“Yes. Yes, thank God!”
“You may open M. the Intendent’s purse, while I’m about it,” I said with a grimace at Lassels. “I am down to my last few pistoles, and I cannot help the Duc with that alone.”
Lassels flushed. “But, messire, I can’t. He’s taken the taille money with him. He and the governor and the mayor are all together at the governor’s house; they’re planning to put down a revolt by the local Protestants—”
“Is there an uprising in Poissy, then?”
“No!” Lassels sounded frustrated. He was a small, thin man; he did not wear a sword; still, there was a light on his face at the thought of a Protestant rebellion. It vanished. “The dear good God—if the Huguenots are blamed for Henri’s death now, it could be another Bartholomew’s Day!”
Strange, the potency of that memory in men’s minds. I was born about the time that the Valois King Charles IX stood back and let his Catholic subjects slaughter Coligny and almost all the Protestant citizens of Paris, and even I sometimes feel that I lived through it.
“You must ask M. the Intendent for money.”
“I can’t!” Lassels looked the colour of old cheese rind. “He won’t do anything now, not even for you, M. Rochefort. He’s frightened. Look! Who knows what will happen now!”
Where Lassels pointed, I saw men with half-pikes and arquebuses jogging out to assemble in the town square, with a richly dressed man I took to be the local governor haranguing them. They made no appreciable difference to the flood of traffic on the main road, but plainly it wouldn’t be long before the town gates did get closed.
And there is M. Dariole, I thought, bringing my gaze back to him through the obscure panes of the leaded window. I could observe him clearly enough to see that he was watching the militia drill with a would-be professional eye. If he gets into conversation with the soldiers. If he should think it funny to have them apprehend M. Rochefort. He has no idea of the seriousness of this. He is a boy.
“I do not want to be stopped and questioned,” I told Lassels. Lassels had the expression of a man accepting that the Duc’s spy might not want to be hindered in his business. By way of dissimulation I said, “Is the road clear to Paris? You must take these letters; the Intendent’s couriers may get through before I do.”
He took the first two copies with a degree of reluctance. I added: “Come, have you any money, Lassels? I will see the Duc repays you.”
He bit his lip at that, chewing at a blond moustache no thicker than a string. He shook his head, and his gaze slid away from mine. In a time of fear, men hold fast to what is theirs. The King is dead; Sully’s influence already weakens.
I suppressed my impatience, and my concern for money; pushed my ring into the molten wax to seal the final copy, and stood. “Here. If there is no more that you can tell me, I will be going.”
“The proclamation….” He hesitated.
“Well?”
“Parliament is supporting Queen Marie. They all sent her messages to say they would do her will, whatever it is. She’s signed the proclamations as ‘Queen Regent.’”
I took leave of Lassels, striding down the hôtel steps into the square, and spent another of my pistoles in paying the boy who held the horses, taking back the reins into my own hands. I led the dun and the roan across the crowded town square.
A spy is by no means a popular man. Were that different, I might have a number of men willing to lobby on my behalf—Sully’s fellow Huguenot, Jeannin, President of the Council. De Lorme, the King’s physician, for the same reason. President de Vic; procurator-general Lullier; other courtiers. I would need powerful support to stay and maintain my story against Marie de Medici; I am not a wholly innocent man. As matters stand, I have no more of a potential faction on my side than—well, than this boy-duelist has!
Coming up beside M. Dariole where he watched the governor and the arquebusiers, I was moved by an odd quirk of conscience. “Don’t ride any further with me, messire.”
It was remarkably unwise. He would be a voice used to convict Sully: I must wish him out of the way or, preferably, dead.
He turned back from studying the imposing frontage of Poissy’s governor’s mansion and gave me a cheerful look. “But I’m leaving France with you. There’s one thing I can rely on—if there’re rats leaving the sinking ship, M. Rochefort will be the rat who can swim!”
