FALLEN ANGELS
BERNARD CORNWELL

and

SUSANNAH KELLS

Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain 1983

Copyright © Bernard Cornwell 1983

Cover design by Holly Macdonald © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018 Cover images © Stephen Dorey - Bygone Images / Alamy Stock Photo (scene); Shutterstock.com (texture)

Bernard Cornwell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content or written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

Source ISBN: 9780007176427

Ebook edition June 2008 ISBN: 9780007290031

Version: 2019-05-28

Note to Readers

This ebook contains the following accessibility features which, if supported by your device, can be accessed via your ereader/accessibility settings:

 Change of font size and line height

 Change of background and font colours

 Change of font

 Change justification

 Text to speech

Fallen Angels is for Sean and Kerry

‘… the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists and calculators, has succeeded: and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.’

‘Our antagonist is our helper.’

Edmund Burke, 1729–1797

From Reflections on the Revolution in France Published 1790

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Note to Readers

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by Bernard Cornwell

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

Death’s kingdom is the night. When the church bell strikes the small hours, when the owls hunt, when the land is black with night; death reigns.

They are the witching hours, when castle and cottage are closed against the dark, yet cannot stop the reaper who comes to grin his skull-grin and give the gravedigger employment.

At such an hour, on a night furious with storm, the Lady Campion Lazender woke into nightmare.

A scream woke her. She heard hooves on the gravel and a man shouting. His words were snatched to oblivion by the wind and rain that slashed dark at the Castle’s windows.

Edna, the maid whose scream had jarred Campion awake, pounded on the door. ‘My Lady! My Lady!’

‘I’m awake!’ Campion was already pulling a woollen gown over her nightclothes.

Edna opened the door. She held a candle and her face was as white as its wax. ‘He’s bleeding, my Lady. He fell!’ Her voice was half sobbing, half scared.

‘Has the doctor been sent for?’ Campion’s voice was calm. She led the maid through the ante-chamber, out into the long corridor. ‘Has he?’

‘I don’t know, my Lady.’

Servants, woken by the commotion, watched in the passages. Campion smiled at them, knowing they needed reassurance. The single candle, half shielded by Edna’s hand, threw strange shadows on the high marble pillars and on the painted ceilings of the great rooms.

Campion ran barefooted up the marble staircase that led to the Upper Gallery. The longcase clock struck two.

The lights were brighter in this part of the Castle. Servants had lit candles and their flickering flames showed the open door of her father’s rooms.

Campion stepped over a flax sheet, bright with blood, into her father’s bedroom. Her father was on the floor. There was blood on the carpet, on the bed, and on the hands of the servants. Her father’s terrible, sunken, dying face seemed paler than ever. His eyes were shut.

‘What happened?’

Caleb, her father’s manservant, answered. ‘Fell out of bed, my Lady.’

On the table beside the bed was a spilt bottle of brandy. Doubtless, she thought, he had tried with his one good arm to reach for it to dull the pain that tormented him, and somehow his paralysed body had fallen.

She knelt beside him, took his hand and stroked his cheek. His face was a grimace of pain. He moaned, but he seemed insensible to her presence. She dropped his hand and lifted the blanket that Caleb had put over the leg’s stump.

The Earl of Lazen had been paralysed these fifteen years, a strong man brought to pain and sickness and nightmares by a falling horse. Just one week ago the surgeons had taken off a leg because the gangrene had come in his foot.

‘It opened up, my Lady,’ Caleb Wright said. She could see that the servant had twisted a silken bed cord about the thigh to staunch the bloodflow.

‘Lift him onto the bed,’ Campion said. She helped, and her father moaned as they put his wasted, light body onto the mattress. She put the blanket back over him. ‘The doctor’s coming?’

‘Yes, my Lady,’ Caleb said.

She stroked her father’s face. ‘Father? Father?’ But he could not hear her. She wondered how much blood he had lost. His breathing was slow, his chest hardly rising and falling, and she could scarcely feel the beat of his heart when she put her hand on his neck. She bent over and kissed him.

The wind rattled rain on the window by his bed. For fifteen years the Earl had looked on his estates through that window, and, through all those long seasons of his dying, his daughter had been his consolation and his joy.

She was called Lady Campion Lazender and, on this September night of 1792, she was twenty-four years old. She had been given beauty as few are given beauty, yet she seemed unaware of the gift. She was slim and tall, with pale gold hair that was the colour of fine wheat two weeks before harvest. She had a face that was swift to smile, and her quick spirit flashed like sunlit gold in the huge halls and sickness-haunted rooms of Lazen Castle.

She could have been in London; she could have danced in palaces and taken tribute from every hopeful son, yet she would not leave Lazen. Her father was sick, her brother absent, and she had taken the reins of Lazen into her slim hands and it was she who was its ruler now. She was sensible, practical, and decisive. She could talk to ploughmen or lawyers, millers or magistrates, and every man left her presence a little bit in love and ready to believe that Lazen was not cursed.

There was a belief that the Castle was cursed.

The Earl was dying, drunk when he was awake, racked by pain when he awoke.

The Countess was dead, killed giving birth to a stillborn child.

The eldest son, who would have inherited Lazen, had been burned to death with his wife and child.

Lazen, the house of fortune, seemed cursed in all things but its daughter.

A servant piled coals on the fire. Campion still held her father’s hand and she stroked his face as if she could drive her love through his insensibility. She prayed for the doctor to come quickly, that her father would not die, that he would live, at the very least, long enough to see Toby married.

Toby was her brother, the new heir, Viscount Werlatton. He was in Paris, a member of the British Embassy there, and now that the French had imprisoned their King and the revolution was turning bloodier by the day, he was coming home. He was bringing a bride with him, a dark-haired French girl of winsome and fragile beauty. There would be babies soon in Lazen and Campion was glad. Lazen needed babies, and she prayed that this pale, bleeding man would live to see them.

There was the sound of running footsteps, she turned, and William Carline, the Castle’s ponderous steward, appeared breathless at the door. ‘My Lady?’

‘What is it?’ She knew it was bad news. She could tell by his face, paler than ever, and by the flicker of panic that ran like lightning among the servants.

‘It’s Doctor Fenner, my Lady. He’s not home. They say he’s gone to Millett’s End.’ Carline’s voice trailed away.

All the servants stared at her. She was twenty-four and on her slim shoulders rested this great house and all its possessions.

She lifted the blanket to look at the stump of her father’s leg. She thought there was more blood on the linen, and she knew her father was going to die unless she acted swiftly. ‘Carline?’

‘My Lady?’

‘I want you to go to the stables, please, wake Burroughs, and ask for the horse needles and thread.’

He blinked, then nodded. ‘Yes, my Lady.’

‘I want water, Caleb.’ She was trying to think of what else she would need. Candles, linen, and courage.

Her maid stared wide-eyed at her. ‘You’re going to sew him up, my Lady?’

‘And you’re going to help me.’

The storm had blown itself out by the time she had finished. She had untied the crude bandage, washed the stump, tied the broken artery, then, taking the flap of skin, stitched it into place. She had worked from instinct, doing what seemed to be necessary, frowning when the fragile skin tore under the thread’s pull. Edna had held a candle close to her hands while Caleb and another servant held her father still.

Now, the room thick with the smell of lymph and blood, she untied the silken bed cord from her father’s thigh. She watched in fear as the white skin flushed red with the released blood, the flush going ever closer to the newly closed wound, but, to her relief, the stitches held. A few drops seeped, but nothing more.

Her father would live, to know more pain and to count the slow hours of death’s kingdom. Yet, Campion knew, he would also live to see his son come home with a bride to fill the Castle with new life, fresh laughter, and the bright hope of glittering days that would obscure the memories of these dark nights.

Her father slept. Campion carried the hooked horse needles and gut out of the door, and the servants, who waited outside, looked to her for reassurance. She smiled at them. ‘All’s well, and thank you all.’

She walked slowly back to her rooms. She was Lady Campion Lazender, she was twenty-four, lovely as the dawn, and she had woken to a nightmare. Yet this night, in his own kingdom, she had cheated the reaper with his skull-grin, defeated him by her courage, but he would be back. He always came back. She warmed her hands by her fire, waited for the sunrise, and prayed for her brother to come home from Paris.

1

Fear, like the rumour of plague, can empty a city’s streets.

Paris, on that hot September evening of 1792, seemed empty. The citizens stayed behind closed doors as though, after a week of slaughter, they were suddenly ashamed of the horrors they had fetched on their city. There was a silence in Paris, not an absolute quiet, but a strange, almost reverent, hush in which a raised voice seemed out of place.

Fear, on that evening, smelled like a charnel house.

Four horsemen rode through the streets. There was a menace in the sound of their hooves, a menace that made the hidden, listening citizens hold their breath until the sound passed. Death had become a commonplace that week, not decent death at sickness’s end, but the death of the slaughterhouse. The hollow sound of the hooves was urgent, as if the horsemen had business with the horrors that had choked Paris’s gutters with blood.

It was a hot evening. If it had not been for the stink in the city it would have been a beautiful evening. The roofs were outlined with startling clarity against a water-colour sky. Clouds banded the west where the sun, like a huge, blood-red globe, was suspended over the horizon.

The whole summer of 1792 had been hot. The soldiers who had gone north to fight the invading Austrians and Prussians had marched through Paris with a grime of sweat and dust caked on their faces. Rumour said that those soldiers were now losing the war on France’s northern frontier, and that too had made this city fearful.

The summer had been so hot that the leaves, withered and dry, had fallen early. On the day that the King was taken prisoner, he had walked from the Tuileries Palace to the National Assembly and his son, the dauphin, had kicked the piles of fallen leaves into the air as if it was a game. That had been the second week of August, only the second week, yet the leaves had fallen. Never, it was said, had there been a summer so hot, a heat that had not diminished as autumn came, that turned the corpses into the stench which fouled the exhausted city.

The four horsemen rode into a square where martins dipped over the darkening cobbles. They slowed their horses to a walk.

Facing the four men was a great building with an imposing archway. The gates were open. In the entrance of the building was a small crowd, oddly cheerful and noisy on this evening of silence and fear. The people in the small crowd were tired, yet the bottles from which they drank, and the memories of their great day, gave them a feverish energy and ebullience. Nearly all of them wore soft red hats that sat rakishly on their long hair.

The oldest of the four horsemen motioned with his hand for his companions to hold back while he rode on alone. The crowd, eager for more excitement, came to meet him.

The horseman looked over the group. ‘Who’s in charge?’

One man stepped forward, a man with a great belly that sagged over the rope belt of his trousers. He looked up at the horseman and then, instead of answering, took a slow drink from his bottle. When he had finished all the wine, he belched. The crowd laughed. The fat man, pleased with his performance, spat, and looked truculently at the rider. ‘And who, citizen, are you?’

The horseman took a folded square of paper from a pouch on his belt and handed it wordlessly to the fat man who made a great pantomime with it. First he handed his empty bottle to a companion, then he brushed his moustache, then he planted his feet wide, and finally, with a flourish, he shook the square of paper open.

He read it slowly, his lips moving. He frowned, looked suspiciously at the horseman, then turned the paper over as though its blank reverse might hold an answer to his puzzlement. He turned it back.

He stared at the signature at the foot of the paper. He stared at the seal. ‘You’re from the English Embassy?’

The horseman sighed. He spoke in patient French. ‘The British Embassy.’

‘All of you?’

The horseman gestured at his companions. Closest to him was a young man with bright red hair. ‘That is Mr Lazender, behind him is Mr Drew, and my name is Pierce. Our names are all listed there.’ He did not bother to introduce the fourth horseman who hung back as if he did not wish to be associated with the three Englishmen. The fourth man was the only one in the group who was armed. At his left hip there hung a long, black-scabbarded sword.

The fat man frowned. The signature seemed genuine, and the seal seemed genuine, and the orders did not seem particularly troublesome. He scratched his cheek, pulled up his trousers, then handed the paper back to the man called Pierce. ‘Who are you looking for?’

‘A woman.’

‘Name?’

‘Lucille de Fauquemberghes. You’ve heard of her?’

The fat man shook his head. ‘Never heard of her.’ He looked at the fourth horseman, a young man dressed entirely in black who, unseen to the three Englishmen, gave the smallest nod to the fat man. The fat man seemed relieved by the signal. He waved carelessly towards the archway. ‘Go on, then!’

The three Englishmen dismounted and gave their reins to the man in black who tethered their horses to a grating beside the archway. His own horse, a superb black mare, he let stand free. He walked to the open prison gates. The gutter that came out of the building was darkly choked, smelly, and busy with flies. A dog, its ribs stark against its matted skin, licked at the black substance that clogged the drain.

The fat man watched the three Englishmen go into the prison. He waited till they had disappeared, then grinned at the man in black and offered his hand. ‘How are you, Gitan?’

‘Thirsty.’

Gitan leaned against the stones of the archway. Even in repose he was an impressive man with a lithe, strong, animal elegance. His face, dark tanned, was thin and handsome. His eyes were light blue, an odd colour for a man with such dark skin and black hair. The contrast made his eyes seem bright and piercing. In any crowd Gitan would be remarkable, but among these sweaty, tired people he was like a thoroughbred among mules. He seemed to look on them with an amused tolerance, as though all that he saw he judged against the unfair measure of his own competence. He was a man whose approval was constantly sought by other men.

Jean Brissot, the fat bellied man, offered a wine bottle. Gitan did not take it at once; instead he fetched a scrap of paper from his pocket, some tobacco, and in Spanish style he twisted himself a small cigar. Another of the red-capped men hurried forward with a tinder box and the black-dressed man leaned forward as though it was the most natural thing in the world for people to be solicitous of him. He blew smoke into the evening air then nodded at the horror inside the courtyard. ‘Been busy, Jean?’ His voice was relaxed, his eyes amused.

‘A hard day, Gitan. You should have been here.’

Gitan said nothing. He wore a gold ring in his left ear. He reached for the wine bottle.

Jean Brissot watched him drink. ‘If you hadn’t been with them I’d have said no.’

Gitan shrugged. ‘The paper’s genuine.’

Brissot laughed. ‘I’m astonished the citizen Minister lets them poke around! Bloody English!’

The smoke from Gitan’s tobacco drifted under the archway. Flies buzzed in the courtyard behind him. He picked a shred of leaf from his lip. ‘They say we don’t want war with the English yet.’ He spoke lazily, as if he did not really care whether there was war or not. His name, Gitan, simply meant ‘Gypsy’. If he had a real name no one used it. He was horse-master to the young redheaded man, described on the paper as ‘Mr Lazender’. Mr Lazender, in truth, was Viscount Werlatton, heir to the Earldom of Lazen, but this was no week to advertise aristocratic birth in Paris.

Two girls came through the archway, laughing, their wooden sabots clattering on the cobbles. They saw the Gypsy and became coy, giggling and nudging each other. ‘Gitan!’ one of them called.

He looked at them with his bright, amused eyes.

The black haired girl jerked her head. ‘You with the foreigners?’

The Gypsy smiled. ‘Which one do you fancy, Terese?’

They all laughed. Jean Brissot, sucking in his belly, looked enviously at the Gypsy. ‘Is there a girl in Paris you don’t know, Gitan?’

‘The Austrian whore.’

That provoked more laughter. Marie Antoinette was imprisoned with her husband, the King.

Terese came close to the Gypsy. He smelt of leather and tobacco. She played with the laces of his black coat. ‘Are you at Laval’s tonight?’

‘No.’

‘Gitan!’

‘I work! I sleep at the stables. If you ask my master he might let you in, but the straw gets everywhere.’ He blew smoke over her head, then cuddled her almost absent-mindedly. Brissot was jealous. The Gypsy, it was said, had a way with women as he did with horses. Now Gitan smiled down at the girl. ‘You’re getting in the way of the bottle. Go on with you.’ He pushed her out into the square where the martins flickered between the dark houses.

Jean Brissot shook his head. ‘How do you do it?’

‘Do what?’

‘The women!’ The plump man laughed. ‘If I had your luck, Gitan, just for one day!’

