A Crowning Mercy (18 page)

She was taken from the room, Goodwife's hands spiteful on her, and when she was in the secretary's room Cony moved and slammed the door, leaving him alone with his henchman Thomas Grimmett. Cony rubbed his eyes. 'The girl's got spirit.'

'Has she got the seal, sir?' ,

Cony edged round the table and sat down. 'No. I thought she might, but I don't think so.' He laughed. 'I offered her a price she couldn't refuse. No. She hasn't.' He looked up at the huge Grimmett. 'It's still in that damned house, Thomas. Search it again. Pull every damned stone down, dig up the garden if need be, but find it.'

'Yes, sir.'

'But first,' Cony pushed papers about on his desk until he came up with what he wanted, 'that's Scammell's marriage certificate, dated this morning to make it legal.' Sir Grenville sounded tired. He looked up again. 'She has to be married, Thomas, she has to be! You understand?'

'If you say so, sir.'

'I don't say so, Thomas, the law says so. The will says so, the marriage settlement says so. If she's married then Scammell is the seal-holder, and Scammell will give the seal to us.'

'You know that, sir?'

'I know it, Thomas, because you will stay with Brother Scammell until he does give it to you.'

Grimmett smiled. 'Yes, sir.'

'So get them married. Tonight! And make it legal. A priest, the prayer book, none of Scammell's ranting Puritans. You can fix that?'

Grimmett thought for a second. 'Yes, sir. Where?'

'In Brother Scammell's house.' Cony invested Scammell's name with derision. 'Take her there in the boat, then do what you have to do.'

'Get them married, sir.' Grimmett grinned.

'Yes. And afterwards, Thomas, not before, because I want this legal, make damned sure she's no longer a virgin. I don't want her claiming the marriage isn't valid and opening her legs to prove it. If that damned Puritan doesn't know how to do it, then you stand over him.'

'Do it myself, sir?'

Sir Grenville looked up, curious.

'You like her?'

'Very pretty, sir.'

'Then you do it. It will be your reward.' He laughed at the huge, leather-jacketed man. 'The hardships you endure for me, Thomas.'

Grimmett laughed.

Cony waved at the door. 'Go on, then. Enjoy yourself. Leave the boy here, I've got a use for him. Come to me in the morning, Thomas. I want to hear all about it!'

Sir Grenville watched as the small party embarked in his barge. The girl, in her distinctive blue cloak, was struggling, but Grimmett easily subdued her with one hand. The servant, Goodwife, seemed to be slapping and pinching the girl who was beneath Grimmett's grip. Samuel Scammell walked behind, his hands flapping in impotent helplessness, and Cony shook his head and laughed.

He had been worried for a while, thinking the girl might have gone to Lopez, but he need not have worried. She was here, and the seal would turn up in a few days. All was well, indeed, more than well for Ebenezer was here. Sir Grenville, on first meeting Ebenezer, had seen the boy's need for a cause, had seen the bitter look on the cripple's face. There was no love there, either, for his beautiful sister. Cony smiled. It was time to educate Master Ebenezer, that gift from the gods to Cony's plans.

The sky had its first touch of red. The bargemen, the girl finally safe in the boat, pushed away from the pier. The oars dipped down, went forward, and the white-painted boat moved easily on to the darkening stream. Light flashed from the widening ripples at its stern. Sir Grenville Cony was tired, but happy. The Scots, he knew now, would come into the war against the King and that was good for Cony's investments, but this news was better. The seals would be his. He turned away from the river, looked up at the naked Narcissus bending over his pool, then threw open the anteroom door. 'My dear Ebenezer! My dear boy! We have so much to talk about. Bring that wine!'

Sir Grenville Cony was a happy, happy man.

10

James Alexander Simeon McHose Bollsbie knew, as did Sir Grenville Cony, moments of pure happiness. Bollsbie was a clerk in holy orders, a minister of the Church of England, ordained as such by the Bishop of London, licensed to preach, to administer the sacraments, to bury the dead, and, of course, to join Christian souls in holy matrimony.

The Reverend James Bollsbie was also a drunkard.

It was that circumstance, rather than any desire to witness for the Lord, which had prompted the nickname 'Sobriety'. Sobriety Bollsbie he had been for two years now. His drunkenness, in addition to supplying him with a new name, was also responsible for those moments of happiness he was given to enjoy. He also had moments of fearful despondency, but new every morning was the ale-given joy.

