A Crowning Mercy. Bernard Cornwell

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СКАЧАТЬ the heavy gold, wondering at it, looking at it in her hands when, just as the skirting board had moved, so now the seal seemed to give in her fingers. She frowned, tried to repeat what she had just done, and realised that the seal was in two halves, the joint concealed cunningly by one band of the precious stones. She unscrewed the two halves.

      The half of the cylinder which bore the Seal of St Matthew fell away in her right hand. She lifted the other half into the light. The jewel, on its long golden chain, held a secret.

      There was a tiny carving inside the cylinder, a carving that had been made with exquisite skill and cast in silver so that the gold cylinder enclosed a tiny silver statue. The statue shocked her. It was a symbol of such ancient power, a symbol of all that she had been taught to hate, and it had been in this house. Her father would have abominated this, yet he had kept it, and Campion stared at it, fascinated and repelled. It was a crucifix.

      A crucifix of silver in a cylinder of gold, a seal made into a jewel, the key to great wealth. She looked at the letter again, noting once more the urgent appeal for Matthew Slythe to mark the seal. She lifted the jewel into the light and saw that her father had scratched a line across the face of the axe-blade. To stop counterfeiting, the letter said, but who was the man to whom the impression had to be sent? Who was Aretine? Lopez? Her discovery of the seal had uncovered new mysteries and she knew the answers did not lie in Werlatton.

      The answers would be in London. The letter was signed Grenville Cony, and beneath his signature he had written, simply, ‘London’.

      London. She had never seen a town, let alone a city. She was not even sure which was the road that led from Werlatton towards London.

      Grenville Cony was in London, whoever he was, and Toby Lazender was certainly in London, and Campion looked at her table and saw the heavy, leather purse with her father’s hoard of gold. That could take her to London! She gripped the jewel in her hands, stared at the flooding of the summer light into the valley, and she felt the excitement rise within her. She would run away, away from Ebenezer and Scammell, from Goodwife and Werlatton, from all the people who wanted to crush her and make her into what she was not. She would go to London.

PART TWO

       The Seal of St Mark

6

      Sir George Lazender, Toby’s father, was a worried man.

      He had friends who thought him always worried, gnawing at problems when the meat was long gone from the bone, but, as August ended in 1643, Sir George had real reasons for concern.

      He had hoped to forget his worries for a morning. He had taken a boat from the Privy Stairs and landed in the city. Now he was in the precincts of St Paul’s Cathedral indulging his passion for books, yet his heart was not in it.

      ‘Sir George!’ It was the bookseller, coming crabwise behind his stall. ‘A fine day, Sir George!’

      Sir George, ever courteous, touched the brim of his hat in response to the bookseller’s greeting. ‘Mr Bird. You’re well, I hope?’

      ‘I am, sir, though trade is bad, indeed it is, Sir George. Very bad.’

      Sir George picked a random book from the table. He could not face a long discussion of the new taxes which Parliament had imposed and for which, as a member of the House of Commons, he was partly to blame. Yet it would be discourteous to ignore the bookseller, so he waved at the cloudless sky. ‘The weather is on your side, Mr Bird.’

      ‘I thank God it’s not raining, Sir George.’ Bird had not even needed to bring out the canvas shelters for his tables. ‘Bad news from Bristol, Sir George.’

      ‘Yes.’ Sir George opened the book and stared, unseeing, at the pages. Even less than he wished to discuss trade did he wish to discuss the war. It was the war which was his chief worry.

      ‘I shall let you read, Sir George.’ Mr Bird, thankfully, had taken the hint. ‘That copy is a little foxed, Sir George, but still worth a crown, I think.’

      ‘Good! Good!’ Sir George said absent-mindedly. He found he was reading Harington’s translation of Orlando Furioso, a book he had owned for twenty years, yet by burying his nose in the poetry he might escape the greetings of his many friends and acquaintances who used the bookstalls at St Paul’s.

      The King had taken Bristol and that, in a very strange way, worried Sir George. It worried him because it suggested that the Royalists might be gaining the upper hand in the Civil War, and if Sir George changed sides now, then there were many men who would say he did it out of fear, deserting Parliament in a cowardly attempt to join the winning side, and that was not true.

      Sir George wanted to change sides, but his reasons had nothing to do with the fall of Bristol.

      War had begun the previous year and Sir George, as a loyal Parliamentarian, had no doubts then. He had been offended, deeply so, by King Charles’s use of illegal taxation, and the offence had become personal when the King had forced loans out of his richer subjects. The loans, Sir George knew, would never be repaid and he was among the men who had been robbed by his monarch.

      The argument between King and Parliament had drifted almost imperceptibly into war. Sir George continued to support Parliament for its cause was his cause; that the kingdom should be ruled by law and that no man, not even the King of England, was above that law. That doctrine pleased Sir George, made his support of the rebellion firm, yet now he knew that he was changing sides. He would support the King against Parliament.

      He moved to one of the great buttresses of the medieval cathedral and leaned against the sun-warmed stone. It was not, he thought, that he had changed, it was the cause that had changed. He had entered the rebellion convinced that it was a political fight, a war to decide how the country should be governed, but in opening the gates of battle Parliament had released a plague of monsters. The monsters took religious shapes.

      Sir George Lazender was a Protestant, stout in the defence of his faith, but he had little time for the Ranters, the Fifth Monarchy Men, the Anabaptists, the Familists, the Mortalists, or any of the other strange sects that had suddenly emerged to preach their own brand of revolutionary religion. Fanaticism had swamped London. Only two days before he had seen a stark naked woman parading in the Strand, preaching the Rantist sect, and the extraordinary thing was that people took such nonsense seriously! And with the religious nonsense, that might be harmless, came more insidious political demands.

      Parliament claimed that it fought only against the King’s advisers. That, Sir George knew, was a nonsense, but it gave Parliament a shred of legality in its revolt. The aim of Parliament was to restore the King to his throne in Whitehall, a throne that was meticulously maintained for his return, and then to force him to rule England with the consent and help of his Parliament. There would, of course, be great changes. The bishops would have to go, and the archbishops, so that the Church of England would appear a more Protestant church and, though Sir George was not personally offended by bishops, he would sacrifice them willingly if it meant a king ruling a kingdom according to law and not whim. Yet Sir George no longer trusted that Parliament, if it defeated the King, could control the victory.

      The fanatics were fuelling the rebellion, changing it. They spoke now not just of abolishing the bishops, but of abolishing the King as well. Men preached an end to property and privilege and Sir George СКАЧАТЬ