John Mason, grinning hugely, offered Toby his sword and pistol. Toby, still dazed, took them. He buckled the sword belt, pushed the pistol home, then took Campion’s elbow and walked her toward the table. His chair had been overturned when Devorax’s guards seized him and he bent to put it upright. He looked at Ebenezer’s guards, each one threatened by a weapon, and he looked back to Devorax. “I thought you were going to kill her.”

“They thought so, too.” Devorax nodded cheerfully toward Sir Grenville and Ebenezer. “Otherwise they wouldn’t have come. Think about it, Sir Toby. Think how else I could have done this.” He raised the bottle. “I agree it wasn’t comfortable for you, but I think it passing clever of me, don’t you?” He chuckled and looked at Campion. “Lady Campion, please pick up the seals. I’ve gone to a great deal of trouble for them and I need to get drunk.”

Campion sat. Devorax put a glass of wine before her, handed another to Toby as he sat beside her. Devorax raised the bottle. “I give you an absent friend, I give you Christopher Aretine.”

Campion smiled, sipped, and found she was thirsty. She drained the glass.

Vavasour Devorax smiled sadly. “He would be proud of you.”

She looked up at him. “He would?”

“Both of you.” He nodded at Toby. “Both of you.” Devorax pulled the seals toward him, put them on the top of the box and then, one by one, put them before Campion. “I’m just sorry that the last seal isn’t here.”

She stared at the three cylinders of gold. “So am I.”

“Pick them up, Lady Campion. They’re yours.”

She stared at them. She did not move.

Devorax sighed. “Sir Toby? Order your wife to pick them up. I really could not do all this again, I’m getting too old.”

Campion touched them. She fingered them cautiously, as if they might burn her, and then, decisively, she took her father’s fortune. Matthew, Mark and Luke. An axe, a winged lion and a winged ox. She looped the chains wide about her bonnet and let the jewels hang bright over her cloak. Ebenezer watched. Sir Grenville watched.

The sound of the waves breaking in the night was closer now. Campion listened, remembering the poem that had comforted her in the Tower. She wondered if this was the sound of mermaids singing.

Vavasour Devorax heard the surf too, and he smiled at them. “You’ll be gone soon, we’re just waiting so that a boat can get close enough to the shore.”

Campion looked at the scarred, ravaged face. “You’re not coming?”

“No.” He seemed to laugh. He looked at Sir Grenville and Ebenezer. “I have this filth to clear up.”

Campion looked at her brother, but her question was to Devorax. “You’re not going to kill him?”

“I am!”

She shook her head. “No.”

“No?” Devorax sounded genuinely surprised.

He had been her brother, whatever he had done, and in his defeat he looked young again. Devorax’s betrayal had taken the supercilious smile from him, had taken away his newly won assurance, had left him as Campion remembered him at Werlatton; a gawky, awkward boy whom she had tried so hard to love, to protect from a world that was hard to the whole, let alone the lame. “No. He’s my brother.”