Fallen Angels (51 page)

But Dagon was dead, his throat sliced so that his great head hung bloody in the crypt, and the man who held the gun turned it on Lucifer and Campion laughed aloud.

He had red curls, unruly and uncut, and he grinned at her with the same old mischief and delight. 'Hello, sister.'

Le Revenant
had come back from the dead, and Campion, the sudden blood and horror wiped out by his presence, ran to him, eyes bright, laughing, and put her arms about his neck. 'Toby! Toby!'

Skavadale took the big, brass-mouthed gun from Toby's hand. Campion hugged her brother. 'Toby!'

He had tears in his eyes, tears of joy, and he laughed because he seemed unable to say anything. With rough affection he stroked her head with hands scraped coarse by tearing down the stubborn stones of the blocked passage.

Behind them, like a broken animal trailing a red slime, Marchenoir pulled himself over the floor. He looked up at Toby Lazender and knew that this was his enemy come back from the grave. Marchenoir, forgetting that he had preached a dead God, crossed himself.

Christopher Skavadale, the gun held easy in one hand, walked to Lucifer.

The silver-clad arms tried to fend him off, but he was helpless against the Gypsy's strength. Skavadale pushed the cowl back and Campion, at last, saw her enemy.

This was the man who, with a subtle thread, had drawn her over the sea.

Toby let go of Campion. He turned on Lucifer who, without his hood, looked ludicrous, like an awesome judge who, stripped of his wig, is seen to be a frightened, weak man. Toby frowned. 'Why?'

Lucifer said nothing. He looked from Toby to Campion, back to Toby. He had thought Toby dead, and now, seeing him alive, he knew that he had been outplayed by a cleverer hand. He shook his head, as if the gesture of denial would make Toby go away. 'No! No!' There was horror on Lucifer's face, the face of a man outwitted who prided himself on his wits. 'No!'

Toby pushed the silver-robed man, making him stumble against Larke's body. 'Why?' His voice was louder. 'Why?'

The man in silver went back from the anger, back into the main chamber, down the marble steps to his bleeding half-brother, the son of the town whore, the half-brother with whom, in Auxigny's shadow, he had found a childhood companion in resentment and with whom he had learned mischief and learned mischief's pleasure that became evil. He looked at Toby. 'You would not understand!'

Beneath his silver glove Campion could see the lump made by the ring that had belonged to the Bishop of Bellechasse.

'Why?' Toby shouted again.

Uncle Achilles ignored him. He pointed at Campion. 'You! I warned you! I told you not to come, but you had to come!' He laughed suddenly, the sound like a flare of madness in a marble chamber built for madness. 'I knew you would disobey. I told you, but you wouldn't listen! Society? You wouldn't enter it. You're a woman, but you work like a housekeeper! You're not worthy! I warned you but you preferred him!' He pointed at the Gypsy, and his head shook in a spasm of disgust. 'I tried to save you! I tried! But you wanted your own way!' He screamed this last at her.

Toby, Campion, and the Gypsy stood silent, transfixed by the sudden frenzy. Achilles, with a curious gesture of pride, twitched his silver robe into place and looked at Toby. 'Do you know what your precious sister is doing? She's rogering a gypsy! Did you know that, Earl of Lazen? That your sister is being tupped by the servants' hall? By a peasant! She forfeited her nobility with her virginity!' He pointed at Skavadale. 'To that!'

Toby said nothing. He stared at the raving man who had always seemed so gentle and cynical, but who now spat his words in a shrieking, shrill voice. 'I told her not to come, but she would have her own way, wouldn't you?' He looked at Campion. 'I always knew how to manipulate you. I would tell you one thing to make you do the other. You could have been a queen, but no! You had to bed yourself with that!'

'Uncle!' Campion's cry was not in protest. It was a cry of pain and affection as if she saw a sick man, but he shook his head at her and raised a silver-gloved hand against her tentative step forward.

'Don't call me uncle! You're not noble! You don't have nobility in England! It's bastard blood, tainted! You don't know what civilization is.' The hand pointed at Toby. 'Earl of Lazen! Look at you! In Auxigny you wouldn't be fit to scrub stone!' He suddenly shouted as if in great pain. 'I wanted Lazen! I would have made it beautiful! I would have made it a refuge in this world, the one place where music and poetry and refinement could live! I would have given England an aristocracy! I would have dazzled your peasant country, your crude King, your beer-sodden people, your sottish women, your sluts, your whores, your fox hunting fools!' The last was spat out. He looked with disgust at Campion. 'Look at her! The English got to her, didn't they? In love with a gypsy! She's not fit to open her legs to an ape. I would have made Lazen great!'

