A Crowning Mercy

by Bernard Cornwell

  Lopez smiled. “Vavasour’s a soldier, perhaps one of the best in Europe, but what does a soldier do when he’s too old? Vavasour’s like an old, experienced wolfhound who fears he can’t keep up with the pack any more.” Campion liked that thought and she smiled. Lopez saw the smile and was pleased. “Remember that once he was young and he had hopes and dreams and plans, but not any more.” He shook his head. “He can be vilely rude, noisy and frightening, but that’s because he doesn’t want anyone to see what’s inside him. So don’t be frightened of him. Even an old wolfhound deserves a bone or two. Now!” He changed the subject abruptly. “Marta’s going to light more candles, we’ll have a fire, and we shall eat supper.”

  Campion wondered if she could feel sympathy for a man like Devorax, whatever Lopez said, but over the supper she forgot the soldier and warmed to the elegant, gentle old man who proved a wondrously sympathetic listener. He coaxed from her the story of her life, all of it, and she even told him, shyly, of Toby’s name for her. He liked it.

  “May I call you Campion?”

  She nodded.

  “Then I will. Thank you.” He gestured at her plate. “The duck is from Holland, Campion. You must try it.”

  When the supper was over, her story told, he took her back to the chairs by the window. It was black night beyond the panes, a darkness sparked by candlelit windows on the great bridge and by the poop lanterns of moored ships that streaked their yellow reflections on the water which slid like dark oil beneath them. Mordecai Lopez closed the curtains, shutting off the sound of water. “You’d like Toby to know you’re safe?”

  She nodded. “Please.”

  “I’ll have one of Vavasour’s men go to Oxford. Lord Tallis, you said?”

  She nodded again, remembering the note from the Reverend Perilly.

  Lopez smiled at her. “Of course he’s Sir Toby now.”

  She had never once thought of that. She laughed, an uncertain sound for it was unpracticed. “I suppose he is.”

  “And you’ll be Lady Lazender.”

  “No!” The thought was ridiculous, not of marrying, but of a title.

  “Oh yes! And rich.”

  The word made her alert. Not once had Mordecai Lopez spoken to her of the seals, though he had listened closely as she talked of the efforts Sir Grenville Cony and her brother had made to obtain the Seal of St. Matthew. Now, Campion knew, the moment had come, that moment she had innocently sought once in Sir Grenville Cony’s house. She had gone there in search of the secret of the seals, and had been trapped instead by the greed they engendered. Lopez had stood, had crossed to a bag he had placed on a table and she felt, as he returned to the windows, that she was on the brink of a great discovery. It frightened her.

  Mordecai Lopez did not speak. Instead he put his hand down on the table beside her, glanced at her, then went back to his chair. He left something on the table.

  She knew what it was without looking.

  He smiled. “It’s yours to keep.”

  The gold seemed to have an added luster in the candlelight. She saw in the gold, jewel-banded cylinder the cause of all her misery. She hardly dared touch it. Samuel Scammell’s throat had been cut for one of these, and she had been brought very close to the hideous flames, Lazen Castle had fallen, Sir George had been killed, and all for these seals.

  She picked it up, almost holding her breath as she did so. Again she was surprised by the weight of the precious gold.

  St. Matthew had shown an axe, the instrument of that martyr’s death, while St. Mark had the proud symbol of the winged lion. This seal, St. Luke, was similar. It showed a winged ox, head high and burly, the symbol of the third Evangelist.

  She unscrewed the two halves and the small, silver statue inside made her smile. St. Matthew had contained a crucifix, St. Mark a naked woman arching in pleasure, while in St. Luke was a little, silver pig.

  “Each of the seals, Campion, contains a symbol of the thing the seal-bearer most fears.” Lopez’s voice was quiet in the room. The moment seemed almost unnatural to Campion; the mystery unravelling. “To Matthew Slythe went a crucifix. To Sir Grenville Cony went a naked woman, and I received a pig.” He smiled. “I don’t count that as much of an insult.”

  She put the halves together and looked at the white-bearded old man. “What’s in the fourth seal?”

  “I don’t know. The man who had those seals made is the holder of St. John. I would like very much to know what it is that he fears.”

