“Who?” Campion asked. They were alone in the house, late at night.

“You wouldn’t know the Cockells, dear. He was a baker in St. Sepulcher’s and he took one look at Beth, he did, and his yeast was up for life, dear.” She sighed romantically. “Very happy they were, too, till he died of the stone, poor man. Broken-hearted, she was. She went a week later. Said she couldn’t live without him and she just took to her bed and faded away. So what did he say to you today?”

They were in love, and the hours when they were not together were like endless nights, while the hours they shared flew like minutes. They planned a future that took no notice of the present, and they talked of their lives as though they would be spent in an eternal summer beneath an unmarred sky. In those days Campion discovered a happiness so great she thought her heart could not contain it, yet reality was remorseless in its pursuit of them.

Toby spoke of her to his father. As he expected, but with a force that was quite unexpected, Toby had been told that Campion was unsuitable. She would not do, she must be forgotten, and Sir George would not even agree to meet her. His opposition was absolute. There was more. Toby had to leave London, on pain of possible arrest and imprisonment, three days before Campion’s appointment with Sir Grenville. Toby shook his head. “I won’t leave.”

“You must!” Campion was terrified for him.

“I’m not leaving without you.” He was adamant. “I’ll wait.”

Mrs. Swan, with her gossip-sharpened acuteness, quickly divined that Toby was of Royalist sympathy. She liked him for it. “I remember Queen Bess, young man, and I tell you they were good days. Ah me! They were good days!” In truth Mrs. Swan had been a toddler when Queen Elizabeth had died, though she claimed to remember being held up in her father’s arms to see the royal coach go by. “There weren’t so many Saints then, I can tell you. A man prayed in his bedroom or in his church and there wasn’t all this caterwauling in the streets and gloom in the pulpits. We were happier then.” She sniffed in disapproval. “The country’s got drunk on God since then, and it don’t make for happiness.”

Toby smiled. “And the sun always shone on good Queen Bess?”

Mrs. Swan knew she was being teased, but she liked being teased by good-looking young sons of the gentry in her own parlor. “It’s a funny thing, Mister Toby, but it did. If that doesn’t show God approving of us, I don’t know what does.” She shook her head and laid her work on the table. “We used to have such fun! Tom and me went to the bear baiting, and the plays, and there was a puppet man in the Paris Garden who could make you roll on the grass! He really could! There was no harm in it. There were no Roundheads then, telling us what we could and couldn’t do, not when the Queen was in London. I don’t know why they don’t all go to America and leave us in peace. They’re welcome to America! They can all be gloomy there and let us be happy here.”