Fallen Angels

He tugged the chain free, his fingers scrabbling at her throat, and she twisted away, the sickness thick in her gorge, and then he let go of her wrists, gripped the cream linen dress she wore beneath her blue, fur-lined cloak, and jerked her with savage force as he tore the dress down to her waist.

He hit her hands out of the way, hooked his fingers on her petticoat, and she screamed again as he tore at it. The force of his tearing hands lifted her body from the grass and, as the petticoat ripped open, she fell back, screaming and sobbing.

He was kneeling over her, straddling her body, and she could feel his spittle dripping on her cold, naked breasts. His nose was running, dribbling to his mouth. He was laughing, the laughter choking in his slavering throat, and he forced her hands aside to look at her body and he laughed. ‘Pretty girly, pretty, pretty girly.’ He held her arms on the ground.

‘No!’ She screamed. ‘No! No!’

He leaned back, the better to see her, and she could smell his breath like ordure and hear the air rasping in his throat. He let go of her arms and she clasped them over her breasts and then she felt his hands tugging at her waistband and she struck at him and he slapped her stingingly on the face. ‘You be good, girly! You be good!’

She tried to kick him, but his weight was on her thighs, and he laughed as he took from somewhere in his rags a small, rusted knife and began to saw at the dress’s belt. His trousers had fallen to his thighs. He grunted as he ripped at the cloth, beat her hands aside again, and cursed as she twisted desperately and the tangle of cotton and linen snatched the small blade from his hand. He thumped his fist onto her bare belly to make her quiet. His orders were to disfigure her, to scar her, to pox her, to scab her, to make her a thing that no man could ever desire. He fumbled for the knife, impatient to cut her clothes off, then, losing patience as she twisted so desperately beneath him, he raised himself up and simply pulled her skirts above her waist and forced her legs apart. ‘You be good now, girly! You be good!’

She screamed in despair. The scream sobbed helplessly as she twisted and then, from nowhere it seemed, came rescue. Into her lonely place of horror came help.

It came with a shout, with the thunder of hooves, with a cry of alarm from the man who pawed at her and who suddenly scrambled away, gibbering and shouting, and Campion clutched her torn clothes to herself, rolled over, and it seemed as if the air was filled with the noise of hooves, the shadow of a great horse that pounded within inches of her head and she had a glimpse of a mounted man who held a streak of light in his hand.

‘No!’ her attacker shouted. His shout was one of pure, sudden terror. He stumbled, one hand holding his trousers, the other warding off the sudden brightness of the long sword. Campion’s eyes were closed. Over the thunder of hooves, over her attacker’s cry for mercy, she heard the hiss of steel in air. Then silence.

Except it was not silence. She could hear the hooves on the grass. She could hear the creak of a saddle, the chink of a curb chain.

She pushed herself to her hands and knees. She vomited.

‘Madam?’ The voice was crisp, educated, and solicitous. ‘Dear Lady?’ The man had dismounted, had come close to her.

She shook her head. Her breath came in huge, stomach-heaving gasps. She was on all fours and she could see the scraps of her cream coloured dress hanging down by her breasts. A small, rusty knife was on the ground beneath her. She sobbed.

She screamed as something touched her, but the man’s voice was gentle. ‘Quiet now! Quiet! Gentle, dear lady!’ A great cloak was dropped about her shoulders, a cloak that enveloped her. It smelt of horses. The man’s voice was soothing, as if he spoke to an unbridled colt. ‘Quiet now. Gentle now!’

Slowly she knelt up, clutching her own and her rescuer’s cloak about her torn clothing. Her fur bonnet had fallen on one side of her face and she shuddered as she felt his hands put it back into place, but his touch was gentle and she was glad of it.

‘Dear lady?’

She looked up.

Her rescuer was in uniform. The sight was somehow astonishing. Here, on this lonely heath, was a cavalryman in his finery, a blue jacketed and breeched uniform, bright with red facings and gold lace and looped with frogging and sword slings. An embroidered sabretache swung at his side. Small gold chains hung from his epaulettes. His voice was anxious. ‘Are you hurt, dear lady?’

‘Only in my pride.’ It came out as a squeaking sob. She tried to say it louder, then saw the man who had attacked her.

He lay dead. He could not be alive. His dark rags and his lank hair were red with blood. His trousers were about his thighs. His neck had been half cut through by a great sword, steel bright, blood stained, that her rescuer had plunged into the turf. The man had died in an instant.

Campion’s breath came in huge gasps. A gobbet of blood, thick as honey, trickled down the sun-reflecting brightness of the big sword. Vomit retched in her throat and she forced it back.

The cavalryman turned to look at his victim. ‘I shouldn’t have killed him.’

She frowned. ‘Sir?’

‘He should have hung.’ Her rescuer’s voice was suddenly full of outrage. ‘God damn him. He should have hung!’

Oddly it seemed funny to her. She gave a choking laugh. She knew she sounded hysterical, but she could not help laughing and crying and sobbing at the same time.

The cavalry officer crouched beside her. ‘Gentle now! Gentle!’

She shook her head. She swallowed. She took a great gulp of air. ‘I’m all right, sir.’ It came out as a sob again and she forced calmness into her shaking voice. ‘I thank you, sir.’ The words made her cry.

The cavalryman took from his sleeve a handkerchief, offered it to her, then realized that both her hands were gripping the cloaks to cover her nakedness. He seemed embarrassed by her tears and stood up. He went to the sword, plucked it from the turf, and cleaned the bright blade with the folded handkerchief. He had to scrub at the blood and, when he was done, he tossed the handkerchief away.

