A Crowning Mercy (41 page)

'Call me Campion.' She smiled shyly.

'Campion! What a lovely name. What a lovely name. Your middle name?'

She nodded, not wishing to explain.

'Campion! Splendid. You must sign papers, Campion. So many papers! I sometimes think we lawyers will choke ourselves with paper. Let's start here.'

He had written out her own story, telling the truth, and she skimmed through it, admiring the style, and signed her name. Then followed a batch of receipts, acknowledging favours received in the Tower. He smiled when she queried those. 'We want your gaolers to be happy, don't we? It makes a good impression in court if they smile at you, help you. The jury knows you can't be such a bad girl after all. Don't worry. We'll pay a little money here and there as well.'

Then he put a pile of letters on the table. They were requests for witnesses to come forward. Twenty-four alone were to members of the watch, another forty-five were for soldiers who had served at the siege of Lazen Castle. Francis Lapthorne said he had taken their names from the Parliamentary muster rolls, and he rubbed his hands with glee. 'We'll make them regret this trial, my dear! Oh yes! We'll make them look the fools they are!' He laughed at her suggestion that the Roundhead soldiers would be afraid to give testimony. 'The law is the law, my dear. You've seen a harsh side of it, but you'll find it can be a tender preserver of the truth too. They'll come if they are ordered. Now, you read the letters and then you sign them.'

She laughed at the great pile. 'Read all of them?'

'Always read what you sign, my dear.' He laughingly allowed that the letters were all duplicates of each other, but made her read through the top copy. Then he fanned them out on the table. He watched her write her signature again and again and, as she did so, explained that he had thought it far too dangerous to invite Lady Margaret or the Reverend Perilly to give evidence as she had suggested. 'This is not the time for avowed Royalists to be in London. You do understand?'

'I do.'

'But worry not! We will win, indeed we will!' Francis Lapthorne sanded her signatures, tipped the sand off and packed the papers away.

'Is that all?'

'You want more?' He laughed. 'That's all, my dear.'

He promised to return the next morning and Campion, cheered by his visits, watched him walk away across the footprints left by Archbishop Laud. He paused in the small archway, turned, smiled and gave her a bow. She waved.

An hour later, in a private room of the Bear Inn at the city end of London Bridge, Francis Lapthorne took the papers from the leather case. He burned all of them, except for two which bore Campion's signature on otherwise blank sheets. Those two, with a flourish, he put before Ebenezer Slythe. 'A deal of work, sir.'

'But well paid.'

'Indeed! Better than the theatre!' Since the Puritans had closed the playhouses, actors like Francis Lapthorne had been short of work. 'It's always a pleasure doing business for Sir Grenville.'

Ebenezer looked at him sourly. 'And doubtless a business when you provide him with pleasure.'

Lapthorne shrugged. 'It's an honour to be a friend of Sir Grenville,' he said defensively.

Ebenezer was not listening. He was staring at the signed sheets. 'God in his heaven!'

'What?'

'Look!' Ebenezer pushed the sheets across the table. 'Fool!'

'What?' Lapthorne did not understand. 'You asked me to get two signatures, I got two signatures! What more did you want?'

Ebenezer turned one of the sheets round and read it aloud in a sarcastic voice. 'Dorcas Campion Scammell. What the hell is that supposed to be?'

'Her name!'

'Campion? Her name's not Campion!'

Lapthorne shrugged. 'She told me it was. She said it was her middle name.'

'You're a fool.'

The actor assumed an air of hurt dignity. 'A person may assume whatever name they like, it's not illegal. If she says that is her name, then that is her name. It will be quite sufficient for her confession.'

'Pray you never have to make a confession to me, fool.' Ebenezer took the two sheets. 'And pray you're right.' He put two coins on the table.

Lapthorne looked at them. Four had been promised, and even that was hardly a great amount for the deal of writing he had done, yet he did not care to argue with the intense, dangerous young man whose eyes were dark and fanatical. He smiled. 'Pray give Sir Grenville my regards.'

