A Crowning Mercy

Matthew Slythe was shaking now, his fury subsiding. He put the belt about his waist and buckled it. He had cut his hand on the buckle but he did not notice. He looked at Goodwife. ‘Bring her down when she’s tidy.’

‘Yes, sir.’

This was not the first beating she had been given; she had lost count of the times that her father had harnessed God’s wrath to his right arm. She sobbed, the pain blurring everything, and then Goodwife Baggerlie slapped her face. ‘Get up!’

Elizabeth Baggerlie, who had been honoured by Matthew Slythe with the name Goodwife after the death of his wife, was a short, fat-waisted woman with a shrewish, raw-boned face and small red eyes. She ruled Werlatton Hall’s servants and she devoted her life to the extermination of the Hall’s dust and dirt as her master devoted his to the extermination of Werlatton’s sin. The servants were driven about Werlatton Hall by Goodwife’s shrill, scouring voice, and Matthew Slythe had given her also the governance of his daughter.

Now Goodwife thrust Campion’s bonnet at her. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself, girl! Ashamed. There’s a devil in you, that’s what there is! If your dear mother had known, if she’d known! Hurry!’

Campion pulled the bonnet on with nerveless fingers. Her breath came in great, sobbing gasps.

‘Hurry, girl!’

The household was awesomely quiet. The servants all knew that the beating was taking place, they could hear the belt, the screams, the terrifying anger of their master. They hid their feelings. The beating could happen to any of them.

‘Stand up!’

Campion was shaking. The pain was as it always was. She knew she would not be able to sleep on her back for at least three or four nights. She moved like a dumb thing, knowing what was to happen, submitting to the inescapable force of her father.

‘Downstairs, girl!’

Ebenezer, one year younger than his sister, sat reading his Bible in the great hall. The floor shone. The furniture shone. His eyes, dark as sin, dark as his Puritan clothes, looked unfeelingly at his sister. His left leg, twisted and shrunk at birth, stuck out awkwardly. He had told his father of what he had seen and then listened with quiet satisfaction to the searing cracks of the belt. Ebenezer was never beaten. He sought and gained his father’s approval by quiet obedience and hours of Bible reading and prayer.

Campion still cried as she came down the stairs. Her beautiful face was smeared with tears, her eyes red, her mouth twisted.

Ebenezer, his black hair cut short in the fashion that had given rise to the nickname ‘Roundheads’, watched her. Goodwife nodded to him, and he acknowledged the recognition with a slow, stately inclination of the head. At nineteen he was old beyond his years, bitter with his father’s bitterness, envious of his sister’s wholeness.

Campion was taken to her father’s study. Outside the door, as ever, Goodwife pushed down on her shoulder. ‘Down!’ Then Goodwife knocked on the door.

‘Come in!’

The ritual was always the same. After the punishment, forgiveness, and after the pain, prayer. She crawled in on hands and knees as her father demanded of her and Goodwife shut her in with Matthew Slythe.

‘Come here, Dorcas.’

She crawled to his chair. She hated him at this moment. She submitted because she had no choice.

The big hands closed on her tight-fitting bonnet. She hated the feel of them. The fingers pressed on her skull.

‘Oh God our Father! Almighty God!’ The fingers pressed tighter and tighter. His voice rose in powerful prayer, as Matthew Slythe hectored his God asking Him to forgive his daughter, to cleanse her, to make her whole, to take away her shame, and all the while the hands threatened to crush her skull. He pushed at her head, shaking it, seeking in a paroxysm of power to convince God that Dorcas needed His grace, and when the prayer was over he leaned back, exhausted, and told her to stand up.

He had a strong face, big-boned and fierce, a face heavy with God’s anger. He looked at Campion with his usual distaste and his voice was deep. ‘You are a disappointment to me, daughter.’

‘Yes, father.’ She stood with head bowed, hating him. Neither he nor her mother had ever kissed her, ever hugged her. They had beaten her, prayed over her, but never seemed to love her.

Matthew Slythe rested his hand on his Bible. He breathed heavily. ‘Woman brought sin into the world, Dorcas, and woman must ever bear that disgrace. A woman’s nakedness is her shame. It is disgusting to God.’

