Campion smiled. “No.”

“Yet the Prescotts were rich, they could afford a large dowry, and they attached more than a bride to the dowry. They attached you. Matthew Slythe agreed to marry Martha, to take you, and to bring you up as his natural daughter. Matthew and Martha promised never, ever, to reveal the shame of Agatha. You had to be hidden.”

Campion thought of Matthew and Martha Slythe. No wonder, she thought, they had leaned the wrath of God heavily on her, fearing that every smile and every small act of joy might be Agatha Prescott’s shameful personality breaking through the Puritan bonds.

“Then,” Lopez went on, “Kit Aretine made his fortune and wanted you to have it.” He laughed softly. “You’d think that to give a child a fortune would be easy! But, no. The Puritans wouldn’t take the money. It came from the devil, they said, and it would seduce you from the true faith. Then Matthew Slythe’s business began to fail.” Lopez poured more wine. “Suddenly Kit Aretine’s offer became less devilish, even began to smack of Godliness!” He laughed. “So they asked a young lawyer to negotiate for them.”

“Sir Grenville Cony?” Campion asked.

“Just plain Grenville Cony then, but a subtle little toad all the same.” Lopez smiled. “And like all lawyers he loved subtlety. Subtlety makes a lawyer rich. Things, my dear, began to get difficult.”

The clocks chimed a ragged cacophony of the quarter hour. From the river came the mournful sound of halyards slapping against masts.

“We couldn’t give you the money as an outright gift. The law made that difficult and we simply did not trust Grenville Cony. He came to Amsterdam to see us and that proved a disaster.”

“A disaster?”

Lopez’s face showed a wistful amusement. “Cony had to fall in love with your father. I suppose that wasn’t difficult if you loved men instead of women, but Cony managed to offend Kit. He pursued him like a slave.” Lopez chuckled. “I told your father to encourage it, that we should use Cony’s devotion to our advantage, but Kit was never kind to that sort of man. He ended by stripping Cony naked, thumping his ass with a scabbard, and throwing him into a canal. All in public.”

Campion laughed. “I wish I’d seen it. I wish I’d done it!”

Lopez smiled. “Cony took his revenge, of a sort. He bought a painting, a naked Narcissus, and he paid to have your father’s face painted over the original. He wanted people to think that Aretine had been his lover. An odd sort of revenge, I suppose, but it seemed to please Grenville Cony.”

Campion had stopped listening. She was remembering. She was seeing in her mind’s eye that splendid, savage, pagan, arrogant face that had transfixed her in Cony’s house. Her father! That man, that face of unbelievable handsomeness, that creature she had thought too good-looking to be true, and it was her father! Now she understood why so many spoke with such awe of Kit Aretine as the handsomest man in Europe. Her mother would never have stood a chance, the Puritan seeing the god and falling in love. Campion remembered the golden hair, the strength of the face, the sheer beauty of it.