A Crowning Mercy 02 Fallen Angels

by Bernard Cornwall

  'To Lazen we shall go. I would dream of going nowhere else.' He was leading his own horse towards her. She was shaking still. She could see the dark ruin that had been her attacker's throat and she closed her eyes on the sight.

  'Lady Campion?' Lord Culloden's voice was gentle.

  'My Lord?' She opened her eyes, forcing herself to be calm.

  He was blushing, making his blond moustache seem even lighter against his red skin. 'If you clutch the cloaks so tight then I fear I will have to lift you onto the saddle, can you bear that?' He smiled.

  She nodded.

  He lifted her easily to set her sidesaddle on his horse, then used the wrecked phaeton as a mounting block to settle himself on one of the bays. He gathered its long driving rein into his hands, took the reins of the other, and smiled at her. 'To Lazen, my Lady. The dragon's corpse we will leave behind!'

  She was suddenly freezing, shivering despite the two cloaks, but the relief of it all was overwhelming. She even felt lightheaded now, laughing as Lord Culloden talked to her and they descended the steep hill towards the town. He was still nervous of her. He looked at her often for reassurance that some small witticism was well received, and he touched his moustache in an habitual gesture whenever she smiled at him. He became shyer as the excitement of the rescue faded, embarrassed almost to be in her presence. She remembered some story of his family, of his father gambling away much of the property. She guessed that Lord Culloden was not accustomed to glories such as Lazen.

  They rode through the town and earned inquisitive looks from the people who watched them pass and then, as they came to the gatehouses, Lord Culloden reined in. He shook his head in amazement. Before him, like a hill of stone and glass, was the grandeur of Lazen. Seen thus for the first time it was easy to imagine why some people called Lazen 'The Little Kingdom'.

  'It's magnificent! Magnificent! I'd heard so, of course but…' His voice tailed away.

  She smiled. He could have said nothing better calculated to please her, such was her love of this place. 'My father will want to thank you, my Lord.'

  He blushed modestly. 'I could not impose, my Lady.'

  She dismissed his modesty, urged him onwards, and together they rode into Lazen.

  Chapter 5

  It was the first time in three years that the fifth Earl of Lazen had left the Castle.

  First he was carried downstairs by three footmen, then carefully placed on the cushioned seat of Lazen's most comfortable travelling coach. He hated leaving his rooms. He hated outsiders to see his weakness.

  He was sober this day. His face was pale and drawn, the face, Campion thought, of an old man. She was not going with him, but as she watched the blankets being tucked about his thin body she thought how the raw, winter light made him look a score of years older than fifty. His manservant, Caleb Wright, climbed into the coach and the door was shut.

  The Earl nodded to Wright, who rapped on the coach roof, and then the Earl grimaced as the coach jolted forward. Even small movements gave him pain, yet he had insisted on going out this day.

  There was not, after all, far to go.

  The coach went down the driveway, through the huge gates with their stone carved escutcheons that showed the bloodied lance of Lazen on either post, past the gatehouses that curved forward in elegant wings, and then slewed right on the cobbles of the market place to take the Shaftesbury road.

  Lord Culloden rode beside the coach. His face looked grim and wintry, suitable for this occasion.

  Simon Burroughs, Lazen's chief coachman, had brought extra horses and, when they reached the field at the bottom of Two Gallows Hill, they were harnessed to the six already pulling the coach so that the great vehicle could be hauled to the summit of the hill.

  Waiting at the hilltop, as the coach heaved and jolted upwards, was a common cart. It stood close to the pitch-painted gallows that leaned eastwards towards the town.

  A small group of men stood about the cart. They were cold. The Castle lay like a great stone monument in the valley beneath them. The smoke from its scores of chimneys drifted flatly over the winter-hard land.

  The coach, creaking and swaying, reached the gentler slope at the hill's top. The men standing about the cart pulled off their hats as the door was swung open. They could see the white face of the sick Earl staring from his seat. He raised a hand in acknowledgement of their muttered greetings.

  The door had been opened so he could see what was about to happen.

  Lord Culloden dismounted. 'You're ready, my Lord?'

  'I am.' There was a grim pleasure in the Earl's voice.

