A Crowning Mercy

by Bernard Cornwell

  “I do not love Mr. Scammell, sir.”

  “Ah! You poor child. You poor, poor child. You want to be in love! You want the stars spread beneath your feet in a carpet of light, you want flowers in your heaven, and you want to meet a twin soul, breast on breast, and live in harmony and gold. Is that right?” She did not answer, and he chuckled. “You have, I presume, read the marriage settlement?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Yet still you want love? Ah, but of course, you are not a lawyer as I am. True, I must divide my time between the councils of state and the Court of Chancery, but I still retain a few scraps of useful law in my old head. Mr. Scammell, I believe, has signed the marriage agreement?”

  “I believe so, sir.”

  “Your belief is well founded. I assure you he has! He has moved from his London house, from his business of creating river-craft, and he has hired a man to keep his place of business going, and all so that he could devote himself to you! And now, because you want the stars at your feet, Mr. Scammell must be disappointed! He has spent money on this marriage, Dorcas, he has made sacrifices, and in return he has been promised much! He is like a man who, having paid his price, is denied the goods! Do you not think, dear child, that Mr. Scammell might now have recourse to the lawyers?”

  His voice mocked her, taunted her, yet she could not take her eyes from the grotesque face that leered at her, smiling. He paused, she made no reply, and he chuckled.

  “Suppose now, child, that Mr. Scammell takes himself and his marriage agreement to the Court of Chancery. He complains that Miss Dorcas Slythe is fickle, that she prefers the stars and the sun and the moon to his own solid virtues. Shall I tell you what will happen? I shall! Nothing!” He laughed. “To my own certain knowledge the Court of Chancery has of this day twenty-three thousand cases pending…twenty-three thousand! I would not have thought there was that much ink in the land, let alone lawyer’s breath, but yet more cases come each day! Your case will be heard, Dorcas, it will be heard, but by that time you will be old, wrinkled and shrivelled and your money, such as it is, will have been drained from you by clever lawyers. And who, my child, will marry a fading flower whose future is tied up in Chancery?”

  Campion said nothing. Mildred Swan had talked of “being baked in a lawyer’s pie,” and now she knew what it meant. Her future with Toby, that endless summer beneath a seamless sky, was being shredded and soiled by the frog-like, laughing man. He leaned forward, his voice a conspiratorial whisper.

  “You want to be free of Mr. Scammell?” She said nothing. He looked dramatically into the corners of the room, as if someone might be listening. “Do you want to be free of Mr. Scammell, Dorcas, without the threat of Chancery either? Do you?”

  She nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  “Then give me the seal, Dorcas. Give it to me.”

  “I don’t have it, sir.”

  “Then you must marry Mr. Scammell!” He spoke as if she were a small child, a singsong intonation in his voice. “You’ll have to marry Brother Scammell!”

  “No!”

  He leaned back, smiling at her, and his voice became friendly. “My dear, dear Dorcas. What is it? Is it that you do not wish to make the beast with two backs with Brother Scammell? Is that it!” He laughed. “I can see you now, so happy in your bedroom.” His voice rose, became harder, and he flayed her with a graphic and grotesque description of Scammell mounting her. She tried to blot her ears, she shook her head, she moaned, but his voice was relentless in its obscene, sweaty vision of her future. He mocked it by calling it “love,” and his words painted a picture far worse than her own thoughts had been of Scammell clambering on her as a bull reared on to a heifer. She was in tears when he had finished. He watched her cry, waited till the sobs were gentler.

  “You want to avoid that, Dorcas?”

  “Yes!”

  “Then give me the seal.”

  “I don’t have it!”

  “Then you must marry Mr. Scammell.”

  “No!” It was half a sob, half a cry of protest.

  Sir Grenville Cony watched her shrewdly. “One more chance, Dorcas, just one. You give me the seal of St. Matthew, and I will give you a hundred pounds, yes, a hundred pounds! Enough for you to live on, child, while you find someone you care for more than you do for Mr. Scammell.”

  “No!” She had hardly listened, the image he had put in her head blotting out his words, but she dared not now reveal that she had lied. She would be questioned more, punished maybe, as her father had punished her, and so she gripped to her story. “I don’t have the seal!”

