A Crowning Mercy. Bernard Cornwell

room, to her left her mother’s, and she hesitated.

      It was dark in the room. She wished she had thought to bring a candle, but the curtains were open and slowly her eyes became accustomed to the gloom. She could hear her own breathing. Every sound she made seemed magnified; the rustle of skirts and petticoat, the tiny scuff of her stockinged feet on the wooden floor.

      She looked to the right, hearing even her hair as it moved on her shoulders, and she saw the mess in her father’s dressing room. Someone had been here before her, had turned out the chest and pulled clothes from the shelves. She suspected her mother’s room would have had the same treatment. The door was ajar.

      She crept towards it, letting her weight gently on to each foot, freezing at the slightest creak of a board, and then her hand was on the door, she pushed and it swung ponderously, silently open.

      Moonlight showed her the small room. A door at the far end gave directly into Goodwife’s bedroom. It was shut. If anyone had searched this room they had left it tidy or, more likely, Goodwife had been in after them. It was used now to store the heavy flax sheets that were pale on the shelves. The room smelt of rue which, Goodwife said, repelled moths.

      Closed up. Her mother’s big chest stood, its lid open, against the wall.

      Campion was nervous. She listened. She could hear the creak of timbers in the old house, she could hear her own breathing, she could hear the far, muffled rumble of Scammell’s snoring.

      She was close, she knew she was. She remembered playing hunt-the-thimble with their old cook, Agnes, in the kitchen garden, and Campion knew that at this moment she was warm. Over the years she suddenly heard Agnes’s voice: ‘You’ll burn yourself, child, you’re that close! Look, child! Go on with you!’

      She was utterly still, drawn to this room by instincts sharpened by her long immersion in her father’s papers. She imagined him hiding something. What would he have done?

      Secret places. Closed up. Then it came to her, so simple, and again she was listening to her father’s voice. He had preached each Sunday to his household in the days before Faithful Unto Death had come to Werlatton parish, and now Campion was remembering one of those sermons. It had been his usual two-hour length, the servants and family expected to be still on the hard benches as he preached, and she remembered the sermon about the secret places of a man’s heart. It was not enough, her father had said, to be an outward Christian, praying much and giving much, because there were secret places in a man’s heart where evil could lurk. It was in those secret places that God looked.

      It is like, Matthew Slythe had preached, a strong box. When the lid is open a thief in the night will see only an ordinary chest, but the owner knows that there is a secret layer at the bottom of the chest. God is the owner, and he knows what is in the secret part of each person’s life. Campion remembered the story and turned slowly, knowing that her father drew his stories and examples from his own life.

      It would not be this chest but his own, and Campion went soft as the night across the floor, like a thief in the darkness, into the room that was strewn with his clothes, pulled the untidy mess out of the huge wooden chest and made a pile of clothes on the floor.

      She searched the bare, wooden box, finding nothing, but always hearing the voice across the years from the kitchen garden. ‘Look, child!’

      She tried to lift the chest, but it was impossibly heavy, and she probed at its corners, pushed each knothole in the wood. Nothing moved, nothing gave, yet still she knew she was warm.

      In the end it was simple. The base of the chest was surrounded by a thick skirting board of varnished wood which she had tugged and pushed. Then she thought that it might be easier to lift the chest at one end, jam a pair of her father’s great shoes beneath, and thus feel the chest’s base. She shuffled slowly to the right-hand side of the huge chest, moved a pair of her father’s breeches out of the way, and saw something she had missed in the thick darkness of the room. There was a handle cut into the skirting board, presumably to facilitate the lifting of the heavy chest, and she knelt in front of it, gripped the simple handle, and tried once more to lift the chest.

      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