Kitabı oku: «Fallen Angels», sayfa 3
The horse, big, sleek and black, trotted superbly on the gravel, while the rider, long-legged and straight-backed, seemed arrogantly at home in his saddle.
The rider was dressed entirely in black. Black breeches, black boots and a black shirt. A black coat was rolled and tied to his saddle. He had long, black hair that moved with the horse’s motion, and, as he came closer, Campion saw the glint of a gold earring in his left ear.
Her uncle, also staring in admiration, suddenly laughed. ‘It’s a gypsy. He must have stolen the horse.’
The Gypsy’s face was dark, thin, and savage as a hawk’s. Campion stared at the face, struck by it, thinking suddenly that never, ever in her life had she seen so superb a man. He rode as though he trampled a conquered world beneath his mare’s hooves.
He looked at them as he passed, his oddly light, bright, blue eyes passing incuriously over the man and girl. He did not stop, he did not acknowledge them, he seemed to observe them and then arrogantly dismiss them from his attention. Campion saw that the man’s sinewy forearms were tattooed with the images of eagles. A sword hung from the saddle, incongruous for a man who was not a gentleman.
Uncle Achilles watched her face, then laughed gently. ‘Perhaps you don’t have a clockwork heart.’
She was embarrassed instantly. She blushed.
He took her arm again. ‘It’s easier for a man. Just as my father did, we men can take our fancies of the peasant masses, indulge them, and pass on. It’s so much harder for a woman.’
‘What are you talking about, uncle?’
‘Oh, nothing!’ He sketched an airy gesture with his ribboned cane. ‘Only he was rather a handsome brute and your face did rather look like that tedious little Joan of Arc when she heard her boring voices.’ He smiled at her. ‘Take him as a secret lover.’
‘Uncle!’
He laughed. ‘I do like to shock you. Perhaps I shall find you a husband who looks like the Gypsy, yes?’ He laughed again.
To her relief a great drop of rain splashed on the drive and her uncle, forgetting the Gypsy, groaned at the catastrophe. ‘My coat will be ruined!’
‘Run!’
‘It’s so inelegant to run.’
‘Then be inelegant.’ She laughed, tugged his elbow, held up her skirts, and they ran in the gathering rain, past the old church, straight for the garden door of the Old House.
‘Mon dieu, mon dieu, mon dieu!’ Achilles d’Auxigny brushed at the sleeves of his grey velvet coat as they stopped within the hallway. The sleeves were hardly spotted with water, yet he sighed as though he had been drenched. ‘It was new last month!’
‘It’s not touched, uncle!’
‘How little you girls know of clothes.’ He flicked his lace cuffs, then listened as the stable clock struck the hour. He sighed. ‘Eleven o’clock. I must go. Come and bid me farewell.’
‘You’re coming back soon?’
‘For Christmas.’ He smiled. ‘Or for your wedding, whichever is sooner.’
She smiled, reached up and kissed his cheek. ‘I shall see you at Christmas.’
He laughed, they walked towards the entrance where his coach waited, and Campion, amazed what one glance could do to her sensible soul, wondered who the tall man was who rode like a conqueror and looked like a king.
Uncle Achilles left. The servants were lined beneath the portico and grateful for the boxes he had left for them. Campion had a glimpse of his slim, ringed hand waving from behind the carriage window, then the horses slewed out into the rain and he was gone.
‘My Lady?’ William Carline, Lazen’s steward, gave her his imperceptible bow. He was a man of enormous and fragile dignity.
‘Carline?’
‘A most strange man, a foreigner, wishes to talk with you. He is most insistent. He carries, he claims, a message from Lord Werlatton.’ Carline’s sniff suggested that no foreigner could be trusted.
The Gypsy. She felt her heart leap, and was instantly ashamed of herself, more so because she was sure that Carline would see her confusion, but on his broad, pale face there was no sign that anything was amiss. She nodded in acknowledgement, forcing herself to keep her voice casual. ‘Ask Mrs Hutchinson to attend me in the gallery and send him there.’
‘Very good, my Lady.’ Carline gave another of his tiny bows and waved an imperious dismissal at the servants.
Campion felt a pang of excitement as she turned to go to the Long Gallery. She felt astonishment too. She had merely glimpsed a man, a gypsy, evidently a servant of her brother’s, and one sight of his face had filled her with this odd thrill of anticipation. She felt, as she waited for Mrs Hutchinson, her companion, a shame that she should be so moved by a man who was her inferior.