  “Then you must marry Samuel Scammell.”

  “I will not!”

  She was recovering now, wanting to fight back if only with words.

  He laughed, his wide mouth opening to show stained teeth. “Oh, but you will, Dorcas, you will. I am a lawyer, remember? I can do most things, child, and even Chancery will move with unaccustomed speed when Sir Grenville Cony calls.” He was smiling hugely, and his left hand moved, not toward the pie, but to a piece of paper which he held up above the desk. She could see black writing on it, and a great, red seal dependant at its base.

  “Shall I tell you what this is? It is a document, a legal document, and I took the trouble of collecting it this morning. I knew you might visit me, Dorcas, and I told the court of your plight. Ah! Such a plight! An orphan, not yet twenty-one, alone, away from home, and the court was touched. Yes! Truly touched. She needs a guardian, I said, as does her brother and, do you know, Dorcas, you are both now wards of court.” He laughed. “Your brother seems happy enough, and I’m sure you will be. You’re a ward of the court and I, Grenville Cony, am your guardian. Your future, child, is entirely within my capable hands.” He put the paper down, leaned back in triumph, and laughed.

  She had listened, appalled, as her dreams had collapsed. She saw his white, round face split by the laughing mouth, tears blurred her vision, then she heard him call to his secretary.

  “John! Open the door, John!”

  There was gleeful anticipation on Cony’s face. “Come in! Come in! All of you!”

  The room suddenly seemed filled with people, with faces staring at her in curiosity, in dislike, and she shook her head as if to clear it of a nightmare. “No!”

  “But yes!” Cony was standing now. “You met Thomas Grimmett, I believe. He is my chief guard and a noble servant.” The man who had held her against the stable-block wall at Werlatton, who had thrust his knee between her legs, leered down at her. A boil was livid on his broad, broken-nosed face.

  Cony’s voice was relentless. “Your dear brother, Ebenezer. Such a fine young man! I have offered him employment. And Goodwife! Loyal Goodwife, how pleased you must be that your errant chick is restored.”

  Goodwife’s spiteful face seemed about to spit at her. Ebenezer looked scornful.

  Cony laughed. “And Brother Scammell! Lo! Your bride, restored! What joy there is in the practice of law!” Samuel Scammell smiled at Campion, bobbed his shorn head, and she could feel the great clamps of law and duty and religion and punishment close on her soul. Her hopes, her love, her freedom, all were going, even as the light began to fade over the river. She bowed her head, she cried, and the tears dropped on to the fine, silvered threads of her cloak.

  Sir Grenville Cony made a sympathetic noise. “Ah! See how moved she is? She cried! Is there not more joy in heaven when one sinner repents?”

  “Amen,” Scammell said.

  “And amen!” Sir Grenville Cony said it fervently. “Now, Ebenezer! Goodwife! Brother Scammell! Take dear Dorcas next door. Thomas will join you soon. Go now! Goodbye, dear Dorcas! I am glad you visited me, yes, very glad!”

  She was taken from the room, Goodwife’s hands spiteful on her, and when she was in the secretary’s room Cony moved and slammed the door leaving him alone with his henchman Thomas Grimmett. Cony rubbed his eyes. “The girl’s got spirit.”

  “Has she got the seal, sir?”

  Cony edged rou
nd the table and sat down. “No. I thought she might, but I don’t think so.” He laughed. “I offered her a price she couldn’t refuse. No. She hasn’t.” He looked up at the huge Grimmett. “It’s still in that damned house, Thomas. Search it again. Pull every damned stone down, dig up the garden if need be, but find it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “But first,” Cony pushed papers about on his desk until he came up with what he wanted, “that’s Scammell’s marriage certificate, dated this morning to make it legal.” Sir Grenville sounded tired. He looked up again. “She has to be married, Thomas, she has to be! You understand?”

  “If you say so, sir.”

  “I don’t say so, Thomas, the law says so. The will says so, the marriage settlement says so. If she’s married then Scammell is the seal-holder, and Scammell will give the seal to us.”

  “You know that, sir?”

  “I know it, Thomas, because you will stay with Brother Scammell until he does give it to you.”

  Grimmett smiled. “Yes, sir.”

