It made her cry again.
He patted her hand. He sighed. He closed his eyes, moaned, and she waited for the spasm to go. He seemed exhausted by it. He rolled his head toward her. “You’re not happy about marrying Culloden, are you?”
“No.”
He grimaced, but whether in pain or at her answer, she could not tell. He sighed again. “Do you remember that alder tree at Werlatton?”
“Yes.” The tree was in truth two trees. They had begun as saplings side by side and, in a spring storm, the saplings had been wind-lashed so that they twined about each other. Campion saw them much later, before the fire that killed her elder brother had burned the tree down. It began as two trunks and then, four feet above the ground, the trunks joined in a writhing, lumpy mass before, glorious above the knotted wood, a single trunk grew smooth and straight.
Her father smiled. “Think of marriage like that. You start separate, there’s a period of joining which has to be difficult, and then it comes right. It just takes time. Two people don’t grow together without problems.”
“I know.”
He tried to smile. “I hope you know. You need a husband.”
“I do?” She tried to make the question light.
He nodded. “If Toby dies, my love, then you’ll need a man here to keep Julius in order.”
“Toby won’t die.”
“He’s riding a high horse, my love. I don’t blame him. Young men should do that.” He gripped her hand. “Marry soon, marry quietly if I’m dead, but marry.”
She nodded.
He smiled. “Light the portrait.”
There were silver holders either side of the painting of her mother and Campion pushed candles into the sockets, took a taper, and lit the eight wicks.
He stared at his dead Madeleine. “She was a joy. You’re like her.”
“You’re making me cry again.”
“Do you remember your mother teaching you the minuet at Auxigny?”
She nodded. It had been on the lawn by the moat, across from the Mad Duke’s magical shrine, on a night that was stupendous with stars, and her mother, when Campion was still a tiny girl, had taught her the intricate steps of the minuet and then, joy on her face, had gone into a peasant dance, romping and free, singing the tune aloud and holding her small, laughing, capering daughter by her hand and waist in the moonlight.
Her father smiled. “The two of you looked more beautiful than the stars.”
She looked at him. “I love you.”
“I know that, fool.”
She cried.
He waited till she was calm. “Tell Caleb to bring me Sarah’s mixture.”
“Now?”
“Now.”
He winced again, and she thought of the red hot poker of pain that slammed up him. She went to the door. A dozen faces looked at her in the ante-chamber. “Caleb?”
The Earl said his goodnights to rector, doctor and servants.
He told her to stay.
He smiled at her. “Leave the rents alone; if the cottage is happy then so is the Castle, and always ride the wettest furrow of a plowed field.”
She laughed at the hunting adage at the end.
He held his hand to her, took her within his arm and hugged her close. “I love you, child.”
“I know.” Beside the bed Sarah’s mixture of white and red made a sediment in a glass of brandy. Her father looked at it and grimaced.
“Looks like liver fluke.”
“It will make you sleep.”
“I know.” He hugged her. “Remember what I told you. Marry. Don’t let the crucifying bastards get their hands on Lazen.”
“I won’t, father.”
“I wish I could have seen you marry.”
“You will, father.”
He grimaced. “Promise me you’ll marry?”
She kissed him. “I promise you.”
He stared into her eyes. “I love you, Campion Lazender.”
“I love you, father.”
“Don’t cry. Don’t cry. For sweet Jesus’ sake, don’t cry.”
There was thunder in the night, a racking, splintering, crashing storm that brought boughs down in the park and flooded the banks of the lake.
In the morning there was a sharp west wind. The sky was ragged with driven clouds.
William Carline, steward of Lazen Castle, climbed to the topmost point of the Great House at dawn. He dropped a rope-tied bundle at his feet.
He rarely came up here. He allowed himself a moment to stare from the high, stone balustraded platform. He looked from the town with its mixture of thatch and red tile to the thick wind-tossed greenness of the eastern woods. To the north was the blackthorn of Sconce Hill and to the west stretched the fertile Lazen valley. The “Little Kingdom” was damp and shadowed by cloud. The wind lifted his sparse hair, the same wind that flattened the smoke from the castle smithy eastward.
