking to him was a sin, or so her father would say, but she wanted to see him again. She was in love, a hopeless, romantic, helpless love because there was nothing she could do about it. She was her father’s daughter, at his command, and she was Dorcas Slythe.

      Yet she yearned, now, to be Campion.

      Toby cut the rushes for her, making it all a game, and then he left. She watched him walk north along the stream and she wished she was going with him. She wished she was anywhere but at Werlatton.

      She carried the rushes home, hiding the campion flowers in her apron while, unknown to her, her brother, Ebenezer, who had watched all afternoon from the shadows under the great beeches, limped to the Dorchester road and waited for their father.

      She was Dorcas and she wanted to be Campion.

2

      The leather belt cracked on to her back.

      Matthew Slythe’s shadow was monstrous on her bedroom wall. He had brought candles to her room, unbuckled his belt and his big, heavy face was burdened with God’s anger.

      ‘Whore!’ Again his arm descended, again the leather slammed down. Goodwife Baggerlie, whose hands were in her hair, was pulling Campion across the bed so that Matthew Slythe could whip her back.

      ‘Harlot!’ He was a huge man, bigger than any man who worked for him, and he felt a thick fury within him. His daughter naked in a stream! Naked! And then talking to a young man. ‘Who was he?’

      ‘I don’t know!’ Her voice came in sobs.

      ‘Who was he?’

      ‘I don’t know!’

      ‘Liar!’ He brought the belt down again, she screamed with the pain and then his anger took over. He thrashed her, shouting that she was a sinner. He was in a blind fury. The leather tip of the belt lashed on the wall and ceiling and still he drove his arm so that her screams stopped and all he could