His hand stroked her cheek. “I don’t want you to.”

The rooks were loud across the stream. She stared at their ragged flight. “Perhaps we should never have met.”

Toby laughed. His face was deeply lined, his eyes tired. He took little sleep now. “Do you wish that?”

She was silent a moment. Her cheek rubbed against the leather of his jerkin. “Perhaps we’re not meant to be together.”

He pushed her away from him, turning her face so she was looking at him. He smiled. “We’ll be married before the year’s out.”

She leaned against him again. She was unhappy. The river of her life was gathering speed, she could sense it sweeping her away from Toby and carrying her into a new darkness, a clouded darkness, and she was afraid. “Hold me.”

Her right hand clutched the golden seal, clutched it as if she wanted to crush it out of existence and thus release her life from its thralldom. With a last, triumphant blaze of red light, the sun died in the west.

“‘Clouds and darkness are round about him: Righteousness and judgment are the habitation of his throne. A fire goeth before him, and burneth up his enemies round about.’”

The voices of young men were strong in the dusk, chanting the psalm. The preacher, Faithful Unto Death Hervey, stood on the wagon-loading platform of Lazen’s mill and raised his hands at the troops in the mill field. “Louder! Let the enemy hear you! Louder!”

The voices surged. The men grinned. They were happy, united by the metrical beat of the psalm, confident that the Lord was with them.

Ebenezer Slythe, standing where the great water-wheel clanked and dripped, its blades weed-grown and dank, listened to the noise. It uplifted him, exalted him, made him know that God was truly with Parliament. He liked being with the army, liked the smell of leather and horses, the sight of strong men. He was feared, as a man who worked for Parliament should be feared, and no man mocked him for his shrunken, twisted leg.

He limped into the miller’s house, the sound of the psalm still filling his head with glory and righteousness. The girl, a miserable wretch who had been found in the woods, smiled at him.

“Get out!” He scowled. He needed her at night, but her fawning wish for approval annoyed him at other times. She was a sin, of course, but Faithful Unto Death had assured him that some men were so burdened by God’s responsibilities that they were granted special privileges by heaven; did David not have Bathsheba? Within days he would discard her, because in days this siege would be over.

He sat at his table and reflected on the coming success. He had sent two men into the castle, gunners who were ostensibly deserters, but who were in fact sworn to him. They would fire the castle’s magazine at their first chance. They were ordered to do it when the morning trumpets sounded in the Roundhead lines and Ebenezer prayed that they would do it soon. Let it be tomorrow! He had waited with excitement this very morning, praying that the great flame would explode over his enemies, but the dawn had come as usual. Colonel Fuller, the man sent by Grenville Cony to take over the siege from Lord Atheldene, had given his opinion that perhaps the two men had been detected and imprisoned. Ebenezer had given Fuller his coldest smile. “Is the Lord not on their side?”