Fallen Angels (43 page)

To be unfaithful was to court the punishment of losing an ear or a hand. To be a whore was filthy, unfitting for Rom, to be as bad as the
gaje.

'Why do the
gaje
hate you?' Campion asked.

'They say we stole the swaddling clothes from the baby Jesus. They say we made the nails for his cross.'

Campion laughed.

Ababina smiled. 'Because we're free, so they envy us. Because we see the future, so they fear us.'

'And can you see the future?'

The old woman clicked her tongue at her dogs. 'Anyone who lives can see the future. You just have to trust what you see.' She looked ahead to where a small village straddled the road and she spat at the verge. 'Soldiers.'

—«»—«»—«»—

Christopher Skavadale rode a horse borrowed from one of Ababina's grandsons. He dismounted and went into the guardhouse.

The
vardoes
stopped in the village street. The villagers surreptitiously crossed themselves, preferring to risk the wrath of a regime that did not like religion than to run the dangers of the gypsies' evil eye.

The soldiers, less fearful, walked slowly down the line of wagons. They asked for papers. They stole the dead chickens that hung at the wagons' sides, not knowing that the gypsies had stolen the fowls earlier in the day for just that purpose.

The soldiers carried muskets. They had bayonets sheathed at their belts. Their feet were bare or stuffed into straw filled sabots.

A soldier stopped beside Ababina's wagon and reached for their papers. He took them, glanced at them, and handed them back. He could not read.

He looked at Campion. 'You're not a gypsy.'

'I am.'

He laughed. Two of his companions joined him, and they called to the other soldiers so that the troops crowded about the
vardo
and stared at the gypsy who had golden hair showing at her scarf's edge.

'You want money, gypsy?'

She said nothing.

The man reached out with his musket and hooked the muzzle beneath her skirts. He lifted them and the soldiers cheered as they saw her calf. 'Come on, girl! A livre from each of us?'

She said nothing.

He pushed the musket higher, jerking her skirts back down over her knee and she twisted away, pushing the skirts down, and the man reached out and caught her wrist. He pulled her down so that her face was close to his and she could smell the onions on his breath. 'I'm offering you money. If you don't say yes, little one, I'll take you for nothing. Now what's it to be?'

She was terrified. She felt inadequate. She sensed that another girl, more used to the world, would have known how to deflect them with laughter and boldness. She knew they sensed her fear, they had found themselves a victim.

He pulled her further towards him and more hands reached up to take her shoulders to haul her clear of the wagon. She screamed, and they laughed.

'Come on, beautiful! We'll steal you back from the bastards!'

She half fell from the wagon seat, both arms held by soldiers, and they began to drag her towards one of the houses. A hand snatched the scarf from her head and a whistle of appreciation sounded as her gold hair spilled in the sunlight.

The pistol shot froze them.

She pulled one arm free.

An officer ran towards the men, his face appalled, while behind him, on the steps of the guardhouse, Skavadale reloaded his pistol.

'Leave her,' the officer shouted, 'for God's sake! Leave her!'

The soldiers frowned. She was just a gypsy, a nobody, a girl to rape with the freedom conferred on them by liberty's uniform.

The man who held her left arm, the man who had lifted her skirts, pulled her towards him. 'We offered the bitch money!'

'Let her go!'

The officer's command over his men was tenuous, but behind him Skavadale walked slowly towards the soldiers and they fell back before his air of comfortable confidence. The man let go her right arm.

Skavadale walked past her. He took the man by the throat and hit him twice over the face. 'Well?'

'Captain?' The man appealed to his officer.

Skavadale hit him again, harder. 'Well?'

The officer's face warned his men to make no trouble.

Skavadale lifted the soldier by the throat. He did it without apparent effort, his eyes on the man's eyes, and, when he held him six inches above the ground he suddenly dropped him and brought up his right knee.

The man screamed, fell, and curled on the ground with his hands clutching his loins.

Skavadale turned. 'My papers, Captain.'

The officer handed over not a passport or a travel permit, but a folded sheet of paper that bore a red seal.

