A dozen servants, led by Simon Burroughs, had left Lazen. They guarded Periton House this night, including the empty tack room where Lord Culloden had been locked for the night.
Edna sat in the kitchen with Campion. The smell of damp plaster was made worse by the smell of lard that Skavadale had melted in a huge pot on the fire. He was busy with the sponge, slicing it with his knife, but he obstinately refused to explain why he did it.
He spoke in French with Campion. He said he had come to Lazen because he feared for her, that he had cause to fear for her.
“Cause?”
He cut the last piece of sponge into halves, then took a ball of twine. “You had a portrait painted once. You wore a cream dress and held flowers?”
“Yes.” She frowned at the seeming irrelevancy.
“Where is it?” His blue eyes shone in the candlelight.
She shrugged. “I gave it to Lord Culloden.”
He had cut a length of twine and was tying it about one of the lumps of sponge, compressing the sponge until it resembled an odd, string tied ball less than an inch in diameter. “I carried that portrait, my Lady, from England to France. I had orders to give it to Bertrand Marchenoir.”
She stared at him. She wondered if she had heard correctly. “You did what?”
He started on the second lump of sponge with another length of twine. “I’m Marchenoir’s messenger. I can’t read his letters because they’re in code. But Marchenoir did say one thing to me.” He grunted as he tied the lump tight.
“What?”
“How much he’d like to be the one who killed you.” He looked up at her with a quick, apologetic grin. “He didn’t merely say kill, but I’ll spare you the rest.”
She was appalled. Edna, who spoke no French, watched her mistress’s face. Campion’s voice was low. “Kill?”
“So he said.” Skavadale was tying the next lump. “It seems, my Lady, that your house has enemies. They killed Toby’s bride and they want to kill you.” He spoke mildly, as though they chatted about the weather or the prospects of harvest. He began compressing the next scrap of sponge into a tight ball. “Why would your husband be in league with Marchenoir?”
She shook her head. She had thought earlier that Lord Culloden had leagued himself with Julius just to evade her father’s will, yet Skavadale’s casual sounding words hinted at a stranger, darker, more terrible cause. Nothing made sense. Her thoughts flitted as uselessly as the moths that flirted with the candles in the kitchen.
Christopher Skavadale tossed another finished ball onto his small pile. “Mystery after mystery, my Lady!” He smiled at her. “So tomorrow morning I’ll squeeze some answers from Lord Culloden. I think that what he tells us will give Lazen back to Toby.”
She was silent for a few seconds. “You don’t know?”
The sob in her voice at last made him stop his strange activity. He frowned at her. “Don’t know what?”
“About Toby?” He shook his head and she had to swallow to make her voice clear. “They killed him.”
“Who did?”
“The French!” She gestured helplessly. “They found his burned body. They cut his head off.”
Skavadale laughed.
She stared at him in shock. “Didn’t you hear me?”
He started on the next square of sponge. “They cut his head off?” He laughed again.
“Mr. Skavadale?” Her voice was cold.
His oddly light eyes looked at her. He smiled. “Why do you think he’s called Le Revenant? The creature come back from the dead?”
She said nothing. She sensed what he was saying, but the news was too good to believe, and somehow his studied attitude of carelessness made the news even harder to accept.
He smiled. “You mustn’t tell anyone. Don’t even thank God in your prayers.”
“He’s alive?”
He smiled at her. “The French found a body with Toby’s clothes and Toby’s sword. We burned the head so they wouldn’t see that the man didn’t have red hair.” He grinned. “We had to take a chance with the rest of him, if you understand me. What I’m telling you, my Lady, is that your brother is alive. He’s well. But no one must know.” He raised his voice as she started to smile. “No one! We don’t know who your enemies are. They may have spies in your own household! No one must know! You don’t even tell Lord Paunceley! You don’t tell anyone! You don’t tell her,” he nodded at Edna who was bemused by the sudden urgency in his voice, “you don’t tell your uncle, you don’t tell the lawyers, you tell no one! Everyone must believe Julius is the new Earl, everyone! Only three people know Toby’s alive. He knows, I know, and now you know.”
