Mary Gentle

by A Sundial in a Grave-1610

  She looked small against the great door. I watched her pound on it. Mlle Dariole: all slime from hair down to boots. Her linen doublet was drenched brown from tabs to collar; her Venetian breeches first soaked and bagging, and then—as filth drained out of them—clinging wetly to her thighs and buttocks as if glued.

  She stinks, even from here.

  Morning rain had made the kennel a river, clotted with unidentifiable lumps; deep, maybe, as a man’s arm is long. Shit soaked her, head to foot. Strands of her wet hair flew and spattered as she yelled and thumped on the door.

  A casement window briefly opened over her head, and emitted a burst of male laughter, and the contents of a chamber-pot that splashed across the cobbles.

  They will come out again, and silence her.

  I watched her soaking, spoiled, weeping with fury; and was, for a moment, in a quandary. Is it so easy to reduce her to this? How could I not do it myself!

  Her hat lay in the mud, a hefty footprint crushing it irrevocably out of shape. Her sword was half-sunk, neglected, in filth. That will need swift cleaning, if it is not to rust.

  Saburo hitched at his cloth belt, under the cloak. I shook my head.

  “Wait.”

  “For what?”

  For me to finish my enjoyment of this spectacle . I did not say it aloud. I caught him frowning out of the corner of my eye.

  “Men will come, will look at us,” he protested.

  I was far from sure that he had been thinking just that. Still, I saw a pair of apprentice boys stop, down one of the side streets, and turn to look at the shit-soaked youth battering on the door of the house. And London has a city Watch.

  “Giri,” Saburo stated, his voice harsh, moving forward.

  Obligation? Honour? Something of the sort. It seems he is not a man to forget his debts. I paused, undecided for my best move.

  If he lops off a head or two, there’s enough notice paid to any man; we become embarrassingly public….

  Dariole slammed the flat of her left hand against the nail-studded door, hard enough to bruise bone. Stained palm-prints overlapped on the wood. Her right hand banged her dagger pommel against the door, leaving dints and depressions in the grain. In a cracked voice she called out, “Open it! Open this fucking door!”

  She had forgotten her English. It was angry French, and with an admixture of the lowest Parisian French, at that. Her brown cheeks were streaked, blubbered with tears, in an utter lack of control or dignity.

  I smiled, becoming wry.

  The truth is, as she said, that I should have sought the dark of the night watches on board the Willibrod and cut their throats, and put the bodies overboard.

  But, since I have not done that….

  I walked up beside Saburo, catching him easily with my longer stride. “You get her sword.”

  His brows came down at the order. For a moment I thought I would have a duel to fight. Then his mouth tightened and he nodded, once. As he bent to pick up the rapier from the kennel’s shit, I walked forward to where Dariole was slamming both hands against the oak door.

  I grabbed her dagger hand neatly. That done, I rapped her knuckles smartly against the wood. The dagger dropped out of her hand. I left it to Saburo. I twisted her arm up behind her back, grabbing her around her sopping-wet body with my other arm, and lifted her up off the ground bodily.

  She squealed. “Don’t you do that!”

  Shifting my grip, I got her cradled: one of my arms pinning both of hers to her sides, and my other arm clamping her thighs and knees together. I felt myself to be holding a bag of live eels. “Dariole! Mademoiselle!”

  She fell utterly still and limp—could almost have fainted, except that her breathing felt too rapid, against my chest.

  Saburo caught me up, the dirty weapons swathed distastefully in his cloak. My cloak, rather. I walked briskly off, taking side-street after side-street, getting us far enough away from the area that would attract the curious.

  Why—why in the name of the good God am I doing this!

  It was almost more disturbing that Messire Saburo did not question my action.

  Automatically, I turned my face south by the sun, weaving a way through the more deserted alleys towards the Thames-river. I looked down at Arcadie-Fleurimonde-Henriette de Montargis de la Roncière, in my arms. She made a hot, wet, and heavy bundle. Shit soaked through her breeches, and caked her boots. Her drying hair might have been mud-soaked, if it were not for the vomit-inducing smell. Yellow-brown excrement soaked wetly through her doublet—and into mine.

