A Crowning Mercy (9 page)

A letter from 1630 was in a different hand, telling Matthew Slythe of his father-in-law's death and Slythe had written in the letter's margin a laconic note recording the death of his mother-in-law a week later. 'The Plague' was the brief explanation.

Someone knocked loudly on the study door. Campion put the letter down and ran fingers through her unpinned hair. The knock came again. 'Who is it?'

'Ebenezer. I want to come in!'

'You can't. Go away.' She was half undressed, her hair undone, and she could not let him in.

'What are you doing in there?'

'You know what I'm doing. Tidying up!'

'No, you're not! I've been listening.'

'Go away, Eb! I'm reading the Bible.'

She waited till she heard his footsteps disappear, heard him grumbling down the passage and then got stiffly to her feet to light more candles. She thought Ebenezer might try to enter the room through the window, or spy on her through the crack in the curtains. She stood between the curtain and the window, in the darkness of the night, watching to see if Ebenezer's curiosity would take him into the garden. An owl bellied its call in the darkness, bats flickered above the lawn, but Ebenezer did not appear. She waited, listening, and could hear nothing. She remembered the many, many nights when she would lie awake in childhood's cold bed, listening for the voices of this house raised in anger, and she would know, with a child's sense, that when her parents fought with each other they would expend their venom on her.

The letters told her nothing, offered no explanation, mentioned no seal. The only papers left were those covered in mathematics and she picked them up wearily, spread them out and bent again to her reading. These, evidently, were the papers that had driven Matthew Slythe to the long nights in this room, that had forced him into writhing, wrestling prayer with his God. She looked in amazement at the work.

Her father had believed that the Bible contained two messages; the first open to anyone who cared to read, the second hidden by means of secret numbers disguised in the text. As the alchemists struggled to turn mercury into gold, so Matthew Slythe had tried to prise God's secrets from the scriptures.

'Praise bee for this!' began one page, and Campion saw that he had been working from the book of Revelation where the number of the beast, the anti-Christ, the Pope of Rome, was given as 666. He had tried to divide it by twelve and, because it was impossible, he was pleased. Twelve, it seemed, was a godly number, indeed the fourteenth chapter of Revelation said that 144,000 people would stand on Mount Zion and her father had excitedly divided that number by twelve (the 'apostles and tribes of God') and received the answer 12,000. For some reason that seemed to be significant for he had underscored the number twelve times, and then listed further subdivisions. By three, the number of the Trinity, by four 'for that bee the corners of this world', and by six, described merely as 'halfe twelve'.

Yet for each such success, there were horrid failures. The book of Daniel foretold the world's end, the abomination, as being 2,990 days after the 'end of sacrifice'. Matthew Slythe had struggled with that number and it had yielded nothing, its secret intact, and in desperation he had copied a verse from the same chapter of Daniel that expressed his disillusion: 'for the words are closed up and sealed till the time of the end.'

Sealed. She shrugged and smiled at the word. It had not been important to her father, instead he had underlined the words 'closed up'. Closed up. She frowned, the paper forgotten, because something tugged at her memory, something she could not place, and she said the words aloud. 'Closed up. Closed up.' She felt as she knew Toby Lazender must feel when his fingers felt the pressure in the cold water and he knew that a fish was between his hands, but she could still not place the words. Closed up.

Cony, Covenant, closed up.

She rubbed her temples and tried to take from the words their hidden meaning, just as her father had struggled with the Bible's numbers. Yet the more she thought, the more elusive was the answer. Closed up? Why had that triggered her?

She stood up, pulled the curtain back, and opened one of the two windows. The lawn was pale in the moonlight, the hedge dark, and she could see the smear of stars above her. Closed up. It was quiet now, the whole household asleep, but then the owl sounded again, hunting the beeches on the ridge. Cony, Covenant, closed up.

