Fallen Angels (42 page)

She said nothing. They all seemed to be waiting for her reply, but she gave none. She looked at Skavadale. In a sense, she thought, her uncle had been right. The Gypsy was working for the Fallen Ones as well as for Lord Paunceley, but which had his loyalty? She remembered Lord Culloden telling of the girl he had killed at Auxigny, of the death that was required as a sacrifice for every new Fallen Angel, and she shuddered to think that she was to be the next victim. She searched the Gypsy's dark, strong face and she could not believe that this man was an enemy. The silence stretched.

The Gypsy sighed. He was sitting on the library steps. He looked at Campion with a flicker of sadness, then shrugged to Lord Paunceley. 'I have another girl who can go, my Lord.'

Paunceley looked at him. 'You do? So what does she look like?'

'Blonde hair, same height.' He shrugged. 'Of course, we'll have to pay her.'

'She's used to taking money, is she?' Paunceley laughed. 'Is she beautiful, this whore of yours?'

The Gypsy nodded. 'She's thought beautiful, my Lord.'

'What girl?' Campion asked.

Paunceley scowled at her. 'If you will not help us, my Lady, then pray do me the courtesy of not interrupting us!'

She stood, inflamed by his rudeness. 'What girl?'

The Gypsy shrugged. 'She's an actress.'

'So was Nell Gwynn,' Paunceley laughed. 'Every whore calls herself an actress! There aren't enough theatres in Europe for all the actresses!' He looked at Skavadale. 'You'd better take her, Bastard.'

'She'll go in my place?'

Paunceley's voice was suddenly savage. 'Lady Campion, I would not sacrifice a shilling to save this house, I couldn't care if the
Illuminati
turn it into a whorehouse. But I do care about Britain. It may have a fat King and it may be filled with more fools than a carnival, but I would not like to see it seething with gibbering revolutionaries who will disturb my declining years. I am paid to keep the lunatics in Parliament, not to have them rampaging in our streets! Lucifer, my Lady, will turn this country into another France, a blood-filled charnel house! So I must kill him. That's why fat George employs me! And if you will not help me, then, by God, I'll pay every trollop in town to go in your place!' He looked back to Skavadale. Tray excuse my intemperate interruption, Bastard, and tell me about this lubricious maiden you will escort through France?'

Campion was staring in astonishment at the Gypsy. 'You mean this girl will call herself Campion Lazender?'

He nodded. 'Of course!'

'She will not!'

Her words were almost shouted. Paunceley smiled. It had been his idea to invent a fictitious girl who would go in Campion's place. He looked at her. 'You can't forbid it.'

She was astonished at the jealousy that had stabbed at her, the jealousy of some unknown girl having this man's company in France. She looked at him. 'How are you going to travel in France?'

'With the Rom as far as Paris, after that the public stage.'

There was silence.

Paunceley chuckled. 'Perhaps the actress would be better, Bastard? I doubt whether the Lady Campion could endure the discomfort.'

She ignored him. She stared at Skavadale. She thought of Achilles' warning, yet was not this assemblage in Lazen's library proof that the Gypsy's loyalty was to Paunceley? Every scrap of sense warned her not to go, but at the same time she was being offered a chance to be alone with this man, away from servants and chaperones and gossip. She swallowed nervously. 'And what happens at Auxigny?'

Skavadale smiled. The girl is my bait. She draws the Fallen Ones and I kill them.' Everyone in the room was staring at her and Skavadale took the opportunity to silently mouth another message. 'Toby.'

So Toby would be at Auxigny.

Geraint Owen cleared his throat. 'We'll provide you with passports, travel permits, all the papers. It really will be safe, my Lady. We send men into France all the time!'

'How many come back?'

He smiled. 'Most.'

She touched the seals of Lazen at her breast. 'If we went, when would we go?'

Paunceley smiled. Tomorrow?'

'Tomorrow!'

'Unless you have other things planned?' he said sarcastically. 'A small tea party, perhaps? Some friends to giggle with you!' He held up a hand to ward off her angry protest. 'Do not tell me I am rude, Lady Campion! Remember I am made in God's image!' He turned to Skavadale. Take your whore, Bastard. This one can't endure a small insult, and France is one great insult these days.'