  There was shit all over the front of my red velvet doublet, which I had put on as best suited for meeting English relatives. My point-ribbons and the lace of my cuffs were stained, and the ties of my ruff. Where her forehead rested against my chest, she was getting shit into my hair, also.

  She could not move, since I gripped her tightly, but she did not attempt it in any case. Her head rested forward; I could not see if she wept or not. Her breathing against my chest felt ragged. Chill wetness soaked through the elbow-creases of my doublet.

  I could, of course, gloat .

  Her scabbard dangled from her hanger, irretrievably broken in two places; the wood veneer cracked right through. Only the leather covering held it together. I shot a glance at Saburo, stalking along beside me. He clasped Dariole’s rapier and dagger distastefully in one hand.

  “Kitsune,” he grunted. “You would not leave her.”

  “Nonsense! Preposterous!”

  Dariole seemed deaf and blind to comment. The faint quivering I felt throughout her body indicated her lost in humiliation, deep as the sky. But I did not care to reflect on the impact that the samurai’s words had on me. I am holding her, in my arms.

  The stench almost made me gag. Clouds of flies buzzed around me. Early in the season, but I could not fault their taste. The Spring sun brought out the stench of shit even more strongly. I felt the young woman quiver suddenly in my grip. Misery? Shame? Or anger, at being carried bodily, and by M. Rochefort, and not being able to prevent it?

  “Is there public bath-houses?” Saburo said.

  “Not inside the city, since syphilis grew so strong.”

  His face might be alien, but it spoke volumes of disgust. “Where we clean?”

  The roofs grew less crowded ahead. I felt pleasure that my memory for direction had not played me false, for all it must be six years since I had last trodden London streets.

  “There.” I saw a narrow way between two buildings, and sun on the water beyond it.

  He grunted. “If her kinsmen turn her away, she has a right to be angry. To show it so—that is the stupidity of youth.”

  The hic mulier was no light weight in my arms. I tightened my grip as I carried her down the alley.

  Saburo added, “A wise man would keep his silence—and go back tonight, and burn down the house, and not be caught.”

  The unpredictable mixture of his honour and pragmatism caught me again. Out of habit and fatigue, I spoke in French, and it was just as well. “Somewhere to the east, dear good God, there is a whole country entire of men like you!”

  We came out of the narrow alley to the banks of the Thames-river itself. An old broken-down quay had mostly collapsed into the river. Pilings jutted up from the clear water, beyond what remained of the board-walk. Fish darted against a background of gravel—I could see them under my feet, between the wooden boards, as I walked out onto the quay.

  “Pardon me, mademoiselle.” My heart began to thump in my ribs at addressing her; I could not have said why I felt that sudden apprehensiveness.

  Her clotted, thick voice muttered, “Fuck off, Rochefort!”

  She was a sullen weight in my arms, wet, soggy, and warming in the sun, and breathing out a stench quite unbelievable. Her head stayed turned away from me. I could not tell if she looked around at the river, the boats, the houses. I braced my feet apart on the ruined quay and used my strength to straighten my arms, so that I held her right out from my bod
y, over the Thames-river.

  I opened my arms.

  She dropped like a stone.

  “Rochefort!”

  I turned away from the subsequent splashing and language, the loudness of it telling me that she could swim. I had wondered.

  This was a deserted backwater—side-water, rather; it being at an angle to the main river, and hidden between buildings. I took the opportunity to unbutton and unpoint my doublet, and take it off; likewise to untie the strings of my cuffs and ruff, and see what I could do to clean my linen. The wood was cool where I knelt. The man from the Japans sat back on his heels in a way that looked painful. He set about cleaning Dariole’s rapier and dagger in the river, with an expression of extreme distaste—which I thought effeminate for so stout a soldier: no man loves shit, but no man can avoid contact with it.