‘Yes, father.’

‘Look at me!’

She raised her eyes. His face was twisted with dislike. ‘How could you do it?’

She thought he would hit her again. She stood still.

He opened the Bible, his fingers seeking the book of Proverbs. He read to her, his voice grating. ‘“For by means of a whorish woman a man is brought to a piece of bread.”’ The page turned. ‘“Her house is the way to hell, Going down to the chambers of death.”’ He looked up at her.

‘Yes, father.’

He seemed to growl. He had beaten her again and again, but he had never crushed her and he knew it. He could see the flicker of challenge in her soul and he knew that he would never destroy it. Yet he would never stop trying. ‘You will learn the seventh and eighth chapters of Proverbs by heart by this time tomorrow night.’

‘Yes, father.’ She already knew them.

‘And you will pray for forgiveness, for grace, for the Holy Spirit.’

‘Yes, father.’

‘Leave.’

Ebenezer still sat in the hall. He looked at her and smiled. ‘Did it hurt?’

She stopped and looked at him. ‘Yes.’

He still smiled, one hand holding the pages of his Bible flat. ‘I told him.’

She nodded. ‘I thought you might have done.’ She had always tried to love Ebenezer, to give him the love she had not been given, to protect a small, weak, crippled boy who was her brother. He had always rejected her.

Now he sneered. ‘You disgust me, Dorcas. You’re not fit to be in this house.’

‘Goodnight, Eb.’ She climbed the stairs slowly, her back hurting and her mind filled with the bleakness and horror of Werlatton Hall.

Matthew Slythe prayed when she was gone, prayed as he often prayed, with a furious, twisting intensity as if he thought God would not hear a quiet plea.

Dorcas was a curse to him. She had brought him wealth beyond his dreams, but she was, as he had feared when the wealth was offered, a child of sin.

She had never, in truth, been bad, but Matthew Slythe did not see that. Her sin was to be strong, to be happy, to show no signs of fear of the awful, vengeful God who was Matthew Slythe’s master. Dorcas had to be crushed. The child of sin must become a child of God and he knew he had failed. He knew that she called herself a Christian, that she prayed, that she believed in God, but Matthew Slythe feared the streak of independence in his daughter. He feared she could be worldly, that she could seek out the pleasures of this world that were damned, pleasures that could be hers if she found his secret.

There was a jewel hidden, a seal of gold, which he had not looked at in sixteen years. If Dorcas found it, if she learned what it meant, then she might seek the help of the seal and uncover the Covenant. Matthew Slythe groaned. The money of the Covenant belonged to Dorcas but she must never know. It must be tied up by a will, by his wishes, and, above all, by a marriage settlement. His daughter, with her dangerous beauty, must never know she was rich. The money which had come from sin must belong to God, to Matthew Slythe’s God. He drew a sheet of paper towards him, his head throbbing with the echoes of prayer, and wrote a letter to London. He would settle his daughter once and for all. He would crush her.

Upstairs, in the bedroom she had to share with one of the maids, Campion sat on the wide window-sill and stared into the night.

Once Werlatton Hall had been beautiful, though she did not remember it thus. Its old, stone walls had been hugged by ivy and shaded by great elms and oaks, but when Matthew Slythe had purchased the estate he had stripped the ivy and cut down the great trees. He had surrounded the Hall with a vast lawn that took two men to scythe smooth in summer, and about the lawn he had planted a yew hedge. The hedge was tall now, enclosing the clean, ordered world of Werlatton and keeping at bay the strange, tangled outside world where laughter was not a sin.

Campion stared at the darkness beyond the hedge.

An owl, hunting the great ridge of beeches, sounded hollow across the valley. Bats flitted past the window, wheeling raggedly. A moth flew past Campion, attracted by the candle and causing Charity, the maid, to squeal in alarm, ‘Shut the window, Miss Dorcas.’

Campion turned. Charity had pulled out the truckle bed from beneath Campion’s. The girl’s pale, frightened face looked up. ‘Did it hurt, miss?’