A Crowning Mercy

by Bernard Cornwell

  “Why not? Because, you bastards,” Harries was angry again, “she was tried for witchcraft and murder, but no one thought to ask about the damned crucifix she was carrying. Suppose it came from Rome or Spain. Do you want to be fighting the Pope’s armies as well as the damned King?” The soldiers listened reluctantly. Harries tried to placate them. “She’ll be back for her warming, but first we want to ask some questions. We’ll help her answers out with a little torture.” He twisted about. “Shut those gates!”

  Harries’s promise of torture and the undoubted veracity of the seal of the House of Commons which had been passed to Colonel Prior, seemed to mollify the troops. They grumbled, but Harries promised she would be back within the week, and that would mean a second holiday for them. Faithful Unto Death Hervey demanded to see the warrant, but when Harries scowled at him he swiftly backed down.

  “Sir! Boat’s here, sir!” Harries’s trooper had returned.

  “Bring the girl, Mason,” Harries swung easily off his horse. “You two! Take the horses and meet us at Westminster.”

  “Sir!”

  Suddenly all was activity. Two of Harries’s men turned their mounts, took the other horses by the reins and spurred toward the closing Tower gates. The crowd’s fury was filling the air. Wellings lifted Campion down, trying to be gentle, and his solicitude earned a sneer from Colonel Harries. “You fancy the witch, Wellings?”

  “Her hands are tied, sir.”

  “She can jump, can’t she? Christ! You new soldiers couldn’t fight a damned elf. Come on, girl.” He took her shoulder, pulled, then looked at Colonel Prior. “Is Ebenezer Slythe here?”

  Colonel Prior frowned, but Faithful Unto Death knew the answer. “He’s on the ramparts.”

  “Making sure of the best view, eh?” Harries laughed. “I can’t wait. Move, witch!”

  Harries and Mason took her under the Bell Tower and down to the slopping, smelly Water Gate. The Traitor’s Gate. A large boat was floating amid the rubbish that was trapped inside the tunnel leading to the steps. Six oarsmen waited in the boat, their faces nervous, for these steps led only to the axe, noose or fire. Harries pushed her down the stone steps. It was low water and the bottom of the stairs was treacherously slippery. “Get in.”

  Colonel Prior had followed them. He frowned. “You’ll not clear the bridge, Colonel.”

  “Of course I’ll not clear the bridge!” Harries snapped. London Bridge’s narrow archways could only be passed by boats at high water, and even then the passage was dangerous. “We’ve got a damned coach waiting at Bear Wharf. Do you think I was going to take her through that bloody mob?”

  Mason, the trooper, sat her in the stern thwart. Colonel Harries dropped beside her, his scabbard rasping on the boat’s planks. He nodded at the oarsmen: “Go!”

  They shoved off, using their oars to pole the boat through the dark, dripping tunnel of stone and beneath the great portcullis that could slam down to bar the gate. Campion saw the bow go into the sunlight, then the warmth was on her face and the oarsmen were turning the craft upstream. They leaned forward into their stroke, pulled, and the boat left the Tower wall behind.

  “Look, witch!” Harries pointed to his right. He seemed to be laughing beneath the steel bars of the helmet.

  Campion saw the crowd on the hill, a great mass of people through which the road was carved which should have led her to the piled timber and stake that was clearly visible at the hill’s low summit. The noise lashed at the boat, a growl that seemed to spread across the city. The sight made her shiver.

  Harries plucked at her cotton shift. “I see you’re dressed for a warm day.” He barked out a laugh. The oarsmen grinned as they leaned forward in unison.

  The Customs House hid Tower Hill from her view, though still the baying of the mob came after her. She was shivering uncontrollably now. She had escaped the fire, but for what? What irons and spikes and flames would rend her now?

  The oarsmen bent toward her, pulled, and their eyes never seemed to leave her. She was crying, though whether with relief or whether because her ordeal was not to be ended in swift horror but prolonged, she could not tell. Sun glittered on the water. The high houses built on London Bridge loomed ahead.

  “Bear Wharf!” Harries growled.

  The starboard oarsmen backed water for one stroke, the boat turned, then headed toward a decrepit timber pier on the city bank. A sailor, pouring slops from a Dutch sloop, stared down at the small boat that went beneath his ship’s stern.

