That adaptability he had carried into his fall and disgrace. Such was the entwinement of church and state that lawyers, such as Sir Grenville, were often in need of a willing priest to add God’s imprimatur to their own. Bollsbie was such a priest.

Bollsbie lived now in Spitalfields, in a miserable room where Thomas Grimmett, having safely delivered Campion to Scammell’s house, discovered the priest drunk. Grimmett manhandled Bollsbie downstairs.

“Leave me, good sir! I am a priest! A priest!”

“I know you’re a damned priest. Hold on, Sobriety.” Grimmett picked up a pail of filthy water and poured it over the straggle-haired man. “Sober up, you bastard!”

Bollsbie moaned. He rocked to and fro, miserable and damp. “Oh, God!”

Grimmett squatted at his side. “When did you last eat, Sobriety?”

“Oh, God!”

“You’re a miserable bastard. You’ve got a wedding, your reverence. Understand? A wedding.”

“I want to eat.”

“You’ll eat. Now fetch your book, Sobriety. We’re going.”

Grimmett helped the priest find his old cassock, a filthy scapular, and his prayer book, then he half carried the preacher into the lane which led to Bishopsgate. He stopped at the first pie-stall and forced two beef pies into Bollsbie, then primed him with a tot of rum. “There, your Holiness. Remember me now?”

Sobriety smiled. “It’s Thomas, isn’t it?”

“That’s it, your reverence. Sir Grenville’s man.”

“Ah! Good Sir Grenville! Does he do well?”

“You know Sir Grenville, reverend, he doesn’t do badly. Now come on, we’ve got work to do.”

Bollsbie looked hopefully at the bag of bottles Grimmett carried. “You want me as a witness? Yes?”

“I told you, Sobriety, a damned wedding. Now come on!”

“A wedding! How pleasing! I like weddings. Lead on, good Thomas, lead on!”

Toby Lazender grew bored. The alley was a cheerless place to wait. After an hour he walked to the Strand, persuading himself that Campion might be leaving by Cony’s front door, but there was no life there except for the guard who leaned against the brick archway. Toby went back to the alleyway, down to the very end where the cobbles became a stinking river-washed ramp of littered mud. The wall of Cony’s garden extended deep into the water and there was no way he could peer round its end. He went back to the porch, leaned against the opposite wall, and stared up at Cony’s blank, featureless house. He must wait. Soon, he consoled himself, very soon, Campion would come through the door and they would be together.

He was in love, and he saw the world through the distorting glass of that love. Nothing mattered except that he should be with Campion, and his father’s disapproval had seemed irrelevant. He had seen her first at the stream and, with the fear of love, he had thought she might not want to see him again. He had cursed himself for not going back, even though his return would have been impossible once he was in London, but then she had written to him and he had left his father’s house within minutes of the letter’s arrival. His life before he had met Campion, the hours he spent without her, both seemed an irrelevance. He was in love. His father, and doubtless his mother too, disapproved. By birth and education she was unsuitable, but Toby did not care. There was something in Campion’s soul that intoxicated him, he would not be without it, and even the dank, sunless alley seemed brighter because of it.