“A girl. She wants clemency for her father.”

“Who is?”

Ebenezer shrugged. “A tallow-chandler. We think he was sending messages to Oxford. He says not.”

“Will you release him?”

Ebenezer shrugged. “That rather depends on his daughter now.”

“What’s she like?”

“Seventeen, a virgin, pretty enough.”

Sir Grenville laughed. “She has no idea whose house this is?”

Ebenezer gave his master a pitying look. “What do you think?”

“Forgive me, Ebenezer, forgive me.” He chuckled. “Lead on, dear boy, lead on.” He heaved himself upright. He liked to watch Ebenezer taking his revenge on a world that had for so long not recognized the cripple’s talents. Sir Grenville could watch from a darkened room through the window into Ebenezer’s bed-chamber. Even without the instruments of torture which the government supplied for his work, Ebenezer was skilled at humiliating, hurting and befouling the innocent whose wholeness he hated. Sir Grenville followed him eagerly.

Rain started to fall outside the house, a freezing rain that fell in utter blackness, falling softly on the darkness of the marsh, on the river and on the congealing ice that slowly and imperceptibly spread toward the calm, western country hidden by night.

“Do you always wear it?”

“Yes.” Campion firmly pushed Toby’s fingers away from the seal and away from the white silk that covered her breasts.

He smiled. “Mother says you’ve been reading John Donne.”

“And Spenser, and Drayton, and Ford, and Greene, and Shakespeare, and Sir Philip Sidney, and Royden, and even someone called Thomas Campion.”

Toby ignored her list. He shut his eyes. “‘Full nakedness, all joys are due to thee.’”

“Not here, and not now, Toby Lazender.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Campion sat on a fur-covered chest that was in front of one of the great fires in the hall. The remains of yesterday’s feast had still not been entirely cleared. The huge logs burned above a mound of glowing, shifting embers. Most of the castle was asleep.

They had sat up late the night before, after Toby had helped his father from the servants’ hall and steered him to his bedroom. They would sit up late again this Christmas night, sharing words and silences into the small hours.

Toby, sitting at her feet, slid his hand up her beribboned arm, cupped her shoulder, pulled her gently toward him. He kissed her, feeling her respond, and then he opened his eyes to see if hers were closed. He found himself looking into two very open, very blue eyes. He leaned back. “You’re not taking me seriously.”

“Oh.” She mocked him with gentle pity.

She could see little change in him, though she wondered if there was a new toughness about him, put there by days in the saddle and the slowly accrued knowledge that he could survive in a fight. He had killed four times now to his certain knowledge, five if he included Thomas Grimmett in Scammell’s house, and all four men had been killed at close range with pistol or sword. He had had time to see the fear in their eyes, to smell it even, and he had learned to conquer his own. He was, she thought, tougher, but that had not stopped him from being very gentle with her.