Mary Gentle

by A Sundial in a Grave-1610

  “If this were very new…but, no.” Cecil’s small brows moved closer together. “I say, it is this man Fludd’s folly. If there were an organisation capable of that in London, even in the suburbs, it could not operate without my knowledge.” He snorted softly. “Unless you will have him be a genuine prophet, Master Rochefort!”

  I found myself touching my doublet sleeve over the healing wound. “With me gone, he will have nothing to observe. Your King is safe. I may leave Fludd under your hand, milord.”

  The English minister raised his head, gazing out at the walls of Westminster as the oarsmen sweated past it. He spoke, apparently absently.

  “You must devise a way of returning to Master Fludd without arousing his suspicions.”

  “Returning—”

  Cecil, despite his tired eyes, brightened as he turned his head to look at me. “The right way to catch Northumberland, if he has been such a fool, is to let this conspiracy run on almost to the sticking-point. Then we may see my lord the Earl compromise himself.”

  I scowled, despite myself. “Milord—”

  “I have no intention of endangering the life of his Majesty. Master Saburo can bring letters from you when he visits court, and if I do not hear, I will haul up my net with only these sprats in it.”

  I stuttered. “But, milord!”

  “You offered me your services, Master Rochefort, did you not?”

  Short of jumping overboard and seeing how far I might swim—which I briefly considered—there was no way out of hearing Mr Secretary Cecil’s words. Knowing it would be useless, I protested, “But I must return to Paris!”

  Cecil smiled overtly. Through my shock, I saw why he rarely permitted it to himself; it made his long face into that of a clown.

  “You, Master Rochefort, will oblige me by keeping your place in this conspiracy, and by going along with Fludd’s plans, and reporting to me whenever you have news. As Sully’s man, I am assured of your skill in this. I don’t doubt that you have practise enough at acting the double agent….”

  Cecil’s long face became solemn again.

  “I appreciate the position you find yourself in—that you have no certain way to receive information from the French court. All the while you work for me, I see no real difficulty in authorising one of my secretaries to let you see a part of the diplomatic despatches that come to me from Paris.”

  Stunned, I stared up at him, and could only think, Bait and hook!

  Rochefort, Memoirs

  16

  I stuttered out the first objection that came to mind, thus giving myself time to think.

  “I may have been followed here. If I’ve been seen where you are, milord, Fludd will suppose I’ve betrayed him!”

  Cecil waved his hand impatiently. “You will think up some convenient lie to tell him, Monsieur Rochefort, will you not? Because that is what you do.”

  Whatever credit I might have with Mr Secretary would evaporate with insistence on a rival network of agents and spies to his own, so much was evident to me. For an Englishman, he was (as M. de Sully had thought) very nearly as touchy in his pride as a Frenchman.

  A convenient lie for Fludd? I wish I had one! The barge creaked under my boots. Thousands of pounds’ worth of silk bunting and gilding went for nothing, for all the effect Prince Henry’s ceremonial barge had on me.

  “We must be of use to one another, ‘Monsieur Herault,’” Cecil said, “if I am to trust you with information from France.”

  I took a breath. “Milord, you are aware of the rumours: that I know who is behind M. Ravaillac’s actions. I have good reason to wish my presence in London unknown, or I will probably be killed.”

  “That is the hazard of your occupation.” Cecil nodded sombrely. “While you lend me your assistance, I will of course lend Monsieur de Rosny’s man my protection.”

  I bowed. He desires to heap coals of fire on M. de Sully’s head. Well, I shall benefit a little, perhaps. But if he has no belief in Fludd’s agents, neither will his men….

  As calmly as if he spoke to one of his English informers, Robert Cecil added, “I appreciate your worth greatly in bringing me this conspiracy of Doctor Fludd. As a conspiracy, it may be the brain-fever of one man. It may not. You shall be engaged in this business of mine, Master Rochefort, and discover all.”

  Cecil picked up his papers and put one hand on the chair’s arm, slipping down to stand on the expensive carpet. Automatically, I rose and bowed in response to his dismissal.

  “If Master Saburo is not available,” he added, as he turned away, “you may make use of that young man lodging with you, as a page to carry word between us. I will recognise his face.”

  I repressed a desire to beat my fists against my head.

  Returning to Southwark, I left M. Saburo still being interviewed—there would be a vast amount of talk before they let him close to King James Stuart, although the decision to do so was taken. Even M. de Sully’s short ambassadorial trip in ’03 took us several months, and the Nihonese captain of foot-soldiers was no established French king’s counsellor.

  Is this such a bad bargain? I wondered, as my small boat left the barge, passed Whitehall-palace, and eventually docked at Bankside.

  Merely to keep watch on a local conspiracy, in return for the best quality information out of Paris that a foreigner can give. Except—except!

  Except that M. de Cecil thinks he can be confident, now, of giving me orders whenever he pleases! And how does that sit with “Queen Regent” Marie de Medici, and my plans?

  I stopped, in the middle of a Southwark street. Men stepped around me without complaint. A seller of band-strings stumbled, banged her tray against my elbow, and gave me a filthy look, and then smiled with gaps between her teeth as I offered her coin. I might have had more from the woman than a handful of ties for ruffs and falling bands, I guessed, but I walked swiftly on through the drying mud of the street.

  Not a bad bargain, except that I must now provide Doctor Robert Fludd with a supposed method of murdering his King!

  Not a bad bargain, except that Doctor Robert Fludd is…well-in-formed.

  If Fludd is a foreteller of the future—then he knows that I have betrayed his conspiracy. Knew that I would when he met me. In which case, why tell me at all!

  Frustration made me clench my fists as I walked. Other than return to Dead Man’s Place and sketch futile—if appropriate to the location—plans for James’s assassination, what else should I do?

