Colonel Harries stopped at a doorway. He took out a knife and cut the bonds that still bit into her wrists. She heard him grunt as he sawed with his knife. The leather gloves were rough where they touched her skin. He pushed the door open. “Inside.”

A fire burned. It waited for her.

A bed waited. There were new clothes, food and wine. She expected rough hands to seize her, but it was a motherly woman who came forward and cradled her in comforting arms. The woman soothed her, stroked her hair, held her tight against the horrors. “You’re safe, child, safe! You’ve been rescued!”

But Campion was past understanding. She wept, collapsed, and her head was filled with the fire that had reached up to burn her, and which, though she had not yet comprehended it, had been cheated of her. She was safe.

Twenty-three

Colonel Joshua Harries was an aide to the Earl of Manchester, the general who commanded the army of Parliament’s Eastern Association, the army that had done most to win the battle of Marston Moor. Thus, when Colonel Harries had requested a warrant from the Speaker so that the fighting men could discover whether the Dorcas Scammell mentioned in Mercurius was part of a Catholic conspiracy to bring fresh enemies against Parliament, the Speaker had small option but to agree. The army that was winning the war had to be indulged, and the Speaker reflected with relief that it was not he who would have to explain to the howling mob on Tower Hill why their entertainment was delayed.

Yet the Speaker might have been a good deal less complacent had he known that on the day fixed for Campion’s execution Colonel Joshua Harries was in the great Minster of York, giving thanks for the Roundheads’ successful siege of that city.

The man who called himself Colonel Harries should also have been in York. He too was a colonel in Parliament’s army, but, unlike the real Colonel Harries, he would not have been giving thanks to God for the Roundhead victory. Colonel Vavasour Devorax was a King’s man serving with the enemy; in short, a spy.

Vavasour Devorax had discarded the thin, leather half-mask by the time he returned to Campion’s room, yet, even without the patch, his face was frightening. His eyes were gray and cold, his skin tanned and lined, while on the right side of his face, running from the steel-gray beard to his hairline, was a jagged, ridged scar that narrowly missed his eye. Vavasour Devorax had a hard, bitter face, a face suggesting he had seen everything and that there was nothing left in this world to surprise him.

He stood beside the girl’s bed. “What did you give her?”

“Laudanum.” The woman had a strong foreign accent.

He looked at Campion in silence, staring at her. One hand fidgeted with the hem of his greasy, filthy leather jerkin. He stared a long time, then looked at the woman. “I want you to cut my beard off.”