Fallen Angels (8 page)

The early winter weeks were hard for Lady Campion Lazender, harder than she dared admit to herself, and made so by the constant visits of the Gypsy to LazenCastle.

It was not that she saw much of the man called Gitan, yet she found that when her brother was in residence she would deliberately find a reason to visit the dairy or brewhouse, to see how the new wall of the kitchen garden was progressing, or to count the stock in the game larder; any excuse, indeed, for going close to the stable entrance. She made herself stop the subterfuge.

Yet still she would glimpse him. Sometimes he would be a black, upright figure schooling a horse in the meadows to the east of the drive, and once she saw him leaning at the kitchen door drinking a glass of ale that had been fetched for him by one of the maids. The maid, a pudgy little girl with a hare lip, stared up devotedly at the tall, dark man, and Campion was astonished by the streak of jealousy that stabbed at her, wrenched at her, and she felt the humiliation of this attraction and the wretchedness of suppressing it.

Yet suppress it she did. She threw herself into her work of which, the harvest having failed for two years running, there was plenty. The Castle, with all its estate and pensioners, had to be fed. The tenancies had to be managed. What harvest there was had to be eked out from the rickyard and storerooms.

There was Christmas to prepare for, her father to care for, and estate decisions to be made. Campion chose which timber should be cut for winter fuel, which coppiced, and how many animals should be kept alive through what promised to be a hard, hungry, cold season.

She had no need to work. The Castle had a steward, as did the estate, and there were lawyers ever eager to charge fees for their services. Yet she hated idleness. She had begun to interest herself in the Castle's management when, at eighteen years old, she made the chance discovery that the housekeeper was buying more sheets each autumn than existed in the whole Castle. That housekeeper was long gone, the accounts straightened, and even in the hardest winter Campion had cut the estate's expenditure by a third. No one went hungry, nothing was skimped, yet the family was not robbed. She liked the work, she was good at it, yet this winter its best advantage was that it kept her from what she knew were humiliating, unfitting thoughts of the Gypsy.

She even wondered whether it was her reluctance for the Gypsy to leave the Castle that made her so adamant in her opposition to Toby's plans.

He was returning to France.

He had told her and she had exploded in sudden and unnatural anger, telling him his duty was to stay at Lazen, to look after Lazen, to marry and have children, and her words had whirled about his stubborn red head with as much force as snowflakes.

He was not thinking of Lazen. He was thinking of scraps of ragged flesh tossed about a cell.

She shook her head in bitterness. 'Suppose you die?'

'Then Julius gets what he's always wanted.' He laughed at the thought of their cousin, Sir Julius Lazender, inheriting the earldom.

She was too angry to speak.

He tried to explain. He tried to tell her that there were men in France who prepared to fight against the revolution, men faithful to the church and to the King, and men who looked to Britain for help. He was not, he said, going alone, but going with the blessing of Lord Paunceley.

'Then Lord Paunceley's a fool!' she said.

Toby laughed. 'They call him the cleverest man in the kingdom.'

'Then that makes all Englishmen fools!'

He shrugged. Lord Paunceley, a mysterious man of immense power, ran Britain's secret service. He had been a lifelong friend of their father, though the friendship was now conducted entirely by correspondence.

Toby smiled. 'I'm taking the rebels muskets, powder, and money. I shall be safe!'

'You'll be dead.'

'Then I'll be with Lucille.'

And that had been the final straw for her, a reply of such stupidity and such an evasion of his responsibility, that they had parted on terms of strained affection. She did not want him to go, she could not stop him going, yet, in the end, there was a certain relief that the tall, black-dressed Gitan was leaving with him.

She said farewell to Toby on a cold morning in November. She hugged her brother tight. They had always been close, always affectionate, and it seemed to Campion that only these last weeks had brought some barrier between them. 'Be safe, Toby.'

'I shall be safe.'

She looked up at the mounted Gypsy, black cloaked, his blue eyes so unreadable. And on this last glimpse, as on her first, she felt the force of the man's looks and personality strike into her soul with undiminished impact. She nodded coldly, wishing him a safe journey, keeping her voice as tight and controlled as ever when she was in his presence.

He smiled and answered in his strongly accented English. 'Thank you, my Lady.'

