Читать книгу Fallen Angels - Bernard Cornwell - Страница 12

The early winter weeks were hard for Lady Campion Lazender, harder than she dared admit to herself, and made so by the constant visits of the Gypsy to Lazen Castle.

It was not that she saw much of the man called Gitan, yet she found that when her brother was in residence she would deliberately find a reason to visit the dairy or brewhouse, to see how the new wall of the kitchen garden was progressing, or to count the stock in the game larder; any excuse, indeed, for going close to the stable entrance. She made herself stop the subterfuge.

Yet still she would glimpse him. Sometimes he would be a black, upright figure schooling a horse in the meadows to the east of the drive, and once she saw him leaning at the kitchen door drinking a glass of ale that had been fetched for him by one of the maids. The maid, a pudgy little girl with a hare lip, stared up devotedly at the tall, dark man, and Campion was astonished by the streak of jealousy that stabbed at her, wrenched at her, and she felt the humiliation of this attraction and the wretchedness of suppressing it.

Yet suppress it she did. She threw herself into her work of which, the harvest having failed for two years running, there was plenty. The Castle, with all its estate and pensioners, had to be fed. The tenancies had to be managed. What harvest there was had to be eked out from the rickyard and storerooms.

There was Christmas to prepare for, her father to care for, and estate decisions to be made. Campion chose which timber should be cut for winter fuel, which coppiced, and how many animals should be kept alive through what promised to be a hard, hungry, cold season.

She had no need to work. The Castle had a steward, as did the estate, and there were lawyers ever eager to charge fees for their services. Yet she hated idleness. She had begun to interest herself in the Castle’s management when, at eighteen years old, she made the chance discovery that the housekeeper was buying more sheets each autumn than existed in the whole Castle. That housekeeper was long gone, the accounts straightened, and even in the hardest winter Campion had cut the estate’s expenditure by a third. No one went hungry, nothing was skimped, yet the family was not robbed. She liked the work, she was good at it, yet this winter its best advantage was that it kept her from what she knew were humiliating, unfitting thoughts of the Gypsy.

She even wondered whether it was her reluctance for the Gypsy to leave the Castle that made her so adamant in her opposition to Toby’s plans.

He was returning to France.

He had told her and she had exploded in sudden and unnatural anger, telling him his duty was to stay at Lazen, to look after Lazen, to marry and have children, and her words had whirled about his stubborn red head with as much force as snowflakes.

He was not thinking of Lazen. He was thinking of scraps of ragged flesh tossed about a cell.

She shook her head in bitterness. ‘Suppose you die?’

‘Then Julius gets what he’s always wanted.’ He laughed at the thought of their cousin, Sir Julius Lazender, inheriting the earldom.

She was too angry to speak.

He tried to explain. He tried to tell her that there were men in France who prepared to fight against the revolution, men faithful to the church and to the King, and men who looked to Britain for help. He was not, he said, going alone, but going with the blessing of Lord Paunceley.

‘Then Lord Paunceley’s a fool!’ she said.

Toby laughed. ‘They call him the cleverest man in the kingdom.’

‘Then that makes all Englishmen fools!’

He shrugged. Lord Paunceley, a mysterious man of immense power, ran Britain’s secret service. He had been a lifelong friend of their father, though the friendship was now conducted entirely by correspondence.

Toby smiled. ‘I’m taking the rebels muskets, powder, and money. I shall be safe!’

‘You’ll be dead.’

‘Then I’ll be with Lucille.’

And that had been the final straw for her, a reply of such stupidity and such an evasion of his responsibility, that they had parted on terms of strained affection. She did not want him to go, she could not stop him going, yet, in the end, there was a certain relief that the tall, black-dressed Gitan was leaving with him.

She said farewell to Toby on a cold morning in November. She hugged her brother tight. They had always been close, always affectionate, and it seemed to Campion that only these last weeks had brought some barrier between them. ‘Be safe, Toby.’

‘I shall be safe.’

She looked up at the mounted Gypsy, black cloaked, his blue eyes so unreadable. And on this last glimpse, as on her first, she felt the force of the man’s looks and personality strike into her soul with undiminished impact. She nodded coldly, wishing him a safe journey, keeping her voice as tight and controlled as ever when she was in his presence.