“He’s alive?”
“He’s alive.” He took another piece of sponge and twine. “Lazen’s been under siege for months. It seemed the only way to get your enemies to show themselves was to give them what they wanted: Toby’s death.” His eyes met hers again. “Swear to me you tell no one.”
She nodded. “I swear.” The news was coursing through her in waves of disbelief followed by inane joy. She wanted to laugh, she wanted to cry, she wanted to hug this man who had teased her with the news. “Is it true?”
He smiled at her. “It’s true. I promise you.”
“He’s alive?”
He laughed. He was tying the last ball of sponge. “My Lady. Your enemies are laying a trap for you. Your brother and I are laying a trap for them. They think he is dead. They must go on thinking that he is dead. But Le Revenant is alive.”
Her incredulity turned to belief and, not caring what Edna thought, Campion put her arms about his neck and kissed his cheek. “Thank you.”
Edna stared open eyed. The castle had gone mad. A wedding, a chase, an invasion by brutal, loud men, and now this!
Skavadale laughed. He touched her cheek in a quick, gentle gesture. “It’s Rom magic, my Lady. We bring the dead to life.”
She laughed. “And that?” She gestured at the tightly bound sponge balls. “More Rom magic?”
“More Rom magic.” He tied the balls to a heavy, iron fork and took them to the slow bubbling pot of lard. He put another log on the fire, swung the pot-crane toward him, then dropped the sponges into the boiling fat. He pushed the crane back over the flames.
“That pot, my Lady, will give us all the answers.”
She laughed. She had woken this morning dreading the day, and now she sat in an unfurnished house and felt that she had joy enough to fill Lazen’s valley. “What is it? Tell me!”
“Just sponge balls.” He laughed. “We boil them for twenty minutes, take them out, let them cool, and that’s it!”
“That’s what?”
“Rom magic.” He smiled. He was beautiful, she thought, a man of such sudden, striking handsomeness that she wanted to hold him and never let him go. He laughed at her. “Then we wait for the dawn, my Lady.”
He would say no more. He looked at Edna whose face was shadowed with tiredness and he lit a candle for her and told her to take her mistress to the blankets that were laid on a bedroom floor. “Sleep, ladies. You have a busy day tomorrow.”
Campion smiled. “I won’t sleep tonight.”
“You will. You’ll be safe.” He took her hand, put it to his lips, and his kiss was warm on her skin. He gave her a secret, mischievous smile that seemed to promise wonder. “Goodnight, dear lady.”
She went upstairs with Edna and, to her surprise, while the greasy balls of fat-soaked sponge cooled in the night, and while the Little Kingdom waited for the morning and for the magic of the Rom, she slept.
18
T he first desperate scream woke Edna. The maid, terrified, clutched Campion beneath the blankets. “My Lady! My Lady!”
Campion held her. Both girls listened, wide-eyed, as the scream came again. “Dear God!” Campion scrambled out of the warm shared bed. “Stay there!”
She pulled a dress over her petticoat, pushed her feet into shoes, and plucked the cloak from their makeshift bed. She ran down the
uncarpeted stairs and out into the back court.
Simon Burroughs, Lazen’s huge coachman, stood guard at the entrance to the stable yard. He had orders, he said, to let no one inside except for her. “Giving him a rare time, my Lady!” He said it cheerfully as, in the dawn’s damp chill, he opened the gate for her.
“Give it to me! Give it to me!” Lord Culloden was screaming. His eyes were wide, bright with tears, and his hair was untied, hanging lank beside his unshaven cheeks. “Give it to me! For the love of Christ! Give it to me!”
She stopped, astonished.
His legs were hobbled with rope, his wrists tied, his breeches stained with vomit. He turned as she came into the yard and, ludicrously, he fell to his knees and raised his hands like a beggar. “Make him give it to me, my Lady! Make him give it to me!”
His gorgeous uniform hung open. He shook.
Behind him, sitting on the mounting block, Skavadale smiled. He had a long coachman’s whip in his right hand. “Good morning, my Lady!” His voice was cheerful.
