The Fallen Angels

by Bernard Cornwell

  The Great House was the tallest building, topped by the huge banner of Lazen, and fronted by the fluted columns that reared so arrogantly from the great spread of gravel. It was there, in the Great House, that Campion’s father had lain for fifteen years, ever since his best-loved hunter had fallen on him, rolled on him, and bequeathed him paralysis and pain.

  To the left was the lowest part of the building, the Garden House that was joined to the Great House by a curving, pillared arcade. It had been built for Campion’s mother, a gift from her husband, but now it was used as a guest wing. It was in the Garden House that Uncle Achilles had been staying on this visit that ended today.

  Campion stared at Lazen Castle, seeing it reflected in the wide lake. It was home to more than two hundred people; grooms, maids, cooks, footmen, postilions, cellarmen, seamstresses, servants by the score, and all fed and paid by Lazen, their babies born in the town and raised in the Castle’s shadow, their beer brewed in the Castle’s brewhouse, their linen pounded in the Castle’s fullery, their corn ground in the Castle’s mill.

  Her uncle stared at her. “Do you ever get tired of it?”

  “Never!” She smiled wistfully, took his elbow again, and began walking. “Do you ever wish that nothing should change?” She looked up at him. “That everything would just stop?” She waved at the Castle. “Perhaps next summer? On a day of perfection? If we could just leave it like that forever?” She laughed at her own fancy.

  He stopped walking, took her face in his long, thin hands on which, perversely, he still wore his bishop’s ring, and kissed her solemnly on the forehead. “Dear Campion, may I say something offensive?”

  “Uncle?”

  “This is serious advice.”

  “Oh dear.” She smiled.

  “It is time you grew up.” His face, thin and intelligent, was extraordinarily attractive. He was the cleverest man Campion knew, the most interesting, the most unexpected. The lines of age seemed delicately etched beneath the powder on his face. He smiled. “I’ve offended you.”

  “No.”

  “I should have offended you, then.” He took her elbow and walked on with her. “Lazen is not yours, my dear. It will go to Toby and Lucille. You will lose Lazen just as I lost Auxigny. You have your own life to make and the sooner you make it, the better. You should not be here adding up columns of figures and worrying about the harvest and paying the wages; you should be in London. You should be dancing.”

  “That doesn’t sound like growing up.”

  He walked in silence for a few paces. “Experience is growing up, Campion. What’s your family motto?”

  “Dare all.”

  “And you dare nothing! You stay here like a nun in a convent. Of course you’re happy here. You live in the greatest house in western England, you live off the greatest fortune in the realm. You want for nothing, you only have to lift a finger and the servants trample each other to provide for you. I know!” He raised his gold topped cane to ward off her reply. “I know! You work hard. Yet you chose to do that, just as you could have chosen to do nothing. But you exercise your choice in safety. You are like a ship that must leave harbor, a beautiful ship, well built, splendidly rigged, and you dare not leave the quay.” He stopped and smiled at her. “Yet one day, my child, there will be no more harbor, no more quay, no more safety.”

  She stared at him, sensing the seriousness in him, then smiled. “Lazen will go?”

  “Of course not. It’s eternal.”

  She smiled. “Toby will be here.”

  “Ah.” He mocked her with faked comprehension. “So the nun will grow old in her brother’s household? When you are really old your great-grandnephews and nieces will be brought to look at you; ‘See the old lady! See how she dribbles!’”

  She laughed. “It isn’t true.”

  “Then marry.”

  She said nothing for a few paces. “Marriage will come, uncle.”

  He tutted irritably. “You make it sound like a disease!”

  “I don’t want it to be an escape.”

  “How clever you are, niece.” He smiled at her as they climbed the gentle bank toward the driveway. “My beautiful, clever niece with a clockwork heart.”

  “Nonsense!”

  “Then I expect to find you drowning in love’s illusion when I return. I demand it! I expect you to be sighing and writing excessively awful poems about your love’s eyes.”

