Mary Gentle

by A Sundial in a Grave-1610

  I glanced down the street; looked back over my shoulder. Another man limped down the road behind me—I had been turning to check doorways, windows, but his lurching gait came on fast enough to have me dropping hand to dagger. It was a Bedlamite. One of those madmen who sits drooling in doorways and hearing voices, which, if they truly are God’s Saints, show the Saints to be not as wise as we have been taught.

  Or rather, it may be such a man.

  The blind man’s stick lifted.

  Instinctively my feet moved into a duelling position. I backed a half-pace, as if I needed room to draw; thought, Fool, will you be jumping at shadows next! A blind man and a drooling madman—

  “Master!” The blind man’s stick traced arcs in the air. The tip sought me, slowly. “Please, I’ve got nowhere to sleep tonight. The Spring nights are cold enough to kill. I’m a sick man. Just a penny, sir; just a penny.”

  I put my hand across to my sword-grip—and a stunning weight struck my head and right shoulder from above.

  I fell to my knees, cracking them against cobbles set amongst the mud. My head swam from the blow. It felt like a man’s full body weight.

  I writhed, eel-like; forcing my hand to my rapier, and hauling it out of the scabbard. A hob-nail boot stamped down on the back of my hand, catching it between the hard grip of the rapier and cobble-stones. Everything from my fingers to elbow on that side exploded with pain.

  A heavy weight grabbed at me with human arms; I seized the wrist of the man’s dagger-hand with my free hand as we rolled on the ground. I caught a glimpse of beam and plaster above—and an open lattice, where he must have jumped from the overhanging window.

  The dagger fell and vanished. Both his hands grabbed at my wrists, digging in with ragged nails. I could reach no weapon. Another hand slashed down; the blind man’s stick laid open my forehead.

  The Bedlamite kicked me as I rolled, scrambling and brawling with the other two.

  I got half-up on to my feet—was hit one-two-and-three!, as more ragged men hurled themselves on top of me in the brawl. Three more impacts punched me down. I heard the scabbard of my rapier crack. The grip on my wrists bit in with a lunatic’s strength; I could reach neither of my hilts.

  Blood stung my eyes. I found myself buried under a rolling mass of men. Men with crutches, that they lifted and brought down on me; men with bandaged arms, with wild red eyes gazing out of flour-whitened faces.

  No madmen, no poor; but sturdy beggars! My initial instinct not to strike at cripples and the feeble-minded vanished: I began to fight back.

  They were not ever where I grasped.

  I could neither catch hold properly to wrestle, nor dodge the punches and kicks. I landed, thrown on my face, on cobbles and mud; groping back to find no dagger, no sword.

  The tip of a boot caught my lip, pain sparking down my jaw. Blood poured out over my hand and the earth. I grabbed: no man was there. Wherever I grabbed.

  It is…like fighting Robert Fludd.

  In seconds I was pinned; spread-eagled face-down. I found, heaving and shoving, that I could not move out from under the weight of eight or nine of them, tall and strong as I am.

  The “blind” man squatted down in front of me.

  “Now you listen, friend.” He grinned, showing the wrecked stumps of his teeth. The black linen threads rose up, glued to his eyelids, and his pupils gleamed at me.

  I made a lunge: the sheer weight of bodies bore me down, and I could not reach eyes to gouge, or grab a man’s testes, to twist. A kick caught me on the side of the head, and started a high-pitched whine in my ear.

  I wanted to think it a robbery. How ironic to lose a purse an hour after having been given one! But this dream-like ease with which they evade and subdue me….

  Fludd has sent them. That he could do this to me, and that these men should find me so soon, it can be no coincidence—

  “You—listen—to—me!” The blind man punctuated each word with a punch to my face; I felt my cheekbone split. I have not been so handled since I was a boy. Thrash and struggle as I might, he had too many accomplices. Their weights crushed my ribs, making breathing laborious.

  I made experiment: slashed a random bite at the Bedlam beggar where he held my shoulder.