He untied the halyard of the flagpole, then stooped, picked up the great, colored bundle, and pushed the toggle of the bundle into the halyard’s loop.
There was one more toggle and loop to join, and then he ran the bundle to the very top of the pole, pulled on the slack, the slip knot came apart and, like a damp flower opening, the great standard of Lazen fell, unfolded, caught the air, and snapped noisily in the wind. Scarlet, yellow, blue and green, a banner that had flown over this valley for centuries, a banner that had seen the family ennobled, that had been added to as they married other noble families, but which still bore the proud bloodied lance-head of the Lazenders. The banner stretched out in the storm’s wake of wind.
William Carline leaned back, watching the flag for a second, and then, as if the task was a burden, he pulled the halyard once more.
Unusually, on this morning of wind, a knot of people stood at the Castle entrance. They were townspeople and they too watched the flag.
They saw the great emblazoned standard spreading its glorious colors against the low, dark clouds, and then it sank to the half and stopped.
Vavasour George Aretine Lazender, Fifth Earl of Lazen, widower, father and cripple, was dead.
15
T hey buried the Earl in the vaulted crypt of the old church. He was carried the short distance from the castle in a hearse drawn by black-plumed horses.
The sixth Earl was not present.
Sir Julius Lazender was not present.
When it was done Campion stared down into the vault. On her father’s velvet draped coffin, bright in the gloom, was his coronet with its eight silver balls.
Beyond it, shadowed, were the other coffins, their velvet palls faded and matted, their coronets misted by cobwebs. The first Campion was there, the first Countess, the first woman to wear the seals that now hung on Campion’s black dress. There, too, was Campion’s mother between the new, vivid velvet and the tiny coffin that bore the child whose birth had killed her.
She stared. Beside her, embarrassed, was Lord Culloden. “Should we go, my Lady?”
She ignored him. She stared at the palled coffins. One day, she thought, she would join that company. One day her name would be chiselled stone on this floor, worn over the years to a dull inscription. Hic jacet Lady Campion Culloden.
Lord Culloden stirred beside her.
Or perhaps, she thought, she would be buried with the Cullodens, buried in some strange church with her lozenge shield fading on the nave’s wall.
She looked up. The Bishop, the Rural Dean and the Rector watched her across the opened floor. She smiled sadly at the Bishop. “Thank you, my Lord.” She pulled the veil over her face and turned away from the crypt.
She walked from the church into the sunlight. She kept her head high. Until her brother returned she was Lazen. She would be a great lady.
The castle seemed silent after the Earl’s death. The visitors went, the great rooms and long corridors were quiet. Flax sheets covered the furniture in the earl’s room. His bedding and mattress were burned. Campion moved the portrait of her mother to the Long Gallery.
She was busy. A quarter day was due and she had to sign letters and seal them with the castle’s great seal. She had done it often enough for her father, now she did it for the sixth Earl. She heard nothing of Toby.
She wrote to Lord Paunceley, prevailing on her father’s old friendship, and begging his Lordship that Toby should be brought back from France. There was no reply. The news from the Vendée, where Toby helped the rebels, frightened her. She dreaded the post, the London newspapers, the sound of hooves on the gravel that might be a messenger bringing the tidings of another death.
She heard nothing of Christopher Skavadale. At night, when Lazen seemed empty, she would remember the kiss, but it seemed now to belong to a distant past, a time when her father was alive, when Lazen had a purpose. The search for love’s wonder was drowned in grief, in hard work, just as the black drapes of mourning dulled the castle’s rooms.
Lord Culloden went to London. He said he would return in a month. Their marriage was postponed.
The wedding gifts were still piled in the Yellow Drawing Room. The townsfolk had given her a splendid, beautiful picture of the Castle. Campion herself was in the foreground of the picture, driving her phaeton behind high stepping bays at the Castle gate. The painting was meant to hang in the large room of Periton House. Campion no longer rode to see if the plaster dried on the walls.
