Fallen Angels (44 page)

The cheer sounded again.

A prisoner was allowed no defence and the prosecution needed to bring no evidence. To be accused was enough. The lawyers who dominated this revolution insisted that a defence merely confused the issue. Revolutionary virtue, they said, would guarantee justice.

She looked at the crowd, at their happy faces, and she wondered if she could see the townspeople of Lazen standing like this beneath twin uprights that held a slanting blade, and she thought that truly the faces were no different. Small children, bored by the machine, chased pigeons on the cobbles. Lovers held hands. People laughed.

A man climbed the steps. He turned and called cheerful words to the prisoners behind him, and then his elbows were taken, he was swung forward, and she clung to Skavadale, gritted her teeth, and watched as the red aproned man pushed the neck clamp down, stepped back, and released the rope.

She made herself watch.

The blade was stained.

It fell slowly for the first two feet, then she heard it, she was holding her breath, and it crashed down and she saw the fountain of red that provoked the cheer, and the executioner was hauling the blade up while his assistants, one still with the rose in his mouth, released and lifted the body. Blood ran down the slant of the blade, collected, dripped.

'Oh God.' She let her breath out.

They called it sneezing into the basket. She supposed that the man who now climbed the steps, hard on the heels of the one who had just died, would lie on the plank and see, just inches beneath his gaze, the severed heads of the men and women who had been his companions a moment before, their dead eyes staring at the blood-soaked weave of the basket like fish in a creel.

The thought made her put her face into Skavadale's black coat. She heard the blade fall again.

He patted her shoulder. 'Don't show it! It's dangerous! You can die on the machine for disliking what it does.'

She forced herself to look.

The executioner had tied the blade so it was suspended two feet above the brace. He straddled the plank on which the victims were tied, wiped the blood from the blade's edge, then felt in his back trouser pocket for a stone. She heard the commonplace sound of steel being sharpened, a ringing, scraping, homely sound. Christopher Skavadale still held her shoulders. 'He takes the blade home with him.'

She frowned, uncertain what the significance of the remark was.

He smiled at her. 'Otherwise people would come here to kill themselves at night.'

'No!'

He nodded. 'Yes. Have you seen enough?'

'Too much!'

He led her away. Behind her she heard the scraping rattle, the thump, and she thought how she, too, had become used to death in just these few moments. She looked at Skavadale. 'Why did you make me watch?'

For a few steps he said nothing, then he shrugged. 'It exists. It's there. You can't ignore it.'

She wasn't sure that the answer was satisfactory. 'But you made me watch!'

He stopped. He looked into her eyes and Parisians, passing by, were struck by the man and girl and thought it a miracle that such love and beauty still lived in a city crouching beneath the stench of blood. He smiled at her. 'Does your uncle ever go into the kitchens at Lazen?'

She was used to his apparently irrelevant questions by now. She shook her head. 'No.'

'Does he ever visit the smithy?'

'No.'

'The cottages?'

'No. Why?'

'You do.'

She shrugged. 'So?'

'So who knows more about Lazen? You, who see it all? Or your Uncle Achilles, who never leaves the gilt and plasterwork.'

She smiled. 'I live there.'

'And you see it all. You can't go through life and pretend that it doesn't have bits that reek of foulness. It must be wonderful to sit at a great dinner, but is your enjoyment spoilt because you know of grease in the kitchen or blood in the slaughterhouse?'

She frowned. 'I'm not sure I understand.'

He gestured at the machine. 'It exists! It's as real as Lazen!'

She shivered despite the sunshine that warmed Paris. Are you telling me that's the alternative to Lazen?'

He smiled. 'No, my Lady. Auxigny is the alternative to Lazen. Shall we go?'

She walked through Paris with him and it seemed like a dream, an adventure, love's madness that was leading her to the heart of evil, to the Mad Duke's shrine, and to whatever lay beyond the road's ending at Auxigny.

'You know where you are?'

She nodded. Dusk was touching the trees of the valley dark, filling the spaces between the trunks with mysterious shadow. Beyond the hill was Auxigny, her mother's childhood home, the lair of the Fallen Ones.

