A Crowning Mercy

by Bernard Cornwell

  “Master Cony said that if we controlled the land then one day we might simply dam the golden stream. That it gave Matthew Slythe, indeed yourself, an uncertain future.” Lopez shook his head ruefully. “You have no idea, Campion, how hard we tried to give that money to you, and how difficult it was. So, we drew up a different scheme, a little more subtle. We agreed to give up control of the properties on the condition that it all went to you when you were twenty-one. You would take control of the land, the profits, everything, but Matthew Slythe wouldn’t accept that. He believed that if you became rich too quickly then you would slide back into the pagan ways of your real parents. He wanted more years to save your soul, so we agreed, in the end, that you would inherit at twenty-five.

  “We’d agreed, remember, to give up the control of the properties, but not to Grenville Cony and Matthew Slythe. Instead we all decided that the Bank of Amsterdam would administer all the land. Even Grenville Cony agreed to that, because it’s the one bank everyone trusts. It doesn’t belong to one family, but to the whole nation, and it hardly ever cheats anyone. To this day, Campion, they administer your wealth.”

  Lopez’s references to “her” wealth seemed strange. She did not feel wealthy, or even fortunate. She was a Puritan girl, struggling for freedom, far from the man she loved.

  Lopez looked at the ceiling. “The bank administers your property. They receive the profits from all the agents throughout Europe. The agents, of course, deduct their fees and I’ve no doubt that every single one is cheating you. The bank takes its own fee for its trouble, and I’m sure they sometimes add the sums wrong in their own favor, and then the money goes each month by draft of hand to Sir Grenville Cony. And he, my dear, undoubtedly takes an enormous fee. The remainder of the money was sent to your father, and the Covenant, which is the agreement between the four of us and the bank, says that the money must be used for your comfort, education, and happiness.”

  She laughed at the thought of Matthew Slythe caring for her happiness.

  Lopez smiled.

  “Truly it was not very subtle, it might even have worked, but there was one terrible mistake. Your father, Kit Aretine, had to interfere. We’d made a provision in the Covenant for changes to be made. Suppose that England went to war with Holland and the money could not be paid? In that case we’d need to transfer the control of the property somewhere else, and we’d decided, quite simply, that any three signatures from the four of us should be sufficient to change the arrangements. That seemed safe, after all neither I nor your father were ever likely to agree with Grenville Cony or Matthew Slythe, but then Kit had to complicate matters. What happens, he asked, if one of the four men dies? Wouldn’t it be simpler, he said, if every man had a seal and each man can hand the seal on to whomever he likes. The seal gives its owner one quarter of the authority over the Covenant and it authenticates the signature of anyone who writes to the Bank of Amsterdam about the Covenant. I said it was a dreadful idea, but I think Kit had already hatched the idea of sending Matthew Slythe a crucifix and Grenville Cony a woman, and so it was done.

  “But now, you see,” Lopez leaned forward, “it was not three signatures that were needed, but three seals. Any man who could gather three seals would control the whole fortune. All of it. They could end the Covenant. If Sir Grenville, whom I very much suspect at this moment has two seals, can take a third, then he will simply go to the Bank and he will take all the property forever. All of it. You’ll have nothing.”

  Campion frowned. “And if Sir Grenville has two seals then no one else can change the Covenant.”

  “Exactly. And if he had succeeded in having you killed then you could not have taken the Covenant when you were twenty-five.”

  Lopez lifted his wine and smiled at her over the rim of the glass. “What you have to do, young lady, is to collect those seals of Sir Grenville’s and take them, with the Seal of St. Luke to the Bank of Amsterdam. That’s what your father wanted, and that’s what I will help you do.”

  Campion picked up the seal on the table. She understood now why Sir Grenville had hunted her and tried to kill her, she understood why Samuel Scammell had died so that Ebenezer could inherit control of one seal, she even understood why Matthew Slythe had lied to her when she had asked about the seal. She understood so much, though her mind would still have to go over and over the information, yet there was one thing she did not understand. She looked at Mordecai Lopez.

  “Where’s the fourth seal?”

