The carrier’s wife, having settled her own bill, took her out into the street where her husband had already strung the mules into their chain. They walked into the dawn again and Campion’s spirits soared to the sky for she had survived one whole day.

The carrier, Walter, was a taciturn man, as stubborn as the mules that made him a living. He walked slowly at the head of his string, his eyes on his Bible that his wife proudly told Campion he had recently learned to read. “Not all the words, mind you, but most of them. He reads me nice stories from the scriptures.”

It clouded over that day, great clouds that piled from the south, and in the afternoon it rained. That evening, in a tavern on the edge of the New Forest, Campion dried herself in front of a fire. She drank small beer and stayed close to Walter’s wife, Miriam, who protected her from the men who tried to flirt with the beautiful, shy girl beside the hearth. Miriam tutted. “Your mother should have married you off.”

“I think she wanted me at home.” She instantly feared that Miriam would ask why, in that case, her mother had sent her to London, but the carrier’s wife was thinking of other things.

“It’s not a blessing, dear.”

“What?”

“To be fair, like you. You can see the disturbance in the men. Still, the Lord didn’t make you proud, and that’s a blessing. But if I were you, dear, I’d marry and marry soon. How old be you?”

“Eighteen,” Campion lied.

“Late, late. Now I was wed to Walter at fifteen, and a better man God could not have shaped in His clay, b’aint that be, Walter?”

Walter, puzzling his way through Deuteronomy, looked up and grunted shyly. He went back to his scriptures and his pot of ale.

Campion looked at Miriam. “Don’t you have children?”

“Lord bless you, child, but the children be growed. Them that God let grow. Our Tom now, he be married, and the girls are in service. That’s why I travel with Walter, to keep him company and out of trouble!” She laughed at her own joke and Campion was surprised to see a warm smile soften Walter’s stern face. The joke was evidently an old one between them, a comforting one, and Campion knew she was with good, kind people and wished that she did not need to deceive them.

They crossed the New Forest the next day, travelling in company with two dozen other people, and Walter pulled out a great pistol that he stuck in his belt and laid a sword across the leading mule’s packs. They were not troubled in the forest though, except by more rain that soaked the path and dripped from the trees long after the showers had stopped. By afternoon the sun shone again and they were coming close to Southampton where Campion must leave Miriam’s company.

Each stage of her journey loomed ahead to worry her. She had reached Southampton safely, and she was further from home now than she had ever dreamed of going, but there was still the largest obstacle to be cleared; the journey to London itself. Miriam asked if she had much money and Campion said yes, about five pounds, and Miriam told her to take the stage wagon. “It’s the safest way, child. Is your uncle expecting you?”