Skavadale led her between small ricks of drying hay. She could smell the pines ahead. A colony of rooks were noisy to her left, screeching like harpies as they fought and tumbled in the air above their black nests.

They crossed a plank bridge over a small stream, and went into the woods.

They climbed towards the high crest that would reveal Auxigny. Once or twice, where rocks cropped up on the hillside to bar their way, he would give her his hand and the touch of his warm skin was comforting.

The slope became steeper and he stopped more frequently to help her. They were climbing in dark pine woods. She passed the fragile, white lattice of a dead raven, the fox-scattered black feathers still lying on the pine needles.

Skavadale was weighed down with two big leather bags, both of them roped to his left shoulder. He wore a sword. He carried two pistols and an ammunition pouch, yet he moved as easily as if he carried nothing. It had been a sharp, bright autumn day, but the effort of climbing the hill made her as hot and sticky as if it was summer.

The sky, glimpsed between the tall pines, was darkening to the east, while above her, spreading westward beyond the ridgeline, the sun reddened the thin, high clouds. Skavadale led her quickly, wanting to reach the crest before the sun disappeared.

His hand pulled her up one last barrier of tumbled stone, the sun shone huge and red into her eyes, and below her was Auxigny.

Like a secret jewel cradled by dark hills, the Chateau of Auxigny stood in the centre of its deep valley.

The light touched red on the two moats and slashed crimson on the windows of the south front. The white walls rose to the blue-black slates of the pointed turrets. She had half expected to see the chateau burned, to see the windows as black, empty holes, but it looked as it had always looked, beautiful and serene, the proud home of the Lords of Auxigny out of which armed men had ridden, laws had been issued, and justice had come like vengeance on the lesser mortals below.

It was beautiful and intricate, but seeing it now from this high crest above the tops of the pines beneath her, it seemed so very different to Lazen. Lazen sprawled, it was part of the town, it opened on to every part of the estate, while Auxigny, proud Auxigny, was secretive and aloof. There were two entrances only; the southern bridge that crossed the moat and led to the great facade, and, at the north, the bridge which led to the shrine.

The shrine, to the north of the chateau, was surrounded by its own, smaller moat.

The Mad Duke had come close to bankrupting the family to build his shrine. It reared like a grotesque fantasy on its artificial island, with walls of green marble and turrets of polished black stone that jutted about the copper-lined dome. There were no windows.

The bridge which crossed the smaller moat, the bridge leading directly to the windowless shrine, was not built of stone. It was a wooden drawbridge.

The Mad Duke had ordered the drawbridge built. The first miracle of his shrine was the order for his servants and tenants to go to worship while he ostentatiously stayed on the chateau side of the moats. The drawbridge would be drawn up and, minutes later, he would appear in the shrine. The peasants and servants would dutifully applaud his walking on the water despite their memory of digging the tunnel that led beneath both moats. The village
cure,
knowing the Duke's madness, had indulged the harmless lunacy.

Campion stared from the high crest. The chateau, this night of autumn clarity, looked splendid and unchanged, as though the machine which beat in the heart of Paris had not stained this beauty with its splashing blood.

She looked beyond the chateau, following the line of the stream to where the valley opened to the west. The small town of Auxigny guarded the valley's head. Its roofs were touched red by the setting sun so that it seemed, from their place on the mountain, as though the town glowed like great embers where the river ran past the hills.

Skavadale watched her, a half smile on his sun darkened face. 'How long since you've seen it?'

She smiled. 'Five years?'

'It hasn't changed.'

Except that it was owned by the government now, confiscated from the d'Auxignys. Uncle Achilles, she realized with surprise, was now the Lord of Auxigny, except there were no more Lords in France. She thought sadly how much he would have loved to live here. He would have filled its elegant, high rooms and wide, moat-edged lawns with music. He would have liked to be the precious jewel within the jewel of Auxigny.

Skavadale picked up the two leather bags. 'We must go on, my Lady.'

