He had been worried for a while, thinking the girl might have gone to Lopez, but he need not have worried. She was here, and the seal would turn up in a few days. All was well, indeed, more than well for Ebenezer was here. Sir Grenville, on first meeting Ebenezer, had seen the boy’s need for a cause, had seen the bitter look on the cripple’s face. There was no love there, either, for his beautiful sister. Cony smiled. It was time to educate Master Ebenezer, that gift from the gods to Cony’s plans.

The sky had its first touch of red. The bargemen, the girl finally safe in the boat, pushed away from the pier. The oars dipped down, went forward, and the white-painted boat moved easily on to the darkening stream. Light flashed from the widening ripples at its stern. Sir Grenville Cony was tired, but happy. The Scots, he knew now, would come into the war against the King and that was good for Cony’s investments, but this news was better. The seals would be his. He turned away from the river, looked up at the naked Narcissus bending over his pool, then threw open the anteroom door. “My dear Ebenezer! My dear boy! We have so much to talk about. Bring that wine!”

Sir Grenville Cony was a happy, happy man.

Ten

James Alexander Simeon McHose Bollsbie knew, as did Sir Grenville Cony, moments of pure happiness. Bollsbie was a clerk in holy orders, a minister of the Church of England, ordained as such by the Bishop of London, licensed to preach, to administer the sacraments, to bury the dead, and, of course, to join Christian souls in holy matrimony.

The Reverend James Bollsbie was also a drunkard.

It was that circumstance, rather than any desire to witness for the Lord, which had prompted the nickname “Sobriety.” Sobriety Bollsbie he had been for two years now. His drunkenness, in addition to supplying him with a new name, was also responsible for those moments of happiness he was given to enjoy. He also had moments of fearful despondency, but new every morning was the ale-given joy.

It had not always been so. He had once been known as a preacher of fire and conviction, a man who could start hysteria in the nearest pews and spread it back down the church. He specialized in sermons of hell fire, and had been known in a score of parishes as a man who could frighten sinners from their ale-houses into true repentance. He preached against alcohol, yet the enemy had laid siege and broken into his citadel. Sobriety Bollsbie preached no more.

Yet even as a finished man, a broken drunkard in his late forties, Sobriety Bollsbie had his place in society. He had always been an adaptable man, ready to trim the sails of his belief to the prevailing wind of theological fashion; thus when Archbishop Laud had been supreme and had demanded church services modelled on the hated Papist ritual, Sobriety had been the first to deck his altar cloths and illuminate his choir with candles. When he saw that he had miscalculated, and that the pathway to heaven lay in a plainer, Puritan service, he had not been shy in his conversion. Not for him the sly change or the slow dismantling of ritual. He advertised his change of allegiance. He invited the Puritans to witness the destruction of his gaudy altar, the burning of his altar rails, and the shredding of his embroidered vestments. He preached a sermon in which he likened his enlightenment to the conversion of St. Paul and thus, in one service, became the darling of the Puritan faction as a witness to their truth.