A Crowning Mercy. Bernard Cornwell

to hurt!’ She pealed with laughter at the thought, her eyes unblinking on the man of God who, sure enough, reacted. Whether it was the talk of Romish saints or the discussion of breasts that had offended him, Campion could not tell. He leaned towards Mrs Swan.

      ‘You are indecent in your talk, woman!’

      She ignored him and smiled at Campion. ‘Does she have long ears, dear?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘God be thanked for that, dear, ’cos there’s no cure for long ears except a clouting. A good clouting!’ She turned to the minister, but he had already leaned back in defeat, his eyes on Ecclesiastes. Mrs Swan tried to rouse him again. ‘Has she got the falling sickness?’

      ‘Oh, yes.’

      ‘Yes. My aunt had that, God rest her. One moment she was on her feet, the next she was flat on the floor. Just like that. St Valentine cures that, dear.’ The minister stayed silent.

      Mrs Swan settled back on the bench. ‘I’m going to sleep now, dear. If anyone molests you,’ and here she looked hard at the travelling preacher, ‘you just wake me up.’

      Mrs Swan was her guide, her mentor, her protector, and now, as they alighted at the end of the Strand, her landlady too. She would not hear of Campion seeking lodging in an inn, though she had not been slow to make clear that her hospitality was not free. ‘Not that I’m greedy, dear, no. No one can say that of Mildred Swan, but a body has to look after a body.’ With which gnomic words the deal had been made.

      Even though Charing Cross and the Strand were not London proper, but just the westward extension of the houses built outside the old walls of the city, it seemed fearful to Campion. The eastern sky was hazed dark with the smoke of innumerable chimneys, a haze pierced by more church towers and spires than Campion could have dreamed possible; the whole overshadowed by the great cathedral on the hill. The houses in the Strand, down which Mrs Swan led her, were huge and rich, their doors guarded by armed men, while the street was filled with cripples and beggars. Campion saw men with empty, festering eye-sockets, children with no legs who swung themselves along on strong arms, and women whose faces were covered with open sores. It stank.

      Mrs Swan noticed none of it. ‘This is the Strand, dear. Used to be a lot of gentry along here, but most have gone, more’s the pity. It’s all Saints, now, and Saints don’t pay like the gentry.’ Mrs Swan had been left money by her sea-captain husband, but she augmented her income by embroidery, and the Puritan revolution in London had lowered the demand for such decorative work.

      A troop of soldiers marched from the city, long pikes over their shoulders, their barred helmets bright in the sunlight. People were thrust unceremoniously from their path. Mrs Swan shouted scornfully at them, ‘Make way for the Lord’s anointed!’ An officer looked sternly at her, but Mildred Swan was not a woman to be overawed by the military. ‘Watch your step, Captain!’ She laughed as the officer hastily dodged a pile of horse-dung. She made a dismissive gesture at the soldiers. ‘Just playing, they are. Did you see those boys at the Knight’s Bridge?’ The coach had been stopped at the bridge in the fields to the west of London, and the soldiers had searched the travellers. Mrs Swan snorted. ‘Little boys, they are. That’s all! Shave their heads and they think they can rule the world! This way, dear.’

      Campion was led into an alley so narrow that she could not walk alongside Mrs Swan. She was lost now, confused by the maze of tiny streets, but at last Mrs Swan reached a blue door which she laboriously unlocked, pushed Campion inside, and Campion reflected, as she settled into the small parlour, that she had reached her destination. Here, in this great, confusing city, she might find the answer to the seal which hung between her breasts. Here too was Toby Lazender, and in a world where her only friend was Mrs Swan, he suddenly loomed large in her thoughts. She was in London at last, free.

      Mrs Swan sat heavily opposite her, pulled up her skirts and took off her pattens. ‘Oh, my poor corns! Well, dear! We’re here.’

      Campion smiled. ‘We’re here.’ Where the mystery could be solved.

7

      Campion’s behaviour, before she ran away from Werlatton, had been so solitary and eccentric that her absence on the first morning provoked nothing more than grumbles and self-satisfied noises from Goodwife saying that she had always known the girl could not be trusted. By mid-afternoon the grumbles had turned to alarm in Scammell’s head and he ordered a horse saddled and rode himself about the bounds of the estate.

      Even when it was realised that Campion had disappeared, their imagination could not encompass anything so dramatic as a journey to London. On the second day, at dawn, Scammell ordered Tobias Horsnell to search the villages to the north, while he and Ebenezer went south and west. By then the trail was long cold, and that evening, in the great hall, Samuel Scammell felt the stirrings of fear. The girl was his passport to riches beyond dream and she had gone.

      Goodwife Baggerlie took pleasure in Campion’s disappearance, much as bad news will always cheer a prophet of doom. Goodwife had joined eagerly in the Slythes’ persecution of their daughter, a persecution that was rooted in a distaste for her looks, her spirit, and her apparent unwillingness to subdue her soul to the tedious boredom of Puritan existence. Now that Campion had fled, Goodwife dredged from the past an endless catalogue of trivial sins, each magnified in Goodwife’s sullen mind. ‘She has a devil, master, a devil.’

      Faithful Unto Death Hervey, who had joined the search, looked at Goodwife. ‘A devil?’

      ‘Her father, God bless him, could control it.’ Goodwife sniffed and dabbed at red eyes with her apron. ‘“He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes.”’

      ‘Amen,’ said Scammell.

      ‘Praise his word,’ said Ebenezer, who had never been beaten by his father, though he had often watched as his sister was lashed with the great belt.

      Faithful Unto Death Hervey steepled long fingers in front of his bobbing Adam’s apple. ‘“As a jewel of gold in a swine’s snout, so is a fair woman which is without discretion.”’

      ‘Indeed and indeed.’ Scammell searched his mind for a suitable verse of scripture so he would not be left behind in this company. Nothing came to mind except inappropriate words from the Song of Solomon, words he dared not say aloud: ‘Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins.’ He groaned inwardly. He wondered what her breasts were like, breasts that he had yearned to fondle, and now, perhaps he would never know. She had gone, taking her beauty with her, and taking, too, Scammell’s hope of wealth. ‘We must watch and pray.’

      ‘Amen,’ Ebenezer said. ‘Watch and pray.’

      Campion’s supposition was right. Grenville Cony was, indeed, a lawyer, only now, according to Mrs Swan, much more. ‘He’s a knight, dear, Sir Grenville, and he’s so high and mighty that he doesn’t notice the likes of you and I. He’s a politician. A lawyer and a politician!’ Her words left no doubt as to her opinions of both categories. Lawyers, to Mrs Swan, were the lowest form of life. ‘Killing’s too good for them, dear. Bloodsuckers, dear. If God hadn’t invented sin, then the lawyers would, just to line their own purses.’ She expounded further so that her life, to Campion, seemed to have been a perilous journey between the dangers of various illnesses on the one side, and the plottings of predatory lawyers on the other. ‘I could tell you stories, dear,’ said Mrs Swan, and proved it by doing so; many of the stories of a complexity that would have done credit to a lawyer, but all distinguished by endings in which Mrs Swan, single-handedly, confounded the entire legal profession.

      Yet Campion could see little choice but to visit Sir Grenville Cony and here, once more, fortune smiled on her. A neighbour of Mrs Swan, a French tailor, knew Sir Grenville’s address which turned out to be one of the massive houses in the Strand.

      Mrs Swan was pleased. ‘That’s convenient, dear, nice and close.’ She was threading coloured silks on to fine needles. ‘You tell him, dear, that if he