She said nothing. She was wondering what the names Lazender and Skavadale would look like wreathed in white fire on a nighttime 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.”
She laughed. “You heard them too?”
“Half the county must have heard them. There was a crowd watching them when I came past.”
She liked the way he had said it. Her uncle, dear though he was to her, could not have mentioned the couple without being sly, or without insinuating that there was something horrid and fascinating about their lovemaking. Lord Culloden would not have mentioned them at all, or, if forced to, he would have pretended disapproval for her benefit. Christopher Skavadale had talked of them as though it was the most natural thing in the world.
He flicked the small cigar into the darkness and poured himself more wine. “I had to take the lamp to a Lord Paunceley. It seems to me now that Skavadale was doing me a favor.” He shrugged. “He couldn’t take me back to his own house; there were too many bitter women and under-worked sons there, so he gave me his name as a gift and sent me to Paunceley instead.”
Lord Paunceley the spy-master, the subtle man in the center of his sticky webs that had entangled her brother. “Which is how you met Lord Werlatton?” she asked.
He smiled at her use of her brother’s title. “Toby pretended that I was a French Rom that he’d hired as a groom. It was obvious that the French would recruit me to spy on the British, and they did. They never knew I’d been recruited already.” He looked at her. “I don’t suppose I’m meant to tell you any of this.”
“Then why are you?”
He shrugged. “You asked what I am, so now you know. I’m an agent of the British government, a spy.” He looked at her as though waiting for an adverse reaction.
“Why did you tell me?”
He smiled. He stared into the wine glass, swirling the liquid about. “I can’t impress you with a uniform fit for the fairy queen,” she knew he meant Lord Culloden’s cavalry uniform, “and I’m not bowed into great rooms because I’m rich, so,” he looked at her and smiled ruefully, “I lay what little I have before you.”
“I’m impressed. Prince of the Gypsies?”
He laughed. “Thank you for that.”
She laughed too. She was suddenly nervous. So much had been said in their seemingly innocuous words of the last seconds. She changed the subject deliberately, steering it away from the sudden intimacy of their shared laughter. “How’s Toby?”
“He’s well. Strong as an ox and needing to cut his hair. He’s happy. He’d like to be here, but…” He shrugged. “He’s hunting the man who killed his Lucille.”
“He knows who killed her?”
Skavadale was making another of his Spanish cigars. He paused and looked at her. “Bertrand Marchenoir.”
It was like a shock of cold water. Marchenoir! The man whose name had become a byword for blood and savagery, the man who could shock Europe, the man who fed the machine of death in Paris. Uncle Achilles, when he had first heard that the ex-priest had risen to infamy, had exploded in rare wrath. “He comes from Auxigny. His mother was the town whore! We educated him! We took him from the dungheap and made him a priest, and now look at him!” She stared at the Gypsy. “Why?”
He shrugged. “Probably because she was engaged to Toby. Marchenoir hates the Auxigny family. He’d like to kill all of them, including you.” He pointed at her with his unlit cigar.
“He doesn’t even know I exist!”
Skavadale smiled. “He knows. There’s nothing he doesn’t know about the family, or its English connections. There is a rumor,” he sounded uncertain suddenly, as if he might offend her, “a rumor that he was one of the Mad Duke’s bastards.”
He did not offend her. The Mad Duke of Auxigny, her grandfather, had spawned too many bastards for the family to take offense at their memory. “He’d be my uncle.” She said it wonderingly. “Do you know him?”
Skavadale nodded. He had struck a light and bent his head to the flame. He lit his cigar and the flame was snuffed out. “I know him.” He gave her his quick smile. “I assure you there’s no family resemblance. He calls me mon ami. He puts his arm around my neck and tells me I should marry for France and breed a family of republican cavalrymen.”
She laughed nervously. His mention of marriage touched a raw nerve this night. “Are you?”
He smiled. “Getting married? Yes, I’m twenty-eight, it’s past time, but I won’t marry for France.” He looked out at the moon silvered parkland. “I want to breed the fastest damned horse in the world.”
She had said the same thing herself once. She felt suddenly jealous because this man, this Gypsy, would have the life she wanted. She felt jealous of whoever would share his life and the jealousy drove out her thoughts of Bertrand Marchenoir. She made her voice light, determined not to show the jealousy. “What’s breeding a fast horse got to do with marriage?”
“I can’t do that and cook for myself at the same time.”
She laughed as she was meant to. She looked at the floor by her feet and kept the tone of her voice casual. “Who are you marrying?”
“When I meet her I’ll know.” He paused. The wind stirred the dead leaves at her feet. When he spoke again his voice sounded to Campion as dark as the night itself. “She will be fairer than the dawn, and in her eyes stars. At her feet grow lilies, and in her hands, love.”
He took her breath away. The words seemed to shake her. He had been talking so calmly, in such an ordinary way, and then the sudden poetry. She looked up at this disturbing, handsome man. “Who wrote that?”
“I did. You don’t go to market without knowing what you want.”