  The man-woman reached and pulled herself up from the river, sitting herself clothed and soaking on the boards at the end of the quay. A pool of water grew around her. I found myself checking distance, just as I might if she were still armed, anticipating that she might think about revenge. The memory of Zaton’s stung me, as it habitually did.

  But not, I realised, as much. What is this?

  She wrenched off her boots, rinsing them in the river. A passing wherry-man gave her a look and called out something in an indistinguishable English. She ignored the tone. I watched her discard sword-belt, broken hanger, and garters, and rapidly unbutton the forty or so cloth-covered buttons down the front of her pale doublet.

  I became aware that I was frozen in position, no longer cleaning the mess from my clothes. The stables at Ivry came back to me with an intensity that made me feel dizzy. The smooth warmth of her skin against mine; the flex of muscle under it. The hot, tight, dirty wetness of her arse encompassing me.

  She slid doublet and Venetian breeches and hose off together, leaving them in a sodden heap on the planking. The May wind blew cold. She rubbed her hands up and down her arms, rucking the linen of her shirt—and lifted up her shirt-hem, stripping the garment off bodily over her head.

  Men’s linen netherhose or under-breeches were still tied at her waist, covering her down to just above the knee. The sun shone brightly on her pale flesh. The flare of her hips, the indentation of her waist, all with the puppy-fat curves of the young…. Her breasts were small and round, tipped with small brown-pink nipples. They had the same luxurious flesh of middle adolescence, when life has not hardened flesh to the angles of the body, or childbirth slackened it.

  Instant desire stiffened my prick.

  She grinned widely enough to show all her white teeth, and leapt off the planking, hitting the river with an immense splash.

  I returned to sponging and dabbing at my doublet and hose, and took advantage of that to shift my aching flesh to where it was not so easily noticeable.

  “This was not conduct I was aware of,” Saburo remarked, nodding towards the pale, swimming young woman as she dolphined about in the water. “Gaijin in the Japans are shamed by naked bodies.”

  “It’s considered sinful.” I finished what cleaning-up could be done, concluding that I had been left with a doublet fit only for rag-pickers. More steadily than I felt, I said, dry-mouthed, “She does it to provoke, messire. Ignore her.”

  The young woman swam back and pushed herself up in the water, hanging on to the edge of the jetty with her fingers. All except her head and hands was underwater, and her hair was slicked back, making her look like an otter. She made blowing motions, as if she shivered. She nodded at the pile of her clothes, and lifted her face to me.

  “Rinse that lot out, will you, messire? You’re supposed to be the one playing servant!”

  I stood.

  I could not prevent myself from staring down through the clear water.

  The river-bottom was ochre gravel. Between that and the rippled surface hung Dariole, her body foreshortened, and her skin made unnaturally white by the water, but her bare upper body plainly visible. The curve of her breasts made me think, all in a second, of how cold and water-dappled her flesh will be when she leaves the river, and how my hands would feel, large and warm, if placed against them.

  I could have taken her out of the water and fucked her instantly, releasing the desire of my swollen flesh.

  She gazed up at me with an expression of boyish camaraderie. I could not be sure if there was a glint in her eyes or not. Boy-girl or hic mulier….

  “I thought you didn’t like girls, messire?”

  Her teasing note was unmistakable. Saburo did not appear to be attending, since we spoke in French. Irresolute, I stared down for a moment.

  Deliberately plaintive, she said, “I’m cold, messire!”

  With no small amount of awkwardness, I turned and walked to her clothes, first throwing her the relatively-dry linen shirt that would cover her from neck to knee.

  Impossible! No, impossible, I thought. Impossible—I cannot wish to spare her embarrassment!

  Her clothes were beyond any repair save a wash-house and competent tailor. I undid my baggage, and searched out the spare doublet I would have loaned Saburo—were it not for his unexplained refusal to wear it—and the woollen breeches she had borrowed from me in the stables at Ivry. With the touch of that wool, I could not keep the memory of her skin against mine out of my senses.