She thought suddenly of Toby Lazender and had a clear vision of his face, a vision that had eluded her for weeks. She smiled into the darkness, for she was intent now on running away, and she thought that he would be the person she would run to. Perhaps he would remember her, but even if not, surely he would help her for he had been kind, generous and a friend if only for one afternoon. Then she felt the hopelessness of it. How could she reach London without money?

She sighed, closed the window, and was suddenly utterly still. Closed up. She remembered it now! She remembered her mother's funeral, four years before, and she remembered the weeping in the women's pews, the long, long sermon from Faithful Unto Death Hervey in which he had likened Martha Slythe to the Martha in the Bible, and she also remembered the words 'closed up'. Her father had prayed at the funeral, an extemporaneous prayer in which he had tussled with God, and he had used the words in the prayer. Not that there was anything special in the way he used them, more, she remembered, in the manner in which he spoke them.

He had paused just before those two words. The echo of his voice was fading between the stone pillars and embarrassment was spreading through the congregation for they thought that Matthew Slythe had broken down. The silence stretched. He had said something like 'her life on this earth is ended, her affairs...' and then he had embarrassed them by a long silence. She remembered the feet shuffling on the floor, the sobbing from Goodwife, and she had raised her head to steal a glance at her father. His face was turned up to the beams, one fist was raised, and she realised, as the pause went on, that he had not broken down. He had simply lost the thread of his words and thoughts. It was nothing more. She saw him shake his massive head and then he had simply finished the sentence by saying 'closed up'.

That was all. Yet at the time it had struck her as strange, as if some remnants of her mother's life had been locked in a cupboard. She remembered little else of the funeral, except singing the doleful words beside the raw grave as the snow whirled off the high ridge. Closed up.

It was not much, yet the letters had come from Martha Slythe's parents, and Cony, whoever he was, had appeared in their lives just at the time when Matthew Slythe came into his fortune, and she wondered if the seal, the secret of the seal, was hidden, not here, but in her mother's room. Closed up still? Waiting?

She dressed quickly, blew out the candles and turned the key in the lock. It scraped as it yielded, she froze, but there was no sound from the passageway. She would search upstairs, in her parents' bedroom that was empty, awaiting her marriage with Scammell that was confidently expected before her birthday in October.

The servants, except for Goodwife, all slept at the far end of the house where her own bedroom was. Scammell was in a room above the main entrance, and she could hear his snores as she paused at the top of the private stairs. Goodwife was the closest, in a bedroom that opened directly from her mother's dressing room, and Campion knew she would have to move with desperate silence. Goodwife would wake at the smallest sound and then emerge, bristling with anger, to face the intruder. Campion crept on stockinged feet down the short passageway and into the large, silent room where her parents had shared their unhappy bed.

The room smelt of wax. The bed was covered with a heavy flax sheet, rucked where the poles went up to the dark canopy. To her right was her father's dressing room, to her left her mother's, and she hesitated.

It was dark in the room. She wished she had thought to bring a candle, but the curtains were open and slowly her eyes became accustomed to the gloom. She could hear her own breathing. Every sound she made seemed magnified; the rustle of skirts and petticoat, the tiny scuff of her stockinged feet on the wooden floor.

She looked to the right, hearing even her hair as it moved on her shoulders, and she saw the mess in her father's dressing room. Someone had been here before her, had turned out the chest and pulled clothes from the shelves. She suspected her mother's room would have had the same treatment. The door was ajar.

She crept towards it, letting her weight gently on to each foot, freezing at the slightest creak of a board, and then her hand was on the door, she pushed and it swung ponderously, silently open.

Moonlight showed her the small room. A door at the far end gave directly into Goodwife's bedroom. It was shut. If anyone had searched this room they had left it tidy or, more likely, Goodwife had been in after them. It was used now to store the heavy flax sheets that were pale on the shelves. The room smelt of rue which, Goodwife said, repelled moths.

Closed up. Her mother's big chest stood, its lid open, against the wall.

Campion was nervous. She listened. She could hear the creak of timbers in the old house, she could hear her own breathing, she could hear the far, muffled rumble of Scammell's snoring.