Marchenoir looked up at the man who was his half-brother, who had been his companion in boyhood bitterness, who had been his Bishop. 'It was all for you? Just for you?'

'Don't be a fool, Bertrand.' Achilles' voice was suddenly and curiously affectionate. 'I gave you what you wanted, I gave you Auxigny!' He laughed suddenly, his eyes bright. 'Auxigny should have been mine. I was fit for it! I could have made Auxigny into the brightest jewel of the finest aristocracy in the world, but no! I was the youngest son! I was the monkey who should have been drowned at birth! I was fobbed off on the church!' He was shouting again. He pointed at Toby. 'You don't deserve Lazen! She doesn't! She's a whore! Making the two-backed beast with a gypsy! Where's the grace? The exquisite detail? Tell me?' He asked the questions with a terrible intensity.

Toby looked horrified. 'You're mad!'

'Mad? I fooled all of you!' He stopped, his eyes going from one to the other, his head suddenly jerking in denial because he had been fooled too. 'Mad? Look at her! She's mad! In love with a peasant! Love?' Achilles laughed. 'Messy love? Sweat on the sheets? Spilling, sticky, messy, slippery, filthy, sweaty love?' The anger came again. 'Your place was to be beautiful! To be a woman, a mystery, a gesture with a jewelled hand, a smile! Not heaving on a peasant's body, sliding in his slime!'

Toby went down the steps. He shook his head. 'You could have lived at Lazen, uncle.'

'Lived! And listened to your endless talk of horses! Horses! What does the English aristocracy think it is? Do you think of nothing but horses and farming?' He backed away from Toby. 'There's no manners in England, no elegance, no fineness. I could have given it to you! I could have brought it to you like a gift, you could have shone in the world like a great crown, the inheritor of all that those bastards took away from us here. And you spoilt it!' He cried it in mad agony in this marble hall built for madness.

Campion stared at him in horror. 'You ordered me raped!'

'Jesus Christ!' He looked at her with pure scorn. 'You were throwing Lazen away! Your footmen slouch! It had to be saved!' His voice was rising again. 'There has to be one place where the best of our world can live and grow and dazzle. Don't you understand? If you had gone into society, girl, if you had tried to be worthy of it, I would have let you live! How many chances did I give you? How many? Go to London, I said, but no!' He wailed the last word, his head shaking, and then he stared at the horror in her eyes and gave a casual laugh of pure insanity. 'Rape? Yes. Yes. You should have been raped. Your brother should be dead. But I would have looked after you!' He nodded eagerly at Campion. 'It was a small price for the glory of Lazen, don't you see that? But with a gypsy? A peasant?'

Bertrand Marchenoir, his robe stiff with blood, stared up at Lucifer. 'My mother was a peasant!'

'Don't be a fool, Bertrand!' Achilles laughed. 'It's not the same for men! Men can spawn what they like, but women are different!'

Marchenoir shook his head. 'You betrayed us!'

'Betrayed you! Betrayed? I gave you France, Bertrand. All I wanted was Lazen!'

Toby stepped closer. 'You're mad, uncle, you're like your father.'

Achilles stared at Toby with disdain, looking from Toby's unruly hair down to his shabby boots. 'I am a duke.' He said it with great dignity, then raised his hand to point at Campion. 'And she is a whore.'

'You're just a mad bastard.' They were the first words Christopher Skavadale had spoken in minutes, and the sound of his strong, careless voice seemed to jar Uncle Achilles. He looked at the huge gun in the Gypsy's hand and suddenly, with a swirl of his silver robes, he turned and ran to the doors of the shrine. 'Colonel! Colonel!' His voice echoed from the lobby where he struggled with the huge metal ring-latch. 'Colonel!'

Skavadale moved with his cat-like speed. He crossed the sunken floor, past the blood trail, and he stopped at the inner doors and raised the gun. 'Lucifer!'

Lucifer turned his head. He stared into the oddly light eyes of the man he had thought he was using for his ambition. He shook his head and the Gypsy fired.

The scraps of iron lifted Achilles up and slammed him against the huge bronze doors that his mad father had put there.

The silver robe was twitched flat on his body. It was spotted with scarlet.

His head, silver hair flecked with his blood, was thrown back.

He sighed, he slid, and his twitching, gloved hands smeared trails through the blood on the bronze doors.

