Fallen Angels. Bernard Cornwell
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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.
The three men, if they saw Larke, ignored him.
One of the three, a pugnacious, ugly man, was laughing as he tried to unbutton the flap of his breeches. The man belched, then finally succeeded in pulling the flap open. He held onto the wall. ‘Hitch her skirts up, Robin!’
An old woman, a drunkard, had come scavenging in the kitchen yard. She had either collapsed in gin-sodden unconsciousness, or else had been knocked down by the three young men who laughed at her helplessness.
‘Company!’ A tall young man whom Larke recognized as the Honourable Robin Ickfield drew the word out as if he was a drill sergeant. ‘Company! Fire!’
All three pissed on her, laughing loudly as she tried to drag herself out of the way.
Valentine Larke moved silently behind them and climbed the steps into the house. The young lordlings were at play and that was never a good time to disturb them. There were few things in life more dangerous than the idle, bored young men of London society.
Larke went into the house, through an antechamber, and then into the great, well-lit hallway into which the front-door of the house opened. A footman, hugely muscled beneath his elaborate uniform, started as Larke silently appeared from the back of the house, but then recognized him and relaxed. ‘Mr Larke, sir.’
While Larke was giving the man his cloak, hat and cane, a door to the left of the hall opened and a huge woman, middle aged and grotesque, came into sight.
She was dressed in lurid purple silk, her piled hair surmounted by a feather dyed the same colour. At her huge breasts hung a pendant of gold. She stopped when she saw Larke, sniffed, then nodded coldly. The feather quivered above her head. ‘Mr Larke, I see.’
He bowed to her. ‘Your servant, Ma’am.’
‘You’ll want food, I suppose,’ she said ungraciously.
‘Indeed,