  “Come on, witch!” Harries hauled her on to the pier, tossed a purse to the stroke oarsman and led her swiftly to a waiting coach. The leather curtains had been nailed shut. A man waited on the driver’s seat and Mason climbed up beside him while Harries pushed Campion into the dark interior. They lurched forward.

  She could not tell how long they travelled. It did not seem long. She heard the driver shout at obstructions, felt the swaying turns as the coach negotiated the narrow city streets, and sometimes, as the coach went into the sunlight, she would see the narrow strips of brightness thrown from the slits at the curtains’ nailed edges. She did not know if they went north or south, east or west, she only knew that she was being carried to new torments.

  Then a gate slammed on the sounds of the street, she could hear the hooves of the horses loud on stone echoing from walls, and Harries pushed open the door. The coach stopped, swaying on its leather springs. “Out.”

  She was in a courtyard of stone. The walls were windowless. A single arched doorway led into a dark interior.

  “Inside, witch.”

  Campion thought of the book of martyrology she had been given as a child. She knew she would not have the bravery to endure the pincers, fires, claws and racks of truth. She cried.

  Harries pushed her down a long, chill passageway. His boots echoed from the stone walls. Campion shrank from the pain that awaited her.

  Colonel Harries stopped at a doorway. He took out a knife and cut the bonds that still bit into her wrists. She heard him grunt as he sawed with his knife. The leather gloves were rough where they touched her skin. He pushed the door open. “Inside.”

  A fire burned. It waited for her.

  A bed waited. There were new clothes, food and wine. She expected rough hands to seize her, but it was a motherly woman who came forward and cradled her in comforting arms. The woman soothed her, stroked her hair, held her tight against the horrors. “You’re safe, child, safe! You’ve been rescued!”

  But Campion was past understanding. She wept, collapsed, and her head was filled with the fire that had reached up to burn her, and which, though she had not yet comprehended it, had been cheated of her. She was safe.

  Twenty-three

  Colonel Joshua Harries was an aide to the Earl of Manchester, the general who commanded the army of Parliament’s Eastern Association, the army that had done most to win the battle of Marston Moor. Thus, when Colonel Harries had requested a warrant from the Speaker so that the fighting men could discover whether the Dorcas Scammell mentioned in Mercurius was part of a Catholic conspiracy to bring fresh enemies against Parliament, the Speaker had small option but to agree. The army that was winning the war had to be indulged, and the Speaker reflected with relief that it was not he who would have to explain to the howling mob on Tower Hill why their entertainment was delayed.

  Yet the Speaker might have been a good deal less complacent had he known that on the day fixed for Campion’s execution Colonel Joshua Harries was in the great Minster of York, giving thanks for the Roundheads’ successful siege of that city.

  The man who called himself Colonel Harries should also have been in York. He too was a colonel in Parliament’s army, but, unlike the real Colonel Harries, he would not have been giving thanks to God for the Roundhead victory. Colonel Vavasour Devorax was a King’s man serving with the enemy; in short, a spy.

  Vavasour Devorax had discarded the thin, leather half-mask by the time he returned to Campion’s room, yet, even without the pat
ch, his face was frightening. His eyes were gray and cold, his skin tanned and lined, while on the right side of his face, running from the steel-gray beard to his hairline, was a jagged, ridged scar that narrowly missed his eye. Vavasour Devorax had a hard, bitter face, a face suggesting he had seen everything and that there was nothing left in this world to surprise him.

  He stood beside the girl’s bed. “What did you give her?”

  “Laudanum.” The woman had a strong foreign accent.

  He looked at Campion in silence, staring at her. One hand fidgeted with the hem of his greasy, filthy leather jerkin. He stared a long time, then looked at the woman. “I want you to cut my beard off.”

  “Your beard?” She sounded surprised.

  “Christ, woman! Half the army’s searching for a man with one eye and a beard.” He looked at Campion, eyes shut in sleep. “And all because of her.”

  “You think she’s not worth it?”

  “Who knows?” He left the room.

  The woman looked at the shut door. “Get drunk, Devorax.” The dislike was strong in her accent.