It had not always been so. He had once been known as a preacher of fire and conviction, a man who could start hysteria in the nearest pews and spread it back down the church. He specialised in sermons of hell fire, and had been known in a score of parishes as a man who could frighten sinners from their ale-houses into true repentance. He preached against alcohol, yet the enemy had laid siege and broken into his citadel. Sobriety Bollsbie preached no more.

Yet even as a finished man, a broken drunkard in his late forties, Sobriety Bollsbie had his place in society. He had always been an adaptable man, ready to trim the sails of his belief to the prevailing wind of theological fashion; thus when Archbishop Laud had been supreme and had demanded church services modelled on the hated Papist ritual, Sobriety had been the first to deck his altar cloths and illuminate his choir with candles. When he saw that he had miscalculated, and that the pathway to heaven lay in a plainer, Puritan service, he had not been shy in his conversion. Not for him the sly change or the slow dismantling of ritual. He advertised his change of allegiance. He invited the Puritans to witness the destruction of his gaudy altar, the burning of his altar rails, and the shredding of his embroidered vestments. He preached a sermon in which he likened his enlightenment to the conversion of St Paul and thus, in one service, became the darling of the Puritan faction as a witness to their truth.

That adaptability he had carried into his fall and disgrace. Such was the entwinement of church and state that lawyers, such as Sir Grenville, were often in need of a willing priest to add God's imprimatur to their own. Bollsbie was such a priest.

Bollsbie lived now in Spitalfields, in a miserable room where Thomas Grimmett, having safely delivered Campion to Scammell's house, discovered the priest drunk. Grimmett manhandled Bollsbie downstairs.

'Leave me, good sir! I am a priest! A priest!'

'I know you're a damned priest. Hold on, Sobriety.' Grimmett picked up a pail of filthy water and poured it over the straggle-haired man. 'Sober up, you bastard!'

Bollsbie moaned. He rocked to and fro, miserable and damp. 'Oh God!'

Grimmett squatted at his side. 'When did you last eat, Sobriety?'

'Oh, God!'

'You're a miserable bastard. You've got a wedding, your reverence. Understand? A wedding.'

'I want to eat.'

'You'll eat. Now fetch your book, Sobriety. We're going.'

Grimmett helped the priest find his old cassock, a filthy scapular, and his prayer book, then he half carried the preacher into the lane which led to Bishopsgate. He stopped at the first pie-stall and forced two beef pies into Bollsbie, then primed him with a tot of rum. 'There, your holiness. Remember me now?'

Sobriety smiled. 'It's Thomas, isn't it?'

'That's it, your reverence. Sir Grenville's man.'

'Ah! Good Sir Grenville! Does he do well?'

'You know Sir Grenville, reverend, he doesn't do badly. Now come on, we've got work to do.'

Bollsbie looked hopefully at the bag of bottles Grimmett carried. 'You want me as a witness? Yes?'

'I told you, Sobriety, a damned wedding. Now come on!'

'A wedding! How pleasing! I like weddings. Lead on, good Thomas, lead on!'

Toby Lazender grew bored. The alley was a cheerless place to wait. After an hour he walked to the Strand, persuading himself that Campion might be leaving by Cony's front door, but there was no life there except for the guard who leaned against the brick archway. Toby went back to the alleyway, down to the very end where the cobbles became a stinking river-washed ramp of littered mud. The wall of Cony's garden extended deep into the water and there was no way he could peer round its end. He went back to the porch, leaned against the opposite wall, and stared up at Cony's blank, featureless house. He must wait. Soon, he consoled himself, very soon, Campion would come through the door and they would be together.

He was in love, and he saw the world through the distorting glass of that love. Nothing mattered except that he should be with Campion, and his father's disapproval had seemed irrelevant. He had seen her first at the stream and, with the fear of love, he had thought she might not want to see him again. He had cursed himself for not going back, even though his return would have been impossible once he was in London, but then she had written to him and he had left his father's house within minutes of the letter's arrival. His life before he had met Campion, the hours he spent without her, both seemed an irrelevance. He was in love. His father, and doubtless his mother too, disapproved. By birth and education she was unsuitable, but Toby did not care. There was something in Campion's soul that intoxicated him, he would not be without it, and even the dank, sunless alley seemed brighter because of it.

