by Mary Gentle
A stir in the crowd made him step aside automatically; not until then registering that the Protector and her entourage were coming through.
"Why? All I’ve heard from you—" he dropped his voice to a rough whisper— "since I took you from your mother’s pap, all I’ve heard from you is gentleman-mercenary. Why alter your course now?"
The self-possessed young man met his eyes. In blue satin and ice-lace, as incongruous among these black courtiers as a jay; straight-backed and slender, one hand on the hilt of his sword.
"I’ll join another company. Any other company."
"Boy." His face twisted.
The Lord-Architect’s voice boomed as he passed through the door with White Crow; something about the carriage; and Pollexfen Calmady glanced up automatically.
Silhouetted against the blue outdoor light, a young woman stood with her bare hands tucked up into her armpits. Head bowed, boots neatly together; the topmost of her skirts a ragged black, and her topcoat grey. Without raising her head, she turned it; glittering eyes meeting his.
Pollexfen Calmady rested his hand on Bevil’s shoulder. "Madam Protector!"
The plain-faced woman slowed, fingers of her left hand busy buckling a gauntlet, her head cocked to hear another man read her a report as she walked. "Captain Calmady? There is something more?"
Light from the slit-windows reflected from his eyes: a gaze with some manic glint of humour or despair, impossible to detect which.
"There is one more thing," he said. "There has, or there will be, a complaint of a rape laid against my name. Will you allow me to be tried and cleared of it?"
Bevil Calmady opened his mouth, shut it again.
The Protector squinted against the subdued lamps and snow-bright morning. "Who lays the complaint?"
"Desire-of-the-Lord Guillaime is her name."
Feet shuffled. He looked over his shoulder. Without a word, and as one, the men and women of the Protectorate court drew back, until a clear space of flagstones surrounded the black-haired young woman. She lifted her head. The light brought out the faded bruise under her eye.
Humility Talbot whispered, "A soiled woman is the abomination of desolation spoken of by the prophet . . ."
"Desire-of-the-Lord, is it so?"
"Yes."
Sullen, her low voice sounded clearly in the quiet.
"Then you’re arrested, Captain Calmady, and your trial will follow. " The Protector briefly signalled, and did not wait to watch the helmeted guards move in to surround Calmady. Desire-of-the-Lord Guillaime hugged her arms more tightly about her body, standing alone.
"Father."
Guards grabbed his shoulders. Pollexfen Calmady shrugged loose, nodded to Bevil, and walked with a jaunty step between the armed men, halting as he passed Arbella Lacey.
"Trooper."
He dug in his pocket, slid a rattle of silver coin from his hand into hers.
"Take that down to Bankside. Get the best odds you can. I want to lay the heaviest wager possible that I’ll be acquitted."
Chapter Five
The White Crow straightened up from tucking a tom rag into the crack between wall and floorboard. She held her hand out for a moment, testing for cold draughts.
"That’s one dangerous woman: Olivia. She looks like a farmer on her way to plough a field . . . and you agree to what she proposes without even thinking about it. Not that I’m well-placed against threats, with children."
The Lord-Architect cocked an eyebrow.
"Oh, well enough, then; we aren’t well-placed!" She pulled the nearest rug up to the clothes-chest, overlapping it, and sat back on her heels as Jared entered.
"Mama, Abiathar said it was too time-consuming to travel around town and see things. She let me visit the shops in the court, to buy whatever I wanted." Jared, in stocking-feet and without his coat, maneuvered armsful of papers carefully in and shut the door. "I have all today’s newspapers."
"Ah." The White Crow watched him trot across and settle in a deep armchair. "Ah. Good. I suppose. Casaubon, they won’t be building in this weather, will they?"
"Hardly." The Lord-Architect inclined his head with ponderous grace.
She kicked the rug across to the hearth, and spread the bed-quilt over it. A last check between door and hearth, window and hearth; and she knelt down to take the baby from the bassinet.
"So you can look after these two while I go out."
The orange-haired baby, unwound from swaddling wool clothes, stretched her limbs in crab-like movements, hitching herself facedown across the blanket in an approximation of a crawl.
