She had solved so much of the mystery, and now a new mystery presented itself, a mystery that now seemed even more important than the four golden seals.

“Why didn’t my father come and take me from the Slythes?”

“Would you have wanted that?”

“Yes, oh, yes!”

Lopez shrugged uncomfortably. “He didn’t know that.”

“Did he try and find out?”

Lopez gave her an unhappy smile. “I don’t think he did. I don’t know.”

She knew that there was much unsaid. “Tell me what you know.”

Lopez sighed. He had known these questions would come, yet he had hoped they would not. “I think Kit always thought the time would come when he would fetch you, but the time was never right. Once the Covenant was made and the seals distributed, he took himself to Sweden. He fought for the Swedes and he became close to the King.”

Campion knew that Lopez spoke of Gustavus Adolphus, the great warrior king who had driven the sword of Protestantism deep into the Catholic Holy Roman Empire. “Your father was with the King when he was killed and after that he left the Swedish army. He came to see me in Amsterdam. He’d changed, Campion. Something happened to him in that war, and he’d changed.”

“How?”

“I don’t know.” Lopez shrugged. “He was in his late thirties. I think he knew that he’d failed, that he would never be the great man that his youth had promised. You were eleven. I know he thought of going to see you, even to take you away, but he said you were probably a happy little girl and what could you want with a man like him?” Lopez smiled at her, judging his next words carefully.

“You weren’t the only child, Campion. There were twin boys in Stockholm, a little girl in Venice and a pretty child in Holland.”

“Did he see them?” There was pain in her voice.

He nodded. “Yet he used to travel in those places. He was banished from England.” Lopez shook his head. “I know this will sound hard, but you were the special one, you were the daughter of his ‘angel,’ the only woman I think he truly loved, and you were the only one who’d been taken away from him. I think he was ashamed, too. I know he was. He was ashamed of her death, of abandoning you, and I think he was frightened to see you.”

“Frightened?”

Lopez smiled. “Yes. Suppose the child of Kit Aretine and his angel turned out to be ugly? What price love then? Or suppose you’d hated him for leaving you? I think he wanted to treasure her memory as the perfect woman, the perfect love that could have set the world on fire. I don’t know, Campion, I don’t know.”

Campion lifted the seal again. “Did he think his money was sufficient for me?”

“Perhaps.”

“I don’t want his money!” She was smarting at Aretine’s rejection, she remembered all the unhappy hours of childhood, all the hours that he could have spared her. She put the seal on the table. “I don’t want it.”