  She laughed and they turned into the driveway, walking directly toward the great house. The huge stable block was visible now to the right of the castle, its entrance busy as the outriders’ horses were prepared for her uncle’s departure.

  Hooves sounded on the gravel behind and Campion turned to see who approached.

  At first she thought it was one of the grooms returning from exercising a saddle horse, but then she realized that not one of Lazen’s grooms rode like this man.

  This was a horseman. She had grown up in a house that prized horsemanship, that knew a thing or two about men and horses, but never had she seen a horseman like this. This was a horseman.

  The horse, big, sleek and black, trotted superbly on the gravel, while the rider, long-legged and straight-backed, seemed arrogantly at home in his saddle.

  The rider was dressed entirely in black. Black breeches, black boots and a black shirt. A black coat was rolled and tied to his saddle. He had long, black hair that moved with the horse’s motion, and, as he came closer, Campion saw the glint of a gold earring in his left ear.

  Her uncle, also staring in admiration, suddenly laughed. “It’s a gypsy. He must have stolen the horse.”

  The gypsy’s face was dark, thin, and savage as a hawk’s. Campion stared at the face, struck by it, thinking suddenly that never, ever in her life had she seen so superb a man. He rode as though he trampled a conquered world beneath his mare’s hooves.

  He looked at them as he passed, his oddly light, bright, blue eyes passing incuriously over the man and girl. He did not stop, he did not acknowledge them, he seemed to observe them and then arrogantly dismiss them from his attention. Campion saw that the man’s sinewy forearms were tattooed with the images of eagles. A sword hung from the saddle, incongruous for a man who was not a gentleman.

  Uncle Achilles watched her face, then laughed gently. “Perhaps you don’t have a clockwork heart.”

  She was embarrassed instantly. She blushed.

  He took her arm again. “It’s easier for a man. Just as my father did, we men can take our fancies of the peasant masses, indulge them, and pass on. It’s so much harder for a woman.”

  “What are you talking about, uncle?”

  “Oh, nothing!” He sketched an airy gesture with his ribboned cane. “Only he was rather a handsome brute and your face did rather look like that tedious little Joan of Arc when she heard her boring voices.” He smiled at her. “Take him as a secret lover.”

  “Uncle!”

  He laughed. “I do like to shock you. Perhaps I shall find you a husband who looks like the gypsy, yes?” He laughed again.

  To her relief a great drop of rain splashed on the drive and her uncle, forgetting the gypsy, groaned at the catastrophe. “My coat will be ruined!”

  “Run!”

  “It’s so inelegant to run.”

  “Then be inelegant.” She laughed, tugged his elbow, held up her skirts, and they ran in the gathering rain, past the old church, straight for the garden door of the Old House.

  “Mon dieu, mon dieu, mon dieu!” Achilles d’Auxigny brushed at the sleeves of his gray velvet coat as they stopped within the hallway. The sleeves were hardly spotted with water, yet he sighed as though he had been drenched. “It was new last month!”

  “It’s not touched, uncle!”

  “How little you girls know of clothes.” He flicked his lace cuffs, then listened as the stable clock struck the hour. He sighed. “Eleven o’clock. I must go. Come and bid me farewell.”

  “You’re coming back soon?”

  “For Chr
istmas.” He smiled. “Or for your wedding, whichever is sooner.”

  She smiled, reached up and kissed his cheek. “I shall see you at Christmas.”

  He laughed, they walked toward the entrance where his coach waited, and Campion, amazed what one glance could do to her sensible soul, wondered who the tall man was who rode like a conqueror and looked like a king.

  Uncle Achilles left. The servants were lined beneath the portico and grateful for the boxes he had left for them. Campion had a glimpse of his slim, ringed hand waving from behind the carriage window, then the horses slewed out into the rain and he was gone.

  “My Lady?” William Carline, Lazen’s steward, gave her his imperceptible bow. He was a man of enormous and fragile dignity.

  “Carline?”

