A Crowning Mercy (50 page)

'Mother?'

'You might do that where your mother is not forced to watch.'

He grinned at his mother over Campion's head, then kissed her again. Campion could not have cared if the whole world watched. She was home.

27

Expect nothing, Vavasour Devorax had said, yet hope as she might Campion could not have expected this.

A summer that would live for ever in her memory, a summer heavy with scent and fruit, with leaf and harvest, a summer for love.

Campion Aretine, as Lady Margaret insisted she should be called, would marry Sir Toby Lazender in one month's time. The banns were read in church and no one saw any cause or just impediment why the two should not be joined in holy matrimony. From the Tower, from the road that led to the waiting stake, her life twisted suddenly into an incessant round of parties, dancing, feasts, of people who seemed to share her happiness even though she had never met them. If her life was, indeed, a river, then it had plunged from the dark caverns of brooding terror into this broad, sunlit reach. Yet the sky above was not the seamless blue of her dreams.

She had never seen a place like Oxford. Its towers and courtyards, steeples and archways, all bore witness to a love of beauty that would have been an anathema to Matthew Slythe. All that beauty was threatened. The royal cause was foundering, the King's army on the defensive, and not even Campion's sudden happiness could hide from her the shadows that threatened Oxford. Yet that summer it was a golden city to her. She did not notice the stench in the streets, the effluence of a crowded city. She saw only a place of beauty that men had embellished and endowed with grace. She was in love.

Yet even in the broad, sunlit land through which her river flowed, a land green and scented, profuse with a thousand flowers, another shadow reached out from the past. The men who were drunk on God did not just shatter visible beauty, they had also mounted an attack on her innocence. Faithful Unto Death Hervey's dry, scaly hands had put filth within her and the filth was still there. She knew it in herself, it poisoned part of her, and she felt it on a day, late in August, when Toby was released from his garrison duties and they rode westward, alone, out into the countryside.

War seemed far off that day. The land was generous, its grass heavy and crops full. The river seemed burdened with life, edged with flowers. It was a day like the day a year ago when she had last swum in her pool at Werlatton, a day when the horizon hazed white with heat, when insects hummed in the still air, a day of perfect beauty marred only by the shadow within her.

The river had brought her here, but the water was tainted from the caves of horror it had swept her through. The current had been fast and now it was slow, yet she was still fearful. She hid the horror from Toby, pretending it did not exist, yet she feared marriage because Faithful Unto Death Hervey had put a poison in her.

Toby led her away from the Thames, their horses ambling northwards through rich fields and woods to a lush meadow that fringed a stream going south to the Thames. He tethered their horses to a fallen tree and carried a basket to a patch of grass beside the stream.

They talked as they had talked for three weeks, and it still surprised her how much they could say and how much she liked to talk with him. He amused her, educated her, listened to her, argued with her, and even the smallest thing could throw up a great conversation because they shared a curiosity about their world.

They ate by the stream, sharing bread and cold meat and drinking wine. Afterwards she lay on her back, her head pillowed by her saddle, while Toby lay on his stomach a few feet away. He looked at her. 'They'll know you're here by now.'

'Yes.' It was a subject that kept coming back. Sir Grenville Cony, Toby thought, must have his informants in Oxford. The wine had made Campion drowsy. 'Can we manage without the seals?'

'If you want to.' He was picking the tiny petals of clover and touching nectar to his tongue. 'Do you want to forget them? Throw this one away?' Toby wore the golden seal about his neck.

She sighed. 'They've caused so much trouble. I didn't ask for them. I didn't want all this to happen. I didn't ask for Ebenezer to hate me, and for Cony and for men like Vavasour Devorax.' She twisted her head to look at him. 'I didn't want to be in the Tower.' She could feel the horror inside her.

Toby rolled on to his side, wincing as his weight went momentarily on to his damaged shoulder. 'You didn't ask for it, but without the seals you'd probably be married to someone like Samuel Scammell by now. You'd probably have your own little baby Scammell with its own little Bible and its own little scowl.'

She laughed, turning her face back to the sun. 'Yes.' The stream's murmur was a background to her thoughts. 'Poor Scammell.'

