Fallen Angels. Bernard Cornwell

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      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. СКАЧАТЬ