A Crowning Mercy

by Bernard Cornwell

  “Indeed and indeed,” Scammell smiled and nodded vigorously.

  “Master Ebenezer?”

  Ebenezer nodded, though Campion could see a small frown on his face as though he did not fully understand.

  “Miss Dorcas?”

  “No, I don’t understand.”

  This was unexpected, for Isaac Blood started with some surprise, and then looked annoyed. “You don’t understand?”

  Campion stood and walked toward the north-facing windows. “What is the Covenant, Mr. Blood?” She felt that her wings had been mangled, torn, bloodied, and she was plummeting helpless to earth. Her father’s death had solved nothing, merely delayed the wedding.

  The lawyer ignored her question. He was bundling his papers together. “If you will permit some small advice? I would suggest a quiet wedding in the near future. Six weeks perhaps? It would not be unfitting.” He peered heavily at Samuel Scammell. “You understand, Mr. Scammell, that the will supposed your marriage, and your position in the household is dependent upon it?”

  “I do understand, yes.”

  “And, of course, it would be Matthew Slythe’s wish that the happy event was not overlong delayed. Things must be regular, Mr. Scammell. Regular!”

  “Indeed and indeed.” Scammell stood to show the lawyer out.

  Campion turned from the window. “Mr. Blood, you did not answer my question. What is the Covenant?”

  Her father had been embarrassed by the question, but the lawyer shrugged dismissively. “Your marriage portion, Miss Slythe. The estate, of course, was always destined for your brother, but your father made arrangements for your dowry. I fear I know little more. It was handled by a lawyer in London, but I suspect you will find yourself generously provided for.”

  “Indeed,” Scammell nodded at her, eager for her to be pleased.

  There was a brief silence. Campion’s question had been answered and it had offered her no hope of escaping marriage with Scammell. Then Ebenezer’s grating voice was loud in the room. “What is ‘generously’? How much is the Covenant worth?”

  Isaac Blood shrugged. “I do not know.”

  Scammell raised his eyebrows archly, fidgeted, and looked pleased with himself. He was bursting with his news, eager to impress the beautiful, golden-haired girl whom he wanted to embrace. He wanted Campion to approve of him, to like him, and he hoped that his next words would break the dam of her withheld feelings. “I can answer that question, indeed I can.” He smiled at Campion. “Last year, as near as we can judge, the Covenant yielded ten thousand pounds.”

  “Dear God!” Isaac Blood held on to the lectern.

  Ebenezer stood up slowly, his face animated for the first time that day. “How much?”

  “Ten thousand pounds.” Scammell said it humbly, as though he were responsible for the profit yet did not want to sound boastful. “It fluctuates, of course. Some years more, some less.”

  “Ten thousand pounds?” Ebenezer’s voice was rising in shocked anger. “Ten thousand?” It was a sum of such vast proportions that it was scarcely conceivable. A King’s ransom, a fortune, a sum far in excess of Werlatton’s income. Ebenezer might expect £700 a year from the estate and now he was hearing that his sister had been given far, far more.

  Scammell giggled with pleasure. “Indeed and indeed.” Now, perhaps, Campion would marry him with a glad heart. They would be rich as few in this world are rich. “You’re surprised, my dear?”

  Campion shared her brother’s disbelief. Ten thousand pounds! It was an unthinkable sum. She was grasping for understanding and failing, but she remembered the words of the will and ignored Samuel Scammell. “Mr. Blood? Do I comprehend the will to mean that the money becomes mine when I am twenty-five?”

  “Quite so, quite so.” Isaac Blood was looking at her with a new respect. “Not, of course, if you are married, for then the monies will be your dear husband’s, as is proper. But should he predecease you,” here Blood made an apologetic motion toward Scammell, “then, of course, you will take the seal into your own keeping. That much, I think, is clear from the will.”

  “The seal?” Ebenezer had limped close to the lectern.

  Blood was pouring the last of the malmsey into his glass. “It merely authenticates the signature on any paper dealing with the Covenant.”

  “But where is it, Mr. Blood? Where is it?” Ebenezer was unusually animated.