'Poor?'

'He didn't ask for it either. He was harmless.'

'He was greedy.'

There was silence. The sun was bright on the inside of her eyelids. She heard the horses stirring, a fish plopping in the water. 'Do we need the seals, Toby?'

He rolled back on to his stomach, his dark red hair shading the fine-boned face he had inherited from his mother. He did not reply immediately and Campion turned her face to look at him. She loved his face. It was not, she supposed, a classically handsome face. Eyes would go much faster to a man like Lord Atheldene, but the memory would fasten on Toby. His eyes met hers.

'Two answers. I'll marry you if you're the poorest girl in the kingdom. Second answer. Yes, we do. Lazen's been in the family since anyone knows. I'd like to buy it back one day, God knows when, but I'd like to do it before mother dies.'

She nodded.

He smiled at her. 'But if you tell me that you don't want the seals, that you want to be rid of Sir Grenville and your brother, then I'll throw this one away right now. I'll marry you and think myself lucky.'

'Don't throw it away.' She smiled at him. 'We'll buy Lazen Castle with it.'

He smiled. 'And you'll be Campion Lazender.'

She laughed at that. It sounded strange. She remembered how he had seen the campion flowers in her rush basket and picked the name for her. She laughed again. 'If I hadn't met you I'd still be called Dorcas.'

'Dorcas.' Toby said the name with lugubrious relish. 'Dorcas. Dorcas. Dorcas.'

'Stop it! I hate that name.'

'I shall call you Dorcas when you upset me.'

She waved a fly away from her face. 'Campion.' She said it experimentally. 'I like that name.'

'I love it.' He grinned. 'I'm just glad you hadn't picked cow parsley on the day I met you. Lady Cow Parsley Lazender doesn't sound right.'

'Or deadly nightshade.'

'Or gooseberry.'

'Lady Wortleberry Lazender.' She laughed. 'I like Campion.'

Toby plucked the seeds from meadow oat grass. 'There was a poet called Campion.'

'I know.'

'Only because I told you.' He grinned at her, then levered himself forward on his elbows so he was close to her, his face smiling down at her. 'Listen.' He thought for a few seconds.

Lost is our freedom,

When we submit to women so:

Why do we need them,

When in their best they work our woe?

She laughed at him. 'Did Campion write that?'

'He did.'

'It's not very good, is it?'

He shrugged, tickling her face with the grass stem. 'You're not supposed to like it. You're supposed to get angry with me and tell me I'm a woman-hater.'

'I'm too hot to get angry. Tell me something else he wrote and if I don't like it then I won't marry you.'

He nodded. 'Agreed.' He frowned, pretending to think again, then ducked his head, kissed her lightly on the lips, and quoted again, his eyes on hers.

'Heaven is music, and thy beauty's

Birth is heavenly.'

It was Campion's turn to pretend to think. She stared into his green eyes, then nodded. 'I'll marry you.'

'You liked it?'

'I liked it.'

'I thought you would.'

'Is that why you learned it by heart for today?'

He laughed. 'How do you know?'

'Because the only poems you know are the ones your father used to sing at Christmas, and because you left a book of Campion's poetry on the garden table and it got wet in the night.'

He grinned. 'Women shouldn't be so clever.'

'We need to be, Toby dear, considering what we marry.'

'Whom you marry.'

'What.'

He kissed her again, long and gently, and as her eyes closed he put his right hand on her stomach. He felt her stiffen beneath his touch, knew she was shrinking from him, and raised his face. 'Campion?'

She kept her eyes shut and said nothing. This was the fear, this was the thing that had been smirched. The water was tainted, the evil within her, the shadow reaching from her past.

'Campion?'

She wanted to say something to him, she wanted to give him love if he would only give her time, but they were to be married in a week and she was frightened.

He lifted his hand from her stomach, moved it gently to her face and pushed her eyelids up. The blue eyes that watched him, if not hostile, were very frightened. He smiled. 'The priest won't touch you again.'

She stared at him, her face frowning. 'You know?'

He nodded. 'I read the
Mercurius.
It's not difficult to guess.'

