A Crowning Mercy

‘Business!’ The man seemed never to have heard of the word. ‘Business! Put your petition here. Hurry!’ The eye and nose were replaced with fingers reaching for her petition.

‘I don’t have a petition!’

She thought the man had gone, for there was silence after the fingers disappeared, but then the glittering eye came back. ‘No petition?’

‘No.’

‘Does Mr Cony know you?’ The question was asked grudgingly.

‘He knew my father, sir.’

‘Wait!’

The shutter dropped with a smart click, leaving the house in silence again, and Campion walked back into the alley and stared down at the river. A heavy barge was crawling across her narrow view, propelled by long, wooden sweeps that were rowed by men standing on its decks. One by one, three heavy cannons came into view, lashed to the barge’s deck, a cargo going westward to war.

The shutter snapped up. ‘Girl!’

‘Sir?’

‘Name?’

‘Dorcas Slythe.’ This was no time for fanciful, self-adopted names. She could hear the scratch of quill on paper.

‘Your business?’

She hesitated, provoking a tut from the grille. She had half expected, having been told to wait, that she would be invited into the house, and so she was not prepared with a message. She thought quickly. ‘The Covenant, sir.’

‘The what?’ There was no interest in his voice. ‘Covenant? Which one?’

She thought again. ‘St Matthew, sir.’

The quill scratched beyond the door. ‘Sir Grenville’s not here, girl, so you can’t see him today, and Wednesday is the day for public business. Not this Wednesday, though, because he’s busy. Next Wednesday. Come at five o’clock. No. Six. In the afternoon,’ he added grudgingly.

She nodded, appalled at the time she would have to wait for any answer. The man grunted. ‘Of course he may not want to see you, in which case your time will have been wasted.’ He laughed. ‘Good day!’ The shutter snapped down, abandoning her, and she turned back to the Strand and to Mrs Swan.

In the house she had left, in a great comfortable room that overlooked the Thames, Sir Grenville Cony stared at the barge which lumbered away from him around the Lambeth bend. Guns for Parliament, guns bought with money that had probably been lent by Sir Grenville himself at twelve per cent interest, but the thought gave him no pleasure. He felt his belly gingerly.

He had eaten too much. He pressed his huge belly again, wondering if the small pain in his right side was simple indigestion and his fat, white face flinched slightly as the pain increased. He would summon Dr Chandler to the house.

He knew his secretary was at the House of Commons so he walked himself to the clerk’s room. One of the clerks, a weedy man named Bush, was coming through the far door. ‘Bush!’

‘Sir?’ Bush showed the fear that all the clerks felt of their master.

‘Why are you away from your desk? Did you seek permission to wander through the land on my time? Is it your bladder again? Your bowels? Answer me, you beast of Belial! Why?’

Bush stuttered, ‘The door, sir. The door.’

‘The door! I heard no bell! Correct me, Sillers,’ he looked at the chief clerk, ‘but I heard no bell.’

‘They knocked, sir.’ Sillers dealt laconically with his master, yet never without respect.

‘Who knocked? Strangers at my door, dealt with by Bush. Bush! Who was this lucky man?’

Bush stared in fear at the short, fat, grotesque man who stalked him. Sir Grenville Cony was grossly fat, his face had the appearance of a sly white frog. His hair, white after his fifty-seven years, was cherubically curly. He smiled on Bush, as he smiled on most of his victims.

‘It was not a man, sir. A girl.’

‘A girl!’ Sir Grenville feigned surprise. ‘You’d like that, Bush, wouldn’t you? A girl, eh? Have you ever had one? Know what they feel like, eh? Do you? Do you?’ He had backed Bush into a corner. ‘Who was this slut who has put you into such a fever, Bush?’

The other clerks, fourteen of them, smiled secretly. Bush licked his lips and brought the paper up to his face. ‘A Dorcas Slythe, sir.’

‘Who?’ Cony’s voice had changed utterly. No longer flippant and careless, but suddenly hard as steel, the voice that could ride down committees in Parliament and silence courtrooms. ‘Slythe? What was her business.’