Then she hugged Toby again, her eyes closed and her arms about him. He gently pulled away and climbed into the travelling coach. He went to his revenge, to his chosen work, and Campion watched the tall, black figure that rode beside the coach until the gatehouse hid him from view. They were gone, and there was the sense of a burden lifted.

Yet sometimes, in the long evenings, when her father was lost in the solace of his liquor and the Castle was slowly closing itself for the night, she would find herself before a large, pagan portrait of Narcissus that hung in the Castle's Great Chamber and see, in that old painting, the same arrogant, competent, strong face that she missed. The Narcissus in the painting was naked, and she was ashamed that she should be drawn by the strong, sleek body. She was ashamed and she was astonished that she, who was so controlled, so sensible, so practical, should find her emotion so uncontrollably arrested by a common groom. He was the Gypsy, and he had ridden into her dreams to make them sad.

—«»—«»—«»—

Her father saw it. He looked at her from his bed one bright, cold morning at November's end. 'What's troubling you?'

'Nothing.' She smiled. She was dressed to go out, cloaked and furred and wrapped against the winter's cold.

'You look like a dog that's lost its nose. Are you in love?'

'No, father!' She laughed.

'Happens to people, you know.' He grimaced as pain lanced through him. 'One day they're perfectly sensible, the next they're mooning about like sick calves. It's nothing that marriage won't cure.'

'I'm not in love, father.'

'Well, you should be. It's time you were married.'

'You sound like Uncle Achilles.'

He looked her up and down fondly. 'There ought to be someone who'd marry you. You're not entirely ugly. There's Lord Camblett, of course. He's blind, so he might have you.'

She laughed. 'There's that curate in Dorchester who thought I was the new milliner in town.'

'He wet himself when he found out,' her father laughed. 'Poor booby. Why didn't you tell him?'

'He was being very sweet. He showed me over the church.' The curate, nervous and hopeful, had escorted her from the church to find a carriage and four waiting outside, postilions and grooms bowing to the girl he had thought a milliner. He would not be consoled for his mistake. Campion smiled. 'If I'd have told him he'd only have been more nervous. It's quite nice sometimes to be treated like everybody else.'

'I could always throw you out of the Castle,' her father said hopefully. She laughed, and he held her hand. 'You're not sad?'

'No, father.' How could she tell him about the Gypsy? He would think she was mad. 'Except I wish Toby wasn't in France.'

He shrugged. 'Wouldn't be much of a man if he didn't want adventure, would he?'

'No, father. I suppose not.'

Hooves and wheels sounded on the gravel and her father laboriously turned his head to look at the horses that stopped beneath his window. 'They're looking good.'

'Marvellous.' She said it warmly.

The bays were her joy. A matched pair that were harnessed to a carriage she had chosen for herself, a carriage that her father considered flighty, dangerous, and welcome evidence that his beautiful daughter was not entirely a sensible, practical and dutiful girl.

She had bought herself a phaeton.

Not just any phaeton, but one of the highest, swiftest phaetons in the country. The bays were as spirited as the carriage itself, and the Earl, whenever he saw the equipage drawn up on the forecourt, felt a pang of fear for his daughter.

The phaeton, her father thought, could hardly weigh more than she did! The Earl had ordered ballast placed above each axle, but still the fragile assembly of steel, leather, and wood frightened him.

He looked at her from his pillow. 'Simon tells me you took the ballast off the axles.'

'A bit.'

'A bit!' He laughed. 'I don't know why you don't just glue bloody feathers on it and try to fly.'

'Perhaps I will.' She kissed him. 'I'll see you at lunch time.'

'Drive slowly.'

'I always do.'

'Liar.' He smiled at her.

This morning she was driving to Millett's End. The village was a remote place, lost in the southern heaths, but it was a journey she took each fortnight as part of her duty. Most of the villagers were tenants or pensioners of Lazen, the vicar was appointed by the Castle, it was as much a part of Lazen as the larger, closer, richer town on the Castle's doorstep. Campion went there for duty, yet she admitted to herself the pleasure of letting the bays run free on the high, straight, heathland road.

Not that today she could go fast. The frost had rutted the roads dangerously hard, though once up on the heath she knew she could steer onto the grass and let the bays stretch their legs.