But nonsense or not, as a footman opened the door for the Gypsy to come into her presence, she felt her heart beating in anticipation and excitement.
The Gypsy had come to Lazen.
Campion, as he entered the Long Gallery and walked down its panelled splendour, was struck again by the man’s arrogant magnificence. He bowed to her. ‘My Lady.’ He held out a sealed letter and spoke in French. ‘I come from your brother.’
She took the letter, wondering how a French servant, a gypsy, had learned to walk stately halls with such assurance.
The question did not linger in her thoughts. It was swept from them by Toby’s letter, by the news that made her gasp as if struck by a sudden physical pain.
Lucille was dead.
Campion had met Lucille twice, long ago when travel to France had still been safe, and she remembered a girl of dark, almost whimsical beauty. She knew well her brother’s adoration of Lucille, and in her heart she felt a dreadful sorrow for Toby, and a dreadful anger at what had happened.
She looked up at the Gypsy. Toby, in his letter, had named the man simply as Gitan. ‘You know how she died?’
‘Yes, my Lady.’ Mrs Hutchinson, knitting beside Campion, did not speak French, but she sensed from their voices that the news was bad.
Campion frowned. ‘How?’
The Gypsy’s face was almost expressionless. ‘It was not a good death, my Lady.’
‘Who did it?’
He shrugged.
He seemed a strange emissary, this Gypsy, from a land of shadow and death, and perhaps because he had come from the horrors described in Toby’s letter, because he had seen the massacres in Paris’s prisons, he seemed to have an added attraction about him.
Campion pushed the thought away. She stood up, still holding the letter, and walked down the long carpet of the gallery.
Toby said that hundreds had died in Paris. The mobs had broken into the prisons and then slaughtered the inmates. Lucille, though, had not been in prison. She had been at her parents’ house outside Paris and a squad of men had fetched her and taken her into the city and there killed her. Campion turned. ‘Why?’
‘Do you mean why her, my Lady?’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’
Dear God, she thought, but Lazen is cursed! Mother, father, brother, and now Lucille. Her father would have to be told. Toby, not wanting his horse-master to face the drunken Earl, had sensibly ordered Gitan to give the letter to the Lady Campion.
She walked slowly back down the gallery, listening to the comfortable click of Mrs Hutchinson’s needles. ‘What happened in Paris?’
He told her. He spared her the details, but even in outline the story was horrific. He told it well and Campion, sensing guiltily again her attraction to this man, resented that he had proved so intelligent. To be handsome was one thing, and to be struck by a good-looking servant was not so unusual, but to find then that the man was articulate and subtle only added to the attraction and made the rejection harder.
She sat again. Toby had sent this man to deliver the letter to Lazen, then to join him in London. Toby said he would come to Lazen, but not immediately. She looked up at the slim, tall man. ‘How is my brother?’
He did not seem to think it unusual that he, a servant, should be asked the question. He considered his answer for a second. ‘Dangerously angry, my Lady.’
‘Dangerously?’
‘He wants to find who killed Mademoiselle de Fauquemberghes, and kill them in turn.’
‘Go back to France?’ Her voice was filled with horror.
‘It would seem to be the only way, my Lady,’ he said drily.
She stared at him, and thought that his face, though extraordinarily strong, was also sympathetic. He had answered all her questions with a fitting respect, yet there was more to him than the blandness of a servant. He had somehow imbued his answers with his own character, with independence.
She realized that she had been looking into his blue eyes for some seconds and, to cover the silence, she looked down at the letter again. She made herself read it once more.
When she looked up she saw that he had turned to stare at the great Nymph portrait.
Of all the paintings in Lazen, this was her favourite.
It showed the first Countess, the first woman in this family to bear the name Campion, and it showed her in this very room, her hand lightly resting on the table where Campion had just placed Toby’s letter. Sir Peter Lely, the painter, seemed to have caught the first Campion as she half turned towards the onlooker, delight and joy on her face, and family tradition claimed that the painting was indeed the very image of its subject. Legend said that the family had been forced to pay Lely a double fee, just so that he would not paint her as he painted everyone else, with pouting lips and languorous fleshiness, but as she truly was.
