A Crowning Mercy

by Bernard Cornwell

  Three large houses had been fortified for Parliament, one castle and another house for the King, and the garrisons of all five strongholds raided indiscriminately for food. Neither side touched Sir George’s land; the Parliamentarians may still have thought him one of their own, while the Royalists hoped he would side openly with them.

  Sir George could not sit eternally on the fence. His son-in-law, the Earl of Fleet, visited in November, together with his wife, and taxed Sir George on his allegiance. Sir George intimated that he had none, but Lady Margaret, sitting at her end of the great dining table, frankly declared that Lazen Castle was for the King.

  Her daughter, Anne, was shocked. “You can’t be, mother!”

  “Can’t, child! Can’t! You wish me to rebel against my King? The Fleets may do that, but the Lazenders no.”

  The Earl of Fleet frowned at the table. “This is unhappy. Unhappy.”

  “Certainly it is unhappy, Fleet. I have no wish to see my daughter’s husband lose his head, yet I probably shall. Tower Hill is a bad place to die.

  Sir George hurried to say that it was doubtful whether anyone would be executed on Tower Hill, that times had changed, that men of moderation would doubtless find a compromise to the struggle, but Lady Margaret would have none of it.

  “Rebels are rebels, and rebels should be executed.”

  Anne, the Countess of Fleet, stared at her mother. “I am a rebel, Mother?”

  “I just hope the axe is sharp. Pass the butter, Campion. George, your sleeve is in the gravy.”

  The subject had been dropped, the Fleets leaving next day with an unhappy promise to return for Christmas. The war was souring the family.

  Yet war or no war, these were happy days for Campion and days of change. For the first time in her life she dressed in clothes that were intended to be pretty instead of acting as shrouds to hide the shame of being a woman. Lady Margaret had once been a passionate dressmaker, a job now sensibly left to the castle’s two seamstresses, but old chests were opened and Campion was clothed in satin, muslin, lace and silk. Her new dresses had soft, flowing lines and were tight-waisted with their skirts split to reveal the petticoats beneath. The necklines were low, trimmed with satin or lace, and even though they were worn with shawls about her shoulders, the dresses seemed so immodest that, at first, Campion was ashamed to wear them. Lady Margaret would have none of it.

  “What’s the matter?”

  Campion pointed to the expanse of skin revealed above the dress. “It feels strange.”

  “Strange? You’ve got nothing there that’s big enough to be strange!” She twitched the diamond-shaped velvet stomacher that was tight at Campion’s waist. “You’re thin, dear. Now show me the blue.”

  The blue dress was Campion’s favorite, perhaps because the powder-blue satin was the same color as the cloak Toby had bought her. She had waited impatiently as the dress was stitched, yet the waiting had been worthwhile.

  The blue dress was shockingly low, the square neckline hemmed in white silk that was cold on her breasts when she first put the dress on. The sleeves, too, were of white silk, but covered in blue ribbons that were sewn at wrist and shoulder so that, when she moved, her sleeves seemed a coruscation of white and blue above the triple cuffs of lace. The skirt was split in the center, pinned back to show the full-length white satin petticoat, and even Lady Margaret, curmudgeonly with compliments, shook her head in admiration. “You look lovely, child. Quite lovely.”

  Her hair was long and golden, a pale gold like wheat two weeks before the harvest, and her mother had made her scrape it severely back and then coil the tresses in a tight bun that could be hidden by a Puritan bonnet. Once a month at Werlatton, Campion and the maids would sit in the kitchen and Goodwife would shear the ends of their hair, chopping one straight line with long scissors, and that was the extent of Campion’s knowledge of hair. Caroline Lazender, Toby’s younger sister and the third of Lady Margaret’s seven children to survive infancy, repaired the damage. Caroline herself had long, dark hair, and Campion had the impression that the sixteen-year-old could happily spend half of eternity doing nothing but curling and decorating it. Caroline was delighted to have another head to play with. “It’s got to be ringlets.”

  “Ringlets?” Campion sounded dubious. Caroline had appeared with a tray heaped with scissors, tongs, strange implements that had to be heated, and a pile of pale blue ribbons.

