Lord Culloden took her arm, the crowd parted for them, applauded them, and she smiled left and right as Lewis led her to the portico and the waiting night sky. Footmen pulled back their chairs. The Duchess d’Auxigny, Campion saw, had already claimed the highest row of seats. She was calling loudly for wraps and furs, complaining about the cold English night. Campion smiled at her, then sat by Lord Culloden.
Despite the complaints of the French Duchess, the night was dry and warm. The stars showed above Two Gallows Hill and there was enough moonlight to reveal the mysterious preparations on the far side of the lake. Behind Campion, within the castle, the music played on.
Lord Culloden led the applause as the first stars of fire exploded in the darkness.
Campion had been nervous about his return to Lazen, yet oddly she had found herself calmer than she expected. She wondered whether she had at last accepted the inevitability of marriage, had recognized that it was a commonplace and not something of wonderful strangeness. She had even begun to look forward to Periton House, to entertaining there, and she had felt that sudden, inexplicable yearning for motherhood. She was, she supposed, accepting marriage with decent grace, though she did not see why the graciousness had to extend to every small detail of her new life. She smiled at Lord Culloden. “Would you ever think of shaving off your moustache?”
He turned astonished from the fireworks. “Shaving it off?”
“Yes.” She mimed a pair of scissors with her fingers in front of his mouth. “Like that.”
He frowned. “What’s wrong with it?”
“Would you like it if I had a moustache?”
“Not excessively.”
“It’s like being kissed by a horse brush. That’s pretty.”
Culloden turned to look at the flaming comets that were reflected in shaking streaks on the water. “I rather like my moustache.”
“You must preserve it, my Lord, if it’s very precious to you.”
There seemed to be a struggle on his face. He touched both ends of the offending hair, then shrugged. “Of course, if you really want it off, dear Campion, I shall get Mellors to shave it tomorrow morning.”
“If you make that sacrifice,” she said, “I shall have to marry you, my Lord.”
He laughed. Mrs. Mounter, the Rector’s wife, who stood protectively beside the Bishop, saw their happiness and pointed it out to her companions. “Made in heaven, I say! Made for each other!” She sniffed.
The Bishop swirled his brandy. “She’s a good filly! Best damn seat on a horse I ever saw! Good Lord! Look at that! Isn’t it splendid!”
The crowd applauded the pretty fires that laced the sky and fell like stars into the water. Great clouds of smoke, shot through with colors of the fireworks, drifted over the lake. In one great burst of white flame Campion saw the gleaming roof of the sunken pleasure barge. Servants moved among the great crowd with salvers of wine and plates of food. The townspeople were thick on the driveway, their applause echoing that from the Great House steps.
“Magnificent!” Culloden applauded. The crest of Two Gallows Hill was suddenly spitting fire that arced red into the air like a great crown, a crown that grew and grew until the whole sky seemed to be suffused with the color. The hanging gallows were touched scarlet.
Then the men from Bristol lit their masterpiece and the cheers echoed from the Castle. On the huge, wrought iron fence that stood so grandly between its ten foot high stone pillars along the Shaftesbury road they had hung an arrangement of fire that glowed white, showered sparks, and spelled the names Lazender and Culloden. The names were wreathed in hearts and surmounted, as was fitting, by the escutcheon of the Earl himself. The crowd seemed to sigh as the fires died and as the last sparks fell red from the iron frame. The shield was the last piece to fade, the lance blazing in a final burst as a challenge to the darkness.
Campion hoped her father had seen the fireworks. She looked impetuously at Lord Culloden. “I’m going to see father.”
He frowned. “You think he’ll be awake?” She knew he meant sober.
“I’ll go and see.”
“You have some free dances?”
She looked at the card that was held by a tasselled cord to her wrist. “Major Farthingdale. Give him my apologies and say I’ll save a dance for him later.”
Culloden bowed over her hand. “Remember we have a polonaise.”
“I’ll remember.”
