A Crowning Mercy 02 Fallen Angels

by Bernard Cornwall

  She said nothing.

  He turned his head and gave a short whistle. She heard a snort, heard more hooves, and then, trotting obediently to his command, came a horse of wondrous beauty.

  She guessed, in the moonlight, that it was chestnut. It was not a big horse, but it had long fronts, deep shoulders, straight hind legs, and, as it trotted, it showed a long, full action that promised speed and stamina. The Gypsy smiled at the horse, reached out, and let it nuzzle his hand. 'She's called Hirondelle.' He spoke in French. The name translated as the Swallow.

  Campion walked to the mare and stroked her muzzle.

  The Gypsy smiled. 'Your brother's gift. He ordered me to buy the best horse I could find. I found her in Kent. She's a beauty.'

  Campion smiled. She ran her hand down the strong neck. 'She's lovely.' The mare trembled under her touch. 'Why a French name on an English horse?'

  'I named her.'

  'It's a good name.'

  'Five years old, well enough nagged. You can hunt her next year.'

  Campion stopped, one hand on the horse's back. She looked over Hirondelle at the black-cloaked man. 'What did you say?'

  'Well enough nagged.'

  It was a common phrase, meaning that the horse had been well schooled. It was not the phrase that surprised her, but the fact that the Gypsy had spoken in English. There had been no trace of a French accent. She stared at him. 'You're English.' She said it accusingly.

  The Gypsy laughed. He swung from his black horse and, carrying a saddlebag, climbed the temple steps. His voice was cheerful. 'Mandi Angitrako Rom, rawnie.' He sat on the wall to the right of the entrance, one leg bent in front of him, his back leaning on a pillar.

  She knew this was the moment when she should thank him for bringing the gift, order him to stable Hirondelle, and then she should walk back to the Castle. She knew, too, that he had deliberately intrigued her so she would stay. She looked at him from beneath the cowl of her hood. 'What did you say?'

  'Mandi Angitrako Rom, rawnie.' He smiled. 'It means "I am an English Rom, my Lady."'

  'Rom?'

  'You call it gypsy. My tribe is the Rom, and their language is the Romani, and I come from that part of the tribe that lives in England. My mother, though, was French Rom.' He had taken a bottle of wine from his bag and two glasses. The glasses were familiar to her, both had come from the Castle. He poured the wine and placed one glass at the end of the wall as an invitation to her. He leaned back, raised his glass, and smiled. 'My congratulations on your forthcoming marriage.' He managed to inflect the formal words with inoffensive irony.

  She knew she should not stay, but why else had she come? Hesitantly she walked towards the temple. She climbed the steps. The floor of the temple was incised with the signs of the zodiac about a great half globe that protruded from the floor's centre. At the top of the half globe was Britain, and at the very top, where the globe was flattened as an impractical table, was the word Lazen. Campion ignored the wine. She walked left about the globe to be on the far side from him. Her feet stirred the dead, dry leaves that had collected on the floor. She frowned at him, as if to show that her presence here was not incompatible with her dignity. She tried to think of something to say that would be natural, that would explain her staying at the temple. 'Hirondelle came from Kent?'

  The Gypsy nodded. His teeth were white in the darkness. 'From Hawkhurst. Put a martingale on her for a few weeks. That'll teach her not to star-gaze.'

  Campion smiled. She could talk about horses for ever. 'So she's not perfect?'

  'She will be. She's fast.'

  She felt a trembling inside her. When he smiled, and his face was transformed with a kind of mischievous joy, she felt her heart beat faster. In repose there was a savagery to his face that was exciting, but the smile promised other things. She hid her feelings. 'We were sorry my brother could not be here.'

  He laughed. It occurred to her that he was laughing at the formality of her words. He sipped his wine. 'Toby wanted to come, but the French were waiting for him. He's safe, but he had to go back inland.'

  He had used her brother's Christian name as if it was normal.

  She frowned. 'Yet you came.'

  He smiled. 'But I move about France, my Lady, with the permission of the French, and about England with the permission of the English.'

  The words tantalized her. She supposed they were meant to. 'So what does that make you?'

  'A Rom.'

