He spoke confidently. James was Toby’s servant, a huge young man who was the son of Lazen’s blacksmith and had inherited his father’s great muscles and easy strength. James Wright had grown up with Toby. They had learned to hunt game in the woods together and to poach neighbor’s fish together, and now they fought in the war together. Toby had often spoken of James’s prowess with a woodman’s axe carried against the Roundheads.

Yet she did worry and, to calm her, Toby offered a purse of five pounds to any man who could kill Samuel Scammell. The target was pointed out to gunners and musketeers, so that Brother Scammell, every time he appeared in the enemy lines, was pursued by musket balls as though they were hornets. Men fell to his left, to his right, yet somehow he survived. He took comfort from Psalm 91: “A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand: but it shall not come nigh thee,” yet even so, he was fearful of his hours of duty and he wondered whether Campion was somehow directing the storm of musket fire that hummed and whirred about his head.

On June 11 the gatehouse fell. Its old stones were undermined by the enemy gunfire and it collapsed, sliding in dust and noise to make a heap of stone under which ten defenders were buried. The ring became tighter, the morale of the defenders lower, for though they were resisting the enemy’s fumbling attacks, the enemy would not give up and go away. There was food within the castle still and plenty of water, but thirty men had died, as many were lying in stinking, suppurating pain, and boredom gnawed at the people trapped by the siege. The guns still fired, making inroads now on the Old House, opening its northern rooms to the spring rain and the fire of the enemy.

Sir George, seeing the path by which the enemy would come into the castle and understanding that the simmering war in the north would mean no relief from the King’s army, wrote to Atheldene. He wrote despite the protest of his wife, and his letter requested the safe conduct that had been offered in May for the ladies of Lazen Castle. They would go, Sir George said, with Lord Atheldene’s permission and protection, to Oxford.

The guns stopped as the messenger rode from the castle, a white pennon attached to his sword blade. The letter seemed an admission of defeat to the garrison, a defeat brought about not by the enemy’s superior fighting ability, but by the gnawing, endless attrition of the big guns. Campion, unhappily collecting clothes to be packed in a great leather travelling trunk, listened to the horses being harnessed to the coaches that would carry her, Lady Margaret, Caroline and their maids away. Colonel Washington agreed with Sir George that Lord Atheldene’s permission would be readily forthcoming.

The reply came in two hours. Lord Atheldene, it said, had left that morning, summoned to London, there to face charges that he had “delivered comforte to oure enemies in Lazen Castle.” The Parliamentarian forces were now under the command of Colonel Fuller, the author of the letter, who claimed to have no knowledge of any safe conduct being offered by Lord Atheldene.