Skavadale said nothing. He watched Campion. He waited.

She knew she would go. Achilles' advice notwithstanding, she would go. She would go because Toby was there, but above all she would go because, if she did not go, then another girl would take her place.

She would go to the land of death and madness. She would go to France and she knew, as the three men watched her, that she did it in the name of love.

She took a breath. She thought this was the most fateful decision she had ever made, but if that kiss in the temple, the touch of his hand, if that magic that had seared through her meant anything, then she must trust him. She looked at the tall, light eyed man who could set her soul aflame. 'I will go to Auxigny.'

—«»—«»—«»—

That night, as Campion slept, Lord Paunceley waited alone in the library.

A decanter of port was at his elbow, a book on his lap, candles beside him. The fire glowed red.

He heard the door open, there was a second's silence, then it closed with a soft click. The reptilian face lifted from the book. 'Gitan?'

'Oui.'

'Come where I can see you.'

Christopher Skavadale sat on the hearth fender. The fire lit one side of his face.

Lord Paunceley stared into the dark, thin face as though he would read it like the book on his lap. Then he gave his thin, mischievous smile. 'She's more beautiful than sin, Gitan.'

'Yes.'

'I haven't seen a girl so lovely in fifty years!' Paunceley sighed. 'And so innocent! Do you like them innocent, Gitan? Do you have a taste for purity?' Lord Paunceley sipped his port. 'She's in love with you. That's why she's going, isn't it?'

Skavadale shrugged. 'How would I know?'

'You would know, Gitan, you would know.' Paunceley stared at him. 'How sad, Gitan, that you were born in a ditch, eh? You'd make such a couple!' He laughed softly. 'But it can't be, can it? You can't marry her, so you'll take her to Auxigny instead, yes?'

'Yes.'

Paunceley stared at him. In the hall outside a clock struck one. Paunceley smiled a subtle smile. His voice was suspicious. 'Did you tell her that her brother was still alive?'

Skavadale paused, then nodded. 'Yes.'

'How clever of you. Does she believe you?'

'She believes me.'

Lord Paunceley closed his eyes. His harsh, grating voice was hardly louder than the sound of the log fire. '"Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman, 'Yea'",' and he drew out the last word to a long, lascivious syllable and opened his eyes to stare at the Gypsy. The fire flickered and the candles shivered. 'And what name, serpent, have you chosen from the angels?'

Skavadale smiled. 'Thammuz.'

Paunceley quoted the Bible again. 'The "women weeping for Thammuz", yes?' He laughed softly into the bright, light eyes of the Gypsy. 'You'd like to be called Lucifer, wouldn't you? It would suit you!' He waited, but the Gypsy did not respond. Paunceley smiled. 'So what can I do?'

Skavadale took a sealed letter from a pocket. 'This has to be delivered to Larke.'

Paunceley grunted as he leaned forward to take the letter. 'You're telling him to go to Auxigny?'

'Yes.'

Paunceley put the letter inside his book. 'So innocent, so pure, so ready to be ravished. Do you ravish her, Gitan? Do you go to her in the night and make her moan?'

'No.' Skavadale smiled.

'More subtle than any beast of the field.' Paunceley laughed. 'But you will, Thammuz! Before you deliver her to Auxigny, you will!' He waved his hand in dismissal. 'Goodnight, Gitan! Oh, thou most excellent servant, goodnight!'

The Gypsy went on silent feet to his room in the Garden House, and Lazen, beneath the infinite spaces of the dark sky, slept.

They lay in the sandhills that stretched inland, the dawn limning the spiky grass, and the sea crashing dully behind them. The gulls cried in the wind over the foam.

Christopher Skavadale was beside her. He watched the road below them. 'I always knew you'd come.'

'Why?'

He smiled. 'It's in the blood. Your father did it, your brother did it, perhaps your children will do it.'

'I hope not.' She shivered.

She was dressed as a gypsy with dark heavy skirts, a blouse, a vest, two aprons, and a headscarf that was bright with small gold discs. She felt conspicuous and foolish, yet Geraint Owen, the nervous, quick Welshman had explained why they used the gypsies to travel the dangerous, well guarded coast roads in France. Strangers, he had said, were always suspect in France, yet gypsies were the one kind of stranger that no one was surprised to see.