The Lord-Architect Casaubon appeared miffed. "The Protector-General won’t take kindly to my delaying."
"Nor me, either—"
"I must go to the site sometime today."
"Mama!"
The White Crow, standing up, grunted as she received Jared’s full weight in her midriff. The boy clung, his arms tightly round her waist.
"You’re going away again!"
She met Casaubon’s gaze across the room. Obscurely warmed, she scruffled Jared’s neat blond hair. "No I’m not, pudding. Promise."
"You are."
The White Crow bent from the knee, closed her arm across the boy’s thighs, and with a grunt of effort hoisted him into her arms. She looked at his red face, level now with hers, and kissed his cheek.
"All I’m doing, pudding, is going somewhere perfectly respectable for the afternoon, if I can get through the streets."
Her head cocked to one side, she suddenly grinned. The boy wriggled. As if recollecting his dignity, he slid to the floor and pulled his cut-down waistcoat straight. The White Crow squatted down on her haunches.
"Can we trust your papa to look after Jadis on his own, do you think?"
The small boy’s gaze shifted to Casaubon. Before he could voice his obvious doubts, the White Crow concluded: "How would you like to come with me on a visit to the Mint?"
Jared frowned seriously.
"I would like that very much, mama." He hesitated. "If you take me, then you won’t look sus . . . suspicious, will you?"
The White Crow whistled, and looked across at Casaubon. The Lord-Architect’s chins creased in a vastly amused beam.
"An infant after my own heart!"
She held out her hand, waited until Jared took it, and pulled him into a hug. "But he’s perfectly right."
Desire-of-the-Lord Guillaime sat waiting for him in one of The New-Founde Land Arms’s high-backed cubicles. Sir Denzil Waldegrave, seating himself opposite her with customary insouciance, noted first something brittle about her body language, and then the traces of bruises on her face.
He put his ale mug down with care. "One time, my little spy, you shall have to tell me why you do this."
The young woman looked at him with dark, dancing eyes. She hugged her greatcoat around herself. Snow melted in her hair. "Why? I suppose because it pleases me."
Denzil Waldegrave sprawled back, fingering ringlets. "No protestations of loyalties to myself, or to the Crown, or to the commonwealth? Merely, ‘It pleases me’?"
Something shifted in her face. She looked down at her cold-mottled hands, shrouded in fingerless leather gloves.
"You’ve said often that you know ‘my sort.’ My lord."
Waldegrave shrugged. "You might say I have a sympathy with you. A Puritan girl for whom purity was too cold, and so she makes herself available to good Queen Carola’s court, for sport or for advancement. Pardon my cynicism. I am a debatable case myself. No man—nor no woman neither— knows for sure who’ll come out victor in this war."
"I care not, either way." Now her eyes did glow, but the humour had a new, bitter cast. "I amuse myself. My lord."
"Why, Desire, you’re dangerous. Honest, and so therefore dangerous. A pretender, and so therefore dangerous. Joyful in a time of war, and so therefore dangerous."
"Am I so?"
"You hide yourself from yourself, and are therefore dangerous—to yourself." De
nzil Waldegrave drained his ale mug. "So: now. Without more delay. What word from that woman’s court?"
"The sole news I have for my lord is this. She has her architect come to her from the provinces. He arrived yesterday. I’ll tell you his name," the girl said, "and you can pay me your silver pennies later."
The bulk of the building cut off the rising wind. Snow crunched, giving underfoot. The White Crow stamped her boots down into the settled mass. Jared, brown coat neatly buttoned, trotted in her tracks.
"Mama, sometimes I think father isn’t very responsible."
Her head went back. The White Crow gave a great bark of laughter. Jared stopped by the Royal Mint and Observatory’s entrance and knocked the crushed snow off his boots. Cold flushed his cheeks red.
Snow covered the wide steps and the pillared portico. Squared Palladian roofs bore a weight of white. The glass of the observatory-dome glittered, each pane’s snow thinning towards the centre, showing the light within.
"Mama?"
"I would say, don’t underestimate your father, Jared—however, I suspect you’re right. He is irresponsible. I’ve often said so myself."
