Sometimes the grille of her door would darken and she would look up to see a face pressed against the small opening. Eyes looked white at her. Sometimes there would be laughter; sometimes the hiss of hatred: “Witch! Papist! Whore!”

She did not descend into the abyss of madness. Two things saved her. She did not know if Toby was alive or dead, yet she imagined him alive. She forced herself to imagine him alive, and she would rock in her corner, arms clutching her knees, and imagine the life they would one day have. She saw Toby avenging her on her enemies, she saw him strike down Sir Grenville, the sword blade opening up that world of which they had dared dream. She imagined the Reverend Faithful Unto Death Hervey whining for mercy. She saw her brother on his knees, and she imagined the sweetness of offering him a sister’s forgiveness, more terrible than the sword’s swift revenge.

When she was not in her dream world, living among the fields of eternal summer beside cool streams, she forced herself to recite aloud. She tried to remember the whole of the Song of Solomon, and she would weep sometimes as the words sounded in her head: “His banner over me was love.” She recited psalms, remembered from the long hours of childhood, but most of all she spoke aloud the words of a poem she had read so often in Lazen Castle. She could only remember the first verse, and of that she was not certain that her memory was correct, but she loved the words. Lady Margaret had said that the poem mocked love’s intensity, but Donne’s words were like music in her stinking, cold, rat-running cell:

Go, and catch a falling star,

Get with child a mandrake root,

Tell me, where all past years are,

Or who cleft the Devil’s foot,

Teach me to hear mermaids singing,

Or to keep off envy’s stinging,

And find

What wind

Serves to advance an honest mind.

She had never seen the sea, the closest she had been was when she had met Mrs. Swan in the inn yard at Southampton, but she imagined it as full of mermaids’ singing, and she saw herself and Toby listening to the songs and knowing peace.

At other times she came close to despair. She remembered the week of travel from Lazen Castle, a week in which Goodwife had spat out a vituperative stream at her, dredging from the past every small sin, every disobedience, and flaying Campion with her envy and malice. In her cell, day after indistinguishable day, Campion was determined to live, yet there were moments when it seemed so futile. When the water ran on her cell walls, when her mouth and throat were sour with the stink of urine, when the rats woke her in the darkness, when she shivered uncontrollably and could not even be bothered to pick off the lice that she could see on her skin, then, at those moments, she sometimes wished she was no more. At those moments she was sure Toby was dead and she wished only to be with him. Perhaps, she thought, the mermaids only sang to the dead.