  “Everyone’s in ringlets. Absolutely everyone.” The words were said with finality. Ringlets it would be.

  So ringlets she had, and for a few days Campion would catch an unexpected glimpse of herself in a mirror or darkened window, and she would stop in amazement at her own reflection. Instead of the demure, modest Puritan, dressed to cover the shame of woman’s sin, she saw a creature of golden softness, bare shouldered, long necked, her skin just tickled by the long curls that hung from the silver fillet in her hair. The seal hung at her breasts, and on her fingers were rings lent by Lady Margaret. Sir George, on the first night that she appeared in all her finery, pretended surprise and asked to be introduced. She laughed, curtseyed and wished that Toby could see her.

  She spent her days with Lady Margaret, sharing her energy and enthusiasms, and each evening before dinner she read aloud to her patroness. She had a good voice and read well, though at first she was sometimes shocked by the things Lady Margaret wished to hear. She was introduced to books she had never heard of, could never have imagined had been written, nor did she suspect that Lady Margaret was choosing the books deliberately. Lady Margaret was especially fond of poetry and, one night, Campion stopped reading and blushed. Lady Margaret frowned.

  “What on earth is the matter, child?”

  “It’s rude.”

  “Sweet Lord above! Jack Donne was in holy orders, the Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral. We knew him well when we were young.” Lady Margaret forebore to mention that John Donne, when young and before he became a priest, had been a rare and boisterous companion.

  “Is he dead?”

  “Alas, yes. Read on!”

  Campion read, despite her embarrassment:

  License my roving hands, and let them go

  Before, behind, between, above, below.

  O my America! My new found land,

  My kingdom, safeliest when with one man manned…

  She blushed again when she reached the final couplet:

  To teach thee, I am naked first, why then

  What needest thou have more covering than a man?

  Lady Margaret smiled through the window. “Very nice, dear. You read it tolerably well.” She sighed. “Dear Jack. He was the kind of man who kept his boots on.”

  “He what, Lady Margaret?”

  “Never mind, dear, some things should not be told to the young.”

  Yet Lady Margaret knew this girl was not so young. Campion was twenty-one now, well past the age when most girls were married, and she was still innocent. Yet she learned. Lady Margaret taught her, opening the mind, filling it, and Lady Margaret enjoyed the occupation.

  There was laughter in the castle, conversation and endless excitements. Campion was forced to help Lady Margaret with her warlike preparations, which, after the completion of her “fortifications,” took the form of musketoon practice across the moat. One November morning, after Campion had erected the target and walked back across the rickety plank bridge, Lady Margaret waved a paper at her. “A new letter from Toby. Don’t worry, there’s one for you.” Campion could see the carrier being given ale in the castle yard. Letters arrived when the carriers came, though some letters took weeks if the carrier decided that business demanded a long detour. Lady Margaret looked down her Roman nose at the letter. “Ha! He’s killed a man. Good!”

  “Killed?”

  “He says he went on a chevauchée, whatever that is. Ah, I see, a raid. Why doesn’t he call it a raid in the first place? They met some lobsters in a village and he shot one with his pistol. Good for him!” Campion knew enough now to
know that a “lobster” was a heavily armored Roundhead cavalryman.

  “Is he well?” She asked anxiously.

  “No, dear, he’s dead. Toby killed him.”

  “I mean Toby.”

  “Of course he’s well! He couldn’t have written otherwise! There are times, Campion, when I fear you might be quite as stupid as my own girls. Ah! Good Lord!”

  “Lady Margaret?”

  “Be patient, child. I’m reading.” She finished the letter, then handed it, with its enclosure, to Campion. The news that had provoked the surprise from Lady Margaret was ominous. The fight in the village where Toby had shot his lobster had resulted in the capture of a Roundhead messenger and, among the papers found in his pouch, was a Commission of Array addressed to “Oure Loyal Servant Samuel Scammell.” Scammell was ordered to raise a troop of men, raising it presumably with money that came from the Covenant. Toby went on to say that it was thought that Parliament wished to scour the Royalists from Dorset, releasing the next year’s rich harvest for their own armies. Campion looked at Lady Margaret. “They’ll be very close to us.”