“What have you done to him?”
“Make him give it to me!” Culloden shuffled forward on his knees. “My Lady! Please, my Lady!” The tears dripped from his cheeks to his torn stock. There was vomit on his waistcoat.
Campion stepped around him. Her voice was shocked. “What does he want?”
“This.” Skavadale lifted a tin flask.
“What is it?” She was frowning. It was not easy to see a man so humbled and broken, even this man who yesterday had tried to strip her naked and hunt her through Lazen’s woods.
Skavadale smiled and offered her the tin flask. She took it and felt a liquid sloshing inside.
“What is it?”
“It’s an old Rom trick, my Lady.” He glanced at Lord Culloden who stared beseechingly at the flask in Campion’s hands. “What does a farmer do with a pig that dies of a mysterious disease?”
She frowned at the seemingly irrelevant question. “Buries it, of course.” A pig that died of disease was a mass of poisons. No sensible man ever used such a carcass for food.
Skavadale glanced at the kneeling, crying Lord Culloden, then stooped and picked up the one remaining sponge ball. He smiled at Campion. “Supposing you’re a hungry gypsy. You make these balls as I did last night. You soak them in hot lard, then let them cool. And when the fat has hardened, my Lady, you cut the string away.” She saw the marks where the twine had bound the sponge. “The cold fat holds the sponge tight, my Lady, and you feed a half dozen to a pig. They’ll eat anything. That one,” and he jerked his head scornfully at Culloden, “threw up the first four but I said I’d ram them down his gullet with a sword if he didn’t keep them down.” He tossed the sponge ball in his hand. “So the pig eats them, my Lady, and the cold fat holds the sponge together, but what happens when it reaches the pig’s stomach?” He turned from her to a bucket of water that was on the mounting block. Steam rose from the surface. Skavadale dropped the ball of sponge into the pail.
Campion stared into the water.
White tendrils drifted and faded from the larded sponge. A scum appeared on the water and the sponge began to open as the fat left it. The cold lard held the sponge compressed, but as the lard melted, so the sponge welled back to its full size. Skavadale laughed.
“The stomach’s a fine warm place, my Lady, and the sponge expands and blocks the intestines. You can’t digest sponge. It just stays there and nothing gets past it. The pig dies. It’s not a nice death. And we gypsies say that we’ll take the diseased carcass off the farmer’s hands. We save him the bother of burying it. He thinks we’re fools who’ll poison ourselves, but instead we eat well for a fortnight.” He laughed and pointed at Lord Culloden. “You’ve got a week to live, my Lord! You’ll die with your belly bloated and your guts in agony!”
Culloden struggled to his feet and hobbled toward them. “Give it to me!” he screamed.
Campion was frowning. She held the flask up. “So what’s this?”
“It dissolves sponge, my Lady. It hurts, but he’ll live.” He looked scornfully at the broken cavalry officer. “All he has to do is tell you what he’s just told me. All of it. Then you can decide whether you want him to live. If you do, give him the flask. If not?” He shrugged.
She stared at Culloden’s weeping, beseeching, desperate face. The man was in terror. She wondered if already there was a pain in his belly, a pain that would grow as his intestines were blocked tight and his death came closer. “Give it to me!” He held his bound hands toward the flask.
“Talk to us, my Lord,” Skavadale mocked him. “Talk to us.”
He talked. Campion, standing by Hirondelle’s door, listened.
She kept the flask in her hands, the flask that would give Lord Culloden his life, but after his first answers she forgot the flask and listened in horror to his babbling, pleading voice.
She heard the names Chemosh, Belial, Dagon, Moloch and Lucifer. She heard of the ceremony in the Mad Duke’s shrine. She heard her husband say how he had murdered the girl for his initiation. The story had to be teased from him, admission after reluctant admission.
She heard that the Fallen Ones wished to take Lazen, that the marriage was part of the plan. She heard and was horrified.
Once Culloden pushed his fingers down his throat in an attempt to vomit, and Skavadale curled the lash of the whip about his Lordship’s boots, pulled, and the tall, golden haired cavalryman slammed to the ground and the lash cracked above his face and he stayed still.