  Vavasour Devorax would get drunk, too. His face had been ravaged by war, and further by alcohol. He was sober most mornings, sober through most days, but it was a rare night when Vavasour Devorax was not drunk. In company he could be boisterously drunk, but most nights he was morosely alone, savage in his drinking.

  He was not without friends. The men who followed him, the men who had ridden desperately for London after Devorax had read the Mercurius, were all soldiers who were proud of him and, in their way, friends. They too were adventurers, mercenaries from the European wars of religion, and their allegiance was to neither King nor Parliament, only to Vavasour Devorax. When he ordered, they obeyed.

  Devorax in turn had a master whose orders he obeyed. He was the Jew’s man, though none knew why. It was rumored that Mordecai Lopez had bought the Englishman out of a Moorish slave galley. Others, more fanciful perhaps, said that Vavasour Devorax was the Jew’s bastard son, whelped on a gentile woman, but no one had ever dared ask Devorax if that were true. Only one thing was certain; Devorax obeyed Mordecai Lopez’s wishes.

  Marta Renselinck, the motherly woman who nursed Campion out of her terrors, did not like Vavasour Devorax. She resented his influence on her master, hated his savage moods, and feared his careless, biting tongue. Marta was Lopez’s housekeeper, devoted to him, and the only servant who had crossed the North Sea with him to London. The other servants in Amsterdam had been instructed to say that their master was dangerously ill, and in the meantime Lopez had taken the first available boat that sailed to England. He carried papers that identified him as an agent of the Bank of Amsterdam, come to negotiate one of that bank’s loans to Parliament, and the false papers had taken them swiftly past the soldiers who guarded London’s docks against Royalist agents. The two, master and servant, had come straight to this house and here, for the first time since Lopez had read the Mercurius, he seemed to relax. “Vavasour is here, Marta, he’s here. Everything will be good now!” Lopez had been pleased, confident that the girl would be freed, and Marta, to please her master, hid her dislike of the big, crude, English soldier.

  It took three days for Campion to recover. She was slow to trust her rescuers, slower still to persuade herself that she was truly safe, and in those three days only Marta tended her. It was not until the third evening that Marta finally persuaded Campion to meet the man who had sailed from Amsterdam on her behalf, the Jew, Mordecai Lopez.

  Campion was nervous as she dressed, hardly aware of what clothes she put on, thinking only of the distrust she had for all the seal-bearers. Marta Renselinck laughed at her fears. “He’s a good man, child, a kind man. Now, sit down while I arrange your hair.”

  The room into which Marta showed her and left her was magnificent. It faced the river and, for the first time, Campion realized she was on the south bank of the Thames. To the right she could see the Tower of London, its highest ramparts touched with the sun’s dying light, and to her left was the great bridge, rearing high above the water. The room itself was dark-panelled, its floor covered with eastern rugs, while one wall was covered with bookshelves, the gold-blocked spines of the packed volumes glinting from the light of the few lit candles. She moved nervously toward the wall of windows, toward the magnificent view, and then started, cried out, for a shadow moved in an alcove among the books.

  “Don’t be frightened! Come, Dorcas! It is my pleasure to meet you.” The man smiled. “At last.”

  An old man moved toward her. He was thin and upright, his face made distinguished by white hair brushed back from a tanned, wrinkled skin. He had a small, neatly pointed white beard, and his clothes were of black velvet trimmed discreetly with white lace.

  “My name is Mordecai Lopez. I own this house, and all that is in it is yours.” He smiled at his own flowery courtesy, then bowed to her with solemn grace. “Will you sit with me in the window? The sunset over the bridge is the best sight in London, truly magnificent. I don’t think Venice can offer anything as good. Please?”

  His manner was gentle, his courtesy exquisite. He moved slowly, as if any sudden gesture might frighten her, and for some minutes he spoke of the house in which they sat. “My people are not welcome in England. I used to live in London, but we were expelled, so I closed up my fine mansion in the city, but kept this house in secret.” He smiled. “I can come here by boat and leave quickly by boat too.” The house was right on the river, the sound of the water slapping at piles easily audible to Campion. Mordecai Lopez offered her wine. “Vavasour uses the house now. He hides his Royalist friends in it. I suppose one day it will be discovered and I’ll come here to find nothing but destruction.” He handed her a beautifully cut crystal goblet. “Did you like Vavasour?”