It was obvious to me that he opened his mouth without thought. If I had mistreated a man as he had mistreated me—my face burned as the memory came near the surface of my mind—I would not be so anxious to be in that man’s company. Or to leave him alive, come to that.
He thinks if I do not attack him with a sword, there is no other way I can harm him. And he believes me defeated .
I held the horses’ reins in my right hand. I rested my left hand down on the pommel and grip of the long Saxony rapier I wear. The flat black ribbon-guards knocked against my knuckles. Forty inches of steel, broad as the first joint of a man’s thumb; long enough to be used in a duel, short enough to be drawn in the scrum of battle. It might not have served me in the stable. It is far from being my sole weapon.
Dariole nodded at the proclamation pinned on the market cross, a few yards away. His voice was quiet and joyful. “You read that, messire. There’s a reward for any man who had anything to do with the King’s assassination. You’re worth money to me, Rochefort.”
I gave him a foul look, wishing it was safe to call Monsieur the governor and let the young man Dariole try to explain why he was in Poissy at this hour, eighteen miles from Paris and still running. He might be blamed for much. A reward for his capture might supply the lack of my own money, I having in fact been forced to leave with no more than two hundred pistoles and the gear I stood up in—and even if I slept in the fields between here and Le Havre, there is still boat passage to be paid for, across the sea to England.
But I cannot, and he must ride with me .
“Take my advice,” I said soberly. “Go back to Paris, keep quiet, console yourself with the thought that you have—disadvantaged—the duelist Rochefort. These are men’s matters now.”
I would not have been altogether sorry if he had taken that advice, although I had planted enough barbs in the giving of it to make sure that he would not. Some vague thought in the back of my mind desired him to leave at my charitable offer, and be in debt to me for that, even though he would never know it. It would go some way to redressing the balance between us.
I could not think back to the occurrence in the Paris stables with enough clarity; my mind flinched away from it. If some part of me wanted him gone for his own sake, some more obscure part wanted him gone for mine.
Clearly on the verge of giving me a sharp reply, Dariole’s gaze went past me, past the horses whose reins I held. “Do you know that man?”
Lassels was on the steps of the hôtel. Standing in front of him, a thickset man in crimson velvet trunk-hose and a short grey cloak stabbed a finger at the little man’s face. It was too far to hear what he said, but evidently he made demands. Lassels’ gaze, moving across the square, hesitated for the briefest second when he came to me—and then moved on.
Lassels pointed at the troops, evidently directing the man to his excellency the governor.
The man is asking about me .
He turned: I saw his face clearly: I recognised him. He had been in Les Halles, with Marie de Medici; he had held Maignan’s right arm, while his compatriot cut Maignan’s throat.
Dariole put his fists on his hips, grinning. “Hey, shall I take a chance and call him over? I guess he might be one of Sully’s—”
I grabbed Dariole’s shoulder hard enough to wipe the expression off his face. He made no move to pull his sword out of the scabbard: looking startled, taken aback.
It was the first and only time I had imposed a physical presence on him. The shock, and his reaction, betrayed me into unexpected plain honesty. “That is one of the Medici’s men. Mount up; ride out of the south gate af
ter me.”
“Medici? The Queen? South? But that’s back to Paris!”
“And we will ride around a different way when we’ve gone a league from Poissy. Now go!”
I pushed the roan’s reins at the young man. With a creak of leather, I pulled myself up into the jennet’s saddle.
The thickset man stepped down into the crowd and was immediately lost.
On such occasions, there can be a handful of minutes in which a man may move unobserved. He is here; there may be others. If chance gives me this short space, I will not waste it.
A league or so down a country track, with the white hawthorn flower covered in dust, and the bright wild flowers in the verges trodden down by passing men’s feet, M. Dariole edged the roan closer to me. “If that was one of the Queen’s men, why didn’t he just order the governor to shut the gates, and search the town?”
This, too, was a sharper question than I expected from him. My instinct was to say nothing. An impulse that he should be made aware of some part of his foolishness, coupled with the knowledge that he was unlikely ever to be returning to Paris, moved me to speak.
