Part III

The Seal of St. Luke

Fifteen

March 25, 1644, New Year’s Day, was bright and cold, one of the good March days that promise spring. Lady Margaret Lazender, with typical perversity, refused to recognize it as New Year’s Day, preferring the continental and Scottish 1 January. Sir George, who liked tradition, scoffed at the January date, and made sure that he sent lavish greetings to his wife from Oxford. Yet, New Year’s Day or not, it promised well. The corn had been seeded, there were calves in the steadings and Lazen Castle’s dairy was busy after the winter’s scarcity; the milk made sweet by the parsnip leaves on which the cows had been fed while they waited for the spring grass.

Great fires still burned in the castle, but now some windows were opened to let cold air scour the halls. There had been the usual rash of new babies, hastily christened, all owing their lives to last year’s May Day. Lazen’s church, oddly, was built within the circle of wall and moat and thus was in the castle’s gardens. Each mother returned to the village bearing a small silver cup, of which Lady Margaret seemed to have an inexhaustible supply.

Most of the castle’s treasures had disappeared. Colonel Andrew Washington, the commander of Lazen’s garrison, had suggested that Sir George hide his most valuable pieces. They had been taken to the cellars, only a handful of old servants privy to what was happening, and there they had been walled up. The new wall had been smeared with a diluted mixture of cow-dung, to make it look old and encourage the growth of lichen to disguise the hiding place. The household now ate off pewter and the gold and silver had disappeared from halls and rooms.

Colonel Washington, sent from Oxford, was a short, tubby man who did not look, at first sight, like an experienced soldier. The first impression was wrong. He efficient, authoritative and he proved his reputation for bravery on his first meeting with Lady Margaret. He had been standing by his horse, staring thoughtfully at the ditches she had dug either side of the gatehouse, ditches that had suffered from the snow and rain of the winter. Lady Margaret had beamed at him. “You see, Colonel! I have begun your work!”

Washington gave her a respectful look. “What are they, your Ladyship?”

“What are they?” Lady Margaret looked astonished. She drew herself up to her full height, towering over the small colonel. “They are fortifications, Colonel Washington, defenses!”

“Your Ladyship’s expecting an attack from a church choir, perhaps? They’ll be soldiers, ma’am, soldiers! Fortifications!” And he had walked away, leaving Lady Margaret speechless, and the castle trembling as to which would win the battle of wills.

Yet Colonel Washington was not a successful soldier for nothing. He knew which battles to fight, and when to call for a truce, and once he had surveyed the defenses, and once his one hundred and fifty men were settled into the keep, gatehouse and Old House, he made his peace with Lady Margaret. He skillfully sought her advice and, just as skillfully, planted his own ideas into her head so she would think them her own. Thus the last months of the old year had been peaceable enough. The colonel and his twelve officers ate with the family and, after two months, the officers even gave up their siege of Campion.