A Crowning Mercy (12 page)

It clouded over that day, great clouds that piled from the south, and in the afternoon it rained. That evening, in a tavern on the edge of the New Forest, Campion dried herself in front of a fire. She drank small beer and stayed close to Walter's wife, Miriam, who protected her from the men who tried to flirt with the beautiful, shy girl beside the hearth. Miriam tutted. 'Your mother should have married you off.'

'I think she wanted me at home.' She instantly feared that Miriam would ask why, in that case, her mother had sent her to London, but the carrier's wife was thinking of other things.

'It's not a blessing, dear.'

'What?'

'To be fair, like you. You can see the disturbance in the men. Still, the Lord didn't make you proud, and that's a blessing. But if I were you, dear, I'd marry and marry soon. How old be you?'

'Eighteen,' Campion lied.

'Late, late. Now I was wed to Walter at fifteen, and a better man God could not have shaped in His clay, b'aint that be, Walter?'

Walter, puzzling his way through Deuteronomy, looked up and grunted shyly. He went back to his scriptures and his pot of ale.

Campion looked at Miriam. 'Don't you have children?'

'Lord bless you, child, but the children be growed. Them that God let grow. Our Tom now, he be married, and the girls are in service. That's why I travel with Walter, to keep him company and out of trouble!' She laughed at her own joke and Campion was surprised to see a warm smile soften Walter's stern face. The joke was evidently an old one between them, a comforting one, and Campion knew she was with good, kind people and wished that she did not need to deceive them.

They crossed the New Forest the next day, travelling in company with two dozen other people, and Walter pulled out a great pistol that he stuck in his belt and laid a sword across the leading mule's packs. They were not troubled in the forest though, except by more rain that soaked the path and dripped from the trees long after the showers had stopped. By afternoon the sun shone again and they were coming close to Southampton where Campion must leave Miriam's company.

Each stage of her journey loomed ahead to worry her. She had reached Southampton safely, and she was further from home now than she had ever dreamed of going, but there was still the largest obstacle to be cleared; the journey to London itself. Miriam asked if she had much money and Campion said yes, about five pounds, and Miriam told her to take the stage wagon. 'It's the safest way, child. Is your uncle expecting you?'

'I think so.'

'Well, you take the wagon. Who knows, maybe he'll pay for you?' She laughed, then took Campion to the huge inn where the wagons left, and kissed her farewell. 'You're a good girl, I can tell. The Lord protect you, child. We'll pray for you.'

And perhaps the prayers worked, for at Southampton Campion met Mrs Swan, and although Mildred Swan was not the likeliest person to be God's instrument, she was undoubtedly effective. Within minutes of seeing Campion, lost and frightened, she had taken the girl under her wing. They shared a bed and Campion listened to the interminable story of Mildred Swan's life.

She had been visiting her sister who was married to a clergyman in Southampton and was now returning to her own home in London. The story, interrupted by sleep, was picked up the next morning as they waited in the cobbled yard. 'I'm a widow, dear, so I knows about sorrows and troubles.' She had a huge, untidy bundle on the ground, next to a basket filled with pies and fruit. As she turned to check on their safety she saw an ostler loitering near her belongings. 'Get your thieving eyes off them! I'm a Christian woman travelling defenceless! Don't you think you can thieve from me!' The ostler, astonished, made a hasty retreat. Mrs Swan, who liked to arrange the world about her, smiled happily at Campion. 'You must tell me about your mother, dear.'

Mildred Swan was a plump, middle-aged woman, wearing a dress of faded blue, with a gaudy, flowered scarf about her shoulders and a bright red bonnet crammed on unruly, fair hair. She did not wait for Campion to answer, instead she wanted to know whether Campion planned to travel on top or inside the coach. Campion said she did not know.

'You'd better travel with me, dear. Inside. Then we can protect each other against the men.' The last words were spoken loudly enough for a tall, gloomy-looking minister to hear. Mrs Swan watched him to make sure the words had registered, then looked back to Campion. 'So?'

Campion had changed her story a little. She had kept a sick, failing mother, but now she claimed to be travelling to London to see a lawyer about an inheritance. It was close enough to the truth, for Campion had conceived the idea that Grenville Cony must be the lawyer who had arranged the Covenant.

