Twenty-four

The bells of St. Mary’s rang eleven. From across the water, from the city that climbed to the great cathedral, dozens of other bells echoed the hour. The gates of London were being shut, its thousands of inhabitants were mostly already asleep, and in the morning they would awake to another day not much different to the one on which they had closed their eyes. Yet not Campion. She would never again have a day like the ones before this night, for suddenly she had been wrenched as few people are wrenched. Matthew Slythe, the grim Puritan who had burdened her with God’s wrath, had not been her father. Her father was a failed poet, a wit, a lover, and an exile. Kit Aretine. She turned the page of the ruined book back to the portrait. She tried to see a likeness to herself in the arrogant, imperious portrait, but she could not. “My father?”

“Yes.” Lopez’s voice was gentle.

She felt as if she had fallen into a chasm of immeasurable darkness, as if within its bleakness, she struggled to make great wings beat that could take her once more into the light. “Poems, &c. Upon Severall Themes.” But what? What themes had motivated her real father?

“It’s a story that begins long ago, Campion, in Italy.” Lopez had rested his head against the high back of his chair. “There was a riot against my people. I don’t even remember why, but I suppose some Christian child had fallen into a river and drowned and the mob thought we Jews had kidnapped it and sacrificed it in our synagogue.” He smiled. “They often thought that. So they attacked us. Your father was there, a very young man, and I think it simply struck him that it would be more amusing to fight the mob than join it. He saved my life, and that of my wife and my daughter. He fought for us, rescued us, and was offended when I suggested payment. I paid him in the end, though. I heard he was in the Tower and I had lent money to the King of England. So I cancelled King James’s debt for your father’s life.

“He was penniless when I took him back to Holland. I offered him money and he refused it, then he made a bargain with me. He would take the money and return it, with interest, in one year. Anything he made in addition would be his.”

Lopez smiled at the memory. “That was 1623. He bought a ship, a splendid vessel, and he recruited men and bought guns and sailed off against Spain. He was a pirate, nothing else, though the Dutch gave him letters of commission that wouldn’t have stopped the Dons putting him to a slow death. They never did. When fortune smiled on your father, she really smiled well.” Lopez sipped wine. “You should have seen his return. Two more ships with him, both captured and both full of Spanish gold.” He shook his head. “I’ve never seen money like it, ever! Only two men have ever taken more off the Spanish, and no man ever cared less about it than your father. He paid me his debt, took some for himself, and he charged me with a new commission. I was to make the rest of the money available to you. It was a fortune, Campion, a true fortune.”