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A Crowning Mercy
Bernard Cornwell
In a country at war, a secret inheritance reveals a dark conspiracy …On a sunlit afternoon in seventeenth-century Dorset, a young girl falls in love with a stranger.But when her Puritan brother tries to force her into an unbearable marriage she flees, taking with her only the gift left to her by her unknown father, a gold pendant sealed by an engraving of an axe, and the words: St Matthew.One of four intricately wrought seals – each holding a secret within – it can, when combined with the other three, bring great wealth and power. This power is her true inheritance – but it’s a perilous legacy others will kill for …
A CROWNING MERCY
BERNARD CORNWELL
and
SUSANNAH KELLS
Copyright (#ulink_12e766d2-e9e3-583d-8d9f-4f0ab98add0d)
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain 1983
Copyright © Bernard Cornwell 2003
Cover design by Holly Macdonald © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018 Cover image © The Print Collector/Getty Images (scene); Shutterstock.com (http://www.shutterstock.com) (texture)
Bernard Cornwell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.
Source ISBN: 9780007168231
Ebook Edition © February 2016 ISBN: 9780007289998
Version: 2018-10-01
Dedication (#ulink_9d8865d7-4932-570f-9326-c5bb3fadba76)
For Michael, Todd and Jill
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, The bed be blest that I lie on, Four angels to my bed, Four angels round my head, One to watch, and one to pray, And two to bear my soul away.
Thomas Ady
Contents
Cover (#u54ab8be8-396e-554f-a0ac-7718895caf07)
Title Page (#u42e325ae-85ca-58d9-aef0-d31531293c7b)
Copyright (#ulink_b81cfcdc-afe7-578e-a95f-bf0c4a4fca2c)
Dedication (#ulink_5367136e-6a3d-5dca-bf72-140f8b46b9de)
Prologue 1633 (#ulink_33d65609-7edf-570d-93dd-85c21d238ee4)
Part One: The Seal of St Matthew (#ulink_3d676c63-e458-50a7-a3d3-2a9905d10249)
Chapter 1 (#ulink_9615689a-ba62-5e02-8e0a-646ae546e2ee)
Chapter 2 (#ulink_056c72d1-20d6-54b2-8c10-287547e68c71)
Chapter 3 (#ulink_c0869eee-250f-5aa6-bd7e-80c840084865)
Chapter 4 (#ulink_99588aa2-fcc0-5590-b341-e66196184564)
Chapter 5
Part Two: The Seal of St Mark
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Part Three: The Seal of St Luke
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Part Four: The Gathering of the Seals
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Keep Reading (#uf22aef39-c24f-5307-83bf-c5b82b153597)
About the Author
Also by the Author
About the Publisher
PROLOGUE (#ulink_3ff9ecad-12a3-56ae-9462-85c75a25c363)
1633
The boat slammed into a wave. Wind howled in the rigging and brought water stinging down the treacherous deck, driving the shuddering timbers into the next roller.
‘Cap’n! You’ll take the bloody masts out of her!’
The captain ignored his helmsman.
‘You’re mad, Cap’n!’
Of course he was mad! He was proud of it, laughing at it, loving it. His crew shook their heads; some crossed themselves, others, Protestants, just prayed. The captain had been a poet once, before all the troubles, and all poets were touched in the head.
He shortened sail an hour later, letting the ship go into irons so that it jerked and rolled on the waves as he walked to the stern rail. He stared through the rain and windspray, stared for a long while at a low, black land. His crew said nothing, though each man knew the sea room they would need to weather the low, dark headland. They watched their captain.
Finally he walked back to the helmsman. His face was quieter now, sadder. ‘Weather her now.’
‘Cap’n.’
They passed close enough to see the iron basket atop the pole that was the Lizard’s beacon. The Lizard. For many this was their last sight of England, for too many it was their last sight of any land before their ships were crushed by the great Atlantic.
This was the captain’s farewell. He watched the Lizard till it was hidden in the storm and still he watched as though it might suddenly reappear between the squalls. He was leaving.
He was leaving a child he had never seen.
He was leaving her a fortune she might never see.
He was leaving her, as all parents must leave their children, but this child he had abandoned before birth, and all that wealth he had left her did not assuage his shame. He had abandoned her, as he now abandoned all the lives that he had touched and stained. He was going to a place where he promised himself he could start again, where the sadness he was leaving could be forgotten. He took only one thing of his shame. Beneath his sea-clothes, hung about his neck, was a golden chain.
He had been the enemy of one king and the friend of another. He had been called the handsomest man in Europe and still, despite prison, despite wars, he was impressive.
He took one last, backward look and then England was gone. His daughter was left behind to life.
PART ONE (#ulink_3806ce61-68be-5267-8a80-57029ab33cc0)
The Seal of St Matthew (#ulink_3806ce61-68be-5267-8a80-57029ab33cc0)
1 (#ulink_d6760089-1caa-5f55-a622-dceae6a37b17)
She first met Toby Lazender on a day that seemed a foretaste of heaven. England slumbered under the summer heat. The air was heavy with the scent of wild basil and marjoram, and she sat where purple loosestrife grew at the stream’s edge.
She thought she was alone. She looked about her like an animal searching for enemies, nervous because she was about to sin.
She was sure she was alone. She looked left where the path came from the house through the hedge of Top Meadow, but no one was there. She stared at the great ridge across the stream, but nothing moved among the trunks of heavy beeches or in the water meadows beneath them. The land was hers.
Three years before, when she had been seventeen and her mother dead one year, this sin had seemed monstrous beyond imagination. She had feared then that this might be the mysterious sin against the Holy Ghost, a sin so terrible that the Bible could not describe it except to say it could not be forgiven, yet still she had been driven to commit it. Now, three summers later, familiarity had taken away some of her fear, yet she still knew that she sinned.
She took off her bonnet and laid it carefully in the wide, wooden basket in which she would carry back the rushes from the pool. Her father, a wealthy man, insisted that she worked. St Paul, he said, had been a tentmaker and every Christian must have a trade. Since the age of eight she had worked in the dairy but then she had volunteered to fetch the rushes that were needed for floor-coverings and rushlights. There was a reason. Here, by the deep pool of the stream, she could be alone.
She unpinned her hair, placing the pins in the basket where they could not get lost. She looked about her again, but nothing moved in the landscape. She felt as solitary as if this was the sixth day of creation. Her hair, pale as the palest gold, fell about her face.
Above her, she knew, the Recording Angel was turning the massive pages of the Lamb’s Book of Life. Her father had told her about the angel and his book when she was six years old, and it had seemed an odd name for a book. Now she knew that the Lamb was Jesus and the Book of Life was truly the Book of Death. She imagined it as vast, with great clasps of brass, thick leather ridges on its spine and pages huge enough to record every sin ever committed by every person on God’s earth. The angel was looking for her name, running his finger down the ledger, poised with his quill dipped in the ink.
