Fallen Angels (21 page)

'No, no!' Geraint Owen reassured him. They never hanged spies quickly. It spoilt the crowd's enjoyment.

Lord Paunceley peered at Owen. His Lordship's reptilian, questing face was screwed in displeasure. 'Do you drink wine in Wales, Owen? Or only water? Ale, perhaps? Or do you have some particular Welsh beverage? Crow's blood? The bile of toads? The juice of virgins squeezed at midnight into coconut shells?'

'A glass of wine would be most pleasant, my Lord.'

'It's very good wine,' his Lordship said dubiously.

'I'll do my best to survive it, my Lord.'

His Lordship poured him a generous glass. 'I do so enjoy these occasions. When you are my age, Owen, you will find that an execution is a most marvellous tonic. To be old and to see the young die! That is a measure of success, is it not? There. Sip it. I paid four shillings a bottle, and God only knows how high this war will drive that price. Where's Lord Werlatton?'

The sudden question merely confirmed Owen's suspicion that the Earl's letter had been about his son. 'In the Vendee, my Lord.'

'Not murdering people in Paris?'

Owen smiled. 'He's in the Vendee, my Lord.'

'How soon can we send word to him?'

Owen shrugged. 'Within a week.'

A great cheer spread through the tiers of seats and Lord Paunceley peered anxiously through the window. 'Ah ha! Our work, you see, is not in vain!'

The Frenchman, dressed in boots, breeches and shirt, was a fine looking man. He stood in a cart, his head held high and the wind stirring his dark brown hair. Lord Paunceley chuckled. 'A loss to the ladies, eh?'

'Indeed, my Lord.' Owen was thinking that his Lordship would have done better to let the wine sit in his cellar for another two or three years. He decided it was best to say nothing.

The cart that held the prisoner passed close to Lord Paunceley's carriage. His Lordship laughed. 'A brave young fool, Owen.'

'Indeed, my Lord.'

'And all so laughably pointless! They only had to read the Naval Gazette! Still, we must not be ungrateful for the entertainment they will give us.' Paunceley rubbed at a speck of dirt on the window. 'The Earl of Lazen, Owen, wishes us to summon his son home. He is to come for his sister's nuptials. Her virginity is to be sacrificed to some lumpen ape of the aristocracy and I am supposed to bring Werlatton back so he can watch the proceedings! Oh, splendid!' This last was because the Frenchman, who had reached the gallows in his cart, was trying to make a speech about liberty. One of the gaolers brought the speech to a swift end by the simple expedient of punching the man in the belly. The blow doubled him over and conveniently allowed the noose to be slipped over his dark head and tightened.

Lord Paunceley was leaning forward, tongue between his teeth, watching. 'Gently now! Gently!'

The carthorse was urged slowly forward, and the Frenchman forced to walk backwards by the tension of the rope about his neck. The crowd was silent. They grinned. There was small sympathy for the death of a Frenchie, except for a few women who thought it a terrible waste of a good looking man.

'Gently! We don't want to lose him!' his Lordship said anxiously.

The prisoner's feet came to the end of the cart, they were seized by the executioners who had jumped to the ground, and, as the cart went away, they took the man's weight and lowered him slowly so that the rope tightened, his head tilted to one side, and then they let him hang.

'Good!' Lord Paunceley smiled. The man would choke to death slowly, very slowly, his legs dancing for the entertainment of the crowd. 'Very finely done, Owen, very finely done!'

Geraint Owen looked, frowned, and looked away. French spies had to die, of course, but he would have preferred them to die a soldier's death, standing before a firing squad. Yet he allowed that this slow, agonizing death might be a deterrent to others.

The Frenchman jerked, his legs moving as though he were trying to swim upwards in the air and take the choking, blinding pain from his neck. Lord Paunceley smiled as the crowd cheered. 'That will teach him to count His gross Majesty's ships!'

'Indeed, my Lord.'

'It seems, Owen,' Lord Paunceley had his head turned away from the Welshman, 'that the Earl is dying. He would like his son to be at his deathbed. Touching, yes?'

'Indeed, my Lord.'

'Ah! He's watered!' Liquid dripped from the Frenchman's dangling boots to the pleasure of Lord Paunceley and the crowd. 'I like Lazen, he's a good man. You know he once held my office?'

'I did know, my Lord.'

