Fallen Angels (28 page)

She skirted the mound that had once held the keep when Lazen was a real castle. At its foot, where she hugged the dark hillock, were the Castle's beehives.

She stopped at the edge of the mound and saw the lights brilliant in the castle's northern windows. Couples walked in the gardens, couples whose laughter came soft over the grass.

She walked on. There was an exhilarating, nervous pleasure in this secrecy, this assignation on such a night as this. She wanted to laugh aloud, she wanted to kick off her slippers and run barefoot on the grass. How many brides left their betrothal ball to meet another man? The thought made her laugh.

To her right was Sconce Hill, a tangle of bushes and darkness, and ahead were the ruins of the old gatehouse. Once LazenCastle had faced north. Now, when it was no longer a place of war, but one of the great mansions of England, it had turned its face to the warmer south.

She could see the bright couples walking beneath the paper lanterns in the WaterGarden. She could not go that way. Like the guilty person she felt herself to be, she must stay in the darkness. She went to her right, crossing the northern approach road, and going into the long, tangling grass beyond.

Laughter bubbled inside her. Practical, sensible Campion was doing what no one would believe she could do. She could scarcely believe it herself.

She had to pull the coloured Peking above her knees to climb the barred fence that divided the grassland from the park. She climbed carefully, not wanting to tear her satin stockings, and then, unsnagged, she jumped safely to the far side.

She went more slowly now. The park was rough pastureland, its dips and bumps scarcely lit by the moon or the brilliant light that came from the Castle. She lifted the skirts of her dress and cloak above the long grass and searched ahead for a sight of the small temple on its low rise.

She heard muffled laughter to her left. She stopped, crouched and listened. She could hear voices, a man's and a woman's, and then she heard a long moan, a laugh, and she knew suddenly that a couple had gone to the shadowed secrecy at the bottom of the ha-ha. The ha-ha was a ditch that separated the formal gardens from the park, a ditch with one sheer face that no deer could climb, thus keeping the view from the Castle unimpeded by a fence and the gardens unravaged by deer. And Campion, listening to the sound, felt as though she was a part of the happiness of illicit love that was spreading about Lazen this night. A pang of excitement and apprehension shot through her as she rose and walked on. She was being foolish, she knew it, and it was delightful, delirious foolishness.

She justified the foolishness by telling herself that she came only to receive Toby's present. She tried to persuade herself that she did nothing that would offend Uncle Achilles' concern for her dignity. She would take the present, whatever it was, thank him graciously, and walk away.

She saw the moon whiteness of the footpath, turned onto it, and there, faintly pale against the beeches behind, was the elegant temple. Her grandfather had built it, a small pillared fancy that stood on a stepped pedestal and was crowned by a white, domed roof. She had sometimes climbed the steps and chased about the floor with Toby when she was a child. Her father had spoken of pulling it down, yet it still stood, deserted and odd, the retreat where the fourth Earl of Lazen had written his huge, unpublished attack on the Copernican system.

She walked to the bottom of the steps. The Solomonic pillars twisted to the white dome. A wall, low enough to sit on, edged the temple's floor. She looked up. She wondered if she should call his name. She wondered if she should turn back to the Castle.

She could hear the music of the dance, so faint now as to be like the music of the fairies that her mother would tell her to listen for in the night-time woods behind the Castle.

'Hello?' Her voice seemed small and shy.

Silence, but for the trees moving in the wind.

She felt sudden fear. She was alone in the darkness to meet a man she did not know, a servant. She told herself that she should go back to the Castle, that she should abandon this foolishness.

'Hello?'

Two bats skittered through the temple's pillars, twisting and darting into the darkness.

She turned. A shadow moved in the park, a swift, dark shadow against the blackness of Two Gallows Hill. She heard the hooves on the turf, the jingle of curb chains, and she knew he had come and she felt something close to panic in her, a panic edged with excitement. She stood unmoving as the shadow resolved into a black horse, a black-cloaked rider on its back.

The Gypsy stopped five yards from her. The black cloak was draped on his horse's rump. He leaned on the pommel of his saddle. The moonlight made his light eyes bright in his dark face. 'My Lady.'

She said nothing.