  “So get them married. Tonight! And make it legal. A priest, the prayer book, none of Scammell’s ranting Puritans. You can fix that?”

  Grimmett thought for a second. “Yes, sir. Where?”

  “In Brother Scammell’s house.” Cony invested Scammell’s name with derision. “Take her there in the boat, then do what you have to do.”

  “Get them married, sir.” Grimmett grinned.

  “Yes. And afterward, Thomas, not before, because I want this legal, make damned sure she’s no longer a virgin. I don’t want her claiming the marriage isn’t valid and opening her legs to prove it. If that damned Puritan doesn’t know how to do it, then you stand over him.”

  “Do it myself, sir?”

  Sir Grenville looked up, curious.

  “You like her?”

  “Very pretty, sir.”

  “Then you do it. It will be your reward.” He laughed at the huge, leather-jacketed man. “The hardships you endure for me, Thomas.”

  Grimmett laughed.

  Cony waved at the door. “Go on, then. Enjoy yourself. Leave the boy here, I’ve got a use for him. Come to me in the morning, Thomas. I want to hear all about it!”

  Sir Grenville watched as the small party embarked in his barge. The girl, in her distinctive blue cloak, was struggling, but Grimmett easily subdued her with one hand. The servant, Goodwife, seemed to be slapping and pinching the girl who was beneath Grimmett’s grip. Samuel Scammell walked behind, his hands flapping in impotent helplessness, and Cony shook his head and laughed.

  He had been worried for a while, thinking the girl might have gone to Lopez, but he need not have worried. She was here, and the seal would turn up in a few days. All was well, indeed, more than well for Ebenezer was here. Sir Grenville, on first meeting Ebenezer, had seen the boy’s need for a cause, had seen the bitter look on the cripple’s face. There was no love there, either, for his beautiful sister. Cony smiled. It was time to educate Master Ebenezer, that gift from the gods to Cony’s plans.

  The sky had its first touch of red. The bargemen, the girl finally safe in the boat, pushed away from the pier. The oars dipped down, went forward, and the white-painted boat moved easily on to the darkening stream. Light flashed from the widening ripples at its stern. Sir Grenville Cony was tired, but happy. The Scots, he knew now, would come into the war against the King and that was good for Cony’s investments, but this news was better. The seals would be his. He turned away from the river, looked up at the naked Narcissus bending over his pool, then threw open the anteroom door. “My dear Ebenezer! My dear boy! We have so much to talk about. Bring that wine!”

  Sir Grenville Cony was a happy, happy man.

  Ten

  James Alexander Simeon McHose Bollsbie knew, as did Sir Grenville Cony, moments of pure happiness. Bollsbie was a clerk in holy orders, a minister of the Church of England, ordained as such by the Bishop of London, licensed to preach, to administer the sacraments, to bury the dead, and, of course, to join Christian souls in holy matrimony.

  The Reverend James Bollsbie was also a drunkard.

  It was that circumstance, rather than any desire to witness for the Lord, which had prompted the nickname “Sobriety.” Sobriety Bollsbie he had been for two years now. His drunkenness, in addition to supplying him with a new name, was also responsible for those moments of happiness he was given to enjoy. He also had moments of fearful despondency, but new every morning was the ale-given joy.

  It had not always been so. He had once been known as a preacher of fire and conviction, a man who could start hysteria in the nearest pews and spread it back down the church. He specialized in sermons of hell fire, and had been known in a score of parishes as a man who could frighten sinners from their ale-houses into true repentance. He preached against alcohol, yet the enemy had laid siege and broken into his citadel. Sobriety Bollsbie preached no more.

  Yet even as a finished man, a broken drunkard in his late forties, Sobriety Bollsbie had his place in society. He had always been an adaptable man, ready to trim the sails of his belief to the prevailing wind of theological fashion; thus when Archbishop Laud had been supreme and had demanded church services modelled on the hated Papist ritual, Sobriety had been the first to deck his altar cloths and illuminate his choir with candles. When he saw that he had miscalculated, and that the pathway to heaven lay in a plainer, Puritan service, he had not been shy in his conversion. Not for him the sly change or the slow dismantling of ritual. He advertised his change of allegiance. He invited the Puritans to witness the destruction of his gaudy altar, the burning of his altar rails, and the shredding of his embroidered vestments. He preached a sermon in which he likened his enlightenment to the conversion of St. Paul and thus, in one service, became the darling of the Puritan faction as a witness to their truth.