'He wasn't as good as I, of course. Oh but this is magnificent!'

The Frenchman was twisting on the turning rope. His right leg was in spasm. Lord Paunceley watched avidly. He came frequently to the gallows for this entertainment. 'The French are so inhumane, Owen.'

'They are, my Lord?'

'Machines for killing people! What next? They call it "sneezing in the basket"!'

'I had heard, my Lord.'

'Ridiculous! This is the natural way, Owen, God's way! It gives the man time to dwell on his transgressions, to repent, to prepare his soul.' Lord Paunceley's fur-swathed shoulders shook with laughter. 'So how do I get Lord Werlatton back to England in a hurry? Tell me precisely so that I may reassure Lazen.'

The prisoner choked, loud enough for Lord Paunceley to hear. The man was twisting and jerking and the crowd was roaring its approval.

Geraint Owen had leaned back on the seat so as not to see the death agonies. He closed his eyes. He blotted out the baying of the crowd and thought instead of the small ships that plied the channel and decided the Navy was wrong for this task. To use the Royal Navy meant making a request of their Lordships of the Admiralty and answering God alone knew how many ridiculous questions. Instead, the Welshman decided, he would use one of the many smuggling ships that ignored the war to keep the gentry supplied with brandy and good wine. 'I can have the
Lily of Rye
there within two weeks, my Lord.'

'The what of what?'

'The
Lily of Rye
, my Lord.'

'Sounds like a harvest whore. And have it where?'

There's a village called Saint Gilles. It has a small quay. We've used it before.'

'Then use it again, pray. What day should Werlatton be there?'

Owen thought again. In his remarkable head he kept, along with the myriad details of the secret war, a tide table of the Channel. 'He has to be there on the nights of the fifteenth and the sixteenth, my Lord. The usual signals.'

'Whatever they may be. How you do enjoy your work, Owen. Very well. I will write to Lazen and tell him that His corpulent Majesty's resources will be laid at the altar of his daughter's virginity, and you will inform Lord Werlatton to come and witness the loss of his sister's purity. Do you think she is a virgin, Owen?'

'My Lord, I have not the first idea.'

His Lordship chuckled. 'One does doubt it. So few girls are these days. It goes out of fashion, Owen, like a full-bottomed wig. Soon it will be a mere word in the lexicon and the young will need to have it explained. Oh, how sad!' This last was not for the extinction of virginity, but rather because the prisoner's twitching was slow and fading. 'He's going! You remember the one who lasted four hours?'

'The Gascon?'

'The very same.' Paunceley watched the hanging man and frowned. 'He's gone! It was hardly worth the journey, Owen.' The prisoner's knees were slowly drawing up. 'From being His Majesty's prisoner, he has become His Majesty's corpse. Do you think vulgar George would like it if I presented the body to him? With an apple in its mouth?'

'I would never presume upon the tastes of my betters, my Lord.'

Paunceley laughed. 'Fat George isn't your better, Owen. He's not fit to lick your impediments. So, Saint Gilles? The fifteenth or sixteenth?'

'Indeed, my Lord.' Owen had never known his Lordship be so interested in the minutiae of an expedition.

'The Harvest Whore?'

'The
Lily of Rye
, my Lord.'

'Then so be it. Arrange it. Expedite it!' The tortoiselike face turned to Owen. 'I suppose Lord Werlatton has not whined to you any more about his family being persecuted?'

Owen smiled. 'No, my Lord.'

'No tales of hooded men besieging his sister?'

'No, my Lord.'

Paunceley laughed. 'I knew there was nothing in it! Nothing at all! What nonsense young men do utter!' He turned back to the window and watched as the body-men scrambled to cut down the corpse. They could fetch fifteen guineas from an anatomist for such a fine specimen. Paunceley smiled. 'I intend to stay for more pendant pleasures, Owen. I believe we have a brace of women this morning! You wish to stay?'

'Your Lordship is very kind…'

'You were ever an accurate man.'

'But I will decline, my Lord.'

'So be it, Mr Owen, I bid you good morning. Pray do not ventilate the carriage as you go!' Lord Paunceley shivered ostentatiously as the Welshman left, and then, before the next victims arrived, and before even returning to the book in his pocket, he wrote down the details of the ship and the rendezvous that would fetch Lord Werlatton home. He was getting old, he thought to himself, and the memory was not what it was, not what it was at all. Then, the details noted, he tucked his pencil and notebook away and settled back for more immediate and entertaining pleasures.