Ebenezer ignored him. He limped from the room, gesturing for his men to close behind him. He walked slowly, using a cane to assist his limp. He crossed the street and went slowly down the steps to the wharf. People parted for him, awed by his face and by the armed guards. His own boat waited, its oars held upright so that the black blades were outlined against the myriad points of light upon the river. Ebenezer settled in the stern and nodded to the oarsmen. He felt good. He guessed the signatures would do for the confessions, one for witchcraft and one for murder. His sister was doomed and not even the Jew in Amsterdam could save her. Ebenezer smiled. Even the news from Europe was showing that Hervey's foolish ambition had caused no harm.

--<<>>--<<>>--<<>>--

Julius Cottjens, the man who provided his clients with privileged news from the financial capital of the north, walked to the wharves again that evening. He had done it every evening since Sir Grenville's faintly hysterical letter had reached him and Cottjens was content with this duty. He liked to walk, his pipe drawing sweetly and his dog running happily about him, but to be paid for his evening constitutional was a piece of beneficent luck. Amsterdam looked rich and peaceful in the evening light, its people plump and prosperous. Cottjens felt a great contentment.

He stopped in his usual place and sat on a bollard while his dog sniffed excitedly at bales of cloth. Cottjens's pipesmoke drifted over the placid canal waters in the evening, summer air.

The
Wanderer,
the object of these evening strolls, was still tied up. It was high out of the water, its cargo hold empty as it had been for weeks. The mainmast had been stepped up again, but the spars were still lashed to the ship's deck. It was a beautiful ship, Cottjens reflected, but it was days from being ready for sea.

A sailor came over the gangplank carrying a wooden box of wedges. Cottjens waved his pipe stem at the ship and raised his voice. 'Ships don't make money tied to wharves, my friend.'

'
Mijnheer
?"

Cottjens repeated himself and the sailor shrugged. 'She's made plenty of money in her lifetime,
Mijnheer.'

Cottjens looked impressed. He nodded at the name, elegantly carved beneath the windows of the stern gallery. 'An English ship, yes?'

'Lord no,
Mijnheer!
Mordecai Lopez owns it. It was built here! I think he likes an English name.'

'My friend Mordecai? He's back in Amsterdam?'

The sailor hefted his box. 'He's here, but he's ill. May the good Lord preserve him if He watches over pagans.'

'Amen to that.' Cottjens knocked his pipe out on the bollard. 'Badly ill?'

'So they say,
Mijnheer,
so they say. You'll excuse me?'

Cottjens called his dog, then started back, a happy man. He could write with more news to Sir Grenville, news that would undoubtedly make that fat, subtle Englishman also a happy man.

Cottjens made a short detour to look at Lopez's house. The windows of the two lower floors, as ever, were barred and shuttered, but higher up he could see lamplight through the windows. A shadow moved across a curtain.

Cottjens whistled for his dog. Like Ebenezer Slythe in London, he was a happy man; a little richer, a little older, and a little wiser. He would write to Sir Grenville with his news, his good news, that Mordecai Lopez was sick in Amsterdam, unable to interfere in Sir Grenville's affairs.

22

The day before Campion's execution dawned grey and wet, rain slamming down from the west and beating the river into a surface of pewter-grey misery.

The bakers were worried. A fine day meant a fine profit. Even if it poured with rain there would still be a vast crowd on Tower Hill to watch the execution, but few of them would want to buy soggy pies. The bakers prayed for a break in the clouds, for God to send fine weather to London. By mid-morning it seemed their prayers were answered. A great hole was tearing itself in the western clouds, the first shafts of sunlight falling on Whitehall and Westminster, and the weather-wise proclaimed that the morrow would be a good July day.

There was still the small matter of the trial to be completed, but that had not stopped the bakeries working late for days before the execution. There was no doubt about the verdict, merely what sentence Sir John Henge, the judge, would pass down. Most of London favoured hanging. The time had passed when witches were burned, and the city believed that Dorcas Scammell should be convicted of witchcraft and hanged, high and slowly above their heads. Others preferred a longer death, saying that her crimes were so heinous that a signal punishment was needed to deter others. They favoured that she should be hung, drawn and quartered. It had the added advantage, as well as persuading other witches not to loose their familiars on armed men, that the victim would have to be stripped naked before her entrails were cut out and burned in front of her face. The body of a naked young girl would double the price that could be charged by those whose upper windows, fortuitously, overlooked Tower Hill. The builders of London, who customarily made small, laddered platforms from which spectators could watch executions, were similarly in favour of the severer punishment.

