A Crowning Mercy (46 page)

The bells of St Mary's rang eleven. From across the water, from the city that climbed to the great cathedral, dozens of other bells echoed the hour. The gates of London were being shut, its thousands of inhabitants were mostly already asleep, and in the morning they would awake to another day not much different to the one on which they had closed their eyes. Yet not Campion. She would never again have a day like the ones before this night, for suddenly she had been wrenched as few people are wrenched. Matthew Slythe, the grim Puritan who had burdened her with God's wrath, had not been her father. Her father was a failed poet, a wit, a lover, and an exile. Kit Aretine. She turned the page of the ruined book back to the portrait. She tried to see a likeness to herself in the arrogant, imperious portrait, but she could not. 'My father?'

'Yes.' Lopez's voice was gentle.

She felt as if she had fallen into a chasm of immeasurable darkness, as if, within its bleakness, she struggled to make great wings beat that could take her once more into the light. 'Poems, &c. Upon Severall Themes.' But what? What themes had motivated her real father?

'It's a story that begins long ago, Campion, in Italy.' Lopez had rested his head against the high back of his chair. 'There was a riot against my people. I don't even remember why, but I suppose some Christian child had fallen into a river and drowned and the mob thought we Jews had kidnapped it and sacrificed it in our synagogue.' He smiled. 'They often thought that. So they attacked us. Your father was there, a very young man, and I think it simply struck him that it would be more amusing to fight the mob than join it. He saved my life, and that of my wife and my daughter. He fought for us, rescued us, and was offended when I suggested payment. I paid him in the end, though. I heard he was in the Tower and I had lent money to the King of England. So I cancelled King James's debt for your father's life.

'He was penniless when I took him back to Holland. I offered him money and he refused it, then he made a bargain with me. He would take the money and return it, with interest, in one year. Anything he made in addition would be his.'

Lopez smiled at the memory. 'That was 1623. He bought a ship, a splendid vessel, and he recruited men and bought guns and sailed off against Spain. He was a pirate, nothing else, though the Dutch gave him letters of commission that wouldn't have stopped the Dons putting him to a slow death. They never did. When fortune smiled on your father, she really smiled well.' Lopez sipped wine. 'You should have seen his return. Two more ships with him, both captured and both full of Spanish gold.' He shook his head. 'I've never seen money like it, ever! Only two men have ever taken more off the Spanish, and no man ever cared less about it than your father. He paid me his debt, took some for himself, and he charged me with a new commission. I was to make the rest of the money available to you. It was a fortune, Campion, a true fortune.'

The fire was dying behind its screen, the room becoming chill, but neither moved to put more wood on the feeble flames. Campion listened, her wine forgotten, listened to a stranger tell her who she was.

Lopez stroked his beard. 'Before all that happened, before Kit wrote his poem about King James, he fell in love. Dear God! He was smitten. He wrote to me that he had found his "Angel", and he would marry her. By then I'd known him six years and I doubted he'd ever marry, but he wrote to me again, six months later, and he was still in love. He said she was innocent, gentle and very strong. He also said she was very, very beautiful.' Lopez smiled at her. 'I think she must have been, for she was your mother.'

Campion smiled at the compliment. 'What was her name?'

'Agatha Prescott. An ugly name.'

'Prescott?' Campion frowned.

'Yes. She was the younger sister of Martha Slythe.' Lopez shook his head in wonderment. 'I don't know how Kit Aretine met a Puritan girl, but he did, and he fell in love, and she with him, and they never had time to marry. He was arrested, taken to the Tower, and he left her pregnant.'

Mordecai Lopez sipped his wine. 'She was alone. I suppose she asked Kit's friends for help, but he ran with a swift pack in those days and the help never came. Who needed a pregnant angel?' He shrugged. 'I didn't know her, she didn't know me. I wish I could have helped, but she did the fatal, perhaps the only, thing. She crawled home in disgrace.'

Campion tried to imagine how Matthew Slythe would have behaved if she had come home pregnant. It was a fearful thought. She felt a pang for the girl who had been forced back to the Prescotts.

Lopez clasped his hands on his knees. 'They hid her. They were ashamed, and sometimes I think they may have been glad at what happened. She died of the childbirth fever just days after you were born. Perhaps they hoped you'd die, too.'

