That Maximilien de Bethune, Duc de Sully, was more than a dull Gascon duke with the soul of an accountant, it had taken me very little time to learn. Wars racked France as I grew up: each of the Valois sons of Caterina de Medici succeeded in their turn to the throne, each madder than the last, and men of the true religion and Huguenot Lutherans happily killed each other by the thousand. There among the grinding civil wars was Henri of Navarre, cousin to the Valois, known successor to the throne, walking a narrow precipice—and always with him, doggedly incorruptible, and with a devil’s grasp of finance, Maximilien de Bethune, Baron Rosny, who ruled his household and the taxes of France with an absolute grip, and who, some three or four years back, the King made Duc de Sully for his successes in turning the country from a wasteland to a prosperous state.
“You might better ask,” I said ironically, “why the Duc de Sully permits M. Rochefort to be in his service. But that is not a story for young ears, messire boy.”
He put his hand on his sword as he walked towards me. “I wouldn’t worry, Rochefort—soon, it’ll be ancient history!”
He approached the out-flung strand of weed on the sand that I had picked as my mark. Pistols are inaccurate much beyond arms-length, although the damage a one-inch lead ball makes smashing through a man’s body more than makes up for that disadvantage. Out of his line of sight, I took one wheel-lock pistol out of the nearer holster and hooked it to my belt, and held the other ready to clap to his chest as he walked around the Andalusian’s head.
A pistol is sure, I thought. When it fires. But there is no skill in it.
I will not ever know if I could have beaten him. All I will know is that I was like a frightened boy, too scared to put it to the test.
And this, also, is a humiliation.
Which, out of necessity, I will bear .
Dariole approached closely enough for me to see his eyes slitted against the sun and wind, his expression bright. He grinned. “Is this where you make some attempt to put me in the ground?”
I looked at him over the horse’s withers. “Some attempt, yes.”
“I don’t seem in much danger, do I? Even if you do have a very impressive—weapon. Is your flesh upright again, messire?”
His smile was a miracle of covert amusement and knowing complicity. I suppose that I coloured a little, it being beyond a man of my age to blush.
The cold sea-wind blew into my face, and it was the smell of freedom. I spared a glance north, for the long glitter of water, the St Willibrod. From here to London, to Zeebrugge, to the Scandinavian countries, to the New World: merely a step. I felt as if the brisk wind that tugged at my hair could blow everything away.
And then I saw his boot come down on the sand. The next step would bring his foot to the strand of sea-weed; I would step forward and shoot.
He was not pretty, so much is true. His eyes, set wide apart, were the only things that gave distinction to his face in repose. Otherwise he was nondescript. What brought his features alive—with malice, with wicked amusement, taunts, triumph—was his smile. At this precise moment, that smile vanished in favour of a look of priggish seriousness.
“I can kill you, you know, Messire Rochefort.”
He was an inch or so taller than when I had first laid eyes on him in Zaton’s, a year ago. His hair was now cut shorter, just touching the ruff that made a piquant frame for his face. Although he still had the puppy-fat of an adolescent young man, the practise of swordsmanship gave him a balanced poise.
A man is as old as his actions, I told myself. M. Dariole has been killing men in duels for a year to my knowledge, and doubtless longer, given that his skills did not come to him in an instant. He is old enough to pay for gratuitously intruding himself into conspiracy.
I shifted my weight back, momentarily hidden by the Andalusian jennet’s shoulder, and checked the cocking of the pistol. I set my finger to the trigger, brought the barrel down, and stepped forward, out from the cover of the stone horse.
He was not there.
For a second, I gawked in amazement; then my gaze fell.
The young man Dariole was down on his knees in the sand.
Blood thundered in my head: I felt myself go hot, then cold, and dizzy.
I hesitated.
Twenty years of experience, and I hesitated. If he had had a pistol in his turn, he could have blown me to the afterlife with no more trouble than a man swatting a wasp.
“Really, messire,” I stuttered, at a loss. “Begging is not something I expected from you!”