Yet others, mindful perhaps that the revolution was releasing strange ideas on England, preferred that she should be burned. If a man killed his wife the punishment was death by hanging, but if a wife murdered her husband, then the punishment was worse because the crime was worse. Women must be restrained, and there was a goodly body of London opinion that believed the sight of a burning, screaming woman would remind wives that the revolution did not encourage husband-murder.

Yet on one thing all were agreed. In church after church, in parishes a good half-day's walk from London, the preachers roused the faithful in preparation for the great event. Perhaps never in living memory had so many Puritan preachers simultaneously taken the same words of scripture as their text: Exodus 22, verse 18, 'Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.' The
Mercurius
had done its work well. Faithful Unto Death Hervey was a hero to the city, the witch would die and already an enterprising publisher had put on sale a lurid and lengthy pamphlet that told the sorry tale of the witch Dorcas Scammell. Mothers subdued troublesome children by threatening them with Dorcas.

On the day before the execution there was already a fair crowd that gathered solely to watch the preparations, despite the rain that intermittently swept like smoke over Tower Hill. Many of the crowd were connoisseurs of this place, remembering the deaths of noblemen who had the privilege of sword or axe, the death swift so long as they had given a fat purse to the executioner. There was general agreement that they would have preferred Dorcas Scammell to die at Tyburn; the facilities for spectators were better there, though they were sympathetic to the authorities who thought it unlikely that they could safely escort the witch that far. She was bound to be lynched somewhere on the journey across London.

Carpenters came and constructed a scaffold. The crowd jeered them good-naturedly, yelling at them to build the platform higher. Later, as the rope was fixed to the crossbar, a portion of the crowd began to shout that the witch should be burned, as witches used to be burned, but the anger died when one of the workmen mimed a dancing, hanging death on the raw planks. Laughter sounded on the rainswept hill.

Someone, seeing the completed gibbet, asked if the sentence had been passed, but it seemed that the authorities were merely anticipating Sir John Henge's final decision. Rumour swept the crowd, but nothing was certain.

Some of the chief actors in the drama were cheered by the people. The weather improved, a weak sun shining on the hill when the hangman came to inspect the work. He waved at his public, exchanging jokes with them, delighting the crowd when he pretended to measure up a fat, loud-mouthed woman who screamed for the workmen to build the gibbet even higher.

Faithful Unto Death Hervey visited the hill three times from the courtroom within the Tower. At his third visit there was still no sentence, but he climbed on to the scaffold and calmed the crowd by waving his hands.

'It will soon be over, good people! Soon! Tomorrow you will see a witch die! Tomorrow this city will be a safer place for us all!' They cheered him again. He prayed with them, asking God to give him strength to fight the evil of witchcraft, and then he promised the crowd that he would deny himself all comfort, all rest, until the last witch had been extirpated from among the Saints. The Saints clapped and shouted for him.

Far off, in the Strand, Sir Grenville Cony was in his house. He expected four eminent visitors, members of the Commons who were devout Puritans, and so the naked Narcissus was hidden behind its closed shutters. A Bible, that his secretary had lavishly inked with marginal notations, was prominent on his desk. The four visitors were waiting and would continue to wait until Sir Grenville had finished with his present visitor.

Septimus Barnegat was perhaps the only man who did not fear Sir Grenville Cony. Barnegat could have no fear, for as an astrologer he sheltered behind the destiny of stars and planets, and the truth he told could not be swayed by fear or favour. Barnegat was an expensive astrologer, as highly thought of as any seer in Europe, and he charged high fees to those merchants who sought his advice about insurance, or as to whether a ship should set sail on a particular tide. Barnegat was a busy man, in demand by politicians, lawyers, merchants and nobility. He was also irascible, jealous of his science and easily annoyed by questions that were beyond that science's competence. Sir Grenville had just asked such a question and Barnegat's small, fierce face scowled as he replied.