She walked through the hall, smiling at friends, then up the western staircase to avoid the crowds on the main flight. Two strange servants ran past her with wraps for their mistresses who wished to take the air. She wondered whether beds had been found for all the servants; more had come that she had anticipated, and then she decided she could not worry about such things on this night of music, fire and dance.
A couple were embracing in the shadow of the great Roman statue on the main landing. She smiled when she saw that they had extinguished the candles nearest them. She smiled at the women who waited by the Chinese screens erected in front of the chamberpots, and then she turned into the corridor that led to her father’s rooms. The music reached up here, fault and beautiful, like a reminder of past times in the great house.
She walked beneath the pictures of horses. Her heelless satin slippers were silent on the thick carpet. Candles in smoked glass chimneys stood on the small tables every few feet.
Her father’s manservant smiled and stood as she came into the ante-chamber. “He’s asleep, my Lady.”
“I won’t wake him, Caleb. I’ll just look.”
The Earl slept peacefully. His face, for the first time in weeks, looked calm. His breathing was gentle. The candles either side of her mother’s portrait burned steadily. Campion leaned down and touched her lips gently on his gray hair.
She would not wake him. Good sleep was a rarity for her father, and sleep as gentle as this, sleep that had taken the lines of pain from his face, was almost unknown now. She smiled at him, then walked to the farther window and stared down at the forecourt.
People strolled in the light of the great lanterns which lit the facade of the castle. On the far side of the lake, their torch flames rippling on the reflecting water, the firework men cleaning up their apparatus. On Two Gallows Hill the fires started among the thorns by the fireworks were beaten out by farm laborers hired for this night.
There was laughter beneath her and she saw three couples dance into her view. They were being applauded by the strollers on the forecourt. There was happiness down there, a great party in a great castle, and all for her marriage. She looked at her father. Was his sleep due to contentment? Was her marriage the solace of his pain-filled days? She smiled. She felt a welting surge of love for him, of pity for his pain, of gratitude.
She still smiled as she looked back at the forecourt. The dancers circled the fountain now. Someone had put a candelabra on the stone wall that held the fountain’s pool, and in its tight she could see two lovers kiss. The girl, Campion thought, leaned so willingly forward, stayed so lingeringly.
To be touched once, she thought, by that magic. Just as the fire rippled and swayed and shivered on the lake, so she wanted to know what that girl knew.
She looked left toward the town. A horseman trotted on the grass by the lake and she half frowned, thinking that one of Lord Culloden’s cavalry friends had saddled a horse for some night-time mischief, and then the rider stopped.
She knew who it was. Even in shadow the man and horse looked like one being. Only one man rode like that. He had come.
She had wanted him to come. She had wanted him to see her in her splendor. She had wanted to see his face. Nothing Achilles had said could change that. The guilt, the shame, the excitement, all mingled and seethed in her. She stared at the shadow within the shadow and she put a hand to her breast as though she wanted to quell her heartbeats.
The shadow did not move.
She turned.
She saw herself in the mirror across the room and it was as if she stare
d at a stranger. That girl in silk and feathers and gold was a girl arrayed to marry a lord. She wanted to weep suddenly, and that offended her, and she straightened her head, refused to turn back to the window, and walked slowly toward the door.
Caleb stood as she approached. He shut the door of the Earl’s bedroom softly. “You look as if you’ve seen a ghost, my Lady!”
She smiled. “No, Caleb. I think it’s just the excitement.”
“You should be excited this night, my Lady. Now you go on down. They’ll be missing you! And you do look lovely, my Lady, if you’ll forgive an old man.”
“It’s only clothes, Caleb!” She plucked at the colored Pekings.
“Ah! Get on with you! I remember you in swaddling, my Lady, and you were a picture then!”
She laughed. She went from her father’s room, back to the ball and its glory, back to the excitement which a shadowed horseman had brought so suddenly to this night.
She sipped champagne, she danced. The Bishop insisted on a minuet, raising his feet as though he was a carthorse and clumping them down in a travesty of the dance’s minute, precise, calculated movements. He boomed at her how he had spent the morning helping his groom to blister the hocks of his hunters. Campion smiled, made polite answers, and searched the crowds who lined the room’s edges. She knew the Gypsy would not come into this splendor, but she looked.