He fell, he rolled on his back, and his belly, where the iron scraps had torn free, looked as if dogs had torn at him. He had been opened from the crotch to his neck, he was ragged tatters of silk and blood and bone and flesh. He was the last Duc d'Auxigny, who had thought himself Lucifer, and he was dead.

—«»—«»—«»—

Colonel Tours, standing beyond the drawbridge, heard the shot and heard the rattle of metal on the bronze doors. One of his Captains frowned. 'Should we go and look?'

'Christ, no!' Tours shivered. He had been ordered to be curious about nothing, to do nothing, to wait. His men were tight about the small moat. Above him the clouds were silvered by the thin moon.

'We wait, Captain.' He wondered who the girl was. If he rose high enough in the hierarchy of power, he thought, then perhaps he too could afford a girl like that.

They waited.

—«»—«»—«»—

Christopher Skavadale threw the gun down. 'I'm putting my own clothes on.'

Toby nodded. He was staring at his uncle. He did not look round as Skavadale left the great chamber.

He turned only when Skavadale had gone. He walked past the wounded, bleeding Marchenoir and climbed the steps to his sister. 'Is it true?'

'Is what true?'

'You and Gitan?'

She looked into his eyes. She did not know what he was thinking. She nodded. 'Yes.'

Toby frowned. He was suddenly the sixth Earl of Lazen, the head of the family, and in his voice was astonishment. 'You're his lover?'

She put defiance into her voice. 'I'm going to marry him.'

Toby said nothing for a few seconds. His face was grim. 'Marry Gitan?'

'I'm going to marry him.' She said it stubbornly. 'I don't care what the world thinks. I'm going to marry him.'

'Do you know what you're doing?'

'Yes.'

'You do? You've thought about it?'

'Damn thought!' She was angry suddenly. 'I love him!'

He seemed to sigh. He shook his head. 'You don't know what you're doing, sister, truly you don't.'

'Tell me.' She said it sharply.

'You're marrying a man of no birth.' He saw her stiffen and ignored it. 'Of no name, apart from a name given him by an eccentric Lord. A man of no fortune and no standing.' He paused. 'Isn't that so?'

She shrugged. 'I don't care.'

He put his hands on her shoulders and she shook them off. He went on in the same tone of voice. 'You're marrying the strongest man I know, who doesn't stoop to malice or cheapness. Other men judge themselves by him and find themselves wanting.' He smiled into her upturned face which slowly dawned with the realization that he had teased her. 'You're also marrying the best damned horseman in the world so I won't have to pay for his advice. And you're marrying the luckiest bastard that ever lived.' He kissed her on the nose. 'That's what you're doing. And why are you crying? You know I can't stand women who cry.'

'I'm not crying.' She hugged him.

He laughed at her. 'He even asked my permission. I thought it was most polite.'

'When?'

'After he first saw you.'

'He did?' She smiled. 'What did you say?'

'That if he was mad enough to want you, he was welcome to you.'

She laughed. Happiness seethed in her like the mountain pool beneath the waterfall, then she thought of the happiness that had been denied to her brother. 'And what will you do, Toby?'

He shrugged. 'I think I want Paunceley's job.'

'You do?'

'I shall come and visit the two of you and you can envy me.' He smiled at her. 'Or I you, whatever.' He let go of her, walked to the table, and picked from the wooden box the largest of Marchenoir's knives. He stared at it, then gave her a smile. 'But before all that, I have one more thing to do, just one.' He turned the blade so that it flashed in the candlelight. 'Perhaps you'd better join Gitan?'

She nodded. She looked at Marchenoir. He was her half-uncle, his bitterness sprung from the same mad root as Achilles' envy. She was suddenly glad that Gitan was so sensible, so strong. If the world would not accept him as her husband, then that was the world's loss.

She walked down the passage. She heard her brother say the name Lucille and she flinched as a scream echoed in the marble hall and was abruptly cut short. It was done.

—«»—«»—«»—

They left through the tunnel when midnight was past. The soldiers who guarded the gatehouse recognized Skavadale as one of the privileged friends of Bertrand Marchenoir. They knew better than to ask who his companions were.

Toby led them westward, away from the hills, going to where he had horses hidden for their escape. They rode towards the sea and the ship that would take them home. They stopped as the dawn blazed from the mountains and they turned to look behind them. The seals of Lazen hung in the sunlight, glorious and safe, and Campion, thinking of the tall, golden woman of the Nymph portrait, thought how the fortune of Lazen had been founded by love and now preserved by it.