She travelled with false papers, though her true protection lay with Skavadale. He had a paper signed by the Committee for Public Safety itself, a paper that would command instant obedience from any French soldier. They could, Skavadale said, have used the paper to commandeer a carriage, yet he preferred the hidden, secret travel of the Rom. It was best, he explained to her, that they did not attract attention. She believed that he preferred, for at least a few days, to show her his own people.

They waited for
vardoes,
the gypsy wagons with their bright-painted roofs. When a
vardo
was built, he explained, the seller would stand inside the wagon at night with a lit candle in his hand. The buyer would prowl about the outside, and if so much as a single chink of light escaped through the narrow, jointed planks, then the
vardo
was reckoned to be unsound. If light could get through, then so could rain.

She would travel the autumn roads in a
vardo,
sharing it with an ancient gypsy woman. Just to be in this country, Campion knew, condemned her to death, but as she waited for the travelling people to come to this rendezvous, she felt oddly happy. This was an adventure and perhaps he was right, perhaps it was in her blood. Beneath her clothes she carried the seals of Lazen; she had debated whether to bring them, but she had thought they might give her strength. She was in France for Lazen, but so much more besides. The heart has reasons that reason does not know, and she travelled with the Gypsy.

—«»—«»—«»—

Ababina seemed older than Mistress Sarah. She was a tiny, white haired lady with skin wrinkled a thousand, thousand times. She still kept her own horse, fetched her own water, lit her own fires and cooked her own food. There were five
vardoes
in the group, the other four all driven by Ababina's grandsons. On the second day, as Campion sat beside the old woman on the driving board, and they followed the wagon in front that clanged with buckets and chains and had four dogs tied to its back axle, the old woman tapped her pipe on the footboard and said she had once seen the old King of France.

'You did?' Campion asked.

'Yes,
rawnie.
He was an angel. He rode in a chariot of fire and gold.'

Later, much later, Campion realized she meant Louis XIV who had died seventy-eight years before.

'Of course I was only a child,' Ababina explained. 'I'd only had one baby then.'

Each hour was full of strange stories, yet not all were believable. One of the grandsons, a surly, dark bearded man who earned a living as a blade-sharpener, had a scar on his face that ran from his temple to his chin. Ababina said that he had fetched the scar as a tiny child when the cow that he had been put to suckle trampled on him. She laughed at Campion's disbelief. 'You'll learn,
rawnie,
you'll learn.'
Rawnie
meant 'great lady'. Christopher Skavadale, whose single earring marked him as a leader of the Rom, insisted that she was treated with respect.

Her travelling papers, forged in London, gave her name as Shukar. Skavadale had chosen it.

She tried to learn some Romani from Ababina, yet there was not time to learn more than a few nouns.
Grai
was horse,
jakel
was dog,
pal
was a friend, and a man who had the
tacho rat
was a man of true Rom blood. It was not thought fit for such a man to marry a
gaje,
a non-gypsy.

At night Christopher Skavadale pointedly slept far from her wagon. It was not the Rom way, Ababina said, for a man and a woman to share a bed before marriage.

She asked Ababina where the gypsies came from.

The old woman shrugged. 'Who knows? Our enemies say that Eve lay with Adam when he was dead, and we are the result.'

There were stories that the gypsies could curse people, could master fire, and that they stole fair-haired children. Ababina laughed at Campion's gold hair. 'They'll think that we stole you.'

Campion asked the old woman whether Ababina meant anything or was it just a name?

'It means Sorceress.'

Campion smiled. 'And Shukar? Does that mean anything?'

The old woman laughed. 'It's what your man calls you!' Except that Christopher Skavadale was not her man. He was
tacho rat,
and she was
gaje.
But at least, as
gaje,
she was better than the tinkers. Tinkers, to Ababina, were the lowest of the low.

The Rom, Campion found, were scrupulously clean. She helped Ababina scrub out the
vardo,
she helped wash clothes in a stream and was surprised to find that the women's clothes were never washed with the men's. To do so was to be unclean. She learned never to put shoes on a table, and never to wear white. White was the colour of death.