  Marta had told Campion that “Colonel Harries” was truly Vavasour Devorax. Campion was still nervous. She looked at the shrewd, kindly Jew. “He seemed very frightening.”

  Lopez laughed. “He is, my dear, he is. Very frightening!”

  “Who’s frightening?” The voice was harsh, unexpected, coming from the door of the room. Campion turned, startled, and she saw the tall, gray-haired colonel. She would not have recognized him except for the voice. Devorax’s beard was gone, the patch was gone, but his face was still brutally ugly, a merciless face. He looked at her as he approached. “A sunset you never expected to see, Miss Slythe? Or should it be Mrs. Scammell?”

  She stammered her reply, “Miss Slythe.” She felt threatened by Devorax.

  “She speaks! A miracle.” He flourished a bottle at her, as if in a toast. “You’d better thank me, Miss Slythe. I saved you from a scorching.”

  Her heart was beating on her rib-cage. “I thank you, sir.”

  “And so you damn well should.” Vavasour Devorax slumped into a chair, his legs in filthy boots sprawled out on one of the rugs. He grinned at Lopez. “I’ve been walking the streets of this once fair city. They say the devil rescued her! The devil!” He laughed, rubbing his chin that was paler than the rest of his face.

  Lopez’s voice was patient, even affectionate. “Are you getting drunk, Vavasour?”

  “Very drunk.” He said it savagely, then looked at Campion. “If you ever wish a bottle emptied, Miss Slythe, a maiden rescued, or a cause betrayed, I am your most excellent servant.” He tipped the bottle. Two thin trickles of wine dripped on to his leather jerkin. The bottle went down and his hard, cold eyes looked at her. “Do you think I make a good devil, Miss Slythe?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “‘Sir,’ she calls me ‘sir’! What it is to be old, Mordecai.” He shook his head, then suddenly looked accusingly at Campion. “That priest with you at the Tower—stringy man with the twitch—that was Faithful Unto Death Hervey?”

  She nodded. “Yes.”

  “I wish I’d known then. God! I saw the bastard today, preaching at Paul’s Cross, calling me the devil! Me! I should have dragged the bastard back here when I rescued
you and gelded him with a rusty knife. If there’s anything to geld, which I doubt.”

  “Vavasour!” Lopez chided him. “You’re offending our guest.”

  Devorax laughed silently. The cynical eyes looked at Campion. “You see? I’m not frightening at all. I can be reprimanded by my master. No one who can be reprimanded can be frightening.” He looked at Lopez. “I need money, master mine.”

  “Of course. For food?”

  “And wine, and women.”

  Lopez smiled. “You can eat with us, Vavasour.”

  Campion hoped silently that the big soldier would refuse. To her relief, he shook his head. “No, Mordecai. Tonight I buy my men pork. You never serve pork because of your weird religion. I need pork, drink and flesh, and a place where women are not offended by my common soldier’s tongue.” He stood up. “Money?”

  Lopez stood, looked at Campion. “I shall be one minute.”

  She was left alone. She felt a wave of relief that Vavasour Devorax was gone. He might have rescued her, yet she felt unsafe in his presence. She calmed herself and stared out of the wide windows.

  The sun setting behind the bridge was, as Lopez had said, magnificent. The eastern reach of the Thames was dark beneath the great bridge that was silhouetted against the crimson, dying light. The tide was ebbing so that the river water was forcing itself through the narrow arches, and the mixture of falling foam and slickness was gilded by the hidden sun so that it seemed as if the whole, great bridge was afloat upon a mass of molten gold that poured itself into the dark water. It seemed unreal that she was here, watching the magnificence, and she wished she could see Toby or Lady Margaret. She needed friends, not strangers.

  “He frightens you a lot, doesn’t he?”

  She turned to see Mordecai Lopez in the doorway. He closed the door and walked toward her. “You don’t have to be frightened of him. He’s my man, sworn to me, and I promise he will protect you.” He sat opposite her and looked at her with grave eyes. “You think he’s not kind? I think maybe he is, but he’s very unhappy. He’s close to fifty now and he’s never found happiness. He’s growing old, and he buys his contentment out of bottles and whores.”