Fallen Angels. Bernard Cornwell

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      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 СКАЧАТЬ