  The turf about the gallows was worn thin. To the south Lord Culloden could see the heathland where he had rescued Campion. The sky above was grey and white. He nodded to the waiting, cold men about the cart. 'Do your duty!'

  The body of the man who had attacked the Lady Campion Lazender had been fetched from the heath. It had been stripped naked, then bound in a net of chains. The links jingled cheerfully as the men hauled the body off the cart, as it thumped on the ground, as they dragged it by the feet to the gallows.

  The Earl watched.

  The ladder had been forgotten, but one of the small boys who had come to watch shinned the upright and sat astride the crossbeam. A rope was thrown to him that he threaded through the rusted iron ring that was bolted to the beam. The lad stayed there.

  They tied the rope to the chains at the nape of the dead man's neck, then hauled him up so that he hung like a misshapen sack. He would rot now, the chains holding his decomposing flesh as the birds tore at him. By winter's end he would be nothing but bones in rusted chain.

  The Earl watched with grim satisfaction. It was a pity he could not have hanged the bastard alive, but he would hang him dead and in a place where, each dawn, the body could be seen from the Lazen valley; a warning to others who dared attack his family.

  The small boy, while the men supported the weight of the dead man, tied the rope at the ring iron. The men let the body hang. It turned slowly, the head slumped down on the chains about the half cut neck. Lord Culloden stood back, touched his blond moustache, and looked at the Earl through the open carriage door. 'May God damn his soul, my Lord.'

  'God can have his soul,' the Earl said, 'but I'll have his bones. I'll grind them for the pigs.' He grimaced in pain. 'Give the men their cash, my Lord, and add a half guinea for that lad! Then home!'

  Campion, watching from the Long Gallery, saw the dark speck hanging on the skyline. Beside her, Mrs Hutchinson, her companion and chaperone, frowned. 'Hanging's too good for him, dear.'

  Campion smiled at the old woman. 'Where he's gone, Mary, he's suffering far worse.'

  'I hope so, dear, I hope so. You know me, I'm not vengeful, but I'd have torn his heart out with my own hands! I would, too!'

  Campion laughed. 'You can't kill a moth!'

  Mrs Hutchinson tried to look fierce and failed hopelessly. 'Well at least Lord Culloden is staying on! I thank the good Lord for him, dear, truly I do.'

  Campion looked at the old lady and smiled. 'So do I.'

  'And you'll pardon me for saying it, dear, but it is nice to have a gentleman about the house again! It's been too long! Entirely too long.'

  'It has, Mary, it has.' Campion smiled, and there came, inevitably and annoyingly, a sudden image of a black-haired man laughing with the small maid at the kitchen door, and she angrily thrust the image away. 'I'm glad he's staying.' She made herself say it warmly, and she told herself, as she had told herself a dozen times since the awful attack on the heath road, that her meeting with Lewis Culloden was a miraculous providence of heaven.

  Lewis Culloden's dramatic entry into her life had made her look up a half forgotten passage in Mr Burke's book 'Reflections on the French Revolution', a passage which said that 'the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded.' Mr Burke, she thought, was wrong. The age of chivalry had come with a bright sword and the hammer of hooves on the lonely road t
o the south. A maiden had been rescued, a villain hanged, and a lord had come to a castle. Chivalry, she tried to persuade herself, yet lived.

  —«»—«»—«»—

  'If they kill their King,' Valentine Larke said, 'we should turn Paris into a slaughterhouse. To do nothing is to condone the crime. We will have to fight!'

  His companion laughed. 'With what? We've reduced the army again!' The Prime Minister believed that Britain would not need an army now that the French nation, as Burke had prophesied, promised to destroy themselves in blood and fire.

  Larke said nothing. He was staring into the Westminster night, waiting for a cab or chair to come to the steps of Parliament. Sedan chairs, now that London was growing at such a rate to make their journeys impossibly laborious, were increasingly rare. Larke's broad face looked grim in the light of the great lanterns. Sleet was falling on the cobbles.

  His companion shivered within his greatcoat. 'You'll get your war, Larke, but the Prime Minister wishes you wouldn't call for it quite so fiercely.'

  Larke laughed. 'I owe Pitt no favours.'

  'But he can do you some.' His companion smiled. 'You're coming to White's?'

  'No.'