Simon Burroughs shouted from the stable-block doors. 'You want company?'

'No!' She smiled at him. Sometimes a groom would accompany her on a saddle-horse, but Campion knew the grooms were instructed to keep her pace slow. Today, on this crisp, cold, hard day she wanted to be alone.

The wheels blurred as the bays trotted down the long, curved driveway, over the small bridge that crossed the stream which fed the ornamental lake. It was here, she thought, that she had first seen the Gypsy, and then she pushed that thought away as she rattled between the gatehouses and onto the cobbled street that led to Lazen's market place.

She raised a gloved hand to those who greeted her, called a welcome to Mrs Swan who was brushing out her cottage, and pretended not to notice the lurch as two children jumped onto the back axle stand. Two only was the rule, and only as far as the mill bridge, but it was no fun unless she pretended not to notice.

She let the horses go faster as she crossed in front of the covered market. She had seen Simon Stepper, the bookseller whose business was almost entirely owed to the Castle, wrapping a scarf about his neck in his shop doorway. He was a clever man, but once he began talking he would never stop. She looked the other way, laughing as a man who stacked logs beside the glebe cottages gestured for her to go faster, and then Simon Stepper was left behind and the phaeton, its shadow leaping from cottage to cottage, slowed to approach the mill bridge. She heard a gasp and laughter as the children fell clear.

The water was high, spilling gleaming from the mill pond. The smoke from the mill kitchen chimney was whipped away by a stiff breeze and Campion caught a whiff of roasting meat and then she was driving past the town's clink, the small single cell jail with its door open onto mysterious shadow, and she was through the town. She slowed as the cobbles ended and the road climbed between black, frost rimed hedges towards Two Gallows Hill.

She went slowly here, remembering how in spring these hedgerows were thick with flowers and fragrance. Spring, she thought, seemed so far away. The road climbed more steeply. Joshua Cartwright, who farmed on this edge of the town, would bring his horses to help wagons climb this incline, yet the bays pulled the phaeton without apparent effort. She looked right at the single, empty, leaning gibbet on Two Gallows Hill, then the road twisted through pasture land, heaved up one more steep slope, and levelled itself onto the heathland above. The gibbet was left behind, the sky was immense now over the flat landscape, a landscape bare of features except for the road, a few, windbent trees, and the curious, humped ridges of the old earthwork fort to her left.

It was a cold day, the sky was cloudless and the sunlight slanted low and bright onto the bushes. She took the bays off the road onto the wide, flat verge, and let them go into a trot. Their breath whipped back past their gleaming flanks. Her spirits rose with the speed.

She let them go faster. The ground here was quite level, quite safe, free of hidden stones that could tip a fast-moving phaeton and smash it to tinder. She shook the reins again and it seemed to her that she rode a chariot in the sky. The bushes blurred as she went past them, she felt the joy of it, the excitement of it, the reins quivering against the tension of her forearms, and she let the horses go faster still.

The wind put tears into her eyes and lifted the cord of the whip. She thought the speed might even pluck off the fur bonnet that was pulled so low over her ears and about her face, but still she shouted at the horses, laughed, and felt the pure exhilaration of the speed.

The Reverend Horne Mounter, dining in the Earl's rooms last week, had explained the scientific fact that there was an absolute celerity beyond which a human body could not travel.

The Earl, sitting up in bed, and grumbling about an itching in his mended stump, had opined that such a scientific fact was garbled mumblelarkey.

The Reverend Mounter had laughed politely and complimented the Earl on his spitchcock'd eel.

'Always liked eel,' the Earl said. His thin face had been flushed. The room had a sour smell in it, a smell of sickness. At least, though, he was sober. Campion had cut more of her father's food, then smiled at the rector.

'An absolute celerity, Reverend Mounter?'

'Indeed so, my Lady.' The Reverend Horne Mounter swallowed his mouthful of eel and helped it with some of the Castle's best claret. 'At speeds, they say, in excess of one equivalent to thirty miles in an hour, it is certain that the blood of the body would be driven by the excessive motion to the rear of the body. Unless, of course, one was travelling backwards, in which case it would be driven to the front of the body!' He demonstrated this fact with copious movement of his plump, white hands. 'Starved of the blood the front, or back, half of the body would die! It's quite certain!'