She was horrified. “You mean…”

He nodded. “I mean Sir Toby Lazender has lost everything. Everything. I suppose he and his mother live off charity now.”

She stared at the seal, its gold bright in the room’s darkness. She knew she could not rid herself of the seals. For Toby’s sake she must follow Christopher Aretine’s plans. She shook her head. “I have to collect them?”

Lopez smiled. “With our help. I shall give that task to Vavasour.”

“Your wolfhound.”

Lopez nodded. “I shall set a wolfhound to trap a frog.”

Lopez had sidetracked her, taking her from the anger she felt against Kit Aretine to the duty she owed to Toby and his mother. Yet she would not be deflected. Anger came back into her voice, defiance into her face. “Will my father come back?”

The old man’s voice was gentle. “That’s for him to decide. Does it matter? I’m helping you because of the debt I still owe him.”

Campion seemed to hear Matthew Slythe’s voice in her head. “‘For I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the Fathers upon the children.’” She stared at the Seal of St. Luke and knew that it was her father’s iniquity that was being thrust on her. She had to take it, for Toby’s sake, yet she hated the seals. She looked at Lopez. “Keep it for me till I leave.”

He smiled. “A few more days won’t hurt. I’ve kept it sixteen years.” He picked it up.

She went to bed an hour later, but Mordecai Lopez lingered after she had gone. He drew back the wide curtains and thought of an old love between a Puritan and a poet; a cruel, doomed love that had burned so briefly bright and left behind this girl as dazzling as the love itself. The river heaped and fell, heaped and fell through the arches of the bridge, the turbulence shaking the long reflections of the ships’ lights in the water’s mirror. Kit Aretine had been his friend, his treasured friend, yet Lopez could not deny Campion’s final, bitter thrust. Of father and daughter, she said, it was not she who was the bastard. Lopez stared above the bridge, stared westward into the far night, and muttered the words of an old sadness, “My friend, my friend.”

Twenty-five

London was in uproar. A witch had escaped, taken from the Tower itself, and the army searched the city with a thoroughness that was tempered by a suspicion that she had long fled. The churches were full, the preachers haranguing God to protect His people from the devil, while every murdered body found in the dawn was ascribed to the demon that stalked the streets.

Mordecai Lopez, breakfasting the morning after his long, long talk with Campion, watched soldiers searching the wharves on the opposite bank. He smiled. “They’re in for a long fruitless day.”

“Like most soldiers,” Devorax grunted.

Lopez looked at Vavasour Devorax’s red eyes and sour expression. “A bad night?”