A Crowning Mercy. Bernard Cornwell
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were stored, she heard another part of her future being planned. ‘There’s good swaddling clothes and a crib. They were yours and Ebenezer’s, and we kept them in case more should be born.’ ‘We’, to Goodwife, always referred to herself and Campion’s mother, two bitter women united in friendship. Goodwife looked critically at Campion. ‘You’ll have a child before next year’s out, though with your hips I’ll be bound it will be trouble! Where you get them I don’t know. Ebenezer’s thin, but he’s spread in the hips. Your mother, God rest her soul, was a big woman and your father’s not narrow in the loins.’ She sniffed. ‘God’s will be done.’
Faithful Unto Death Hervey read the banns once, twice and then a third time. The day came close. She would never be Campion, never know love, and she yearned for love.
‘By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth.’ And by night on her bed Campion tossed in an agony of apprehension. Would Scammell take her as a bull took a heifer? She cringed from her imagination, hearing his grunts, feeling the hanging weight of his great body as he mounted her. She imagined the fleshy lips at the nape of her neck and she cried out helplessly in her bed. Charity stirred in her sleep.
Campion saw her own death as she gave birth, dropping a sleek, bloody mess as she had seen cows drop. Sometimes she thought it would be simpler to die before the wedding.
Her father spoke to her only once about her wedding and that three days before the ceremony. He came upon her in the pantry where she was slapping butter into great squares for the table. He seemed surprised to see her and he stared at her.
She smiled. ‘Father?’
‘You are working.’
‘Yes, father.’
He picked up the muslin that covered the butter jar, twisting it in his huge hands. ‘I have brought you up in the faith. I have done well.’
She sensed that he needed reassurance. ‘Yes, father.’
‘He’s a good man. A man of God.’
‘Yes, father.’
‘He will be a tower of strength. Yes. A tower of strength. And you are well provided for.’
‘Thank you, father.’ She could see that he was about to leave so, before he could disentangle his hands from the muslin, she asked the question that had intrigued her since Scammell had spoken to her beneath the beech trees. ‘Father?’
‘Daughter?’
‘What is the Covenant, father?’
His heavy face was still, staring at her, the question being weighed in the balance of his mind. A pulse throbbed in his temple.
She would always remember the moment. It was the only occasion when she knew her father to lie. Matthew Slythe, for all his anger, was a man who tried to be honest, tried to be true to his hard God, yet at that moment, she knew, he lied. ‘It is a dowry, no more. It is for your husband, of course, so it is not your concern.’
The muslin had torn in his hands.
Matthew Slythe prayed that night, he prayed for forgiveness, that the sin of lying would be forgiven. He groaned as he thought of the Covenant. It had brought him riches beyond hope, but it had brought him Dorcas as well. He had tried to break her spirit, to make her a worthy servant of his harsh God, but he feared for her if she should ever know the true nature of the Covenant. She could be rich and independent and she might achieve that effortless happiness that Slythe sensed in her and feared as the devil’s mark. The money of the Covenant was not for happiness. It was, in Matthew Slythe’s plans, money to be spent on spreading the fear of God to a sinful world. He prayed that Dorcas would never, ever, discover the truth.
His daughter prayed, too. She had known, she did not know how, that her father had lied. She prayed that night and the next that she would be spared the horror of marrying Samuel Scammell. She prayed, as she had ever done, for happiness and for the love God promised.
On the eve of her wedding it seemed that God might be listening.
It was a fine, sunny day, a day of high summer, and, in the early afternoon, her father died.
‘Apoplexy,’ Dr Fenderlyn said.
‘Sir?’
‘Apoplexy, Dorcas.’ Fenderlyn stood beside his horse at the entrance to Werlatton Hall. ‘Too much blood, child, that’s all. I could have bled him last week, if I’d known, but he wouldn’t come to me. Power of prayer!’ He said the last scornfully as he slowly climbed the mounting block. ‘Urine, child, urine! Send your physician urine regularly and you might have a chance, you might …’ He shrugged, drawing in a hiss of breath that suggested everything was doomed anyway. ‘You’re not looking well, child. Too much yellow bile in you. I can give you an emetic, it’s better than prayer.’
‘No, thank you, sir.’ Campion had been given one of Fenderlyn’s emetics in the past, dark brown and slimy, and she could still remember the desperate breath-stealing vomit that had erupted to the doctor’s grave approval.
He gathered the reins of his horse, swung his leg across the saddle and settled himself. ‘You heard the news, Dorcas?’
‘News, sir?’
‘The King’s taken Bristol. I suppose the Royalists will win now.’ He grunted approvingly. ‘Still, I suppose you’ve got other things on your mind. You were to be married tomorrow?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Not now, child, not now.’ Fenderlyn said it gloomily, but the words were like an angelic message in her head. The doctor pulled his hat straight. ‘It’ll be a funeral not a wedding. Fine weather, Dorcas! Bury him soon. I suppose he’ll want to rest beside your mother?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I’ll make sure Hervey opens up the grave. Heigh ho. Another one gone.’ He looked up at the eaves of the Hall where the house martins had their nests. ‘It comes to us all, child, comes to us all. Apoplexy, the stone, strangury, the gout, epilepsy, leprosy, botches, plague, fistula, cankerworm, dropsy, gut-twisting, rupture, goitre, fever, the pox, tetterworm, the sweat, gripes.’ He shook his head, relishing the list. ‘It’s only the young who think they’ll live for ever.’ Dr Fenderlyn was seventy-eight years old and had never had a day’s illness in his life. It had made him a cheerless man, expecting the worst. ‘What will you do, Dorcas?’
‘Do, sir?’
‘I suppose you’ll marry Mr Scammell and breed me more patients?’
‘I don’t know, sir.’ There was a joy in Campion, a leaping joy because she did not know what the future held. She knew only that the marriage had been postponed and she felt as a condemned prisoner must when the gaoler announces a reprieve.
‘I’ll bid you good day, Dorcas.’ Fenderlyn touched his whip to the brim of his hat. ‘Tell that brother of yours to send me some urine. Never thought he’d survive weaning, but here he is. Life’s full of surprises. Be of good cheer!’ He said the last miserably.
Ebenezer had found his father dead, slumped over his study table, and on Matthew Slythe’s face was a snarl that had been there so often in life. His fist was clenched as if, at the last moment, he had tried to hold on to life and not go to the heaven he had looked forward to for so long. He had lived fifty-four years, a good length for most men, and death had come very suddenly.
Campion knew she should not feel released, yet she did, and it was an effort to stand beside the grave, looking down at the decaying wood of her mother’s coffin, without showing the pleasure of the moment. She joined in the 23rd psalm, then listened as Faithful Unto Death Hervey rejoiced that Brother Matthew Slythe had been called home, had been translated into glory, had crossed the river Jordan to join the company of Saints and even now was part of the eternal choir that hymned God’s majesty