The Gypsy shrugged. ‘Women are like horses.’

‘You ride them, eh?’

The tall, handsome horse-master smiled. ‘You love them, you let them know who is master, and you always have a spare one.’

‘Gitan! Gitan!’ The voice, peremptory and desperate, shouted from within the prison. ‘Gitan!’

The Gypsy tossed away his paper-wrapped cigar and shrugged. ‘Watch my horse, Jean.’

Pierce, the oldest of the three Englishmen, stood by a flight of steps that led up from the courtyard. His face, always pale, seemed paper white in the fading light. ‘She’s there. Upstairs.’ Pierce looked as if he had been sick.

The Gypsy nodded, climbed the steps and pushed past the men who loitered in the entrance. He climbed more stairs, noting how the still, hot air within the prison buildings seemed to have trapped the stench of blood and death so that it was thick in his nostrils and sour in his throat.

He saw Toby Lazender, Lord Werlatton, at the end of a long landing on the fourth floor. The young, redheaded man was leaning against the wall and he was lit by the last rays of the setting sun that filtered through a barred window and through the cell door. He did not turn as the Gypsy walked towards him, he just stared into the cell.

Gitan stopped by the door. He looked at Toby Lazender. He doubted whether, at this moment, the young Englishman was even aware that he was present. The young face was set harder than stone, the eyes empty of everything. He was utterly still. Beside him, a look of helplessness on his face, was Drew.

The Gypsy looked into the cell.

The sun dazzled him. Something stood on the window ledge.

He stepped slowly into the cell, treading gently as though in a flower bed.

‘Gitan?’ Toby’s voice was low.

The Gypsy crouched and grunted.

The young Englishman’s voice was filled with loathing. ‘Was there anything they didn’t do to her?’

The Gypsy did not reply. There was no need to reply.

Lucille de Fauquemberghes had been twenty, lovely as the night, a creature of joy and love and beauty.

Now what was left of her was in this cell. She looked like cuts of meat, nothing more.

Blood was splashed a yard high on the stones. Flesh clung to bones. It was as if she had been torn apart by wild creatures.

Gitan stepped to one side, out of the sun’s rays, and saw the object on the window sill. It was her severed head. Her hair, long and raven, fell below the sill.

‘Christ!’ The shout was like a wail, drawn out, wolf-howling, and the Gypsy turned, stepped over the horror and caught Toby Lazender about the waist. He pushed the young Englishman back against the landing wall, holding him there as Drew, an Embassy clerk, hovered helplessly. Drew, the Gypsy saw, had been sick.

‘I’ll kill them! I’ll kill all those bastards! I’ll kill them!’

Pierce, a Secretary at the Embassy, came running down the corridor. ‘Toby!’

Toby was sobbing the word ‘kill’ over and over, and Pierce looked in horror as the Gypsy held the struggling young lord against the wall. It was in anticipation of this reaction, this anger, that Lord Gower, the ambassador, had ordered the men to ride without weapons.

The Gypsy spoke to Toby Lazender in French. ‘Go downstairs.’

‘No!’ Toby howled the word. ‘No!’

‘I’ll bring her for burial. Go downstairs, my Lord.’

‘My Lord!’ Pierce took the younger man by the arm.

‘Come on. Come on! Gitan will bring her.’ He looked despairingly at the tall gypsy. It had been the ambassador who suggested that Gitan accompanied the search party; there was no man more competent, more accomplished than the Gypsy. Pierce saw the ease with which he pinioned Lord Werlatton. ‘You’ll have to help us take him down.’

The three of them took Toby Lazender down the stairs, down the steps into the yard where the bodies lay in muddled heaps, led him over the blood in the gutter, and even the grinning, blood-spattered men and women at the open gate looked nervous because of the anger and grief that was on the Englishman’s face. Pierce talked to him all the time, talked in English, told him to make no trouble, to leave, to go back to the Embassy, and the horse-master untied their horses and watched them ride away.

The Gypsy let out a long breath. If Toby Lazender had lashed out just once then the crowd would have reacted, would have drawn their blood-stained swords and hacked the Englishmen to pieces. He waited until the three horsemen had disappeared in a dark alley and until the sharp sound of their hooves had faded into the gathering night.

He turned back to the yard of the prison. Torches were being lit and pushed into their iron brackets and the flames were lurid on the heaped bodies. There were men, women and children in the pile of corpses. Some of the children had been too young to have known what happened to them.

It was the same in half the prisons of Paris. The Commune, the new rulers of Paris, had howled that the aristos and the rich were sending messages to the Prussian and Austrian enemies and so the Minister of Justice had ordered them arrested and imprisoned. Then the rumour had gone round the little streets that the aristos planned to break out of the prisons and bring swords and knives to murder the Revolutionary government, and so the people had struck first. They had massacred the prisoners. Aristocrats, priests, servants; men, women, children, all dead in the prisons. Over a thousand had died in the week, hacked and raped and mutilated until the mob was tired of the killing.

Jean Brissot came and stood beside the Gypsy. ‘They found her then?’

Gitan nodded. ‘They found her.’

‘Which one?’

‘Fourth floor. Cut up.’ Gitan’s deep voice was laconic, seemingly uncaring, but his words provoked the fat man to sudden enthusiasm.

‘Long black hair? Pretty girl? Christ! We had joy with that one. Dear God!’ He shook his head with remembered admiration. ‘They’re different, you know.’

‘Different?’ Gitan looked at the grossly fat man.

Brissot nodded. ‘White skins, Gitan, like bloody milk. They only brought her in this morning. I took one look and I couldn’t believe our luck! God! A man could live a hundred years and not see a girl like that.’

The Gypsy had rolled another cigar that he lit from a torch above his head. ‘Who brought her in?’

‘Marchenoir.’

‘Ah!’ The Gypsy nodded as though the answer was not unexpected.

Brissot looked nervously at the tall, calm Gypsy. ‘He knows you’re here. I mean I sent word when you came with the Englishmen. You can’t be too careful these days.’

The Gypsy nodded. ‘True. You did the right thing.’ He smiled reassuringly at the fat man, then stared at the bodies; fat, thin, old, young, a mess of death. ‘So you had the girl, Jean?’

‘Twice!’ Brissot laughed. ‘You should have been here, Gitan. Skin like milk! Soft as bloody silk!’

The Gypsy blew smoke over the lolling, black-streaked bodies in the yard. ‘I need to find a sack. I’m taking her away.’

‘Look in the storeroom.’ Brissot jerked his head towards a doorway. ‘Plenty of empty flour sacks.’ He watched the Gypsy pick his way among the corpses towards the store. ‘Gitan?’

‘My friend?’

‘Why did the Englishman want to find her?’

The Gypsy turned. He blew smoke into the torchlight, and it drifted above a small child’s corpse. He grinned. ‘He was going to marry her next week.’

‘Next week?’

The Gypsy nodded.

Brissot bellowed his laughter round the courtyard.

‘He should have hurried! We got her first! I hope the bastard knows what he’s missing! Married next week, eh? Skin like cream! She was a bloody treat, my friend, I tell you. Still,’ his laughter died and he shrugged, ‘I suppose you’ve had lots of them.’ He sounded jealous.

‘No,’ Gitan said, ‘I haven’t.’

‘You haven’t had an aristo?’ Brissot was unbelieving. ‘Not this week?’

‘Not ever.’ The Gypsy turned away to find a sack to serve as a shroud for a dead aristocrat.

The Gypsy worked slowly, the foul cell lit by a single candle as he scooped the remains from the stone floor and, with bloodied hands, pushed it into the sack.

When the work was half done he heard heavy footsteps on the landing. With them came the thick smell of cigar smoke. The Gypsy rubbed his hands on a corner of the sack, stood, and leaned against the wall.

A large, fierce-faced man appeared at the cell door. He was a man in his late forties whose shoulders were humped with muscle like an ox. He was huge-chested, massive-armed; everything about him spoke of strength and weight. His shirt had separated from his trousers, showing the straps of a corset that held in his belly. He looked at the mess on the floor and at the Gypsy’s stained hands. ‘You’ll forgive me if I don’t shake hands with you.’ He laughed.

The man was called Bertrand Marchenoir. There had been a time when he was a priest, a fierce preacher made famous by the vitriol of his sermons, but the revolution had let him abandon the service of God for the service of the people. He was now a leader of the revolution; a man to fear or love, but never ignore.

Marchenoir bullied his followers; he preached, he shouted, he thumped tables into the night, he led, he harangued, he wept false tears to rouse the mob, his gestures were as expansive as his oratory. His voice, starting low and rising to a massive crescendo, had stirred the people from their slums out into the great streets of Paris. He had been at the Bastille, he had helped fetch the King from Versailles, and now his massive, terrifying force whipped the laggards in the National Assembly. ‘Forward! Forward!’ was his cry, and this week in Paris, fearing that the revolution would go backwards, Bertrand Marchenoir had led the slaughter in the prisons.

For those who wanted vengeance on their betters, Marchenoir was an idol. For those who wanted moderation, he was a scourge. No one was allowed to forget that he was peasant born; no gutter, he said, was lower than the one in which he had been spawned, and no palace, he shouted, was so high that it could not be pulled down. Forward, ever forward, and this week a thousand and more had died that Marchenoir’s revolution could go forward.

This was the man who came to the cell, who looked almost disinterestedly at the mess on the floor, then back to the Gypsy. ‘So you’re Gitan?’

‘I am Gitan.’

‘You know me?’

‘I know of you, citizen.’

Marchenoir smiled and waved his cigar at the scraps of the body. ‘You’re doing woman’s work, Gitan.’

‘A man is lucky to have a job these days, citizen.’

The heavy, jowled face stared at the Gypsy whose words had verged on criticism of the revolution. Then Marchenoir twitched his unshaven cheeks into a smile, into a laugh, and he kicked at the sack. ‘Why are you doing it, Gitan?’

‘The English lord wants to bury her.’

‘So let him do his own dirty work. Are you a slave?’

‘I am a horse-master.’

‘And she’s a corpse.’ Marchenoir stepped over the sack and peered at the face on the window ledge. ‘She took a long time dying.’

‘So Brissot said.’

‘Brissot has a fat mouth. One day I’ll sit on it and fill it up.’ Marchenoir spoke without anger. ‘I let them have her first. They queued from her to the second floor!’ He leaned against the wall, the candle throwing the shadows upwards on his big, red face. ‘I should have charged two livres a go, eh?’

‘Not a very revolutionary thought, citizen.’

Marchenoir laughed. He was a leader of ‘the left’, so called because they sat on the left side of the Assembly. They were revolutionaries who sought to abolish the crown, destroy the old privileges, and declare France a people’s republic. The events of the last two months were bringing that dream to fruition. Now Marchenoir blew a plume of smoke over the cell. ‘I was thinking that we ought to have a people’s brothel with girls like this. Every whore an aristo, yes? It would pay for the army.’ He looked at the girl’s head. ‘Do you think she deserved to die, horse-master?’

‘We all die,’ Gitan said. He was astonished at the brooding sense of power that was in this room. He had heard Marchenoir speak many times, he had seen the powerful arms beckoning at the crowd, listened to the voice arouse their anger and their hopes, yet still he was astonished at the sheer presence of the man.

Marchenoir chuckled at the non-committal answer. ‘She had to die, Gitan, but why? That, my friend, is my secret.’ He stabbed with his cigar at the Gypsy. ‘Nothing can be done without blood, nothing! Even the church taught that! If we fear blood we fear life! Isn’t that right, sweet child?’ He had asked the question of the severed head. He chuckled, and pushed the stub of his cigar into the dead lips. He turned back to the Gypsy. ‘I wanted to talk with you.’

‘I’m here.’ Even with such a rising, powerful man as Marchenoir, the Gypsy seemed laconically independent, yet there was a hint of respect, of deference in his bearing. Marchenoir, after all, was in the new government.

Marchenoir sat against the far wall. He was a man of extraordinary slovenliness, his clothes filthy, torn, patched and held by loops of fraying string where the buttons had come free. Gitan, whose black clothes were spotless, saw the streaks of food and spittle on the politician’s coat and reflected that such an appearance was a decided advantage for the ambitious in these days. It was certainly part of Marchenoir’s appeal. The people saw him as rough, ready, lovable, and theirs. He spoke for them, and he killed for them.

Marchenoir had taken another cigar from his waistcoat pocket and he leaned forward to light it from the candle. ‘What else are you besides a horse-master?’

Gitan shrugged. ‘Just that.’

Marchenoir stared at him. When his face was in repose it had a brooding aspect, as if his mind stirred above a pot of horrors. Slowly, he smiled. ‘I hear from Citizen Belleau that you are more.’ He ignored Gitan’s shrug. ‘You are a spy, Gitan, a spy.’

‘If Citizen Belleau says so.’

Marchenoir laughed. ‘Citizen Belleau does say so. You have, he says, given us much valuable information from the English Embassy.’

Gitan said nothing. What Marchenoir said was true. For three years, while employed by Lord Werlatton, the Gypsy had passed news to whatever government ruled in Paris. Marchenoir took a scrap of tobacco leaf from his tongue. ‘Do you deny it?’

‘No.’

‘So what happens to you, horse-master and spy, when the Embassy closes down?’

Gitan shrugged. The British Embassy was one of the last in Paris. After the slaughter of this week it would undoubtedly close. ‘There’s always a job for a good horse-master.’

‘Like a whore or lawyer, eh?’ Marchenoir’s pouchy, bloodshot eyes watched the Gypsy. ‘Does your little English lord want you to stay with him?’

Gitan paused, then nodded. ‘Yes.’

Marchenoir smiled. ‘Tell me, horse-master, do you know who your little lordling’s father is?’

‘He’s an earl.’

‘An earl.’ Marchenoir said the word with distaste. His bitter hatred for the aristocracy was at the root of his fame. ‘But not just any earl, horse-master. Before his accident he was Britain’s spymaster. Did you know that?’

‘No.’

‘The British spymaster.’ Marchenoir said it as though he spoke of a terrible ogre to a small child. He laughed and spat another shred of leaf towards the blood. ‘Lord of the English spies! The Lazenders are so damned deep into spying that they’ve got eyes in their backsides. Your little lordling’s a spy, isn’t he?’

The Gypsy did not reply, though he knew the accusation was true. Lord Werlatton’s job in the Paris Embassy was to entertain the politicians and bureaucrats of Paris. He would lavish champagne and luxury upon them, and leave the rest to their indiscretions.

Marchenoir pointed the cigar at Gitan. ‘So will you go to England with your lord, Gypsy?’

‘I don’t know.’

Marchenoir stared at him, as if considering the truth of the answer. Slowly, he smiled. ‘I want you to go with him.’ The Gypsy said nothing. Marchenoir spoke softly. ‘I want you to go, Gitan, because soon we will be at war with England, and because the English will ask you to become a spy.’

The Gypsy shrugged. ‘Why would they ask me?’

‘God made the gypsies fools?’ Marchenoir’s smile took the sting from the words. ‘They will have a French-speaking man whom they know has friends in Paris. Of course they’ll recruit you! They will think you work for them, but really you will work for me.’ He said the last words slowly and forcefully.

‘For you?’

‘I need a messenger, horse-master, who can travel between here and London. A messenger who can travel in utter safety.’ Marchenoir’s voice was low and urgent. ‘So let them recruit you. In England they will protect you, and in France we will protect you. What could be more perfect? Our enemy will be your friend.’

The Gypsy did not speak or move. His odd, light blue eyes stared at the other man, his long black hair clung to shadow his thin face.

Marchenoir pointed to the candle with his cigar. His voice was still low. ‘It is not I who ask, Gitan, nor France. It is that.’

The Gypsy looked at the flame. He knew the secret message that was being given to him. The candle gave light, and light was reason, and reason was the gospel of the Illuminati. ‘For reason?’

Marchenoir smiled. His voice was low. ‘For reason, which is above the law.’

The Gypsy looked from the candle to the powerful man. For the first time the Gypsy smiled easily, his fear of Marchenoir gone. Now he knew why such an important man had sought him out. Even Gitan’s voice seemed to change. He no longer was wary, he spoke now as if to an equal because he had discovered that this most dangerous, forceful man was, like himself, a member of the secret Illuminati. ‘I sometimes feared that the brethren slept.’