‘A Covenant, sir. St Matthew.’ Bush was quaking.

Sir Grenville Cony was very still, his voice very quiet. ‘What did you tell her, Bush?’

‘To come back next Wednesday, sir.’ He shook his head and added in desperation, ‘They were your instructions, sir!’

‘My instructions! Mine! My instructions are for you to deal intelligently with my business. God! You fool! You fool! Grimmett!’ His voice had been rising, till his final call became a shrill scream.

‘Sir?’ Thomas Grimmett, chief of Grenville Cony’s guards, came through the door. He was a big man, hard-faced, utterly fearless in his master’s presence.

‘This Bush, Grimmett, this fool, is to be punished.’ Cony ignored the clerk’s whimpers. ‘Then he is to be thrown out of my employment. Do you understand?’

Grimmett nodded. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘Sillers! Come here!’ Sir Grenville Cony stalked back into his room. ‘Fetch the papers on Slythe. We have work, Sillers, work.’

‘You have the Scottish Commissioners to see, sir.’

‘The Scottish Commissioners can bubble the Thames by farting, Sillers. We have work.’

The punishment was administered during Cony’s dinner, so that Sir Grenville could watch while he ate. He enjoyed it. Bush’s squeals of pain made a better sauce for the lamb, chicken, prawns and beef than anything his kitchen could provide. He felt better afterwards, much better, so he no longer regretted that he had forgotten to summon Dr Chandler. After dinner, when Bush had been taken away to be hurled into some gutter, Sir Grenville graciously allowed the Scottish Commissioners to see him. They were, he knew, all fervent Presbyterians, so he prayed aloud with them, praying for a Presbyterian England, before settling to his work with them.

The girl. He thought of her, wondering where she was in London, and whether she would bring him the seal. Above all he wondered whether she would bring him that. St Matthew! He could feel the excitement of it, the joy of a long-ago plot well laid. He sat up late that night, drinking claret before the darkened river, and he raised his glass to the grotesque reflection in the diamond-paned window, a window that broke his squat, heavy body into a hundred overlapping fragments. ‘To the Covenant,’ he toasted himself. ‘To the Covenant.’

Campion could only wait. Mrs Swan seemed genuinely glad of her company, not least because Campion could read the news-sheets aloud to her. Mrs Swan did not see the ‘point’ in reading, but she was avid for news. The war had made the news-sheets popular though Mrs Swan did not approve of the London sheets which, naturally, supported Parliament’s cause. At heart Mrs Swan supported the King and what she felt in her heart emerged easily on to her tongue. She listened as Campion read the stories of Parliamentary victories, and each one was greeted with a scowl and a fervent hope that it was not true.

Not much news that summer brought relief to Parliament. Bristol had fallen and there had been no great victory by which the balance of that defeat could be redressed. There were numerous small skirmishes, enlarged by the news-sheets into premature Armageddons, but the victory Parliament wanted had not come. London had other reasons to be gloomy. In their search for money to prosecute the war, the Parliament had raised new taxes, on wine, leather, sugar, beer and even linen, taxes that made King Charles’s burden on London look light. Mrs Swan shook her head. ‘And coal’s short, dear. It’s desperate!’

London was warmed by coal brought by ship from Newcastle, but the King held Newcastle so the citizens of London faced a bitter winter.

‘Can’t you move away?’ Campion asked.

‘Dear me, no! I’m a Londoner, dear. Move away! The thought of it!’ Mrs Swan peered closely at her embroidery. ‘That’s very nice, though I say it myself. No, dear. I expect King Charles will be back by winter, then everything will be all right.’ She shifted closer to the window light. ‘Read me something else, dear. Something that will cheer a body up.’

There was little to cheer anyone in the news-sheet. Campion began reading a vituperative article which listed those members of the Commons in London who had still not signed the new Oath of Loyalty that had been demanded in June. Only a handful had not signed and the anonymous writer claimed, ‘that tho it bee said sicknesse bee the cause of their ommission, yet it bee more likelie a sicknesse of the courage than of the bodie’.