She thought he had not known, that the stain was hidden within her and she had hidden it from him. She had told Lady Margaret much of what had happened, though not all, and now she sat up, brushing hair from her face. 'Did your mother tell you?'

'No.' Which was not quite true. With her usual directness Lady Margaret had assured Toby that his bride was still a virgin, but she had also told him he must treat her carefully. Now Toby pushed himself up so he was sitting opposite her. 'Tell me.'

She shook her head petulantly. 'There's nothing to tell.'

'Then there's nothing to worry about.'

Her eyes met his almost in challenge, then she shrugged and, in a toneless, flat voice, she told him.

She knew it could have been far worse, but she still felt the defilement of Hervey's hands on her breasts, his breathing in her ear as his fingers groped down past her waist. She spoke of the tribunal spectators staring at her while the priest's hands slid over her body. She could feel them now, kneading and rubbing, and she knew that Faithful Unto Death Hervey had spoiled something she wanted kept clean. The stain would not go from her.

He said nothing when she finished. She had not looked at him as she talked, but had stared across the stream. Now Toby looked at her profile, wistful and beautiful, and still he waited.

She turned to him, still defensive. "Vavasour Devorax said something odd to me.'

'What?' He was being as gentle and delicate as if he were feeling in cold waters for an elusive trout.

'He said everyone has a terrible secret, something horrible, and he said the secret is always in the bedroom. He meant it too. It all sounds so foul, as if love ends up in a squalid, dirty room with smelly sheets.'

'It doesn't.'

She had not heard him. 'Scammell pawed at me and that man you killed tried. Then there was the Reverend Hervey and there was a soldier in the Tower.' She stopped, shaking her head, and she hated the seals again for it was they that had made her vulnerable to all that lust, that had poisoned this summer's day beside a stream.

Toby lifted his hand and pushed up an unwilling chin. 'Do you think my parents found it squalid?'

'No, but they're different.' She knew she sounded childish.

He smiled at her, shaking his head. 'It doesn't have to be squalid

'How do you know?'

'Will you listen to me?'

'Lady Clarissa Worlake?'

'No!' He laughed. 'Now will you listen?'

'Who?'

'Campion!' He startled her with sudden sternness. 'Listen! How do you think the people in Lazen found their wives, husbands and lovers?'

'I don't know.' She was miserable because of the shadow on her, childish because she was ignorant, frightened because this was the smear on the flawless sky.

'We used to talk of May Day, remember? And harvest? How the young people and the not so young used to go off at night into the woods. That wasn't horrible! If it was, why would people look forward to it?' He smiled. 'It could be uncomfortable if it rained, but it wasn't squalid. At least a third of our marriages started that way and the church never minded. It's called love, people celebrate it. It doesn't get spoiled.'

'I never had a May Day.' She was looking at the grass, but now she looked at him accusingly. 'You did.'

'Of course I did! What was I supposed to do? Sit at home reading my Bible and deciding which of my neighbours was a sinner?'

His indignation forced a reluctant smile from her. She shook her head, still troubled. 'I'm sorry, Toby, I'm sorry. You shouldn't marry me. I'm just a Puritan and I don't know anything.'

He laughed and touched her cheek. 'I'm glad you're a Puritan.'

'Why?'

'Because no one caught you on May night or in the harvest rick.'

She smiled, still miserable. 'You caught a few, didn't you? And you caught me swimming.' She shook her head. 'If I'd known you'd seen me...'

'You'd have died?'

'I would have been embarrassed.'

'Poor Campion.' He smiled. 'When did you last swim?'

'Last year.' She shrugged. 'The day I met you.' She had thought so often, in the Tower, of those moments she had stolen in the stream, of the sun on her body and the water so clean about her.

Toby knelt up. 'I'm going for a swim.'

'You can't.'

'Why not?'

She shrugged, saying nothing. Because, she thought, he would undress here, and she was terrified. Faithful Unto Death Hervey had put this fear in her, a fear of her own body, of other bodies, and she was terrified of the moment that came closer, the wedding night, and yet she knew, instinctively, that Toby had brought her here to exorcise that horror.