Mrs. Swan noticed none of it. “This is the Strand, dear. Used to be a lot of gentry along here, but most have gone, more’s the pity. It’s all Saints, now, and Saints don’t pay like the gentry.” Mrs. Swan had been left money by her sea-captain husband, but she augmented her income by embroidery, and the Puritan revolution in London had lowered the demand for such decorative work.

A troop of soldiers marched from the city, long pikes over their shoulders, their barred helmets bright in the sunlight. People were thrust unceremoniously from their path. Mrs. Swan shouted scornfully at them. “Make way for the Lord’s anointed!” An officer looked sternly at her, but Mildred Swan was not a woman to be overawed by the military. “Watch your step, Captain!” She laughed as the officer hastily dodged a pile of horse-dung. She made a dismissive gesture at the soldiers. “Just playing, they are. Did you see those boys at the Knight’s Bridge?” The coach had been stopped at the bridge in the fields to the west of London, and the soldiers had searched the travellers. Mrs. Swan snorted. “Little boys, they are. That’s all! Shave their heads and they think they can rule the world! This way, dear.”

Campion was led into an alley so narrow that she could not walk alongside Mrs. Swan. She was lost now, confused by the maze of tiny streets, but at last Mrs. Swan reached a blue door which she laboriously unlocked, pushed Campion inside, and Campion reflected, as she settled into the small parlor, that she had reached her destination. Here, in this great, confusing city, she might find the answer to the seal which hung between her breasts. Here too was Toby Lazender, and in a world where her only friend was Mrs. Swan, he suddenly loomed large in her thoughts. She was in London at last, free.

Mrs. Swan sat heavily opposite her, pulled up her skirts and took off her pattens. “Oh, my poor corns! Well, dear! We’re here.”

Campion smiled. “We’re here.” Where the mystery could be solved.

Seven

Campion’s behavior, before she ran away from Werlatton, had been so solitary and eccentric that her absence on the first morning provoked nothing more than grumbles and self-satisfied noises from Goodwife saying that she had always known the girl could not be trusted. By mid-afternoon the grumbles had turned to alarm in Scammell’s head and he ordered a horse saddled and rode himself about the bounds of the estate.

Even when it was realized that Campion had disappeared, their imagination could not encompass anything so dramatic as a journey to London. On the second day, at dawn, Scammell ordered Tobias Horsnell to search the villages to the north, while he and Ebenezer went south and west. By then the trail was long cold, and that evening, in the great hall, Samuel Scammell felt the stirrings of fear. The girl was his passport to riches beyond dream and she had gone.