  She frowned, almost afraid to know what, for a year, she had longed to know. “Is Christopher Aretine the man who has St. John?”

  “Yes.” Lopez was staring intently at her, his voice still quiet and gentle. “It’s time, Campion that you knew it all.” He sipped some wine, listening to the damp river wood spit at the screen in front of the hearth. Every second seemed heavy to Campion. Lopez put his wine glass down, the movement delicate, then looked at her again.

  “We shall begin with Christopher Aretine. My friend.” He stared at the seal in Campion’s hands as if it was something strange, something forgotten. “It was said that Kit Aretine was the handsomest man in Europe, and I think he truly was. He was also a scoundrel, a wit, a poet, a fighter, and the best company I ever knew.” Lopez smiled wistfully, then stood again. He talked as he crossed to the bookshelves. “He was a great lover of women, Campion, though I think he was a dangerous man for women to love.” He reached to the topmost shelf, grunted, and brought down a book. “There was a fine madness in Kit, I’m not sure even now I can describe it. I don’t think he knew fear, and he had too much pride, too much anger, and he refused ever to bow the knee. I sometimes wonder if he was driven by hatred in search of love.” Lopez smiled at the thought as he sat again, the book on his knees.

  “Kit Aretine could have had everything, Campion, everything. He could have been an earl! The old King offered him an earldom, and Kit threw it all away.”

  He paused, sipped more wine, and Campion leaned forward. “Threw it away?”

  Lopez smiled. “You have to understand, my dear, that King James was like Sir Grenville Cony. He preferred his lovers to be men. I think he fell in love with Kit, but Kit would have none of it. None. The King offered him everything, and in return Kit gave him a poem.” Lopez smiled. “It was printed anonymously, but everyone knew Kit Aretine was the author. He even boasted about it! He described the King in the poem as ‘that Scottish thistle of ungendered prick.’” Lopez laughed, pleased to see the same from Campion. The old man shook his head ruefully. “It was a bad poem, a bad idea, and it could only have one result. Kit ended up where you were, in the Tower. Everyone said he’d die, that the insult was too great and too public to go unavenged, but I managed to get him out.”

  “You did?”

  Lopez smiled. “I owed Kit a great debt, and the King of England owed me a small one. I forgave the King his debt, and in return he gave me Kit Aretine. There was a condition. Kit Aretine was banished, never again to set foot in England.” Lopez picked the book up from his lap. “He stopped being a poet then, if he ever had been one, and became a soldier instead. Here,” he held the book out. “That’s him.”

  The book felt odd, as if the leather covers were too big for the pages. Campion understood when she opened it. Someone had ripped the pages from the spine, leaving only two behind. One was the title page. “Poems, &c. Upon Severall Themes. By Mr. Christopher Aretine.” On the opposite page was a woodcut, framed in a complex design, that showed the poet. It was a small, lifeless drawing, yet the artist had conveyed arrogant good looks. It was an imperious face, staring at a world it would conquer.

  She turned the title page to find the empty space where the binding threads hung ragged. Something was written here in a bold, dashing hand. “To my friend, Mordecai, this much Improved Booke. Kit.” Campion looked at Lopez.

  “He tore the poems out?”

  “Yes. And burned them. In that very fireplace.” Lopez chuckled at the memory, then shook his head sadly. “
I think he knew he could never be a great poet, so he decided to be no poet at all. Yet I don’t think he ever knew what an extraordinary man he really was. Kit Aretine, my dear, was a terrible waste of enormous talent.” Mordecai Lopez sipped his wine. He was looking at the seal, but as he put the wine down he lifted his eyes to Campion and said the words which, somehow, were no surprise, yet which turned her soul inside out. “He was also your father.”

  Twenty-four

  The bells of St. Mary’s rang eleven. From across the water, from the city that climbed to the great cathedral, dozens of other bells echoed the hour. The gates of London were being shut, its thousands of inhabitants were mostly already asleep, and in the morning they would awake to another day not much different to the one on which they had closed their eyes. Yet not Campion. She would never again have a day like the ones before this night, for suddenly she had been wrenched as few people are wrenched. Matthew Slythe, the grim Puritan who had burdened her with God’s wrath, had not been her father. Her father was a failed poet, a wit, a lover, and an exile. Kit Aretine. She turned the page of the ruined book back to the portrait. She tried to see a likeness to herself in the arrogant, imperious portrait, but she could not. “My father?”