The soldiers watched in silence as Skavadale helped her back onto the wagon. They sensed that they had been fortunate. The guillotine, these days, was utterly without discrimination.

Skavadale rode beside her. 'Are you all right?'

She nodded. She had been appalled. She was ashamed that she had not behaved better.

He smiled. 'Next time tell them they're not men enough for you, that you don't ride donkeys, only stallions.' Ababina laughed. 'You'll learn, Shukar, you'll learn.'

—«»—«»—«»—

They parted from the gypsies to the west of Paris. The sky was smeared with the city's smoke. There was a chill in the air, the hint of autumn's ending. The birds had been flocking south for three days now, flying over the
vardoes
and gathering in great swarms in the golden trees.

Ababina was the last to say farewell. She kissed Campion on both cheeks.
'Ja develesa, shukar.'

Campion smiled. 'Which means?'

'Go with God.'

'And
shukar
? What does that mean?'

The old woman laughed. 'It means beautiful. Remember one thing.'

'What?'

The old woman looked at Skavadale who had relinquished the horse and now waited for her. 'He's frightened of you.'

'He's not frightened of anything!'

The old woman laughed. 'He chose the
gaje
world, Shukar. Do you think it doesn't frighten him? He won't show it, but in your world he feels as strange as you in ours.' She shrugged. 'It's his choice.'

She kissed the old woman. 'Thank you for everything.'

'Ja develesa, rawnie,
and I think you do.'

—«»—«»—«»—

The greatest change Campion could see in Paris was in the clothes of the people. It was dangerous, Skavadale said, to be seen flaunting wealth, and so the inhabitants, even those who had money, adopted a protective costume of dirty rags. Most wore rosettes of red, white and blue, similar to the one that Skavadale pinned on Campion's shawl.

The houses were festooned with patriotic banners, the colours bright, the slogans preferring death to loss of liberty. Yet the houses also had the names of their inhabitants painted on the doors so that the soldiers could search to find those who slept without permission in Paris.

Skavadale took her to the Section
Bonnet Rouge
and sent her upstairs to the Revolutionary Committee. 'Ask for a permit to sleep in the Section.'

'You're not coming?'

'I'll be a moment.' He smiled. 'You'll be safe.'

Eight men sat at the table. They seemed to spend all day in the room that was smothered with posters exhorting the world to revolution. The table was littered with half-eaten food, wine bottles, dice, and playing cards. Women cooked in a kitchen next door, their laughter loud, their heads bright with red caps of liberty.

The men stared at her.

One man took her papers. He glanced at her passport, but frowned for a long time at her forged
Certificat de civisme
that guaranteed, in this age of liberty, that her political views were acceptable to the revolutionaries. He sniffed. The room buzzed with flies.

One man looked her up and down. 'Why are you in Paris?'

'To seek work.'

That made them laugh. 'You could earn a fortune without leaving your bed,
ma poule!'

She smiled.

Skavadale had paused to buy a bottle of apple brandy. Now he stood in the deep shadow outside the Committee room. His voice startled her. 'She's not a gypsy.'

She felt panic sear through her.

The men, who ruled this section of Paris, stared at her.

Skavadale spoke again. 'She's an English aristocrat.'

They looked at the shadows by the door. She felt her stomach turn into churning, liquid fear.

One of the men suddenly roared a great welcome. 'Gitan!' There was an explosion of laughter.

Skavadale shook their hands one by one. 'You're getting fat, Michel.' He punched a friendly fist into the man's stomach. He had a word for everyone in the room, knew their nicknames, and happily sat with them and offered them his gift of brandy. He jerked his head at Campion. 'My woman. We need an inn.'

'Just one room, eh?' One of the men laughed. 'You're a lucky bastard, Gitan!'

Skavadale grinned. He patted the chair beside him and Campion sat. They scribbled the permit she needed and pushed it to her.

The man called Michel grinned at her. 'You'll prefer me, gypsy girl! I'm a man of substance!'

