A Crowning Mercy (22 page)

'Stop! In the name of the King!' The watch captain, in his excitement, forgot the rebellion. He dragged a long-barrelled pistol from his belt. 'Stop!'

Toby was half in the boat now, draped over its stern, and he kicked hard with his feet. Suddenly the current plucked at them, turned the boat, and Toby hauled himself over the side.

The watch captain swore, knowing the range was long, but ignored Scammell's frantic shouts, raised the pistol, and aimed at Toby. He could see easily, thanks to the fire, his stubby foresight settled on Toby's spine and he pulled the trigger.

Toby heard the bang, had a glimpse of the tiny explosion in the pan and the gout of red flame at the muzzle, and then the pistol ball smacked into the centre thwart, gouged a splinter and ricocheted up towards the bridge.

'Toby!'

'I'm not hurt. Sit still!'

The boat was picking up speed, circling towards the dangerous rapids where the river was compressed by the bridge's narrow arches. If the boat became caught in one of the miniature weirs it would be whirled down the white chute and destroyed. Toby fumbled with the oars, forced himself to be calm, and fitted them into the tholes that gave them leverage. Pistols banged and stabbed flame from the wharf, but the small boat was in shadow now. He leaned into his stroke, turned the boat, and headed upstream and away from the city bank. It was hard work, the oars bent at each stroke, but they were clear now, going into the darkness across the river.

'Toby?'

He grinned at her. Her face was a mask of mud, white-eyed where she had wiped it.

'You remember me?'

'He married me, Toby!'

'Do I call you Mrs Scammell?'

'Toby!' He was not sure whether she was crying or laughing.

They were pulling past the fire now, on the far bank, and Toby glanced over and saw the heart of the flames that fed the great plume of smoke. The firelight was reflected on houses, steeples and towers, even on the great, stone tower of St Paul's Cathedral itself.

Toby looked back at Campion. 'Hello, Campion.'

A huge crash sounded from over the river as the sheds finally collapsed. Campion looked in awe at the blaze, then at Toby. 'Toby.'

Scammell was shouting at a waterman, ordering him inshore so he could pursue his bride, but Campion and Toby were safe now. Toby paused for a second or two, leaned forward, and touched her mud-smeared hand.

'Everything will be all right. Mrs Swan's waiting for us in the Paris Garden. We're going to Lazen.'

'Lazen?' She shook her head. 'But your mother?'

'Don't worry about her!' He began to laugh. He could be executed for this night's work, and they still had to escape from the patrols about London. They would have a few hours' start over their pursuers. "We're going to Lazen! We're going home!'

She seemed to be sobbing, but then Toby realised it was laughter. They were free.

12

The best way to approach Lazen Castle was from the north, across the humped hills that were grazed by Lazen sheep, dipping into the shallow valleys where willow and alder grew beside Lazen streams, and over the final crest that revealed the Lazen valley with the castle at its centre.

It was on this road that Toby brought Campion and Mrs Swan in the first week of September. Mildred Swan had insisted on making the whole journey, caught up in the excitement of the escape. 'There's no saying what you two will" get up to if there isn't an older body with you,' she had declared, though Campion suspected that Mrs Swan simply enjoyed travelling. Mrs Swan had taken the truth of Campion's predicament well, abandoning her long-held worries about the supposedly ill mother with good grace. 'I suppose you couldn't trust anyone, dear, and you're quite right.'

The first two days had been the worst, escaping the tendrils of the London garrison, going west on minor tracks. Closer to Oxford their progress became faster. Toby had been given a Royalist passport, recognised by the first patrol that found them, and in Oxford Campion and Mrs Swan took once more to a stage wagon going west. Toby bought a horse, using Campion's money, and now, six days later, they stood and looked at Lazen from the north.

Mrs Swan sniffed. 'Not quite like Hampton Court, is it, Mister Toby?'

'Not exactly, Mrs Swan.' Toby smiled. Mildred Swan was a Londoner and nothing could match anything in London for her. She had been invited to stay on with them at Lazen, but had trenchantly refused. She would travel gladly, but only so that she could return, her prejudices confirmed, to Bull Inn Court.

