Mary Gentle

by A Sundial in a Grave-1610

  He first smiled, and then inclined his head in admission; both gestures very small and subtle.

  I added, “As it stands, I’m currently committed to the foolishness of not having killed either of you. So much is at stake that I can’t trust you from my sight.”

  It was a relief to speak at least this much with no double motive—to treat him with even this much of a gentleman’s behaviour. It has been many years since I could behave so. And why do I think of that, now?

  “What about me!” Dariole demanded.

  My mood shattered. Chill wind whipped the ends of my hair into my face, undeterred by the hat brim. I looked down at her where she walked with her arms folded across her body.

  “What about you, mademoiselle?”

  “I—hey! You ought to still call me ‘monsieur.’”

  “You expect to pass for a man, here?”

  “Why not? You do!”

  I could be thankful, I reflected as I watched Mlle Dariole wheezing herself into incapacity at her own jest, that M. Saburo’s grasp of French was as yet poor to non-existent.

  She added finally, “Messire, I’d have thought whatever’s the local equivalent of Les Halles would be where you wanted to go.”

  The equivalent names came back to me effortlessly after six years: Southwark, and the Liberty of Bankside, on the other side of the river.

  “You’re right, Monsieur Dariole. That is the type of place that an agent would hide. For that very reason…let Marie de Medici’s agents search Southwark while I’m in a respectable quartier of London.”

  She responded only with a sound like a mare’s soft snort.

  I had spoken no more than ten words together to Mlle Dariole during our crossing of the sea that the English call the Channel. It irked me to realise that she did not notice this, or notice that I was again addressing her—that she was so beguiled with her new “demon” that M. Rochefort was quite abandoned.

  That both moved me internally to sardonic laughter, and angered me.

  I should not care what this sexually lax young woman does or does not do! I should not find myself—as now—watching her lithe, epicene figure as she strides through the London mud, pushing between apprentices, shop-men, clergy, and women out to shop; gesturing as she floods the air with her chatter to the samurai. Least of all should I look at her weather-stained linen doublet and consider that it contains her woman’s white paps, which I have never seen, and now will not….

  I am bedeviled by women!

  I found myself chewing at my lip as I walked behind the woman and the man of Nihon.

  Ten days, and all I have of Paris is ship-board rumour . I must make contacts, as soon as I safely can. I can take no action until I have sound knowledge.

  The two curved short scabbards of the foreigner’s swords stuck out, making an odd shape of his cloak; I had noted them jammed through the cloth sash that wrapped his waist, in such a way that they did not fall. To a man used to the long scabbards of rapiers, he might seem to be unarmed. Dariole was not dressed richly enough to be a magnet to the cut-purse. I myself would look to be nothing more than any other street-ruffian with a Saxony rapier and hat worn in the French style.

  Mlle Dariole came to a halt, where three narrow and two wider roads opened into a space. We were among better houses, now, with the ground floors of stone and only the upper of brick and plaster, and a fair way from the agues that would attend being close to the city’s river.

  She frowned. “I remembered it bigger….”

  “You will introduce me as ‘M. Herault.’ A good Huguenot name. For now, M. Saburo and I will await you here.”

  “Giving orders, messire?” Her voice sounded mild, but her eye glinted white, turning towards me. “You want me to hand your ass to you again?”

  The coldness of the Normandy shoreline came back to me with fierce impact. I found I desired to slap her, as one does a woman, not strike her as one does a man.

  “Mademoiselle…was I ever truly defeated?”

  “Were you—”

  “You must admit: you are a woman.” I raked her up and down with my gaze. She stood no higher than my collar-bone.

  I decided to speak of what I had been considering on board ship: I could break her with my bare hands. “Mademoiselle, think: some part of me must always have sensed that—and held back. How else, despite any skill, could a weak woman defeat a strong man?”

  “Held back.” She repeated the words flatly. “Messire, you’re an idiot. Is this why I didn’t find you sneaking up behind me at the ship’s rail and pushing me over? You actually think you can beat me?”

