“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.”

“Good night, 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 toward 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.