  She smiled. She sat on the wall, the movement tentative as though expressing that she ought not to be here. She stared at him across the hump of the half world. 'How does a horse-master get permission of warring governments to move where he pleases?'

  He turned and stared at the Castle which seemed to float on a great surge of light. 'Because, my Lady, I am not a horse-master.'

  'What are you then?' She could feel herself trembling beneath her cloak.

  He took a twist of tobacco from a pocket, a slip of white paper, and wrapped the one in the other. He opened his tinder box, struck a spark, and blew the charred linen into a. small flame. He bent his head to the flame and she thought, as she stared at the strong, fire-lit features, that she had never seen so magnificent a man. Smoke whirled into the darkness as he closed the box. 'For ten years, my Lady, I lived as a Rom. Then my parents died, killed in a ditch by a farmer. You remember the laws?'

  She nodded. The Gypsy Laws, repealed only ten years before, had made it a crime even to talk with a gypsy, while the death of gypsies had worried no one, certainly not any Justice of the Peace.

  The Gypsy blew more smoke. 'The farmer said they'd stolen his child. It was nonsense, of course, but that didn't stop him shooting both of them. He searched the wagon and there was no child, except me. He tried to kill me.'

  He told the story in such a commonplace way that it astonished her. She frowned. 'He tried to kill you?'

  'With a knife. I wasn't worth powder and shot.' He grinned. 'I killed him instead. Slit his belly open with my own knife.' He looked at her as if waiting for a reaction. She said nothing. He smiled. 'So I went to work in stables. I was good with horses. Suddenly people wanted me.'

  'Wanted you?'

  'To make their horses go faster. And other people wanted to stop me. I became better with a knife, learned to use guns and a sword. I was paid fortunes by the quality to win races,' he shrugged, 'and I got bored with it, so I set off for Italy.'

  'Why Italy?'

  'Why not?' He smiled. 'I liked the sound of it. I was eighteen, my Lady, and at eighteen you think the world is all yours and that the roads have no ending.'

  'How did you live?' She had become fascinated. When the Lazenders travelled it was with thirty or more servants, their own cooks to take over inn kitchens, and their own lice-free beds to put into the best rooms.

  He smiled. 'A good horseman can always make a living, a good thief makes a better one, and we have a saying that the best bread is begged bread. I lived.'

  She laughed. It felt utterly natural to be talking with him. She had come here in a mixture of excitement and shame, not knowing what to expect, knowing only that there existed a great gulf between them that should have kept them decently apart. Instead, though the excitement was still there, she felt this odd, happy comfort in his company. 'Where did you go in Italy?'

  'Venice, Padua, Florence, Rome, Naples.' He shrugged. 'It was in Naples that I met the Marquess of Skavadale. You've heard of him?'

  'He came here once.' She smiled. 'When I was very small.'

  The tip of the Gypsy's tobacco glowed a hard, bright red. 'I liked Skavadale. He was digging up Roman relics. You've probably got some?'

  She nodded. There had been a insatiable passion among the great houses for the relics of ancient Rome, a passion that had been blown to white-heat by Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Lazen had not been immune. Wagons had brought old, expensive, battered statues that still stood in unlikely corners and in the more remote bedrooms. The Gypsy sip
ped his wine, then leaned his head on the pillar. 'Someone was stealing from Skavadale and I stopped it. He was grateful. He taught me to read. He made me his chief helper, his guardian, his whipper-in.' He smiled. 'He also discovered that I wasn't baptized so he found some Anglican clergyman who was touring the ruins and had me christened in the remains of a Roman bath-house.'

  'With what name?' She asked it quickly.

  He turned to look at her. He shrugged. 'Christopher Skavadale.'

  'I like it.'

  He shrugged. 'It's not my real name. You don't take a new name at twenty.'

  'Why not? You expect women to do it all the time.'

  He laughed. 'That's true.' He raised his glass to her. 'Lady Campion Culloden?'

  She said nothing. She was wondering what the names Lazender and Skavadale would look like wreathed in white fire on a night-time fence. She thrust the thought away. 'What happened then?'