  “I should like to see your husband come, dear.” Lady Margaret liked referring to Scammell as Campion’s husband. She put a wealth of scorn into the word. She sniffed, and raised the musketoon to her shoulder. “Let him come!” The target, a man-sized piece of sacking suspended from a pole, stirred in the small breeze. Lady Margaret squinted down the barrel, only half charged with powder, flinched, then pulled the trigger. The gun coughed, belched filthy smoke, and the ball went far wide of the untouched sacking. Lady Margaret frowned. “There’s something wrong with this gun. It’s most perverse.”

  Campion was still worried. “Do you think they’ll come here?”

  “No, child. They’re more troops for Corfe, I expect. Stop worrying. They’ll never come here.” Lady Margaret dismissed Werlatton and Scammell from her mind. The two houses were just twelve miles apart, but Puritan Werlatton looked south while Lazen went north for its supplies and market days. There were deep woods between the houses, of interest only to pig keepers and hunters of deer, and Toby’s incursion into Matthew Slythe’s land had been a rare occurrence.

  The first frosts of winter came with the long nights. The laborers on the estate swathed themselves with sacking as they brought in the animals. Some were kept alive for the following year, but most were slaughtered and their meat salted down in the store rooms. Barns, paddocks, stables, and home pastures were filled with animals who all needed winter feeding, the great ricks being sliced open like giant loaves, and even the bees in their hives in the kitchen garden needed food. Lady Margaret and Campion put small bowls of water, honey and rosemary into each hive. The castle was closing down for winter’s siege, stocking up on timber and food, looking toward Christmas.

  There was still some warlike activity. The hides of the slaughtered cattle were taken to the lime-pits where they were soaked till most of the hair was gone. Then the skins were scraped, tanned with oak-bark and steeped in farmyard dung. The finest leather was treated with dog dung, but this year’s leather did not have to command a high price in the market. This year Lazen made leather for defence, boiling the hides to toughen them, fashioning them into heavy jerkins that could stop a sword cut or a half-spent bullet. Sir George expected war.

  He had finally declared his new allegiance. The King, wintering in Oxford, had issued a summons for a parliament to meet in the university town and Sir George had replied with an acceptance. He had asked, in the same letter, that the King should provide a small force to protect and fortify Lazen, and he had warned the tenants and servants that they, too, might have to bear arms beneath the banner of Lazender. The flag now flying on the gatehouse showed a bloodied lance across a green field.

  The weather was cold and dirty now, the gray clouds sometimes so low that they obscured the flag and hid the topmost stones of the keep. The trees beside the Lazen stream were bare and black, and there were days when Campion sat in the long gallery and stared at a valley swamped by slanting rain, a gray and dark landscape, and she was glad of the three great fires that warmed the gallery and made mysterious shadows among the prancing deities of Lady Margaret’s heathen ceiling.

  Her plasterwork might be pagan, but Lady Margaret was shocked to discover that Campion had not been confirmed into the Church of England. It was hardly likely that she should have been. Her father had despised bishops, and so the confirmation at the hands of the bishop had been dropped in Werlatton parish as had the other services of the church which Matthew Slythe disliked. The Reverend Faithful Unto Death Hervey (and it was with a strange, small shock that Campion sometimes recalled such people from her past) had even abandoned the service of Holy Communion, replacing it with what he chose to call the “Lord’s Supper.” Lady Margaret was outraged. “The Lord’s Supper! Quite ridiculous! You might as well have the Lord’s Breakfast, or the Lord’s Midday Rabbit-pie!”

  She took it upon herself to prepare Campion for confirmation, declaring she could do the task quite as well as Mr. Perilly, Lazen’s vicar, and, inevitably, the lessons led to talk of God and religion. “You make it entirely too complicated, child.” Lady Margaret’s gray head shook in disapproval. “God is good, and anything He provides is good. That’s all there is to it.”

  “All?”

  “Of course! Do you truly think He put us on the earth to be unhappy? If you enjoy something then it’s a good thing, it comes from God.”

