Fallen Angels

‘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.