  “A most strange man, a foreigner, wishes to talk with you. He is most insistent. He carries, he claims, a message from Lord Werlatton.” Carline’s sniff suggested that no foreigner could be trusted.

  The gypsy. She felt her heart leap, and was instantly ashamed of herself, more so because she was sure that Carline would see her confusion, but on his broad, pale face there was no sign that anything was amiss. She nodded in acknowledgment, forcing herself to keep her voice casual. “Ask Mrs. Hutchinson to attend me in the gallery and send him there.”

  “Very good, my Lady.” Carline gave another of his tiny bows and waved an imperious dismissal at the servants.

  Campion felt a pang of excitement as she turned to go to the Long Gallery. She felt astonishment too. She had merely glimpsed a man, a gypsy, evidently a servant of her brother’s, and one sight of his face had filled her with this odd thrill of anticipation. She felt, as she waited for Mrs. Hutchinson, her companion, a shame that she should be so moved by a man who was her inferior.

  But nonsense or not, as a footman opened the door for the gypsy to come into her presence, she felt her heart beating in anticipation and excitement.

  The Gypsy had come to Lazen.

  Campion, as he entered the Long Gallery and walked down its panelled splendor, was struck again by the man’s arrogant magnificence. He bowed to her. “My Lady.” He held out a sealed letter and spoke in French. “I come from your brother.”

  She took the letter, wondering how a French servant, a gypsy, had learned to walk stately halls with such assurance.

  The question did not linger in her thoughts. It was swept from them by Toby’s letter, by the news that made her gasp as if struck by a sudden physical pain.

  Lucille was dead.

  Campion had met Lucille twice, long ago when travel to France had still been safe, and she remembered a girl of dark, almost whimsical beauty. She knew well her brother’s adoration of Lucille, and in her heart she felt a dreadful sorrow for Toby, and a dreadful anger at what had happened.

  She looked up at the Gypsy. Toby, in his letter, had named the man simply as Gitan. “You know how she died?”

  “Yes, my Lady.” Mrs. Hutchinson, knitting beside Campion, did not speak French, but she sensed from their voices that the news was bad.

  Campion frowned. “How?”

  The Gypsy’s face was almost expressionless. “It was not a good death, my Lady.”

  “Who did it?”

  He shrugged.

  He seemed a strange emissary, this Gypsy, from a land of shadow and death, and perhaps because he had come from the horrors described in Toby’s letter, because he had seen the massacres in Paris’ prisons, he seemed to have an added attraction about him.

  Campion pushed the thought away. She stood up, still holding the letter, and walked down the long carpet of the gallery.

  Toby said that hundreds had died in Paris. The mobs had broken into the prisons and then slaughtered the inmates. Lucille, though, had not been in prison. She had been at her parents’ house outside Paris and a squad of men had fetched her and taken her into the city and there killed her. Campion turned. “Why?”

  “Do you mean why her, my Lady?” He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  Dear God, she thought, but Lazen is cursed! Mother, father, brother, and now Lucille. Her father would have to be told. Toby, not wanting his horse-master to face the drunken earl, had sensibly ordered Gitan to give the letter to the Lady Campion.

  She walked slowly back down the gallery, listening to the comfortable click of Mrs. Hutchinson’s needles. “What happened in Paris?”

  He told her. He spared her the details, but even in outline the story was horrific. He told it well and Campion, sensing guiltily again her attraction to this man, resented that he had proved so intelligent. To be handsome was one thing, and to be struck by a good-looking servant was not so unusual, but to find then that the man was articulate and subtle only added to the attraction and made the rejection harder.

  She sat again. Toby had sent this man to deliver the letter to Lazen, then to join him in London. Toby said he would come to Lazen, but not immediately. She looked up at the slim, tall man. “How is my brother?”

  He did not seem to think it unusual that he, a servant, should be asked the question. He considered his answer for a second. “Dangerously angry, my Lady.”

  “Dangerously?”

  “He wants to find who killed Mademoiselle de Fauquemberghes, and kill them in turn.”

