Fallen Angels

Fallen Angels
О книге

A lost legacy puts one of England’s great families in mortal peril …Lazen Castle, home to the much-envied Lazender family, is a house under siege. The heir is abroad, pursuing his own adventures, so the family estates fall under the control of his sister, Campion. Meanwhile, The Fallen Angels, a powerful and dangerous secret society in Europe, need the Lazender fortune to bring their rebellion to England.Surrounded by deceit, Campion draws ever closer to a subtle trap that has been laid for her, her only hope being Gypsy – her brother’s aloof horse-master, whose loyalties have always been uncertain.In this powerful blend of passion, adventure and intrigue, the second chronicle of the great Lazender family comes to life.

Читать Fallen Angels онлайн беплатно


Шрифт
Интервал


FALLEN ANGELS

BERNARD CORNWELL

and

SUSANNAH KELLS


HarperCollinsPublishers 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 © HarperCollinsPublishers 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

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content or written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

Source ISBN: 9780007176427

Ebook edition June 2008 ISBN: 9780007290031 Version: 2018-10-16

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

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.



Вам будет интересно