  “I don’t know.” He sounded sad.

  “Is my father alive?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She had solved so much of the mystery, and now a new mystery presented itself, a mystery that now seemed even more important than the four golden seals.

  “Why didn’t my father come and take me from the Slythes?”

  “Would you have wanted that?”

  “Yes, oh, yes!”

  Lopez shrugged uncomfortably. “He didn’t know that.”

  “Did he try and find out?”

  Lopez gave her an unhappy smile. “I don’t think he did. I don’t know.”

  She knew that there was much unsaid. “Tell me what you know.”

  Lopez sighed. He had known these questions would come, yet he had hoped they would not. “I think Kit always thought the time would come when he would fetch you, but the time was never right. Once the Covenant was made and the seals distributed, he took himself to Sweden. He fought for the Swedes and he became close to the King.”

  Campion knew that Lopez spoke of Gustavus Adolphus, the great warrior king who had driven the sword of Protestantism deep into the Catholic Holy Roman Empire. “Your father was with the King when he was killed and after that he left the Swedish army. He came to see me in Amsterdam. He’d changed, Campion. Something happened to him in that war, and he’d changed.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know.” Lopez shrugged. “He was in his late thirties. I think he knew that he’d failed, that he would never be the great man that his youth had promised. You were eleven. I know he thought of going to see you, even to take you away, but he said you were probably a happy little girl and what could you want with a man like him?” Lopez smiled at her, judging his next words carefully.

  “You weren’t the only child, Campion. There were twin boys in Stockholm, a little girl in Venice and a pretty child in Holland.”

  “Did he see them?” There was pain in her voice.

  He nodded. “Yet he used to travel in those places. He was banished from England.” Lopez shook his head. “I know this will sound hard, but you were the special one, you were the daughter of his ‘angel,’ the only woman I think he truly loved, and you were the only one who’d been taken away from him. I think he was ashamed, too. I know he was. He was ashamed of her death, of abandoning you, and I think he was frightened to see you.”

  “Frightened?”

  Lopez smiled. “Yes. Suppose the child of Kit Aretine and his angel turned out to be ugly? What price love then? Or suppose you’d hated him for leaving you? I think he wanted to treasure her memory as the perfect woman, the perfect love that could have set the world on fire. I don’t know, Campion, I don’t know.”

  Campion lifted the seal again. “Did he think his money was sufficient for me?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “I don’t want his money!” She was smarting at Aretine’s rejection, she remembered all the unhappy hours of childhood, all the hours that he could have spared her. She put the seal on the table. “I don’t want it.”

  “You don’t want his love, you mean.”

  “I never had it, did I?” She thought of him. The handsomest man in Europe, the wit, rogue, poet, lover and fighter, who had abandoned his daughter to the Puritans because he could not be cumbered with her. “What happened to him?”

  “I saw him last in 1633, in Amsterdam. He wanted to settle down. He said he would write again, but not poetry. He wanted a new country, he said, a clean country, and he wanted ev
eryone to forget there had ever been a Christopher Aretine. He said he’d make himself a grave, with a carved gravestone, and then he would make himself a farm and he would grow things, write things, and perhaps, at last, rear children. He went to Maryland.” He smiled. “I’m told there is a grave with his name on it, but I suspect he’s laughing at everyone who thinks he’s beneath that stone. I think he’s now a farmer, or perhaps he’s dead.”

  “He never wrote to you?”

  “Not a word.” Lopez looked tired. “He said he was going to Maryland to forget all the evil of his past.”

  “And the seal?”

  “He took it with him.”

  “So he could be alive?”

  Lopez nodded. “He could be.” Lopez hated to lie to Campion. He liked her. He saw in her the strength of her dead mother, and some of the spirit of Kit Aretine. Yet Aretine was Lopez’s friend, and Aretine had forced a promise from Mordecai Lopez. The promise had been solemn and simple, that Lopez would never reveal Kit Aretine to anyone, not even his own bastards, and Lopez would not break that promise. Yet he had received news from Maryland since 1633, and Lopez knew that Aretine lived. The old man smiled at Campion. “He couldn’t be a great poet, so he stopped being any kind of poet. I think perhaps he couldn’t be Kit Aretine either, so he stopped trying. Think of him as a middle-aged American farmer, dreaming of the strange life he once had.”