She schooled Hirondelle, riding the mare to the lonely chalk hills north of Lazen, galloping under clouded skies of summer, and slowly, as the crops ripened to harvest, she felt her old obsession return. Skavadale, Skavadale. Hirondelle reminded her of Skavadale. As her grief mellowed so the dark, slim, lively face came back to haunt her waking dreams. “He’ll come back to us, Hirondelle.” She would say it on the lonely hilltops, her voice snatched by the summer wind into emptiness.
Her evenings she spent in the Long Gallery. She played old, half-forgotten tunes on the harpsichord. She would look sometimes at the portraits of the first Countess in her old age and she would see herself as she would look in age, and she wondered if, when she had that gray hair and that straight back, she would reflect on a barren, wasted life. Mrs. Hutchinson, Carline, the Reverend Mounter, all thought she was obsessed by melancholy. She was thinner, her lovely face shadowed. Letters were sent to Uncle Achilles. Dr. Fenner was called to the castle, but Campion refused to see him.
Yet one morning she suddenly seemed brighter. She took breakfast and ordered Wirrell, the estate steward, to come to the castle. She walked with him to the lake, her voice crisp and her manner energetic, and the castle was glad that she seemed to have recovered some of her old, happy ebullience.
They were less happy with the task she had set them. She had ordered the sunken barge to be taken from the water.
A footman who was a strong swimmer looped chains over the prow, hooking them beneath the swell of the Lazen escutcheon. The fence of the park had to be taken down to give the horses room to haul westward, yet even with thirty horses being urged on by grooms and farmworkers it seemed the barge could not be shifted.
She insisted they keep trying. She ordered a rope tied to the pavilion and pulled sideways to rock the boat in its mud bed and, as the pavilion pillar splintered, so the great teams jerked forward and Wirrell shouted to keep them moving and the men cheered because at last the hull had freed itself from the clinging slime of the lake’s bed.
Campion laughed with the soaking, happy men as the boat came, smeared and stinking, lurching up onto the bank with the water pouring from its sprung planks. She saw the cutlery, broken crystal, and smashed china on its deck. George Hamblegird, who feared he would have to rebuild the craft, scratched his head beside her. “Better let her dry out, my Lady, before we lift her onto a wagon.”
She smiled at him. “I don’t want it lifted onto a wagon, George. I want it burned.”
He looked at her in astonishment. “You want what?”
She was walking away from the barge. “I said burn it!”
Some thought that her father’s death had turned her brain, but the order had come in the voice of a great lady and the order was obeyed. It took two days, the wood was so wet, but by cramming the soggy interior with pitch smeared lumber and tinder, the boat was burned. At night Campion could see the dull red of the fire, and by day there was a smear of smoke that drifted over the park. When it was done, and when the barge was just scraps of blackened timber on the scorched grass, Hamblegird brought her a curious, knobbly lump of silver. “Reckon that be a knife we didn’t find, my Lady, melted right down!”
She put it on the Long Gallery mantel like a trophy.
Yet if burning the boat in which she had accepted marriage was her private gesture, there could be no such public gesture. In August, in a flurry of dust, outriders, carriages, and servants, Lord Culloden returned. With him, whether by accident or design, came Uncle Achilles and Cartmel Scrimgeour.
She felt as if the tribe of men, the capable, authoritative tribe, had come to end her days of sad freedom. There was a sudden air of decision in the castle, like a cold wind in a warm house.
Lord Culloden, the day of his arrival, begged to walk with her in the Water Garden. Mrs. Hutchinson, bundled with shawls against an unseasonal north wind, sat in an arbor of roses to watch them where they paced the walks.
Campion, a black parasol over her head, kept her elbows tight to her side so that Lord Culloden could not take her arm. She walked slowly, stopping often to stare into the slow moving, shallow canals where the carp swam among the lily pads. Lord Culloden seemed to turn his body toward her as he walked. He gesticulated. Mrs. Hutchinson, half dozing among the roses, thought how solicitous he looked as he spoke so earnestly to Campion.