She took the brandy that Skavadale gave her. She was still liquid with terror inside, but she forced a smile onto her face. 'I never ride donkeys, only stallions.'

They laughed. She was in Paris.

—«»—«»—«»—

That night she lay beneath an open window and watched the clouds and smoke skein before a crescent moon.

She had never travelled without a horde of servants. She had never been in an inn where the innkeeper was not solicitous for her comfort. She had never been in such danger.

There had been times since she had landed in France when she had felt lost, lonely and frightened, yet those times were few. She had hated it when the soldiers grabbed her, but even then she had known that Skavadale was near, that he would come for her, that she was safe. Just as now, lying alone in her narrow bed, she felt safe because he was downstairs.

Tomorrow they would take a coach for Bellechasse, and from Bellechasse they would cross the mountains to Auxigny. And at Auxigny, she knew, all the answers would be found. Not just to Lucifer and the Fallen Ones, but to the questions that had mocked her these twelve months. Love, her uncle had said, was an illusion. Nothing more.

Then this, too, was an illusion. This journey, this madness, this adventure.

He had told her once that the roads never end, yet it seemed to her that they would end, not in sadness, but in the mysteries at Auxigny. After that, she told herself, the old roads would be gone. She smiled. She was in France and she was happy.

She knew that the machine stood in the Place de la Revolution, yet somehow it was a surprise to see the twin shafts rising above the crowd's heads. She stopped, frowning.

'What's the matter?' Skavadale was carrying their bags towards the stage terminal. 'Oh, that!'

'Dear God!'

'Don't use English.'

'Did I?'

He smiled. 'Yes.'

But it was a shock, like finding that the Green Man really did live in the woods or that witches circled the moon on broomsticks. It was there, sticking into the sky like nothing she had ever seen, but was oddly familiar all the same. It was close by the great plaster statue of Justice that loomed over its own victims' deaths.

She suddenly gasped. They're using it!'

'Of course! They do every day!'

She took his arm. 'Come on!'

She had seen the crowd there, but had somehow not thought that they watched an execution. The sight of people walking through the huge square had convinced her that nothing was happening, and it was only the flicker of the blade climbing the twin shafts that had told her that Paris had become so used to this sight that most passers-by did not even stop to watch. Death was a commonplace now. She wrinkled her face. 'It smells!'

'They want to build a "sangueduct".'

'A what?'

'A gutter to carry the blood to the Seine.' He smiled down at her. 'So much blood has soaked into the square that it stinks.'

She heard a thump and a cheer. She tried to ignore it, but Skavadale stopped and she had to stop with him. She looked up at him. 'Can't we go on?'

'Look at it.'

She looked. A woman was climbing the steps. Even at this distance Campion could see how her hair had been chopped short. Paris, with rough humour, called the haircut that was given to every prisoner
'La Toilette'.

One man took her right elbow, the red-aproned executioner her left, and the third man her legs. The third man held a rose between his teeth. The woman was thrown forward, face to the plank, and, while the man with the rose in his teeth pulled a strap over her back, so the executioner brought the neck brace down.

He stepped to one side, jerked the rope, and she heard the scraping rattle, the thump, and the cheer of the crowd.

'You can open your eyes now.'

'Oh God!' She could see the headless body being heaved off the platform. 'I'm going to be sick.'

'You are not.' He walked her up and down the cobbles.

She heard the scraping, grating fall of the blade, the thump, and the cheer. 'How many more?'

'Till there's no one left to kill.'

Edmund Burke had prophesied this. He had said that the revolution would try to purify itself by blood and fire. She was here, where the cleaning was being done, where peasants were being executed for saying they thought the revolution a mistake.

She heard the machine. The thump seemed to go through her soul.

Blood smelt thick.

It was all so casual. People passed through the square about their business and did not even look at the guillotine. Death was so common that it was not worth a glance.

It was casual, but horribly efficient. No one escaped because there was not time to organize an escape. If she was arrested this day then she would be tried the next morning, found guilty, and be at the guillotine within three hours. No one escaped.