—«»—«»—«»—

On a May night, a night warm and glorious with spring, Campion sat at her table in the Long Gallery. The windows were open. The curtains bellied slowly like a line of strange white ghosts.

Most of the gallery was in darkness. A few candles burned on her table where she sat beneath the Nymph portrait. The candle flames shivered in the soft breeze.

Before her, on the table, were four jewels.

'I love him, I love him not, I love him, I love him not.' She said the words aloud, sadly and slowly, placing the jewels one by one from her left to her right side. Each jewel had a long, golden chain that trailed on the table.

These were the jewels of Lazen.

They were seals for marking hot wax. Each golden, jewel-banded cylinder was tipped by a mirror-image of steel. One mirrored the axe that had taken St Matthew's head, the

Mark's winged lion, the third bore a winged ox for St Luke, while the last showed a serpent wound about the poisoned chalice of St John.

She looked up at the Lely Nymph portrait. The first Countess, the first Campion, wore these jewels about her neck. It was said that these jewels, these seals of the Evangelists, had once controlled all of Lazen's fortune, all its future.

Each of the gold cylinders unscrewed. Within each seal was a second symbol, fashioned in silver, though the significance of these hidden symbols had long been forgotten. In St Matthew was a crucifix, in St Mark a naked woman, in St Luke a tiny pig, and in St John was nothing. There had been something once, but someone in the past had taken the symbol out.

She unscrewed the seal of St John and felt with her finger the rough edges of the small claws that had held whatever had once been inside. Something missing.

She felt an extraordinary sadness.

At least, she thought, the Gypsy was far away. She tried to persuade herself that her unworthy madness was over, that his face was a fading memory, and her shame a secret that receded into a forgotten past. Yet she knew she had not forgotten him. The prospect of marriage was made worse by the thought, the hope, that the Gypsy would come to Lazen with Toby. On a day when she should be most happy, she would be forced to see that haunting face and feel the awful, shameful, secret longing.

She slowly joined the two halves of the seal of St John. Once this house had been under siege, and all of it for these jewels. Now they were kept in a locked box in a locked room and she doubted whether they were looked at from one year's end to the next.

The age of chivalry, she thought, is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has replaced it.

Soon she would be married.

She touched the seals one by one. 'I love him, I love him not, I love him,' she paused with the seal of St John in her hand, then slowly put it with the others. 'I love him not.'

The servants smiled differently at her, as though the prospect of marriage had changed her. It was childhood's end, she supposed, her initiation as a woman was close, and she wondered why she felt nothing when Lewis Culloden touched her. She wondered if there would be magic in his kisses if he shaved off his moustache.

Marriage, she told herself for the hundredth hundredth time, is a compromise. It is a decision about money, about lands, about inheritance. It is an arrangement.

Love, she told herself for the hundredth hundredth time, is a fiction for kitchen girls. Love was not a sudden glory of light that dazzled and changed the world, it was something that grew. It was a responsibility.

She looked again at the splendid, smiling woman who was buried in Lazen's old church, yet seemed to live on in the great portrait. The family said that she had fought for this house, that she had gone through the valley of darkness and hatred and war so that Lazen could exist. Did it all come down to marrying Lewis Culloden? Was all romance, and all glory, and all magic just a child's tale, as insubstantial as the naked nymph who swam in the water-silk? Was love really this insidious, slow, calculating progress towards marriage?

Yet she was being unfair, and she knew it. Sometimes, in the dark nights of winter, she remembered the leering, filthy face that dribbled on her nakedness, the way the man had fumbled with his knife at her waist, and then she remembered too the savage joy of the hoofbeats, the sweep of the great sword that sounded so triumphant, the shout of fear, the crunch of the blade going home, then why, she thought, was love not invested with the same glory? Did Iseult feel disappointment when Tristan kissed her?

It seemed almost unfair that it should have been Lord Culloden who had rescued her, and she knew that to be an unworthy thought. Yet there were times when she imagined that it had been a man with black hair and an arrogant face who had ridden to her rescue. She imagined the Gypsy's hands comforting her. She would try to fight that waking dream, but in her longest, loneliest nights it had been a curiously comforting dream to have.