Mary Gentle

by A Sundial in a Grave-1610

  The sun lay hot on the grass, pennants gleamed over the Southwark roofs, spring sun shone. I had the time to think, This must be what it’s like to be an ordinary swordsman…

  But unskilled men do not duel in this manner. No man handles a weapon like this! Whatever my mind might think of the matter, every reflex of my body, every shift of muscle, every reaction, knows his movements to be wrong. Timing is everything in a duel, and his timing…

  Not off by virtue of being slow, the realisation was forced on me. His timing is off because he is moving first.

  Always moving to counter a heartbeat before I strike home.

  Fludd’s point jabbed lightly into my upper arm, passing my guard as if he knew to the breadth of a hair where my sword would be.

  That he should touch me, Rochefort—!

  Anger and panic bubbled in my veins. I confess the panic freely. He chose that—chose not to kill.

  Ferocity rose up in me; I forced it down, and sliced his blade out and away, as he moved his steel back.

  That left me momentarily forward, my weight distributed wrongly. I couldn’t shift back; my legs felt as if I stood in quicksand. It is a dozen years since I have been put so off-balance in a duel.

  Fludd stepped in quickly, reaching for my hilt. For a moment I felt his gloved hand on mine, on the wire-bound grip. Caught wrong-footed, I put all my strength and quickness into yanking my blade up and back—and made a slicing shallow cut up his hand, as I wrenched free of his grip.

  He swore, wrung his fingers, and took my sword with his other hand.

  I felt the grip slide out of my hand, twisted in the exact wrong way for me to hold it, or even catch my fingers in the guardrings—and he stepped back, lifting both rapiers away together.

  My chest heaved, breath and blood pounding together. I stared. My empty hands shook.

  “Pardon me if I don’t continue longer,” Fludd said, panting. He looked down at his hand; his expression rueful. “I have the knowledge, but not the strength. Similarly with the death of King James. I can know anything; I cannot do everything.”

  I said nothing, only staring at him.

  “I didn’t study how to fight.” Robert Fludd’s breath hissed in his throat. “I cast my calculations, many times, over many years, and studied this fight.”

  The meaning sunk through to me as I breathed heavily and stared at my sword in his hand. If a man could calculate what guards and thrusts and shrewd cuts another man will make in a particular fight—why, then, he might rehearse to counter them how he pleased. As many times as he pleases. A man with no skill at swordplay, a man who handles a sword as if it is a walking stick cut fresh out of a hedge, might defeat the greatest master, armed with foreknowledge of how that master will fight.

  “Ridiculous!” My voice failed me. I nodded at the stain on his glove, where his cut hand bled.

  “Ask any man of the theatre—one may rehearse a hundred times, but still….” Fludd looked, for the first time, sad. “Still, extra blood must be spilled, before success.”

  I have no idea how long I stared at him: this man who has both injured and defeated me. Fludd held out my sword to me, hilt forward.

  I took it, and for all the ache in me to see the blade curve brightly in the air and scatter his blood across the grass, I did not do it.

  “We have one chance only.” Fludd’s breath rasped. His face had gone white, and the skin under his eyes a blackish-green. “One only. I don’t think only of today. Half a millennium, or a little more, or a little less…and a comet will appear in the sky, foretelling the extinguishing of us all. We’ll be wiped out by the hand of God, and justly so, the world then being ruled by warlords, despots, and tyrants. I’ve spent many years with these calculations, Monsieur Rochefort. I’ve only one way to avoid that disaster—to put Prince Henry on the throne, create a college of Hermetic advisors to him while I’m at his side, keep the line of Stuart kings always on the throne, and build up a society of peace and industry. Then we may work to spare ourselves the comet. Truly, monsieur, I don’t like it any more than you do that we have to begin by murdering James Stuart. But if we don’t, his son Charles will become king in less than twenty years, and then endless civil wars begin.”

  The woman Lanier spoke, her voice apologetic. “I don’t like to call it ‘murder.’ Doctor Fludd, it is a righteous killing on behalf of the country. Like Jael killing Sisera with a tent-peg.”

