Bernard Cornwell - Fallen Angels

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HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain 1983

Copyright © Bernard Cornwell 1983

Cover design by Holly Macdonald © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2018 Cover images © Stephen Dorey - Bygone Images / Alamy Stock Photo (scene); Shutterstock.com(texture)

Bernard Cornwell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007176427

Ebook edition June 2008 ISBN: 9780007290031

Version: 2019-05-28

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Fallen Angels is for Sean and Kerry

‘… the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists and calculators, has succeeded: and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.’

‘Our antagonist is our helper.’

Edmund Burke, 1729–1797

From Reflections on the Revolution in France Published 1790

Title Page

Copyright

Note to Readers

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by Bernard Cornwell

About the Publisher

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.