Читать книгу A Crowning Mercy - Bernard Cornwell - Страница 17

8

For two days, it seemed, they did nothing but talk. Mrs Swan was an easy chaperone, always ready to put her feet up and ‘let you young things go on without me,’ though if anything truly interesting was promised she was assiduous in accompanying them. On the second evening they went to a play together. The theatre had been banned by the Puritans, but dramas were still privately staged in some large houses, and Campion was astonished by the experience. The play was Bartholomew Fayre, and there was an added spice to the occasion for they could all have been arrested simply for watching the actors.

Campion had never seen a play and did not know what to expect. Her father had preached that such things were spawned of the devil and the performance was not without moments of sharp guilt for her. Yet she could not but find it amusing. The audience, unsympathetic to London’s new masters, revelled in Ben Jonson’s mockery of the Puritans. Campion had never known that the mockery existed, that people despised and hated men like her father, yet even she could see that the character Zeal-of-the-land Busy was both typical and ridiculous. The audience roared their approval when Zeal-of-the-land Busy was finally clapped in the stocks, and for a moment Campion was appalled by the hatred she sensed around her. Then the actor who played Zeal-of-the-land Busy made such an amusing face, one that reminded her of her father’s scowl, that she laughed out loud. Toby, who was sensitive to her moods, relaxed beside her.

Campion was luckier than she knew. Toby’s father, who was a sensible man, often thanked God for his fortune in his only son. Toby Lazender was someone to be proud of. He had inherited his mother’s independence and spirit, but he had also taken his father’s intelligence and sympathy. Toby knew that his parents would disapprove of Campion; his father would say Toby must marry money, for the sake of Lazen’s roof, and preferably wellborn money, while what Lady Margaret would say, Toby could not predict; his mother being a lady difficult if not impossible to predict. Campion’s parents, her birth, her station, all conspired against Toby, yet he would not give her up. To his own mind their first meeting had seemed as fortuitous and miraculous as it had to Campion, and now on this second meeting it seemed instantly that they had shared a lifetime, so much did they have to say. Even Mrs Swan, who was rarely short of a word, marvelled at their loquaciousness.

Toby would inherit Lazen Castle with all its fertile lands in the Lazen valley and its flocks in the higher land to the north. He was twenty-four now, more than ready for marriage, and he knew that his mother kept a memorised list of girls suitable to take her place in Lazen Castle. Toby now dismissed them all. It was foolish, he knew, wildly impractical, yet nothing now would deflect him from the Puritan girl he had met beside a summer stream. He had fallen in love with all the unexpectedness, suddenness and impracticality that love is capable of, and Mrs Swan, observing it, was delighted. ‘It’s like Eloise and Abelard, it is, and Romeo and Juliet, and Will and Beth Cockell.’

‘Who?’ Campion asked. They were alone in the house, late at night.

‘You wouldn’t know the Cockells, dear. He was a baker in St Sepulchre’s and he took one look at Beth, he did, and his yeast was up for life, dear.’ She sighed romantically. ‘Very happy they were, too, till he died of the stone, poor man. Broken-hearted, she was. She went a week later. Said she couldn’t live without him and she just took to her bed and faded away. So what did he say to you today?’

They were in love, and the hours when they were not together were like endless nights, while the hours they shared flew like minutes. They planned a future that took no notice of the present, and they talked of their lives as though they would be spent in an eternal summer beneath an unmarred sky. In those days Campion discovered a happiness so great she thought her heart could not contain it, yet reality was remorseless in its pursuit of them.

Toby spoke of her to his father. As he expected, but with a force that was quite unexpected, Toby had been told that Campion was unsuitable. She would not do, she must be forgotten, and Sir George would not even agree to meet her. His opposition was absolute. There was more. Toby had to leave London, on pain of possible arrest and imprisonment, three days before Campion’s appointment with Sir Grenville. Toby shook his head. ‘I won’t leave.’

‘You must!’ Campion was terrified for him.

‘I’m not leaving without you.’ He was adamant. ‘I’ll wait.’

Mrs Swan, with her gossip-sharpened acuteness, quickly divined that Toby was of Royalist sympathy. She liked him for it. ‘I remember Queen Bess, young man, and I tell you they were good days. Ah me! They were good days!’ In truth Mrs Swan had been a toddler when Queen Elizabeth had died, though she claimed to remember being held up in her father’s arms to see the royal coach go by. ‘There weren’t so many Saints then, I can tell you. A man prayed in his bedroom or in his church and there wasn’t all this caterwauling in the streets and gloom in the pulpits. We were happier then.’ She sniffed in disapproval. ‘The country’s got drunk on God since then, and it don’t make for happiness.’

Toby smiled. ‘And the sun always shone on good Queen Bess?’