  I thought I caught a note of discontent in Aemilia Lanier’s tone. Jael is female, if I remember my Old Testament. I saw her companions did not like her putting herself forward. Fludd need not call on outside murderers: he would have at least one volunteer. And so….

  “Why me, monsieur?” I said, as levelly as I could to a man who has kicked me in the balls. That his sword-hand might move in advance of mine, I put firmly out of my mind.

  All three older men in this “conspiracy of mathematicians” made to speak at one time. Robert Fludd held up his hand for silence. He finished wiping his forehead with a clean-looking kerchief.

  “Because I have calculated, Monsieur Rochefort, and—you are the only man who can succeed.”

  There was silence in the garden.

  “Why else would I have sought you out?”

  Because you’re a madman! I thought, but did not say. My arm stung, painfully, where he had pushed his sword point a half-inch into the flesh. It swamped the residual pain in my groin. As well as the bone-and muscle-deep memory of how wrong his movements were, I must now carry (along with the fear of it turning bad) the knowledge of how purely easily he had inflicted the wound.

  And how easily he might have made it a killing stroke. Being mad, as he is.

  “Here.” He pressed his purse into my hand again. I merely held it. I am practised enough at not letting my thoughts show on my face.

  “King James must die, and as soon after his son Henry is made Prince of Wales as is possible. I should prefer the other children, Elizabeth and Charles, to survive: therefore, no Powder Conspiracy petards. Prince Henry must live, and rule. This is all you must bear in mind, Monsieur de Cossé Brissac. We will see you again as soon as you have selected the ground.”

  The man that he called John heaved the heavy oak gates open a yard or two more, and stood back from them. I looked at the way out. A yard, opening to an ordinary enough street. The trodden mud underfoot was yellow; the houses had been given a coating of lime-wash sometime in the reign of the late Queen. For Southwark, it was respectable.

  If I step out of the door, I thought, will I have an assassin’s knife in my ribs, or a constable’s hand on my shoulder?

  “You need not say when or where we will meet,” Fludd repeated, busying himself smoothing down the folds of his robe. “I have foreknowledge of it. It is soon.”

  He looked up at me, his eyes narrowed against the sunlight.

  “And when you meet with Tanaka Saburo and Mademoiselle de la Roncière again…you will find them in the cemetery.”

  Rochefort, Memoirs

  13

  W alking away down the empty Southwark street, I found myself suddenly missing the company of Gabriel Santon.

  Perhaps because a gentleman should have his servant here at such a time, to bandage his wound, refurbish his spoiled garments—and debate with him the wisdom of certain decisions.

  But Gabriel is either captured by Marie de Medici, a prisoner along with M. de Sully, or else fled sensibly into the countryside. One hopes, the latter. And there are no trusted agents here in London that I might seek out.

  I lifted my head, the growth-laden breeze of Spring blowing into my face. Roaring sounded from the distant bull-baiting pen. The wheels of a score of ox-drawn carts screamed, sounding to be west of me—we had crossed over the main high-road to London-bridge, I guessed; Robert Fludd’s house must stand on the opposite side of it from the playhouses.

  Glancing towards the river confirmed it; I saw myself opposite the Tower. East of here will be Deptford; Greenwich; ships that leav
e for Europe, the New World, the far East….

  I felt a stab of wrenching regret for the contents of my lost saddlebags, that held, among other necessities, a spare sword-belt.

  There are enough men in my profession whom I have seen caught because they could not walk away from some treasured thing. I pride myself on my ability to walk away from all, great or little, without remorse.

  Mill-houses rumbled at the bank of the Thames-river. Here, small bridges in the road crossed streams, stinking like the open sewers they were. I took my way over them, doubling forward and back into Southwark, heading towards Bankside itself, and stopped at a bath-house that was also a whorehouse, both being common in these suburbs where the law does not run.

  You will find them in the cemetery, I heard again in my mind, as I trod up the creaking stairs to the upper rooms. I swore under my breath, causing the old woman with the dirty pinner to narrow her eyes at me; and put the nonsense firmly out of my mind.

