Then, after 1626, there were no more references to Matthew Slythe’s inability to manage his financial affairs. Now the letters spoke of Slythe’s riches, of “God’s bounteous grace to you, for which wee give manifold Thankes,” and one of the letters looked forward to “oure visit to Werlatton.” So her father, sometime between 1625 and 1626, had moved from Dorchester. She would have been three years old at the most and could not remember the move. Werlatton Hall was all she had known. She skipped through more letters, seeking a clue to her father’s sudden wealth, but there was none. One year he had been a struggling merchant, the next master of this huge estate with its great Hall.

A letter from 1630 was in a different hand, telling Matthew Slythe of his father-in-law’s death and Slythe had written in the letter’s margin a laconic note recording the death of his mother-in-law a week later. “The Plague” was the brief explanation.

Someone knocked loudly on the study door. Campion put the letter down and ran fingers through her unpinned hair. The knock came again. “Who is it?”

“Ebenezer. I want to come in!”

“You can’t. Go away.” She was half undressed, her hair undone, and she could not let him in.

“What are you doing in there?”

“You know what I’m doing. Tidying up!”

“No you’re not! I’ve been listening.”

“Go away, Eb! I’m reading the Bible.”

She waited till she heard his footsteps disappear, heard him grumbling down the passage and then got stiffly to her feet to light more candles. She thought Ebenezer might try to enter the room through the window, or spy on her through the crack in the curtains. She stood between the curtain and the window, in the darkness of the night, watching to see if Ebenezer’s curiosity would take him into the garden. An owl bellied its call in the darkness, bats flickered above the lawn, but Ebenezer did not appear. She waited, listening, and could hear nothing. She remembered the many, many nights when she would lie awake in childhood’s cold bed, listening for the voices of this house raised in anger, and she would know, with a child’s sense, that when her parents fought with each other they would expend their venom on her.

The letters told her nothing, offered no explanation, mentioned no seal. The only papers left were those covered in mathematics and she picked them up wearily, spread them out and bent again to her reading. These, evidently, were the papers that had driven Matthew Slythe to the long nights in this room, that had forced him into writhing, wrestling prayer with his God. She looked in amazement at the work.

Her father had believed that the Bible contained two messages; the first open to anyone who cared to read, the second hidden by means of secret numbers disguised in the text. As the alchemists struggled to turn mercury into gold, so Matthew Slythe had tried to prise God’s secrets from the scriptures.