The Fallen Angels by Bernard Cornwell

Author:Bernard Cornwell [Cornwell, Bernard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061828676
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2012-03-09T18:42:28+00:00

She sipped champagne, she danced. The Bishop insisted on a minuet, raising his feet as though he was a carthorse and clumping them down in a travesty of the dance’s minute, precise, calculated movements. He boomed at her how he had spent the morning helping his groom to blister the hocks of his hunters. Campion smiled, made polite answers, and searched the crowds who lined the room’s edges. She knew the Gypsy would not come into this splendor, but she looked.

She danced with a gloomy French count, one of the exiles who kept bitter court at her grandmother’s house, who frowned at the other dancers and spoke hardly a word to her until he bowed elegantly at the music’s end. “You are to be married, my Lady?”

“Indeed, my Lord.”

“If you are bored, madame,” and he twitched the lace cuff of his threadbare sleeve, “I am always at your service. I am, of course, discreet.”

She stared in astonishment as he walked away. Her uncle laughed at her as he took her to the pillared drawing room for champagne beneath the great Vecchio ceiling. “He propositioned you?”

“I think he did, uncle.”

“That’s how he makes his living.”

“But he’s so gloomy! And ugly!”

Achilles laughed again. “I am told by my lady friends, dear niece, that he is exquisitely skilled.” He raised his eyebrows at her and presented her with champagne.

She leaned with him at the doors which opened onto the Water Garden. The gravel paths which led to the small stone bridges above the shallow, carp filled canals were busy with couples who walked, stood, talked, and kissed. Ropes had been strung from the castle to tall poles at the western edge of the garden from which hung paper Chinese lanterns.

“Exquisitely skilled.” Her uncle’s words intrigued her. She felt nothing when Lord Culloden kissed her, nothing except distaste at his moustache. She wondered what the skill would be that Achilles described, but dared not ask. She felt oddly childish. Perhaps marriage, and the duty of marriage, would initiate her into this world she did not understand, this world that she could glimpse only by half understood gesture and elegant innuendo. There was a secret, and she did not share it, and she felt that these people, even her uncle, laughed at her innocence. Then she remembered the single Christmas touch of the Gypsy and thought there was a clue in that memory to what her uncle spoke of.

She looked for the Gypsy in the Water Garden and she could not see him. She told herself that Caleb had been right. She had seen only a ghost in the shadows at the edge of her happiness. She had seen a horseman, no more, and she had decided that the horseman must be he. She had been wrong.

Achilles smiled at her. “You look forlorn, dear Campion.”

She laughed. “I have to sit with your mother.”

“Then let me not keep you from the awesome presence.”

She dutifully found her grandmother who held stately court on a small dais at one side of the ballroom.

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