She was close, she knew she was. She remembered playing hunt-the-thimble with their old cook, Agnes, in the kitchen garden, and Campion knew that at this moment she was warm. Over the years she suddenly heard Agnes's voice: 'You'll burn yourself, child, you're that close! Look, child! Go on with you!'

She was utterly still, drawn to this room by instincts sharpened by her long immersion in her father's papers. She imagined him hiding something. What would he have done?

Secret places. Closed up. Then it came to her, so simple, and again she was listening to her father's voice. He had preached each Sunday to his household in the days before Faithful Unto Death had come to Werlatton parish, and now Campion was remembering one of those sermons. It had been his usual two-hour length, the servants and family expected to be still on the hard benches as he preached, and she remembered the sermon about the secret places of a man's heart. It was not enough, her father had said, to be an outward Christian, praying much and giving much, because there were secret places in a man's heart where evil could lurk. It was in those secret places that God looked.

It is like, Matthew Slythe had preached, a strong box. When the lid is open a thief in the night will see only an ordinary chest, but the owner knows that there is a secret layer at the bottom of the chest. God is the owner, and he knows what is in the secret part of each person's life. Campion remembered the story and turned slowly, knowing that her father drew his stories and examples from his own life.

It would not be this chest but his own, and Campion went soft as the night across the floor, like a thief in the darkness, into the room that was strewn with his clothes, pulled the untidy mess out of the huge wooden chest and made a pile of clothes on the floor.

She searched the bare, wooden box, finding nothing, but always hearing the voice across the years from the kitchen garden. 'Look, child!'

She tried to lift the chest, but it was impossibly heavy, and she probed at its corners, pushed each knothole in the wood. Nothing moved, nothing gave, yet still she knew she was warm.

In the end it was simple. The base of the chest was surrounded by a thick skirting board of varnished wood which she had tugged and pushed. Then she thought that it might be easier to lift the chest at one end, jam a pair of her father's great shoes beneath, and thus feel the chest's base. She shuffled slowly to the right-hand side of the huge chest, moved a pair of her father's breeches out of the way, and saw something she had missed in the thick darkness of the room. There was a handle cut into the skirting board, presumably to facilitate the lifting of the heavy chest, and she knelt in front of it, gripped the simple handle, and tried once more to lift the chest.

It would not move. It was simply too heavy, but the skirting board moved. Only the smallest fraction, but she knew she had not been deceived, and she hauled on it again, and again she felt the tiny movement.

There was a small window behind her, its wooden shutter open, and she was aware that the sky was lightening. Dawn would come soon.

She frowned, the tiredness heavy on her, as she contemplated the skirting board with its cut-out handle. It had moved, but it revealed nothing, and she tugged it again, knowing the effort to be useless, and trying to think what she should do.

She put her hand into the hole and felt with her fingers at the back of the board. There was something cold there, something made of metal, and her long fingers explored the metal, found a ring, and she tugged on it.

She heard the sound of a bolt sliding open. She froze, half expecting the small sound to bring Goodwife from her room, but the house was still.

Campion's heart was beating as it did before she went naked into the water.

She gripped the handle again, pulled, and this time the skirting board moved easily, sliding out as the front of a shallow, secret drawer, and then the runners of wood shrilled and she froze again.

She bit her lip, closed her eyes, as if those actions might lessen the noise, and pulled again.

The drawer opened. She had found her father's secret place and she knelt there, not exploring the contents, waiting to see if anyone in the house stirred.

The first birds were calling outside. Soon, she knew, Werlatton would be busy, and the knowledge made her hurry.

Two bundles were in the drawer. She lifted the first, hearing the clink of money, and she guessed that this had been her father's secret reserve of cash. Most houses, even the poorest, tried to keep a little money hidden against the bad times. Agnes had told her that her mother had pushed a leather purse of two gold coins into the eave of the thatch, and this heavy bag was Matthew Slythe's equivalent. She put the purse on to one of his shirts, then lifted out the smaller, lighter package.