He touched the seal, feeling it as a lump beneath his leather coat and shirt. It had touched her skin, now it touched his, and even that triviality was turned by the distorting glass into an omen of brilliant hope.

He heard her before he saw her. He was leaning against the wall, dreaming the dreams of the shadowless future, when he heard her shriek. He turned, catching one glimpse of the silver-blue cloak in the boat's stern, and then the oarsmen bent forward again, pulled, and the barge surged out of sight.

'Campion!' He ran to the water's edge, but already she was gone, the river current carrying her away. 'Waterman! Waterman!'

Damn, damn and damn again! There was never an empty boat when you needed one!

He ran up the alley, his boots loud between the walls, and he turned east into the Strand. He tried to think of the nearest stairs to the river. Exeter Street! The Temple Stairs! He pushed past people, careless of their complaints, and he knew that with each second his loved one was going further from him.

Scammell! It had to be Scammell! Campion had told him the whole story and he had made her tell it again and again as he searched for an escape within the legal tangle of will, Covenant and marriage settlement. He wondered, as he pushed through the evening crowds, whether it was another name from the letter, Lopez perhaps, who had seized her, but if he was to rescue her then he had to make his own fateful decision about which of her enemies had taken her and his instinct said Scammell. A maker of boats, she had said, and the barge on which she had gone looked lavish and fitting for a boat-maker.

He turned off the Strand, banging into a solid merchant who shouted at him, and then he was taking the steps of Exeter Street down towards the line of people who waited for watermen.

A pikestaff slammed across the narrow street, stopped him, and a breastplated soldier moved in front of him. Two more came up behind him. 'In a hurry, lad?'

'Yes!' God damn! A patrol! One of the many that Parliament put into the streets to search for deserters.

They had him against the wall now. The other people using the street sidled at the far side, not wishing to be involved in any kind of trouble. The soldier who had stopped him looked Toby up and down. 'Who are you, lad?'

He thought quickly, snatching the name of the son of one of his father's colleagues. 'Richard Cromwell, Oliver Cromwell's son.'

'In a hurry, were you?' The soldier frowned, uncertain now.

'Yes. My father's business.'

'Let him go, Ted,' one of the other two said, but the third was frowning.

'Red 'air.' He sniffed. 'Strong build, red 'air. That's what the captain said we was to look for.' He snatched at the leather helmet-liner, tugging it clear of Toby's head. 'There you are! Red 'air!'

The first soldier was impressed, but still a little uncertain. 'Lazender?'

Toby forced himself to relax, even to smile. 'My name is Richard Cromwell. Take me to your captain. Who is he?'

The first man shifted uneasily. 'Ford, sir. Captain Ford.'

'Ah! Ford!' Toby laughed. 'I know Ford! Let's go and see him. Come on! You have your duty to do.' He smiled at the first man. 'What's your name?'

'Wiggs, sir. Edward Wiggs.' Wiggs looked pleased.

'Let's get it done then, Wiggs, then I can be about my father's business.'

Wiggs was quite prepared to let Toby go there and then, but the other two decided that a walk to Ludgate, their guardhouse, would be a welcome break in the monotony.

Toby contained himself. It was maddening, but to do the wrong thing was to invite disaster. He must pick his spot, and he watched the corner of Essex House coming closer as he carefully rehearsed his actions in his mind. Wiggs was on his left, saying that a word in the right place would be most welcome, thank you sir, while the other two trailed behind. They were all relaxed, lulled by Toby's cheerful co-operation, and then they were at the corner, the archway to Fleet Street on their right, and Toby pointed to the roof of the arch and laughed. 'Look at the stupid man!'

They looked, of course, and Toby brought his right knee about into Wiggs's crotch, snatched the falling pike, and then ran. He heard the bellow of pain behind him and then started shouting himself, 'Make way! Make way! Stop him!'

The crowd assumed he was a soldier. They parted before the blade and looked round for the man he was chasing. The illusion was helped by Wiggs's two colleagues who came shouting behind.

Toby was far fitter than the London apprentices who made up the city's garrison. He sprinted into the centre of the Strand, going away from the city, away from Campion, and then he twisted to his right into one of the foetid alleyways that lay to the north. He dropped his pike so he could go faster through the narrow maze. The shouts faded behind him.