“You don’t want his love, you mean.”

“I never had it, did I?” She thought of him. The handsomest man in Europe, the wit, rogue, poet, lover and fighter, who had abandoned his daughter to the Puritans because he could not be cumbered with her. “What happened to him?”

“I saw him last in 1633, in Amsterdam. He wanted to settle down. He said he would write again, but not poetry. He wanted a new country, he said, a clean country, and he wanted everyone to forget there had ever been a Christopher Aretine. He said he’d make himself a grave, with a carved gravestone, and then he would make himself a farm and he would grow things, write things, and perhaps, at last, rear children. He went to Maryland.” He smiled. “I’m told there is a grave with his name on it, but I suspect he’s laughing at everyone who thinks he’s beneath that stone. I think he’s now a farmer, or perhaps he’s dead.”

“He never wrote to you?”

“Not a word.” Lopez looked tired. “He said he was going to Maryland to forget all the evil of his past.”

“And the seal?”

“He took it with him.”

“So he could be alive?”

Lopez nodded. “He could be.” Lopez hated to lie to Campion. He liked her. He saw in her the strength of her dead mother, and some of the spirit of Kit Aretine. Yet Aretine was Lopez’s friend, and Aretine had forced a promise from Mordecai Lopez. The promise had been solemn and simple, that Lopez would never reveal Kit Aretine to anyone, not even his own bastards, and Lopez would not break that promise. Yet he had received news from Maryland since 1633, and Lopez knew that Aretine lived. The old man smiled at Campion. “He couldn’t be a great poet, so he stopped being any kind of poet. I think perhaps he couldn’t be Kit Aretine either, so he stopped trying. Think of him as a middle-aged American farmer, dreaming of the strange life he once had.”

Campion looked scornful. “And of the children he abandoned?”

“With a fortune, if you care to take it.”

“I don’t.” She was angry with a man she had never met. She stood up, unhappiness frustrating her, and picked up the Seal of St. Luke. She looked at it, hating it, then put it decisively on the table beside Lopez. “I don’t want it.”

The old man watched her cross to the fireplace. She took the screen from in front of the fire and poked savagely at the dying blaze. A log collapsed in sparks. She put the poker down and turned back toward Lopez. “Does the Mercurius go to Maryland?”

Lopez smiled. “It takes weeks and weeks to reach there. Meanwhile,” he picked up the seal, “there is this.”

She shook her head. “Couldn’t he have come to me just once?”

Lopez seemed not to hear her. He held the seal in front of his eyes and spoke casually, almost offhandedly. “I have friends in London, men of trade who don’t mind my religion. Vavasour has talked to some of them for news. It appears that Sir Grenville Cony has taken Lazen Castle for his own.” His eyes turned to look at Campion. “Without compensation.” He put the seal down.