The first Campion was said to have been the most beautiful woman in Europe. Her hair was light gold, her eyes blue, and her calm face suffused by a kind of vivacious contentment. She was beautiful, not just with the lineaments of bone and lip and skin and hair, but with the beauty that comes from kindness and happiness within. The Gypsy turned from the painting and his blue eyes looked with amusement at Campion.
She was embarrassed.
She knew what he was thinking, she always knew what people thought when they saw the painting. They thought it was of her. Somehow, over the generations, the beauty of the first Countess had been passed to her great-great-great-granddaughter.
Yet there was more to the painting than its odd likeness to herself. There were stories in it, stories about the four golden jewels about the Countess’s neck, and a story about its title, the Nymph portrait. The title puzzled some visitors, and most had to stay puzzled, for only a few, a very privileged few, were told to stand at the far side of the gallery and stare at the silken folds of the shockingly low cut dress worn by the first Countess of Lazen.
The dress was blue green, the colour of water, and suddenly, by staring, and after it was pointed out, it was possible to see in the gorgeous drapery the shape of a naked girl swimming, but then a second later the onlooker would blink, frown, and swear there was nothing to be seen. Yet she was there, naked and beautiful, a nymph in her stream, and legend said that it was thus that the first Countess had been seen by her husband.
Campion, who knew the picture, could see the naked girl every time, but no visitor had ever spotted the nymph until she was pointed out. Campion had a sudden, outrageous urge to tell the Gypsy, an urge she suppressed with more embarrassment. The naked, swimming nymph bore the same uncanny resemblance to herself.
She suddenly felt angry with herself. At a time like this, when her brother was in mourning, she flirted with a forbidden attraction and she was guilty and ashamed and astonished that the thoughts, so unbidden, should be so strong. She looked at the man. ‘You are returning to London?’
‘Yes, my Lady.’
‘You wish to stay a night in our stables?’
He hesitated, then shook his head. ‘My orders are to return quickly, my Lady.’
She felt a wash of relief. She did not think that life would be easy if this tall, splendid, intriguing man was in Lazen Castle. ‘You can get food in the kitchens.’
‘Thank you, my Lady.’
‘And thank you for bringing this.’
He bowed to her and, thus dismissed, walked from the gallery. She watched him go and, as the door closed on him, she felt as if her senses had been released from a sudden and unwelcome burden. She turned to Mrs Hutchinson, her chaperone. ‘It’s bad news, Mary.’
‘Oh no, dear. Oh dear, no.’
Lucille was dead, there would be no babies in Lazen, and Campion cried.
Gitan left Lazen that afternoon, his fed and rested mare strong on the road eastward.
He smiled as he went into the wet woodlands that bordered the estate, the autumn leaves dripping monotonously with rainwater and the air rich with the smells of a damp forest.
He carried messages from Marchenoir to London, messages of secrecy, messages hidden within his sword scabbard.
He had come safely to England, brought by Lord Werlatton, but his true purposes were hidden, hidden as well as the naked swimming girl that he had seen in the great blue-green portrait in the gallery. He had almost laughed when he saw it, so lifelike did the image seem and so like the beautiful girl who was his master’s sister.
He thought of fat Jean Brissot. He thought how the Parisians would like to have that girl in their hands. He patted his horse’s neck and smiled. Bertrand Marchenoir would like her most of all; the rabble-roaring ex-priest who had led Paris into blood and more blood was famous for his dealings with the daughters of the fallen aristocracy, and there would be added pleasure for Marchenoir in the fact that this lovely creature was, on her mother’s side, one of the hated d’Auxignys. Gitan laughed at the thought.
The wind blew the rain cold from the west as man and horse rode through the brown, wet woods of an English autumn. He stopped in a clearing on the hill’s crest, turned in his saddle, and stared at the great house that was now beneath him. It was, he thought, a most beautiful house. It was also, though it did not yet know it, a house under siege. The Gypsy clicked his tongue and rode on.
3
‘What is your name?’
The answer came from a man who stood alone in the centre of a sunken, marble floor. The man was naked.
The room was brilliantly lit by a ring of candles, hundreds of flames reflected from polished marble, silver, and mirrors that threw the man’s shadow in a complex coronet radiating from his bare feet. The room was circular and, high above the naked man’s head, there was the gleam of gold mosaics that decorated the domed ceilings. It was a lavish room, fit for an Emperor or a great whore.
The questioner spoke again. He could not be seen and his voice came as a hoarse whisper that seemed to fill the room, coming from no direction and every direction. ‘What is your desire?’