From Campion's view there were still signs that Lazen Castle had once been just that: a castle. To her left were the remains of a massive keep, square built on a small rise in the valley, and used now, Toby said, as a storage place for Lazen's farms. Closer to Campion, and straddling the road just a hundred yards from the foot of the hill, was the old gatehouse, now quite separate from the main house but still habitable. An empty flagstaff awaited Sir George's return. There was a moat, too, that most proper decoration of a castle, but it now covered only the approaches from the south and west and, in truth, the water looked more like an ornamental lake than an instrument of defence.

Most of the ancient castle had disappeared. A brief length of battlemented wall joined the keep to the main house, but its chief purpose now was to provide support for the espaliered fruit trees in the kitchen garden. Another length of wall guarded the eastern approach, joining the keep to the huge stable-yard and sheltering the smithy, brewhouse, and a score of other buildings from the winter winds. The rest of the castle had gone, its stones used in the making of new buildings. Those buildings were beautiful.

Campion was in awe. She listened to Toby describing the castle, but the size of the place, its comfortable grandeur, reminded her that Lady Margaret Lazender waited within. She feared the confrontation and she knew, despite Toby's protestations to the opposite, that he was by no means confident that his mother would welcome her.

Closest to the gatehouse, some seventy yards further south, was the Old House, built in the reign of Elizabeth and, despite its name, still less than a hundred years old. It was stone-built, though its west front, that looked across formal gardens to the moat, had been faced with mock half-timber cladding. Its windows were high and wide, quite unsuited for defence, but marvellous for spilling evening light into the great hall.

Joined to the house, and so attached that the two buildings formed a large 'L', was the New House. This, Toby said, had been completed just ten years before and was his mother's pride. It faced south, was stone-built throughout, and Toby spoke of an interior that was splendid with marble and plasterwork, tiles and polished oak. He pointed, as they went slowly down the slope, to the new kitchens, inconveniently distant from the great hall when Lady Margaret decided to entertain the county, and he spoke with pride of the new bedrooms, each room separate, that had replaced the old ones which had been arranged like a corridor, each room leading to the next, and in which curtained beds had been a necessity of modesty. The bedrooms shared the upper floor of the New House with the long gallery, the throne room of Lady Margaret, and it was towards the gallery that Toby led them.

They made slow progress. At the gatehouse a child erupted from a doorway and shouted a welcome to Toby, offering to take his horse, and the child's shout brought more servants and retainers to see the cause of the commotion. Campion and Mrs Swan, walking, hung back as servitors and footmen, maids and cooks, the families who served Lazen came to greet him. They doffed hats, skimped bows or curtseys, and then stretched out to touch his hand and give what news they had. Mrs Swan shook her head. 'God knows how they feed all these mouths, dear.'

The closer she went to Lady Margaret, the greater was Campion's fear. Toby had spoken much of his mother, and though he spoke in terms of love and admiration, there was an unmistakable awe in his voice. She ruled Lazen: the castle, estate, village, church, the lives of tenants, servants, priest, family, and any other person who came within her wide purlieu. She was a formidable lady, a great lady even, and Lazen Castle was the setting for her considerable talents. She ran the estate, Toby said, far better than his father could have done, a fact recognised by Sir George, and within its bounds Lady Margaret's word was law.

It was not, Toby had hastened to assure Campion, a tyrannous law. It brooked little interference, knew great charity, and was subject to no known codification. Lady Margaret's whim was her desire, her desire was her law, and her strongest desire was to keep the estate happy for a happy estate was an efficient estate.

They climbed the wide staircase from the great hall, leaving the servants behind, and Toby plunged into a dark maze of old corridors, passage rooms, and odd, brief stairways. Their entrance into the New House was through a low, stone archway that opened into a magnificently light, high, decorated landing. A great tapestry took up one wall, a tapestry showing a chained and crowned unicorn that lay its head in the lap of a young girl. Above it the ceiling was a riot of intricate plasterwork, flowers and fruit spilling downwards and leaving, in the ceiling's centre, a great blank oval that Toby said awaited a suitable painter. He grinned at Campion and Mrs Swan. 'Wait here.'

