Toby did not look a gentleman. He travelled as a soldier, sword belted over leather coat, pistol in his belt and helmet slung from his saddle. He looked like any other soldier returning from the year’s campaign, a pack-horse behind him, with his wife on a third horse. Campion dressed as a Puritan. She had bought herself a pair of slab-sided, stiff, leather shoes, and beneath her long black cloak was a Puritan dress with wide, white collar and starched apron. Her hair was modestly hidden by a bonnet. She had other clothes, clothes fit for Lady Lazender, but they were hidden in the pack-horse’s bundles.

If her dress was sober and her demeanor modest, her hopes were high. Mordecai Lopez had done as he had promised, he had arranged for the seals to be gathered, and she rode to fulfill her strange father’s destiny. She felt little sorrow at the death of Sir Grenville Cony, none at Faithful Unto Death Hervey’s end, and she believed that the killing was now done. The seals had extracted their price of blood; now they would yield the wealth with which she could restore her husband’s family. She rode eagerly, not minding the cold winds and rain of autumn, the chill that brought a foretaste of the frosts to come that would harden the rutted roads into ice-sharp furrows.

They crossed Epping forest, two travellers alone in an immensity of trees. The leaves had turned, were blown by the winds to carpet their path, and sometimes, deep in gold shadow, Campion would see a motionless deer watch them pass. Once they passed a camp of charcoal makers, their temporary turf huts almost unseen till the horses were close by. The turf-clad kiln silted blue smoke among the trees. The charcoal makers sold them hedgehog meat, roasted in clay. They knew nothing of the war, except that their charcoal was fetching a good price for gunpowder.

Toby and Campion could not travel on the Sunday, for this was Puritan country and the Lord’s Day was sacred. They had left the forest and were in a small-hilled country of rich earth and big, timber barns. They took the only private room in the tavern, its walls plastered with news of Parliament’s victories and they were given clean straw on which to sleep.

They attended church, for to have avoided the day’s three services would have attracted suspicion and inquiry. Toby, not able to resist play-acting, gave his name as Captain Righteousness Prevaileth Gunn, and said they travelled to Maldon where his wife’s family lived. The preacher, an earnest young man who had prayed for the Royalists to be “scythed mightily that their blood might fructify the land of the Saints,” looked at Campion. They were outside the church, surrounded by villagers among the ancient tombstones. “And where does your family live in Maldon, Mistress Gunn? My own mother lives there.”

Campion, not ready for the question, gaped.

Toby put a hand on her arm and spoke soothingly to the preacher. “The Good Lord saw fit to make my dear wife simple-minded, sir. You must be gentle with her.”