‘To join you.’
‘What gives light?’
‘Reason.’
‘What gives darkness?’
‘God.’
‘How do you apprehend this?’
‘With reason.’
‘What is your name?’
The naked man answered again. His voice was strong in the room, echoing from the marble and from the magnificent gold mosaics of the dome.
Another voice, also a whisper, echoed mysteriously about the great chamber. ‘What protects the weak?’
‘The law.’
‘What is above the law?’
‘Reason.’
‘What is your name?’
The man answered. He stood quite still. He was a tall man and well muscled. He did not seem uncomfortable with his nakedness.
A third voice whispered. ‘What is death?’
‘Nothing.’
Silence.
Real silence. No windows opened to the outside world in this extraordinary place. The doors by which the naked man had entered were of bronze, doors so heavy that it had taken all his strength to close them on the night.
It was October outside. In this room it could be any season, any hour, any year.
One of the whispers sounded. ‘Kill him.’
Silence again.
The man expected this, yet he felt a crawling fear within him. He kept his face rigid. He was being judged.
‘Why did you come here?’
‘To serve you.’
‘Whom do we serve?’
‘Reason.’
‘What bounds does reason have?’
‘None.’
‘Kill him.’
‘Kill him.’
The third voice did not sound.
Europe was rife with secret societies, most imitating the Masons, all offering a man the secret pride of belonging to a privileged group. Some, like the Rosati, were harmless, devoted to poetry and wine. Others, like the Illuminati, had more sinister purposes. Yet this gathering, in this strange marble hall that was like a mausoleum awaiting its dead, was a secret society within a secret society. These were the Fallen Angels of the Illuminati.
The Illuminati had come from Germany where the princes and dukes had persecuted the movement and driven it south to France where, in the ferment of revolution, the ‘Illuminated Ones’ had found a home. It was said that more than half the leaders of the revolution belonged to the Illuminati, that the achievements of the revolution had been planned, not in political meetings, but in the secret halls of the society. It was rumoured that the Illuminati were spreading like an unseen stain throughout the civilized world.
They had been given the light of reason. They were above the law. They were the future. They would take the world from the dark splendours of superstition into the brilliance of a planet governed by the intellect. The society of the Illuminated Ones existed to establish a new religion that worshipped reason, and to forge a universal republic. France had lit the way; France had proved that the old monarchies and the old gods could be destroyed.
The naked man had been Illuminati for five years. Now he had been offered a greater honour. He could join the Fallen Angels.
The Fallen Angels were not the only secret group within the Illuminati. Each group, like this one, had a task to fulfil. Just as cavalry rode ahead of an army to spy out the land and confuse the enemy with short, sharp raids, so did the secret groups of the Illuminati prepare the way for the coming age of reason. The Fallen Angels planned one such raid now and the naked man, standing on the echoing marble, was needed for a specific task. First, though, he must pass this trial.
The naked man, if he failed this test, would die. Simply by coming to this place he had learned too much about the Fallen Angels. If he passed the test then he would be given a new name, the name of a fallen angel; one of those bright creatures who had rebelled against God, who had fought the war in heaven, and who had fallen with Satan into the bottomless pit of defeat. The Fallen Angels took the names of those who had dared to fight God as symbols of their own rebellion against religion, superstition, and government.
A whisper sounded again. ‘What is your name?’
He told them.
‘What do the Fallen have?’
‘Reason.’
‘Do they obey the law?’
‘They make the law.’
‘Do they obey the law?’ The whisper had a suggestion of irritation.
‘No.’
Silence. The candle flames were still and bright. A few, their wicks untrimmed, shivered and raised thin streaks of smoke that darkened the ceiling of the circular alcove within which all the candles burned. The alcove, its rear wall mirrored, ran like a recessed shelf clear round the base of the dome.
The whispers seemed to sigh about the circular room. Then one voice rose above the others. ‘What is evil?’
‘Weakness.’ The naked man had not been rehearsed in his answers, but his sponsor, one of the three men who questioned him, had talked of what he might expect. He might expect death.
‘What is the punishment for weakness?’
‘Death.’
‘What is your name?’
He told them. There was silence.
He felt the shiver of fear again, but he kept his head high and he stared at the veined sheen of the curved marble walls and tried to see from where the voices came.