He smiled and answered in his strongly accented English. ‘Thank you, my Lady.’

Then she hugged Toby again, her eyes closed and her arms about him. He gently pulled away and climbed into the travelling coach. He went to his revenge, to his chosen work, and Campion watched the tall, black figure that rode beside the coach until the gatehouse hid him from view. They were gone, and there was the sense of a burden lifted. Yet sometimes, in the long evenings, when her father was lost in the solace of his liquor and the Castle was slowly closing itself for the night, she would find herself before a large, pagan portrait of Narcissus that hung in the Castle’s Great Chamber and see, in that old painting, the same arrogant, competent, strong face that she missed. The Narcissus in the painting was naked, and she was ashamed that she should be drawn by the strong, sleek body. She was ashamed and she was astonished that she, who was so controlled, so sensible, so practical, should find her emotion so uncontrollably arrested by a common groom. He was the Gypsy, and he had ridden into her dreams to make them sad.

Her father saw it. He looked at her from his bed one bright, cold morning at November’s end. ‘What’s troubling you?’

‘Nothing.’ She smiled. She was dressed to go out, cloaked and furred and wrapped against the winter’s cold.

‘You look like a dog that’s lost its nose. Are you in love?’

‘No, father!’ She laughed.

‘Happens to people, you know.’ He grimaced as pain lanced through him. ‘One day they’re perfectly sensible, the next they’re mooning about like sick calves. It’s nothing that marriage won’t cure.’

‘I’m not in love, father.’

‘Well, you should be. It’s time you were married.’

‘You sound like Uncle Achilles.’

He looked her up and down fondly. ‘There ought to be someone who’d marry you. You’re not entirely ugly. There’s Lord Camblett, of course. He’s blind, so he might have you.’

She laughed. ‘There’s that curate in Dorchester who thought I was the new milliner in town.’

‘He wet himself when he found out,’ her father laughed. ‘Poor booby. Why didn’t you tell him?’

‘He was being very sweet. He showed me over the church.’ The curate, nervous and hopeful, had escorted her from the church to find a carriage and four waiting outside, postilions and grooms bowing to the girl he had thought a milliner. He would not be consoled for his mistake. Campion smiled. ‘If I’d have told him he’d only have been more nervous. It’s quite nice sometimes to be treated like everybody else.’

‘I could always throw you out of the Castle,’ her father said hopefully. She laughed, and he held her hand. ‘You’re not sad?’

‘No, father.’ How could she tell him about the Gypsy? He would think she was mad. ‘Except I wish Toby wasn’t in France.’

He shrugged. ‘Wouldn’t be much of a man if he didn’t want adventure, would he?’

‘No, father. I suppose not.’

Hooves and wheels sounded on the gravel and her father laboriously turned his head to look at the horses that stopped beneath his window. ‘They’re looking good.’

‘Marvellous.’ She said it warmly.

The bays were her joy. A matched pair that were harnessed to a carriage she had chosen for herself, a carriage that her father considered flighty, dangerous, and welcome evidence that his beautiful daughter was not entirely a sensible, practical and dutiful girl.

She had bought herself a phaeton.

Not just any phaeton, but one of the highest, swiftest phaetons in the country. The bays were as spirited as the carriage itself, and the Earl, whenever he saw the equipage drawn up on the forecourt, felt a pang of fear for his daughter.

The phaeton, her father thought, could hardly weigh more than she did! The Earl had ordered ballast placed above each axle, but still the fragile assembly of steel, leather, and wood frightened him.

He looked at her from his pillow. ‘Simon tells me you took the ballast off the axles.’

‘A bit.’

‘A bit!’ He laughed. ‘I don’t know why you don’t just glue bloody feathers on it and try to fly.’

‘Perhaps I will.’ She kissed him. ‘I’ll see you at lunch time.’

‘Drive slowly.’

‘I always do.’

‘Liar.’ He smiled at her.

This morning she was driving to Millett’s End. The village was a remote place, lost in the southern heaths, but it was a journey she took each fortnight as part of her duty. Most of the villagers were tenants or pensioners of Lazen, the vicar was appointed by the Castle, it was as much a part of Lazen as the larger, closer, richer town on the Castle’s doorstep. Campion went there for duty, yet she admitted to herself the pleasure of letting the bays run free on the high, straight, heathland road.