  'He sent me to London five years ago. He made me take a gift.' He held out his tinder box. 'It was a Roman lamp, just this size, one of the oil lamps with a spout for the flame, and a lid that covered half the bowl. On the lid was a bas-relief. It showed a man and a woman. They were doing what I think a couple of your guests are doing in the ha-ha.'

  She laughed. 'You heard them too?'

  'Half the county must have heard them. There was a crowd watching them when I came past.'

  She liked the way he had said it. Her uncle, dear though he was to her, could not have mentioned the couple without being sly, or without insinuating that there was something horrid and fascinating about their love-making. Lord Culloden would not have mentioned them at all, or, if forced to, he would have pretended disapproval for her benefit. Christopher Skavadale had talked of them as though it was the most natural thing in the world.

  He flicked the small cigar into the darkness and poured himself more wine. 'I had to take the lamp to a Lord Paunceley. It seems to me now that Skavadale was doing me a favour.' He shrugged. 'He couldn't take me back to his own house; there were too many bitter women and under-worked sons there, so he gave me his name as a gift and sent me to Paunceley instead.'

  Lord Paunceley the spy-master, the subtle man in the centre of his sticky webs that had entangled her brother. 'Which is how you met Lord Werlatton?' she asked.

  He smiled at her use of her brother's title. 'Toby pretended that I was a French Rom that he'd hired as a groom. It was obvious that the French would recruit me to spy on the British, and they did. They never knew I'd been recruited already.' He looked at her. 'I don't suppose I'm meant to tell you any of this.'

  'Then why are you?'

  He shrugged. 'You asked what I am, so now you know. I'm an agent of the British government, a spy.' He looked at her as though waiting for an adverse reaction.

  'Why did you tell me?'

  He smiled. He stared into the wine glass, swirling the liquid about. 'I can't impress you with a uniform fit for the fairy queen,' she knew he meant Lord Culloden's cavalry uniform, 'and I'm not bowed into great rooms because I'm rich, so,' he looked at her and smiled ruefully, 'I lay what little I have before you.'

  'I'm impressed. Prince of the Gypsies?'

  He laughed. 'Thank you for that.'

  She laughed too. She was suddenly nervous. So much had been said in their seemingly innocuous words of the last seconds. She changed the subject deliberately, steering it away from the sudden intimacy of their shared laughter. 'How's Toby?'

  'He's well. Strong as an ox and needing to cut his hair. He's happy. He'd like to be here, but…' He shrugged. 'He's hunting the man who killed his Lucille.'

  'He knows who killed her?'

  Skavadale was making another of his Spanish cigars. He paused and looked at her. 'Bertrand Marchenoir.'

  It was like a shock of cold water. Marchenoir! The man whose name had become a byword for blood and savagery, the man who could shock Europe, the man who fed the machine of death in Paris. Uncle Achilles, when he had first heard that the ex-priest had risen to infamy, had exploded in rare wrath. 'He comes from Auxigny. His mother was the town whore! We educated him! We took him from the dungheap and made him a priest, and now look at him!' She stared at the Gypsy. 'Why?'

  He shrugged. 'Probably because she was engaged to Toby. Marchenoir hates the Auxigny family. He'd like to kill all of them, including you.' He pointed at her with his unlit cigar.

  'He doesn't even know I exist!'

  Skavadale smiled. 'He knows. There's nothing he doesn't know about the family, or its English connections. There is a rumour,' he sounded uncertain suddenly, as if he might offend her, 'a rumour that he was one of the Mad Duke's bastards.'

  He did not offend her. The Mad Duke of Auxigny, her grandfather, had spawned too many bastards for the family to take offence at their memory. 'He'd be my uncle.' She said it wonderingly. 'Do you know him?'

  Skavadale nodded. He had struck a light and bent his head to the flame. He lit his cigar and the flame was snuffed out. 'I know him.' He gave her his quick smile. 'I assure you there is no family resemblance. He calls me mon ami. He puts his arm round my neck and tells me I should marry for France and breed a family of republican cavalrymen.'

  She laughed nervously. His mention of marriage touched a raw nerve this night. 'Are you?'