  The lawyer drank the sweet wine, then shrugged. “How would I know, Master Ebenezer? I assume it is in your father’s belongings.” He stared regretfully into the empty wine glass. “You should look for it. I recommend a diligent search.”

  He left, after expressing perfunctory but profound sympathies for their sad loss, and Ebenezer and Scammell escorted the lawyer to his horse. Campion was left alone. The sun slanted through leaded windows on to the polished, waxed floorboards. She was still a prisoner here; the fortune of the Covenant changed nothing. She did not understand all the legalities; she only understood that she was trapped.

  Samuel Scammell came back into the hall, his shoes squeaking on the boards. “My dear? Our fortune surprised you?”

  She looked wearily at him. “Leave me alone. Please? Leave me alone.”

  It was August now, a high, ripening August that promised better crops than for years past. Campion walked through the scented fields, avoiding those where anyone worked, seeking always the solitary places where she could sit and think. She ate alone, slept alone, yet her presence pervaded Werlatton Hall. It was as if her father’s force, his ability to impose a mood upon the house, had passed to her. Goodwife Baggerlie resented it most. “She’s got a devil in her, master, you mark my words!”

  “Grief is hard,” Scammell said.

  “Grief! She’s not grieving!” Goodwife crossed her arms and stared defiantly at Scammell. “She needs a beating, master, that’s all! A good beating! That’ll teach her her place. Her father would have beaten her, God rest his soul, and so you should.” Goodwife began vigorously dusting the hall table where Scammell was finishing a lonely lunch. “She’s lacked for nothing, that girl, nothing! If I’d been given her advantages…” She tutted, leaving it to Scammell’s imagination what heights Goodwife might have scaled had she been Matthew Slythe’s daughter. “Give her a beating, master! Belts aren’t just for holding up breeches!”

  Scammell was master now, doling out the servants’ wages and collecting the estate’s rents. Ebenezer helped him, sharing the work and always seeking to ingratiate himself with the older man. They shared a concern, too. The seal of the Covenant could not be found.

  Campion did not care. The existence of the Covenant with its extraordinary income did not help her. She was still trapped in a marriage she did not want and neither ten pounds nor ten thousand would reconcile her to Scammell. It was not, she knew, that he was a bad man, though she suspected he was a weak man. He might, she supposed, make a good husband, but not for her. She wanted to be happy, she wanted to be free, and Scammell’s flabby lust was inadequate compensation for the abandonment of her dreams. She was Dorcas and she wanted to be Campion.

  She did not swim again—there was no joy in that now—yet she still visited the pool where the purple loosestrife was in flower and remembered Toby Lazender. She could not summon his face in her imagination any more, yet she remembered his gentle teasing, his easy manner, and she daydreamed that one day he might come back to the pool, and rescue her from Werlatton and its crushing rule of the Saints.

  She was thinking of Toby one afternoon, a smile on her face for she was imagining him coming, when there were hoofbeats in the meadow behind and she turned, the smile still there, and watched as Ebenezer rode toward her. “Sister.”

  She held the smile for him. “Eb.” She had hoped, for one mad, exhilarating second, that it was Toby. Instead her brother’s face scowled at her.

  She had never been close to Ebenezer, though she had tried so hard. When she had played games in the kitchen garden, safe from her parents’ prying eyes, Eben
ezer would never join in. He preferred to sit with his open Bible, memorizing the chapter ordained by his father for the day, and even then he had watched his sister with a jaundiced, jealous gaze. Yet he was her brother, her only relative, and Campion had thought much about him during the week. Perhaps Ebenezer could be an ally. She patted the grass beside her. “Come and sit down. I wanted to talk to you.”

  “I’m busy.” He frowned on her. Since their father’s death he had adopted an air of burdened dignity, never more evident than when he shared the ministration of household prayers with Samuel Scammell. “I’ve come for the key to your room.”

  “What for?”

  “It’s not for you to ask what for!” His anger showed as petulance. He held out a hand. “I demand it, isn’t that enough? Brother Scammell and I wish to have it! If our dear father was alive you would not be skulking behind locked doors!”