‘No, my friend. So? Will you be our messenger?’

Gitan still smiled. He gestured at the candle. ‘Of course.’

Marchenoir grunted approval and struggled to his feet. ‘There will be rewards, Gitan.’ He waved his cigar at the body. ‘We’re going to strip these bastards of everything, everything!’ He stared at what was left on the floor. ‘She was going to marry your English lord, yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘Your English lord.’ Marchenoir’s voice was suddenly bitter. ‘His mother was a d’Auxigny. I grew up in Auxigny. We had to kneel in the mud if one of the family went past. Even if the coach was a half mile away we had to kneel. Even if we were thigh deep in muck we had to kneel. All between the river and the mountain belonged to Auxigny, and that included us.’ He laughed. ‘Do you know who the present owner of Auxigny is?’

Gitan smiled at the big man. ‘You, citizen!’

‘Me!’ Marchenoir pointed at his breast with his cigar. ‘Perhaps I’ll turn it into a brothel of aristo bitches.’ He nudged the sack with his dirty boot. ‘That’s one at least I won’t have to kneel to again.’ He laughed as he walked to the cell door. ‘Good hunting, my friend. See me before you leave Paris!’ He was in the corridor now, his voice booming behind him as he walked away. ‘Come and drink to our success, Gitan!’ He laughed again, then sang a line of the new song that was sweeping through Paris. ‘The day of glory has arrived!’ The smell of his cigar lingered in the stink of blood, urine and flesh. He shouted once more, his voice fading. ‘Forward! Forward!’

The Gypsy did not move for a long time after the politician had gone. He stared at the candle. Then, at last, he stepped to the window, took the damp cigar stub from the dead girl’s lips, and threw it into the darkness.

He finished his work, tying the neck of the sack over the long, black hair of a girl who had been beautiful before this day, then he carried his soggy burden down to where carts were being loaded with the white, naked bodies of the enemies of the state.

His horse, untethered still, whinnied and came towards him. The Gypsy mounted, the sack heavy in his hand, and rode into a night that was filled with the smell of death, into a city exhausted by massacre. Yet he knew there would be more blood, far more; these deaths were just a beginning, enough to give the new men who had risen to power the taste of slaughter.

He thought of Marchenoir, of the candle’s secret message, and smiled in pleasure. He was the Gypsy, the black dressed horseman who would ride through the horrors on the secret, silent path of the traitor, just as he now rode through a silent, dark, frightened city with his burden of death. He rode unafraid through a city of fear; he was the Gypsy.

2

Rain threatened Lazen. Since dawn the clouds had been low over the hills that edged the Lazen valley, and the wind that came from the west was cold as though it brought the chill of the long grey waves from beyond Cornwall.

The Lady Campion Lazender, dressed in a plain blue linen dress covered with a blue cloak, was riding, in a most unladylike manner, over a newly ploughed field. She rode astride, careless that her ankles showed.

At the edge of the field she turned the horse back. The field was muddy, heavy with the rain that had fallen in the night. She kicked her heels to force the mare into a trot.

‘She’s a rare looking girl, Mr Burroughs,’ said a tall, bald man who stood at the field’s edge.

‘That she is.’ Simon Burroughs was the Castle’s head coachman, a rank denoted by the six capes of his greatcoat and by the curled whip he carried in his gloved right hand.

‘Mare goes well for her!’ The bald man was hopeful that her Ladyship would buy the mare from him.

‘Maybe.’ Burroughs would not commit himself.

Campion turned the horse again, and forced it into a canter. She leaned forward, trying to hear if the breath was whistling in the mare’s pipes. ‘Come on, girl! Come on!’ She slapped its neck.

The owner of the horse, Harry Trapp, was a farmer who had ridden this day from the Piddle Valley. He knew that Lazen Castle would always buy a decent horse.

Campion turned the horse again and this time she galloped the mare up the slope of the field, across the grain of the plough, and she kicked her heels back to see what speed the animal would show in this deep, wet ground. Mud flecked the skirts of her dress and cloak. She turned at the field’s head and cantered toward the two men. Her cheeks were glowing, her face alive with pleasure.

She swung herself from the saddle, slapped at some of the mud on her cloak, and went to the horse’s head. ‘She summered in a field, Mr Trapp?’

‘Yes, my Lady.’

That, she thought, explained the horse’s poor condition. She was newly shod, but the shoes had been put on over feet battered by a summer on dry land. ‘Has she had any oats?’

‘No, my Lady. But she filled up nicely last winter.’

Campion ran her hand down the horse’s neck, down the forelegs to the chipped knee. The farmer shrugged. ‘That don’t stop her, my Lady.’

‘Why are you selling?’

The farmer shrugged. ‘Ain’t got no call for her, my Lady. Too good to pull a bloody cart.’

‘Don’t you swear to her Ladyship,’ Simon Burroughs said.

‘Sorry, my Lady,’ the farmer said.

Campion hid her smile. All the men in the Castle, Simon Burroughs included, swore freely in front of her, but were outraged if any outsider took the same liberty.

The mare was broad and firm at the root of her neck, and was hardly blowing because of the exercise. She would, Campion thought, make a good hunter, but would never breed the foal that Campion wanted which would be as fast as any in England. She opened the horse’s mouth. ‘Six years old?’

‘Yes, my Lady.’

‘Seven,’ said Simon Burroughs. ‘You tried to sell her last year to Sir John. You said she was six then.’

‘Seven,’ said Mr Trapp.

‘What do you call her?’

‘Emma.’ He seemed ashamed of the name.

‘It’s a nice name.’ Campion was looking at the mare’s eyes. There was a tiny fleck in the left eye, but not in the line of vision. ‘What are you asking?’

The farmer hesitated. He was not used to bargaining with girls, let alone the beautiful daughters of the aristocracy, and in truth what he was asking was inflated outrageously simply because he had come to Lazen which was famous for its fortune. He decided to brazen it out. ‘Squire at Puddletown offered me seventy pounds for her.’

‘You should have taken it,’ Campion said. ‘Feed her two pounds of oats a day for a week and I’m sure he’ll offer it again.’ She smiled at the man and held him the reins. ‘Thank you for coming, Mr Trapp.’

‘My Lady!’ The farmer was blushing. ‘I thought she’d be happier here.’

Campion gave him her most beautiful smile, pleased by the compliment. She knew what the horse was worth, and so did the farmer, but it would be unthinkable to buy the mare without going through the necessary bargaining. She pushed a muddy hand at her hair. ‘You can’t expect me to pay top price for a horse that’s been out at grass this long. It’s going to take me a month just to put some muscle on her!’

‘You rode her!’ Mr Trapp pointed out reasonably. ‘Wasn’t pumping one bit when you brought her off the plough! She’ll be fit for anything in a month!’

She ran a hand over the mare’s chipped knee. ‘Did you splint this?’

But the farmer was not listening. He was staring instead at a vision that approached along the path which came from the Castle. The farmer’s jaw dropped. No one would believe him in the taproom tonight.

A middle-aged man stepped precariously between the puddles. He wore breeches of dark blue silk, above tasselled boots of white leather that had been polished to glass brightness. His tail coat was of grey velvet, and his shirt and stock of white silk. He wore no hat or wig, instead his silver hair had been drawn back and tied with a black velvet bow. His fingers were lavishly beringed. In his right hand was a tall ebony cane, topped with gold and decorated with blue ribbons. On his thin, mischievous face there was powder and, on his left cheek, a black beauty patch. He smiled beatifically at the farmer. ‘May blessings rain upon your head, dear man.’

The farmer shook his head. ‘Sir?’

‘May the light of his countenance shine upon you, and give you peace.’ He spoke with a distinct French accent. ‘Is that a horse?’

Campion laughed. ‘Hello, uncle.’

He grimaced. ‘Good God! Is that you, dear Campion? I thought it was a dairy maid. Mr Burroughs.’ He gave the slightest bow. ‘I bid you good day.’

‘Sir,’ the head coachman said.

Campion patted the mare’s neck.’ We’re buying a horse, uncle.’

‘I can’t think why. You have so many, and all they do is clutter up the stables. You should buy a unicorn, dear Campion, a white unicorn with pearls upon its horn. I might learn to ride such a beast.’ He smiled wondrously at the farmer. ‘Can you see me in a unicorn’s saddle, sir? I think reins of gold would suit me, don’t you?’ He put fingertips to his mouth. ‘You must forgive me, dear sir, for you have not the advantage of my name.’ He bowed to the farmer. ‘Achilles d’Auxigny, my most humble duty to you.’

‘Eh?’ said the farmer.

‘This is Harry Trapp, uncle, and you’re not to embarrass him.’ Campion looked at the coachman. ‘I want her, Simon, but I won’t pay more than we paid for Pimpernel.’

Burroughs grinned. ‘Yes, my Lady.’

‘You’ll forgive me, Mr Trapp?’ She smiled at him. ‘And thank you for bringing Emma here.’

‘You’re welcome, my Lady.’ The farmer was blushing again because the Lady Campion was offering him her hand. He wiped his right hand on his smock and took hers. ‘Thank you, my Lady.’

‘And make sure you get something to eat before you ride home.’

‘I will.’ Harry Trapp smiled at her. He knew a real aristocrat when he met one, not some frippery floppery like the weird Frenchman.

Campion took her uncle’s arm and led him back towards the Castle. ‘You shouldn’t be cruel to people.’ She spoke, as she always did in private with him, in her perfect French.

‘I do enjoy teasing your yokels. They are so very teasable.’ He smiled at her. ‘You do look dreadful. Do you have to dress like a peasant? And can’t you leave horses to grooms?’

‘I like horses.’

‘It is time you were married,’ Uncle Achilles said irritably. ‘A good husband would keep you out of the stables.’

She laughed at him. She liked her Uncle Achilles, her mother’s younger brother. His elder brother had become the Duc d’Auxigny, and had inherited with the Dukedom the Marquisates of a score of French villages and become Count of two score more, while Achilles, the younger brother, had inherited nothing except a minor title he refused to use, a noble name, and a clever head. Against his will he had been trained for the priesthood. His noble birth had insured a swift rise to a rich bishopric, a rise that his scandalous, hedonistic behaviour had not impeded in the least.

The revolution in France had let him slide, like Bertrand Marchenoir, out of the priesthood. He refused to take the Constitutional Oath, resigned his See, and when the burning of the great houses began, and when the stories of hacked, raped and slaughtered aristocrats spread through France, he had fled with his widowed mother to the Earl of Lazen’s London house. The Duchess still lived on Lazen’s charity, a charity she constantly criticised. Uncle Achilles, more independent, earned a living from the British government. He did not care to talk much about his work, but Campion knew from her father that Achilles d’Auxigny helped ferret out the secret agents who were smuggled into Britain as so-called refugees from the revolution.

They went through the kissing gate that led to the Castle’s gardens. Campion, holding her uncle’s arm, smiled up at him. ‘I can’t really imagine you as a bishop.’

He pretended indignation. ‘I was a most loved bishop! I used to preach a very good sermon in which I would terrify a parish into making their confessions. I would then listen in the confessional and make a note of which ladies had committed adultery. Then, if they were very pretty, I would visit them and compound the offence, though with instant forgiveness, of course.’ He laughed at her expression.

Turning Achilles d’Auxigny into a priest had been his father’s ambition. Achilles’ father had been known in France as the Mad Duke. He had believed himself to be God and, for his own worship, he had built a shrine at his Chateau of Auxigny in which, by careful mechanical contrivances, he would perform miracles. Undoubtedly the Mad Duke had hoped that his youngest son would preach the family gospel. Instead, as Achilles was fond of saying, his father had thought of himself as God and taught his children thereby that there was none. Now he looked at his niece. ‘I always told your father not to marry into our family. We’re all quite mad.’

‘You’re not.’

He shrugged as if he did not care to argue the point. ‘I just made my farewells to your father. Everyone says you did a remarkably fine thing with his leg.’

‘I just sewed it up, uncle.’

‘Just sewed it up, indeed! I couldn’t have done it. I would have fainted.’

She laughed. She made him walk with her towards the ornamental lake. He complained that it would rain, that he had neither hat, umbrella, cloak or gloves, but consented to accompany her.

‘I do hope Lucille can take to your English ways,’ he said dubiously. ‘Horses and walking. It’s most uncivilized.’

‘She’ll be too busy having babies,’ Campion said. Her brother would be coming with his bride within the week. ‘Lots of babies.’

‘How utterly dreadful. I do hate babies.’

She laughed, refusing to believe him. Achilles d’Auxigny watched her as they walked. She was, he thought, the most beautiful creature he had ever seen. His sister had been beautiful, but in marrying the fifth Earl of Lazen, his sister had created this extraordinary girl, hair as gold as pale wheat, eyes the colour of the Virgin’s dress, a face of strong lines, softened by the mouth and by an indefinable air of goodness that she carried quite unconsciously. She had, her uncle thought, the clearest skin he had ever seen, eyes that shone with happiness; she was a girl of delicate, wonderful beauty. He squeezed her arm. ‘When are you going to marry, Campion?’

She smiled at the question. ‘You don’t give up, uncle, do you?’

‘There are a hundred young men who would lay their souls at your feet! A thousand!’

‘Nonsense.’ She looked away from him. ‘That coppice needs trimming. I told Wirrell last week.’

‘And don’t change the subject,’ Achilles said. ‘You should marry someone, my dear Campion. It is time you were worshipped. That is what women are for! To be worshipped, to be stroked, to be adored.’

‘To be loved?’

‘You talk of illusions.’

‘To be decorative, then?’ she asked him teasingly.

‘Of course,’ he replied seriously.

They had reached the strip of grass between the Castle’s lake and the great, wrought-iron fence that fronted the Shaftesbury road. Achilles stopped and looked over the water. ‘Magnificent.’

They were looking at the celebrated view of Lazen, the one that had been drawn and painted so often that Campion claimed the artists’ easels had permanently marked the lawn at this spot.

From this lake bank Lazen Castle spread across their view in all its magnificence. The Castle had taken two centuries to build, yet it was marvellously coherent. It was really three houses. To the right was the Old House with its Long Gallery and its great windows that reflected the day’s grey light. The Old House was joined by a bridge of rooms to the Great House, and the bridge also formed the portico beneath which carriages drew up to deliver guests to the Castle.

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 for ever?’ 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 harbour, 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 harbour, 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 towards 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 towards 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 grey 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 Christmas.’ 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 towards 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 acknowledgement, 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 splendour, 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’s 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 drily.

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 favourite.

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 towards 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 colour 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 stream, 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.

He had come safely to England, brought by Lord Werlatton, but his true purposes were hidden, hidden as well as the naked swimming girl that he had seen in the great blue-green portrait in the gallery. He had almost laughed when he saw it, so lifelike did the image seem and so like the beautiful girl who was his master’s sister.

He thought of fat Jean Brissot. He thought how the Parisians would like to have that girl in their hands. He patted his horse’s neck and smiled. Bertrand Marchenoir would like her most of all; the rabble-roaring ex-priest who had led Paris into blood and more blood was famous for his dealings with the daughters of the fallen aristocracy, and there would be added pleasure for Marchenoir in the fact that this lovely creature was, on her mother’s side, one of the hated d’Auxignys. Gitan laughed at the thought.

The wind blew the rain cold from the west as man and horse rode through the brown, wet woods of an English autumn. He stopped in a clearing on the hill’s crest, turned in his saddle, and stared at the great house that was now beneath him. It was, he thought, a most beautiful house. It was also, though it did not yet know it, a house under siege. The Gypsy clicked his tongue and rode on.

3

‘What is your name?’

The answer came from a man who stood alone in the centre of a sunken, marble floor. The man was naked.

The room was brilliantly lit by a ring of candles, hundreds of flames reflected from polished marble, silver, and mirrors that threw the man’s shadow in a complex coronet radiating from his bare feet. The room was circular and, high above the naked man’s head, there was the gleam of gold mosaics that decorated the domed ceilings. It was a lavish room, fit for an Emperor or a great whore.