Not that today she could go fast. The frost had rutted the roads dangerously hard, though once up on the heath she knew she could steer onto the grass and let the bays stretch their legs.

Simon Burroughs shouted from the stable-block doors. ‘You want company?’

‘No!’ She smiled at him. Sometimes a groom would accompany her on a saddle-horse, but Campion knew the grooms were instructed to keep her pace slow. Today, on this crisp, cold, hard day she wanted to be alone.

The wheels blurred as the bays trotted down the long, curved driveway, over the small bridge that crossed the stream which fed the ornamental lake. It was here, she thought, that she had first seen the Gypsy, and then she pushed that thought away as she rattled between the gatehouses and onto the cobbled street that led to Lazen’s market place.

She raised a gloved hand to those who greeted her, called a welcome to Mrs Swan who was brushing out her cottage, and pretended not to notice the lurch as two children jumped onto the back axle stand. Two only was the rule, and only as far as the mill bridge, but it was no fun unless she pretended not to notice.

She let the horses go faster as she crossed in front of the covered market. She had seen Simon Stepper, the bookseller whose business was almost entirely owed to the Castle, wrapping a scarf about his neck in his shop doorway. He was a clever man, but once he began talking he would never stop. She looked the other way, laughing as a man who stacked logs beside the glebe cottages gestured for her to go faster, and then Simon Stepper was left behind and the phaeton, its shadow leaping from cottage to cottage, slowed to approach the mill bridge. She heard a gasp and laughter as the children fell clear.

The water was high, spilling gleaming from the mill pond. The smoke from the mill kitchen chimney was whipped away by a stiff breeze and Campion caught a whiff of roasting meat and then she was driving past the town’s clink, the small single cell jail with its door open onto mysterious shadow, and she was through the town. She slowed as the cobbles ended and the road climbed between black, frost rimed hedges towards Two Gallows Hill.

She went slowly here, remembering how in spring these hedgerows were thick with flowers and fragrance. Spring, she thought, seemed so far away. The road climbed more steeply. Joshua Cartwright, who farmed on this edge of the town, would bring his horses to help wagons climb this incline, yet the bays pulled the phaeton without apparent effort. She looked right at the single, empty, leaning gibbet on Two Gallows Hill, then the road twisted through pasture land, heaved up one more steep slope, and levelled itself onto the heathland above. The gibbet was left behind, the sky was immense now over the flat landscape, a landscape bare of features except for the road, a few, windbent trees, and the curious, humped ridges of the old earthwork fort to her left.

It was a cold day, the sky was cloudless and the sunlight slanted low and bright onto the bushes. She took the bays off the road onto the wide, flat verge, and let them go into a trot. Their breath whipped back past their gleaming flanks. Her spirits rose with the speed.

She let them go faster. The ground here was quite level, quite safe, free of hidden stones that could tip a fast-moving phaeton and smash it to tinder. She shook the reins again and it seemed to her that she rode a chariot in the sky. The bushes blurred as she went past them, she felt the joy of it, the excitement of it, the reins quivering against the tension of her forearms, and she let the horses go faster still.

The wind put tears into her eyes and lifted the cord of the whip. She thought the speed might even pluck off the fur bonnet that was pulled so low over her ears and about her face, but still she shouted at the horses, laughed, and felt the pure exhilaration of the speed.

The Reverend Horne Mounter, dining in the Earl’s rooms last week, had explained the scientific fact that there was an absolute celerity beyond which a human body could not travel.

The Earl, sitting up in bed, and grumbling about an itching in his mended stump, had opined that such a scientific fact was garbled mumblelarkey.

The Reverend Mounter had laughed politely and complimented the Earl on his spitchcock’d eel.

‘Always liked eel,’ the Earl said. His thin face had been flushed. The room had a sour smell in it, a smell of sickness. At least, though, he was sober. Campion had cut more of her father’s food, then smiled at the rector.

‘An absolute celerity, Reverend Mounter?’