  Campion looked scornful. “And of the children he abandoned?”

  “With a fortune, if you care to take it.”

  “I don’t.” She was angry with a man she had never met. She stood up, unhappiness frustrating her, and picked up the Seal of St. Luke. She looked at it, hating it, then put it decisively on the table beside Lopez. “I don’t want it.”

  The old man watched her cross to the fireplace. She took the screen from in front of the fire and poked savagely at the dying blaze. A log collapsed in sparks. She put the poker down and turned back toward Lopez. “Does the Mercurius go to Maryland?”

  Lopez smiled. “It takes weeks and weeks to reach there. Meanwhile,” he picked up the seal, “there is this.”

  She shook her head. “Couldn’t he have come to me just once?”

  Lopez seemed not to hear her. He held the seal in front of his eyes and spoke casually, almost offhandedly. “I have friends in London, men of trade who don’t mind my religion. Vavasour has talked to some of them for news. It appears that Sir Grenville Cony has taken Lazen Castle for his own.” His eyes turned to look at Campion. “Without compensation.” He put the seal down.

  She was horrified. “You mean…”

  He nodded. “I mean Sir Toby Lazender has lost everything. Everything. I suppose he and his mother live off charity now.”

  She stared at the seal, its gold bright in the room’s darkness. She knew she could not rid herself of the seals. For Toby’s sake she must follow Christopher Aretine’s plans. She shook her head. “I have to collect them?”

  Lopez smiled. “With our help. I shall give that task to Vavasour.”

  “Your wolfhound.”

  Lopez nodded. “I shall set a wolfhound to trap a frog.”

  Lopez had sidetracked her, taking her from the anger she felt against Kit Aretine to the duty she owed to Toby and his mother. Yet she would not be deflected. Anger came back into her voice, defiance into her face. “Will my father come back?”

  The old man’s voice was gentle. “That’s for him to decide. Does it matter? I’m helping you because of the debt I still owe him.”

  Campion seemed to hear Matthew Slythe’s voice in her head. “‘For I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the Fathers upon the children.’” She stared at the Seal of St. Luke and knew that it was her father’s iniquity that was being thrust on her. She had to take it, for Toby’s sake, yet she hated the seals. She looked at Lopez. “Keep it for me till I leave.”

  He smiled. “A few more days won’t hurt. I’ve kept it sixteen years.” He picked it up.

  She went to bed an hour later, but Mordecai Lopez lingered after she had gone. He drew back the wide curtains and thought of an old love between a Puritan and a poet; a cruel, doomed love that had burned so briefly bright and left behind this girl as dazzling as the love itself. The river heaped and fell, heaped and fell through the arches of the bridge, the turbulence shaking the long reflections of the ships’ lights in the water’s mirror. Kit Aretine had been his friend, his treasured friend, yet Lopez could not deny Campion’s final, bitter thrust. Of father and daughter, she said, it was not she who was the bastard. Lopez stared above the bridge, stared westward into the far night, and muttered the words of an old sadness, “My friend, my friend.”

  Twenty-five

  London was in uproar. A witch had escaped, taken from the Tower itself, and the army searched the city with a thoroughness that was tempered by a suspicion that she had long fled. The churches were full, the preachers haranguing God to protect His people from the devil, while every murdered body found in the dawn was ascribed to the demon that stalked the streets.

  Mordecai Lopez, breakfasting the morning after his long, long talk with Campion, watched soldiers searching the wharves on the opposite bank. He smiled. “They’re in for a long fruitless day.”

  “Like most soldiers,” Devorax grunted.

  Lopez looked at Vavasour Devorax’s red eyes and sour expression. “A bad night?”

  “It didn’t seem bad at the time.” Devorax drank water and made a grimace. “I’m getting too damned old for it. So, what’s to be done?”