  I should rather be concerned with how shockingly well-informed this ‘Robert Fludd’ is about the recent past, never mind the future!

  Who can have told him what he knows about me?

  And—who else is privy to what he knows?

  My wound I had washed out with wine and dressed. It was nothing, but the soreness kept Fludd present in my mind, which I supposed to be his intent. Gabriel Santon would have dressed the wound better, I thought.

  This room under the gable-end of a row of Southwark houses was not so different from my lodgings in Paris. Were it not for the street-cries sounding in English, it would take little to believe that I might step outside onto the peculiarly ineradicable black mud of the Paris streets, and find myself confronted by Queen Regent Marie de Medici’s horsemen….

  If it still endures, her Regency. I am cut off from all my usual sources. There’s nothing to be got here but gossip!

  Gabriel Santon would not only have dressed my wound more precisely, with the skill that comes of soldiering; nor only have listened to tavern rumour. He would have provided a background presence that, no matter I cannot discuss such things with him, aids me to put my silent thoughts into order.

  I cleared of food a cast pewter dish deep enough to have served as a buckler in a bar-brawl, the last nausea of Fludd’s kick evaporating as I did so. The Queen Regent is my business, not Doctor Fludd.

  I drank down sour English beer, and could not help pacing the length of the room, tankard in hand. Sully, I thought. Sully. And Marie de Medici, who is Great Henri’s widow—what may one Messire Rochefort do against her, for all his fine words?

  Well, let us see. I might blackmail her, I thought coolly. Since I do know who set me on to have Henri murdered. But then I must contact her, and she may more easily find and kill me. At home I was a man of powerful friends; here, the English lords will have their own interests, which will not be easily engaged—although that is one possible road….

  In France there will doubtless be men who already seek to depose her, and I may in time make use of them. But she will have supporters; not she alone will have desired the Regency. Many members of her household that she brought from Italy will be flying high now: Madame Leonora, Messire Concini….

  In the days when the Queen listened to M. de Sully as a friend, he somewhat counteracted the influence of those two, but now…France run by Marie de Medici, and she run by her favourites, dear God!

  I might kill her myself. Or find another Ravaillac, I thought grimly. That would be amusing.

  I drank down the beer and gazed unseeing out over the roof-tops of Southwark, wishing that it were the Arsenal, or even Les Halles.

  The best and only way is honesty.

  That made me smile.

  But it is. If M. de Sully retains even one fraction of his power—and if I can free him from the danger in his household—then I foresee that he, himself, may be the one man who can legally arraign her for her crime, with myself as witness. Who else would be believed, except Great Henri’s incorruptible Sully? Every other man at court has his own interest, but not Sully: all men know he cares only for France and his King.

  And I must confess to him that I am responsible for Henri’s death; that I chose, rather than endanger his own life, to endanger the King’s. Confess, and withstand his most bitter anger, for my stupidity. His hate, for my failure. My catastrophic failure.

  I sweated. I failed, but I may make it right.

  It is the true way, the best way; more likely, the only way. If Sully makes this claim, and verifies it, men will believe. Parliament will take the Regency from the Queen. They may even choose, as new Regent, M. de Sully….

  The Medici knows that. If Sully hasn’t fallen from power already, she will kill him as soon as she can do it without suspicion. Not in days—but not months, either. A matter only of weeks, if not sooner.

  It is certain.

  “Merde!” I threw the tankard at the wall, denting both pewter and plaster, and followed it with a punch that stung from my knuckles to my shoulder. To know how very badly she must desire his death, and mine, and to know nothing of how things now stand at home!

  And, just when I begin to think I am successfully lost to all men’s sight—then comes this Doctor-Prophet Fludd, whom someone has briefed very well. Very well indeed.

  Who knows I am in England? Who knows I am de Cossé Brissac? Who else knows that I am the man who caused Henri’s death?

  Slowly, I sat down at the table, and counted out a few extra coins as payment for the damage to the wall.

  For all the shock of the madman Fludd’s words, I thought, there is one sensible and urgent conclusion that I can come to.