"Oh, mama!"
The boy pushed his tricorne hat more squarely upon his head. He gazed up. The winged-dragon weathervane above the portico creaked around, bronze wings shrieking open, snow shaking down. It shrieked:
"Will you watch the skies?
Debase the coinage of lies?
New-mint a truth that we can know?
Will you enter? Will you forego?"
Jared lifted his hat politely. "Enter, if you please."
"Now." The White Crow knelt. Cold soaked the knee of her breeches. "Draw me the magia-sigil for finding your way back to Roseveare."
He raised stubby fingers and drew, stolidly, upon the air. A faint flare lightened the snow: the White Crow quenched it with a gesture of her own.
"And the sigil for people not to notice you’re there? Good. And to call me or your father, if you should need us? Yes . . . more after this fashion. Thus. Yes. Good, Jarrie."
"I wish you wouldn’t call me that, mama."
"You’ll do."
Straightening, her hand fell to her hip. Her gloved hand brushed her studded doublet, under the thick frieze coat that hung open; no sword-belt and no blade.
One of the pair of vast wooden doors creaked open. Golden light slanted into the dim daylight. A blast of heat hit the White Crow’s face, bringing awareness of how cold numbed her skin. She rested three fingers on Jared’s shoulder, steering him towards the door: a mother and her child, visiting tourist sights. A smile crinkled the skin around her eyes, deepening delicate lines.
"Yes?" A stout man peered out, loose brown satin robe falling open to show a fine linen shirt. A long brown periwig fell halfway down his chest and back. "Madam?"
"White Crow, Master-Physician of the Invisible College. This is my son Jared. I’m told I can speak with the Master of the Mint, Master Isaac."
The man stared from under heavy eyebrows. A wide mouth and large nose made his oval face seem crowded of feature. He plucked absently at one of the periwig’s trailing curls. His gaze fell on Jared.
"Ah, I see. An educational visit. I am Master Isaac, madam. Come in, come in. Be quiet!"
The dragon-weathervane cut off its chant in mid-shriek and pivoted north-north-east in a fit of pique. The White Crow grinned up at it. Boot-heels skidding in slush, she followed Jared through the entrance and into the warm corridors of the Royal Mint and Observatory. The door creaked shut behind them.
The boy stopped and stared around at the milling benches, the stone grinders, the cutters and clippers, and the baskets of coin that spilled across the floor. Workers glanced up at their entrance. Isaac signalled them to continue.
"Through this way, madam, if you please. We have a most interesting observation in progress."
The metallic din faded as they passed a further door. The White Crow automatically trod softly, staring up in dim light at the brass barrels and adjustment-cogs and wheels of a great telescope. Frost chilled the air, the glass observation-dome cranked open a yard or two.
"This most recent comet may now be viewed in daylight." Master Isaac bustled forward, a restraining hand on Jared’s shoulder. "As you may see, madam. Young man, a comet is a collection of rocks and visible gases that circle the sun; not, as has been in error supposed, a celestial influence—"
Turning to the small lens-piece let her hide a smile. Behind her, the boy gave a forty-five-year-old man’s dry cough.
She peered into the lens. Whiteness swung and focused in a bright blue sky. Magnified, the white dot swelled to a clear image.
A snarling lion’s mask shone against the sky.
Dust-hazed, distinct, and of a marble whiteness: a hollow lion-head. Unbearable highlights shone on wrinkled lips, nostrils, on the great rigid swathes of mane; the light of the sun reflectant in purple-blue, oxygen-starved space. Intense indigo sky showed through the hollow eye-holes.
"That’s Sekhmet’s Comet."
Master Isaac’s disembodied voice held surprise. "You’re well-informed."
"After a fashion. It’s not my specialist field."
Sunlight, unhindered by air and dust, blazed from the point of one white-marble canine tooth. Pitting and scoring marked the stone pelt: the abrasions of aeons. Corroded dust starred the great stone mane, trailing in the Lion-comet’s wake with invisibly slow ripples.
She stood back, blinking, to let Jared at the lens. Through the edges of the observation dome, the comet reduced itself to a chalk-white smear across a patch of blue sky.