  Her eyes were bright with mockery. My breath came harsh in my chest. The insolence of her look made me clench as if all of me were a fist. “I must have known!”

  She shifted her stance—and I moved. Moved as a man does by habit, to put himself and his sword in the most advantageous place. Her eyes creased into slits in the brilliance of the May sun. Her face spoke a taunt she did not voice.

  I subdued my temper, with difficulty. “Go! Go get your cousin!” I added, in French, the brief codicil, “No need to alarm him by first turning up on his doorstep with an armed thug and a ‘demon.’”

  Her mouth turned up at the corners. For a moment, she was neither boy-girl nor hic mulier. I could not put a name to what she was, wearing that gamin grin.

  “You wait here!” She loped across the junction of streets.

  These were all private houses for the most part; a merchant shop far down on the road to my left, but that was all. The streets were quieter, with few men walking past us. I subtly drew Tanaka Saburo back under the shadow of the nearby eaves with me.

  The smell of London is different to Paris. Always the sea-estuary in the background, and the odour of cow-dung from the close fields. The sun felt warm on my back. The kennel or water-channel in the middle of the road was choked with slops and offal thrown down from above, and plainly it had rained of late. Water spilled out of the kennel and over the rough paving in places. Saburo and I trod through an inch or two of water to reach dry standing.

  I glanced back and saw Dariole striding between a couple of Englishmen in servant’s blue, to the door of a building on one corner. It looked sufficiently well-to-do; built in the reign of some earlier king, and with upper storeys built of oak timber, jutting out into the street, all but meeting across the way with other houses. In my quarter of Paris it might have been broken up into lodging houses. Here it was plainly one family’s residence.

  The Spring sunlight slanted down, raising steam from the cold muck of the road between her and us. I caught Saburo’s expression of disgust.

  “Filthy gaijin!” he muttered.

  “It’s a large city,” I temporised. “There will be fifty thousand souls here in London, messire; their waste must go somewhere.”

  “And in Osaka, five hundred thousand!”

  He will have lost track of his English numbers, I thought.

  “Half-million in Osaka—no filth! This garbage, it’s lain here overnight. For days!—What is that?” Saburo’s face screwed into anger, or perhaps only puzzlement. I followed his gaze.

  Dariole stood in front of the great oak door, facing the Markham servants. Her voice came shrilly across the street as I looked:

  “—see Messire Guillaume Markham!”

  Guillaume. “William.” No, I realised. One “Griffin Markham ” is the man I am remembering. They may be kin, or not, and if this continues, I must make investigation—the said Master Griffin being one of those traitors to the English crown of whom I recall hearing, on my last visit here.

  “I want to see him!” By her emphasis, it was not the first or second time Dariole had said it.

  The elder of the two men sneered, “I bet you do, boy!”

  Merde! I thought, wondering what remark I had missed in the moment it took me to speak with Tanaka Saburo.

  “I’m his cousin, you imbecile!” Dariole glared up at the man, barely far from stamping he
r booted feet. “His cousin, from France—”

  “Sure you are,” the second, more burly man cut in. “And I’m the Pope, amn’t I?”

  “Bless me, Father!” A skinny Englishman slipped out of the doorway to join his fellows, with a rapidity that led me to guess he had been listening at the crack. He was another one in dark blue doublet and trunk-hose. There was a livery on his sleeve, but it did not match the one carved in stone above the door. So: new money. This third man wiped his nose on his cuff. “Who’s the whoreson brat?”

  I read stiff outrage in Dariole’s shoulders.

  “I’m Arcadie-Fleurimonde-Henriette de Montargis de la Roncière! And now call out Monsieur Markham!”

  The older man had cropped white hair showing under his wool cap. He chuckled. “‘Arcadie.’ A girl, are we?”

  The skinny servant leaned forward as if to get his nose into the discussion. “You can’t tell with the French!”

  The familiar tension that begins a fight made itself felt down my spine. Nothing more than lackeys quarrelling, but she will skewer one or two, or all three. And the English are squeamish about their servants, so this will make a visible scandal, which I should not be associated with.

