Fallen Angels. Bernard Cornwell

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