By the time Campion had explained about the inheritance they were inside the wagon, perched on a cushioned bench, and Mrs Swan had jostled the other passengers unmercifully to make herself ample space. The minister, a Bible now in his hands, sat opposite Campion by the window.

Mrs Swan was fascinated by Campion's sick mother. 'She's got thin blood, has she, dear?'

'Yes.'

'Buttercups, dear, buttercups. Buttercups work for thin blood, dear. My mother had thin blood. She died, of course, but it wasn't just the thin blood. Oh no.' She said the last words darkly as though they enshrined a terrible secret. 'What else does she have, dear?'

For two hours, as the wagon rumbled and lurched northwards, Campion heaped upon her mother the troubles of a female Job, each ailment more terrible than the last, and for each Mrs Swan had a remedy, always infallible, though she also always knew of someone who had died despite them. The conversation, though tiring on Campion's imagination, was a very heaven for Mrs Swan. 'The ague, dear? My grandmother had the ague, God bless her, but she didn't die of it. No. She was cured, but then she prayed to St Petronilla. Can't do that now, of course, thanks to some I won't name.' She glowered at the minister to whom she had taken an irrational dislike. 'Does she have sore breasts, dear?'

'Very.'

'She would, she would,' Mrs Swan sighed heavily. 'I had sore breasts, dear, when my husband was alive, but then he was a sailor. Yes. He brought me the image of St Agnes from Lisbon and, do you know, it worked like a charm, but then it was a charm, of course.' She was raising her voice to provoke the minister. 'Mind you, dear, they were sore. And there's plenty of them to hurt!' She pealed with laughter at the thought, her eyes unblinking on the man of God who, sure enough, reacted. Whether it was the talk of Romish saints or the discussion of breasts that had offended him, Campion could not tell. He leaned towards Mrs Swan.

'You are indecent in your talk, woman!'

She ignored him and smiled at Campion. 'Does she have long ears, dear?'

'No.'

'God be thanked for that, dear, 'cos there's no cure for long ears except a clouting. A good clouting!' She turned to the minister, but he had already leaned back in defeat, his eyes on Ecclesiastes. Mrs Swan tried to rouse him again. 'Has she got the falling sickness?'

'Oh, yes.'

'Yes. My aunt had that, God rest her. One moment she was on her feet, the next she was flat on the floor. Just like that. St Valentine cures that, dear.' The minister stayed silent.

Mrs Swan settled back on the bench. 'I'm going to sleep now, dear. If anyone molests you,' and here she looked hard at the travelling preacher, 'you just wake me up.'

Mrs Swan was her guide, her mentor, her protector, and now, as they alighted at the end of the Strand, her landlady too. She would not hear of Campion seeking lodging in an inn, though she had not been slow to make clear that her hospitality was not free. 'Not that I'm greedy, dear, no. No one can say that of Mildred Swan, but a body has to look after a body.' With which gnomic words the deal had been made.

Even though Charing Cross and the Strand were not London proper, but just the westward extension of the houses built outside the old walls of the city, it seemed fearful to Campion. The eastern sky was hazed dark with the smoke of innumerable chimneys, a haze pierced by more church towers and spires than Campion could have dreamed possible; the whole overshadowed by the great cathedral on the hill. The houses in the Strand, down which Mrs Swan led her, were huge and rich, their doors guarded by armed men, while the street was filled with cripples and beggars. Campion saw men with empty, festering eye-sockets, children with no legs who swung themselves along on strong arms, and women whose faces were covered with open sores. It stank.

Mrs Swan noticed none of it. 'This is the Strand, dear. Used to be a lot of gentry along here, but most have gone, more's the pity. It's all Saints, now, and Saints don't pay like the gentry.' Mrs Swan had been left money by her sea-captain husband, but she augmented her income by embroidery, and the Puritan revolution in London had lowered the demand for such decorative work.

A troop of soldiers marched from the city, long pikes over their shoulders, their barred helmets bright in the sunlight. People were thrust unceremoniously from their path. Mrs Swan shouted scornfully at them, 'Make way for the Lord's anointed!' An officer looked sternly at her, but Mildred Swan was not a woman to be overawed by the military. 'Watch your step, Captain!' She laughed as the officer hastily dodged a pile of horse-dung. She made a dismissive gesture at the soldiers. 'Just playing, they are. Did you see those boys at the Knight's Bridge?' The coach had been stopped at the bridge in the fields to the west of London, and the soldiers had searched the travellers. Mrs Swan snorted. 'Little boys, they are. That's all! Shave their heads and they think they can rule the world! This way, dear.'