  He leaned back out of the way a half-heart-beat before I moved.

  The false blind man spat. “You listen. I’m the Upright Man here. What I say is ben—what I say, goes. You can see we’ve taken your sword. We can beat you as hard as we like if you won’t listen to us.”

  “So?” I managed every ounce of contempt I could muster. It is many years since I had a right to feel offence at being manhandled by the canaille, it being equally many since I was a gentleman; still, a man does not lose the habit. “All this for a purse? Nine dogs onto one true man?”

  He reached forward and stuck his fingers, with their black jagged nails, up my nostrils.

  He pulled.

  My head jerked up. I roared. There is little enough way to disguise true agony in a man’s tone.

  “No chat-back to my face.” He grinned widely, looking madder than the madman. “We know who you are. Here.”

  His other hand fumbled down inside the front slit of his shirt. Water ran in my vision; I could not see what he drew out. My body thrashed under the weight of the other men, without result except that one of them hit me a sharp, stunning blow over the right eye.

  The blind man made a crumpling motion, closing his fist on something in his shirt. He clamped his other hand shut over my nose. Blood frothed and sputtered as I struggled to breathe in, opened my mouth to shout—

  The blind man stuffed what he held into my mouth.

  I choked, breathing in the obstruction, catching it against the back of my throat. Weight shifted, lifted off me as I choked, helpless in a paroxysm of coughing. Bare feet slapped away over the cobbles and mud. A tiny sound compared to shod feet. I couldn’t tell which way they went.

  Shaking with rage, battered, bleeding at the nose, and in a coughing fit, I reached up and yanked out what had been stuffed into my mouth.

  Paper.

  Scrunched up, soggy, marked with blood, and with sharp edges, and black ink running…

  I sprawled across the cobbles and recovered my rapier and dagger, kept my sword point out in front of me, pushed myself back into the nearest doorway, with stout oak at my back; and stared out at the street.

  False beggars. Abraham Men, the English call them. Wandering the countryside in gangs; infesting the cities.

  No doors opened, no shutters came off windows, as my breathing quietened to normal. Men will mind their own business in Southwark.

  Blood dripped down onto my ruff. I pressed my hand to my nostrils, stopping the flow, but getting blood on my sleeve and the crumpled ball of paper.

  Religious tract? Genuine madmen?

  Who were not there when I moved. Slid away like eels from my grip. Always a breath in front or behind my punch. Well-rehearsed.

  Pain stabbed down from my forehead to my eye. The sun made one eye weep. My hat was gone, laying upside-down on the far side of the street. I trapped one corner of the paper between ring-finger and rapier-grip, and used my other hand to flatten the paper out across my knee:

  ‘To M. Rochefort.’

  The feeling that went through me was compounded of anger, fear, shock, and rage that I had been taken in. That I could be such a fool as to let myself be followed, after all my precautions—after all my years acting as Sully’s intelligencer.

  “Twice, in the one day?” I raged out loud, incredulous.

  Dear God, what am I! Am I Sully’s agent, these fifteen years; am I the Duc’s spy? Have I entirely lost whatever little wit I ever had?

  “Whoreson, useless, lack-witted fool!”

  I crushed the paper in my fist. And then, bitterly, spread it out again, to read:

  ‘To M. Rochefort. You will do this as many times as pleases you, until you are convinced. When you are convinced, you will sleep with the d
ogs until it is time for us to meet again. You will not leave London. The sooner you begin your work, the more fortunate it will be for you.’

  It was not signed. I did not know the hand. I did not need to. M. Fludd thinks he and his men can follow me wherever I go in London, does he? Very well, we will see.

  I will be out of this London before three in the afternoon.

  I threaded my way back past Southwark cathedral to the great and only bridge across the wide Thames.

  As I set foot on the flagstones of London-bridge, under the crowded great gate, a man shifted his shoulders off the wall where he had been leaning and made his way between the people towards me.

  I recognised his face. “John.”

  The dark-bearded man nodded curtly. “I am to say, ‘cross over if you wish, but the end will be the same.’”