Skavadale’s voice was like the whip. “Go on, my Lord.”
She heard, with shame and anger, how Lord Culloden had hired the man to attack her. He told the story hesitantly, in terror, and the Gypsy cracked the whip about his head, not touching him, forcing the story out.
Lord Culloden told how he had brought the man from London and paid him to rape the Lady Campion Lazender, to give her the pox, to scar her, to make her unmarriageable. “But then I saw you! I saw you! I couldn’t do it!”
Skavadale laughed. “He decided to marry you himself. How noble!”
She listened and it seemed as if she dreamed, except that the crack of the whip was real and the babbling, pleading, sobbing man was real, and the tin flask of liquid was heavy in her hands, and she heard of the Fallen Ones, of the names of the angels who had fought God, and she listened as Skavadale cross-examined Culloden about the ceremony at Auxigny.
She listened. She could hardly believe what she heard, yet the evidence of the flask was in her hands. He pleaded for it, begged for it, wept for it, and bit by bit Skavadale took more from him.
Lady Campion Culloden must die. Her husband, who knelt like a serf before her, had promised to break her neck and leave her beside a hedge as though she had fallen from her horse.
The Gypsy tossed his whip down and walked behind Culloden. “With your brother dead, you are the only person to stand between them and Lazen. They plan to kill you. This thing,” and he nudged Culloden with his boot, “will give Lazen to the Fallen Angels. Ask him why.”
She did, and Lord Culloden talked of revolution in England, of using the money of Lazen to rot the government and arm the Corresponding Societies who admired the French revolutionaries. He babbled about Julius’s debts, about Larke, about Marchenoir, and he pleaded for his life. He shuffled on his knees, his pink cheeks smeared with tears, his hands held high, and he swore on the Bible and all the saints that he had never meant her harm, never.
She looked scornfully at his plump, tear-stained cheeks. “You were going to hunt me naked yesterday. First man, first served? Or did I hear wrong?”
“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” He raised supplicant hands to her. “I’m sorry.”
The Gypsy stood behind him. He took a pistol from his belt and pulled back the flint. He levelled the gun at her husband’s head. “Shall I give him the cure, my Lady, or you?”
She held the flask in her hands. With two steps she could give this man life.
She looked at the b
roken man. She thought of her face scarred. She thought of the would-be rapist dribbling on her naked breasts. She thought of Lucille dead. She thought of the lies, the deception, the honor cast away by a man of rank, she thought of the death that the Fallen Ones had planned for her. She thought of her father’s trust betrayed, and she thought of the slow, careful, long plot that had curled its tendrils about Lazen. For months now, while she had agonized about love and marriage, they had plotted to kill her and take the Little Kingdom. She heard again his mocking laughter as he had tried to strip the skirts from her in the wood.
“Please, my Lady! I beg you, my Lady.”
She thought of her father.
She unscrewed the cap of the flask.
“My Lady!” Culloden’s face was shaking. “Please, my Lady!”
She stared at him. This was the man who was to save Lazen! This miserable, shaking coward was to be her shield and strong right arm. She looked at Skavadale and nodded. “You.”
He fired into the base of Culloden’s neck.
The head jerked up, eyes wide, mouth opening, and she saw the horror in his eyes as blood spilled bright from his mouth and then he slumped forward, still on his knees, his head on the cobbles in front of her.
The smoke drifted through the stable yard. A horse whinnied.
She stared at Skavadale. She had ordered a death.
He smiled. He was cleaning the burned powder from the pan of the gun. “There is no liquid that I know of, my Lady, that dissolves sponge.”
The body, with an odd, bubbling sigh, slumped onto its side. The early sunlight glinted on the silver wire epaulettes of the gorgeous uniform.
“What?”
“There is no liquid that dissolves sponge.” He laughed. “That’s just water. He was a dead man, my Lady, from the moment I pushed the sponge down his throat.” He looked grimly at the body. “I just wish the bastard could have told us more.”
The Fallen Angels Page 30