Campion was led into an alley so narrow that she could not walk alongside Mrs Swan. She was lost now, confused by the maze of tiny streets, but at last Mrs Swan reached a blue door which she laboriously unlocked, pushed Campion inside, and Campion reflected, as she settled into the small parlour, that she had reached her destination. Here, in this great, confusing city, she might find the answer to the seal which hung between her breasts. Here too was Toby Lazender, and in a world where her only friend was Mrs Swan, he suddenly loomed large in her thoughts. She was in London at last, free.

Mrs Swan sat heavily opposite her, pulled up her skirts and took off her pattens. 'Oh, my poor corns! Well, dear! We're here.'

Campion smiled. 'We're here.' Where the mystery could be solved.

7

Campion's behaviour, before she ran away from Werlatton, had been so solitary and eccentric that her absence on the first morning provoked nothing more than grumbles and self-satisfied noises from Goodwife saying that she had always known the girl could not be trusted. By mid-afternoon the grumbles had turned to alarm in Scammell's head and he ordered a horse saddled and rode himself about the bounds of the estate.

Even when it was realised that Campion had disappeared, their imagination could not encompass anything so dramatic as a journey to London. On the second day, at dawn, Scammell ordered Tobias Horsnell to search the villages to the north, while he and Ebenezer went south and west. By then the trail was long cold, and that evening, in the great hall, Samuel Scammell felt the stirrings of fear. The girl was his passport to riches beyond dream and she had gone.

Goodwife Baggerlie took pleasure in Campion's disappearance, much as bad news will always cheer a prophet of doom. Goodwife had joined eagerly in the Slythes' persecution of their daughter, a persecution that was rooted in a distaste for her looks, her spirit, and her apparent unwillingness to subdue her soul to the tedious boredom of Puritan existence. Now that Campion had fled, Goodwife dredged from the past an endless catalogue of trivial sins, each magnified in Goodwife's sullen mind. 'She has a devil, master, a devil.'

Faithful Unto Death Hervey, who had joined the search, looked at Goodwife. 'A devil?'

'Her father, God bless him, could control it.' Goodwife sniffed and dabbed at red eyes with her apron. ' "He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes."'

'Amen,' said Scammell.

'Praise his word,' said Ebenezer, who had never been beaten by his father, though he had often watched as his sister was lashed with the great belt.

Faithful Unto Death Hervey steepled long fingers in front of his bobbing Adam's apple. '"As a jewel of gold in a swine's snout, so is a fair woman which is without discretion."'

'Indeed and indeed.' Scammell searched his mind for a suitable verse of scripture so he would not be left behind in this company. Nothing came to mind except inappropriate words from the Song of Solomon, words he dared not say aloud: 'Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins.' He groaned inwardly. He wondered what her breasts were like, breasts that he had yearned to fondle, and now, perhaps he would never know. She had gone, taking her beauty with her, and taking, too, Scammell's hope of wealth. 'We must watch and pray.'

'Amen,' Ebenezer said. 'Watch and pray.'

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Campion's supposition was right. Grenville Cony was, indeed, a lawyer, only now, according to Mrs Swan, much more. 'He's a knight, dear, Sir Grenville, and he's so high and mighty that he doesn't notice the likes of you and I. He's a politician. A lawyer and a politician!' Her words left no doubt as to her opinions of both categories. Lawyers, to Mrs Swan, were the lowest form of life. 'Killing's too good for them, dear. Bloodsuckers, dear. If God hadn't invented sin, then the lawyers would, just to line their own purses.' She expounded further so that her life, to Campion, seemed to have been a perilous journey between the dangers of various illnesses on the one side, and the plottings of predatory lawyers on the other. 'I could tell you stories, dear,' said Mrs Swan, and proved it by doing so; many of the stories of a complexity that would have done credit to a lawyer, but all distinguished by endings in which Mrs Swan, single-handedly, confounded the entire legal profession.

Yet Campion could see little choice but to visit Sir Grenville Cony and here, once more, fortune smiled on her. A neighbour of Mrs Swan, a French tailor, knew Sir Grenville's address which turned out to be one of the massive houses in the Strand.