The sigh came again, like a wind half heard far away. It died into silence.
The floor on which he stood was of green and blue marble. It was some forty feet in diameter and surrounded by white marble steps, four in all, that climbed to a mosaic pavement. The walls were decorated with columns, sculpted wreaths, and intricate bas-reliefs, any of which could hide the openings from which the voices must come. The chamber, though lavish and bright, seemed to be missing something, as though a throne or a great catafalque should stand within its barren splendour.
‘What is your name?’
He told them.
‘Kill him.’
‘Kill him.’
The third voice, instead of confirming his doom, whispered that he should close his eyes.
The naked man obeyed. He could hear nothing, but there was a sudden shivering of colder air on his body as though a tomb had been opened.
Then he heard footsteps.
He heard naked feet on the marble floor. The feet approached him, walking slowly, and he had to fight the desire to open his eyes. He was shivering. He wanted to break away from the centre of the floor and run from the slow, soft feet that came closer and closer to him. He imagined a blade reaching for him and he had to steel himself to stand still and keep his eyes closed.
Something touched his shrinking, crawling flesh and he almost jumped and shouted in alarm.
Fingers stroked his chest. Fingers that were soft and warm and gentle. The fingers traced down his ribs, over his belly, down to his loins. The relief was coursing through him. He had expected death.
‘Open your eyes.’ The whisper echoed about the high chamber.
The naked man obeyed and, in front of him, smiling up at him, was a girl. She was pretty. She had a round, freckled face with red hair that had been tied back with a red ribbon. Her hair was full and springy because it had been washed. She smelt of soap because she had bathed before this ceremony. Like him she was naked. Her skin was pink, freckled, young and clean.
She smiled at him and her hands stroked him.
‘Do you like her?’ one of the whisperers asked.
‘Yes.’ He felt embarrassed. Her hands were soft and shameless. They flickered and stroked, touched and kneaded his flesh.
The naked man guessed the girl was nineteen or twenty. She had big, firm breasts and the wide hips of a girl who would be strong in childbirth. She leaned forward and licked the sweat on his chest, then reached up to pull his head down to hers.
He kissed her. Her salty tongue was quick between his lips. She hooked a leg behind his legs and her strong thigh was warm on his skin.
‘Take her,’ the whisper commanded.
She was pulling him down to the cold marble and he knelt, laid her down, and ran his right hand down her body.
The girl closed her eyes. The gentlemen who had hired her from the Dijon brothel had promised her a huge sum for this night’s work. Half of it was already in her purse downstairs, the other half would be given to her after she had made this man happy. It was silly, of course, but what girl could refuse such a sum for such a small task?
She opened her legs, thinking what an uncomfortable bed cold marble made, and opened her eyes and smiled into the man’s face. ‘Come, come.’
The naked man ran his hands from her thighs to her breasts and she arched her back, moaned, and closed her eyes again. ‘You’re so good! Come to me.’
‘Take her,’ the whisperer ordered.
He took her, and with a whore’s skill she made him feel that he was a lover greater than any in history. Her head turned from side to side in false pleasure, she moaned softly, she reached for him to pull him down, she pushed up with her hips, and the man, propped on his hands that were either side of her shoulders, smiled down on her as she locked her ankles behind his thighs.
Each whisper so far had been in French. Now, suddenly, one of the hidden men spoke in English. ‘Kill her.’
He froze, then knew that this was the test, that hesitation was failure and failure was death and he fell on her, his hands moving from the floor to her neck and he gripped her throat with his big hands, squeezed, and her eyes opened in terror as she still thrust at him, and then she twisted beneath him, tried to wrench her body free and she rolled on top of him, thrashing, kicking, clawing at him and he shook her head with his hands and forced her back to the floor again.
Her fingers pulled at his wrists, but her strength was nothing like his and he had her beneath him and he beat her head on the floor.
Still he squeezed. He could feel her pulse beneath his thumbs. Her legs beat on the floor. He knelt up, his knee slipping in liquid, and beat her head again. His teeth were gritted.
She took a long time to die. When he took his fingers from her throat, he thought they would never straighten again. He was panting.
Slowly he stood up. He stepped away from the body.
