A Crowning Mercy. Bernard Cornwell

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СКАЧАТЬ rest his soul, and so you should.’ Goodwife began vigorously dusting the hall table where Scammell was finishing a lonely lunch. ‘She’s lacked for nothing, that girl, nothing! If I’d been given her advantages …’ She tutted, leaving it to Scammell’s imagination what heights Goodwife might have scaled had she been Matthew Slythe’s daughter. ‘Give her a beating, master! Belts aren’t just for holding up breeches!’

      Scammell was master now, doling out the servants’ wages and collecting the estate’s rents. Ebenezer helped him, sharing the work and always seeking to ingratiate himself with the older man. They shared a concern, too. The seal of the Covenant could not be found.

      Campion did not care. The existence of the Covenant with its extraordinary income did not help her. She was still trapped in a marriage she did not want and neither ten pounds nor ten thousand would reconcile her to Scammell. It was not, she knew, that he was a bad man, though she suspected he was a weak man. He might, she supposed, make a good husband, but not for her. She wanted to be happy, she wanted to be free, and Scammell’s flabby lust was inadequate compensation for the abandonment of her dreams. She was Dorcas and she wanted to be Campion.

      She did not swim again – there was no joy in that now – yet she still visited the pool where the purple loosestrife was in flower and remembered Toby Lazender. She could not summon his face in her imagination any more, yet she remembered his gentle teasing, his easy manner, and she daydreamed that one day he might come back to the pool, and rescue her from Werlatton and its crushing rule of the Saints.

      She was thinking of Toby one afternoon, a smile on her face for she was imagining him coming, when there were hoofbeats in the meadow behind and she turned, the smile still there, and watched as Ebenezer rode towards her. ‘Sister.’

      She held the smile for him. ‘Eb.’ She had hoped, for one mad, exhilarating second, that it was Toby. Instead her brother’s face scowled at her.

      She had never been close to Ebenezer, though she had tried so hard. When she had played games in the kitchen garden, safe from her parents’ prying eyes, Ebenezer would never join in. He preferred to sit with his open Bible, memorising the chapter ordained by his father for the day, and even then he had watched his sister with a jaundiced, jealous gaze. Yet he was her brother, her only relative, and Campion had thought much about him during the week. Perhaps Ebenezer could be an ally. She patted the grass beside her. ‘Come and sit down. I wanted to talk to you.’

      ‘I’m busy.’ He frowned on her. Since their father’s death he had adopted an air of burdened dignity, never more evident than when he shared the ministration of household prayers with Samuel Scammell. ‘I’ve come for the key to your room.’

      ‘What for?’

      ‘It’s not for you to ask what for!’ His anger showed as petulance. He held out a hand. ‘I demand it, isn’t that enough? Brother Scammell and I wish to have it! If our dear father was alive you would not be skulking behind locked doors!’

      She stood up, brushing the grass from her skirt and unhooked the key from the ring at her waist. ‘You can have it, Eb, but you’ll have to tell me why you want it.’ She spoke patiently.

      He glared at her, his face shadowed by his wide-brimmed, black hat. ‘We are searching, sister, for the seal.’

      She laughed at that. ‘It’s not in my room, Eb.’

      ‘It isn’t funny, Dorcas! It isn’t funny! It’s for your benefit, remember, not mine! I don’t get ten thousand a year from it!’

      She had held the key towards him, but now she withdrew her hand. She shook her head. ‘You don’t understand, Eb, do you? I don’t want ten thousand pounds. I don’t want anything! I just want to be alone. I don’t want to marry Mr Scammell. We can look after the money, Eb. You and I. We don’t need Mr Scammell!’ The words were tumbling out now. ‘I’ve thought about it, Eb, I really have. We can live here and you can take the money and when you marry I’ll go and live in a house in the village, and we can be happy, Eb! Happy!’

      His face had not moved as she spoke. He watched her sourly, disliking her as he always had because she could run while he could not; she could swim naked in a stream while he dragged his twisted, shrunken leg behind him. Now he shook his head. ‘You’re trying to tempt me, aren’t you? You’re offering me money, and why? Because you dislike Brother Scammell. The answer is no, sister. No.’ He threw up a hand to stop her interrupting. ‘It sounds so good, just you and me, but I know what you’d do! You’d run away with the money as soon as you were twenty-five. Well, you won’t, sister, because you’re going to marry, and when you’re married you’ll learn that Brother Scammell and I have an agreement. We will share the money, Dorcas, all three of us, because that’s what Brother Scammell wants. It’s what our father would have wanted and have you thought of that? You think that because he’s dead all his hopes are to be destroyed? That all he prayed for should be destroyed?’ Ebenezer shook his head again. ‘One day, Dorcas, we will meet him again and in a better place than this, and I want him to thank me on that day for being a good and faithful son.’

      ‘Eb?’

      ‘The key, sister.’ He thrust his hand out again.

      ‘You’re wrong, Eb.’

      ‘The key!’

      She gave it to him, then watched as he wrenched violently at the horse’s rein, rowelled savagely with his right spur, and galloped towards the house.

      She sat again, the stream placid in front of her, and she knew that her dreams were vain. Ebenezer disliked her, she did not know why, and she suspected that he enjoyed her misery. Ebenezer had inherited more than anger from his father, he had taken too the streak of cruelty that had been in Matthew Slythe. She remembered when Ebenezer was ten how she had found him in the orchard, Clark’s Martyrologie open beside him. The page showed Romish priests disembowelling a Protestant martyr, and she had screamed in anger because, tied to an apple tree, was a small kitten on which Ebenezer was copying the torture, tearing at its tiny, soft stomach with a knife. She had dragged him away from the blood-soaked tree, away from the yowling kitten, and Ebenezer had spat at her, clawed at her, and shouted spitefully that this was the tenth kitten he had so killed. She had been forced to kill the kitten herself, cutting the little throat, and she could remember Ebenezer laughing.

      Now Ebenezer was in league with Samuel Scammell. Her marriage portion was to be divided between them and she would have no say in the matter.

      There was nothing for her in Werlatton. She watched where the stream ran strong and calm past the pool’s entrance, and she thought that she must leave. She should go with the stream, seeing where it led, and even though she knew that it would be impossible to run away, she knew too that it would be impossible to stay.

      She stood up, sad in the afternoon sun, and walked slowly back towards the house.

      She entered through the side passage that led past her father’s study. The lawn was pungent with the smell of newly-scythed grass, the sunlight so bright that she was temporarily blinded when she walked into the darkness of the passage. She did not see the man who stood in the door of her father’s room.

      ‘The bowels of Christ. Who are you?’

      Her shoulder was gripped, she was pushed against the wall, and the man grinned at her. ‘Sweet God! A little Puritan maid. Well, well.’ He tilted her chin up with his finger. ‘A ripe little piece of fruit.’

      ‘Sir!’ It was Samuel Scammell’s voice. He hurried СКАЧАТЬ