Bernard Cornwell - Fallen Angels

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, Ma’am.’

‘And no doubt you’ll settle the bill, Mr Larke?’ Her small eyes glared at him from the shapeless, pudgy face that seemed like a lump of dough piled haphazardly at the top of her massive cleavage. She seemed to have no neck at all. She jerked her monstrous head, making the pearls shake where they hung in her piled hair. ‘I am not a charity, Mr Larke.’

He smiled. ‘Indeed you are not, Mrs Pail.’

She sniffed and swept on, attended by two small footmen who fussed behind her like pageboys.

Her name was Abigail Pail, and these were her Rooms. Mrs Pail’s Rooms were famous in London, not just for the food, which was superb, or for the gaming, which was fast, but most of all for the girls, who were superb and fast. The ugliest woman in London ran the best whorehouse. It was here that the rich and the titled came to play, where their fortunes were lost, where their every need was attended to at a price that was extortionate.

The three men who had relieved themselves in the kitchen yard came noisily back into the hall. The pugnacious one, whose wigless black hair was cut short as a curry-brush, had vomit stains on his red silk coat. He saw Valentine Larke and laughed. ‘Christ! They let you come here?’

Larke smiled and bowed. Sir Julius Lazender, he thought, had one merit; consistency. He was offensive all of the time.

Sir Julius brushed rain off his coat. ‘Abigail lets you paw her girls, Larke?’

The Honourable Robin Ickfield snickered in a high voice. ‘I thought politicians preferred boys.’

‘You should bloody know, Robin,’ Sir Julius laughed. He belched drunkenly. ‘Christ! I could tup a bloody horse tonight.’ He pulled himself up the stairway, then turned with a malicious grin on his face. ‘You’ve come for the Countess, Larke?’ He said it accusingly.

‘The Countess, Sir Julius?’ Larke’s voice was unctuous.

‘Don’t tell me you didn’t know!’ Sir Julius’s breeches flap was only half buttoned. ‘The old faggot’s got a French Countess here, Larke, but then I don’t suppose you can afford her, eh?’

‘She’s expensive, Sir Julius?’

Sir Julius laughed. ‘Five years ago the sniffy bitch wouldn’t look at you! Now her Ladyship will rub her tits on your arse for a shilling.’ He leered at Larke. ‘But only if you’re a gentleman.’ He turned away, pleased with his insult, followed by his companions.

Valentine Larke watched the three climb the stairs, his hard eyes showing no offence. Valentine Larke had not been born into the gentry, but if Sir Julius Lazender was a measure of gentility then Larke was glad he was no gentleman. Sir Julius, nephew to the Earl of Lazen, was a belligerent, drunken, pugnacious, rude wastrel. Larke smiled. Sir Julius would live to regret every sneer and every insult.

He turned towards the gaming room. The footman, who knew that Larke was neither a lord nor conspicuously rich, only opened one of the two leaves of the door.