"Rocks and gases?"
"Any apparent shape is coincidental, madam, I assure you."
Her feet followed the man automatically, oblivious until she caught a door as it swung back and ushered Jared through in front of her into the milling room.
"I’ll speak of the milling process itself in a moment, madam." The grey-wigged man gestured with restrained excitement, his eyes bright. "If I might prevail upon you for a moment, first, Master-Physician—this is something of my own. Young master Jared may find it intriguing."
"Yes," the woman said, "he probably will."
The Master of the Mint led them across to cupboards and benches, at the further side of the hall. He spoke loudly, over the noise of the machines, and the clink and snap of cut metal. On one of the benches, fashioned from steel, ballbearings swung on the wires of an armillary sphere.
"That’s interesting." The White Crow, her voice carefully neutral, peered into the armillary sphere’s interstices. "This is unfinished."
"No, madam. Complete."
She touched a fingertip to the bands marking the degrees of ascension and declension. "No engravings for which Sphere each world belongs to—Hermes, Aphrodite, Kronos, or the rest."
"No, madam, and do you know why? Because it needs them not." He straightened, hands clasped behind his back in a swirl of brown satin. "You need nothing else, nothing else to account for the procession of worlds about the earth but the knowledge of gravitational forces! Look you, madam, you and that fool Astrologer-Royal doubtless say, with orthodoxy, that it is the planetary numina, the Intelligences of each Sphere, that propel the worlds in their orbits? That the sphaera barbarica and the paranatellons each have influence on our bodies and our fates?"
She nodded gravely.
"Non astrum melius, sed ingenium melius: it is not a better star which creates the genius, it is the loftier mind! The fixed stars, in their orbits a little beyond the orb of Saturn, and the sun and moon, follow a plain gravitational orbit about the earth. Nothing else but that moves them."
He waved his hand triumphantly.
"I can prove my accuracy. Look, look here." He pulled open a drawer stuffed with papers. Crabbed mathematical symbols covered every inch. "The manuscript of my Principia Mathematica—which the Astrologer-Royal refuses to license for publication."
She stood with her thumb hooked into her breeches belt. The
long coat hung from her narrow shoulders, hem sweeping the parquet flooring. Her head turned, seeking the small boy who stood absorbed before another of the stamping-presses.
"You’d reduce the universe to a machine, Master Isaac, all springs and motion, unable to deviate, unable to change itself—and, by the by, the earth circles the sun."
"My observations tell me otherwise, madam. I cannot comprehend why the Astrologer-Royal perceives the world differently."
His shoulders slumped. Closing the drawer and tucking in a comer of the manuscript, he sighed.
"The universe is not animistic nor animate. Worlds do not turn because the Music of it pleases them. Weights and pulleys, madam. Wires and fulcrums. The universe can be accounted for solely on this principle."
A flurry of snow beat against the far windows. Distant, through the glass, sounded the cry of the weathervane. The White Crow raised fingertips to the feathers growing soft at her temples, and the man’s gaze went past her deliberately unfocussed. One of his stubby fingers poked the air, delineating an example: "If an apple falls from a tree it strikes the earth, it can never do anything else!"
Her fingers smelled of summer apples. "I think it some while since you were in an orchard, Master Isaac."
"I have my duties here," he said regretfully, "and thus haven’t time for all the observations I need. I do a little practical alchemy, also, you understand, in the furnaces . . . The salary of Master is not great. Now General Olivia wants the coinage reissued, we having suffered so greatly from counterfeiters in the late civil revolt, that I have hardly an hour to myself. Upon my retirement, I shall complete the Principia."
The White Crow reached into the breast of her coat. She held out a folded paper, sealed with heavy black wax.
He stared. "That’s the Protector-General’s seal."
"Jared, ask the gentleman at the far bench to explain the milling process to you." She lowered her voice to the decibel-level of the Mint’s machinery. "Master Isaac, I didn’t come to make your life easier. I came to bring the General’s commission, which I like—about as much as you do. I have a carriage outside. Can your people bring it into the yards, please, and load the coin secretly as ballast?"