“Your beard?” She sounded surprised.

“Christ, woman! Half the army’s searching for a man with one eye and a beard.” He looked at Campion, eyes shut in sleep. “And all because of her.”

“You think she’s not worth it?”

“Who knows?” He left the room.

The woman looked at the shut door. “Get drunk, Devorax.” The dislike was strong in her accent.

Vavasour Devorax would get drunk, too. His face had been ravaged by war, and further by alcohol. He was sober most mornings, sober through most days, but it was a rare night when Vavasour Devorax was not drunk. In company he could be boisterously drunk, but most nights he was morosely alone, savage in his drinking.

He was not without friends. The men who followed him, the men who had ridden desperately for London after Devorax had read the Mercurius, were all soldiers who were proud of him and, in their way, friends. They too were adventurers, mercenaries from the European wars of religion, and their allegiance was to neither King nor Parliament, only to Vavasour Devorax. When he ordered, they obeyed.

Devorax in turn had a master whose orders he obeyed. He was the Jew’s man, though none knew why. It was rumored that Mordecai Lopez had bought the Englishman out of a Moorish slave galley. Others, more fanciful perhaps, said that Vavasour Devorax was the Jew’s bastard son, whelped on a gentile woman, but no one had ever dared ask Devorax if that were true. Only one thing was certain; Devorax obeyed Mordecai Lopez’s wishes.

Marta Renselinck, the motherly woman who nursed Campion out of her terrors, did not like Vavasour Devorax. She resented his influence on her master, hated his savage moods, and feared his careless, biting tongue. Marta was Lopez’s housekeeper, devoted to him, and the only servant who had crossed the North Sea with him to London. The other servants in Amsterdam had been instructed to say that their master was dangerously ill, and in the meantime Lopez had taken the first available boat that sailed to England. He carried papers that identified him as an agent of the Bank of Amsterdam, come to negotiate one of that bank’s loans to Parliament, and the false papers had taken them swiftly past the soldiers who guarded London’s docks against Royalist agents. The two, master and servant, had come straight to this house and here, for the first time since Lopez had read the Mercurius, he seemed to relax. “Vavasour is here, Marta, he’s here. Everything will be good now!” Lopez had been pleased, confident that the girl would be freed, and Marta, to please her master, hid her dislike of the big, crude, English soldier.

It took three days for Campion to recover. She was slow to trust her rescuers, slower still to persuade herself that she was truly safe, and in those three days only Marta tended her. It was not until the third evening that Marta finally persuaded Campion to meet the man who had sailed from Amsterdam on her behalf, the Jew, Mordecai Lopez.