Campion waited. Lazen Castle was less than a half day's ride from Werlatton, yet nothing in her life had prepared her for such a place. It crushed her with its size, its pretensions, and she felt gauche, awkward and out of place. How could she make an impression on Lady Margaret? She was dirty from travelling, unkempt, and though Mrs Swan brushed at her clothes and tweaked them straight, Campion could feel presentiments of failure. Voices and laughter sounded from the bottom of the vast, marble staircase that ended on this landing. What was she to these people? Why should they care for her?

She feared Lady Margaret. She could hear nothing from within the long gallery into which Toby had gone, yet she knew that at this moment her fate was being decided. She knew nothing of Sir George's letter, delivered two days previously by the Earl of Fleet, and had she known then her melancholy would have been even more profound.

'Cheer up, dear.' Mrs Swan pulled Campion's collar straight. 'She'll like you. Can't help but like you.'

Toby had said, candidly enough, that Campion's best chance of acceptance lay in Lady Margaret adopting her as she adopted, at frequent intervals, new enthusiasms that made up in absorption what they lacked in duration. Toby had spoken laughingly of these enthusiasms and of the havoc they created in Lazen's life. Some were harmless enough, such as Lady Margaret's period of sonnet writing that had merely inflicted reams of poetry on the family and spattered a good inlaid table with ink. Her adoption of drama, Toby said, had even imported some excellent players and musicians to the castle.

Only once had Sir George firmly protested, and that had been when Lady Margaret had contracted an overpowering desire to be a taxidermist. She had written to a tradesman in Bristol, demanding the secrets of his trade, but Toby suspected that the man had kept his professional secrets and palmed Lady Margaret off with false instructions.

For a summer Lady Margaret had cut a swathe of death through the castle's chicken population, yet no matter how she practised, the stuffed chickens had become malodorous and alarmingly misshapen. The long gallery had become almost uninhabitable, so overpowering was the smell, yet still Lady Margaret scooped at hen cadavers and replaced their organs with her own mixture of sawdust and plaster. Every table in the gallery, Toby remembered, had been inhabited by strange, ghoulish chickens; creatures that resembled sagging, lumpen, be-feathered bladders with dangling heads. They had all, finally, been burnt, all except one prize specimen that Toby kept in a locked cupboard in the keep.

The gilded, panelled door of the long gallery opened. Toby stood there, smiling, but his face gave no message of what had transpired in his half-hour talk with his mother. 'Mrs Swan? I'm going to settle you comfortably. We'll find some food.' He grinned at Campion. 'You're summoned to the presence.' He gestured her inside.

'Now?'

'This second. Don't be nervous.'

The order was impossible to obey. Her nervousness increased as she went past Toby, as he closed the door behind her and she found herself in a room of sumptuous magnificence. It ran the length of the New House, wide windows opening south on to the Lazen valley, with their white curtains billowing inwards in the slight breeze. Campion had an impression of rich tables and chairs, settles and chests, of a carpet laid the full length of the two-hundred-foot room, of paintings on the white wall opposite the windows, and of more plasterwork on the ceiling. It was all a quick, overwhelming impression, for then she saw Toby's mother, halfway down the room, watching her.

'Do I call you Miss Slythe, Mrs Scammell, Dorcas, or Campion? You seem to have a plethora of names for a simple girl. Come here.'

Campion walked along the rich carpet, feeling as she had imagined she might feel when, on the Day of Judgment, she would have to walk the crystal floor beneath the throne of thrones.

'Closer, girl, closer! I don't intend to eat you!'

Campion stopped close to Lady Margaret, bobbed an ungainly curtsey, and kept quiet. She looked once at Toby's mother, then avoided her eyes. She had a swift glimpse of a tall, grey-haired lady with an imperious, commanding face.

Lady Margaret looked at her for a few seconds. 'So you're the girl my son burned down half of London for?'

An answer was required. 'Yes, ma'am.'

'My name is Lady Margaret. We have still not established what yours is, but doubtless we will agree on something.' Lady Margaret sniffed in evident disapproval. 'Three businesses destroyed, twelve houses burned to ashes and two men dead. Did you know that?'

'Yes, ma'am, Lady Margaret.' The news-sheets had overtaken Toby and Campion a day from Lazen. Lady Margaret sniffed again.