The questioner spoke again. He could not be seen and his voice came as a hoarse whisper that seemed to fill the room, coming from no direction and every direction. ‘What is your desire?’

‘To join you.’

‘What gives light?’

‘Reason.’

‘What gives darkness?’

‘God.’

‘How do you apprehend this?’

‘With reason.’

‘What is your name?’

The naked man answered again. His voice was strong in the room, echoing from the marble and from the magnificent gold mosaics of the dome.

Another voice, also a whisper, echoed mysteriously about the great chamber. ‘What protects the weak?’

‘The law.’

‘What is above the law?’

‘Reason.’

‘What is your name?’

The man answered. He stood quite still. He was a tall man and well muscled. He did not seem uncomfortable with his nakedness.

A third voice whispered. ‘What is death?’

‘Nothing.’

Silence.

Real silence. No windows opened to the outside world in this extraordinary place. The doors by which the naked man had entered were of bronze, doors so heavy that it had taken all his strength to close them on the night.

It was October outside. In this room it could be any season, any hour, any year.

One of the whispers sounded. ‘Kill him.’

Silence again.

The man expected this, yet he felt a crawling fear within him. He kept his face rigid. He was being judged.

‘Why did you come here?’

‘To serve you.’

‘Whom do we serve?’

‘Reason.’

‘What bounds does reason have?’

‘None.’

‘Kill him.’

‘Kill him.’

The third voice did not sound.

Europe was rife with secret societies, most imitating the Masons, all offering a man the secret pride of belonging to a privileged group. Some, like the Rosati, were harmless, devoted to poetry and wine. Others, like the Illuminati, had more sinister purposes. Yet this gathering, in this strange marble hall that was like a mausoleum awaiting its dead, was a secret society within a secret society. These were the Fallen Angels of the Illuminati.

The Illuminati had come from Germany where the princes and dukes had persecuted the movement and driven it south to France where, in the ferment of revolution, the ‘Illuminated Ones’ had found a home. It was said that more than half the leaders of the revolution belonged to the Illuminati, that the achievements of the revolution had been planned, not in political meetings, but in the secret halls of the society. It was rumoured that the Illuminati were spreading like an unseen stain throughout the civilized world.

They had been given the light of reason. They were above the law. They were the future. They would take the world from the dark splendours of superstition into the brilliance of a planet governed by the intellect. The society of the Illuminated Ones existed to establish a new religion that worshipped reason, and to forge a universal republic. France had lit the way; France had proved that the old monarchies and the old gods could be destroyed.

The naked man had been Illuminati for five years. Now he had been offered a greater honour. He could join the Fallen Angels.

The Fallen Angels were not the only secret group within the Illuminati. Each group, like this one, had a task to fulfil. Just as cavalry rode ahead of an army to spy out the land and confuse the enemy with short, sharp raids, so did the secret groups of the Illuminati prepare the way for the coming age of reason. The Fallen Angels planned one such raid now and the naked man, standing on the echoing marble, was needed for a specific task. First, though, he must pass this trial.

The naked man, if he failed this test, would die. Simply by coming to this place he had learned too much about the Fallen Angels. If he passed the test then he would be given a new name, the name of a fallen angel; one of those bright creatures who had rebelled against God, who had fought the war in heaven, and who had fallen with Satan into the bottomless pit of defeat. The Fallen Angels took the names of those who had dared to fight God as symbols of their own rebellion against religion, superstition, and government.

A whisper sounded again. ‘What is your name?’

He told them.

‘What do the Fallen have?’

‘Reason.’

‘Do they obey the law?’

‘They make the law.’

‘Do they obey the law?’ The whisper had a suggestion of irritation.

‘No.’

Silence. The candle flames were still and bright. A few, their wicks untrimmed, shivered and raised thin streaks of smoke that darkened the ceiling of the circular alcove within which all the candles burned. The alcove, its rear wall mirrored, ran like a recessed shelf clear round the base of the dome.

The whispers seemed to sigh about the circular room. Then one voice rose above the others. ‘What is evil?’

‘Weakness.’ The naked man had not been rehearsed in his answers, but his sponsor, one of the three men who questioned him, had talked of what he might expect. He might expect death.

‘What is the punishment for weakness?’

‘Death.’

‘What is your name?’

He told them. There was silence.

He felt the shiver of fear again, but he kept his head high and he stared at the veined sheen of the curved marble walls and tried to see from where the voices came.

The sigh came again, like a wind half heard far away. It died into silence.

The floor on which he stood was of green and blue marble. It was some forty feet in diameter and surrounded by white marble steps, four in all, that climbed to a mosaic pavement. The walls were decorated with columns, sculpted wreaths, and intricate bas-reliefs, any of which could hide the openings from which the voices must come. The chamber, though lavish and bright, seemed to be missing something, as though a throne or a great catafalque should stand within its barren splendour.

‘What is your name?’

He told them.

‘Kill him.’

‘Kill him.’

The third voice, instead of confirming his doom, whispered that he should close his eyes.

The naked man obeyed. He could hear nothing, but there was a sudden shivering of colder air on his body as though a tomb had been opened.

Then he heard footsteps.

He heard naked feet on the marble floor. The feet approached him, walking slowly, and he had to fight the desire to open his eyes. He was shivering. He wanted to break away from the centre of the floor and run from the slow, soft feet that came closer and closer to him. He imagined a blade reaching for him and he had to steel himself to stand still and keep his eyes closed.

Something touched his shrinking, crawling flesh and he almost jumped and shouted in alarm.

Fingers stroked his chest. Fingers that were soft and warm and gentle. The fingers traced down his ribs, over his belly, down to his loins. The relief was coursing through him. He had expected death.

‘Open your eyes.’ The whisper echoed about the high chamber.

The naked man obeyed and, in front of him, smiling up at him, was a girl. She was pretty. She had a round, freckled face with red hair that had been tied back with a red ribbon. Her hair was full and springy because it had been washed. She smelt of soap because she had bathed before this ceremony. Like him she was naked. Her skin was pink, freckled, young and clean.

She smiled at him and her hands stroked him.

‘Do you like her?’ one of the whisperers asked.

‘Yes.’ He felt embarrassed. Her hands were soft and shameless. They flickered and stroked, touched and kneaded his flesh.

The naked man guessed the girl was nineteen or twenty. She had big, firm breasts and the wide hips of a girl who would be strong in childbirth. She leaned forward and licked the sweat on his chest, then reached up to pull his head down to hers.

He kissed her. Her salty tongue was quick between his lips. She hooked a leg behind his legs and her strong thigh was warm on his skin.

‘Take her,’ the whisper commanded.

She was pulling him down to the cold marble and he knelt, laid her down, and ran his right hand down her body.

The girl closed her eyes. The gentlemen who had hired her from the Dijon brothel had promised her a huge sum for this night’s work. Half of it was already in her purse downstairs, the other half would be given to her after she had made this man happy. It was silly, of course, but what girl could refuse such a sum for such a small task?

She opened her legs, thinking what an uncomfortable bed cold marble made, and opened her eyes and smiled into the man’s face. ‘Come, come.’

The naked man ran his hands from her thighs to her breasts and she arched her back, moaned, and closed her eyes again. ‘You’re so good! Come to me.’

‘Take her,’ the whisperer ordered.

He took her, and with a whore’s skill she made him feel that he was a lover greater than any in history. Her head turned from side to side in false pleasure, she moaned softly, she reached for him to pull him down, she pushed up with her hips, and the man, propped on his hands that were either side of her shoulders, smiled down on her as she locked her ankles behind his thighs.

Each whisper so far had been in French. Now, suddenly, one of the hidden men spoke in English. ‘Kill her.’

He froze, then knew that this was the test, that hesitation was failure and failure was death and he fell on her, his hands moving from the floor to her neck and he gripped her throat with his big hands, squeezed, and her eyes opened in terror as she still thrust at him, and then she twisted beneath him, tried to wrench her body free and she rolled on top of him, thrashing, kicking, clawing at him and he shook her head with his hands and forced her back to the floor again.

Her fingers pulled at his wrists, but her strength was nothing like his and he had her beneath him and he beat her head on the floor.

Still he squeezed. He could feel her pulse beneath his thumbs. Her legs beat on the floor. He knelt up, his knee slipping in liquid, and beat her head again. His teeth were gritted.

She took a long time to die. When he took his fingers from her throat, he thought they would never straighten again. He was panting.

Slowly he stood up. He stepped away from the body.

As he stood one part of the marble wall of the circular chamber suddenly moved. Two wooden doors, cunningly painted in the manner of poor church interiors to look like marble, opened before his astonished eyes to reveal a hidden room. There was a table of black stone within the room. Candles stood on the table about which three figures sat. On either side of the table sat men in robes of black and gold, with great stiff cowls like monks’ hoods over their heads. At the table’s head, facing the naked man, sat a figure robed and hooded in silver. He was Lucifer, the day star, the prince of darkness, the leader of the Fallen Angels and, with due ceremony and courtesy, he welcomed the new member who henceforth, he said, could wear the black and gold habit of a Fallen Angel. The robe waited for him on a vacant chair. Then Lucifer gave the newcomer his name. From henceforth, he said, he would be known as Chemosh.

The Fallen Ones met in the shrine built by the Mad Duke who had thought he was God. The shrine was behind the splendid Chateau of Auxigny. The Mad Duke was long dead, gone to meet the God he had failed to be, and his eldest son, the present Duke, was imprisoned with his King in Paris.

One of the Fallen Angels did not sit at the black table, for he was a deaf mute. Lucifer had given him the name Dagon. He was a huge, shambling creature with the face of an idiot. The black and gold robe sat on his shoulders like a royal cloak draped on a dancing bear. His task was to care for the Chateau of Auxigny and its strange shrine, a task he did to the terror of the local children who spoke of strange things in the woods behind the Castle.

When Chemosh had been admitted to the chamber, and the doors had been closed again, Dagon took the body of the girl downstairs. He stroked it, and from his throat came strange noises. Later, when the Fallen Angels had gone, and when Dagon was again alone in the Chateau of Auxigny, he would take the body to the dark woods behind the shrine and he would leave it for the ravens and the night creatures and her body would be flensed and the bones scattered and the remnants covered by the falling pine needles. She was not the first girl to die in this place, for every new Fallen Angel was initiated with death, and Dagon, as he ran his huge hands down her still warm flesh, hoped she would not be the last.

* * *

Lucifer gestured with a silver-gloved hand at the wine. ‘Drink, Chemosh. You need some wine after that nonsense.’

Chemosh smiled. ‘Nonsense?’

‘Of course. Superstition! Yet we have to know if you believe what you say, that you believe reason is above the law, that you believe a reasonable man can do no evil. So we frighten you a little and give you a trifling test. Now you can forget it.’ He shrugged beneath the robes. His face was entirely hidden by the dipping cowl of his hood that made a black shadow from which his voice came so hoarse and low. It seemed to Chemosh to be an old voice, a voice that spoke from long and bitter knowledge. Once only, as the cowl was raised towards Chemosh, did the newcomer see the glitter of eyes that themselves seemed to be like two hard silver lights in the darkness.

Lucifer, his voice as dry as dead leaves in a cold wind, spoke of the purpose of the Fallen Angels.

He spoke of a war that would soon be declared between France and Britain. He spoke of the decision, by the Illuminati, to work for Britain’s defeat.

His business, he said, was not with armies. France would fight, and France would win, and France would take republicanism and reason to Britain. But first the Illuminati would rot Britain from within.

He spoke of the British Corresponding Societies that supported the revolution. They would need money, help, and arms.

He spoke of the British journals and their writers, the scribblers who would take any bribe and spread any rumour.

He spoke of that ‘mad, fat King’ who would be dethroned, of the scandals that would be spread in high places, of the foulness that would be smeared over Britain’s leaders and aristocrats, until the people of Britain had no trust in their government and would welcome the cleansing flood of republicanism.

And all this, Lucifer said, would take money. ‘More money than you can dream of, Chemosh. The task of the Fallen Angels is to provide the Illuminati with that money.’

The new silk robe was cold on Chemosh’s thighs. He was still shaking from the effort of killing the girl. Her eyes, wide and bulging, still stared in his brain.

Lucifer drank water, then the silvery cowl turned to the newcomer again. Neither of the other two hooded men had spoken yet. Like Chemosh, they listened to their master’s voice. ‘We are going to take a fortune in Britain, Chemosh, and your task is to help us.’ His voice was bitter and dry, soft and sibilant, yet even Lucifer could not hide the pleasure of his next words. ‘We are going to take the Lazen fortune.’

Lazen! Chemosh knew of Lazen. Did anyone not know of the richest earldom in England? Lazen, with its sprawling great house and its London property and its estates in every shire, was rumoured to have a greater income than that of most kingdoms. Lazen! He said nothing, but he wondered how, in Reason’s name, these few men would take the fortune of Lazen.

Lucifer, his hands gloved in silver, told him how.

The Earl of Lazen was sick. He was dying. It was said he could not live another winter, that, indeed, he had almost died a few weeks before when the stump of his amputated leg began bleeding in the night. He would die, Lucifer said, and when he died the fortune of Lazen, with the title, would pass to his son, Viscount Werlatton. Lucifer turned to his left. ‘Moloch?’

The robed man opposite Chemosh pushed back his hood. He smiled at the newcomer.

Chemosh was suddenly frightened. He was staring at a face that had been lampooned by half the caricaturists of Europe. He was staring at a heavy, powerful, brooding, knowing face that was the very symbol of the French revolution. Moloch was Bertrand Marchenoir, the ex-priest who now preached his gospel of blood.

Marchenoir leaned forward, lit a cigar from one of the candles, then took up the tale. ‘Werlatton was in the British Embassy in Paris. He’s an adventurer and up to his bloody neck in spying.’ Marchenoir blew smoke over the table. Chemosh saw how his black and gold robe was filthy with wine stains. The Frenchman gave a grim smile. ‘He was due to get married; you might remember the fuss the London papers made? We killed his bride and stopped him spawning more heirs. I now hear that he wishes to return to France, seek me out, and take his revenge.’ He laughed.

‘We shall pray he does,’ Lucifer said.

‘And when he does,’ Marchenoir went on, ‘and after his father’s death, I shall kill him.’

‘After?’ Chemosh asked.

The silver cowl of Lucifer looked at him. ‘We do not want the Earl to change his will. The father will die, and the son will follow. The son is a fool. He should be rearing a family already, but he cannot resist adventure. So he will die, and the earldom will pass to a cousin. Belial?’

Chemosh knew who Belial was. He was another politician, a member of Britain’s House of Commons who was famous for his impassioned speeches against the French and their revolution. Valentine Larke preached war against France in public, while in private he worked for Britain’s defeat. Larke had sponsored Chemosh for the Fallen Angels and now he turned his hooded face towards his protégé. ‘The cousin is called Sir Julius Lazender. We have no problems with Sir Julius. Soon all that he will inherit will belong to us.’

‘How soon?’ Lucifer asked.

‘Two months? Maybe three.’

The silver cowl nodded. ‘You see, Chemosh, by how slender a thread the fortune hangs? The Earl, his son, and then it is ours. All of it. Except for one problem, a problem that you,’ and here a silver gloved finger stabbed at him, ‘will solve. Tell him, Belial.’

Valentine Larke, MP, leaned back from the table. ‘There is a daughter. Her name is Campion.’ He said the unusual name slowly and scornfully. ‘She is, for a girl, remarkably well educated. At present she has all the responsibility for Lazen. Her father is ill, her brother absent, and she governs. She does it, I am told, well.’ He paused to sip wine. ‘Our problem, Chemosh, is simple. The Earl knows how slender is the thread. He knows his son has no heir. He knows that Sir Julius might inherit and Sir Julius is a gambler. Lazen is in peril, and we believe that the girl is his answer. One. She might inherit, though I doubt it. Two, she might inherit part of the fortune, though I doubt that the Earl will divide his inheritance. Three, and most likely, is that whoever inherits will find themselves still under her thumb. The estate, in short, will be entailed and she will have the governance of the entail.’ He shrugged. ‘We can’t kill her now, because the Earl will change his will, just as he would if the son died, so we must do something else.’

