She took it upon herself to prepare Campion for confirmation, declaring she could do the task quite as well as Mr. Perilly, Lazen’s vicar, and, inevitably, the lessons led to talk of God and religion. “You make it entirely too complicated, child.” Lady Margaret’s gray head shook in disapproval. “God is good, and anything He provides is good. That’s all there is to it.”

“All?”

“Of course! Do you truly think He put us on the earth to be unhappy? If you enjoy something then it’s a good thing, it comes from God.”

“But what if it hurts somebody?”

“Don’t be impertinent, I am instructing you. If it hurts somebody then it’s bad and comes from the devil.” Lady Margaret sniffed. “Sir Grenville Cony obviously comes from the devil, but think of all the good things God has given us. A good meal, a gallop to hounds, a kind deed, marriage, pretty dresses,” she rattled off the ineffable blessings of Almighty God in a confident tone, “good books, music, fishing, mulled wine, friends, killing rebels, and a warm house. They’re all God’s gift, child, and we have to be thankful.”

Campion tried to explain her own fears, fears that sprang from her education that had depicted life as a constant struggle against sin, and taught her that sin pervaded every corner of everyday life. Lady Margaret would have none of it.

“You’re being quite tedious, child. You make my Creator sound an extremely unpleasant man, and I won’t have it.”

It was a new kind of Christianity to Campion, an acceptance of religion that did not demand tortuous struggle and endless self-flagellation. Lady Margaret’s Christianity saw the world as God’s gift, filled with His love, available to be enjoyed. It was a simple faith, but Campion liked it for that, for she was tired of the endless Puritan wrangles about the triune nature of God, about the doctrine of predestination, about redemption and faith, the splitting of countless hairs in the vicious endeavor to prove that one man was “saved” while another was not. Lady Margaret’s faith was rooted in her conviction that Lazen Castle was a microcosm of God’s world, and that the Almighty was a grandly omnipotent type of manorial lord, a kind of heavenly Sir George Lazender. “My dear Campion, I don’t expect the tenants to stand around adoring George! No work would get done! They have to be respectful, of course, if they meet him, and we expect them to come to us when they’re in trouble and we do our best to patch things up, but we’d all be in a fine kettle if they spent half their lives worrying what He’s thinking and shouting his praises to the sky. They expect things of us, of course, like feasts on Plow-Monday, May Day, harvest and Christmas, but we enjoy those, too! Our tenants are happy and that makes us happy. Why on earth should man be gloomy to make God happy?”

It was an unanswerable question, and so, through the autumn and winter, the fear of God leeched itself from Campion’s soul, to be replaced by a more robust and self-reliant faith. She was changing, inwardly and outwardly, and though she knew that she was being changed, it was an incident shortly before Christmas that threw before her a grim reminder of her old life, and made her see herself as she was now compared to the person she had been, and filled her, temporarily, with stark fear.