  “Go back to France?” Her voice was filled with horror.

  “It would seem to be the only way, my Lady,” he said dryly.

  She stared at him, and thought that his face, though extraordinarily strong, was also sympathetic. He had answered all her questions with a fitting respect, yet there was more to him than the blandness of a servant. He had somehow imbued his answers with his own character, with independence.

  She realized that she had been looking into his blue eyes for some seconds and, to cover the silence, she looked down at the letter again. She made herself read it once more.

  When she looked up she saw that he had turned to stare at the great Nymph portrait.

  Of all the paintings in Lazen, this was her favorite.

  It showed the first Countess, the first woman in this family to bear the name Campion, and it showed her in this very room, her hand lightly resting on the table where Campion had just placed Toby’s letter. Sir Peter Lely, the painter, seemed to have caught the first Campion as she half turned toward the onlooker, delight and joy on her face, and family tradition claimed that the painting was indeed the very image of its subject. Legend said that the family had been forced to pay Lely a double fee, just so that he would not paint her as he painted everyone else, with pouting lips and languorous fleshiness, but as she truly was.

  The first Campion was said to have been the most beautiful woman in Europe. Her hair was light gold, her eyes blue, and her calm face suffused by a kind of vivacious contentment. She was beautiful, not just with the lineaments of bone and lip and skin and hair, but with the beauty that comes from kindness and happiness within. The Gypsy turned from the painting and his blue eyes looked with amusement at Campion.

  She was embarrassed.

  She knew what he was thinking, she always knew what people thought when they saw the painting. They thought it was of her. Somehow, over the generations, the beauty of the first Countess had been passed to her great-great-great-granddaughter.

  Yet there was more to the painting than its odd likeness to herself. There were stories in it, stories about the four golden jewels about the Countess’s neck, and a story about its title, the Nymph portrait. The title puzzled some visitors, and most had to stay puzzled, for only a few, a very privileged few, were told to stand at the far side of the gallery and stare at the silken folds of the shockingly low cut dress worn by the first Countess of Lazen.

  The dress was blue green, the color of water, and suddenly, by staring, and after it was pointed out, it was possible to see in the gorgeous drapery the shape of a naked girl swimming, but then a second later the onlooker would blink, frown, and swear there was nothing to be seen. Yet she was there, naked and beautiful, a nymph in her stre
am, and legend said that it was thus that the first Countess had been seen by her husband.

  Campion, who knew the picture, could see the naked girl every time, but no visitor had ever spotted the nymph until she was pointed out. Campion had a sudden, outrageous urge to tell the Gypsy, an urge she suppressed with more embarrassment. The naked, swimming nymph bore the same uncanny resemblance to herself.

  She suddenly felt angry with herself. At a time like this, when her brother was in mourning, she flirted with a forbidden attraction and she was guilty and ashamed and astonished that the thoughts, so unbidden, should be so strong. She looked at the man. “You are returning to London?”

  “Yes, my Lady.”

  “You wish to stay a night in our stables?”

  He hesitated, then shook his head. “My orders are to return quickly, my Lady.”

  She felt a wash of relief. She did not think that life would be easy if this tall, splendid, intriguing man was in Lazen Castle. “You can get food in the kitchens.”

  “Thank you, my Lady.”

  “And thank you for bringing this.”

  He bowed to her and, thus dismissed, walked from the gallery. She watched him go and, as the door closed on him, she felt as if her senses had been released from a sudden and unwelcome burden. She turned to Mrs. Hutchinson, her chaperone. “It’s bad news, Mary.”

  “Oh no, dear. Oh dear, no.”

  Lucille was dead, there would be no babies in Lazen, and Campion cried.

  Gitan left Lazen that afternoon, his fed and rested mare strong on the road eastward.

  He smiled as he went into the wet woodlands that bordered the estate, the autumn leaves dripping monotonously with rainwater and the air rich with the smells of a damp forest.

  He carried messages from Marchenoir to London, messages of secrecy, messages hidden within his sword scabbard.