  He smiled. 'Getting married? Yes, I'm twenty-eight, it's past time, but I won't marry for France.' He looked out at the moon silvered parkland. 'I want to breed the fastest damned horse in the world.'

  She had said the same thing herself once. She felt suddenly jealous because this man, this Gypsy, would have the life she wanted. She felt jealous of whoever would share his life and the jealousy drove out her thoughts of Bertrand Marchenoir. She made her voice light, determined not to show the jealousy. 'What's breeding a fast horse got to do with marriage?'

  'I can't do that and cook for myself at the same time.'

  She laughed as she was meant to. She looked at the floor by her feet and kept the tone of her voice casual. 'Who are you marrying?'

  'When I meet her I'll know.' He paused. The wind stirred the dead leaves at her feet. When he spoke again his voice sounded to Campion as dark as the night itself. 'She will be fairer than the dawn, and in her eyes stars. At her feet grow lilies, and in her hands, love.'

  He took her breath away. The words seemed to shake her. He had been talking so calmly, in such an ordinary way, and then the sudden poetry. She looked up at this disturbing, handsome man. 'Who wrote that?'

  'I did. You don't go to market without knowing what you want.'

  She laughed, but it was a nervous laugh. He had turned the subject to love, and it would be so easy to turn it away, but somehow she did not want to draw back at this moment. She spoke slowly. 'I'm told love is an illusion.'

  'Who by?'

  'My uncle,' she shrugged. 'Even my father says there's no certainty.' She heard herself saying the words and she wondered at it, yet still it felt so natural to talk with him. She could speak to so few people about love. Her uncle mocked her gently, her father cared only to see her secure, her friends were as ignorant as she was herself. Somehow this man, with his gentle, confident voice, neither mocked, nor spoilt, nor thought the subject odd.

  'There's no certainty.' He finished the glass of wine and poured another. 'But who wants certainty? If every dawn and sunset were the same, why would we look at them?'

  'My uncle says,' she said, 'that you won't find love if you're looking for it.'

  'That's because we don't know what to look for.'

  'Do you?' Her heart was beating so strongly that she could feel it shifting the gold seals at her breast.

  He answered in French, with a sentence that she had read long before and had half forgotten. '"The heart has reasons that reason does not know."'

  'Pascal?'

  He nodded, then smiled. 'You're surprised that a nothing of mongrel gypsy can read Pascal?'

  'No!' Yet she had been thinking exactly that.

  He laughed at her protest, then
swung his leg off the wall. He picked up the glass of wine he had poured for her and walked about the swelling globe. He held the glass to her. 'Do you think love is real, my Lady?'

  'I suppose so.' She was embarrassed now.

  'Do you know what it is?'

  She said nothing. She took the glass from him.

  He spoke gently. His words, for all their meaning, were edged with humour. 'But suppose love came to you from nowhere, out of a sudden dark night, would you know it?'

  She looked up at him. His eyes were bright in the small moonlight. He had a half-smile that made his savage face gentle. She knew suddenly why it felt so natural to be here, it was because he had made it so. She could feel his strength, his assurance, his ease. She thought of the hours in which she had tried to persuade herself that Lord Culloden was a strong man, but now, sitting on the low wall, she knew that Christopher Skavadale was setting a standard against which any man might fail. This man was strong enough to know when to be gentle. His strength was almost frightening.

  He smiled, as if he knew she would not answer his question. He touched her glass with his own. 'Here's to the fastest horse in the world, my Lady. May it run like the north wind.'

  Her hand was shaking. She raised her glass. 'May it be faster.'

  She sipped the wine. He stepped away from her. He stood by the next pillar and watched her.

  She knew what was happening. They talked of love and it seemed as if they skirted some dark, forbidden place where, if she but dared walk boldly in, she would find the magic that she sought. She did not dare. She trembled on the edge of that place, advancing, fearing, retreating. In that mysterious place the soul was naked. She knew the answer to his question. She knew what love was when it came from nowhere on this sudden, dark night, but she could not answer him. She stared at the globe. In the moonlight she traced the words chiselled at its base. Terra Incognita'.

  'We Rom have a thing called dukkeripen.'

  His sudden words startled her. She looked up, grateful that he had broken the silence. 'What is it?'