“I worry for you, dear Campion.”
“I would not have you worried, my Lord.”
Their shoes seemed loud on the gravel. From the lawns beyond the Garden House came the slithering whisper of scythes.
Lord Culloden took off his black hat, frowned at the red lining, then put it back on. “You would not see Dr. Fenner?”
Campion stared at the gravel ahead of her. “I am not ill, my Lord.”
“You’re thin, my dear, very thin.”
“I’ve always been thin.” She said it defensively and stopped on one of the bridges. She stared into the water.
Lord Culloden leaned his back against the bridge. In London Valentine Larke had given him good news, news that the French government forces were closing on Le Revenant, and that soon, very soon, Larke expected to hear of the death of the sixth Earl. Larke also told Culloden that the Fallen Ones were demanding a swift marriage. “I don’t care if she’s in mourning! She has to be tied up, my Lord. There must be no loose ends that can be dragged out into the open. Marry her!”
Culloden looked sideways at her. Light was reflected from the canal, light that rippled on her face as it had on that day in the pleasure barge. He thought how beautiful she was, like a shy, wild creature that had to be tempted with exquisite cunning into the nets of the hunters. It was a pity she must die, though he was consoled by the knowledge that, before she was sacrificed, he would take her in marriage. And then? He still did not know how she was to die. He pushed the problem away and turned, so that his elbow was beside hers. He touched a finger to the ends of his moustache. “Your uncle and Scrimgeour asked me to talk with you.”
She looked at him. So the conjunction of their arrival was no accident. She looked back at the wind-rippled water, bright with lilies. “You needed to be asked, my Lord?” A fish moved in the dark shadows beneath her and she knew she had been churlish. It was not Lord Culloden’s fault that the Gypsy haunted her dreams. She looked at him. “I’m sorry, my Lord.”
As an act of contrition she let him take her elbow. He talked softly but persuasively. He talked of a danger to Lazen, of the future’s uncertainty, of Toby’s irresponsibility. She protested at that, but it was true. Toby should be here, not pursuing his futile vengeance in France.
Culloden spoke of Sir Juli
us. “Rumor says he’s drunk twenty hours of the day. Rumor says worse.”
“Do we listen to rumor, my Lord?”
He shrugged. “Can you imagine Julius taking up residence here? How will you spend your days, my Lady? How will you stop him destroying the pictures, the treasures, the books? And how will you spend your nights?”
She said nothing. She stopped at the north west corner of the garden and stared at the white temple across the park. If it was Skavadale’s hand, she thought, that held her arm, then she would not want to shrink from the touch. She let the wind catch her parasol and used the sudden motion to disengage her elbow.
Lord Culloden took a deep breath. He folded his hands at his back. He cleared his throat. “I once asked for your hand in marriage, dear lady,” he sounded acutely embarrassed, “and now, with great trembling, I do so again.”
She stopped. She looked at him quizzically.
He smiled. “I would bring to your life some solace and joy. I fear more unhappiness, I fear your cousin, I wish only to protect you as I once had the honor to do.”
The memory of her rescue on the Millett’s End road always brought a pang of guilty debt to Campion. She looked down at the gravel. “My Lord?”
His voice was low and urgent. “It is seemly to wait, dear Campion, to wait till the mourning is over, but I fear for you if we wait. You will forgive frankness?”
“I would be grateful for it, my Lord.”
“We should marry. We should have a quiet ceremony. Later, when the unhappiness is forgotten, we can celebrate. It is your uncle’s belief that your father would have wished it so, and it is Scrimgeour’s opinion that we should wed and wed soon for Lazen’s sake.”
She said nothing. She turned and walked along one of the paths. She had promised her dying father that she would marry, that she would have Lord Culloden to protect Lazen. That promise was heavy in her, as heavy as the promise that Skavadale would return.
She thought how she leaned on the Gypsy’s promise, leaned on it as if her life was not her own, but in the hands of some benevolent fate. She waited for the Gypsy to come back as if he could free her from her own promise.
The Fallen Angels Page 25