  “I thank you for your advice,” I remarked in a tone that would have made a Frenchman draw. He merely nodded, walking away between workmen and riders, back into Southwark.

  That is too easy a trick for my English astrologer. Any man might be supposed to cross the Thames by London-bridge if he did not take a boat. Easy to put a man there.

  And —I saw as I climbed the side of Tower-hill, and looked down on St Katharine’s Stairs—it does not require great cognition to think a man might seek a ship again where he first landed.

  I faded into the low buildings before one of Fludd’s mathematicians and what looked like a dozen swordsmen could notice me.

  Let us see what they do when I pick one of the thousand small boats, and change my destination when the wherry-owner is mid-river.

  I displeased my water-boatman much, having hired him at Strand Steps to go to Saint Paul’s, and then directing him first to Bankside, and then without landing back across the river to Westminster, and changing my mind and having us suddenly land before that at Whitehall.

  I added an extra sixpence to his fare. His curses about “bloody Spaniards!” cut off. The cool wind from the river made me wish I had bought a cloak from the whorehouse-mistress, as well as a doublet. As I stood conjecturing whether I should walk back to the city and the shops at Cheapside, and the water-man’s oars splashed as he rowed away, a neatly dressed page stepped out of the group of Parliament men debating on the corner of the square.

  He took a step down to the stairs, looked carefully into my face, and said, “Monsieur, the good Doctor Fludd says, ‘You may go about and about as you please; you will end in the same place.’”

  He was a brat of about thirteen, with a pearl in his ear; in Versailles, he would have had his peach-arse taken long before now. I found his English blond and white colouring too vapid for attraction.

  “What else, boy?”

  “Nothing else but that, monsieur.”

  I reached out and put my hand on his shoulder in what would, to any of the men of the Lords and Commons passing by towards Westminster Palace, look like a friendly gesture. I closed my fingers hard into the meat above his collar-bone.

  “Ow!” He scowled, his expression resigned, making no public fuss. “No, nothing more, he didn’t tell me any more!”

  “Are you sure?”

  The grip of my gloved hand must have bruised him by now. He did not look in the least surprised. He let out a breath as I freed him.

  “I’m certain, monsieur!” He first rubbed at his doublet shoulder; then flushed a boy’s crimson. “I hope whatever he has you do, somebody hangs you for it, Monsieur Frenchman!”

  I could have caught him, no matter how quickly he darted away, but I did not try.

  Can it be possible: that Fludd can calculate what I will do at each and every step of this day?

  I am not a fool, to lose my nerve at the smell of superstition. Is it not still more likely that Fludd has a large enough intelligence net that he can cast it over the city, and catch me wherever I go?

  And yet, I thought. Even if there are men watching the river with spyglasses, landing agents whenever I come ashore…it would still take them longer to get into place than that boy needed.

  No—Fludd will have merely outguessed my landing-place. I will not fall for whatever conjuring trick it is he uses to bemuse lesser men.

  I signalled another boat to pull in to the steps. The breeze having picked up, towering white clouds glided east over the city sky, reflecting down into the clear waters of the Thames. I landed on the far bank, at Falcon Stairs, upriver of the bull-baiting and close to the Bear Garden. There I paid off my boatman—and snarled at the comment that the Master Mathematician Warner would have made to me.

  The scholarly little man, who stood waiting on the river bank, jolted in shock. I strode off past him into the Southwark crowds.

  When I found myself scrutinising faces as I passed, I stopped at the Bear-Pit to gaze unknowingly at the listed afternoon’s fights, and consider what I could now do.

  How might they end in a cemetery? A rash word by M. Dariole; an occasion upon which M. Saburo might give offence, not knowing this country…or simply their water-boat might capsize while shooting the piers of London-bridge, and they be drowned…any one of these things may be a man’s fortune.

  And any one, not.

  I have no way to prevent it.

  They are lost in a city of fifty thousand men.

