Bernard Cornwell - A Crowning Mercy

She took off her bonnet and laid it carefully in the wide, wooden basket in which she would carry back the rushes from the pool. Her father, a wealthy man, insisted that she worked. St Paul, he said, had been a tentmaker and every Christian must have a trade. Since the age of eight she had worked in the dairy but then she had volunteered to fetch the rushes that were needed for floor-coverings and rushlights. There was a reason. Here, by the deep pool of the stream, she could be alone.

She unpinned her hair, placing the pins in the basket where they could not get lost. She looked about her again, but nothing moved in the landscape. She felt as solitary as if this was the sixth day of creation. Her hair, pale as the palest gold, fell about her face.

Above her, she knew, the Recording Angel was turning the massive pages of the Lamb’s Book of Life. Her father had told her about the angel and his book when she was six years old, and it had seemed an odd name for a book. Now she knew that the Lamb was Jesus and the Book of Life was truly the Book of Death. She imagined it as vast, with great clasps of brass, thick leather ridges on its spine and pages huge enough to record every sin ever committed by every person on God’s earth. The angel was looking for her name, running his finger down the ledger, poised with his quill dipped in the ink.

On the Day of Judgment, her father said, the Book of Life would be brought to God. Every person would go, one by one, to stand before His awful throne as the great voice read out the sins listed in the book. She feared that day. She feared standing on the floor of crystal beneath the emerald and jasper throne, but her fear could not stop her sinning, nor could all her prayers.

A tiny breath of wind stirred the hair about her face, touched silver on the ripples of the stream and then the air was still again. It was hot. The linen collar of her black dress was tight, its bodice sticky, the skirts heavy on her. The air seemed burdened by summer.

She put her hands beneath her skirts and unlaced her stocking tops just above her knees. The excitement was thick in her as she looked about, but she was sure she was alone. Her father was not expected back from the lawyer in Dorchester till early evening, her brother was in the village with the vicar, and none of the servants came to the stream. She pulled her heavy stockings down and placed them in her big leather shoes.

Goodwife Baggerlie, her father’s housekeeper, had said she should not dally by the stream because the soldiers might come. They never had.

The war had started the year before in 1642 and it had filled her father with a rare, exalted excitement. He had helped to hang a Roman Catholic priest in the old Roman amphitheatre in Dorchester and this had been a sign from God to Matthew Slythe that the rule of the Saints was at hand. Matthew Slythe, like his household and the village, was a Puritan. He prayed nightly for the King’s defeat and the victory of Parliament, yet the war was like some far-off thunderstorm that rumbled beyond the horizon. It had hardly touched Werlatton Hall or the village from which the Hall took its name.

She looked about her. A corncrake flew above the hayfield across the stream, above the poppies, meadowsweet and rue. The stream surged past the pool’s opening where the rushes grew tallest. She took off her starched white apron and folded it carefully on top of the basket. Coming through the hedged bank of Top Meadow, she had picked some red campion flowers, and these she put safely at the basket’s edge where her clothes could not crush the delicate five-petalled blossoms.

She moved close to the water and was utterly still. She listened to the stream, to the bees working the clover, but there was no other sound in the hot, heavy air. It was the perfect summer’s day; a day devoted to the ripening of wheat, barley and rye; to the weighing down of orchard branches; a day of heat hazing the land with sweet smells. She was crouching at the very edge of the pool, where the grass fell away to the gravel beneath the still, lucid water. From here she could see only the rushes and the tops of the great beeches on the far ridge.

A fish jumped upstream and she froze, listening, but there was no other sound. Her instinct told her she was alone, but she listened for a few seconds more, her heart loud, and then with swift hands she tugged at her petticoat and the heavy, black dress, pulled them up over her head, and she was white and naked in the sun.

She moved swiftly, crouching low, and the water closed about her cold and clean. She gasped with the shock and the pleasure of it as she pushed herself into the deep place at the pool’s centre, giving herself up to the water, letting it carry her, feeling the joy of fresh cleanness on every part of her. Her eyes were shut and the sun was hot and pink on them – for a few seconds she was in heaven itself. Then she stood on the gravel, knees bent so that only her head was above the water, and opened her eyes to look for enemies. This pleasure of swimming in a summer stream was a pleasure she must steal, for she knew it to be a sin.

She had found she could swim, an awkward paddling stroke that could take her across the pool to where the stream’s swift current tugged at her, turned her, and drove her back to the pool’s safety. This was her sin, her pleasure, and her shame. The quill scratched in the great book of heaven.

Three years ago this had been something indescribably wicked, a childish dare against God. It was still that, but there was more. She could think of nothing, nothing at least that bore thinking about, that would enrage her father more than her nakedness. This was her gesture of anger against Matthew Slythe, yet she knew it to be futile for he would defeat her.

She was twenty, just three months from her twenty-first birthday, and she knew that her father’s thoughts had at last turned to her future. She saw him watching her with a brooding mixture of anger and distaste. These days of slipping like a sleek, pale otter into the pool must come to an end. She had stayed unmarried far too long, three or four years too long, and now Matthew Slythe was finally thinking of her future. She feared her father. She tried to love him, but he made it hard.

She stood now in the shallow part of the pool and the water streamed from her, making her hair cold against her back. She brushed water from her breasts, her slim waist, and she felt the touch of the sun on her skin. She stretched her arms up and then her body, feeling the joy of freedom, the warmth on her skin, the sleekness of water around her legs. A fish jumped.

It jumped again, then a third time, and she knew it was no fish. It was too regular. Panic swept her. She waded to the pool’s edge, scrambled desperately on to the bank and fumbled with her petticoat and dress. She pulled them over her hair and down, forcing the heavy, stiff material about her hips and legs. Panic was coursing through her.

The splashing came again, closer now, but she was decent, even if dishevelled. She removed the wet hair from within her collar, sat down and picked up her stockings.

‘Dryad, hamadryad, or nymph?’ An easy voice, full of hidden laughter, came from the stream.

She said nothing. She was shivering in fear, her wet hair obscuring her view.

He smiled at her. ‘You have to be a nymph, the spirit of this stream.’

She jerked her hair away from her eyes to see a smiling young man, his face framed with unruly dark red curls. He was standing in the stream, but curiously bent forward so that his hands and forearms were beneath the water. His white shirt was unbuttoned, tucked into black breeches that were soaking. Black and white, the colours of a Puritan’s sober dress, but she did not believe the young man to be a Puritan. Perhaps it was the fineness of the linen shirt, or the hint of black satin where the breeches were slashed, or perhaps it was his face. She decided it was his face. It was a strong-boned, good face, full of laughter and happiness. She should have been frightened, yet instead she felt her spirits rise at the sight of the stooping, wet man. She disguised her interest, putting defiance into her voice as she challenged the trespasser. ‘What are you doing here?’