“Yes, mother.”

He went on looking at Campion. Lady Margaret, who had engineered this surprise, looked too. A small smile showed on her face. “I’ve done rather well with her, don’t you think?”

“Yes, mother.” Toby felt a catch in his throat, a shiver of the blood in his body. She was magnificent, her beauty almost frightening.

Sir George looked from Campion to his son, back to Campion, then to his wife. He gave a small, secret shrug and he saw the flicker of amusement on Lady Margaret’s face. She knew, they both knew, that there was nothing now to be done. These months in Oxford had not cured Toby, any more than they had cured Campion. Sir George knew he would have to surrender. Only the fires of hell would keep those two apart.

Fourteen

London was not a happy city that Christmas. The King’s possession of Newcastle meant that coal was desperately short, and though Parliament’s allies, the Scots, sent what coal they could, its price was way beyond the means of most citizens. Even when the trees in the royal parks about London had been chopped and cut for firewood and the logs distributed in the city’s streets, most of London’s quarter of a million inhabitants were still bitterly cold. There was never enough coal and timber to go round, and so the people muffled themselves in what clothes they could, wrapped their faces against the east wind, and watched as the Thames slowly froze above London Bridge. It would be a long, cruel winter.

Christmas should have been a bright spark in that cheerless, bleak winter, but Parliament, in its immemorial wisdom, abolished Christmas.

The Scots were to blame. Parliament’s new allies, fervent men from Edinburgh and the drafty houses of the north, declared Christmas to be a heathen abomination, a pagan feast artificially grafted on to Christianity, and the Scots, good Presbyterians all, declared that in a world made perfect by saintly rule there could be no Christmas. The House of Commons, eager to appease their new allies whose armies, though they had achieved nothing yet, might well usher in the glorious Day of the Lord, knuckled their foreheads to the Scottish divines and, in a vote of Parliament, declared Christmas to be no more. To be joyful at Christmas was now not only a sin but also a crime. Truly the Day of the Lord was at hand.

London, a city sympathetic to Parliament, filled with Puritans of all descriptions, seemed ungrateful for this decision. Parliament declared that on Christmas Day businesses were to be open as usual, shops selling what little there was to be sold, watermen plying for hire where the encroaching ice allowed. Parliament ordered in vain. Christmas could not be abolished so easily, not even with the passionate pleading of the Scottish ministers who had brought the light of truth from their cold homeland. London insisted on its Christmas, pagan or not, but the celebration was half-hearted, the gaiety subdued. The Presbyterians stolidly ignored the lawbreaking and consoled themselves that godliness would come in time.