‘You must do something else.’ Lucifer spoke, and again his finger stabbed at Chemosh. ‘Your task, Chemosh, is to ensure that the Lady Campion Lazender is no threat to us. Specifically she is not to marry.’

Chemosh understood that. If she married, then her husband would take her property and would have the governance of the entail or the estate. Her children, if her brother and cousin died, might inherit. ‘I stop her marrying?’

‘You stop her marrying by any means short of death. Later she will die, but not until her father is buried.’

Chemosh had his task now, he had earned it, and he was part of a conspiracy that would twist the history of the world into a new, clearer future. He felt privileged to be in this place where decisions were made which, like those which had led in secret council to the fall of France, would now lead to Britain’s downfall. He was Chemosh, the name of the Fallen Angel that demanded human sacrifice, and he had escaped death by inflicting death. He understood now why they had made him kill for this initiation, for only a man without pity and who understood that Reason’s servants are above man’s petty laws was worthy to be a Fallen Angel. Chemosh’s elation lasted as Lucifer gave his last instructions. He, Chemosh, was to take his orders from Valentine Larke, while Larke would communicate to France through Marchenoir’s messenger. Yet to Chemosh these were mere details that were swamped by his exhilaration at this privilege.

Finally, Lucifer stood and the movement shifted the cowl for one second, and Chemosh saw again the glitter of eyes deep in the shadow. It seemed that even Lucifer’s eyes were silver, then the hood settled back and the dry, rustling voice spoke again. ‘We are done. I shall go, the rest of you will follow in ten minutes. I wish you all a safe journey. I do not need to wish you success, for we are followers of Reason and therefore cannot fail.’

Then, with a shimmer of his robes, he turned and went down the passage at the back of the chamber.

Marchenoir waited till their leader’s footsteps had faded to silence, then stood, stretched his massive arms, and went to the painted, curved doors and pulled them apart. Chemosh saw that the body of the girl was gone. The marble floor glistened.

Marchenoir grinned. ‘Watch, Chemosh.’

‘Watch?’

The Frenchman jerked his head towards the empty, circular chamber.

There was silence. Chemosh gave a puzzled look to Valentine Larke who, now that Lucifer was gone, pushed his hood back from hair that, despite his fifty years, was still glossy black. It was rippled like the hard sand on a creek bed. Beneath the hair was a broad, flat, intelligent face, an impressive face even, a face of such judiciousness that any free-holder would think this man worthy of a vote with or without the election bribe. His eyes stopped his face from being handsome. They were of a blandness so unnatural as to be frightening; dark eyes in flattened sockets. They were the eyes of a quiet, watching man, but they were also eyes of horrid implacability. Valentine Larke did not forget or forgive his enemies. Now, though, he smiled and gestured towards the main room of the shrine. ‘Watch!’

Chemosh turned to the brilliantly lit chamber where he had killed the girl.

He saw nothing strange, but then, deep in the building, he heard the rattle of a chain, a creaking sound like the windlass of a well, and to his astonishment he saw that the brightness of the gleaming shrine was dimming. A shadow seemed to flow down the walls like blood, like an artificial twilight, a shadow that flicked over the statuary, became darker and then, with an awesome finality, extinguished the last flicker of candlelight within the huge room. In just seconds the brilliance of the shining room had been dimmed to darkness.

Only the candles on the black stone table stayed lit. The shadow had swallowed the marble chamber.

Marchenoir laughed at the newcomer’s expression. ‘The Mad Duke’s little palace of tricks!’ He gestured towards the dark dome. ‘Just an iron shutter that drops in front of the candles. Dagon turned the handle downstairs. It was built so the mad bugger could shout “let there be light” and a dozen peasants would haul on the chain!’ He laughed and shook his head. ‘Our job was to worship the crazy bastard. There used to be a tunnel under here so he could suddenly appear in our astonished midst. They bricked that up when the bugger died. But I suppose we were impressed by it all.’ He tossed his cigar onto the darkened marble floor, then turned his hard, brooding face to the newcomer. ‘I envy you, Chemosh.’

‘Envy me?’

‘I hear that the Lady Campion is a pearl of great price.

She is said to be beautiful.’ He walked to the black table and lit another cigar. The Gypsy, who was the messenger between Marchenoir and Larke, had told the French politician that the Lady Campion was more beautiful than a dream. Marchenoir blew smoke into the huge, dark chamber. ‘Very beautiful indeed.’

‘A pity,’ Larke said drily.

‘Pity?’ Marchenoir asked.

‘Because the easiest way to stop her marrying,’ the Englishman said quietly, ‘is to make her unmarriageable. If you scar her face, Chemosh, and scar her body, and scar her mind, who will want her?’ He sipped wine. ‘Have her raped. Hire a poxed man to rape her and scar her and drive her wits a little mad.’ He smiled. ‘You see how easy your task will be?’

Marchenoir laughed. ‘Send her to me.’

‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’ Larke smiled. ‘A virgin aristocrat at your mercy.’

Marchenoir laughed. ‘I am the killer of aristocrats.’ He said it simply, boastfully, then walked to the edge of the dark chamber and stared up at the dome where the iron shutter had dropped over the candles. ‘They’re different. They have white skins, soft skins, skins like silk. They squeal.’ He laughed again, and the sound echoed back in the Mad Duke’s chamber. ‘I would like her. God, how I would like her.’ He turned, and his broad, powerful face stared at the newcomer. ‘If it is possible, Chemosh, if in all this wide God-ridden world you find it possible, then bring her to me.’ He paused, then the voice that had roused Paris against its King, and France against its civilization, roared in the marble emptiness. ‘Scarred or poxed, whole or savaged, Chemosh,’ he paused and he shouted his next four words slowly and distinctly, so that the echo of one faded before the next was uttered. ‘Bring her to me!’

4

The early winter weeks were hard for Lady Campion Lazender, harder than she dared admit to herself, and made so by the constant visits of the Gypsy to Lazen Castle.

It was not that she saw much of the man called Gitan, yet she found that when her brother was in residence she would deliberately find a reason to visit the dairy or brewhouse, to see how the new wall of the kitchen garden was progressing, or to count the stock in the game larder; any excuse, indeed, for going close to the stable entrance. She made herself stop the subterfuge.

Yet still she would glimpse him. Sometimes he would be a black, upright figure schooling a horse in the meadows to the east of the drive, and once she saw him leaning at the kitchen door drinking a glass of ale that had been fetched for him by one of the maids. The maid, a pudgy little girl with a hare lip, stared up devotedly at the tall, dark man, and Campion was astonished by the streak of jealousy that stabbed at her, wrenched at her, and she felt the humiliation of this attraction and the wretchedness of suppressing it.

Yet suppress it she did. She threw herself into her work of which, the harvest having failed for two years running, there was plenty. The Castle, with all its estate and pensioners, had to be fed. The tenancies had to be managed. What harvest there was had to be eked out from the rickyard and storerooms.

There was Christmas to prepare for, her father to care for, and estate decisions to be made. Campion chose which timber should be cut for winter fuel, which coppiced, and how many animals should be kept alive through what promised to be a hard, hungry, cold season.

She had no need to work. The Castle had a steward, as did the estate, and there were lawyers ever eager to charge fees for their services. Yet she hated idleness. She had begun to interest herself in the Castle’s management when, at eighteen years old, she made the chance discovery that the housekeeper was buying more sheets each autumn than existed in the whole Castle. That housekeeper was long gone, the accounts straightened, and even in the hardest winter Campion had cut the estate’s expenditure by a third. No one went hungry, nothing was skimped, yet the family was not robbed. She liked the work, she was good at it, yet this winter its best advantage was that it kept her from what she knew were humiliating, unfitting thoughts of the Gypsy.

She even wondered whether it was her reluctance for the Gypsy to leave the Castle that made her so adamant in her opposition to Toby’s plans.

He was returning to France.

He had told her and she had exploded in sudden and unnatural anger, telling him his duty was to stay at Lazen, to look after Lazen, to marry and have children, and her words had whirled about his stubborn red head with as much force as snowflakes.

He was not thinking of Lazen. He was thinking of scraps of ragged flesh tossed about a cell.

She shook her head in bitterness. ‘Suppose you die?’

‘Then Julius gets what he’s always wanted.’ He laughed at the thought of their cousin, Sir Julius Lazender, inheriting the earldom.

She was too angry to speak.

He tried to explain. He tried to tell her that there were men in France who prepared to fight against the revolution, men faithful to the church and to the King, and men who looked to Britain for help. He was not, he said, going alone, but going with the blessing of Lord Paunceley.

‘Then Lord Paunceley’s a fool!’ she said.

Toby laughed. ‘They call him the cleverest man in the kingdom.’

‘Then that makes all Englishmen fools!’

He shrugged. Lord Paunceley, a mysterious man of immense power, ran Britain’s secret service. He had been a lifelong friend of their father, though the friendship was now conducted entirely by correspondence.

Toby smiled. ‘I’m taking the rebels muskets, powder, and money. I shall be safe!’

‘You’ll be dead.’

‘Then I’ll be with Lucille.’

And that had been the final straw for her, a reply of such stupidity and such an evasion of his responsibility, that they had parted on terms of strained affection. She did not want him to go, she could not stop him going, yet, in the end, there was a certain relief that the tall, black-dressed Gitan was leaving with him.

She said farewell to Toby on a cold morning in November. She hugged her brother tight. They had always been close, always affectionate, and it seemed to Campion that only these last weeks had brought some barrier between them. ‘Be safe, Toby.’

‘I shall be safe.’

She looked up at the mounted Gypsy, black cloaked, his blue eyes so unreadable. And on this last glimpse, as on her first, she felt the force of the man’s looks and personality strike into her soul with undiminished impact. She nodded coldly, wishing him a safe journey, keeping her voice as tight and controlled as ever when she was in his presence.

He smiled and answered in his strongly accented English. ‘Thank you, my Lady.’

Then she hugged Toby again, her eyes closed and her arms about him. He gently pulled away and climbed into the travelling coach. He went to his revenge, to his chosen work, and Campion watched the tall, black figure that rode beside the coach until the gatehouse hid him from view. They were gone, and there was the sense of a burden lifted. Yet sometimes, in the long evenings, when her father was lost in the solace of his liquor and the Castle was slowly closing itself for the night, she would find herself before a large, pagan portrait of Narcissus that hung in the Castle’s Great Chamber and see, in that old painting, the same arrogant, competent, strong face that she missed. The Narcissus in the painting was naked, and she was ashamed that she should be drawn by the strong, sleek body. She was ashamed and she was astonished that she, who was so controlled, so sensible, so practical, should find her emotion so uncontrollably arrested by a common groom. He was the Gypsy, and he had ridden into her dreams to make them sad.

Her father saw it. He looked at her from his bed one bright, cold morning at November’s end. ‘What’s troubling you?’

‘Nothing.’ She smiled. She was dressed to go out, cloaked and furred and wrapped against the winter’s cold.

‘You look like a dog that’s lost its nose. Are you in love?’

‘No, father!’ She laughed.

‘Happens to people, you know.’ He grimaced as pain lanced through him. ‘One day they’re perfectly sensible, the next they’re mooning about like sick calves. It’s nothing that marriage won’t cure.’

‘I’m not in love, father.’

‘Well, you should be. It’s time you were married.’

‘You sound like Uncle Achilles.’

He looked her up and down fondly. ‘There ought to be someone who’d marry you. You’re not entirely ugly. There’s Lord Camblett, of course. He’s blind, so he might have you.’

She laughed. ‘There’s that curate in Dorchester who thought I was the new milliner in town.’

‘He wet himself when he found out,’ her father laughed. ‘Poor booby. Why didn’t you tell him?’

‘He was being very sweet. He showed me over the church.’ The curate, nervous and hopeful, had escorted her from the church to find a carriage and four waiting outside, postilions and grooms bowing to the girl he had thought a milliner. He would not be consoled for his mistake. Campion smiled. ‘If I’d have told him he’d only have been more nervous. It’s quite nice sometimes to be treated like everybody else.’

‘I could always throw you out of the Castle,’ her father said hopefully. She laughed, and he held her hand. ‘You’re not sad?’

‘No, father.’ How could she tell him about the Gypsy? He would think she was mad. ‘Except I wish Toby wasn’t in France.’

He shrugged. ‘Wouldn’t be much of a man if he didn’t want adventure, would he?’

‘No, father. I suppose not.’

Hooves and wheels sounded on the gravel and her father laboriously turned his head to look at the horses that stopped beneath his window. ‘They’re looking good.’

‘Marvellous.’ She said it warmly.

The bays were her joy. A matched pair that were harnessed to a carriage she had chosen for herself, a carriage that her father considered flighty, dangerous, and welcome evidence that his beautiful daughter was not entirely a sensible, practical and dutiful girl.

She had bought herself a phaeton.

Not just any phaeton, but one of the highest, swiftest phaetons in the country. The bays were as spirited as the carriage itself, and the Earl, whenever he saw the equipage drawn up on the forecourt, felt a pang of fear for his daughter.

The phaeton, her father thought, could hardly weigh more than she did! The Earl had ordered ballast placed above each axle, but still the fragile assembly of steel, leather, and wood frightened him.

He looked at her from his pillow. ‘Simon tells me you took the ballast off the axles.’

‘A bit.’

‘A bit!’ He laughed. ‘I don’t know why you don’t just glue bloody feathers on it and try to fly.’

‘Perhaps I will.’ She kissed him. ‘I’ll see you at lunch time.’

‘Drive slowly.’

‘I always do.’

‘Liar.’ He smiled at her.

This morning she was driving to Millett’s End. The village was a remote place, lost in the southern heaths, but it was a journey she took each fortnight as part of her duty. Most of the villagers were tenants or pensioners of Lazen, the vicar was appointed by the Castle, it was as much a part of Lazen as the larger, closer, richer town on the Castle’s doorstep. Campion went there for duty, yet she admitted to herself the pleasure of letting the bays run free on the high, straight, heathland road.

Not that today she could go fast. The frost had rutted the roads dangerously hard, though once up on the heath she knew she could steer onto the grass and let the bays stretch their legs.

Simon Burroughs shouted from the stable-block doors. ‘You want company?’

‘No!’ She smiled at him. Sometimes a groom would accompany her on a saddle-horse, but Campion knew the grooms were instructed to keep her pace slow. Today, on this crisp, cold, hard day she wanted to be alone.

The wheels blurred as the bays trotted down the long, curved driveway, over the small bridge that crossed the stream which fed the ornamental lake. It was here, she thought, that she had first seen the Gypsy, and then she pushed that thought away as she rattled between the gatehouses and onto the cobbled street that led to Lazen’s market place.

She raised a gloved hand to those who greeted her, called a welcome to Mrs Swan who was brushing out her cottage, and pretended not to notice the lurch as two children jumped onto the back axle stand. Two only was the rule, and only as far as the mill bridge, but it was no fun unless she pretended not to notice.

She let the horses go faster as she crossed in front of the covered market. She had seen Simon Stepper, the bookseller whose business was almost entirely owed to the Castle, wrapping a scarf about his neck in his shop doorway. He was a clever man, but once he began talking he would never stop. She looked the other way, laughing as a man who stacked logs beside the glebe cottages gestured for her to go faster, and then Simon Stepper was left behind and the phaeton, its shadow leaping from cottage to cottage, slowed to approach the mill bridge. She heard a gasp and laughter as the children fell clear.

The water was high, spilling gleaming from the mill pond. The smoke from the mill kitchen chimney was whipped away by a stiff breeze and Campion caught a whiff of roasting meat and then she was driving past the town’s clink, the small single cell jail with its door open onto mysterious shadow, and she was through the town. She slowed as the cobbles ended and the road climbed between black, frost rimed hedges towards Two Gallows Hill.