“Because if I am taken in public, there is danger in my telling what I know.”
“Danger? Because you’ll say something the Queen doesn’t want known? Oh, good God—the Queen?”
I shrugged. “I warned you not to come with me, messire.”
“Death of God!” He slapped his palm down onto his rapier hilt, and grinned broadly at me. “And I only thought I had the Chatelet prison to worry about!”
He lifted up his head and began to sing as we rode in the May evening.
If there is one man in France who cared nothing for King and Queen, I have the pleasure to be riding with him, I thought grimly.
I struck off to the west, down tracks that passed farms where peasants came out and stood watching us, not daring to speak, but plainly hoping that some man might tell them what was happening fifteen miles to the south, in Paris. The countryside was by no means deserted enough for a safe murder, experience told me.
How far west must we go before I can circle back to the Rouen road?
The horses ambled on, in that tireless pace I know them capable of keeping up for thirty miles in a day; crossing a bridge; passing a monastery; all the time with the young man singing one of the drinking songs you hear in the taverns in Les Halles—a particularly filthy song for an evening where the sun gilded the dust we raised. And a particularly inappropriate cheerfulness in a country just robbed of its King and Father; I did not know how much longer we could pass as travellers who had not heard the momentous news, in a country whose head of state has just been assassinated.
You must understand, at this time I thought that I had nothing more to worry about than being hanged or broken on the wheel for the murder of Henri the Fourth of France. And even that I did not think likely: I thought it more than possible that I could elude any pursuers. Especially if Marie de Medici considered herself hampered by needing to kill me in secrecy.
I rode north, to keep an appointment that I did not know I had.
I woke with a cock-stand.
There was, momentarily, no reason I could think of for why. I had been deep in a nightmare or half-awake memory: the Porte St Honoré at Paris, and the Swiss and Savoyard soldiers on guard. In my dream, this time they did not let me through, but escorted me back, and then to the Chatelet. Nothing in that to raise a man’s prick.
I opened my eyes, not to the masonry and jagged iron portcullis of the city gate, but the grey dawn light of a provincial inn—an inn barely big enough to call itself one, but at this time even it was packed with travellers: a monk, a wealthy farmer, and a lawyer’s clerk shared the bed with M. Dariole and I. M. Dariole whom I had not been able to get alone without witnesses, and who now slept as if he had no cares in this world.
I had thought, I suppose, that by ignoring them I had escaped the consequences of what had been done to me in the stables. Pain. Rage. Humiliation.
The young man lay next to me, a colourless lump under the sheets. There was so little room in the bed that he was thrust up against me, his buttocks against my belly. And tight against the skin of my belly, I felt my erect flesh.
It being so cold a May night, and the inn-keeper not running to a fire as well as blankets, none of us in the bed had done more than take off boots, ruff, and weapons. It was not the boy’s naked flesh that pressed up against me. I felt the warmth and solidness of his arse through the velvet of his breeches.
Shame and fear raised a sweat on my face. I dared not move, in case I woke him. If he did wake, he would mock me unmercifully.
It is nothing. Nothing more than human warmth; I probably dreamt of a woman as well as the nightmare of leaving Paris. It is nothing….
I could not keep it out of my mind. The stables: being trapped under his lithe weight, his hand at my crotch, and how everything of my helpless body had been motionless except my prick. And his threat to expose me, naked, to public scorn….
My flesh ached, straining at the linen of my drawers. If I could have, I would have laughed at myself; I was closer to a sob. I have not spent in my breeches since I was a boy of twelve—and here I am, on the brink of it, and for what reason!
Infinitely carefully, both because I dreaded to wake him and dreaded the reaction of my body, I slid out from under the coarse linen sheets and woollen blanket. My heart thudded loudly in my ears. One of the other men snorted, but did not wake. I stood, the boards freezing cold through my hose. The grey hour before dawn: the inn-servant was already stirring, I heard her downstairs.
