A Crowning Mercy

by Bernard Cornwell

  “The pressure?”

  He nodded. “I don’t know. It’s just there. The water’s thicker.”

  “And then?”

  “You stroke.” He showed her how he worked his fingers back and forth, closing on the strange pressure until he could feel the fish’s belly. Because his fingers were as cold as the water, and because they moved with infinite slowness the fish suspected nothing. He told her how to stroke the fish, always stroking backward and always gently, until the hands knew precisely how the trout lay in the water. Then he pounced. The fish was jerked out of the weed, faster than it could twist away, and he would send it spinning to the bank. “Then you hit its head.” He grinned.

  She laughed. “Truly?”

  He nodded. “On my honor. Were you swimming?”

  She shook her head and lied. “No.”

  His legs were bare, his wet breeches rolled up. He smiled. “I’ll look the other way while you finish dressing.”

  She felt a pang of fear. “You shouldn’t be here!”

  “Don’t tell anyone and I won’t.”

  She looked about her, but could see no one watching. She put on stockings and shoes, her apron, and laced up her dress.

  Toby made her laugh. She felt no fear of him. She had never met anyone with whom it was so easy to talk. Her father’s absence meant time was not pressing on her and they talked all afternoon. Toby lay on his stomach as he told her of his unhappiness with the war and of his wish to fight for the King rather than his father’s side. She felt a chill go through her when he proclaimed his loyalty for the enemy. He smiled at her, teasing her gently, but asking an unstated question at the same time. “You wouldn’t support the King, would you?”

  She looked at him. Her heart was beating loud. She smiled back shyly. “I might.”

  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 realization 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 savored 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 toward his face, staring at her over the petals, then kissed it. He held it toward 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.
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  Two

  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 hear were her hopeless sobs as she lay curled at the pillow end of the bed. Her wrist was bloody where the belt had caught it. Goodwife Baggerlie, her hands still tangled in Campion’s hair, looked at her master. “More, sir?”

  Matthew Slythe, his short dark hair dishevelled, his big, red face distorted in anger, gasped great lungfuls of air. The fury was still on him. “Whore! Harlot! You have no shame!”

  Campion wept. The pain was dreadful. Her back was bruised, bleeding in places, and the leather belt had strapped her on legs, belly and arms as she had scrambled away from his fury. She said nothing; she could hardly hear her father.

  Her lack of response angered him. The belt whistled again, she called out and the lash cut into her hip. The black dress hardly dulled any of the force.

  Matthew Slythe’s breath was hoarse in his throat. He was fifty-four now, yet still an immensely strong man for his age. “Naked! Woman brought sin into this world, and a woman’s shame is her nakedness. This is a Christian house!” He bellowed the last words as he brought the belt down again. “A Christian house!”

  An owl hooted outside. The night wind stirred the curtains, wavered the candle flames, made the great shadow on the wall shiver.

  Matthew Slythe was shaking now, his fury subsiding. He put the belt about his waist and buckled it. He had cut his hand on the buckle but he did not notice. He looked at Goodwife. “Bring her down when she’s tidy.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  This was not the first beating she had been given; she had lost count of the times that her father had harnessed God’s wrath to his right arm. She sobbed, the pain blurring everything and then Goodwife Baggerlie slapped her face. “Get up!”

  Elizabeth Baggerlie, who had been honored by Matthew Slythe with the name Goodwife after the death of his wife, was a short, fat-waisted woman with a shrewish, raw-boned face and small red eyes. She ruled Werlatton Hall’s servants and she devoted her life to the extermination of the Hall’s dust and dirt as her master devoted his to the extermination of Werlatton’s sin. The servants were driven about Werlatton Hall by Goodwife’s shrill, scouring voice, and Matthew Slythe had given her also the governance of his daughter.

  Now Goodwife thrust Campion’s bonnet at her. “You should be ashamed of yourself, girl! Ashamed. There’s a devil in you, that’s what there is! If your dear mother had known, if she’d known! Hurry!”

  Campion pulled the bonnet on with nerveless fingers. Her breath came in great, sobbing gasps.

  “Hurry, girl!”

  The household was awesomely quiet. The servants all knew that the beating was taking place, they could hear the belt, the screams, the terrifying anger of their master. They hid their feelings. The beating could happen to any of them.

  “Stand up!”

  Campion was shaking. The pain was as it always was. She knew she would not be able to sleep on her back for at least three or four nights. She moved like a dumb thing, knowing what was to happen, submitting to the inescapable force of her father.

  “Downstairs, girl!”

  Ebenezer, one year younger than his sister, sat reading his Bible in the great hall. The floor shone. The furniture shone. His eyes, dark as sin, dark as his Puritan clothes, looked unfeelingly at his sister. His left leg, twisted and shrunk at birth, stuck out awkwardly. He had told his father of what he had seen and then listened with quiet satisfaction to the searing cracks of the belt. Ebenezer was never beaten. He sought and gained his father’s approval by quiet obedience and hours of Bible reading and prayer.

