Fallen Angels. Bernard Cornwell

in a strange country. He smiled at her. ‘Exactly, dear niece. You are so sensible for a mere woman.’ He crossed his legs, taking care not to crease his silk stockings. ‘The English have a sneaking suspicion that we know something about life and elegance and beauty that they do not know, and it is every Frenchman’s duty to continue the illusion. It is even, dear niece, the duty of someone like yourself who has the blessing of being half French.’ He smiled seraphically. ‘Has he asked you to marry yet?’

      ‘I haven’t known him five weeks yet!’

      ‘How proper you are, dear niece.’ He smiled and turned to the dressing table again. He dipped his finger into the cochineal ointment she would use on her lips and painted a heart on her mirror. He ignored her protests. He pierced the heart with an arrow. Above its fletches he wrote ‘CL’, by its point he wrote ‘LC’. He inspected his work. ‘There’s a certain symmetry to the two of you.’

      Mrs Hutchinson, who had not understood a word of the French they had been speaking, understood the drawing. She laughed.

      Campion, who was dressed only in a full length bed robe of coloured Peking silk, sat on the chaise longue. She smiled at her uncle. ‘You think the symmetry is important?’

      ‘I think it’s wonderful!’ He was fastidiously wiping his finger on one of her towels. ‘After all, lovers always seek fate’s happy signs. One says “I was born on a Monday” and the other says “and I also!”, and from that mere, unimportant coincidence they deduce that heaven has had a hand in their conjunction.’ He shrugged. ‘I think CL and LC come into that happy, heavenly category, don’t you?’

      ‘You want me to marry him?’

      He smiled wickedly. He liked teasing her, not the least because she never took offence, however shocked she might be by his words. ‘Do you wish to marry him, dear Campion?’

      ‘What I wish, uncle, is to get dressed.’

      He stood, bowed, and smiled again. ‘I retire defeated from the field. You will dance with me?’

      ‘Of course.’

      ‘If Lord Culloden will let you. Do you think he’s the jealous kind? Men with moustaches often are.’

      ‘Go away.’

      He did, crossing in the doorway with Edna, Campion’s maid, who had fetched a bowl of warm water and hot towels.

      It was Christmas Eve, the traditional day of celebration, the day when the town came to the Castle and the Castle provided bowls of frumenty and plates of pies and vats of punch and music from the gallery and fires in the great hearths and hogsheads of ale and puddings that had seeped their smell from one end of the huge building to the other and, as midnight drew near, great platters of roasted geese would bring cheers from the throng in the Great Hall.

      A throng which expected the Lady Campion to marry. The word seemed to haunt the Castle. The rumour was like a whisper in every room, in every corridor, in every smiling face that greeted her. Lord Culloden had been in Lazen just a few weeks, yet all the Castle, all the estate, expected there would be a marriage.

      Lord Culloden had said nothing. He was correct, polite, and charming, yet the mere fact of his presence fed the rumour that, before the leaves fell again, the Lady Campion would be wed.

      She dressed with more care than usual.

      Mrs Hutchinson cooed over her, patting the dress where it did not need adjusting, twitching hair that was like pale, shining gold. ‘You look a picture!’

      ‘I feel exhausted, Mary.’ Campion, as usual, had organized the day’s celebration.

      Mrs Hutchinson smiled. ‘You look lovely, dear, quite lovely.’ What she meant, Campion knew, was that she looked lovely for him.

      For whom, though?

      For the Gypsy was also here.

      She had seen him and the sight of him after so long was like an arrow thrust into the heart. She had thought she had forgotten him, she thought that the memory of that slim, dark, oddly blue-eyed face was just that, a memory. She had persuaded herself that her thoughts about the Gypsy were not about a real man, but about an idealized man, about a dream, and then she had seen his smiling, strong, competent face, and it seemed as if her heart stopped for that moment, there had been a surge of inexplicable, magic joy, and then she had turned abruptly away.

      He had brought a letter from Toby. Toby was still in France, working for his mysterious master, Lord Paunceley. The letter asked her forgiveness that he could not be in Lazen this Christmas. Instead the Gypsy was in Lazen and on this night of Christmas Eve, just as at the old Roman feast of Saturnalia from which Christmas had sprung, the servants in Lazen would join the festivities with those they served. Tonight the Gypsy was her equal.

      The blue ribbons were threaded into her sleeve so that, when she danced, they would hang and swirl.

      About her neck were sapphires.

      In her hair were pearls.

      She stared at herself in the mirror. CL and LC.

      Lord Culloden had come into her life in a blaze of heroism, in a manner of a Galahad or a Lancelot. He was tall, he was eager to please, and he was happy to make her happy.

      She could not think of a single thing that she disliked about Lord Culloden, unless it was a slightly supercilious air towards his inferiors. She guessed the superciliousness came from his family’s lack of money, a fear that with a little more bad luck he would become like those he despised. On the other hand, as he became more comfortable with Lazen’s great wealth and privilege, he was displaying a dry and sometimes elegant wit. She smeared the red arrow with her finger and she thought that CL did not dislike LC. She might even like him very much, but there was the uncomfortable fact that when she saw him about the Castle she felt nothing. Or, at least, she did not feel the delicious, secret thrill that the Gypsy gave her.

      She wished the Gypsy had not come. She stood. She stared for a moment at the grey, lowering clouds beyond her window. The hills across the valley looked cold, their crests twisting like agony to the winter sky. At the top of Two Gallows Hill, like a black sack, hung the man who had attacked her.

      She shuddered, closed the curtains, and turned. Tonight there would be music and dancing, the sound of laughter in the Great Hall and flamelight on its panelling. Yet none of that, she knew, gave her the tremulous, lovely, guilty anticipation that sparkled in her eyes as she left the room. She had dressed with care, she had made herself beautiful, and, though she could not even admit it to herself, she had not done it for Lord Culloden. She walked towards the music.