  “But what if it hurts somebody?”

  “Don’t be impertinent, I am instructing you. If it hurts somebody then it’s bad and comes from the devil.” Lady Margaret sniffed. “Sir Grenville Cony obviously comes from the devil, but think of all the good things God has given us. A good meal, a gallop to hounds, a kind deed, marriage, pretty dresses,” she rattled off the ineffable blessings of Almighty God in a confident tone, “good books, music, fishing, mulled wine, friends, killing rebels, and a warm house. They’re all God’s gift, child, and we have to be thankful.”

  Campion tried to explain her own fears, fears that sprang from her education that had depicted life as a constant struggle against sin, and taught her that sin pervaded every corner of everyday life. Lady Margaret would have none of it.

  “You’re being quite tedious, child. You make my Creator sound an extremely unpleasant man, and I won’t have it.”

  It was a new kind of Christianity to Campion, an acceptance of religion that did not demand tortuous struggle and endless self-flagellation. Lady Margaret’s Christianity saw the world as God’s gift, filled with His love, available to be enjoyed. It was a simple faith, but Campion liked it for that, for she was tired of the endless Puritan wrangles about the triune nature of God, about the doctrine of predestination, about redemption and faith, the splitting of countless hairs in the vicious endeavor to prove that one man was “saved” while another was not. Lady Margaret’s faith was rooted in her conviction that Lazen Castle was a microcosm of God’s world, and that the Almighty was a grandly omnipotent type of manorial lord, a kind of heavenly Sir George Lazender. “My dear Campion, I don’t expect the tenants to stand around adoring George! No work would get done! They have to be respectful, of course, if they meet him, and we expect them to come to us when they’re in trouble and we do our best to patch things up, but we’d all be in a fine kettle if they spent half their lives worrying what He’s thinking and shouting his praises to the sky. They expect things of us, of course, like feasts on Plow-Monday, May Day, harvest and Christmas, but we enjoy those, too! Our tenants are happy and that makes us happy. Why on earth should man be gloomy to make God happy?”

  It was an unanswerable question, and so, through the autumn and winter, the fear of God leeched itself from Campion’s soul, to be replaced by a more robust and self-reliant faith. She was changing, inwardly and outwardly, and though she knew that she was being changed, it was an incident shortly before Christmas that threw before her a grim reminder of her old life, and made her see herself as
she was now compared to the person she had been, and filled her, temporarily, with stark fear.

  Sir George had declared for the King, but the declaration was by no means public. The Parliamentary leaders of the county still had hopes of his support and, in an attempt to discover his loyalties, they sent the County’s Committee for Assessment to Lazen.

  The Committee for Assessment visited each property within Parliamentary lands and levied, according to the property’s size, a tax that helped pay the costs of the war. Sir George, the Roundheads decided, would pay the tax if he was still of their persuasion while, if he refused, they would take that as a declaration of enmity.

  The Committee for Assessment, delayed by rain, arrived late one afternoon. Sir George, polite as ever, invited them into the hallway of the Old House where they stood, cloaks and scabbards dripping. He offered them ale. They were mostly known to him, men who were neighbors, but might soon be enemies. One or two he did not know, and he needed an introduction. One name interested him. “Sir George? This is the vicar of Werlatton, the Reverend Faithful Unto Death Hervey.”

  Hervey bobbed his head, smiling ingratiatingly at the evidently wealthy owner of Lazen Castle. Faithful Unto Death had still not achieved the fame and fortune he so much desired, though he was pleased to be on the Committee for Assessment, a position he owed to Sir Grenville Cony who had been prompted by Ebenezer Slythe. Faithful Unto Death spoke his usual greeting when visiting houses he hoped to tax, “May the Lord be in this house.”

  “Quite so,” Sir George said.

  At that moment Campion came into the hallway, laughing with Caroline. Both girls were dressed for early dinner, Campion brilliant in red silk draped with dyed muslin. She dropped a polite, shallow curtsey in the direction of the visitors.

  Sir George did not falter for one second. “My daughter, Caroline, and my niece, Lady Henrietta Creed.”