She went slowly here, remembering how in spring these hedgerows were thick with flowers and fragrance. Spring, she thought, seemed so far away. The road climbed more steeply. Joshua Cartwright, who farmed on this edge of the town, would bring his horses to help wagons climb this incline, yet the bays pulled the phaeton without apparent effort. She looked right at the single, empty, leaning gibbet on Two Gallows Hill, then the road twisted through pasture land, heaved up one more steep slope, and levelled itself onto the heathland above. The gibbet was left behind, the sky was immense now over the flat landscape, a landscape bare of features except for the road, a few, windbent trees, and the curious, humped ridges of the old earthwork fort to her left.

It was a cold day, the sky was cloudless and the sunlight slanted low and bright onto the bushes. She took the bays off the road onto the wide, flat verge, and let them go into a trot. Their breath whipped back past their gleaming flanks. Her spirits rose with the speed.

She let them go faster. The ground here was quite level, quite safe, free of hidden stones that could tip a fast-moving phaeton and smash it to tinder. She shook the reins again and it seemed to her that she rode a chariot in the sky. The bushes blurred as she went past them, she felt the joy of it, the excitement of it, the reins quivering against the tension of her forearms, and she let the horses go faster still.

The wind put tears into her eyes and lifted the cord of the whip. She thought the speed might even pluck off the fur bonnet that was pulled so low over her ears and about her face, but still she shouted at the horses, laughed, and felt the pure exhilaration of the speed.

The Reverend Horne Mounter, dining in the Earl’s rooms last week, had explained the scientific fact that there was an absolute celerity beyond which a human body could not travel.

The Earl, sitting up in bed, and grumbling about an itching in his mended stump, had opined that such a scientific fact was garbled mumblelarkey.

The Reverend Mounter had laughed politely and complimented the Earl on his spitchcock’d eel.

‘Always liked eel,’ the Earl said. His thin face had been flushed. The room had a sour smell in it, a smell of sickness. At least, though, he was sober. Campion had cut more of her father’s food, then smiled at the rector.

‘An absolute celerity, Reverend Mounter?’

‘Indeed so, my Lady.’ The Reverend Horne Mounter swallowed his mouthful of eel and helped it with some of the Castle’s best claret. ‘At speeds, they say, in excess of one equivalent to thirty miles in an hour, it is certain that the blood of the body would be driven by the excessive motion to the rear of the body. Unless, of course, one was travelling backwards, in which case it would be driven to the front of the body!’ He demonstrated this fact with copious movement of his plump, white hands. ‘Starved of the blood the front, or back, half of the body would die! It’s quite certain!’

‘It’s quite fiddlededee!’ the Earl had said.

Now, her wheels spinning and bouncing on the frost-hard turf, Campion shook the reins again and let the horses go into a gallop. She wondered how fast they travelled and whether the tingling on her skin was the blood being driven backwards by the celerity of the carriage. She laughed aloud at the thought, and as she laughed, so she saw the shape rise from the gorse to her right.

She stood no chance.

The man ran at the bays, shouted, and hurled a thick bough of dead gorse at their feet. They swerved, Campion leaned on the reins, felt them sawing at her wrists, but the horses had panicked to their left and dragged the light carriage onto the uneven road.

The wheels of the phaeton bounced, slammed down, and caught on the thick, frost-hardened rut at the road’s centre. Campion shouted at the horses, pulled the right reins, and then the front left wheel splintered in shards of varnished, gleaming wood and the carriage crashed down, dug in its spinning axle hub, and Campion was thrown clear, by a miracle the reins uncurling from her hands, and she screamed because the phaeton seemed to be falling on top of her, but it lurched back, was crashing past, and she fell onto the grass of the road’s centre, the breath driven from her body, and she heard the horses slowing as the tangled, broken mess of the phaeton dragged them to a stop.

The man laughed.

Campion’s right hand was on one of the splintered spokes of the wheel, fractured in the crash so that the varnished wood, picked out with yellow paint, was now sheared into a wicked point of fresh timber.

There was pain all over her. She was dazed, but she swung the feeble weapon at the shape above her, kicked, but then her makeshift spear was held and a foot was clamped heavily on her ankle.

The man’s breath rasped loudly in his throat.

For a second he did not move.

Her vision cleared. She could not see him at first, so bright was the sky about his head, but she could smell him. He pulled the broken spoke effortlessly from her hand and tossed it far into the gorse.

He chuckled hoarsely as he knelt beside her. She struck at him with her right hand, but he caught her wrist and forced it to the ground, then seized her left wrist. She saw his face and screamed.

He was unshaven. There was an open sore by his right eye. He looked like any vagabond, any tramp, except that his skin was oddly pallid as though he had been in a sunless prison. His face was scarred by old boils. His hair was lank, littered with straw ends, and his mouth, as he leered at her, was filthy with blackened stumps of teeth. His nose was flat and crooked, as though it had been broken repeatedly. He felt hugely strong to her. She had a glimpse of a great barrel of a belly, dirty where his rags gaped to show a red boil, and she lashed out with her right boot, sobbing, but he put his knee between her thighs, pinning her by the skirts, and his spittle dribbled onto her face as he leered above her.

‘You be nice to me, you be nice! I’ll make it easy on you if you be nice to me, girly!’ He laughed as she tried to kick at him. ‘Don’t do no good fightin’, girly. I be one of the Fancy, I was.’ As if to demonstrate his point he let go of her left wrist, and his fist, that had been bruised, skinned and broken by the bare-knuckle fighting so loved by the gentry, slammed into her belly.

The breath was pushed again from her, she lay helpless, pounded by the blow, and she felt the vomit rise with the panic.

She could not move. The blow had hurt her. He let go of her other wrist that hurt from his cold grip, and pushed her woollen cloak away from her body. He laughed. ‘Pretty.’ He moved his knee, grunted, and hauled her skirts up. ‘Oh, pretty! Pretty!’

She screamed as he touched her thighs, lashed at him with both hands, but he just laughed and caught her fists, and held both her slim wrists in the huge grip of his left hand. She felt as if her wrists would snap as she tried hopelessly to pull away from him.

She was powerless. She tried to kick at him as he fumbled with frost-chilled fingers at the string which held up his ragged trousers, but he just laughed at her feeble efforts. ‘You be good, girly!’

She twisted, jerked, and could do nothing. Her thrashing dislodged the collar of her cloak and the man saw the gleam of the gold chain she wore at her neck. He had untied his trousers and now he reached for the chain.

He tugged the chain free, his fingers scrabbling at her throat, and she twisted away, the sickness thick in her gorge, and then he let go of her wrists, gripped the cream linen dress she wore beneath her blue, fur-lined cloak, and jerked her with savage force as he tore the dress down to her waist.

He hit her hands out of the way, hooked his fingers on her petticoat, and she screamed again as he tore at it. The force of his tearing hands lifted her body from the grass and, as the petticoat ripped open, she fell back, screaming and sobbing.

He was kneeling over her, straddling her body, and she could feel his spittle dripping on her cold, naked breasts. His nose was running, dribbling to his mouth. He was laughing, the laughter choking in his slavering throat, and he forced her hands aside to look at her body and he laughed. ‘Pretty girly, pretty, pretty girly.’ He held her arms on the ground.

‘No!’ She screamed. ‘No! No!’

He leaned back, the better to see her, and she could smell his breath like ordure and hear the air rasping in his throat. He let go of her arms and she clasped them over her breasts and then she felt his hands tugging at her waistband and she struck at him and he slapped her stingingly on the face. ‘You be good, girly! You be good!’

She tried to kick him, but his weight was on her thighs, and he laughed as he took from somewhere in his rags a small, rusted knife and began to saw at the dress’s belt. His trousers had fallen to his thighs. He grunted as he ripped at the cloth, beat her hands aside again, and cursed as she twisted desperately and the tangle of cotton and linen snatched the small blade from his hand. He thumped his fist onto her bare belly to make her quiet. His orders were to disfigure her, to scar her, to pox her, to scab her, to make her a thing that no man could ever desire. He fumbled for the knife, impatient to cut her clothes off, then, losing patience as she twisted so desperately beneath him, he raised himself up and simply pulled her skirts above her waist and forced her legs apart. ‘You be good now, girly! You be good!’

She screamed in despair. The scream sobbed helplessly as she twisted and then, from nowhere it seemed, came rescue. Into her lonely place of horror came help.

It came with a shout, with the thunder of hooves, with a cry of alarm from the man who pawed at her and who suddenly scrambled away, gibbering and shouting, and Campion clutched her torn clothes to herself, rolled over, and it seemed as if the air was filled with the noise of hooves, the shadow of a great horse that pounded within inches of her head and she had a glimpse of a mounted man who held a streak of light in his hand.

‘No!’ her attacker shouted. His shout was one of pure, sudden terror. He stumbled, one hand holding his trousers, the other warding off the sudden brightness of the long sword. Campion’s eyes were closed. Over the thunder of hooves, over her attacker’s cry for mercy, she heard the hiss of steel in air. Then silence.

Except it was not silence. She could hear the hooves on the grass. She could hear the creak of a saddle, the chink of a curb chain.

She pushed herself to her hands and knees. She vomited.

‘Madam?’ The voice was crisp, educated, and solicitous. ‘Dear Lady?’ The man had dismounted, had come close to her.

She shook her head. Her breath came in huge, stomach-heaving gasps. She was on all fours and she could see the scraps of her cream coloured dress hanging down by her breasts. A small, rusty knife was on the ground beneath her. She sobbed.

She screamed as something touched her, but the man’s voice was gentle. ‘Quiet now! Quiet! Gentle, dear lady!’ A great cloak was dropped about her shoulders, a cloak that enveloped her. It smelt of horses. The man’s voice was soothing, as if he spoke to an unbridled colt. ‘Quiet now. Gentle now!’

Slowly she knelt up, clutching her own and her rescuer’s cloak about her torn clothing. Her fur bonnet had fallen on one side of her face and she shuddered as she felt his hands put it back into place, but his touch was gentle and she was glad of it.

‘Dear lady?’

She looked up.

Her rescuer was in uniform. The sight was somehow astonishing. Here, on this lonely heath, was a cavalryman in his finery, a blue jacketed and breeched uniform, bright with red facings and gold lace and looped with frogging and sword slings. An embroidered sabretache swung at his side. Small gold chains hung from his epaulettes. His voice was anxious. ‘Are you hurt, dear lady?’

‘Only in my pride.’ It came out as a squeaking sob. She tried to say it louder, then saw the man who had attacked her.

He lay dead. He could not be alive. His dark rags and his lank hair were red with blood. His trousers were about his thighs. His neck had been half cut through by a great sword, steel bright, blood stained, that her rescuer had plunged into the turf. The man had died in an instant.

Campion’s breath came in huge gasps. A gobbet of blood, thick as honey, trickled down the sun-reflecting brightness of the big sword. Vomit retched in her throat and she forced it back.

The cavalryman turned to look at his victim. ‘I shouldn’t have killed him.’

She frowned. ‘Sir?’

‘He should have hung.’ Her rescuer’s voice was suddenly full of outrage. ‘God damn him. He should have hung!’

Oddly it seemed funny to her. She gave a choking laugh. She knew she sounded hysterical, but she could not help laughing and crying and sobbing at the same time.

The cavalry officer crouched beside her. ‘Gentle now! Gentle!’

She shook her head. She swallowed. She took a great gulp of air. ‘I’m all right, sir.’ It came out as a sob again and she forced calmness into her shaking voice. ‘I thank you, sir.’ The words made her cry.

The cavalryman took from his sleeve a handkerchief, offered it to her, then realized that both her hands were gripping the cloaks to cover her nakedness. He seemed embarrassed by her tears and stood up. He went to the sword, plucked it from the turf, and cleaned the bright blade with the folded handkerchief. He had to scrub at the blood and, when he was done, he tossed the handkerchief away.

He turned back. She had stopped crying. She knelt on the grass and stared at him. He smiled reassuringly. ‘My presence, dear lady, was most fortunate.’

‘Indeed, sir.’ She managed to say the words clearly. Everything seemed unreal, yet slowly the universe was putting itself back together. She could see the chalk scars on the earth ramparts of the old fort, the shadows of the gorse, the black blob of a missel-thrush nest in a bare, stunted elm.

He smiled at her. ‘I’m travelling to Shaftesbury. Someone said this was a short cut.’ He pushed the sword back into the scabbard, the steel ringing on the metal throat. ‘My servant’s following tomorrow.’ He seemed to be filling the silence with inconsequential words. She nodded.

‘You were alone?’ he asked.

‘Yes, sir.’ She swallowed. The world seemed to want to spin about her. She closed her eyes. In her mind’s memory she heard the thick chop of the blade in flesh.

The cavalryman went to look at her phaeton and she opened her eyes and turned to see him unbuckling the harness and leading the miraculously unhurt bays from the wreckage. She was still on her knees. She was shaking. She wiped spittle from her mouth onto the collar of his cloak.

The cavalryman’s hat had fallen off in his charge. The sun glinted on his golden hair and moustache. He had a round face, red from the cold, and she guessed his age close to thirty. He worked efficiently, tying the bays by their reins to the broken splinter-bar of the phaeton.

He slapped his hands together when he was done, then took big, white leather gauntlets from his belt and pulled them on. She saw that the right gauntlet was speckled with bright blood. He smiled. ‘That’s the horses looked after, now for you, madam.’

She felt the need to apologize. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Dear lady! You’re sorry! God! It’s I that should apologize. A moment sooner and I might have stopped the whole damned thing.’ He stooped beside the dead body and picked up the gold chain with its diamond drops. ‘Yours? Hardly his, I suppose?’

He said it so lightly that she laughed. It was a slightly hysterical laugh.

He stood up, still holding the jewel, and bowed. ‘My name is Lewis Culloden, Lord Culloden. Major in the Blues when the fancy takes me, which is not often.’

She looked up at him. ‘Lady Campion Lazender, my Lord.’ That too struck her as funny, to be introducing herself from the grass. She wished she could stop the hysterical swinging between tears and laughter. She wished she had brought dogs with her, that the groom had come, that the horrid man with his dripping nose had not pawed at her. She cried.

Lord Culloden let her cry. He waited till the sobs had faded. He cleared his throat and sounded astonished. ‘You’re Lady Campion Lazender?’

‘Yes, my Lord.’ She was ashamed of herself for crying. She was ashamed of it all. She obscurely felt that it was her fault, and that annoyed her because she knew it was not true.

‘From Lazen Castle, my Lady?’

She nodded. ‘Indeed, my Lord.’

‘My dear lady! Good Lord!’ He seemed quite flummoxed suddenly, as if St George, having rescued the maiden, discovered that he was too shy to talk with her. He blushed. He looked at the crumpled figure on the turf. ‘He must have been mad!’ he blurted out.

She tried to stand, stumbling because she needed to keep her hands within the cloaks, and Lord Culloden came forward to take her elbow as though she was made of porcelain. She smiled her thanks. ‘Do you have any water, my Lord?’

‘Water?’ He said it as if she had asked for the moon. ‘Ah! Water! No. I have rum, my Lady?’

‘Can I beg you for a sip?’

He walked to his horse and Campion felt another shudder of revulsion as she saw the bent neck and still body of her attacker.

‘My Lady?’ Lord Culloden nervously offered her a flask. She could not take her hands from within the cloaks; he seemed to understand and held the flask to her mouth.

She almost choked. She used the first mouthful to swill the sickness from her tongue, spat, and then she drank some of the crude spirit, and she saw her rescuer’s smiling, anxious face and she felt a great rush of warmth and gratitude.

He led her to the phaeton so she could lean against the wrecked, tipped carriage. He smiled. ‘How do we get you home? Can you ride?’

She nodded.

‘And what were you doing alone on the blasted heath?’ He was patting her bays’ necks. ‘I thought fair maidens stayed away from such places. Too many dragons!’

‘Apparently,’ she said. ‘It has always been safe.’

‘That’s what King Harold said about Hastings.’ He grinned. The sun was bright on the gold wires and lace of his uniform. ‘Now, my Lady, you will ride my horse and I’ll take yours.’ One of the bays was shivering, the whites of its eyes showing. Lord Culloden ran his gauntletted hand down the horse’s back. ‘You’re recovered enough, my Lady?’

