Campion was frowning. “They killed her?”

“No.” He drank again, closing his eyes as he tipped the bottle. Hooves sounded in the street, somewhere in the house a timber creaked. “Kit was fighting the bastards. He must have killed half a dozen. Everywhere you looked that night there were enemies. They were coming out of alleys, out of houses, and he was out in the street bellowing at them, hacking them with a sword. He was on foot, but they couldn’t touch him. It was nearly all over when it happened. She surprised him. She came out of their house with a dark cloak on and he thought her hair was a helmet. She suddenly appeared in the doorway and he shot her. Bang. Right through her pregnant stomach.” He shook his head. “He said he’d forgotten about his pistol till that moment. She took half the night to die. It wasn’t pretty.” He tipped the bottle again, drank, then wiped his mouth. “That’s your father’s story, Lady Campion, and if you want my advice, which I’m sure you don’t, then hope that you never meet him. He wasn’t the same again. He wasn’t the man your mother loved.”

Campion’s hand was clasped around Toby’s. Her face showed an awful sadness at the tale. Devorax looked at her and grinned. “You asked. I told you.”

She shook her head, horror in her voice. “It’s terrible.”

“If he couldn’t tell a girl from a soldier and hair from a helmet, then he shouldn’t have had a gun in his belt.” He shrugged. “I suppose we were drunk.” He stood up. “I’ll leave you.”

Campion stood up too. She was shocked by the story, by Devorax’s callousness in his telling of it, but she would have liked to hear more of her father. “Won’t you stay and eat with us?”

“No.” Devorax pulled his sword straight. “I have other comforts at an inn.” He grinned. “You’ll be at Bradwell?”

Toby nodded as he stood. “Do we travel with you?”

“No. I travel alone. But I’ll be waiting for you. Eight o’clock, Monday night.”

He left them, going into a street that was glistening from a fine drizzle. He carried the bottle away.

Campion watched him go, seeing him meet a mounted man who held a spare horse. They disappeared toward Carfax, leaving her horrified by the story he had told. She was frightened, too, fearing to go into the east country, the heart of Puritanism, where the seals were to be gathered. She thought of Lazen, thought of giving it back to this family that had taken her in, loved her, and of which she was now a member. She clung to Toby, appalled by all the sadness in God’s world. She would go east for Toby and his mother.

Two hundred yards away, near where a great fire had just burned a part of Oxford, Vavasour Devorax tossed the empty bottle into the ruins that still smelled of smoke. He looked at Mason. “Well?”