  “Yes.” Lopez’s voice was gentle.

  She felt as if she had fallen into a chasm of immeasurable darkness, as if within its bleakness, she struggled to make great wings beat that could take her once more into the light. “Poems, &c. Upon Severall Themes.” But what? What themes had motivated her real father?

  “It’s a story that begins long ago, Campion, in Italy.” Lopez had rested his head against the high back of his chair. “There was a riot against my people. I don’t even remember why, but I suppose some Christian child had fallen into a river and drowned and the mob thought we Jews had kidnapped it and sacrificed it in our synagogue.” He smiled. “They often thought that. So they attacked us. Your father was there, a very young man, and I think it simply struck him that it would be more amusing to fight the mob than join it. He saved my life, and that of my wife and my daughter. He fought for us, rescued us, and was offended when I suggested payment. I paid him in the end, though. I heard he was in the Tower and I had lent money to the King of England. So I cancelled King James’s debt for your father’s life.

  “He was penniless when I took him back to Holland. I offered him money and he refused it, then he made a bargain with me. He would take the money and return it, with interest, in one year. Anything he made in addition would be his.”

  Lopez smiled at the memory. “That was 1623. He bought a ship, a splendid vessel, and he recruited men and bought guns and sailed off against Spain. He was a pirate, nothing else, though the Dutch gave him letters of commission that wouldn’t have stopped the Dons putting him to a slow death. They never did. When fortune smiled on your father, she really smiled well.” Lopez sipped wine. “You should have seen his return. Two more ships with him, both captured and both full of Spanish gold.” He shook his head. “I’ve never seen money like it, ever! Only two men have ever taken more off the Spanish, and no man ever cared less about it than your father. He paid me his debt, took some for himself, and he charged me with a new commission. I was to make the rest of the money available to you. It was a fortune, Campion, a true fortune.”

  The fire was dying behind its screen, the room becoming chill, but neither moved to put more wood on the feeble flames. Campion listened, her wine forgotten, listened to a stranger tell her who she was.

  Lopez stroked his beard. “Before all that happened, before Kit wrote his poem about King James, he fell in love. Dear God! He was smitten. He wrote to me that he had found his ‘Angel,’ and he would marry her. By then I’d known him six years and I doubted he’d ever marry, but he wrote to me again, six months later, and he was still in love. He said she was innocent, gentle and very strong. He also said she was very, very beautiful.” Lopez smiled at her. “I think she must have been, for she was your mother.”

  Campion smiled at the compliment. “What was her name?”

  “Agatha Prescott. An ugly name.”

  “Prescott?” Campion frowned.

  “Yes. She was the younger sister of Martha Slythe.” Lopez shook his head in wonderment. “I don’t know how Kit Aretine met a Puritan girl, but he did, and he fell in love, and she with him, and they never had time to marry. He was arrested, taken to the Tower, and he left her pregnant.”

  Mordecai Lopez sipped his wine. “She was alone. I suppose she asked Kit’s friends for help, but he ran with a swift pack in those days and the help never came. Who needed a pregnant angel?” He shrugged. “I didn’t know her, she didn’t know me. I wish I could have helped, but she did the fatal, perhaps the only thing. She crawled home in disgrace.”

  Campion tried to imagine how Matthew Slythe would have behaved if she had come home pregnant. It was a fearful thought. She felt a pang for the girl who had been forced back to the Prescotts.

  Lopez clasped his hands on his knees. “They hid her. They were ashamed, and sometimes I think they may have been glad at what happened. She died of the childbirth fever just days after you were born. Perhaps they hoped you’d die, too.”

  Campion had to blink back tears, swept by a terrible pity for a girl who had tried to break the same bonds that she had tried to break. Her mother, like the daughter she left behind, had wanted to be free, yet in the end the Puritans had snatched her back to a lonely, vindictive death.