  She stood up, brushing the grass from her skirt and unhooked the key from the ring at her waist. “You can have it Eb, but you’ll have to tell me why you want it.” She spoke patiently.

  He glared at her, his face shadowed by his wide-brimmed, black hat. “We are searching, sister, for the seal.”

  She laughed at that. “It’s not in my room, Eb.”

  “It isn’t funny, Dorcas! It isn’t funny! It’s for your benefit, remember, not mine! I don’t get ten thousand a year from it!”

  She had held the key toward him, but now she withdrew her hand. She shook her head. “You don’t understand, Eb, do you? I don’t want ten thousand pounds. I don’t want anything! I just want to be alone. I don’t want to marry Mr. Scammell. We can look after the money, Eb. You and I. We don’t need Mr. Scammell!” The words were tumbling out now. “I’ve thought about it Eb, I really have. We can live here and you can take the money and when you marry I’ll go and live in a house in the village, and we can be happy, Eb! Happy!”

  His face had not moved as she spoke. He watched her sourly, disliking her as he always had because she could run while he could not; she could swim naked in a stream while he dragged his twisted, shrunken leg behind him. Now he shook his head. “You’re trying to tempt me, aren’t you? You’re offering me money, and why? Because you dislike Brother Scammell. The answer is no, sister. No.” He threw up a hand to stop her interrupting. “It sounds so good, just you and me, but I know what you’d do! You’d run away with the money as soon as you were twenty-five. Well you won’t, sister, because you’re going to marry, and when you’re married you’ll learn that Brother Scammell and I have an agreement. We will share the money, Dorcas, all three of us, because that’s what Brother Scammell wants. It’s what our father would have wanted and have you thought of that? You think that because he’s dead all his hopes are to be destroyed? That all he prayed for should be destroyed?” Ebenezer shook his head again. “One day, Dorcas, we will meet him again and in a better place than this, and I want him to thank me on that day for being a good and faithful son.”

  “Eb?”

  “The key, sister.” He thrust his hand out again.

  “You’re wrong, Eb.”

  “The key!”

  She gave it to him, then watched as he wrenched violently at the horse’s rein, rowelled savagely with his right spur, and galloped toward the house.

  She sat again, the stream placid in front of her, and she knew that her dreams were vain. Ebenezer disliked her, she did not know why, and she suspected that he enjoyed her misery. Ebenezer had inherited more than anger from his father, he had taken too the streak of cruelty that had been in Matthew Slythe. She remembered when Ebenezer was ten how she had found him in the orchard, Clark’s Martyrologie open beside him. The page showed Romish priests disembowelling a Protestant martyr, and she had screamed in anger because, tied to an apple tree, was a small kitten on which Ebenezer was copying the torture, tearing at its tiny, soft stomach with a knife. She had dragged him away from the blood-soaked tree, away from the yowling kitten, and Ebenezer had spat at her, clawed at her, and shouted spitefully that this was the tenth kitten he had so killed. She had been forced to kill the kitten herself, cutting the little throat, and she could remember Ebenezer laughing.

  Now Ebenezer was in league with Samuel Scammell. Her marriage portion was to be divided between them and she would have no say in the matter.

  There was nothing for her in Werlatton. She watched where the stream ran strong and calm past the pool’s entrance, and she thought that she must leave. She should go with the stream, seeing where it led, and even though she knew that it would be impossible to run away, she knew too that it would be impossible to stay.

  She stood up, sad in the afternoon sun, and walked slowly back toward the house.

  She entered through the side passage that led past her father’s study. The lawn was pungent with the smell of newly scythed grass, the sunlight so bright that she was temporarily blinded when she walked into the darkness of the passage. She did not see the man who stood in the door of her father’s room.

  “The bowels of Christ. Who are you?”

  Her shoulder was gripped, she was pushed against the wall, and the man grinned at her. “Sweet God! A little Puritan maid. Well, well.” He tilted her chin up with his finger. “A ripe little piece of fruit.”

  “Sir!” It was Samuel Scammell’s voice. He hurried out of the study. “Sir! That is Miss Slythe. We are to marry!”

