Fallen Angels (33 page)

'No.' She looked defiantly at him. 'I was feeling faint.'

Solemnly he raised the hand which bore the ring of the Bishop of Bellechasse.
'Te absolvo.
You are the worst liar I know, Campion Lazender.'

She felt ashamed. She could not look at him. 'Nothing happened, uncle.'

'Of course not. You're not that foolish!' Achilles smiled. 'Poor Campion. Do you find your Prince very appealing?'

For some reason the line from Pascal came into her head and she quoted it softly. 'The heart has reasons that reason doesn't know.'

Achilles laughed. 'My dear child! Pascal, eh? You do have a bad attack, don't you? Pascal is so eloquent, so charming! Man is the fallen King! How we fear the infinite far spaces! And what does it all boil down to? To nothing. Pascal was a small man who dared not let go of God's apron strings. Dear, dear Campion, what reasons can the heart have that will remove the awkward fact that your Gypsy is just that, a gypsy! A servant! A peasant!'

'He's more than that!'

'Oh.' Achilles mocked her. 'Do tell me.'

She shrugged. 'He works with Toby, not for him. He works for Lord Paunceley, like you do!'

Achilles stared at her, frowning. 'He told you that?'

She nodded.

His voice was suddenly chilling. 'If he told you that, then he was being very foolish. Does he aspire to you? He told you to impress you, yes?' She said nothing. He looked at her profile, bent towards the table, and his voice was harsh. 'You have to give him up, Campion.'

'I know.' She said it feebly, unhappily. She had hoped against hope that Uncle Achilles would understand, yet she knew that Christopher Skavadale was not of her birth. For all his scorn of convention, Uncle Achilles could not blind himself to that brutal fact.

Achilles stared into the night. 'You will forget your Gypsy. You will rule your heart's reasons, Campion, and I will never embarrass you by talking of him again. We shall pretend that this conversation has not taken place.' He smiled as she looked at him. 'Are we agreed, favourite niece of mine?'

She smiled sadly. 'Agreed.'

'So!' He blew a smoke ring. 'Do I have to inflict the tedious Scrimgeour on you? He will be unctuous, he will be insistent, and he will give you a hundred good reasons why you must marry and marry quickly. Do you want to talk with him?'

She shook her head. 'No.'

'Then you must talk to me.'

She sighed. 'I know what you're going to say.'

'How boringly predictable you must find me.'

She smiled. 'I'm sorry, uncle.' She stood. She walked slowly to the gallery's western end, turned, and stared at him where he sat so elegant and neat in the candlelight. 'You want me to marry Lewis, uncle.' She said it flatly.

'I don't care if you marry the King of Prussia, my dear, but I care that you're married and married well. Lewis is convenient, he serves your purpose. Your purpose is not love. Your purpose is property. You don't have to share a pillow with him, just make sure that if you have a child it looks vaguely like him.' He laughed.

She ran a finger down the golden seals at her breast. 'Do you want an answer now?'

'I couldn't bear an answer now. You're altogether too emotional, you would undoubtedly weep, and I would be forced to go to bed with a guilty conscience.' He smiled. 'However, the day after tomorrow I shall return to London, doubtless with the egregious Scrimgeour beside me, and I would like to know by then.'

'That soon?'

'And if the answer is yes, dear niece, then I shall be back in two weeks to lead you to the altar.'

'Two weeks!'

He stood. 'I've never thought you foolish, Campion. You're one of the few people I know worthy to be a relative of mine, so think about it, be sensible, and give me your answer tomorrow.' He spoke kindly, even lovingly, but with stern purpose.

She stared at him, then nodded. 'I will tell you tomorrow.' She turned to the window, staring into the shadows of the night for the dark horseman who would come back, but the shadows were empty. She was alone.

—«»—«»—«»—

In the Vendee the rebellion was being crushed. The government was winning.

They won by ruthlessness, by burning the crops, poisoning the wells, and slaughtering the peasants. If they slaughtered all, they reasoned, then they would be bound to kill the guilty. God, as a Pope had once said, could sort the innocent from the rest.