The boy dipped his head down, ignoring me—ignoring me. He dug into the matted sea-weed with his dagger, pulling frantically at it with his other hand.
Has he gone mad?
I raised the heavy wheel-lock pistol, preparing to step forward and clap it to his head.
“Look at this!” He yanked up the line of sea-weed that I had marked. It rose in a sand-crusted curve. Not weed—thin rope. The slimy length of it vanished into bladder-wrack, where he groped at a lump of flotsam that might have been a chunk of wooden beam from a wreck, or a dead animal.
As he yanked off the covering weed, I saw it was a human body.
“He’s—” The young man turned to gaze up over his shoulder. His voice stopped.
I suppose that I hesitated over shooting Dariole because he was on his knees. Certainly I can think of no other reason. He knelt by the body of a drowned man, his hands entangled with weed, and it would have been the easiest thing in the world to put the pistol’s muzzle to the back of his neck, and blow his brains out straight over the other corpse.
Dariole looked up at the pistol and his expression visibly dismissed it as no threat to him.
Face bright with enthusiasm and concern, he demanded, “Do you know what to do, messire? Help him!”
“A drowned sailor.” I regained something of my mental balance. “Regrettably, that is common. And none of my concern. Whereas—”
“He’s not!”
“What?”
“He’s not a man.” With a grunt of effort, Dariole rolled the body over so that it was face-up.
The yellow lemon-light of the morning sun was too bright, suddenly, the surf too loud; given the interrupted concentration of combat and the throb in my head from the previous night’s lack of sleep.
The face was inhuman.
I looked down at sallow, yellow-dark skin; ragged and too-black hair. Most of all, the eyes. Even shut as they were, they were the wrong shape—small, and like a nut, and with the skin folded down at the corners.
“You see?” Dariole demanded. “It’s a demon!”
I believe in witchcraft no more than the next man. Less, in all likelihood, growing up in a court containing Caterina de Medici and her sons, and that deluded man called Nostradamus. I learned early that human malice explains the vast proportion of evil in the world. Satan’s servants are not needed to account for it.
The drenched cord that the tide had trailed up the beach for M. Dariole’s attention was knotted about the waist of what I should otherwise have taken to be a stocky, balding man in his fifties. A drowned sailor. Evidently rumours of a wreck were correct. I was surprised the local peasants had missed salvaging even a corpse.
“He’s still breathing!” Dariole reached up, ignoring the pistol, and grabbed my left wrist.
I am not used to being manhandled by other men. Instinct should have had me punch him, or club him with the pistol.
I did neither. Dariole pulled my wrist down with surprising strength, forcing me into a crouch beside him. It was shockingly reminiscent of his grip on me in the stables at Ivry; before I realised what was happening, I had let myself be constrained without question.
Dariole thrust my hand into the junction between the body’s head and shoulder. “How do we save him?”
I recovered my hand, wrenched off my glove, and felt a heartbeat under his chill skin.
Down on one knee, with the wind off the Channel blowing revivingly into my face, I stared at
the body. “This is no demon—unless demons smell like men.” I took refuge in sardonic humour. “Do you smell sulphur?”
“Do you know how to help him!”
I have a charge in each pistol, one for each man .
Irresolute, I gazed at this barely living man that chance had brought to my feet. To risk another witness to my departure from France—a witness to my killing M. Dariole, come to that—would be stupid in the extreme.
I spared a glance for the boy, poised on one knee, his scatterbrained enthusiasm evident.
And how he thinks he can demand assistance from me!
If I forced my mind from the press of confusion that surrounded Dariole in my thoughts, that only brought other memories to mind. I found myself picturing Ravaillac. Bazanez and de Vernyes. Henri the King.
“Turn him over,” I directed. M. Dariole stared at me as if I were mad, then grabbed the man’s clothing. It seemed to be plain linen, fashioned something like a night-gown, except that it opened at the front like a doublet. Dariole hauled the dead weight over onto its face again.