She laughed, but it was a nervous laugh. He had turned the subject to love, and it would be so easy to turn it away, but somehow she did not want to draw back at this moment. She spoke slowly. “I’m told love is an illusion.”
“Who by?”
“My uncle,” she shrugged. “Even my father says there’s no certainty.” She heard herself saying the words and she wondered at it, yet still it felt so natural to talk with him. She could speak to so few people about love. Her uncle mocked her gently, her father cared only to see her secure, her friends were as ignorant as she was herself. Somehow this man, with his gentle, confident voice, neither mocked, nor spoiled, nor thought the subject odd.
“There’s no certainty.” He finished the glass of wine and poured another. “But who wants certainty? If every dawn and sunset were the same, why would we look at them?”
“My uncle says,” she said, “that you won’t find love if you’re looking for it.”
“That’s because we don’t know what to look for.”
“Do you?” Her heart was beating so strongly that she could feel it shifting the gold seals at her breast.
He answered in French, with a sentence that she had read long before and had half forgotten. “‘The heart has reasons that reason does not know.’”
“Pascal?”
He nodded, then smiled. “You’re surprised that a nothing of mongrel gypsy can read Pascal?”
“No!” Yet she had been thinking exactly that.
He laughed at her protest, then swung his leg off the wall. He picked up the glass of wine he had poured for her and walked about the swelling globe. He held the glass to her. “Do you think love is real, my Lady?”
“I suppose so.” She was embarrassed now.
“Do you know what it is?”
She said nothing. She took the glass from him.
He spoke gently. His words, for all their meaning, were edged with humor. “But suppose love came to you from nowhere, out of
a sudden dark night, would you know it?”
She looked up at him. His eyes were bright in the small moonlight. He had a half-smile that made his savage face gentle. She knew suddenly why it felt so natural to be here, it was because he had made it so. She could feel his strength, his assurance, his ease. She thought of the hours in which she had tried to persuade herself that Lord Culloden was a strong man, but now, sitting on the low wall, she knew that Christopher Skavadale was setting a standard against which any man might fail. This man was strong enough to know when to be gentle. His strength was almost frightening.
He smiled, as if he knew she would not answer his question. He touched her glass with his own. “Here’s to the fastest horse in the world, my Lady. May it run like the north wind.”
Her hand was shaking. She raised her glass. “May it be faster.”
She sipped the wine. He stepped away from her. He stood by the next pillar and watched her.
She knew what was happening. They talked of love and it seemed as if they skirted some dark, forbidden place where, if she but dared walk boldly in, she would find the magic that she sought. She did not dare. She trembled on the edge of that place, advancing, fearing, retreating. In that mysterious place the soul was naked. She knew the answer to his question. She knew what love was when it came from nowhere on this sudden, dark night, but she could not answer him. She stared at the globe. In the moonlight she traced the words chiselled at its base. “Terra Incognita.”
“We Rom have a thing called dukkeripen.”
His sudden words startled her. She looked up, grateful that he had broken the silence. “What is it?”
“Telling the future.” He smiled at her. “Most of the time it’s nonsense, just like the belief that we control fire, but it’s useful nonsense. We just tell people what they want to hear, and it’s odd how often, once someone tells you that something will happen, you make it happen. You just needed to be told once. Shall I dukker you?”
“Tell my fortune?”
“Shall I?”
She shrugged, as though it did not matter whether he did or not. “If you’d like to.”
“You have to give me a hand.”
“You’re going to read my palm?” She sounded disappointed.
“No. Hold your hand out, just hold it out. You’ll have to take the glove off and close your eyes.”
She peeled down her right glove and put it beside her glass on the wall. She closed her eyes. It felt like a child’s game. She smiled nervously.
She held her hand out. She knew he was going to touch her. She wanted him to touch her. The fortune-telling was her excuse, no more, a means to persuade herself that she did not flirt with that dark, forbidden place.
She heard his glass clink as he placed it on the wall. His scabbard scraped on stone and his boots rustled the dead leaves. She waited.
His hands, dry and warm, closed on her hand.
She shuddered. She shuddered in every part of her. With one touch he had answered all the questions. When Lord Culloden touched her there was nothing, yet Skavadale’s touch spoke of mystery and wonder and she had to stop a mad impulse to close her fingers on his and draw him toward her.
He stroked her hand. He was gentle. She felt his fingers flicker about her wrist, trace down her palm, stroke magic into her own fingers. She wanted him to kiss her. She wanted to shout a triumph at the whole, dark world because she had been right. The world had told her that love held no mystery, that she must settle for the commonplace, and now this.
His hands seemed to move fast over hers, touching, tingling, and then suddenly pressing. She wanted that touch never to leave her. She let her thumb caress his hand and, as it did, so his touch went away.
“You can open your eyes.”
She opened them. She was almost astonished that the world had not changed. He walked around to the far parapet and she looked down at her hand and wished that he still held it.
She looked at this tall, cloaked figure. “Well?”
He was staring at the Castle.
“Mr. Skavadale?”
He turned back to her. “I can’t tell the whole future. I don’t have the skill.”
“What can you tell?”