  As expressionless as I could appear, I walked back to give her the spare clothes, and stood watching her dress. The shirt made her decent. The too-large woollen trunk-hose, and my doublet made her a figure from a fair-ground. The collar came up to her ears; the sleeves covered her beyond the nails of her fingers.

  “You could get three of me in here!” she grumbled.

  “God forbid there should ever be more than one of you, mademoiselle,” I said gravely. “God He knows, one of you is so very much more than sufficient.”

  She opened her mouth to speak, closed it, looked at me oddly. “You made a joke? Messire Rochefort made a joke?”

  Without comment, I set about packing my baggage again.

  “We shall hope,” I said to Saburo, “to have enough small coins to take a wherry across the river, to Southwark.”

  He nodded. Unseen, behind me, Dariole began to sing under her breath—the events of the past hour apparently gone out of her mind; both the humiliation, and how she had wept like a mere child.

  Impossible, I repeated to myself, doing up the final buckles on my saddlebags.

  She may have been a physical infatuation—may still be one—but she is nothing more. Jealousy proves nothing at all!

  And that you have seen her manhandled and humiliated, now? a voice in my mind prompted.

  That you were glad of it, so very glad, and then—were not? Have just been willing to let it pass without ironic comment? As if you had been her comrade, and not her enemy?

  That thought made me sit back on my heels, my hands on the leather saddlebags, and the panorama of the London river before my unseeing eyes. A week ago, two weeks ago, if I had seen her similarly treated in Paris….

  I would have used it against her unmercifully. I would have taunted her with it until she had no option but to draw sword. And now I do not—worse: it never occurred to me to do it. How is this?

  The weight of her in my arms. Wet, stinking, and unprotected. A nasty experience, for the stink and muck of it. But since I have held her, since I have carried her in my arms, dependent on my strength….

  Dear God . The heart has gone out of my hate.

  The city’s clocks struck the hour a couple of times while we cleaned and refurbished ourselves as much as possible. I could speak nothing to her. If I needed to, I made it seem as if it were a remark addressed to M. Saburo as well.

  Behave like a green boy! the voice in my mind hectored me—that part of me that looks clear-eyed at a man’s faults and small hypocrisies.

  By an hour before noon, I made the decision to move, walking along to a pier not far from the backwater, and paying a wherry-man to take all three of us over the
river. Dariole did not wear my doublet buttoned up; she had lapped it left-over-right as tightly as it would go, and buckled her belt over it to hold all fast. She still looked like a small boy dressing in adult clothing as she set foot on St Mary Overy Stairs, close by the Bear Garden.

  Fool! I thought. I attempted instead to concentrate on what I had learned of Southwark the last time I had been in England; to think where a man might take lodgings without attracting attention from the authorities.

  We had walked some distance, and I was not sure of my direction, when a badly dressed man on a horse bellowed, “Give way!”

  His grey stone horse turned about and about in the narrow street. I moved back to avoid him, becoming separated by several yards from M. Saburo and Mlle Dariole.

  The crowd that shoved in on me, breathing into my face and jostling me with their shoulders, was explained by the wall of the building up against which I found myself momentarily pushed. It was built like a tower with blank-faced walls outward, but much wider and more squat, and in the form of a polygon rather than a round tower. It is a thing the English call a playhouse, they not having the sense to build a true theatre.

  Looking across the heads of the crowd, between plumes and the crowns of hats, I saw the boy-girl and the samurai pushed close together in the press of Englishmen.

  As I endeavoured to join them, a chance congregation of the audience flooded in through the playhouse doors, coming between us. Another cursing rider on a badly behaving bay gelding pushed me back a pace or two, by merest chance.

  A woman in blue stepped out from beside the theatre wall and moved in front of me.

  I had my hand instantly back and gripping my dagger: there was no room in this crowd to draw a rapier. I have in my time become familiar with all varieties of whores. This English one could be much of an age with me. Not a plump piece now—she will be a distraction for a cut-purse.

  She spoke again. I scanned the nearest men and women in the press of bodies.

  So low that I could hardly hear it above the chatter of other people, she said, “I wish to speak with you, Monsieur de Rochefort.”