  Campion still cried as she came down the stairs. Her beautiful face was smeared with tears, her eyes red, her mouth twisted.

  Ebenezer, his black hair cut short in the fashion that had given rise to the nickname “Roundheads,” watched her. Goodwife nodded to him, and he acknowledged the recognition with a slow, stately inclination of the head. At nineteen he was old beyond his years, bitter with his father’s bitterness, envious of his sister’s wholeness.

  Campion was taken to her father’s study. Outside the door, as ever, Goodwife pushed down on her shoulder. “Down!” Then Goodwife knocked on the door.

  “Come in!”

  The ritual was always the same. After the punishment, forgiveness, and after the pain, prayer. She crawled in on hands and knees as her father demanded of her and Goodwife shut her in with Matthew Slythe.

  “Come here, Dorcas.”

  She crawled to his chair. She hated him at this moment. She submitted because she had no choice.

  The big hands closed on her tight-fitting bonnet. She hated the feel of them. The fingers pressed on her skull.

  “Oh God our Father! Almighty God!” The fingers pressed tighter and tighter. His voice rose in powerful prayer, as Matthew Slythe hectored his God asking Him to forgive his daughter, to cleanse her, to make her whole, to take away her shame, and all the while the hands threatened to crush her skull. He pushed at her head, shaking it, seeking in a paroxysm of power to convince God that Dorcas needed His grace, and when the prayer was over he leaned back, exhausted, and told her to stand up.

  He had a strong face, big-boned and fierce, a face heavy with God’s anger. He looked at Campion with his usual distaste and his voice was deep. “You are a disappointment to me, daughter.”

  “Yes, father.” She stood with head bowed, hating him. Neither he nor her mother had ever kissed her, ever hugged her. They had beaten her, prayed over her, but never seemed to love her.

  Matthew Slythe rested his hand on his Bible. He breathed heavily. “Woman brought sin into the world, Dorcas, and woman must ever bear that disgrace. A woman’s nakedness is her shame. It is disgusting to God.”

  “Yes, father.”

  “Look at me!”

  She raised her eyes. His face was twisted with dislike.

  “How could you do it?”

  She thought he would hit her again. She stood still.

  He opened the Bible, his fingers seeking the book of Proverbs. He read to her, his voice grating. “‘For by means of a whorish woman a man is brought to a piece of bread.’” The page turned. “‘Her house is the way to hell, Going down to the chambers of death.’” He looked up at her.

  “Yes, father.”

  He seemed to growl. He had beaten her again and again, but he had never crushed her and he knew it. He could see the flicker of challenge in her soul and he knew that he would never destroy it. Yet he would never stop trying. “You will learn the seventh and eighth chapters of Proverbs by heart by this time tomorrow night.”

  “Yes, father.” She already knew them.

  “And you will pray for forgiveness, for grace, for the Holy Spirit.”

  “Yes, father.”

  “Leave.”

  Ebenezer still sat in the hall. He looked at her and smiled. “Did it hurt?”

  She stopped and looked at him. “Yes.”

  He still smiled, one hand holding the pages of his Bible flat. “I told him.”

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nbsp; She nodded. “I thought you might have done.” She had always tried to love Ebenezer, to give him the love she had not been given, to protect a small, weak, crippled boy who was her brother. He had always rejected her.

  Now he sneered. “You disgust me, Dorcas. You’re not fit to be in this house.”

  “Good night, Eb.” She climbed the stairs slowly, her back hurting and her mind filled with the bleakness and horror of Werlatton Hall.

  Matthew Slythe prayed when she was gone, prayed as he often prayed with a furious, twisting intensity as if he thought God would not hear a quiet plea.

  Dorcas was a curse to him. She had brought him wealth beyond his dreams, but she was, as he had feared when the wealth was offered, a child of sin.

  She had never, in truth, been bad, but Matthew Slythe did not see that. Her sin was to be strong, to be happy, to show no signs of fear of the awful, vengeful God who was Matthew Slythe’s master. Dorcas had to be crushed. The child of sin must become a child of God and he knew he had failed. He knew that she called herself a Christian, that she prayed, that she believed in God, but Matthew Slythe feared the streak of independence in his daughter. He feared she could be worldly, that she could seek out the pleasures of this world that were damned, pleasures that could be hers if she found his secret.

  There was a jewel hidden, a seal of gold, which he had not looked at in sixteen years. If Dorcas found it, if she learned what it meant, then she might seek the help of the seal and uncover the Covenant. Matthew Slythe groaned. The money of the Covenant belonged to Dorcas but she must never know. It must be tied up by a will, by his wishes, and above all, by a marriage settlement. His daughter, with her dangerous beauty, must never know she was rich. The money which had come from sin must belong to God, to Matthew Slythe’s God. He drew a sheet of paper toward him, his head throbbing with the echoes of prayer, and wrote a letter to London. He would settle his daughter once and for all. He would crush her.