“Come here, child. What are you called?”

“Toby calls me Campion.”

“So he says. A fanciful name, but it suits. Very well. Come here, Campion.”

She pointed to her work table. In the center of it, among a litter of paints, brushes and smeared papers, was a tiny, tiny portrait. It was Lady Margaret’s current passion; the painting of miniatures. This one, done from memory because the servants had learned to make themselves scarce when Lady Margaret prowled for sitters, was of Sir George. Campion did not know that. She saw what seemed to be a picture of a doleful egg, eyes crooked and mouth lopsided, with what seemed to be a speck of bird-dropping on its bald pate. Toby, when his mother had asked his opinion, had said just that; that it was bird dropping. Lady Margaret thought it was one of her husband’s distinguished, graying temples. “What do you think, Campion?”

“It’s lovely. It’s beautiful.”

“So you’ve learned to lie, as well?”

Campion laughed, a lovely sound, rare in her life. “I think it’s beautiful.”

Lady Margaret smiled. “I think we shall get along splendidly. We shall clean you up, child, then pack Toby off to Oxford. Come along.”

She led an imperious path through the furniture of the long gallery, beneath the naked romps of the deities who paid homage to the erect, slim Diana in her chariot.

“I think it’s very clever of Toby to have killed for you. George never killed for me. I shall demand that he does so as soon as he returns. I shall expect slaughtered suitors to pave the road between Lazen and Shaftesbury. Come along, child, don’t dawdle. And put your shoulders back, you’re in Lazen now, not grovelling in Werlatton. You’ll sleep in there, next to my room. That’s Caroline’s room, Toby’s younger sister. She’s sixteen now and time she was married. What are you wearing on your feet? You sound like a carthorse. Good Lord, child, do you call those shoes? Take them off instantly, I shall have them burned. And why are you smiling. You think you’re here to enjoy yourself?”

She did, she had come to Lazen, and Campion, again, was happy.

Sir Grenville Cony had still not forgotten the horror of hearing of his faithful Grimmett’s death. Dead! And the girl fled, rescued by some man who had cut down Sir Grenville’s servant. The lawyer had howled with anger at the news, howled like a hurt animal, and within hours he had been assailed by a pain in his vast belly. The pain felt like a great snake that heaved and coiled inside him, rending him with poisonous fangs, and the diet of goat’s milk and pigeon-flesh that Dr. Chandler had prescribed had done nothing to relieve the pain.

Now there was more bad news. He had been summoned from a debate in the Commons, a turgid session in which the members debated changes to the present arrangements for the disposal of captured Royalist property. Sir Grenville knew there would be no changes—he had made sure of that—but it was necessary to give the canting fools the impression that their self-important maunderings carried some weight in the councils of the state. His secretary waited at the door of Westminster Hall. “Sir Grenville?”