  The shelter of the houses increased the warmth of the Spring sun. Men filing past me into the stadium did not wear cloaks—although, this being Southwark, they may have pawned or never owned them. I kept my face turned to the parchment and brown ink, while letting my gaze drift off to the side. Half a street south from here, earlier today, the woman Aemilia Lanier had come out of a theatre.

  A woman might be more easily questioned, especially if she is alone.

  I turned and sauntered that way, making no particular attempt to hide either my height or the length of my stride; those two things that may identify a man at a distance in a crowd. When I came to what I now saw was under the sign of The Globe, the playhouse doors were shut.

  Of a sudden, a yell went up from inside, then a concerted gasp; a piece of ordnance fired off, and three thousand men cheered. I raised a brow. I cannot imagine my master the Duc de Sully frequenting such a place—although, low as his taste regrettably was, King Henri would have loved it.

  The play being full, the road was comparatively empty. I asked the man holding horses for sixpence if he had seen a woman in a blue gown; he had not.

  And a French youth and a cloaked man?

  Nor them, it seemed, neither.

  Turning back, I made my way into the alleys of Bankside. There would be a room for hire, evidently, at the taverns-come-whorehouses that—under the Bishop of Winchester’s disposition—so thoroughly infest these suburbs. I paid less than I imagined, having no horse to stable and no desire for a harlot; and fell to wondering while I ate if I might make my way to one of the southern English Cinque Ports, and go a-ship from there.

  Tomorrow. I will leave London tomorrow. He cannot have agents enough to cover every ship from here to Greenwich, I reflected. Or are the anonymous roads better?

  The matter was not settled in my mind by the time the sun set, between a half-seven and eight of the clock. I set about sleeping—which I did intermittently, with grim humour, in the noise from the streets and the darkness that stank of grease and tapers, with my bare sword in my hand.

  Nothing worse than fleas came to me from my night on the pallet; the straw so elderly that generation must have succeeded generation within it. I rose around five of the clock, and threw open the window. A gust of warm wind blew in, making the room under the eaves more palatable. Gazing down from the rear of the building, I saw the sun staining the Thames-river bright scarlet.

  And this is a Wednesday—no, a Tuesday, and the fifteenth, by this land’s reckoning.

  At home, it will be close on the end of May; the twenty-fifth, and did Fludd not say Ravaillac would die the day after tomorrow? Die without ever opening his mouth about who set him on to kill King Henri?


  That would be a test of any man’s foretelling, I thought, also grimly, and roused myself more thoroughly to wash and furbish myself up, telling the landlady that I was going out in search of a sword-seller where I might get my scabbard repaired.

  I paid my bill, left, and walked down towards Long-Southwark, passing two or three churches of the Protestant persuasion on the way, and finally Southwark’s great cathedral—none of them seeming discommoded that their buildings and boneyards were flanked on each side by whorehouses and other stews. There was little in the way of artisans’ workshops; for those, a man has to wait for London-bridge itself.

  Better if M. Ravaillac does confess, I concluded, my head clearer after even so little sleep. In fact, I think it may be essential.

  The irony made me smile sardonically.

  They will execute the man who killed the father of France soon enough, but, if he is to confirm my part in what he did, then I—and M. de Sully—need at least his testament to the interrogators. He must be witness to my part in the affair, and so, I need Ravaillac to betray me. Which, given the torture they will have been subjecting him to, is just as well….

  My steps slowed without my willing it.

  I stared, coming back to myself.

  A church of grey stone, with a carving that made me suspect its patron Saint was Botolph, sat under the shade of an oak tree to one side, and a livery stable in front.

  The side of the church with the oak looked less frequented, and had sheds, or mere lean-tos, backing up against the church wall; I guessed for spades for digging graves, and other such tools.

  A white shape stood outside the further shed.

  Another, smaller shape stood up beside it.

  Mud squelched under my boots as I entered the graveyard, striding over the morning-wet grass between the low stones. The white shape—the shape of a man in his night-gown, or else another garment all of linen—put his hand down with a gesture utterly familiar.