She nodded. ‘Indeed, my Lord, thanks to you.’

‘Thank the rum, Lady Campion.’ He smiled. ‘Is it far to Lazen?’

‘No, my Lord.’ He was, she thought, despite his gaudy uniform, a plain, honest looking man. She could imagine him in a saddle for a day’s hunting, a squire with a voice that could carry for two wet fields against the wind. He was obviously awed by this meeting with the daughter of one of England’s great families. His eyes, slightly hooded, added a dash of humorous languor to his face, hinting that he might possess a wry wit. He was not, at first sight, a man of startling handsomeness, yet at this moment he was, to Campion, more handsome than St George and all the angels. She made herself stand upright. ‘If we could go to Lazen, my Lord, I would be most obliged.’

‘To Lazen we shall go. I would dream of going nowhere else.’ He was leading his own horse towards her. She was shaking still. She could see the dark ruin that had been her attacker’s throat and she closed her eyes on the sight.

‘Lady Campion?’ Lord Culloden’s voice was gentle.

‘My Lord?’ She opened her eyes, forcing herself to be calm.

He was blushing, making his blond moustache seem even lighter against his red skin. ‘If you clutch the cloaks so tight then I fear I will have to lift you onto the saddle, can you bear that?’ He smiled.

She nodded.

He lifted her easily to set her sidesaddle on his horse, then used the wrecked phaeton as a mounting block to settle himself on one of the bays. He gathered its long driving rein into his hands, took the reins of the other, and smiled at her. ‘To Lazen, my Lady. The dragon’s corpse we will leave behind!’

She was suddenly freezing, shivering despite the two cloaks, but the relief of it all was overwhelming. She even felt lightheaded now, laughing as Lord Culloden talked to her and they descended the steep hill towards the town. He was still nervous of her. He looked at her often for reassurance that some small witticism was well received, and he touched his moustache in an habitual gesture whenever she smiled at him. He became shyer as the excitement of the rescue faded, embarrassed almost to be in her presence. She remembered some story of his family, of his father gambling away much of the property. She guessed that Lord Culloden was not accustomed to glories such as Lazen.

They rode through the town and earned inquisitive looks from the people who watched them pass and then, as they came to the gatehouses, Lord Culloden reined in. He shook his head in amazement. Before him, like a hill of stone and glass, was the grandeur of Lazen. Seen thus for the first time it was easy to imagine why some people called Lazen ‘The Little Kingdom’.

‘It’s magnificent! Magnificent! I’d heard so, of course but…’ His voice tailed away.

She smiled. He could have said nothing better calculated to please her, such was her love of this place. ‘My father will want to thank you, my Lord.’

He blushed modestly. ‘I could not impose, my Lady.’

She dismissed his modesty, urged him onwards, and together they rode into Lazen.

5

It was the first time in three years that the fifth Earl of Lazen had left the Castle.

First he was carried downstairs by three footmen, then carefully placed on the cushioned seat of Lazen’s most comfortable travelling coach. He hated leaving his rooms. He hated outsiders to see his weakness.

He was sober this day. His face was pale and drawn, the face, Campion thought, of an old man. She was not going with him, but as she watched the blankets being tucked about his thin body she thought how the raw, winter light made him look a score of years older than fifty. His manservant, Caleb Wright, climbed into the coach and the door was shut.

The Earl nodded to Wright, who rapped on the coach roof, and then the Earl grimaced as the coach jolted forward. Even small movements gave him pain, yet he had insisted on going out this day.

There was not, after all, far to go.

The coach went down the driveway, through the huge gates with their stone carved escutcheons that showed the bloodied lance of Lazen on either post, past the gatehouses that curved forward in elegant wings, and then slewed right on the cobbles of the market place to take the Shaftesbury road.

Lord Culloden rode beside the coach. His face looked grim and wintry, suitable for this occasion.

Simon Burroughs, Lazen’s chief coachman, had brought extra horses and, when they reached the field at the bottom of Two Gallows Hill, they were harnessed to the six already pulling the coach so that the great vehicle could be hauled to the summit of the hill.

Waiting at the hilltop, as the coach heaved and jolted upwards, was a common cart. It stood close to the pitch-painted gallows that leaned eastwards towards the town.

A small group of men stood about the cart. They were cold. The Castle lay like a great stone monument in the valley beneath them. The smoke from its scores of chimneys drifted flatly over the winter-hard land.

The coach, creaking and swaying, reached the gentler slope at the hill’s top. The men standing about the cart pulled off their hats as the door was swung open. They could see the white face of the sick Earl staring from his seat. He raised a hand in acknowledgement of their muttered greetings.

The door had been opened so he could see what was about to happen.

Lord Culloden dismounted. ‘You’re ready, my Lord?’

‘I am.’ There was a grim pleasure in the Earl’s voice.

The turf about the gallows was worn thin. To the south Lord Culloden could see the heathland where he had rescued Campion. The sky above was grey and white. He nodded to the waiting, cold men about the cart. ‘Do your duty!’

The body of the man who had attacked the Lady Campion Lazender had been fetched from the heath. It had been stripped naked, then bound in a net of chains. The links jingled cheerfully as the men hauled the body off the cart, as it thumped on the ground, as they dragged it by the feet to the gallows.

The Earl watched.

The ladder had been forgotten, but one of the small boys who had come to watch shinned the upright and sat astride the crossbeam. A rope was thrown to him that he threaded through the rusted iron ring that was bolted to the beam. The lad stayed there.

They tied the rope to the chains at the nape of the dead man’s neck, then hauled him up so that he hung like a misshapen sack. He would rot now, the chains holding his decomposing flesh as the birds tore at him. By winter’s end he would be nothing but bones in rusted chain.

The Earl watched with grim satisfaction. It was a pity he could not have hanged the bastard alive, but he would hang him dead and in a place where, each dawn, the body could be seen from the Lazen valley; a warning to others who dared attack his family.

The small boy, while the men supported the weight of the dead man, tied the rope at the ring iron. The men let the body hang. It turned slowly, the head slumped down on the chains about the half cut neck. Lord Culloden stood back, touched his blond moustache, and looked at the Earl through the open carriage door. ‘May God damn his soul, my Lord.’

‘God can have his soul,’ the Earl said, ‘but I’ll have his bones. I’ll grind them for the pigs.’ He grimaced in pain. ‘Give the men their cash, my Lord, and add a half guinea for that lad! Then home!’

Campion, watching from the Long Gallery, saw the dark speck hanging on the skyline. Beside her, Mrs Hutchinson, her companion and chaperone, frowned. ‘Hanging’s too good for him, dear.’

Campion smiled at the old woman. ‘Where he’s gone, Mary, he’s suffering far worse.’

‘I hope so, dear, I hope so. You know me, I’m not vengeful, but I’d have torn his heart out with my own hands! I would, too!’

Campion laughed. ‘You can’t kill a moth!’

Mrs Hutchinson tried to look fierce and failed hopelessly. ‘Well at least Lord Culloden is staying on! I thank the good Lord for him, dear, truly I do.’

Campion looked at the old lady and smiled. ‘So do I.’

‘And you’ll pardon me for saying it, dear, but it is nice to have a gentleman about the house again! It’s been too long! Entirely too long.’

‘It has, Mary, it has.’ Campion smiled, and there came, inevitably and annoyingly, a sudden image of a black-haired man laughing with the small maid at the kitchen door, and she angrily thrust the image away. ‘I’m glad he’s staying.’ She made herself say it warmly, and she told herself, as she had told herself a dozen times since the awful attack on the heath road, that her meeting with Lewis Culloden was a miraculous providence of heaven. Lewis Culloden’s dramatic entry into her life had made her look up a half forgotten passage in Mr Burke’s book ‘Reflections on the French Revolution’, a passage which said that ‘the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded.’ Mr Burke, she thought, was wrong. The age of chivalry had come with a bright sword and the hammer of hooves on the lonely road to the south. A maiden had been rescued, a villain hanged, and a lord had come to a castle. Chivalry, she tried to persuade herself, yet lived.

‘If they kill their King,’ Valentine Larke said, ‘we should turn Paris into a slaughterhouse. To do nothing is to condone the crime. We will have to fight!’

His companion laughed. ‘With what? We’ve reduced the army again!’ The Prime Minister believed that Britain would not need an army now that the French nation, as Burke had prophesied, promised to destroy themselves in blood and fire.

Larke said nothing. He was staring into the Westminster night, waiting for a cab or chair to come to the steps of Parliament. Sedan chairs, now that London was growing at such a rate to make their journeys impossibly laborious, were increasingly rare. Larke’s broad face looked grim in the light of the great lanterns. Sleet was falling on the cobbles.

His companion shivered within his greatcoat. ‘You’ll get your war, Larke, but the Prime Minister wishes you wouldn’t call for it quite so fiercely.’

Larke laughed. ‘I owe Pitt no favours.’

‘But he can do you some.’ His companion smiled. ‘You’re coming to White’s?’

‘No.’

‘Working again, my dear Larke?’

‘Working.’ At that moment the lanterns of a cab appeared and a linkboy ran forward with his flaming torch. Larke crammed his hat on his crinkly, black hair and nodded to his companion. ‘Mine, I think.’

Valentine Larke ran for the cab, climbed in, and shouted his destination to the driver. He could hear the sleet pattering on the tarpaulin that covered the driver’s knees.

Inside the vehicle he smiled. Again, in the candlelit chamber of the Commons, he had given a ringing call for war. He knew Britain was not ready for war, he knew that Pitt would do all he could to avoid war, so this was the perfect time to rattle the sabre and demand slaughter. Valentine Larke, Belial of the Fallen Ones, was establishing impeccable credentials as a man who hated the French and their damned revolution. He laughed aloud.

‘You said something, sir?’ the driver called out.

‘Damn your eyes! Just drive!’

The cab rattled behind its slow horse through the cold London night. Larke, sitting well back in the leather seat, saw the whores sheltering in the doorways, the drunks who would die in this cold, and the children sent out to beg while their mothers whored at home. Larke thought how much he loved this city. He knew it as a rat knows a dark, shadowed and foetid yard.

The cab stopped in one of the new streets of London’s west end. The houses were big, white stuccoed, with elegant iron railings supporting torches. He handed two coins to the driver and waited for the cab to go into the slanting, cold sleet.

He did not climb any of the elaborately porticoed steps. Instead he walked into a dark alley, unlit and stinking of urine. He lifted the skirt of his huge cloak as he walked, crossed a mews that was thick with the stench of horse manure, and then, stepping over a moaning drunk who reeked of gin, he entered another alley. He had a pistol in the pocket of his dark coat beneath the great cloak, but he walked without fear. This was his city. He moved through it with the skill of a hunter in a forest.

Music sounded ahead.

He could have ordered the cab driver to drop him at the glittering, impressive facade of the building that he approached, yet deviousness had become second nature to Valentine Larke. He approached the rear of the building, not because he came in secret, but because he always preferred the hidden approach. He was Belial.

The alley opened, under an archway, into a small brick-enclosed yard that was piled with scraps thrown from a busy kitchen. It was a foul place of rats and cats, a place where the sun would not enter except on a summer’s midday.

Three men were there. All were richly dressed. They wore no greatcoats or cloaks. Their coats were unbuttoned, showing frilled shirts and high silk stocks. The door at the top of the steps leading into the great house was open, letting a wash of yellow candlelight into the yard.

The three men, if they saw Larke, ignored him.

One of the three, a pugnacious, ugly man, was laughing as he tried to unbutton the flap of his breeches. The man belched, then finally succeeded in pulling the flap open. He held onto the wall. ‘Hitch her skirts up, Robin!’

An old woman, a drunkard, had come scavenging in the kitchen yard. She had either collapsed in gin-sodden unconsciousness, or else had been knocked down by the three young men who laughed at her helplessness.

‘Company!’ A tall young man whom Larke recognized as the Honourable Robin Ickfield drew the word out as if he was a drill sergeant. ‘Company! Fire!’

All three pissed on her, laughing loudly as she tried to drag herself out of the way.

Valentine Larke moved silently behind them and climbed the steps into the house. The young lordlings were at play and that was never a good time to disturb them. There were few things in life more dangerous than the idle, bored young men of London society.

Larke went into the house, through an antechamber, and then into the great, well-lit hallway into which the front-door of the house opened. A footman, hugely muscled beneath his elaborate uniform, started as Larke silently appeared from the back of the house, but then recognized him and relaxed. ‘Mr Larke, sir.’

While Larke was giving the man his cloak, hat and cane, a door to the left of the hall opened and a huge woman, middle aged and grotesque, came into sight.

She was dressed in lurid purple silk, her piled hair surmounted by a feather dyed the same colour. At her huge breasts hung a pendant of gold. She stopped when she saw Larke, sniffed, then nodded coldly. The feather quivered above her head. ‘Mr Larke, I see.’

He bowed to her. ‘Your servant, Ma’am.’

‘You’ll want food, I suppose,’ she said ungraciously.

‘Indeed, Ma’am.’

‘And no doubt you’ll settle the bill, Mr Larke?’ Her small eyes glared at him from the shapeless, pudgy face that seemed like a lump of dough piled haphazardly at the top of her massive cleavage. She seemed to have no neck at all. She jerked her monstrous head, making the pearls shake where they hung in her piled hair. ‘I am not a charity, Mr Larke.’

He smiled. ‘Indeed you are not, Mrs Pail.’

She sniffed and swept on, attended by two small footmen who fussed behind her like pageboys.

Her name was Abigail Pail, and these were her Rooms. Mrs Pail’s Rooms were famous in London, not just for the food, which was superb, or for the gaming, which was fast, but most of all for the girls, who were superb and fast. The ugliest woman in London ran the best whorehouse. It was here that the rich and the titled came to play, where their fortunes were lost, where their every need was attended to at a price that was extortionate.

The three men who had relieved themselves in the kitchen yard came noisily back into the hall. The pugnacious one, whose wigless black hair was cut short as a curry-brush, had vomit stains on his red silk coat. He saw Valentine Larke and laughed. ‘Christ! They let you come here?’

Larke smiled and bowed. Sir Julius Lazender, he thought, had one merit; consistency. He was offensive all of the time.

Sir Julius brushed rain off his coat. ‘Abigail lets you paw her girls, Larke?’

The Honourable Robin Ickfield snickered in a high voice. ‘I thought politicians preferred boys.’

‘You should bloody know, Robin,’ Sir Julius laughed. He belched drunkenly. ‘Christ! I could tup a bloody horse tonight.’ He pulled himself up the stairway, then turned with a malicious grin on his face. ‘You’ve come for the Countess, Larke?’ He said it accusingly.

‘The Countess, Sir Julius?’ Larke’s voice was unctuous.

‘Don’t tell me you didn’t know!’ Sir Julius’s breeches flap was only half buttoned. ‘The old faggot’s got a French Countess here, Larke, but then I don’t suppose you can afford her, eh?’

‘She’s expensive, Sir Julius?’

Sir Julius laughed. ‘Five years ago the sniffy bitch wouldn’t look at you! Now her Ladyship will rub her tits on your arse for a shilling.’ He leered at Larke. ‘But only if you’re a gentleman.’ He turned away, pleased with his insult, followed by his companions.

Valentine Larke watched the three climb the stairs, his hard eyes showing no offence. Valentine Larke had not been born into the gentry, but if Sir Julius Lazender was a measure of gentility then Larke was glad he was no gentleman. Sir Julius, nephew to the Earl of Lazen, was a belligerent, drunken, pugnacious, rude wastrel. Larke smiled. Sir Julius would live to regret every sneer and every insult.

He turned towards the gaming room. The footman, who knew that Larke was neither a lord nor conspicuously rich, only opened one of the two leaves of the door.

He walked slowly through the lavishly appointed room, acknowledging the silent greetings of three of the players, and then climbed the far stairs that led to the dining room.