On the pretence that I could not sleep, I went down to the tap-room and demanded beer and oatmeal porridge, since only that fare was on offer. The maid rubbed her full bodice against my shoulder as she served me, and I snorted, thinking that she very nearly got more than she imagined. I could have spread her across the table and had her in that instant. The thought did not satisfy me, so I made no offer. Pox is an expensive penalty for oblivion.
A man does not wisely trust the ostlers of poor inns, so I went out after the meagre meal to check if the Andalusian jennet and the roan had eaten any better. The horse-bread was of reasonable quality. I dismissed the ostler, tacking up both horses myself, and then stopped, resting my arms against the saddle. The smell of oats, straw, horse-manure, and human sweat brought back the Paris stable with such immediacy that I was again physically embarrassed, and in mental torment.
Leaving aside what he may guess of Henri, of the Queen—how can I risk traveling with the boy? He may tell any man, at any time, what happened to me when he defeated me with the sword. He may desire to prove he can do it again. I will be wiser to solve this with my rapier, today. Good as he is, I am still better.
I heard, in my mind, what I had tried vehemently not to hear him say in Paris: You know I can make you kneel to me, don’t you?
I snatched my hand away from absently fondling the crotch of my breeches. A man may have a piss-proud erection of a morning, I thought. It means nothing.
I sighed. A man does not get to my age without knowing when he hides something from himself.
It is merely an obsession, I told myself firmly. The turn of a woman’s head has done as much before now. The shape of a smooth thigh as some noble lady raises her petticoats to tie her garter. And then the pursuit, the chase, the capture—and the obsession done, gone, and over with. This is no more than that. In a month I will wonder what it was that moved me.
Before the week’s end, I will have killed him to stop him falling into the Queen Regent’s path.
We saddled up and rode towards the north gate of that town, and I caught a glimpse of a profile beyond the crowd of men going to early Mass. He had worn a grey cloak in Poissy; now he wore a green one. He was walking towards the north part of the town.
Wordless, I turned the Andalusian’s head and rode west.
The boy had a chance before the close of day to see how adventures in the May sunshine e
nd. The vast sky clouded up, darkened, and rain began to plummet. By the time we came to Ivry—where my master once fought a battle, and much further west than I had ever planned to come—water streamed off my Spanish traveling cloak. M. Dariole reached up, adjusting his hat-brim so that it shot the rain onto his shoulders and not down his collar.
His high riding boots and his breeches were water-darkened, his doublet hidden in the swathes of his short cloak, and the egret-feather on his hat hung down thin and pitiful, reduced to a white rat’s tail. Water dripped off the chape of his rapier. For all that—and to my irritation—the grin that I caught between his cloak-collar and hat-brim was alive with excitement.
It happened that I knew a quiet inn by the river, which I had had occasion to use before when riding out towards Brittany; one with a tactful landlord. With the noise of the rain almost drowning out my words, I bargained with him for sleeping quarters in the hay-loft over the stables, the inn rooms being full of lawyers, a silversmith and his family, two priests, and several horse-traders; all on their way to Alençon, Mayenne, and Rennes. It did not put me in good humour to be housed so, but I did not have the money to bribe the man, not if I were to have enough to leave France at the end of this.
I stamped back to the stable both to establish a pallet-space to sleep, and to wipe down the Andalusian jennet and the roan, if the ostler had, as I suspected, done a poor job.
Their breath was smoky in the rain-cold air as I walked down the long shed in which the inn housed its beasts.
The young man, Dariole, crouched with his back to me, with the contents of my saddlebags strewn on the ground.
“Son of a bitch!” Vicious joy flooded through me. His weapons were on the floor, in their scabbards, some distance from his feet. Let no man say revenge is not a complete satisfaction. Before he could grab rapier or dagger, I took him by his doublet collar and slammed him face-forward up against the piled bales of straw at the end of the stables, so hard that he bounced. I kept a tight grip on the back of his neck. “What are you thieving from me!”
Mary Gentle Page 7