The guillotine never stopped in Nantes. The blade rose and fell to the sound of the crowd's pleasure.

The machine of death had to be fed. The peasants from the rebellious Vendee were a constant supply, yet some people yearned for the old days when the well-dressed aristos had been dragged up the steps to be laid on the soaked board. And on that same night when Campion spoke with her uncle in Lazen's Long Gallery, there was hope, at last, that a real aristo would be brought for the crowd's amusement.

A man had come to claim the reward for
Le Revenant,
for the English Earl who fought in France, for Toby Lazender. The man, on a dank evening, guided a column of troops through a dripping, silent pine forest towards the village where
Le Revenant
had his hiding place.

The Colonel who had been an army butcher no longer led the troops. His report on the bungling at Saint Gilles had guaranteed his death, a report written by a Captain Tours who was now a full Colonel and took care to write his own reports. Colonel Tours commanded the troops on their slow, dusk approach.

Colonel Tours' troops were ill trained. They feared the rebels who had such fatal expertise in ambushes and sudden death. The soldiers moved slowly. Night threatened to end the operation by imposing chaos on the half-trained men.

Tours had hoped to surround the village and then slowly tighten his cordon of bayonets and bullets. Yet the onset of night forced him to abandon the plan. As the shadows stretched long in the dusk he ordered an immediate and frontal attack.

He had been fortunate so far. Not one sentry had been in the pine trees and his men had reached the lip of the valley unseen. He stressed to the officers that the attack must be fast, that the men must carry their bayonets quickly to the enemy, that speed would win this battle.

He shouted them forward.

A ragged line of uniformed men burst from the tree line and ran across the small, damp fields. Hedges slowed them, as did their lack of shoes and the gnawing hunger in their bellies, yet Tours drove them towards the small village where panic could be seen in the torchlit street.

The first muskets twinkled at the village edge, bright sparks in the twilight that left small clouds of drifting white smoke. The noise of the balls fluttering overhead made some of the troops dive to the ground.

'Get up, you bastards! Up!'

More muskets fired from the village. Tours swore. He could see the villagers escaping, running into the safety of the further hills. He shouted at his men to hurry.

A musket ball clanged on his scabbard, another tore at the leaves of a hedge behind him. 'Fire! Fire!'

The troops fired a massive volley. The noise rolled like crackling thunder, echoing back from the hills, and then the thunder seemed to grow, to fill the air, and, as he burst through the bank of smoke left by the volley, Tours saw that a house had exploded in the village. 'Go! Go!'

He guessed that one of his men's musket balls had struck a lantern that had spilt onto a powder barrel. Whatever, the shot had caused the explosion and the explosion had taken the heart from the village's defenders. They were running.

Tours
felt an immense anger.
Le Revenant
would escape again, and the last soldier who had let
Le Revenant
escape had climbed the wooden stairs of Nantes' guillotine. 'On, you bastards, on!'

The troops, panting from the charge, ran ragged into the village's single street.

They took no prisoners, there were none to take. The rebels had fled.

There was scarcely anything to plunder, only some coarse bread, some cheese, a goat, some wasp-eaten apples, and two dozen chickens.

The house that had exploded burned fiercely, the rafters collapsing in a shower of sparks. The heat was extraordinary, making the men stay a good thirty yards from the roaring flames. At least one man had died in the explosion, for his body lay close to the back door of the house, the man's head almost beneath the fallen, white hot roof beams.

Colonel Tours was not interested in the dead man. He cursed his own men, cursed their failure, tried to think of a glib excuse that would persuade Citizen Marchenoir in Paris why they had failed again.

His men did not care about Citizen Marchenoir. They cared for the good boots they could see on the corpse. Good boots were a rarity in the France of liberty.

They found a hook in one of the village barns, a rope in a stable, and they tossed the roped hook to snag the corpse before the fire destroyed those good boots.

They had to throw the hook a dozen times before it caught in the dead man's clothes. They pulled the corpse back from the scorching, terrible flames and eager hands reached for the fine leather riding boots. They had agreed to cast lots for them.

The top half of the corpse was horribly burned, the head and shoulders almost shrivelled to half their size and blackened by the flames.