There was silence. The music came soft over the park. A bat swerved close to the temple’s entrance and disappeared.
He stared at her with his light eyes. “You are going to move in shadows, in death, in horror, but you will not be hurt.”
She shivered. She was in Dorset, in a park, and this man talked of shadows, death and horror. “You’re making it up.” She drank her wine and put the glass down. “You’re trying to frighten me.” She said it defiantly.
He shook his head. “Nothing will be what it appears to be, but you will be safe. Remember that. You will be safe.”
She smiled. “That’s not a fortune, Mr. Skavadale. That’s just pessimism.”
He shrugged. “You wanted me to raise the spirits of the dead? Make the earth tremble?”
“It would have been more impressive.”
He laughed. “I told you the truth, you must do what you want with it. I wish I could tell you more, but I don’t have my mother’s skill at dukkering.”
“Did she tell your fortune?”
He nodded.
“So what did she tell you?”
“That I would find what the Rom are searching for.”
She smiled. “And what are the Rom searching for?”
He walked back to her and leaned against the globe, smothering the marble with his black cloak. He had a pleasant smell of leather, horses, and tobacco. “My people have a story.”
She looked into his humorous, light eyes. She wondered how many girls dreamed of this man. “Tell me your story.”
He smiled. “When the gods put man onto the earth, they gave him a choice. He could do two things. The first was that he could work and make the earth rich. To help him, the gods gave him lordship over every beast; the ox to plow for him, the dog to hunt for him, the cow to feed him, the sheep to clothe him, the horse to carry him. All that, the gods said, man could have.” His soft, deep voice paused.
“And the second choice?”
“The second choice was to be poor, to raise no crops, to herd no cattle, to build no monuments. Instead, the gods said, man could pursue happiness. And what, man asked, is that? And the gods said that they had made one creature after man, the last creature they made, and though that creature could be beaten, whipped, twisted, gutted, skinned, and killed, it could never be mastered. Yet if man could find the creature and make the creature come willingly to him, then man would find happiness. So man asked ‘What is the creature?’ The gods said that the creature was fairer than the dawn and man would know when he had found it. So all the tribes, one by one, chose riches; all the tribes except the Rom. We stole a horse to make our search quicker, and we have roamed the earth ever since and hunted the last and brightest of creation. We have hunted for the creature who is fairer than the dawn.”
She laughed. The sound was nervous. She felt as if there was no world outside this small, white building.
He leaned forward. Very slowly, very gently, he raised his hands. She saw them coming and did not move. He pushed the hood of her cloak back so that her pale gold hair shone in the moonlight. “Fairer than the dawn, my Lady, and in her eyes, stars.”
She looked into his eyes. “There are no lilies at my feet, Mr. Skavadale.”
“You never looked.”
The sadness was immense. The music came faint across the park. It told her that another man had her hand, her promise, her body to be his in marriage. She pulled the hood back over her head and took a deep breath. “This is foolish.”
“Is it?”
He had taken her to the place she feared, to where truth, however wrapped in the finery of fable and flattery, demanded her response. She could not give him what he wanted. She could not look at him. “I am to marry, Mr. Skavadale. I should not be here.”
“Then
go, my Lady.”
She looked up at him sharply, but said nothing.
He stood. “This need not be said, my Lady, but no one will know we have met.”
She began to reply, but fell silent. Tomorrow, she thought, she would have feared just that.
His voice was no longer soft and gentle. “I’ll put Hirondelle in the stable for you. Don’t let the grooms tighten the throat latch too much, they do that here.”
“Yes.” She stood. She shook her cloak straight. She was embarrassed. “Yes, they do.”
He walked to the top of the steps. “I apologize if I have offended you, my Lady.”
She walked to the other side of the entrance. The sky was black, star-spattered, huge. She did not know what to say. She knew he did not want her to leave, to walk back to the music and the candles. Nor did she want to leave.
She did not look at him. “Do your people have a story about what happens when man finds his creature?”
“I’ve not heard it.” He said it casually, his eyes staring up into the stars.
She looked at the Castle. Her place was there, among the dancers who led her toward the well-ordered marriage with Lord Lewis Culloden who would give her children and stand beside her when the children married and lie beside her in the tomb. She felt the immense sadness of it, as if an infinite desolation awaited her.
She looked at him and caught his gaze as he turned his eyes on her. She felt as if she was at the turning point of the earth, in a tiny place, that one move would spin her into chaos.
She could not speak.
Slowly, with infinite gentleness, he raised his right hand and she watched it come close to her face and she told herself that she must move, but then the fingers touched her cheek in a gesture so soft, so comforting, that she shuddered again as he stroked her skin down to her jawbone and then slid his hand, warm and gentle, to the back of her neck.
She stared up at him, her eyes huge.
He kissed her.
She closed her eyes and was astonished.
She kissed him and she felt as if the shudder had started deep inside, had shaken her, warmed her, and she felt, to her astonishment, the same in him. She slid her lips from his, laid her cheek on his shoulder and clung to him with an arm behind his back. She was crying.
The Fallen Angels Page 23