Campion had to blink back tears, swept by a terrible pity for a girl who had tried to break the same bonds that she had tried to break. Her mother, like the daughter she left behind, had wanted to be free, yet in the end the Puritans had snatched her back to a lonely, vindictive death.

'So there you were,' Lopez smiled, 'a little bastard, the shame of the Prescott family. They called you Dorcas. Doesn't that mean "full of good works"?'

'Yes.'

'That's what they wanted you to be, yet the works were to be their works. They would bring you up as a good Puritan.' Lopez shook his head. 'When Kit was released from the Tower he wrote to the Prescotts, asking for news, and he offered to take you from them. They refused.'

She frowned. 'Why?'

'Because they'd solved their problem by then. Agatha had an older sister. I'm told Martha was not as beautiful.'

Campion smiled. 'No.'

'Yet the Prescotts were rich, they could afford a large dowry, and they attached more than a bride to the dowry. They attached you. Matthew Slythe agreed to marry Martha, to take you, and to bring you up as his natural daughter. Matthew and Martha promised never, ever, to reveal the shame of Agatha. You had to be hidden.'

Campion thought of Matthew and Martha Slythe. No wonder, she thought, they had leaned the wrath of God heavily on her, fearing that every smile and every small act of joy might be Agatha Prescott's shameful personality breaking through the Puritan bonds.

'Then,' Lopez went on, 'Kit Aretine made his fortune and wanted you to have it.' He laughed softly. 'You'd think that to give a child a fortune would be easy! But, no. The Puritans wouldn't take the money. It came from the devil, they said, and it would seduce you from the true faith. Then Matthew Slythe's business began to fail.' Lopez poured more wine. 'Suddenly Kit Aretine's offer became less devilish, even began to smack of Godliness!' He laughed. 'So they asked a young lawyer to negotiate for them.'

'Sir Grenville Cony?' Campion asked.

'Just plain Grenville Cony then, but a subtle little toad all the same.' Lopez smiled. 'And like all lawyers he loved subtlety. Subtlety makes a lawyer rich. Things, my dear, began to get difficult.'

The clocks chimed a ragged cacophony of the quarter hour. From the river came the mournful sound of halyards slapping against masts.

'We couldn't give you the money as an outright gift. The law made that difficult and we simply did not trust Grenville Cony. He came to Amsterdam to see us and that proved a disaster.'

'A disaster?'

Lopez's face showed a wistful amusement. 'Cony had to fall in love with your father. I suppose that wasn't difficult if you loved men instead of women, but Cony managed to offend Kit. He pursued him like a slave.' Lopez chuckled. 'I told your father to encourage it, that we should use Cony's devotion to our advantage, but Kit was never kind to that sort of man. He ended by stripping Cony naked, thumping his arse with a scabbard, and throwing him into a canal. All in public'

Campion laughed. 'I wish I'd seen it. I wish I'd done it!'

Lopez smiled. 'Cony took his revenge, of a sort. He bought a painting, a naked Narcissus, and he paid to have your father's face painted over the original. He wanted people to think that Aretine had been his lover. An odd sort of revenge, I suppose, but it seemed to please Grenville Cony.'

Campion had stopped listening. She was remembering. She was seeing in her mind's eye that splendid, savage, pagan, arrogant face that had transfixed her in Cony's house. Her father! That man, that face of unbelievable handsomeness, that creature she had thought too good-looking to be true, and it was her father! Now she understood why so many spoke with such awe of Kit Aretine as the handsomest man in Europe. Her mother would never have stood a chance, the Puritan seeing the god and falling in love. Campion remembered the golden hair, the strength of the face, the sheer beauty of it.

Lopez half smiled. 'You saw the painting?'

She nodded. 'Yes.'

'I never did, but I often wondered how good a likeness it was. Cony hired a Dutch painter to sketch your father in an ale-house.'

'He made him look like a god.'

'Then it sounds a good likeness. Strange it should come out of hatred.' Lopez shrugged. 'Mind you, it didn't make our task any easier.' He left the subject of the painting and went back to the Covenant. 'You see, I'd already bought a great deal of property with the money. You own land in Italy, Holland, France, England, and Spain.' He smiled. 'You're very, very rich. All that land, Campion, produces money, some in rent, some in crops, but a very, very great deal of money. I doubt if there are twenty people in England richer than you. We proposed, quite simply, that we kept control of the land, but passed the profits of the land to Matthew Slythe. When you were twenty-one you would take the profits for yourself. But that wouldn't do.