  “He looks enough of a girl, don’t you, girlie-boy!”

  “Maybe he is a boy—a French bum-boy!”

  The older man and the burly man crowded Dariole physically, one to either side, grinning. The insults were casual, but not, I thought, good-natured.

  “But I’m Arcadie! Get Monsieur de Markham or you’ll be sorry! I’ll make him have you whipped!”

  It is her accent.

  Shrill, and almost comic in the distortion of her rage.

  And a man or boy who loses his temper is always a figure of fun….

  Dear God, I should never have entrusted anything to him—to her!

  “Why do they treat her disrespectfully?” Saburo muttered, at my elbow. “Is there a quarrel inside her clan?”

  His squat body was peculiarly relaxed. In a European, I would have thought him as far from a fight as from the moon. With the beach in Normandy in my mind, I recalled vividly how he had gone from stillness to strike, all in a second. From just such relaxation as this.

  I would have put a restraining hand on M. Saburo’s arm, but I thought that unwise. “Leave this to her to settle.”

  “Get—my—cousin!” Dariole bellowed with her head down, like a farm bull at the charge. On the last word, her voice went high and ragged. Her hands made fists at her sides, nowhere near her sword and dagger. “You’re servants—cochon! Get out of my way!”

  Even from these ten yards away, I could see her face shine with sweat and temper. In Paris she would have drawn her rapier by now. And she would not have lost her temper. Which she has: she has lost her composure completely.

  Why is she not fighting?

  It came to me suddenly: She has forgotten who she is.

  Who she is, now, is not who she was when she was last here. When she was a child….

  “Cousin Guillaume!” Dariole shouted, lifting her head and staring at the casement windows of the first floor. “Wil-li-am! It’s Arcadie, your cousin Arcadie, Therese’s child—come down here!”

  Her body was poised between male and female. It did not surprise me that the three men-servants laughed. They must see her (as I had) as something monstrously ugly: a combination of effeminate boy and a plough-horse of a girl.

  She bellowed, “Come out here!”

  The nail-studded oak door opened again. I moved my hand towards my sword-hilt. Another man came out.

  By his bottle-green satin doublet and trunk-hose, and the fine lace on his ruff, this must be the master of the house. He did not look at Dariole at first, but snapped his fingers at the burly servant.

  “Thomas, what’s this?”

  The man looked instantly contrite. “Sorry, master. We were just having some fun.”

  “Have it quietly, and not on my doorstep!”

  “Sorry, master.” The servant bowed his head, and turned back to Dariole.

  I tensed, waiting for a brawl to start—and she did not draw sword: she merely stared at the man in green.

  “Cousin Guillaume?”

  In clear London English, he prompted: “And you are—?”

  “Arcadie de la Roncière.” The line of her shoulders altered. Discouraged? Puzzled? “You must remember! I came here with Maman. I was of five years of age—”

  “‘Arcadie’ is not a boy’s name.” The Englishman was older than the satin made him look. His point-cut beard was dyed an improbable chestnut. He did not wear a sword, nor did he carry a cudgel in his belt like his servants. A man of the middling sort, at peace in his own house, and now disturbed by this…by this what? I suspected him to be wondering.

  The shadow from the eaves was not enough in itself to keep me from their notice. What does, as I have long had cause to know, is utter stillness. It surprised me to note the same motionlessness in the man of Nihon.

  “Arcadie.” The Englishman’s voice was ironic. “And your servants are—where?”

  The young woman’s head dipped again. I tensed, in case she should look towards us. I read in the line of her shoulders and stiff spine: she has forgotten us, forgotten everything except this man in front of her.

  “I don’t have any servants with me.”

  “Or baggage?”

  “Or baggage!”

  “And—let me guess—you require my hospitality and a trifling loan?”

  I swore under my breath, not knowing whether to be angry, or applaud this man’s shrewd unwillingness to be cozened or tricked.

  The man folded his arms. I saw Dariole open her mouth, and shut it again without finding anything to say.