He turned back. She had stopped crying. She knelt on the grass and stared at him. He smiled reassuringly. ‘My presence, dear lady, was most fortunate.’

‘Indeed, sir.’ She managed to say the words clearly. Everything seemed unreal, yet slowly the universe was putting itself back together. She could see the chalk scars on the earth ramparts of the old fort, the shadows of the gorse, the black blob of a missel-thrush nest in a bare, stunted elm.

He smiled at her. ‘I’m travelling to Shaftesbury. Someone said this was a short cut.’ He pushed the sword back into the scabbard, the steel ringing on the metal throat. ‘My servant’s following tomorrow.’ He seemed to be filling the silence with inconsequential words. She nodded.

‘You were alone?’ he asked.

‘Yes, sir.’ She swallowed. The world seemed to want to spin about her. She closed her eyes. In her mind’s memory she heard the thick chop of the blade in flesh.

The cavalryman went to look at her phaeton and she opened her eyes and turned to see him unbuckling the harness and leading the miraculously unhurt bays from the wreckage. She was still on her knees. She was shaking. She wiped spittle from her mouth onto the collar of his cloak.

The cavalryman’s hat had fallen off in his charge. The sun glinted on his golden hair and moustache. He had a round face, red from the cold, and she guessed his age close to thirty. He worked efficiently, tying the bays by their reins to the broken splinter-bar of the phaeton.

He slapped his hands together when he was done, then took big, white leather gauntlets from his belt and pulled them on. She saw that the right gauntlet was speckled with bright blood. He smiled. ‘That’s the horses looked after, now for you, madam.’

She felt the need to apologize. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Dear lady! You’re sorry! God! It’s I that should apologize. A moment sooner and I might have stopped the whole damned thing.’ He stooped beside the dead body and picked up the gold chain with its diamond drops. ‘Yours? Hardly his, I suppose?’

He said it so lightly that she laughed. It was a slightly hysterical laugh.

He stood up, still holding the jewel, and bowed. ‘My name is Lewis Culloden, Lord Culloden. Major in the Blues when the fancy takes me, which is not often.’

She looked up at him. ‘Lady Campion Lazender, my Lord.’ That too struck her as funny, to be introducing herself from the grass. She wished she could stop the hysterical swinging between tears and laughter. She wished she had brought dogs with her, that the groom had come, that the horrid man with his dripping nose had not pawed at her. She cried.

Lord Culloden let her cry. He waited till the sobs had faded. He cleared his throat and sounded astonished. ‘You’re Lady Campion Lazender?’

‘Yes, my Lord.’ She was ashamed of herself for crying. She was ashamed of it all. She obscurely felt that it was her fault, and that annoyed her because she knew it was not true.

‘From Lazen Castle, my Lady?’

She nodded. ‘Indeed, my Lord.’

‘My dear lady! Good Lord!’ He seemed quite flummoxed suddenly, as if St George, having rescued the maiden, discovered that he was too shy to talk with her. He blushed. He looked at the crumpled figure on the turf. ‘He must have been mad!’ he blurted out.

She tried to stand, stumbling because she needed to keep her hands within the cloaks, and Lord Culloden came forward to take her elbow as though she was made of porcelain. She smiled her thanks. ‘Do you have any water, my Lord?’

‘Water?’ He said it as if she had asked for the moon. ‘Ah! Water! No. I have rum, my Lady?’

‘Can I beg you for a sip?’

He walked to his horse and Campion felt another shudder of revulsion as she saw the bent neck and still body of her attacker.

‘My Lady?’ Lord Culloden nervously offered her a flask. She could not take her hands from within the cloaks; he seemed to understand and held the flask to her mouth.

She almost choked. She used the first mouthful to swill the sickness from her tongue, spat, and then she drank some of the crude spirit, and she saw her rescuer’s smiling, anxious face and she felt a great rush of warmth and gratitude.

He led her to the phaeton so she could lean against the wrecked, tipped carriage. He smiled. ‘How do we get you home? Can you ride?’

She nodded.

‘And what were you doing alone on the blasted heath?’ He was patting her bays’ necks. ‘I thought fair maidens stayed away from such places. Too many dragons!’

‘Apparently,’ she said. ‘It has always been safe.’

‘That’s what King Harold said about Hastings.’ He grinned. The sun was bright on the gold wires and lace of his uniform. ‘Now, my Lady, you will ride my horse and I’ll take yours.’ One of the bays was shivering, the whites of its eyes showing. Lord Culloden ran his gauntletted hand down the horse’s back. ‘You’re recovered enough, my Lady?’

She nodded. ‘Indeed, my Lord, thanks to you.’

‘Thank the rum, Lady Campion.’ He smiled. ‘Is it far to Lazen?’

‘No, my Lord.’ He was, she thought, despite his gaudy uniform, a plain, honest looking man. She could imagine him in a saddle for a day’s hunting, a squire with a voice that could carry for two wet fields against the wind. He was obviously awed by this meeting with the daughter of one of England’s great families. His eyes, slightly hooded, added a dash of humorous languor to his face, hinting that he might possess a wry wit. He was not, at first sight, a man of startling handsomeness, yet at this moment he was, to Campion, more handsome than St George and all the angels. She made herself stand upright. ‘If we could go to Lazen, my Lord, I would be most obliged.’

‘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.

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 to 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.