  The man let her go. He was big, as big as her father had been, and his face was scarred and ugly. It was a broad face, hard as leather, with a broken nose. At his side was a sword, in his belt a pistol, and he looked from Campion to Scammell. “She’s yours?”

  “Indeed, sir!” Scammell sounded nervous. The man frightened him.

  “Only the best, eh? She’s the answer to a Puritan’s prayer, and no mistake. I hope you know how damned lucky you are. Does she have it?”

  “No!” Scammell shook his head. “Indeed, no!”

  The man stared at Campion. “We’ll talk later, miss. Don’t run away.”

  She ran. She was terrified of him, of the smell of him and the violence that he radiated. She went to the stable-yard that was warm in the sunlight and sat on the mounting block and let the kittens come to her. They rolled about her hand, fur warm and sharp-clawed, and she blinked back tears. She must run away! She must go far from this place, but there was nowhere to go. She must run.

  There were footsteps in the archway to the yard, she looked left, and there was the man. He must have followed her. He came swiftly toward her, his sword clanging against the water trough, and before she could move he had seized her shoulder and pushed her once more against the wall. His breath stank. His leather soldier’s jerkin was greasy. He smiled, showing rotten, stained teeth. “Now, miss, I’ve come all the way from London so you’re going to be nice to me, aren’t you?”

  “Sir?” She was terrified.

  “Where is it?”

  “Where’s what, sir?” She was struggling, but was helpless against his huge strength.

  “God’s bowels, woman! Don’t play with me!” he shouted, hurting her shoulder with his hand. Then he smiled again. “Pretty little Puritan, aren’t we? Wasted on that bladder of a man.” He stayed smiling as his right knee jerked upward, forcing her legs apart, and he pushed it up between her thighs, reaching down with his free hand for the hem of her skirt.

  “That’s enough, mister!” The voice came from her right. Tobias Horsnell, the stableman, stood easily in a doorway, the musketoon that was used to kill sick beasts held in his hand. “I doubt this be good, mister. Let her go.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m the one who should be asking that.” Horsnell seemed unconcerned by the man’s crude and violent air. He twitched the gun. “You take your hands off her. Now what be this about?”

  The man had stepped back, releasing her. He brushed his hands as if she had been filthy. “She has something I want.”

  Horsnell looked at Campion. He was a thin man, his wiry forearms burned black by
the sun. He was taciturn in household prayers, though he was one of the few servants who had learned to read and Campion had watched him laboriously mouth the words of the Bible. “Is that true, Miss Dorcas?”

  “No!” She shook her head. “I don’t even know what it is!”

  “What is it, mister?”

  “A seal.” The man seemed to be gauging whether he would have time to pull the pistol from his belt, but Tobias Horsnell kept his musketoon steady and his voice neutral. “Do you have the seal, Miss Dorcas?”

  “No.”

  “There, mister. That be your answer. I think you should go.” The musketoon added force to his polite suggestion and Horsnell kept the weapon levelled till the stranger had left the yard. Only then did he drop the muzzle and give her a slow smile. “’Twasn’t loaded, but the Lord looks after us. I hope you told the truth, Miss Dorcas.”

  “I did.”

  “Good, God be praised. He was an ungodly man, Miss Dorcas, and there be plenty like him outside these walls.”

  She frowned at the words. She had spoken little with Tobias Horsnell, for he was a man who stayed away from the house except for prayers, yet he seemed to have divined her intention of running away. Why else would he have stressed the dangers outside Werlatton’s estate?

  She smoothed the collar of her dress. “Thank you.”

  “You thank your Lord and Savior, miss. In times of trouble He’ll be at hand.” He had stooped to pick up and fondle one of the kittens. “I could tell you tales of His mercy, Miss Dorcas.”

  “And tales of His punishment, Mr. Horsnell?”

  It was a question she would never have dared put to her father, nor would her father have given her the answer that his stable-man now gave. He shrugged, and spoke as matter-of-factly as if he were talking of hoof-oil or dung shovels. “God loves us, miss, that’s all I do know. Wind or blow, Miss Dorcas, He loves us. You pray, miss, and the answer will be there.”