Lady Margaret acquiesced. Nothing could be done, but that did not stop her constantly speculating on the Covenant. She brought to bear on Campion’s few facts her vast knowledge of England’s families. “Aretine, dear. How very extraordinary.”

Campion put down her needlework. “Sir George says he only knows one Aretine.”

“George would, dear. He was thinking of Kit, I suppose?”

“Yes.”

“Sweet Lord, no. England’s positively awash with Aretines. Let me think now. There was an archdeacon at Lincoln. Percy. He preached a very dull sermon and he married a most unsuitable woman. Her parents must have been very pleased. They had eight children who were all quite unbearable. Then there was an Aretine in Salisbury, a lawyer. He went mad, dear, and thought he was the Holy Ghost.”

“And Kit Aretine, Lady Margaret?”

“That’s different. He was an exceptionally handsome being. Poor man.”

“Poor man?”

“Kit must be dead. It’s always the best that go, child.”

Lady Margaret was frustrated in the autumn. She had abandoned the painting of miniatures to take up the art of warfare, convinced that her husband’s almost imperceptible change of allegiance would result in the storming of Lazen Castle by Parliamentary hordes. Work on the estate suffered as she insisted on laborers digging new defenses that connected the gatehouse to the Old House on one side, and to the northern tip of the moat on the other. Behind the ditches she made earthen banks and then compared her achievements with the diagrams in her book of military fortifications. Somehow her own ramparts looked more like untidy farm ditches and she fretted over it.

She had more success at the east of the castle, where a new stone wall spanned the short gap between the stable-yard and moat, and on the completion of the wall she grandly declared Lazen Castle ready for any attack by the enemy. Sir George, lured out of his library to inspect the wall, prayed inwardly and fervently that the enemy would refrain from testing his wife’s work.

The war seemed far from Lazen. The King had survived the summer, though he had failed to capture London, yet the autumn brought grim news to the Royalists. The Scots, fervent Presbyterians, had declared war on Parliament’s side. Now King Charles must face the rebel armies in the south, and the Scots to the north, and Sir George, reflecting on these things among his books, sensed that the fighting would become worse. Lazen, he knew, might well be attacked.

The castle was in the center of a wide tract of country that had mixed allegiances. One village, following the lead of its lord, would support Parliament, while the next would follow their own lord into the King’s camp. Most people wanted no part on either side, desiring only to be left to farm their land in peace, but the war was forcing itself on the county.

Three large houses had been fortified for Parliament, one castle and another house for the King, and the garrisons of all five strongholds raided indiscriminately for food. Neither side touched Sir George’s land; the Parliamentarians may still have thought him one of their own, while the Royalists hoped he would side openly with them.