  Whatever I do—it is not to be done in the same country as this lunatic astrologer who knows too much of my business.

  From the whore-mistress, I bought a sailor’s carry-bag, and—it surprising me greatly to find one—a suit of doublet and trunk-hose in the English fashion that was large enough for me to wear. The man had been fatter than I, although of my great height, but it could be made to fit well enough; a dull mulberry broadcloth, nothing to draw the eye. Fludd’s purse settled the account.

  I further changed my appearance by being bathed, and shaved again of all but a point of beard and small moustaches, although I kept my hair long to my shoulders. To this, I added a low-crowned and wide-brimmed hat, my secret transferred inside. Just so that I look sufficiently different from the unshaven thug ushered from the house of Robert Fludd, and can avoid his intelligencers….

  With an English shilling and an English sixpence, I might hire a post-horse down to Rochester, which is a good small port, and less likely to be watched than London or Dover. Six years ago, however, I remember the natives of Rochester as unfriendly to Frenchmen—the English King’s officers made marks on house-doors, so that as the Duc’s entourage travelled up from Dover, we should know at which houses we could eat and drink. In Rochester, the men of the town went around beforehand, and wiped the marks away. But I need not of necessity travel as a Frenchman.

  Impatience drove me on, now—but, were Fludd’s men watching for me to run, they would expect it immediate. I stayed at the bath-house and took a woman, so as not to appear particular, but the blow to my testes left me painful and slow to perform. I let the woman believe I was angered with her on that matter, and stormed out, throwing down a few English coins.

  The hot sun scalded my cheek. For all it was gone midday, a lot of the houses remained shuttered here. A dog trotted past me. As I registered the loping orange form I saw it was not a dog, but a fox. Which indicates but few men here. Plague? I wondered. It is early in the season, as yet. I swung south away from the river and set about shaking off any man this Fludd might have set to follow me.

  Crossing back eastward over the road of Long-Southwark, with only a glance for the entry to London-bridge, I walked on through the suburbs towards Black-heath. The earth was sticky under my feet. Above, the sky cleared. A haze dogged the horizon. It was only when my breathing eased that I k
new how alert I had been, passing the district that held Fludd’s house. My doubling-back and taking of alley-ways would have shown up the most determined follower, I judged, and my experience in these matters is considerable.

  A few more coins would not have hurt this ‘Fludd’: I might have bought a mount, no matter how sway-backed. Smiling wryly, I set about thinking myself into the role I would play for ship’s-masters in Greenwich. A Dutch deserter from the Low Countries wars; such will account for the lack of horse or much baggage. Anxious to go to the Scandinavian countries, or Poland, say….

  Where I may look at the situation in France, myself remaining unknown, and decide how I might best act next.

  Glancing up at the sun for direction, I found it no more than a left and a right turn to put me on the true road again. A man with sword and dagger will not be defenceless crossing wild heathland, but as I walked down a quiet side-street, the great river on my left, I bitterly missed the pair of wheel-lock pistols in my saddlebags.

  Although it is a true remark that a sword does not hang fire—

  All in a second, I was overtaken by tactile memory: the splintering of the flint in my wheel-lock pistol, Dariole’s smile glimmering out of the dim light of the Paris stable.

  They will not be in a cemetery! M. Saburo has his ambassadorial visit to court to make, he will not let anything dissuade him from duty. Mlle Dariole…is likely playing at hazard in some tavern, with shaved dice.

  I cannot stay: I cannot spare the time to search half of London!

  A blind man tapped a long stick against the house walls, coming up from the Thames steps. A veteran; the lid of his left eye sewn shut with ragged black linen thread.

  “Alms!” His blind face lifted. He heard my boots on the earth. “Money, mistress or master, for a poor blind man!”

  If superstition had moved me, or I had thought Monseigneur God might answer me in kind, I would have given him money; a voyage to the cold north deserves all the luck it can get. I have, however, a dislike of opening my purse on a public street. Particularly since pick-pockets and thieves have been known to disguise themselves as cripples and blind men.