  'Working again, my dear Larke?'

  'Working.' At that moment the lanterns of a cab appeared and a linkboy ran forward with his flaming torch. Larke crammed his hat on his crinkly, black hair and nodded to his companion. 'Mine, I think.'

  Valentine Larke ran for the cab, climbed in, and shouted his destination to the driver. He could hear the sleet pattering on the tarpaulin that covered the driver's knees.

  Inside the vehicle he smiled. Again, in the candlelit chamber of the Commons, he had given a ringing call for war. He knew Britain was not ready for war, he knew that Pitt would do all he could to avoid war, so this was the perfect time to rattle the sabre and demand slaughter. Valentine Larke, Belial of the Fallen Ones, was establishing impeccable credentials as a man who hated the French and their damned revolution. He laughed aloud.

  'You said something, sir?' the driver called out.

  'Damn your eyes! Just drive!'

  The cab rattled behind its slow horse through the cold London night. Larke, sitting well back in the leather seat, saw the whores sheltering in the doorways, the drunks who would die in this cold, and the children sent out to beg while their mothers whored at home. Larke thought how much he loved this city. He knew it as a rat knows a dark, shadowed and foetid yard.

  The cab stopped in one of the new streets of London's west end. The houses were big, white stuccoed, with elegant iron railings supporting torches. He handed two coins to the driver and waited for the cab to go into the slanting, cold sleet.

  He did not climb any of the elaborately porticoed steps. Instead he walked into a dark alley, unlit and stinking of urine. He lifted the skirt of his huge cloak as he walked, crossed a mews that was thick with the stench of horse manure, and then, stepping over a moaning drunk who reeked of gin, he entered another alley. He had a pistol in the pocket of his dark coat beneath the great cloak, but he walked without fear. This was his city. He moved through it with the skill of a hunter in a forest.

  Music sounded ahead.

  He could have ordered the cab driver to drop him at the glittering, impressive facade of the building that he approached, yet deviousness had become second nature to Valentine Larke. He approached the rear of the building, not because he came in secret, but because he always preferred the hidden approach. He was Belial.

  The alley opened, under an archway, into a small brick-enclosed yard that was piled with scraps thrown from a busy kitchen. It was a foul place of rats and cats, a place where the sun would not enter except on a summer's midday.

  Three men were there. All were richly dressed. They wore no greatcoats or cloaks. Their coats were unbuttoned, showing frilled shirts and high silk stocks. The door at the top of the steps leading into the great house was open, letting a wash of yellow candlelight into the yard.

  The three men, if they saw Larke, ignored him.

  One of the three, a pugnacious, ugly man, was laughing as he tried to unbutton the flap of his breeches. The man belched, then finally succeeded in pulling the flap open. He held onto the wall. 'Hitch her skirts up, Robin!'

  An old woman, a drunkard, had come scavenging in the kitchen yard. She had either collapsed in gin-sodden unconsciousness, or else had been knocked down by the three young men who laughed at her helplessness.

  'Company!' A tall young man whom Larke recognized as the Honourable Robin Ickfield drew the word out as if he was a drill sergeant. 'Company! Fire!'

  All three pissed on her, laughing loudly as she tried to drag herself out of the way.

  Valentine Larke moved silently behind them and climbed the steps into the house. The young lordlings were at play and that was never a good time to disturb them. There were few things in life more dangerous than the idle, bored young men of London society.

  Larke went into the house, through an antechamber, and then into the great, well-lit hallway into which the front-door of the house opened. A footman, hugely muscled beneath his elaborate uniform, started as Larke silently appeared from the back of the house, but then recognized him and relaxed. 'Mr Larke, sir.'

  While Larke was giving the man his cloak, hat and cane, a door to the left of the hall opened and a huge woman, middle aged and grotesque, came into sight. She was dressed in lurid purple silk, her piled hair surmounted by a feather dyed the same colour. At her huge breasts hung a pendant of gold. She stopped when she saw Larke, sniffed, then nodded coldly. The feather quivered above her head. 'Mr Larke, I see.'

  He bowed to her. 'Your servant, Ma'am.'

  'You'll want food, I suppose,' she said ungraciously.

  'Indeed, Ma'am.'