  That adaptability he had carried into his fall and disgrace. Such was the entwinement of church and state that lawyers, such as Sir Grenville, were often in need of a willing priest to add God’s imprimatur to their own. Bollsbie was such a priest.

  Bollsbie lived now in Spitalfields, in a miserable room where Thomas Grimmett, having safely delivered Campion to Scammell’s house, discovered the priest drunk. Grimmett manhandled Bollsbie downstairs.

  “Leave me, good sir! I am a priest! A priest!”

  “I know you’re a damned priest. Hold on, Sobriety.” Grimmett picked up a pail of filthy water and poured it over the straggle-haired man. “Sober up, you bastard!”

  Bollsbie moaned. He rocked to and fro, miserable and damp. “Oh, God!”

  Grimmett squatted at his side. “When did you last eat, Sobriety?”

  “Oh, God!”

  “You’re a miserable bastard. You’ve got a wedding, your reverence. Understand? A wedding.”

  “I want to eat.”

  “You’ll eat. Now fetch your book, Sobriety. We’re going.”

  Grimmett helped the priest find his old cassock, a filthy scapular, and his prayer book, then he half carried the preacher into the lane which led to Bishopsgate. He stopped at the first pie-stall and forced two beef pies into Bollsbie, then primed him with a tot of rum. “There, your Holiness. Remember me now?”

  Sobriety smiled. “It’s Thomas, isn’t it?”

  “That’s it, your reverence. Sir Grenville’s man.”

  “Ah! Good Sir Grenville! Does he do well?”

  “You know Sir Grenville, reverend, he doesn’t do badly. Now come on, we’ve got work to do.”

  Bollsbie looked hopefully at the bag of bottles Grimmett carried. “You want me as a witness? Yes?”

  “I told you, Sobriety, a damned wedding. Now come on!”

  “A wedding! How pleasing! I like weddings. Lead on, good Thomas, lead on!”

  Toby Lazender grew bored. The alley was a cheerless place to wait. After an hour he walked to the Strand, persuading himself that Campion might be leaving by Cony’s front door, but there was no life there except for the guard who leaned ag
ainst the brick archway. Toby went back to the alleyway, down to the very end where the cobbles became a stinking river-washed ramp of littered mud. The wall of Cony’s garden extended deep into the water and there was no way he could peer round its end. He went back to the porch, leaned against the opposite wall, and stared up at Cony’s blank, featureless house. He must wait. Soon, he consoled himself, very soon, Campion would come through the door and they would be together.

  He was in love, and he saw the world through the distorting glass of that love. Nothing mattered except that he should be with Campion, and his father’s disapproval had seemed irrelevant. He had seen her first at the stream and, with the fear of love, he had thought she might not want to see him again. He had cursed himself for not going back, even though his return would have been impossible once he was in London, but then she had written to him and he had left his father’s house within minutes of the letter’s arrival. His life before he had met Campion, the hours he spent without her, both seemed an irrelevance. He was in love. His father, and doubtless his mother too, disapproved. By birth and education she was unsuitable, but Toby did not care. There was something in Campion’s soul that intoxicated him, he would not be without it, and even the dank, sunless alley seemed brighter because of it.

  He touched the seal, feeling it as a lump beneath his leather coat and shirt. It had touched her skin, now it touched his, and even that triviality was turned by the distorting glass into an omen of brilliant hope.

  He heard her before he saw her. He was leaning against the wall, dreaming the dreams of the shadowless future, when he heard her shriek. He turned, catching one glimpse of the silver-blue cloak in the boat’s stern, and then the oarsmen bent forward again, pulled, and the barge surged out of sight.

  “Campion!” He ran to the water’s edge, but already she was gone, the river current carrying her away. “Waterman! Waterman!”

  Damn, damn and damn again! There was never an empty boat when you needed one!

  He ran up the alley, his boots loud between the walls, and he turned east into the Strand. He tried to think of the nearest stairs to the river. Exeter Street! The Temple Stairs! He pushed past people, careless of their complaints, and he knew that with each second his loved one was going further from him.