A Crowning Mercy. Bernard Cornwell
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wee give manifold Thankes’, and one of the letters looked forward to ‘oure visit to Werlatton’. So her father, sometime between 1625 and 1626, had moved from Dorchester. She would have been three years old at the most and could not remember the move. Werlatton Hall was all she had known. She skipped through more letters, seeking a clue to her father’s sudden wealth, but there was none. One year he had been a struggling merchant, the next master of this huge estate with its great Hall.
A letter from 1630 was in a different hand, telling Matthew Slythe of his father-in-law’s death and Slythe had written in the letter’s margin a laconic note recording the death of his mother-in-law a week later. ‘The Plague’ was the brief explanation.
Someone knocked loudly on the study door. Campion put the letter down and ran fingers through her unpinned hair. The knock came again. ‘Who is it?’
‘Ebenezer. I want to come in!’
‘You can’t. Go away.’ She was half undressed, her hair undone, and she could not let him in.
‘What are you doing in there?’
‘You know what I’m doing. Tidying up!’
‘No, you’re not! I’ve been listening.’
‘Go away, Eb! I’m reading the Bible.’
She waited till she heard his footsteps disappear, heard him grumbling down the passage and then got stiffly to her feet to light more candles. She thought Ebenezer might try to enter the room through the window, or spy on her through the crack in the curtains. She stood between the curtain and the window, in the darkness of the night, watching to see if Ebenezer’s curiosity would take him into the garden. An owl bellied its call in the darkness, bats flickered above the lawn, but Ebenezer did not appear. She waited, listening, and could hear nothing. She remembered the many, many nights when she would lie awake in childhood’s cold bed, listening for the voices of this house raised in anger, and she would know, with a child’s sense, that when her parents fought with each other they would expend their venom on her.
The letters told her nothing, offered no explanation, mentioned no seal. The only papers left were those covered in mathematics and she picked them up wearily, spread them out and bent again to her reading. These, evidently, were the papers that had driven Matthew Slythe to the long nights in this room, that had forced him into writhing, wrestling prayer with his God. She looked in amazement at the work.
Her father had believed that the Bible contained two messages; the first open to anyone who cared to read, the second hidden by means of secret numbers disguised in the text. As the alchemists struggled to turn mercury into gold, so Matthew Slythe had tried to prise God’s secrets from the scriptures.
‘Praise bee for this!’ began one page, and Campion saw that he had been working from the book of Revelation where the number of the beast, the anti-Christ, the Pope of Rome, was given as 666. He had tried to divide it by twelve and, because it was impossible, he was pleased. Twelve, it seemed, was a godly number, indeed the fourteenth chapter of Revelation said that 144,000 people would stand on Mount Zion and her father had excitedly divided that number by twelve (the ‘apostles and tribes of God’) and received the answer 12,000. For some reason that seemed to be significant for he had underscored the number twelve times, and then listed further subdivisions. By three, the number of the Trinity, by four ‘for that bee the corners of this world’, and by six, described merely as ‘halfe twelve’.
Yet for each such success, there were horrid failures. The book of Daniel foretold the world’s end, the abomination, as being 2,990 days after the ‘end of sacrifice’. Matthew Slythe had struggled with that number and it had yielded nothing, its secret intact, and in desperation he had copied a verse from the same chapter of Daniel that expressed his disillusion: ‘for the words are closed up and sealed till the time of the end.’
Sealed. She shrugged and smiled at the word. It had not been important to her father, instead he had underlined the words ‘closed up’. Closed up. She frowned, the paper forgotten, because something tugged at her memory, something she could not place, and she said the words aloud. ‘Closed up. Closed up.’ She felt as she knew Toby Lazender must feel when his fingers felt the pressure in the cold water and he knew that a fish was between his hands, but she could still not place the words. Closed up.
Cony, Covenant, closed up.
She rubbed her temples and tried to take from the words their hidden meaning, just as her father had struggled with the Bible’s numbers. Yet the more she thought, the more elusive was the answer. Closed up? Why had that triggered her?
She stood up, pulled the curtain back, and opened one of the two windows. The lawn was pale in the moonlight, the hedge dark, and she could see the smear of stars above her. Closed up. It was quiet now, the whole household asleep, but then the owl sounded again, hunting the beeches on the ridge. Cony, Covenant, closed up.
She thought suddenly of Toby Lazender and had a clear vision of his face, a vision that had eluded her for weeks. She smiled into the darkness, for she was intent now on running away, and she thought that he would be the person she would run to. Perhaps he would remember her, but even if not, surely he would help her for he had been kind, generous and a friend if only for one afternoon. Then she felt the hopelessness of it. How could she reach London without money?
She sighed, closed the window, and was suddenly utterly still. Closed up. She remembered it now! She remembered her mother’s funeral, four years before, and she remembered the weeping in the women’s pews, the long, long sermon from Faithful Unto Death Hervey in which he had likened Martha Slythe to the Martha in the Bible, and she also remembered the words ‘closed up’. Her father had prayed at the funeral, an extemporaneous prayer in which he had tussled with God, and he had used the words in the prayer. Not that there was anything special in the way he used them, more, she remembered, in the manner in which he spoke them.
He had paused just before those two words. The echo of his voice was fading between the stone pillars and embarrassment was spreading through the congregation for they thought that Matthew Slythe had broken down. The silence stretched. He had said something like ‘her life on this earth is ended, her affairs …’ and then he had embarrassed them by a long silence. She remembered the feet shuffling on the floor, the sobbing from Goodwife, and she had raised her head to steal a glance at her father. His face was turned up to the beams, one fist was raised, and she realised, as the pause went on, that he had not broken down. He had simply lost the thread of his words and thoughts. It was nothing more. She saw him shake his massive head and then he had simply finished the sentence by saying ‘closed up’.
That was all. Yet at the time it had struck her as strange, as if some remnants of her mother’s life had been locked in a cupboard. She remembered little else of the funeral, except singing the doleful words beside the raw grave as the snow whirled off the high ridge. Closed up.
It was not much, yet the letters had come from Martha Slythe’s parents, and Cony, whoever he was, had appeared in their lives just at the time when Matthew Slythe came into his fortune, and she wondered if the seal, the secret of the seal, was hidden, not here, but in her mother’s room. Closed up still? Waiting?
She dressed quickly, blew out the candles and turned the key in the lock. It scraped as it yielded, she froze, but there was no sound from the passageway. She would search upstairs, in her parents’ bedroom that was empty, awaiting her marriage with Scammell that was confidently expected before her birthday in October.
The servants, except for Goodwife, all slept at the far end of the house where her own bedroom was. Scammell was in a room above the main entrance, and she could hear his snores as she paused at the top of the private stairs. Goodwife was the closest, in a bedroom that opened directly from her mother’s dressing room, and Campion knew she would have to move with desperate silence. Goodwife would wake at the smallest sound and then emerge, bristling with anger, to face the intruder. Campion crept on stockinged feet down the short passageway and into the large, silent room where her parents had shared their unhappy bed.
The room smelt of wax. The bed was covered with a heavy flax sheet, rucked where the poles went