A Crowning Mercy. Bernard Cornwell

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      ‘I said I would.’ She waited for him to leave which, obedient, he did. There were times now when she almost felt sorry for him. She was stronger than he was and she knew that he had come to Werlatton Hall expecting so much, only to be plunged into the misery of the household. She knew, too, that he still wanted her. He still stared at her with hopeless, lusting eyes and she knew that if she married him then he would be obedient and eager to please. Exchanging her body for obedience seemed a bad bargain.

      She lit six of the big candles and saw Goodwife’s face pressed against a window. Goodwife rapped on the glass, asking what she thought she was doing, but Campion simply drew the thick, heavy curtains, blotting out the mean, angry face. The candles and the shut, curtained windows made the room stuffy. She stripped to her petticoat, took off her bonnet, ate her food, then settled to her task again.

      A quarter of the papers were long, rambling essays on God. Matthew Slythe had tried to plumb the mind of God as Campion now tried to plumb Matthew Slythe. She sat with her long legs crossed on the floor and frowned over his tight, crabbed handwriting. He had despaired of God as a master impossible to please. Campion read wonderingly of his fear, of his desperate attempts to appease his unpleaseable God. There was no mention in the essays of God’s love; for Matthew Slythe it did not exist, only God’s demands existed.

      A greater part of the papers seemed to be explorations in mathematics and those she put aside because she had discovered bundles of letters that promised to be far more interesting. She felt like an eavesdropper as she read them, these letters that stretched back to the year of her birth, but through them she could trace the story of her parents’ lives and learn things they had never told her.

      The first letters were dated 1622 and they surprised her. They were from her mother’s parents to Matthew and Martha Slythe, and they contained not just godly advice, but admonitions to Matthew Slythe that he was a poor merchant who must work harder to gain God’s favour and prosper. One letter refused to lend him any more money, saying that enough had already been proffered, and hinting that he must examine his conscience to see if God was punishing him for some sin. At that time, the year of her birth, her parents had lived in Dorchester where her father, she knew, had been a wool merchant. Evidently, from the letters, a poor one.

      She read three years of letters, skipping the passages of religious advice, reading swiftly through the stilted news that John Prescott, her maternal grandfather, wrote from London. She came to a letter that congratulated Matthew and Martha on the birth of a son, ‘a cause of great rejoicing and happinesse to wee all’. She paused, trying to pin down an errant thought, then frowned. There was not one mention of her in any letter, except for general references to ‘the childrenne’.

      The letters of 1625 introduced a new name to her: Cony. Letter after letter talked of Cony; ‘a goode man’, ‘a busie man’, ‘Cony has written you, wee believe’, ‘Have you replied to Mr Cony? Hee deserves your answer’, yet not one of the letters gave the smallest hint why Mr Cony should be ‘busie’ for Matthew Slythe or John Prescott. One letter, evidently written after Matthew Slythe had visited London, spoke of ‘the busienesse wee had words on’. Whatever the business, it was too important to entrust to letters.

      Then, after 1626, there were no more references to Matthew Slythe’s inability to manage his financial affairs. Now the letters spoke of Slythe’s riches, of ‘God’s bounteous grace to you, for which 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, СКАЧАТЬ