I stood over the body, bent to get my arms under his, hauled him up so that his chest was a yard or so above the sand, and rammed my locked fists back up towards me, constricting his ribs and belly.
I have no liking for water. Like most men, I fear drowning. Therefore, I do not forget having seen Gabriel Santon wrestle and squeeze the life back into a trooper of ours, who had fallen drunk into some dike in the United Provinces.
Of course, Gabriel is skilled, I thought grimly as I worked. And this man has been sodden for a long time.
Gabriel Santon came vividly into my recollection. In the Low Countries, pistol in hand, bawling death-threats at any man who would not jump in to fetch the trooper out—Gabriel himself not being able to swim. And where is he now? With the Duc, in the Bastille? In the Chatelet, being questioned, like Ravaillac? Has he had sense enough to get out of Paris?
“Rochefort, you’re going to kill him!”
Dariole had his hands on me again, clinging to my arm. The lack of a man’s full strength told in him when it was not a matter of swords.
The body in my arms jerked of itself. The man’s trailing feet twitched. His head lifted, and he gave a coughing puke. Water and thin vomit splashed out and soaked my sleeves. I let him repeat it until nothing but air came out, and dropped him face-down on the sand.
“I told you he was alive!” Dariole exclaimed, elated as if he had won a bet at Zaton’s.
Already regretting the impulse that had moved me, I busied myself with the leather flask of brandy from my saddlebags, and, after a moment’s thought, a spare doublet. I got the “demon” to sit up and drink from the one, and put the other around his wide shoulders. He was, despite his lack of stature, almost as wide across the shoulders as I. To find a man so ugly, so deformed, stripped down to his under-linen and with nothing else to him but what was, now I looked at it, a soaked and braided silk cord…
Dariole knelt, supporting the man against him, half-buried in sea-weed as he still was; keeping up a flood of young man’s chatter to which I did not attend. He made no reference to the pistol when I put it back on my belt.
“Messire, we need to get the demon into shelter!”
Against my better judgement, I allowed myself to be drawn into contradiction. “He’s not a demon.”
“He is. You look at his eyes!”
The stocky man was shivering violently in the wind off the sea, even with my scarlet wool doublet around him. His flat face showed a yellow-grey. Ill. Unless he had been born like it. He gazed around in a dazed way, and I dropped into a crouch and caught his jaw in my hand, staring into his face.
His eyes, under oval lids, looked out at me as black as tar. And their shape…. This is not a hare-lip, or breasts on a male body; no common freak.
“Do you understand me?” I repeated it in two or three French dialects, as well as the few words of Basque I have. He might be a natural idiot born to some family hereabouts. And now brought back to life, consciousness, memory.
M. Dariole should have minded his own business, I thought, in amused despair at yet another complication in my life.
The “demon” spoke. Thick vocal sounds rattled out of his mouth, with such aggression as to make me grateful I still had my pistol.
“Who are you?” Dariole surprised me by speaking in the langue d’oc as he supported the man. No sign of comprehension showed on the misshapen face. “What language do demons speak, Messire Rochefort?”
“Spanish?” I murmured ironically—Spain being the great threat to the French court. And yet this is a man, and I suppose he may be foreign as well as deformed.
I began to run through greetings in the foreign languages I knew. A man picks up a number in my profession. He gave me no reaction at all to French, German, the Italian of the Veneto, or my skimpy knowledge of Arabic tongues.
“God give you good day.” I spoke Spanish. To my shock, a glimmer of interest showed in his eyes. “Mordieu! Spanish is the Devil’s language, then!”
On a hunch I addressed him sequentially in Portuguese and English. Comprehension lit up his face, where he lay braced against the young man’s knees.
“He knows English, Spanish, and Portuguese,” I said. “The languages of sea-farers. I think your demon is from this world, not Hell.”
“He’s off the wreck.” Dariole looked, if anything, a trifle disappointed. “A woman said they’d been out early combing the foreshore. I guess they missed him.”