  “So there you were,” Lopez smiled, “a little bastard, the shame of the Prescott family. They called you Dorcas. Doesn’t that mean ‘full of good works’?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s what they wanted you to be, yet the works were to be their works. They would bring you up as a good Puritan.” Lopez shook his head. “When Kit was released from the Tower he wrote to the Prescotts, asking for news, and he offered to take you from them. They refused.”

  She frowned. “Why?”

  “Because they’d solved their problem by then. Agatha had an older sister. I’m told Martha was not as beautiful.”

  Campion smiled. “No.”

  “Yet the Prescotts were rich, they could afford a large dowry, and they attached more than a bride to the dowry. They attached you. Matthew Slythe agreed to marry Martha, to take you, and to bring you up as his natural daughter. Matthew and Martha promised never, ever, to reveal the shame of Agatha. You had to be hidden.”

  Campion thought of Matthew and Martha Slythe. No wonder, she thought, they had leaned the wrath of God heavily on her, fearing that every smile and every small act of joy might be Agatha Prescott’s shameful personality breaking through the Puritan bonds.

  “Then,” Lopez went on, “Kit Aretine made his fortune and wanted you to have it.” He laughed softly. “You’d think that to give a child a fortune would be easy! But, no. The Puritans wouldn’t take the money. It came from the devil, they said, and it would seduce you from the true faith. Then Matthew Slythe’s business began to fail.” Lopez poured more wine. “Suddenly Kit Aretine’s offer became less devilish, even began to smack of Godliness!” He laughed. “So they asked a young lawyer to negotiate for them.”

  “Sir Grenville Cony?” Campion asked.

  “Just plain Grenville Cony then, but a subtle little toad all the same.” Lopez smiled. “And like all lawyers he loved subtlety. Subtlety makes a lawyer rich. Things, my dear, began to get difficult.”

  The clocks chimed a ragged cacophony of the quarter hour. From the river came the mournful sound of halyards slapping against masts.

  “We couldn’t give you the money as an outright gift. The law made that difficult and we simply did not trust Grenville Cony. He came to Amsterdam to see us and that proved a disaster.”

  “A disaster?”

  Lopez’s face showed a wistful amusement. “Cony had to fall in love with your father. I suppose that wasn’t difficult if you loved men instead of women, but Cony managed to offend Kit. He pursued him like a slave.” Lopez chuck
led. “I told your father to encourage it, that we should use Cony’s devotion to our advantage, but Kit was never kind to that sort of man. He ended by stripping Cony naked, thumping his ass with a scabbard, and throwing him into a canal. All in public.”

  Campion laughed. “I wish I’d seen it. I wish I’d done it!”

  Lopez smiled. “Cony took his revenge, of a sort. He bought a painting, a naked Narcissus, and he paid to have your father’s face painted over the original. He wanted people to think that Aretine had been his lover. An odd sort of revenge, I suppose, but it seemed to please Grenville Cony.”

  Campion had stopped listening. She was remembering. She was seeing in her mind’s eye that splendid, savage, pagan, arrogant face that had transfixed her in Cony’s house. Her father! That man, that face of unbelievable handsomeness, that creature she had thought too good-looking to be true, and it was her father! Now she understood why so many spoke with such awe of Kit Aretine as the handsomest man in Europe. Her mother would never have stood a chance, the Puritan seeing the god and falling in love. Campion remembered the golden hair, the strength of the face, the sheer beauty of it.

  Lopez half smiled. “You saw the painting?”

  She nodded. “Yes.”

  “I never did, but I often wondered how good a likeness it was. Cony hired a Dutch painter to sketch your father in an ale-house.”

  “He made him look like a god.”

  “Then it sounds a good likeness. Strange it should come out of hatred.” Lopez shrugged. “Mind you, it didn’t make our task any easier.” He left the subject of the painting and went back to the Covenant. “You see, I’d already bought a great deal of property with the money. You own land in Italy, Holland, France, England, and Spain.” He smiled. “You’re very, very rich. All that land, Campion, produces money, some in rent, some in crops, but a very, very great deal of money. I doubt if there are twenty people in England richer than you. We proposed, quite simply, that we kept control of the land, but passed the profits of the land to Matthew Slythe. When you were twenty-one you would take the profits for yourself. But that wouldn’t do.