As he stood one part of the marble wall of the circular chamber suddenly moved. Two wooden doors, cunningly painted in the manner of poor church interiors to look like marble, opened before his astonished eyes to reveal a hidden room. There was a table of black stone within the room. Candles stood on the table about which three figures sat. On either side of the table sat men in robes of black and gold, with great stiff cowls like monks’ hoods over their heads. At the table’s head, facing the naked man, sat a figure robed and hooded in silver. He was Lucifer, the day star, the prince of darkness, the leader of the Fallen Angels and, with due ceremony and courtesy, he welcomed the new member who henceforth, he said, could wear the black and gold habit of a Fallen Angel. The robe waited for him on a vacant chair. Then Lucifer gave the newcomer his name. From henceforth, he said, he would be known as Chemosh.
The Fallen Ones met in the shrine built by the Mad Duke who had thought he was God. The shrine was behind the splendid Chateau of Auxigny. The Mad Duke was long dead, gone to meet the God he had failed to be, and his eldest son, the present Duke, was imprisoned with his King in Paris.
One of the Fallen Angels did not sit at the black table, for he was a deaf mute. Lucifer had given him the name Dagon. He was a huge, shambling creature with the face of an idiot. The black and gold robe sat on his shoulders like a royal cloak draped on a dancing bear. His task was to care for the Chateau of Auxigny and its strange shrine, a task he did to the terror of the local children who spoke of strange things in the woods behind the Castle.
When Chemosh had been admitted to the chamber, and the doors had been closed again, Dagon took the body of the girl downstairs. He stroked it, and from his throat came strange noises. Later, when the Fallen Angels had gone, and when Dagon was again alone in the Chateau of Auxigny, he would take the body to the dark woods behind the shrine and he would leave it for the ravens and the night creatures and her body would be flensed and the bones scattered and the remnants covered by the falling pine needles. She was not the first girl to die in this place, for every new Fallen Angel was initiated with death, and Dagon, as he ran his huge hands down her still warm flesh, hoped she would not be the last.
* * *
Lucifer gestured with a silver-gloved hand at the wine. ‘Drink, Chemosh. You need some wine after that nonsense.’
Chemosh smiled. ‘Nonsense?’
‘Of course. Superstition! Yet we have to know if you believe what you say, that you believe reason is above the law, that you believe a reasonable man can do no evil. So we frighten you a little and give you a trifling test. Now you can forget it.’ He shrugged beneath the robes. His face was entirely hidden by the dipping cowl of his hood that made a black shadow from which his voice came so hoarse and low. It seemed to Chemosh to be an old voice, a voice that spoke from long and bitter knowledge. Once only, as the cowl was raised towards Chemosh, did the newcomer see the glitter of eyes that themselves seemed to be like two hard silver lights in the darkness.
Lucifer, his voice as dry as dead leaves in a cold wind, spoke of the purpose of the Fallen Angels.
He spoke of a war that would soon be declared between France and Britain. He spoke of the decision, by the Illuminati, to work for Britain’s defeat.
His business, he said, was not with armies. France would fight, and France would win, and France would take republicanism and reason to Britain. But first the Illuminati would rot Britain from within.
He spoke of the British Corresponding Societies that supported the revolution. They would need money, help, and arms.
He spoke of the British journals and their writers, the scribblers who would take any bribe and spread any rumour.
He spoke of that ‘mad, fat King’ who would be dethroned, of the scandals that would be spread in high places, of the foulness that would be smeared over Britain’s leaders and aristocrats, until the people of Britain had no trust in their government and would welcome the cleansing flood of republicanism.
And all this, Lucifer said, would take money. ‘More money than you can dream of, Chemosh. The task of the Fallen Angels is to provide the Illuminati with that money.’
The new silk robe was cold on Chemosh’s thighs. He was still shaking from the effort of killing the girl. Her eyes, wide and bulging, still stared in his brain.
Lucifer drank water, then the silvery cowl turned to the newcomer again. Neither of the other two hooded men had spoken yet. Like Chemosh, they listened to their master’s voice. ‘We are going to take a fortune in Britain, Chemosh, and your task is to help us.’ His voice was bitter and dry, soft and sibilant, yet even Lucifer could not hide the pleasure of his next words. ‘We are going to take the Lazen fortune.’
Lazen! Chemosh knew of Lazen. Did anyone not know of the richest earldom in England? Lazen, with its sprawling great house and its London property and its estates in every shire, was rumoured to have a greater income than that of most kingdoms. Lazen! He said nothing, but he wondered how, in Reason’s name, these few men would take the fortune of Lazen.
