They kissed again, this time as if they would crush the one into the other, never to let go, never again to be parted. She held on to his rough, leather armor, clinging to him as if to life itself.

Lady Margaret’s voice came from the house. “Toby!”

“Mother?”

“You might do that where your mother is not forced to watch.”

He grinned at his mother over Campion’s head, then kissed again. Campion could not have cared if the whole world watched. She was home.

Twenty-seven

Expect nothing, Vavasour Devorax had said, yet hope as she might Campion could not have expected this.

A summer that would live forever in her memory, a summer heavy with scent and fruit, with leaf and harvest, a summer for love.

Campion Aretine, as Lady Margaret insisted she should be called, would marry Sir Toby Lazender in one month’s time. The banns were read in church and no one saw any cause or just impediment why the two should not be joined in holy matrimony. From the Tower, from the road that led to the waiting stake, her life twisted suddenly into an incessant round of parties, dancing, feasts, of people who seemed to share her happiness even though she had never met them. If her life was, indeed, a river, then it had plunged from the dark caverns of brooding terror into this broad, sunlit reach. Yet the sky above was not the seamless blue of her dreams.

She had never seen a place like Oxford. Its towers and courtyards, steeples and archways, all bore witness to a love of beauty that would have been an anathema to Matthew Slythe. All that beauty was threatened. The royal cause was foundering, the King’s army on the defensive, and not even Campion’s sudden happiness could hide from her the shadows that threatened Oxford. Yet that summer it was a golden city to her. She did not notice the stench in the streets, the effluence of a crowded city. She saw only a place of beauty that men had embellished and endowed with grace. She was in love.

Yet even in the broad, sunlit land through which her river flowed, a land green and scented, profuse with a thousand flowers, another shadow reached out from the past. The men who were drunk on God did not just shatter visible beauty, they had also mounted an attack on her innocence. Faithful Unto Death Hervey’s dry, scaly hands had put filth within her and the filth was still there. She knew it in herself, it poisoned part of her, and she felt it on a day, late in August, when Toby was released from his garrison duties and they rode westward, alone, out into the countryside.

War seemed far off that day. The land was generous, its grass heavy and crops full. The river seemed burdened with life, edged with flowers. It was a day like the day a year ago when she had last swum in her pool at Werlatton, a day when the horizon hazed white with heat, when insects hummed in the still air, a day of perfect beauty marred only by the shadow within her.