He turned his head and gave a short whistle. She heard a snort, heard more hooves, and then, trotting obediently to his command, came a horse of wondrous beauty.

She guessed, in the moonlight, that it was chestnut. It was not a big horse, but it had long fronts, deep shoulders, straight hind legs, and, as it trotted, it showed a long, full action that promised speed and stamina. The Gypsy smiled at the horse, reached out, and let it nuzzle his hand. 'She's called Hirondelle.' He spoke in French. The name translated as the Swallow.

Campion walked to the mare and stroked her muzzle.

The Gypsy smiled. 'Your brother's gift. He ordered me to buy the best horse I could find. I found her in Kent. She's a beauty.'

Campion smiled. She ran her hand down the strong neck. 'She's lovely.' The mare trembled under her touch. 'Why a French name on an English horse?'

'I named her.'

'It's a good name.'

'Five years old, well enough nagged. You can hunt her next year.'

Campion stopped, one hand on the horse's back. She looked over Hirondelle at the black-cloaked man. 'What did you say?'

'Well enough nagged.'

It was a common phrase, meaning that the horse had been well schooled. It was not the phrase that surprised her, but the fact that the Gypsy had spoken in English. There had been no trace of a French accent. She stared at him. 'You're English.' She said it accusingly.

The Gypsy laughed. He swung from his black horse and, carrying a saddlebag, climbed the temple steps. His voice was cheerful.
'Mandi Angitrako Rom, rawnie.'
He sat on the wall to the right of the entrance, one leg bent in front of him, his back leaning on a pillar.

She knew this was the moment when she should thank him for bringing the gift, order him to stable Hirondelle, and then she should walk back to the Castle. She knew, too, that he had deliberately intrigued her so she would stay. She looked at him from beneath the cowl of her hood. 'What did you say?'

'Mandi Angitrako Rom, rawnie.'
He smiled. 'It means "I am an English Rom, my Lady."'

'Rom?'

'You call it gypsy. My tribe is the Rom, and their language is the Romani, and I come from that part of the tribe that lives in England. My mother, though, was French Rom.' He had taken a bottle of wine from his bag and two glasses. The glasses were familiar to her, both had come from the Castle. He poured the wine and placed one glass at the end of the wall as an invitation to her. He leaned back, raised his glass, and smiled. 'My congratulations on your forthcoming marriage.' He managed to inflect the formal words with inoffensive irony.

She knew she should not stay, but why else had she come? Hesitantly she walked towards the temple. She climbed the steps. The floor of the temple was incised with the signs of the zodiac about a great half globe that protruded from the floor's centre. At the top of the half globe was Britain, and at the very top, where the globe was flattened as an impractical table, was the word Lazen. Campion ignored the wine. She walked left about the globe to be on the far side from him. Her feet stirred the dead, dry leaves that had collected on the floor. She frowned at him, as if to show that her presence here was not incompatible with her dignity. She tried to think of something to say that would be natural, that would explain her staying at the temple. 'Hirondelle came from Kent?'

The Gypsy nodded. His teeth were white in the darkness. 'From Hawkhurst. Put a martingale on her for a few weeks. That'll teach her not to star-gaze.'

Campion smiled. She could talk about horses for ever. 'So she's not perfect?'

'She will be. She's fast.'

She felt a trembling inside her. When he smiled, and his face was transformed with a kind of mischievous joy, she felt her heart beat faster. In repose there was a savagery to his face that was exciting, but the smile promised other things. She hid her feelings. 'We were sorry my brother could not be here.'

He laughed. It occurred to her that he was laughing at the formality of her words. He sipped his wine. 'Toby wanted to come, but the French were waiting for him. He's safe, but he had to go back inland.'

He had used her brother's Christian name as if it was normal.

She frowned. 'Yet you came.'

He smiled. 'But I move about France, my Lady, with the permission of the French, and about England with the permission of the English.'

The words tantalized her. She supposed they were meant to. 'So what does that make you?'

'A Rom.'

She smiled. She sat on the wall, the movement tentative as though expressing that she ought not to be here. She stared at him across the hump of the half world. 'How does a horse-master get permission of warring governments to move where he pleases?'