She danced with a gloomy French count, one of the exiles who kept bitter court at her grandmother’s house, who frowned at the other dancers and spoke hardly a word to her until he bowed elegantly at the music’s end. “You are to be married, my Lady?”
“Indeed, my Lord.”
“If you are bored, madame,” and he twitched the lace cuff of his threadbare sleeve, “I am always at your service. I am, of course, discreet.”
She stared in astonishment as he walked away. Her uncle laughed at her as he took her to the pillared drawing room for champagne beneath the great Vecchio ceiling. “He propositioned you?”
“I think he did, uncle.”
“That’s how he makes his living.”
“But he’s so gloomy! And ugly!”
Achilles laughed again. “I am told by my lady friends, dear niece, that he is exquisitely skilled.” He raised his eyebrows at her and presented her with champagne.
She leaned with him at the doors which opened onto the Water Garden. The gravel paths which led to the small stone bridges above the shallow, carp filled canals were busy with couples who walked, stood, talked, and kissed. Ropes had been strung from the castle to tall poles at the western edge of the garden from which hung paper Chinese lanterns.
“Exquisitely skilled.” Her uncle’s words intrigued her. She felt nothing when Lord Culloden kissed her, nothing except distaste at his moustache. She wondered what the skill would be that Achilles described, but dared not ask. She felt oddly childish. Perhaps marriage, and the duty of marriage, would initiate her into this world she did not understand, this world that she could glimpse only by half understood gesture and elegant innuendo. There was a secret, and she did not share it, and she felt that these people, even her uncle, laughed at her innocence. Then she remembered the single Christmas touch of the Gypsy and thought there was a clue in that memory to what her uncle spoke of.
She looked for the Gypsy in the Water Garden and she could not see him. She told herself that Caleb had been right. She had seen only a ghost in the shadows at the edge of her happiness. She had seen a horseman, no more, and she had decided that the horseman must be he. She had been wrong.
Achilles smiled at her. “You look forlorn, dear Campion.”
She laughed. “I have to sit with your mother.”
“Then let me not keep you from the awesome presence.”
She dutifully found her grandmother who held stately court on a small dais at one side of the ballroom. The dowager Duchess d’Auxigny felt the colored Peking dress with an ancient finger and thumb, sniffed, and supposed that it had been “cobbled in London”?
“Indeed, Grandmère.”
Her grandmother was resplendent in black silk, mourning her son who had been guillotined in Paris. The Duchess had hated her son in life, but now his death had made her a small celebrity among the émigré community. She felt qualified now to pass absolute judgment on the revolution in France, a judgment that none was allowed to question. Her liveried servant, a black band about his yellow-sleeved arm, stood a precise two feet to her left and held a bowl of prunes. The Duchess ate them slowly, leaning over to spit the stones into a silver dish held by Madame la Retiffe, her paid companion. She pointed a finger at Achilles who danced with the Marchioness of Benfleet’s small daughter. “Achilles grows more stupid every day.”
Madame la Retiffe, holding her silver dish, hissed an echo. “Stupid!”
Campion could not understand how anybody could think Uncle Achilles was stupid. “I think it’s nice of him. He always dances with the ladies who feel left out.”
Her grandmother ignored the compliment. “It is ridiculous to think of him as Duc d’Auxigny! Like an ermine wrap on a monkey!”
“Monkey!” hissed la Retiffe.
“I think he looks very distinguished,” Campion protested.
“Distinguished! Distinguished! His father was distinguished, child, not that grinning monkey. I should have drowned him at birth!” Achilles’s father had been the Mad Duke, the man who thought he was God, the man who made simple, child-like miracles to happen with clumsy, expensive machines. The Duchess spat another prune stone out of her mouth, ejecting it in a small spray of yellowed spittle. “Distinguished! Now that is what I call a distinguished man!” She smiled, caking the thick powder in her wrinkled face. “He must be a Frenchman!”