It was almost empty at this time of night. The waiters stood solemnly at the sides of the room watching the few patrons who remained. The food at Abigail’s was famous. Within an hour, Larke knew, the tables would be crowded with men from Parliament who saw no disgrace in eating their chops beneath Abigail’s bedrooms. One of the waiters hurried forward to usher Larke to a table, but Larke dismissed him. He walked the length of the room and through a door that would, by a short passage, bring him back to the main stairway which led to Abigail’s girls.

Another door, marked ‘Private’, led from the short passage. Larke paused, looked left and right, saw that no one was watching, and took from his waistcoat pocket a key. He fitted it into the keyhole, grunted as it turned reluctantly, and then, with a last look left and right, went into the room. He locked the door behind him.

He sat. On a table beside him was a tray with glasses. He poured himself some wine. A great book, bound in morocco leather, was beside the tray and, pulling the candelabra nearer to his chair, he opened the book on his lap.

‘Recorded. That Lady Delavele will drop Twins by Easter Day, between Mr Tyndall and Ld. Parrish. 200L.’

‘Recorded. That Ld. Saltash will Consume Bishop Wright’s Tomcat, prepared in Mrs Pail’s Kitchens, Entire. Between Ld. Saltash and Bishop Wright. 150L.’ Beside it was written. ‘Ld. Saltash the winner.’

‘Recorded. That Mr Calltire’s Bucentaurus will beat Sir Simon Stepney’s Ringneck, the owners up, between Tyburn and St Paul’s. The race to Commence at Midnight, Christmas Eve. Between the Owners. 2000L.’

‘Recorded. That Ld. Saltash will Consume Bishop Wright’s Marmalade Cat, Without Benefit of Onion Sauce, entire, prepared without Any Sauces or Gravies, in Mrs Pail’s Kitchens. Between Ld. Saltash and Bishop Wright. 300L.’

Valentine Larke smiled. The commission on wagers recorded in Mrs Pail’s book was twenty per cent. A key sounded in the lock of the door.

He looked up, his bland, flat eyes wary in the candlelight.

Mrs Pail herself stood in the doorway, her white, podgy face grim.

Larke stood. ‘Dear Mrs Pail.’

‘Mr Larke.’ She shut and locked the door, then turned and gave him a clumsy curtsey.

He smiled. ‘I find you well?’

‘Indeed, sir. Yourself?’

‘Never better, Mrs Pail.’ He put the book on the table. ‘Things seem to be flourishing?’

‘Flourishing they are, flourish they had better.’ She said it grimly, then smiled and bobbed her head as Larke poured her a glass of wine.

He raised his glass to her. ‘What’s this I hear about a French Countess in the house?’

‘Dear me!’ Mrs Pail gave a coy laugh. ‘A spinet maker’s daughter from Birmingham! Father was a rich man, raised her to speak French, but he’s bankrupt now.’ Mrs Pail shook her white, shapeless face. ‘Not the most beautiful of my girls, but I took her as a favour. She does well. She jabbers in French while they work. You’d like to see her?’

Larke smiled. ‘No. But a splendid idea to call her a Countess. I do congratulate you.’

Mrs Pail blushed with pleasure. ‘You’re too kind, sir, entirely too kind.’

‘Please sit, Mrs Pail.’

Valentine Larke was the sole owner of Mrs Pail’s Rooms, though only she, he, and a select few others knew it. He owned a dozen other such establishments in London, places where the gentry went to lose their money at cockfighting, cards, women, or prizefighting. He was insistent that, in public, she treated him as one of her less valued customers, such was his passion, his need for secrecy. He waited till she was seated, then sat himself. ‘I’m sorry to intrude on your evening with business, Mrs Pail.’

The doughy, powdered face screwed itself into a sympathetic smile. ‘It’s always a pleasure, Mr Larke.’

He smiled. ‘I won’t detain you long. I merely wish to know how much Sir Julius Lazender is in your debt.’

She thought for two seconds. ‘Not counting tonight, Mr Larke, nine thousand four hundred and twenty-two guineas.’

He raised his eyebrows. It was a huge sum, yet he did not look displeased. ‘You still lend him money?’

‘Of course, sir. You told me to.’

Larke nodded and sipped his wine.

Abigail Pail watched him without speaking. She did not know why her employer had instructed her to let Sir Julius Lazender run up such a vast debt. Sir Julius did it without difficulty. To Abigail Pail’s knowing mind Sir Julius Lazender was a brute, a brute with an appetite that drew him back night after night. He lost at the tables, he became drunk, and he went upstairs to the lavish, soft rooms and never was asked to pay a penny. Even his gambling debts were settled by the house. Sir Julius Lazender, on Valentine Larke’s specific instructions, had been given the freedom of London’s most exclusive and expensive whorehouse.

Larke knew that freedom should not end yet. His timing in this matter of Sir Julius had to be exquisitely right. He put his glass down, steepled his fingers, and smiled at the woman. ‘You will see Mr d’Arblay and instruct him, upon my authority, to prepare a summons for ten thousand guineas. But it is not to be served, you understand?’

‘Of course, sir.’

‘Nor is Sir Julius to know that the summons exists. He may continue to come here and you will continue to welcome him. If you need money then my bankers will, of course, oblige.’

‘You’re very kind, Mr Larke.’ The white, blubber face sniffed in disapproval.

Valentine Larke saw it and smiled. ‘Something troubles you, dear Mrs Pail?’

‘Not my position to be troubled, sir,’ she said in a tone that contradicted her words. ‘But he’s going to be the ruin of us!’

‘I assure you he is not.’ Larke smiled.

She chose to ignore his assurance. ‘Only this week, Mr Larke! He bit a girl! Horribly, Mr Larke! I can’t work a scarred girl!’

‘You put it on his bill?’

‘Of course.’

‘And the girl?’

Mrs Pail frowned. ‘I can’t put a girl on the streets just before Christmas, Mr Larke! It’s not Christian!’

‘Indeed not.’ He stood, to show that the interview was over. ‘Indeed you may keep her in the house, Mrs Pail, so long as you wish.’ He knew the loyalty that Abigail had to her girls. She educated those that could not read and always ensured that those who were not communicants in the Church of England learned their catechism and were confirmed by a bishop who was one of the house’s steadier patrons. By day the bishop conducted the girls towards heaven, and at night they returned the favour.

Larke bowed over her fat, ring-bright fingers. ‘I will stay a few moments.’

‘Of course, Mr Larke.’ She smiled archly. ‘You’d like company?’

He shook his head. ‘Thank you, but no.’

When she had gone, and when the door was locked, he took from his waistcoat pocket a message that had come to him at the House of Commons. He opened it, read it for the third time, then tossed it onto the grate that was piled with glowing coals. He watched the letter curl, burn, and break into wavering scraps of black ash.

Chemosh had not done what he had said he would do.

Larke stared into the fire.

Chemosh had promised that the girl would never marry because no man would marry her. She would be poxed and scarred, yet she was neither. She lived still with her beauty and her virginity. Chemosh had not done what he had promised he would do.

He put his head back, the corrugated black ridges of his hair crushed on Mrs Pail’s chairback, and he wondered when the Gypsy would next come. The Gypsy was the messenger who connected Larke and Marchenoir, carrying the coded letters that none but those two politicians could read. Larke hoped the Gypsy would come soon for he needed to pass on to Lucifer, by way of Marchenoir, the news of Chemosh. Lucifer would have to decide what was to be done. The timing of this thing was like the workings of a chronometer; gleaming, valuable, and exact. Chemosh was threatening to fail.

They dared not fail. Valentine Larke, staring into the fire, thought that they could not fail. Lord Werlatton was hunted by Moloch, Sir Julius by Belial, and the Lady Campion by Chemosh, and the joy of it was that not one of the victims knew of the hunters. He sipped his brandy and thought of Chemosh. The man had not done what he had promised, but he had not yet necessarily failed. Nor, Larke reflected grimly, would he fail. They were the Fallen Ones, and they did not fail.

Nor would he fail with Sir Julius. He smiled and took another sip of the wine. Sir Julius was baited and hooked, and Larke could reel him in whenever he wished. It could wait, he decided, till after Christmas, and then Belial would strike and the Fallen Ones would tighten the invisible ring that would choke the life from Lazen Castle. He smiled. He drank to the victory that would follow Christmas, to the victory that would lead the Fallen Ones to the Day of Lucifer and the fall of Lazen.

Uncle Achilles ran the blue ribbons through his fingers. ‘You’re going to wear these?’ His tone suggested that perhaps she should burn them instead.

‘I won’t wear anything if you stay here.’

‘My dear Campion, I am far too old to be excited by a woman getting dressed, let alone undressed. Besides, you forget that I’m still a priest. They never unfrocked me.’

‘And I’m not unfrocking while you’re here. Go away.’ She smiled at him and kissed him on both cheeks. ‘I’m glad you came.’

He smiled. ‘And glad that my mother didn’t?’

‘She would have been welcome.’

He laughed. ‘I like your Lord Culloden.’

‘He’s not mine.’

Mrs Hutchinson was laying out a dress of white crepe with Brussels lace at the neck and cuffs. Uncle Achilles looked at it where it lay on her bed and smiled. ‘A wedding dress?’

‘Go away.’

‘But I do like him, truly!’ Uncle Achilles took a pinch of snuff, crossed to her dressing table, and sat down. He opened a pot of rouge, dabbed a finger in it, and rubbed it experimentally on the back of his hand. ‘Not my colour.’

She crossed her arms. ‘I’m going to be late, uncle.’

It was only four o’clock in the afternoon, yet already Campion had ordered candles lit in her bedroom. It was gloomy outside, the sky grey and darkening over the Lazen valley. Uncle Achilles twisted on his chair and stared down at the townspeople who walked in excited groups towards the Castle’s entrance. ‘You English make a great fuss about Christmas.’

‘We don’t make any fuss at all. We simply have a good time. Those of us, that is, who are allowed to dress.’

He grinned at her. He was clothed, Campion thought, lasciviously; there was no other word. He had a suit of gold cloth, a new wig with silk tails, gold-buckled shoes of satin, stockings of white silk, and the faintest touch of cosmetics on his face. He saw her looking him up and down. His voice was teasingly anxious. ‘You think I’m presentable?’

‘You look wonderful. Just like a bishop.’

He laughed. He dipped her powder puff into the china bowl and brushed it against his hand. He held the hand out to the window and frowned critically. His nails were varnished. ‘In London they think I’m very elegant. But then I’m French which always impresses the English. They feel inferior to us for one very good reason.’

‘Because they are?’ She smiled. She thought how bored Achilles must be; an elegant, clever Frenchman only half employed in a strange country. He smiled at her. ‘Exactly, dear niece. You are so sensible for a mere woman.’ He crossed his legs, taking care not to crease his silk stockings. ‘The English have a sneaking suspicion that we know something about life and elegance and beauty that they do not know, and it is every Frenchman’s duty to continue the illusion. It is even, dear niece, the duty of someone like yourself who has the blessing of being half French.’ He smiled seraphically. ‘Has he asked you to marry yet?’

‘I haven’t known him five weeks yet!’

‘How proper you are, dear niece.’ He smiled and turned to the dressing table again. He dipped his finger into the cochineal ointment she would use on her lips and painted a heart on her mirror. He ignored her protests. He pierced the heart with an arrow. Above its fletches he wrote ‘CL’, by its point he wrote ‘LC’. He inspected his work. ‘There’s a certain symmetry to the two of you.’

Mrs Hutchinson, who had not understood a word of the French they had been speaking, understood the drawing. She laughed.

Campion, who was dressed only in a full length bed robe of coloured Peking silk, sat on the chaise longue. She smiled at her uncle. ‘You think the symmetry is important?’

‘I think it’s wonderful!’ He was fastidiously wiping his finger on one of her towels. ‘After all, lovers always seek fate’s happy signs. One says “I was born on a Monday” and the other says “and I also!”, and from that mere, unimportant coincidence they deduce that heaven has had a hand in their conjunction.’ He shrugged. ‘I think CL and LC come into that happy, heavenly category, don’t you?’

‘You want me to marry him?’

He smiled wickedly. He liked teasing her, not the least because she never took offence, however shocked she might be by his words. ‘Do you wish to marry him, dear Campion?’

‘What I wish, uncle, is to get dressed.’

He stood, bowed, and smiled again. ‘I retire defeated from the field. You will dance with me?’

‘Of course.’

‘If Lord Culloden will let you. Do you think he’s the jealous kind? Men with moustaches often are.’

‘Go away.’

He did, crossing in the doorway with Edna, Campion’s maid, who had fetched a bowl of warm water and hot towels.

It was Christmas Eve, the traditional day of celebration, the day when the town came to the Castle and the Castle provided bowls of frumenty and plates of pies and vats of punch and music from the gallery and fires in the great hearths and hogsheads of ale and puddings that had seeped their smell from one end of the huge building to the other and, as midnight drew near, great platters of roasted geese would bring cheers from the throng in the Great Hall.

A throng which expected the Lady Campion to marry. The word seemed to haunt the Castle. The rumour was like a whisper in every room, in every corridor, in every smiling face that greeted her. Lord Culloden had been in Lazen just a few weeks, yet all the Castle, all the estate, expected there would be a marriage.

Lord Culloden had said nothing. He was correct, polite, and charming, yet the mere fact of his presence fed the rumour that, before the leaves fell again, the Lady Campion would be wed.

She dressed with more care than usual.

Mrs Hutchinson cooed over her, patting the dress where it did not need adjusting, twitching hair that was like pale, shining gold. ‘You look a picture!’

‘I feel exhausted, Mary.’ Campion, as usual, had organized the day’s celebration.

Mrs Hutchinson smiled. ‘You look lovely, dear, quite lovely.’ What she meant, Campion knew, was that she looked lovely for him.

For whom, though?

For the Gypsy was also here.

She had seen him and the sight of him after so long was like an arrow thrust into the heart. She had thought she had forgotten him, she thought that the memory of that slim, dark, oddly blue-eyed face was just that, a memory. She had persuaded herself that her thoughts about the Gypsy were not about a real man, but about an idealized man, about a dream, and then she had seen his smiling, strong, competent face, and it seemed as if her heart stopped for that moment, there had been a surge of inexplicable, magic joy, and then she had turned abruptly away.

He had brought a letter from Toby. Toby was still in France, working for his mysterious master, Lord Paunceley. The letter asked her forgiveness that he could not be in Lazen this Christmas. Instead the Gypsy was in Lazen and on this night of Christmas Eve, just as at the old Roman feast of Saturnalia from which Christmas had sprung, the servants in Lazen would join the festivities with those they served. Tonight the Gypsy was her equal.

The blue ribbons were threaded into her sleeve so that, when she danced, they would hang and swirl.

About her neck were sapphires.

In her hair were pearls.

She stared at herself in the mirror. CL and LC.

Lord Culloden had come into her life in a blaze of heroism, in a manner of a Galahad or a Lancelot. He was tall, he was eager to please, and he was happy to make her happy.

She could not think of a single thing that she disliked about Lord Culloden, unless it was a slightly supercilious air towards his inferiors. She guessed the superciliousness came from his family’s lack of money, a fear that with a little more bad luck he would become like those he despised. On the other hand, as he became more comfortable with Lazen’s great wealth and privilege, he was displaying a dry and sometimes elegant wit. She smeared the red arrow with her finger and she thought that CL did not dislike LC. She might even like him very much, but there was the uncomfortable fact that when she saw him about the Castle she felt nothing. Or, at least, she did not feel the delicious, secret thrill that the Gypsy gave her.

She wished the Gypsy had not come. She stood. She stared for a moment at the grey, lowering clouds beyond her window. The hills across the valley looked cold, their crests twisting like agony to the winter sky. At the top of Two Gallows Hill, like a black sack, hung the man who had attacked her.

She shuddered, closed the curtains, and turned. Tonight there would be music and dancing, the sound of laughter in the Great Hall and flamelight on its panelling. Yet none of that, she knew, gave her the tremulous, lovely, guilty anticipation that sparkled in her eyes as she left the room. She had dressed with care, she had made herself beautiful, and, though she could not even admit it to herself, she had not done it for Lord Culloden. She walked towards the music.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.