PROLOGUE

      Death’s kingdom is the night. When the church bell strikes the small hours, when the owls hunt, when the land is black with night; death reigns.

      They are the witching hours, when castle and cottage are closed against the dark, yet cannot stop the reaper who comes to grin his skull-grin and give the gravedigger employment.

      At such an hour, on a night furious with storm, the Lady Campion Lazender woke into nightmare.

      A scream woke her. She heard hooves on the gravel and a man shouting. His words were snatched to oblivion by the wind and rain that slashed dark at the Castle’s windows.

      Edna, the maid whose scream had jarred Campion awake, pounded on the door. ‘My Lady! My Lady!’

      ‘I’m awake!’ Campion was already pulling a woollen gown over her nightclothes.

      Edna opened the door. She held a candle and her face was as white as its wax. ‘He’s bleeding, my Lady. He fell!’ Her voice was half sobbing, half scared.

      ‘Has the doctor been sent for?’ Campion’s voice was calm. She led the maid through the ante-chamber, out into the long corridor. ‘Has he?’

      ‘I don’t know, my Lady.’

      Servants, woken by the commotion, watched in the passages. Campion smiled at them, knowing they needed reassurance. The single candle, half shielded by Edna’s hand, threw strange shadows on the high marble pillars and on the painted ceilings of the great rooms.

      Campion ran barefooted up the marble staircase that led to the Upper Gallery. The longcase clock struck two.

      The lights were brighter in this part of the Castle. Servants had lit candles and their flickering flames showed the open door of her father’s rooms.

      Campion stepped over a flax sheet, bright with blood, into her father’s bedroom. Her father was on the floor. There was blood on the carpet, on the bed, and on the hands of the servants. Her father’s terrible, sunken, dying face seemed paler than ever. His eyes were shut.

      ‘What happened?’

      Caleb, her father’s manservant, answered. ‘Fell out of bed, my Lady.’

      On the table beside the bed was a spilt bottle of brandy. Doubtless, she thought, he had tried with his one good arm to reach for it to dull the pain that tormented him, and somehow his paralysed body had fallen.

      She knelt beside him, took his hand and stroked his cheek. His face was a grimace of pain. He moaned, but he seemed insensible to her presence. She dropped his hand and lifted the blanket that Caleb had put over the leg’s stump.

      The Earl of Lazen had been paralysed these fifteen years, a strong man brought to pain and sickness and nightmares by a falling horse. Just one week ago the surgeons had taken off a leg because the gangrene had come in his foot.

      ‘It opened up, my Lady,’ Caleb Wright said. She could see that the servant had twisted a silken bed cord about the thigh to staunch the bloodflow.

      ‘Lift him onto the bed,’ Campion said. She helped, and her father moaned as they put his wasted, light body onto the mattress. She put the blanket back over him. ‘The doctor’s coming?’

      ‘Yes, my Lady,’ Caleb said.

      She stroked her father’s face. ‘Father? Father?’ But he could not hear her. She wondered how much blood he had lost. His breathing was slow, his chest hardly rising and falling, and she could scarcely feel the beat of his heart when she put her hand on his neck. She bent over and kissed him.

      The wind rattled rain on the window by his bed. For fifteen years the Earl had looked on his estates through that window, and, through all those long seasons of his dying, his daughter had been his consolation and his joy.

      She was called Lady Campion Lazender and, on this September night of 1792, she was twenty-four years old. She had been given beauty as few are given beauty, yet she seemed unaware of the gift. She was slim and tall, with pale gold hair that was the colour of fine wheat two weeks before harvest. She had a face that was swift to smile, and her quick spirit flashed like sunlit gold in the huge halls and sickness-haunted rooms of Lazen Castle.

      She could have been in London; she could have danced in palaces and taken tribute from every hopeful son, yet she would not leave Lazen. Her father was sick, her brother absent, and she had taken the reins of Lazen into her slim hands and it was she who was its ruler now. She was sensible, practical, and decisive. She could talk to ploughmen or lawyers, millers or magistrates, and every man left her presence a little bit in love and ready to believe that Lazen was not cursed.

      There was a belief that the Castle was cursed.

      The Earl was dying, drunk when he was awake, racked by pain when he awoke.

      The Countess was dead, killed giving birth to a stillborn child.

      The eldest son, who would have inherited Lazen, had been burned to death with his wife and child.

      Lazen, the house of fortune, seemed cursed in all things but its daughter.

      A servant piled coals on the fire. Campion still held her father’s hand and she stroked his face as if she could drive her love through his insensibility. She prayed for the doctor to come quickly, that her father would not die, that he would live, at the very least, long enough to see Toby married.

      Toby was her brother, the new heir, Viscount Werlatton. He was in Paris, a member of the British Embassy there, and now that the French had imprisoned their King and the revolution was turning bloodier by the day, he was coming home. He was bringing a bride with him, a dark-haired French girl of winsome and fragile beauty. There would be babies soon in Lazen and Campion was glad. Lazen needed babies, and she prayed that this pale, bleeding man would live to see them.

      There was the sound of running footsteps, she turned, and William Carline, the Castle’s ponderous steward, appeared breathless at the door. ‘My Lady?’

      ‘What is it?’ She knew it was bad news. She could tell by his face, paler than ever, and by the flicker of panic that ran like lightning among the servants.

      ‘It’s Doctor Fenner, my Lady. He’s not home. They say he’s gone to Millett’s End.’ Carline’s voice trailed away.

      All the servants stared at her. She was twenty-four and on her slim shoulders rested this great house and all its possessions.

      She lifted the blanket to look at the stump of her father’s leg. She thought there was more blood on the linen, and she knew her father was going to die unless she acted swiftly. ‘Carline?’

      ‘My Lady?’

      ‘I want you to go to the stables, please, wake Burroughs, and ask for the horse needles and thread.’

      He blinked, then nodded. ‘Yes, my Lady.’

      ‘I want water, Caleb.’ She was trying to think of what else she would need. Candles, linen, and courage.

      Her maid stared wide-eyed at her. ‘You’re going to sew him up, my Lady?’

      ‘And you’re going to help me.’

      The storm had blown itself out by the time she had finished. She had untied the crude bandage, washed the stump, tied the broken artery, then, taking the flap of skin, stitched it into place. She had worked from instinct, doing what seemed to be necessary, frowning when the fragile skin tore under the thread’s pull. Edna had held a candle close to her hands while Caleb and another servant held her father still.

      Now, the room thick with the smell of lymph and blood, she untied the silken bed cord from her father’s thigh. She watched in fear as the white skin flushed red with the released blood,