It was not a ghost, not a desire seen in the shadows.
The Gypsy had come.
The Duchess had spotted him across the room and now she simpered at the tall, handsome man who stood carelessly at the edge of the dance floor.
The Duchess was not the only woman to notice him. He was not dressed as a servant this night, but as a gentleman. His clothes were black, except for a lilac colored shirt and silk stock. His suit was elegantly cut, his hair drawn back, and his left ear was bare of the gold ring.
He was tall, slim, and he wore a full length sword instead of the small dress-swords of the other men. The women watched him over their fans. He was the handsomest man in the room and his air of arrogant self-sufficiency intrigued them.
“Who is he?” the Duchess asked.
Campion was tempted to tell her that the distinguished man she so much admired was a servant. She shrugged instead. “I don’t know.”
“Madame!” The Duchess turned to her sour, pale, thin companion. “I wish to meet him. Go.”
Madame la Retiffe put down her dish of damp stones, stepped from the low platform, and walked obediently across the floor.
The Gypsy, as the woman approached, looked past her at Campion. It seemed, at that moment, as if there were just the two of them in the crowded room, as if those odd, pale blue eyes were reading her very soul. He gave her a flicker of a smile and a hint of a bow.
“He’s seen me!” the Duchess said.
William Carline, Lazen’s steward, who moved magnificently among the guests to check that the servants were doing their duties, saw and recognized the Gypsy. He frowned. He looked at Campion, edged an offended head toward the man he knew to be a servant, and raised an eyebrow that asked whether Campion wished the man to be ejected from among his betters. She gave a tiny shake of her head. Carline, his sense of propriety wounded, stalked toward the hallway.
Uncle Achilles, pausing in the dance, saw the tiny shake of Campion’s head. He sighed. He smiled at the ten year old child he gallantly danced with. “Do you know what happens when you put a black cat in the dovecote?”
“No, sir.”
“Blood and feathers and lots of trouble!” He laughed. “I do like nonsense, my dear, I do so like nonsense!”
Madame l
a Retiffe led her prize across the floor. The heads of the women turned. Some of the servants looked astonished.
The Gypsy stopped in front of the Duchess. He gave her a bow that would have pleased Louis XIV. The old woman simpered and tapped Madame le Retiffe’s chair with her folded black fan. “You may sit beside me, monsieur.” She looked at Madame le Retiffe. “Introduce me, then!”
It seemed Madame le Retiffe had not discovered the name of the intriguing, tall man who had caused such a stir by his presence.
The Duchess looked at him. “Well, who are you?”
He looked at Campion, and the meeting of their eyes seemed to hold the breath in her body. He smiled, changing his face utterly. “The Lady Campion knows who I am.”
The old face glowered at Campion. “You said you didn’t know!”
“I don’t know his name, Grandmère.” That was not quite true. She knew him as Gitan, but that seemed more of a nickname than a name. She smiled, enjoying the moment. “I just know that he’s my brother’s groom, Grandmère.”
She could not resist saying it, not to humiliate the Gypsy, but to see the horror on her grandmother’s face when it dawned on her that she had invited a servant to sit beside her. Campion stood, ignoring the gaping, shocked mouth of her grandmother, and stepped down from the small dais. She made her face cold, her manner stiff, and she reflected that this man deserved humiliation for coming among his betters. “What are you doing here?”
“I come from your brother.” His voice was lazy and confident.
“You have a message?” She addressed him in a voice of aristocratic command, yet his face, so full of life and promise, stirred something deep inside.
He smiled. “No.” He had turned his body subtly and forced Campion to take a further step away from her grandmother so that, to the room as a whole, it seemed that the tall, black haired stranger was deep in private talk with the golden haired bride. “I have brought you his wedding gift.”
It was insufferable, yet he managed to imply that his coming with the gift was the most important part of this evening. He smiled again, and she felt her defenses breaking down. His arrogance, his charm, and the confidence on his slim, dark face, astounded her. She straightened her back. “The steward will receive it.”
The Fallen Angels Page 21