  “Thomas, see to this.” William Markham turned, and walked back into the house. The oak door closed behind him.

  I only focused on Markham for a split second. The burly servant already had his arms clamped around Dariole’s upper body. The older man, together with the skinny man, neatly and simultaneously plucked out rapier and dagger from her scabbards, and I thought, Dear God, they have disarmed her! And with such ease.

  “Guillaume!” Dariole didn’t struggle. She only craned her neck to see past Thomas, to see the closed door of the house. “Guillaume, I’m your cousin—”

  She broke off on a high-pitched squeal.

  “’Ere, she is a girl!” The skinny English serving-man laughed. “Or he ain’t got no prick; one of the two!”

  “Woman turns up in man’s clothes, no servants, no baggage, wants to borrow master’s money, says she’s master’s cousin—aye,” the man Thomas grunted, with a wealth of scorn. “Likely, ain’t it? Sorry we can’t oblige yer French ladyship!”

  “Cochon!”

  I watched her thrash about, arms pinned to her sides, still trying to get to the closed door. There was more shrill disbelief in her voice than fury. I caught a breath. This is not M. Dariole, this is not the duellist—

  I watched as she clawed, scratched, and kicked like a child or a whore.

  The men shoved her from one to the other, all but sick with laughter.

  “Rosh’-fu’-san….”

  “They’re peasants.” I put it into terms I thought Saburo might understand. “They tend to use cudgels. No man ever gained honour from fighting servants or apprentices.”

  “We should cut, walk away.” His hand came down on his silk-woven hilts.

  “No. It’s her fight, messire.”

  And besides, why should I stop it?

  I hid a smile.

  All plans will have to be re-made, but for the moment….

  For the moment, why not enjoy what I see?

  The thin man held her rapier and dagger high over his head, out of her reach. She struggled in the burly Englishman Thomas’s grip, jerked up on her toes to grab—and slipped, comically; swept back into his embraces.

  “Son-of-bitch!” she yelled in English, kicking up behind her, catching Thomas in his g
roin.

  “That does it! You! Out. And don’t come back here! I’ll have the parish constable whip you out of More Gate!”

  He shifted his grip to the back of her collar. The stained linen doublet was not a garment any respectable man would wear, not now; let alone any respectable woman. I tensed, waiting for her to hit him.

  He placed an expert kick in the crease of her knee.

  She instantly fell as her leg involuntarily bent; and dangled in his grip, choking.

  He gave a great laugh, lifted her by her doublet collar, and I saw him grab the slack material at the seat of her breeches. Her arms flailed at him without the slightest effect. She dug the toes of her boots in: they skidded across the wet cobbles.

  Saburo exclaimed something in the language of Nihon. I found myself with my hand gripping my rapier hilt.

  The servant yanked the material of her breeches up, and she squealed as it caught her in the fork of her legs.

  He ran her out across the street, and threw her.

  She was off the ground completely for a heartbeat: I saw the sunlit mud underneath her as she flew.

  A great wave of brown muck splashed up as she hit the ground—hit the surface of the kennel that ran down the centre of the street, rolled, and measured her full length, face-down, in the shit.

  Rochefort, Memoirs

  10

  S he was up in a heartbeat, screeching and spitting—up, drenched, her clothes running with evil brown and yellow liquid, rivulets of excrement flying off her into the air.

  “Cochon! Bitchfuck!” This last in bad English, and she broke off, spitting and blowing repeatedly; loud gobs that I thought must be the most foul-tasting of muck.

  Steel flashed.

  Rapier and dagger, idly tossed by the thin servant into the kennel beside her.

  The three men walked back, not particularly quickly, to the Markham house, and went in and closed the door.

  Dariole lurched forward, slipped; jerked herself up onto her feet again, from one knee, and ran across the street. I could hear her boots squelching. She banged the pommel of her dagger on the door, sobbing and yelling incoherently. That she could leave her rapier unnoticed was sign enough to me of the rise of hysteria in her.