He turned and stared at the Castle which seemed to float on a great surge of light. 'Because, my Lady, I am not a horse-master.'

'What are you then?' She could feel herself trembling beneath her cloak.

He took a twist of tobacco from a pocket, a slip of white paper, and wrapped the one in the other. He opened his tinder box, struck a spark, and blew the charred linen into a. small flame. He bent his head to the flame and she thought, as she stared at the strong, fire-lit features, that she had never seen so magnificent a man. Smoke whirled into the darkness as he closed the box. 'For ten years, my Lady, I lived as a Rom. Then my parents died, killed in a ditch by a farmer. You remember the laws?'

She nodded. The Gypsy Laws, repealed only ten years before, had made it a crime even to talk with a gypsy, while the death of gypsies had worried no one, certainly not any Justice of the Peace.

The Gypsy blew more smoke. 'The farmer said they'd stolen his child. It was nonsense, of course, but that didn't stop him shooting both of them. He searched the wagon and there was no child, except me. He tried to kill me.'

He told the story in such a commonplace way that it astonished her. She frowned. 'He tried to kill you?'

'With a knife. I wasn't worth powder and shot.' He grinned. 'I killed him instead. Slit his belly open with my own knife.' He looked at her as if waiting for a reaction. She said nothing. He smiled. 'So I went to work in stables. I was good with horses. Suddenly people wanted me.'

'Wanted you?'

'To make their horses go faster. And other people wanted to stop me. I became better with a knife, learned to use guns and a sword. I was paid fortunes by the quality to win races,' he shrugged, 'and I got bored with it, so I set off for Italy.'

'Why Italy?'

'Why not?' He smiled. 'I liked the sound of it. I was eighteen, my Lady, and at eighteen you think the world is all yours and that the roads have no ending.'

'How did you live?' She had become fascinated. When the Lazenders travelled it was with thirty or more servants, their own cooks to take over inn kitchens, and their own lice-free beds to put into the best rooms.

He smiled. 'A good horseman can always make a living, a good thief makes a better one, and we have a saying that the best bread is begged bread. I lived.'

She laughed. It felt utterly natural to be talking with him. She had come here in a mixture of excitement and shame, not knowing what to expect, knowing only that there existed a great gulf between them that should have kept them decently apart. Instead, though the excitement was still there, she felt this odd, happy comfort in his company. 'Where did you go in Italy?'

'Venice, Padua, Florence, Rome, Naples.' He shrugged. 'It was in Naples that I met the Marquess of Skavadale. You've heard of him?'

'He came here once.' She smiled. 'When I was very small.'

The tip of the Gypsy's tobacco glowed a hard, bright red. 'I liked Skavadale. He was digging up Roman relics. You've probably got some?'

She nodded. There had been a insatiable passion among the great houses for the relics of ancient Rome, a passion that had been blown to white-heat by Edward Gibbon's
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
Lazen had not been immune. Wagons had brought old, expensive, battered statues that still stood in unlikely corners and in the more remote bedrooms. The Gypsy sipped his wine, then leaned his head on the pillar. 'Someone was stealing from Skavadale and I stopped it. He was grateful. He taught me to read. He made me his chief helper, his guardian, his whipper-in.' He smiled. 'He also discovered that I wasn't baptized so he found some Anglican clergyman who was touring the ruins and had me christened in the remains of a Roman bath-house.'

'With what name?' She asked it quickly.

He turned to look at her. He shrugged. 'Christopher Skavadale.'

'I like it.'

He shrugged. 'It's not my real name. You don't take a new name at twenty.'

'Why not? You expect women to do it all the time.'

He laughed. 'That's true.' He raised his glass to her. 'Lady Campion Culloden?'

She said nothing. She was wondering what the names Lazender and Skavadale would look like wreathed in white fire on a night-time fence. She thrust the thought away. 'What happened then?'

'He sent me to London five years ago. He made me take a gift.' He held out his tinder box. 'It was a Roman lamp, just this size, one of the oil lamps with a spout for the flame, and a lid that covered half the bowl. On the lid was a bas-relief. It showed a man and a woman. They were doing what I think a couple of your guests are doing in the ha-ha.'