Mrs Swan knew she was being teased, but she liked being teased by good-looking young sons of the gentry in her own parlour. ‘It’s a funny thing, Mister Toby, but it did. If that doesn’t show God approving of us, I don’t know what does.’ She shook her head and laid her work on the table. ‘We used to have such fun! Tom and me went to the bear baiting, and the plays, and there was a puppet man in the Paris Garden who could make you roll on the grass! He really could! There was no harm in it. There were no Roundheads then, telling us what we could and couldn’t do, not when the Queen was in London. I don’t know why they don’t all go to America and leave us in peace. They’re welcome to America! They can all be gloomy there and let us be happy here.’

Toby smiled. ‘You could be arrested for saying that.’

Mrs Swan snorted in derision. ‘From what you say, Mister Toby, you could be arrested just for showing your nose in the street. I don’t know what the country’s coming to, I really don’t!’

Toby did not leave London on Sunday, nor on Monday. He would wait till Campion had seen Sir Grenville Cony, for Toby, like Campion, believed that in some way the lawyer would point her towards freedom. They speculated endlessly about the seal, the letter, even the pearled gloves, but in all their speculation they did not find a solution that convinced them. Sir Grenville Cony had the answer, if any man did, and Toby would not leave London till he had learned it. He would not, he said, leave Campion either. Together they planned their improbable, impossible future as if love could conquer everything.

Yet Toby was wanted. A description had been circulated to the watch, to the soldiers in the city, and Campion was appalled at the risks he took. He walked openly in the streets with her, his dark red curls obvious beneath his wide-brimmed hat, and on the Tuesday, the day before her appointment with Sir Grenville, he came close to being caught.

They were walking from St Giles, both soberly dressed, though Toby insisted on having black satin beneath his slashed sleeves. He was laughing at some joke he had made when a burly man stepped into their path. The man raised a hand to Toby’s chest. ‘You.’

‘Sir?’

The man’s face was twisted with anger and inner hatred. ‘You’re him, aren’t you? The Lazender scum!’ He stepped back, raising his voice. ‘A traitor! A traitor!’

‘Sir!’ Toby’s voice was just as loud. People were watching, ready to side with the burly man, but Toby made them listen. He let go of Campion’s arm and pulled up his sleeve, pointing to a great white scar that ran ragged on his left forearm. ‘I took that wound, sir, last year on Edgehill field. Where were you, sir?’ Toby stepped a pace forward, his right hand now dropping to his basket-hilted sword. ‘I drew this sword for the Lord, sir, and I did not have you at my side when the forces of evil surrounded me!’ Toby shook his head sadly. ‘Praise the Lord, brothers and sisters, for He delivered me, Captain Scammell, from the Papist hordes of that man Charles. A traitor, am I? Then I am proud to be a traitor for my Lord and Saviour! I have slain for the Lord, brethren, but was this man with me?’

Toby’s imitation of the Puritan rabble-rousers was so convincing that the small crowd were now all in sympathy with him. The burly man, taken aback by Toby’s pious vehemence, was eager to offer apologies and beseeched Brother Scammell to kneel in prayer with him. Toby, to Campion’s infinite relief, was magnanimous in victory, declining to pray, and pushing his way through the dispersing crowd with many expressions of piety. Once they were clear he grinned at her. ‘I got that scar two years ago, falling off a horse, but it comes in useful.’

She laughed, but there was a desperate worry in her. ‘They’ll find you, Toby!’

‘I’ll put on a disguise, like those actors.’

‘Be careful!’

Toby was taking some precautions, however. He had stopped sleeping at his father’s house, using instead the rooms of a friend in the city itself, but the experience with the angry man in St Giles had worried him. ‘There’s only tomorrow.’

‘Then what?’

They had paused outside Mrs Swan’s house. He smiled down at her; the gentle, amused smile she liked so much. ‘Then we’ll marry.’

‘We can’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘Your father!’

‘My father will fall hopelessly in love with you.’

‘Toby! You said he won’t even meet me!’

Toby smiled again, one finger on her cheek. ‘He will. He’ll have to. He can’t refuse to meet my wife, can he?’

She looked at him, a small frown on her face. ‘Are we mad, Toby?’

‘Probably.’ He smiled. ‘But all will be well, I promise you. All will be well.’

She believed him, but then she was in love, and lovers always believe that fate is on their side.

Sir George Lazender, alone in the upstairs parlour of the house he would leave in two weeks’ time, lit a pipe of his beloved tobacco and wished that the popular belief, that the tobacco-leaf was a dangerous substance giving rise to unnatural fervour and strange fancies, was true. He faced too much reality, too many problems.

He was about to alienate his son-in-law and his eldest daughter. He did not think the enmity would run deep, but they would undoubtedly become enemies.

Now he had estranged Toby.

Twice the soldiers had searched the house for his son, and twice Sir George had truthfully said that he did not know Toby’s whereabouts. He suspected his son was staying in the city and he hourly dreaded the news that Toby had been arrested and imprisoned.

It was the girl’s fault. The Slythe girl. Sir George felt anger. She must be a conniving, ambitious girl to have snared his son.

He walked to the eastern window and stared down into the street. It was dark, the lights of a few torches fitful. Two soldiers, their helmets catching the red glare of the flames, paced towards the Royal Mews. An empty cart went the other way.