  'And no doubt you'll settle the bill, Mr Larke?' Her small eyes glared at him from the shapeless, pudgy face that seemed like a lump of dough piled haphazardly at the top of her massive cleavage. She seemed to have no neck at all. She jerked her monstrous head, making the pearls shake where they hung in her piled hair. 'I am not a charity, Mr Larke.'

  He smiled. 'Indeed you are not, Mrs Pail.'

  She sniffed and swept on, attended by two small footmen who fussed behind her like pageboys.

  Her name was Abigail Pail, and these were her Rooms. Mrs Pail's Rooms were famous in London, not just for the food, which was superb, or for the gaming, which was fast, but most of all for the girls, who were superb and fast. The ugliest woman in London ran the best whorehouse. It was here that the rich and the titled came to play, where their fortunes were lost, where their every need was attended to at a price that was extortionate.

  The three men who had relieved themselves in the kitchen yard came noisily back into the hall. The pugnacious one, whose wigless black hair was cut short as a curry-brush, had vomit stains on his red silk coat. He saw Valentine Larke and laughed. 'Christ! They let you come here?'

  Larke smiled and bowed. Sir Julius Lazender, he thought, had one merit; consistency. He was offensive all of the time.

  Sir Julius brushed rain off his coat. 'Abigail lets you paw her girls, Larke?'

  The Honourable Robin Ickfield snickered in a high voice. 'I thought politicians preferred boys.'

  'You should bloody know, Robin,' Sir Julius laughed. He belched drunkenly 'Christ! I could tup a bloody horse tonight.' He pulled himself up the stairway, then turned with a malicious grin on his face. 'You've come for the Countess, Larke?' He said it accusingly.

  'The Countess, Sir Julius?' Larke's voice was unctuous.

  'Don't tell me you didn't know!' Sir Julius's breeches flap was only half buttoned. 'The old faggot's got a French Countess here, Larke, but then I don't suppose you can afford her, eh?'

  'She's expensive, Sir Julius?'

  Sir Julius laughed. 'Five years ago the sniffy bitch wouldn't look at you! Now her Ladyship will rub her tits on your arse for a shilling.' He leered at Larke. 'But only if you're a gentleman.' He turned away, pleased
with his insult, followed by his companions.

  Valentine Larke watched the three climb the stairs, his hard eyes showing no offence. Valentine Larke had not been born into the gentry, but if Sir Julius Lazender was a measure of gentility then Larke was glad he was no gentleman. Sir Julius, nephew to the Earl of Lazen, was a belligerent, drunken, pugnacious, rude wastrel. Larke smiled. Sir Julius would live to regret every sneer and every insult.

  He turned towards the gaming room. The footman, who knew that Larke was neither a lord nor conspicuously rich, only opened one of the two leaves of the door.

  He walked slowly through the lavishly appointed room, acknowledging the silent greetings of three of the players, and then climbed the far stairs that led to the dining room.

  It was almost empty at this time of night. The waiters stood solemnly at the sides of the room watching the few patrons who remained. The food at Abigail's was famous. Within an hour, Larke knew, the tables would be crowded with men from Parliament who saw no disgrace in eating their chops beneath Abigail's bedrooms. One of the waiters hurried forward to usher Larke to a table, but Larke dismissed him. He walked the length of the room and through a door that would, by a short passage, bring him back to the main stairway which led to Abigail's girls.

  Another door, marked 'Private', led from the short passage.

  Larke paused, looked left and right, saw that no one was watching, and took from his waistcoat pocket a key. He fitted it into the keyhole, grunted as it turned reluctantly, and then, with a last look left and right, went into the room. He locked the door behind him.

  He sat. On a table beside him was a tray with glasses. He poured himself some wine. A great book, bound in morocco leather, was beside the tray and, pulling the candelabra nearer to his chair, he opened the book on his lap.

  'Recorded. That Lady Delavele will drop Twins by Easter Day, between Mr Tyndall and Ld. Parrish. 200L.'

  'Recorded. That Ld. Saltash will Consume Bishop Wright's Tomcat, prepared in Mrs Pail's Kitchens, Entire. Between Ld. Saltash and Bishop Wright. 150L.' Beside it was written. 'Ld. Saltash the winner.'