Bernard Cornwell - A Crowning Mercy

‘Stealing Slythe’s fish. What are you doing?’

There had been something so cheerful in his admission of poaching that she smiled. She liked his face. It was crossed by the odd reflections of the sunlight from rippling water. She saw that he had no rod or net. ‘You’re not fishing.’

‘You’re calling me a liar!’ He grinned at her. ‘We Lazenders don’t lie. At least, not much.’

A Lazender! That made everything more fitting somehow for this private place where she defied her father. Sir George Lazender was the Member of Parliament for the northern part of the county, a great landowner, a knight, and a man of whom her father had a low opinion. Sir George Lazender supported Parliament in its war against the King, but Matthew Slythe believed that support to be lukewarm. Sir George, Matthew Slythe believed, was a man too cautious in the great fight. There was worse. Sir George, it was rumoured, would keep the bishops in a Protestant church, would keep the Book of Common Prayer for its services, and Matthew Slythe believed both to be the works of the Papist devil.

The young, red-headed man bowed clumsily in the stream. ‘Toby Lazender, nymph. Heir to Lazen Castle and stealer of fish.’

‘You’re not stealing fish!’ She was hugging her knees.

‘I am!’ He proved it by slinging a bag from his back and showing her a half dozen trout. Yet he had no fishing gear with him.

She smiled. ‘How?’

He told her. He waded to the bank, lay on the grass a few feet from her, and described how to catch fish with bare hands. It was, he said, a slow business. First he immersed his hands and forearms in the water and left them there until they had chilled to the temperature of the stream. Then, very slowly, he walked upstream still keeping his hands under the water. He explained that trout were lazy fish, lying in the thick weed and swimming only enough to hold their position against the water’s flow. He said she could creep into the weeds and, moving slow as thistledown, feel with spread fingers for the presence of a fish. He grinned at her. ‘You don’t feel the fish, at least not at first. You just feel the pressure of it.’

‘The pressure?’

He nodded. ‘I don’t know. It’s just there. The water’s thicker.’

‘And then?’

‘You stroke.’ He showed her how he worked his fingers back and forth, closing on the strange pressure until he could feel the fish’s belly. Because his fingers were as cold as the water, and because they moved with infinite slowness the fish suspected nothing. He told her how to stroke the fish, always stroking backwards and always gently, until the hands knew precisely how the trout lay in the water. Then he pounced. The fish was jerked out of the weed, faster than it could twist away, and he would send it spinning to the bank. ‘Then you hit its head.’ He grinned.

She laughed. ‘Truly?’

He nodded. ‘On my honour. Were you swimming?’

She shook her head and lied. ‘No.’

His legs were bare, his wet breeches rolled up. He smiled. ‘I’ll look the other way while you finish dressing.’

She felt a pang of fear. ‘You shouldn’t be here!’

‘Don’t tell anyone and I won’t.’

She looked about her, but could see no one watching. She put on stockings and shoes, her apron, and laced up her dress.

Toby made her laugh. She felt no fear of him. She had never met anyone with whom it was so easy to talk. Her father’s absence meant time was not pressing on her and they talked all afternoon. Toby lay on his stomach as he told her of his unhappiness with the war and of his wish to fight for the King rather than his father’s side. She felt a chill go through her when he proclaimed his loyalty for the enemy. He smiled at her, teasing her gently, but asking an unstated question at the same time. ‘You wouldn’t support the King, would you?’

She looked at him. Her heart was beating loud. She smiled back shyly. ‘I might.’

For you, she was saying, I might even change the loyalty in which I was reared.

She was a Puritan girl, protected from the world, and she had never been allowed more than four miles from home. She had been raised in the harsh morality of her father’s angry religion, and though he had insisted that she learn to read, it had been only so she could search the scriptures for salvation. She was ignorant, kept deliberately so, for the Puritans feared the knowledge of the world and its seducing power, yet not even Matthew Slythe could rein in his daughter’s imagination. He could pray for her, he could beat her, he could punish her, but he could not, though he had tried, stop her dreaming dreams.

She would say later that this was love at first sight.

It was, too, if love was a sudden, overwhelming urge to know Toby Lazender better, to spend time with this young man who made her laugh and feel special. She had been walled in all her life, and the result had been that she dreamed of the wild world outside, seeing it as a place of laughter and happiness, and now, suddenly, this emissary from beyond the wall had broken in and found her. He brought happiness and she fell in love with him there and then, beside the stream, making him the object of all the dreams that were to come.

He saw a girl more beautiful than any he had seen before. Her skin was pale and clear, her eyes blue, her nose straight over a wide mouth. When her hair dried it fell like spun gold. He sensed a strength in her that was like fine steel, yet when he asked if he could come again she shook her head. ‘My father won’t allow it.’

‘Do I need his permission?’

She smiled. ‘You take his fish.’

He looked at her in astonishment. ‘You’re Slythe’s daughter?’

She nodded.

Toby laughed. ‘Dear God! Your mother must have been an angel!’

She laughed. Martha Slythe had been fat, vengeful and bitter. ‘No.’

‘What’s your name?’

She looked at him, sadness in her. She hated her name and she did not want him to know it. She thought he would think less of her because of her name’s ugliness, and as she thought that, so the realisation struck her that she would never be allowed to meet him again. Her name could never be Toby’s business.

He persisted. ‘Tell me?’

She shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘But it does!’ he exclaimed. ‘More than the sky, the stars, the heavens, more than my dinner tonight! Tell me.’

She laughed at his ridiculous ebullience. ‘You don’t want to know my name.’

‘I do. Otherwise I shall just have to invent a name for you.’

She smiled as she stared over the stream. She was embarrassed. Perhaps the name he would invent would be worse than her real name. She could not look at him as she spoke it aloud. ‘My name’s Dorcas.’

She expected him to laugh, but there was silence, so she turned a defiant stare on him. ‘Dorcas Slythe.’

He shook his head slowly, looking serious. ‘I think we must find you a new name.’

She had known he would hate her name.

Toby smiled, then leaned over to her rush basket. He picked up one of the pink-red campion flowers and slowly twirled the blossom in front of his eyes. He stared at it. ‘I shall call you Campion.’

She liked it immediately, feeling as if all her life she had waited for this moment when someone would tell her who she was. Campion. She said the name over and over in her mind, Campion, and she savoured it, liking it, and knowing it was a hopeless dream. ‘My name is Dorcas Slythe.’

He shook his head, slowly and deliberately. ‘You’re Campion. Now and forever.’ He drew the flower towards his face, staring at her over the petals, then kissed it. He held it towards her. ‘Who are you?’

She reached for the flower. Her heart was beating as it did before she swam. Her fingers trembled as she took the stalk, shaking the petals, and her voice was low. ‘Campion.’