Tours watched them. He was tempted to order them to give him the fine boots, but what use were boots to a doomed man?

'Colonel! Colonel!' One of his officers was shouting. 'Colonel!'

'What is it!'

The Captain brought Tours a sword that had been hidden beneath the half-shrivelled body.

The hilt was still hot. The snakeskin grip had been browned by the heat. Tours drew it.

It was a lovely, lethal weapon. The steel shone in the brilliant light of the fire. The officers looked enviously at the Colonel.

The blade was engraved. Tours held it so that the light struck at an angle and peered at the design. He saw a coat of arms, lavishly rich, supported by armoured knights and surmounted by a coroneted beast. Beneath it was a motto, two words of English, 'Dare All'.

The shield bore a smeared lance-head, the sign of Lazen, and slowly, unbelievably, it dawned on Colonel Tours who the dead man was.

In a French village, looted and gutted, beside a house that burned itself to fine ash, Colonel Tours was looking at the body of Lazen's sixth Earl.

There would be no coronet in his grave, no dusty plumes on his horses, no velvet for his pall.

Le Revenant
was dead.

—«»—«»—«»—

The next evening, as they waited for dinner, Campion surprised the three men by saying she was not hungry. She took a bottle of wine, a glass, and walked out of the Castle. Mrs Hutchinson tried to follow her, but Campion insisted on being alone. She went to the temple.

She sat on the wall and stared at the incised zodiac.

She had argued with herself for so long. She believed in the magic of love, that the stars could fall to silver a world, yet duty mocked her belief.

Duty was marriage. There was no need to love, only a need to make the lawyers happy, to preserve the house.

She thought of Skavadale. She thought how her body had shuddered when he touched her. She thought of his arms about her, the kiss, she thought of his words that he had himself mocked, but said all the same. Stars in her eyes, lilies at her feet, and love in her hands.

Yet the arguments spilt like water held in her hands. If Toby died then Sir Julius would crawl out from wherever he hid in his foulness and she knew that she could not spend her life fending him off or protecting the treasures of the house against him and his friends. She would need a man.

And if Toby did not die? Then she could not marry a gypsy, a man known to the house as a groom. She wondered why not.

She smiled into the sunset and spoke aloud. 'I can do whatever I like.'

But the words sounded strange to her. She had duties. She had been reared, not to extravagance and careless fancy, but to responsibilities. You live in this house, her father had told her, because you deserve to.

She thought of the Gypsy's promise.

She thought of her own promise.

She stood.

She held the bottle over the steps, paused, and tilted it. She watched the wine fall like a libation to the old gods, the gods who had made a creature fairer than the dawn, and then abandoned it.

Cartmel Scrimgeour, standing with Lord Culloden in the window of the Music Room, frowned. 'What is She doing?'

The answer was a discord played on the spinet, a sound that made both men turn round.

'She's growing up,' Achilles d'Auxigny said. 'She's discovering that the world isn't a warm cradle, but a great cold, horrid, open vastness. She'll cry when she sees it. Any child would cry if they could see the waste spaces of adulthood. Childhood's end, Scrimgeour. Childhood's end.'

The lawyer laughed. 'I'm sure I don't understand you at all!'

'I'm French,' Achilles said in curt explanation. He closed the lid on the keyboard and walked into the evening to meet his niece.

She told him she would marry Lord Culloden in two weeks' time.

He put one arm about her shoulders and led her to a back door of the Castle. He took her that way so that no one should see her tears.

She would be married.

Old men dozed.

Young men yawned and wondered which drawing-room they would conquer the next day.

A knight from the shires snored gently, his ample belly rising and falling. Flies walked among the horse hairs of the Speaker's wig.

It was an autumn evening, yet the heat in Britain's House of Commons was as oppressive as on any midsummer night. Great mats had been hung at the open windows, mats soaked in aromatic liquids to fight the stench of the River Thames.

'Believe me!' The voice rose in the chamber. 'Those who attempt to level, never equalize!' There were a few murmurs of agreement. Some of the opposition slumped lower on their benches. Valentine Larke was one who murmured agreement.