Not just any phaeton, but one of the highest, swiftest phaetons in the country. The bays were as spirited as the carriage itself, and the Earl, whenever he saw the equipage drawn up on the forecourt, felt a pang of fear for his daughter.
The phaeton, her father thought, could hardly weigh more than she did! The Earl had ordered ballast placed above each axle, but still the fragile assembly of steel, leather, and wood frightened him.
He looked at her from his pillow. ‘Simon tells me you took the ballast off the axles.’
‘A bit.’
‘A bit!’ He laughed. ‘I don’t know why you don’t just glue bloody feathers on it and try to fly.’
‘Perhaps I will.’ She kissed him. ‘I’ll see you at lunch time.’
‘Drive slowly.’
‘I always do.’
‘Liar.’ He smiled at her.
This morning she was driving to Millett’s End. The village was a remote place, lost in the southern heaths, but it was a journey she took each fortnight as part of her duty. Most of the villagers were tenants or pensioners of Lazen, the vicar was appointed by the Castle, it was as much a part of Lazen as the larger, closer, richer town on the Castle’s doorstep. Campion went there for duty, yet she admitted to herself the pleasure of letting the bays run free on the high, straight, heathland road.
Not that today she could go fast. The frost had rutted the roads dangerously hard, though once up on the heath she knew she could steer onto the grass and let the bays stretch their legs.
Simon Burroughs shouted from the stable-block doors. ‘You want company?’
‘No!’ She smiled at him. Sometimes a groom would accompany her on a saddle-horse, but Campion knew the grooms were instructed to keep her pace slow. Today, on this crisp, cold, hard day she wanted to be alone.
The wheels blurred as the bays trotted down the long, curved driveway, over the small bridge that crossed the stream which fed the ornamental lake. It was here, she thought, that she had first seen the Gypsy, and then she pushed that thought away as she rattled between the gatehouses and onto the cobbled street that led to Lazen’s market place.
She raised a gloved hand to those who greeted her, called a welcome to Mrs Swan who was brushing out her cottage, and pretended not to notice the lurch as two children jumped onto the back axle stand. Two only was the rule, and only as far as the mill bridge, but it was no fun unless she pretended not to notice.
She let the horses go faster as she crossed in front of the covered market. She had seen Simon Stepper, the bookseller whose business was almost entirely owed to the Castle, wrapping a scarf about his neck in his shop doorway. He was a clever man, but once he began talking he would never stop. She looked the other way, laughing as a man who stacked logs beside the glebe cottages gestured for her to go faster, and then Simon Stepper was left behind and the phaeton, its shadow leaping from cottage to cottage, slowed to approach the mill bridge. She heard a gasp and laughter as the children fell clear.
The water was high, spilling gleaming from the mill pond. The smoke from the mill kitchen chimney was whipped away by a stiff breeze and Campion caught a whiff of roasting meat and then she was driving past the town’s clink, the small single cell jail with its door open onto mysterious shadow, and she was through the town. She slowed as the cobbles ended and the road climbed between black, frost rimed hedges towards Two Gallows Hill.
She went slowly here, remembering how in spring these hedgerows were thick with flowers and fragrance. Spring, she thought, seemed so far away. The road climbed more steeply. Joshua Cartwright, who farmed on this edge of the town, would bring his horses to help wagons climb this incline, yet the bays pulled the phaeton without apparent effort. She looked right at the single, empty, leaning gibbet on Two Gallows Hill, then the road twisted through pasture land, heaved up one more steep slope, and levelled itself onto the heathland above. The gibbet was left behind, the sky was immense now over the flat landscape, a landscape bare of features except for the road, a few, windbent trees, and the curious, humped ridges of the old earthwork fort to her left.
It was a cold day, the sky was cloudless and the sunlight slanted low and bright onto the bushes. She took the bays off the road onto the wide, flat verge, and let them go into a trot. Their breath whipped back past their gleaming flanks. Her spirits rose with the speed.
She let them go faster. The ground here was quite level, quite safe, free of hidden stones that could tip a fast-moving phaeton and smash it to tinder. She shook the reins again and it seemed to her that she rode a chariot in the sky. The bushes blurred as she went past them, she felt the joy of it, the excitement of it, the reins quivering against the tension of her forearms, and she let the horses go faster still.
The wind put tears into her eyes and lifted the cord of the whip. She thought the speed might even pluck off the fur bonnet that was pulled so low over her ears and about her face, but still she shouted at the horses, laughed, and felt the pure exhilaration of the speed.
The Reverend Horne Mounter, dining in the Earl’s rooms last week, had explained the scientific fact that there was an absolute celerity beyond which a human body could not travel.
The Earl, sitting up in bed, and grumbling about an itching in his mended stump, had opined that such a scientific fact was garbled mumblelarkey.
The Reverend Mounter had laughed politely and complimented the Earl on his spitchcock’d eel.
‘Always liked eel,’ the Earl said. His thin face had been flushed. The room had a sour smell in it, a smell of sickness. At least, though, he was sober. Campion had cut more of her father’s food, then smiled at the rector.
‘An absolute celerity, Reverend Mounter?’
‘Indeed so, my Lady.’ The Reverend Horne Mounter swallowed his mouthful of eel and helped it with some of the Castle’s best claret. ‘At speeds, they say, in excess of one equivalent to thirty miles in an hour, it is certain that the blood of the body would be driven by the excessive motion to the rear of the body. Unless, of course, one was travelling backwards, in which case it would be driven to the front of the body!’ He demonstrated this fact with copious movement of his plump, white hands. ‘Starved of the blood the front, or back, half of the body would die! It’s quite certain!’
‘It’s quite fiddlededee!’ the Earl had said.
Now, her wheels spinning and bouncing on the frost-hard turf, Campion shook the reins again and let the horses go into a gallop. She wondered how fast they travelled and whether the tingling on her skin was the blood being driven backwards by the celerity of the carriage. She laughed aloud at the thought, and as she laughed, so she saw the shape rise from the gorse to her right.
She stood no chance.
The man ran at the bays, shouted, and hurled a thick bough of dead gorse at their feet. They swerved, Campion leaned on the reins, felt them sawing at her wrists, but the horses had panicked to their left and dragged the light carriage onto the uneven road.
The wheels of the phaeton bounced, slammed down, and caught on the thick, frost-hardened rut at the road’s centre. Campion shouted at the horses, pulled the right reins, and then the front left wheel splintered in shards of varnished, gleaming wood and the carriage crashed down, dug in its spinning axle hub, and Campion was thrown clear, by a miracle the reins uncurling from her hands, and she