'Master Cony said that if we controlled the land then one day we might simply dam the golden stream. That it gave Matthew Slythe, indeed yourself, an uncertain future.' Lopez shook his head ruefully. 'You have no idea, Campion, how hard we tried to give that money to you, and how difficult it was. So, we drew up a different scheme, a little more subtle. We agreed to give up control of the properties on the condition that it all went to you when you were twenty-one. You would take control of the land, the profits, everything, but Matthew Slythe wouldn't accept that. He believed that if you became rich too quickly then you would slide back into the pagan ways of your real parents. He wanted more years to save your soul, so we agreed, in the end, that you would inherit at twenty-five.

'We'd agreed, remember, to give up the control of the properties, but not to Grenville Cony and Matthew Slythe. Instead we all decided that the Bank of Amsterdam would administer all the land. Even Grenville Cony agreed to that, because it's the one bank everyone trusts. It doesn't belong to one family, but to the whole nation, and it hardly ever cheats anyone. To this day, Campion, they administer your wealth.'

Lopez's references to 'her' wealth seemed strange. She did not feel wealthy, or even fortunate. She was a Puritan girl, struggling for freedom, far from the man she loved.

Lopez looked at the ceiling. 'The bank administers your property. They receive the profits from all the agents throughout Europe. The agents, of course, deduct their fees and I've no doubt that every single one is cheating you. The bank takes its own fee for its trouble, and I'm sure they sometimes add the sums wrong in their own favour, and then the money goes each month by draft of hand to Sir Grenville Cony. And he, my dear, undoubtedly takes an enormous fee. The remainder of the money was sent to your father, and the Covenant, which is the agreement between the four of us and the bank, says that the money must be used for your comfort, education, and happiness.'

She laughed at the thought of Matthew Slythe caring for her happiness.

Lopez smiled.

Truly it was not very subtle, it might even have worked, but there was one terrible mistake. Your father, Kit Aretine, had to interfere. We'd made a provision in the Covenant for changes to be made. Suppose that England went to war with Holland and the money could not be paid? In that case we'd need to transfer the control of the property somewhere else, and we'd decided, quite simply, that any three signatures from the four of us should be sufficient to change the arrangements. That seemed safe; after all neither I nor your father were ever likely to agree with Grenville Cony or Matthew Slythe, but then Kit had to complicate matters. What happens, he asked, if one of the four men dies? Wouldn't it be simpler, he said, if every man had a seal and each man can hand the seal on to whomever he likes. The seal gives its owner one quarter of the authority over the Covenant and it authenticates the signature of anyone who writes to the Bank of Amsterdam about the Covenant. I said it was a dreadful idea, but I think Kit had already hatched the idea of sending Matthew Slythe a crucifix and Grenville Cony a woman, and so it was done.

'But now, you see,' Lopez leaned forward, 'it was not three signatures that were needed, but three seals. Any man who could gather three seals would control the whole fortune. All of it. They could end the Covenant. If Sir Grenville, whom I very much suspect at this moment has two seals, can take a third, then he will simply go to the Bank and he will take all the property for ever. All of it. You'll have nothing.'

Campion frowned. 'And if Sir Grenville has two seals then no one else can change the Covenant.'

'Exactly. And if he had succeeded in having you killed then you could not have taken the Covenant when you were twenty-five.'

Lopez lifted his wine and smiled at her over the rim of the glass. 'What you have to do, young lady, is to collect those seals of Sir Grenville's and take them, with the Seal of St Luke, to the Bank of Amsterdam. That's what your father wanted, and that's what I will help you do.'

Campion picked up the seal on the table. She understood now why Sir Grenville had hunted her and tried to kill her, she understood why Samuel Scammell had died so that Ebenezer could inherit control of one seal, she even understood why Matthew Slythe had lied to her when she had asked about the Covenant. She understood so much, though her mind would still have to go over and over the information, yet there was one thing she did not understand. She looked at Mordecai Lopez.