  Lopez sipped at a dish of tea. It was a luxury he could not do without. “I want a message taken to Oxford. Can one of your men do it?”

  “They do it all the time. What’s it for?”

  Lopez told Devorax of Sir Toby Lazender and the soldier seemed to disapprove of what he heard.

  “You think she’ll go to him?”

  “If he wants her.” Lopez blew on his tea. “If I were a wagering man I’d say she’ll be Lady Lazender before winter.”

  Devorax waited as Marta Renselinck brought food. When the housekeeper had gone he spoke savagely. “She’s a fool! She should go to Amsterdam! She’d be safe there.”

  “She’ll go to Oxford.” Lopez picked a tealeaf from his dish with a delicate forefinger. “Can you get her there?”

  “You pull the strings, Mordecai, and I’ll dance round the damned world for you. I suppose you’ll go back to Amsterdam?”

  “When she’s gone. Yes.”

  “And leave me here.” Devorax sounded morose. He stabbed into a fried egg and watched the yolk run over the pewter plate, then scowled at Lopez’s tea. “I don’t know how you drink that muck.” He scooped a mess of egg on to a piece of bread. “So I’m to gather the seals, eh?”

  “If you can.”

  “I can, Mordecai, I can. It’ll take time, but I can.” The ravaged face smiled a bitter, secret smile, as bitter as the plans he had for the jewels of the Covenant. Vavasour Devorax was going to war.

  Sir Grenville Cony yelped with pain.

  “Sir Grenville! Still! I beg you, sir, still!” The doctor pressed down with his lancet and watched the blood flow into the silver cup. When bleeding his rich patients he always used a silver cup; it reassured them that, even in sickness, they received only the finest treatment. Doctor Chandler shook his head. “It’s thick, Sir Grenville, very thick.”

  “It hurts!” Sir Grenville groaned.

  “Not for long, Sir Grenville, not for long.” Chandler gave a reassuring smile. “And it’s a lovely day, Sir Grenville, a wonderful day. A boat ride, perhaps, will revive you?”

  “You’re a fool, Chandler, a damned fool.”

  “Whatever you say, Sir Grenville, whatever you say.” The doctor wiped blood from the wound.

  The door opened and Ebenezer Slythe came in. His dark, expressionless eyes looked at Sir Grenville. “Cottjens sends his apologies.”

  “Cottjens is a dungheap. Stop hovering, man!” This last wa
s shouted at the doctor who tried to wipe more blood from the cut on Sir Grenville’s upper arm. Sir Grenville pulled up his shirt and jacket, swung his legs to the floor, and groaned. His belly was in agony, had been ever since the girl had escaped from the Tower. “So?”

  Ebenezer shrugged. “It seems Lopez is not ill. Nor is he at home.” He smiled sardonically. “Cottjens says the bribe it took for that information will not be rendered on your account.”

  “How very kind of him.” Sir Grenville sneered. He waved the doctor out of the room, backing away with his linen cloth and silver cup. “So it’s Lopez.”

  “Presumably.”

  “And no doubt the bitch of a girl is already in Amsterdam.”

  Ebenezer shrugged. “Presumably.”

  “Presumably! Presumably! What do those watermen say?”

  The men who had rowed Campion from the Tower had been found. Their story, elicited from them in terror, had not helped. Ebenezer limped to a chair. “They took them to a coach at Bear Wharf.”

  “And then?”

  “Nothing.” Ebenezer seemed unmoved by the tale of failure.

  “And the coach presumably took them to a ship at another wharf.” Sir Grenville rubbed his upper arm, his fat, white face scowling at the pain. “That whoreson Jew! We should have killed them all, not expelled them! Damn him!”

  Ebenezer brushed dust from his black sleeve. “Be grateful it was only the Jew. From what you tell me, Aretine would have made a worse enemy.”

  For five days Sir Grenville had lived in terror that Kit Aretine had come back from the dead. Cottjens’s apologies had lifted that cloud, though Sir Grenville still surrounded himself with guards and travelled infrequently about London’s streets. The frog-like face looked at Ebenezer.

  “Make sure your damned house is well guarded.”