He led her left, striking obliquely down the steep slope which faced Auxigny and the setting sun. They had come from Paris by the public stage, leaving the vehicle at Bellechasse and taking this long, hidden approach across the hills. To her left reared the high peaks, rocks touched crimson above the pines, while to her right was the valley where the chateau, glimpsed between the tips of the trees, seemed like a precious doll's house far beneath her.

She could hear water ahead and knew they came close to the waterfall that glinted high over the chateau. She had never been this high in these hills. She had sometimes stared from the windows of the chateau at the high, bright fall of water and wondered where the stream came from. Her mother had told her that there was always a rainbow at Auxigny's waterfall, that when ever the sun shone the colours would dance above the spray. In her child's mind she would think of the waterfall as a far-off, magic place, like a glimpse of heaven above her head.

She came to the waterfall now, to where the water seethed into a pool carved from the stone by the force of its fall, then split into a rock-strewn course that foamed down the hillside to feed the moats of Auxigny.

Beside the pool was a grassy clearing. There was a long, low hut built against the rock face, an affair of pine branches roofed with turf. It was a summer shelter for shepherds, a refuge from the wolves and the weather. Skavadale smiled. 'Your home tonight.' She noticed the care with which he chose his words. Her home, not his. He would sleep outside, as he had guarded her door each night since they had left the Rom.

He had brought food, water and wine. Within the hut was old bracken for a mattress. Outside, where the grass gave way to a rock ledge that overlooked the valley Skavadale lit a fire, working as ever with economy and skill, teasing the flames, feeding them, so that as the sun spilt its last glorious light on the far rim of the world they sat by the burning pine-cones and watched the darkness cover the land beneath.

She smiled at his profile. 'Should we have a fire?'

'They'll think we're shepherds bringing a herd from the summer pastures.'

There was a rabbit to eat, with bread, cheese and wine. They sat at the edge of the clearing, where the slab of rock still held the heat of the sun. Behind them the water roared in its endless, seething fall.

Auxigny had disappeared. No lights came from the building that had once blazed with light, no fires warmed the magnificent rooms of gold and white.

The town was lit. Campion could see the small, wavering points of flame that showed where torches burned. One small light crept achingly slow along the hidden line of a road, a coach coming late into Auxigny.

They had been oddly silent as they ate.

She knew why. They had travelled across France and, in all that time, it had been as if their meeting in Lazen's temple had never happened. Yet this silence proclaimed that it was not forgotten. As slowly, as inexorably as that light crawled along the dark road towards the town below, she knew that they had waited for this moment.

She knew it, and because she knew it, she made her voice casual. 'Tell me what happens tomorrow.'

'Again?' He smiled.

She gestured towards the hidden chateau. 'It seems more real now.'

'You're frightened?'

She smiled. 'No, Mr Skavadale. I come to France so often these days. I quite frequently act as a lure for a mad pack of killers.'

He laughed softly. He lit one of his small cigars and the light touched red on his strong face. Tomorrow, he said, they would go down from the mountain and she would wait in the woods while he found Toby. Toby was hiding in Auxigny, waiting for their arrival.

She thought how polite they had been for these days, It was if they had silently agreed not to talk of that night in Lazen's park. Only once, as the guillotine rose and fell behind her, had he obliquely made any mention of it. They had been polite, treating each other with a delicate formality.

And by now, he said, Toby should have unblocked the old tunnel by which the Mad Duke walked on water. And tomorrow night, while the Fallen Ones watched Campion in the lit shrine, Toby would come from the gloom of the crypt to kill from behind while Skavadale killed from in front.

Will there be soldiers?'

He shook his head. 'No.' He drew on his cigar and she watched the smoke fade in the air over the valley. He shrugged. 'A few, maybe.'

'A few?'

'Marchenoir's an important man. He'll want to impress his home town with an escort, but they won't trouble us. They won't know about the Fallen Ones, and they won't be allowed into the shrine.'

'And how do we leave?'

He laughed. 'We walk out, of course. We show our papers and we simply walk out.'