‘Indeed so, my Lady.’ The Reverend Horne Mounter swallowed his mouthful of eel and helped it with some of the Castle’s best claret. ‘At speeds, they say, in excess of one equivalent to thirty miles in an hour, it is certain that the blood of the body would be driven by the excessive motion to the rear of the body. Unless, of course, one was travelling backwards, in which case it would be driven to the front of the body!’ He demonstrated this fact with copious movement of his plump, white hands. ‘Starved of the blood the front, or back, half of the body would die! It’s quite certain!’

‘It’s quite fiddlededee!’ the Earl had said.

Now, her wheels spinning and bouncing on the frost-hard turf, Campion shook the reins again and let the horses go into a gallop. She wondered how fast they travelled and whether the tingling on her skin was the blood being driven backwards by the celerity of the carriage. She laughed aloud at the thought, and as she laughed, so she saw the shape rise from the gorse to her right.

She stood no chance.

The man ran at the bays, shouted, and hurled a thick bough of dead gorse at their feet. They swerved, Campion leaned on the reins, felt them sawing at her wrists, but the horses had panicked to their left and dragged the light carriage onto the uneven road.

The wheels of the phaeton bounced, slammed down, and caught on the thick, frost-hardened rut at the road’s centre. Campion shouted at the horses, pulled the right reins, and then the front left wheel splintered in shards of varnished, gleaming wood and the carriage crashed down, dug in its spinning axle hub, and Campion was thrown clear, by a miracle the reins uncurling from her hands, and she screamed because the phaeton seemed to be falling on top of her, but it lurched back, was crashing past, and she fell onto the grass of the road’s centre, the breath driven from her body, and she heard the horses slowing as the tangled, broken mess of the phaeton dragged them to a stop.

The man laughed.

Campion’s right hand was on one of the splintered spokes of the wheel, fractured in the crash so that the varnished wood, picked out with yellow paint, was now sheared into a wicked point of fresh timber.

There was pain all over her. She was dazed, but she swung the feeble weapon at the shape above her, kicked, but then her makeshift spear was held and a foot was clamped heavily on her ankle.

The man’s breath rasped loudly in his throat.

For a second he did not move.

Her vision cleared. She could not see him at first, so bright was the sky about his head, but she could smell him. He pulled the broken spoke effortlessly from her hand and tossed it far into the gorse.

He chuckled hoarsely as he knelt beside her. She struck at him with her right hand, but he caught her wrist and forced it to the ground, then seized her left wrist. She saw his face and screamed.

He was unshaven. There was an open sore by his right eye. He looked like any vagabond, any tramp, except that his skin was oddly pallid as though he had been in a sunless prison. His face was scarred by old boils. His hair was lank, littered with straw ends, and his mouth, as he leered at her, was filthy with blackened stumps of teeth. His nose was flat and crooked, as though it had been broken repeatedly. He felt hugely strong to her. She had a glimpse of a great barrel of a belly, dirty where his rags gaped to show a red boil, and she lashed out with her right boot, sobbing, but he put his knee between her thighs, pinning her by the skirts, and his spittle dribbled onto her face as he leered above her.

‘You be nice to me, you be nice! I’ll make it easy on you if you be nice to me, girly!’ He laughed as she tried to kick at him. ‘Don’t do no good fightin’, girly. I be one of the Fancy, I was.’ As if to demonstrate his point he let go of her left wrist, and his fist, that had been bruised, skinned and broken by the bare-knuckle fighting so loved by the gentry, slammed into her belly.

The breath was pushed again from her, she lay helpless, pounded by the blow, and she felt the vomit rise with the panic.

She could not move. The blow had hurt her. He let go of her other wrist that hurt from his cold grip, and pushed her woollen cloak away from her body. He laughed. ‘Pretty.’ He moved his knee, grunted, and hauled her skirts up. ‘Oh, pretty! Pretty!’

She screamed as he touched her thighs, lashed at him with both hands, but he just laughed and caught her fists, and held both her slim wrists in the huge grip of his left hand. She felt as if her wrists would snap as she tried hopelessly to pull away from him.

She was powerless. She tried to kick at him as he fumbled with frost-chilled fingers at the string which held up his ragged trousers, but he just laughed at her feeble efforts. ‘You be good, girly!’

She twisted, jerked, and could do nothing. Her thrashing dislodged the collar of her cloak and the man saw the gleam of the gold chain she wore at her neck. He had untied his trousers and now he reached for the chain.

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.