“The tide’s coming in now.” There were fragments of debris slopping about further down the beach that might have been whatever was of no worth, left over from a wreck. I pointed, repeating myself in Spanish and English, “Were—you—on—a—ship?”
The man watched my lips attentively, as if he accustomed himself to my voice.
“Ship. Down gone.”
My ear recognised the words: London English.
“Maybe it was a demon ship?” Dariole remarked.
He sounded hopeful. I wondered if he had been one of the young men who would go from Zaton’s to a gypsy foreteller or back-alley alchemist.
The freak’s black eyes were clearer than one would expect in a man who is old: past his fiftieth year, and perhaps approaching his sixtieth. An old demon, I thought, mordantly amused at Dariole’s superstitious insistence on the man’s supernatural qualities.
But then, the boy has not been alive for so many years as I, nor seen so many natural freaks. Nature is unkind and God seems singularly indifferent to what She practises.
“Where are you from?” I made the question English. “Who are you?”
He said a word that I didn’t understand; I supposed it by that to have been a proper name. He repeated it. This time I caught the sound, if not the sense.
“Nihon. Nihon, God give you good den, honoured-sir. Nihon!”
“‘Nihon?’”
With evident effort, he made his voice slow. In English, he said, “The Japans.”
I had some memory, it came to me now, of a silk screen owned by the Papal Legate, Father Cotton, who was a frequent supplicant to my master the Duke. It had showed round-headed and black-haired pilgrims in procession, hundreds all packed close together. As if the two images superimposed themselves in my mind, I looked at the living, breathing man on this Normandy beach.
“The Japans,” I said aloud.
He gave a sharp jerk of his head, a sound that might have been assent, and fell to vomiting up small amounts of water again. Over the coughing and choking, while he held the man’s shoulders, M. Dariole said, “Where’s ‘Japans?’”
“The Indies. Chin.” As he looked blank, I added, “Where the Jesuits get their money from. He is a merchant, probably, if he was on a ship.”
And here he is, alive, and what am I to do with him!
“‘Merchant?’” Dariole repeated, in English.
“Not merchant!” The foreigner lurched away from M. Dariole; I grasped his forearm, st
opping him from tumbling face-forward on the sand. He stayed on his knees, gazing at me with black, misshapen eyes, gibbering out words faster than I stood a chance of hearing them.
“Slower!”
He stopped, gazed at me, and spoke more slowly, all his emphasis wrong, but words nonetheless comprehensible.
“I am of the Ambassador’s party. Ambassador of Tokugawa Hidetada to King-Emperor of the England!”
There were too many names in it for me to hold them in my mind. I shook my head. He tried again:
“Where land is this!”
Politely, while I thought, I said, “You are on the coast of Normandy, monsieur; in France.”
“What part of England is this ‘Franz?’”
I straightened up without answering.
I cannot leave M. Dariole alive here. I cannot kill Dariole in front of this foreigner without also killing the foreigner, because he can make himself understood. I should never have revived him! Why, at my age, have I been sucked into this dilemma?
Self-evidently, I have been a fool. I delayed the necessary death of M. Dariole—and now I have got myself a live Nihonese sailor, for my pains.
This situation is regrettable.
But many things that are regrettable must be done. I have two pistols, and if one hangs fire, I have my rapier.
“Messire Rochefort.” Dariole’s voice was oddly emphatic. “Here come men to kill you.”
Rochefort, Memoirs
7
I spun around, leaving the half-drowned man on his hands and knees, grovelling in the encrusting sand. Dariole pointed.
Seven men came down over the sand towards us, from the direction of the fishing village. Three more men were coming in over the rocks around the next headland. And two more behind them, further back.
Which of you outguessed me? Knew I would ride all through the night?
There was no proof of it, but they ran as men run into combat. Fast, determined—but not soldiers, I observed as the larger gang ran out onto the sand, spreading out as some of them ran faster than others.
They don’t know enough to keep together, they will reach us piecemeal, they are courtiers and back-street thugs from Les Halles.
Mary Gentle Page 10