  Add to which, I am in England, not Paris . And my possible entertainments are uncultured whores, uncultured theatre, or watching animals tear each other to pieces. Dear God, but Zaton’s would fail here for lack of gentlemen to patronise it!

  It was not long before noon. The thought of Zaton’s put a number of things into my mind. A meal. The comrades I had left there, and the possibility of my ever rejoining them. A game of hazard, to multiply the contents of my purse, and where I might find one in Southwark that was not played with false dice and marked cards. And, by a natural progression into which I did not enquire too closely, my mind turned to Mlle Dariole.

  Whom I have not seen these four hours, and therefore take to be causing chaos somewhere….

  Saburo is a responsible man, for a foreigner; I am experienced in my profession. It is only she—only she, now, who knows so little of Henri’s murder, and yet can spoil all with a drunken word, or a boast, like the boy she seems to be!

  I could not tell why being possessed of a vast amount of frustration and foul temper should lead to my thinking immediately of the boy-girl. Perhaps her womanhood, coupled with her defeats of me, still rankled. For all I might suggest that my instincts had suspicioned her to be female, and held back…I had not been conscious of that at the time.

  It is as possible, I admitted to myself, that I did not know at all.

  The distant ends of deserted alleys took my attention as I walked on, and empty shacks and sheds behind stables and brothels, until I realised that whatever confrontat
ion I envisaged between Dariole and myself, I envisaged happening in isolation, if not precisely in private.

  As at Ivry’s stables.

  That made me curse, and spit into the kennel, and stride on with left hand bearing down on the hilt of my rapier, not much concerned if the up-thrust scabbard behind should rake some whore-hunting citizen’s belly. The violence that I felt thudding through me would welcome a pass with swords.

  I turned down one road that took me past several establishments where Masters of Defence taught their skills. I did not think to meet a student skilled enough to give me a bout sufficient to take away ill-temper—any good teacher would be established in London and not the suburbs. Still, I thought, it is choose this, or picking fights in taverns….

  I will have no man’s unnecessary blood on my hands.

  I went upstairs in several schools, to watch students at practise. I might have fought bouts with my rapier, or with other lengths of sword, or with broadsword, buckler, or glaive. All of it seemed lacking, to my jaundiced eye, and I moved on from one establishment to another. It was not until I mounted the oak steps in a narrow house, and entered a long salle d’armes, that I heard an instantly familiar voice among the talk—and knew, equally instantly, what I had felt lacking.

  “Oh, the good God, no! Primo, not secondo! I could hit your elbow from here. And your belly! Suck it in!”

  The familiar raw adolescent-boy’s tone.

  A dozen or so men sitting and standing in the long room were dressed both badly and flamboyantly, in rich men’s cast-off clothing—actors, I realised. From one of the playhouses Mlle Dariole has taken to frequenting. And the middling-tall figure with her shoulder presented to a man in a green doublet, the pair of them with foils between them, was Dariole herself.

  Steel met steel. I folded my arms and leaned up against the pillar of the gallery, just inside the doorway, and watched Dariole as she both named and touched with her point every button she chose on the actor’s lurid doublet, despite all his efforts to the contrary.

  “Yes, you can kill him,” a stringy tall fellow with black hair and a pocked face called over. “Can you teach him the trick so that the audience in the lord’s gallery can view it?”

  “The pit audience will like it better!” Dariole’s accent was little better than when she had made a fool of herself outside her cousin’s house. Her new player friends did not appear to notice. Players and whores and soldiers; all have greater toleration than men of the middling sort who live in rich houses in the city.

  The skinny, pock-marked man protested, “The groundlings don’t throw gold angels down when they like a duel!”

  She grinned at him. “I thought you were a poet. When did you care about who pays how much?”

  In a grim tone, the man remarked, “Since I became a poet!”

  The arms-master, a grizzled Englishman with grey hair shaved close to his skull, came to take me aside for the few necessary questions I would have expected in a Parisian salle d’armes, while equipping me with a rebated blade some yard and a quarter in length. I flexed my wrist, feeling the point dip.

  “You rebate so?” I nodded at the small cloth bag of sand tied tightly over the blade’s point. “Only the point? No edge-play?”

  The English master grunted something under his breath, and swapped me the weapon for one a finger’s length shorter, also bound with sand-filled cloth at the tip, but with the edges filed down to bluntness. As might be expected, the balance was foul. Such are the penalties of swordplay.

  Dariole came treading back across the floor, in the middle of a loud and prolonged diatribe from the assembled men. There was no moment for thought before I saw her make me out in the shadow at this end of the room. Her eyes suddenly brightened.

  “Dariole.”

  I left off the honorific so as not to become mixed in speech between monsieur and mademoiselle. Evidently, from her glare, she didn’t see it that way.

  “Messire! Just the man for me to practise on. Almost a challenge….”

  She had got herself a new doublet of bleached linen—with my money! I reflected—that was a fraction large for her, and the cream-white of the cloth stood out against the charcoal-coloured wool of her Venetian breeches. The folds of her small ruff pressed up under her chin, and she had changed her high crowned hat for a velvet bonnet, flat as a pie, with a pheasant’s feather sticking behind, and the curls and tufts of her hair framed against the velvet.

  She could have been twin to Fludd’s page that turned me back at Whitehall-palace. Her expression was that of the young man at Zaton’s.

  “You are entirely extraneous,” I said, finishing removing my boots, as the custom is, and moving out onto the floor of the salon. “Not to say, superfluous. Has it never occurred to you, puppy, that your cousin is not the only man capable of throwing you into the kennel where you belong?”

  There was laughter at that. Dariole flushed. With more than shame, I thought. As if I have betrayed something a comrade would not tell.

  The pock-marked man and some of the actors broke off their stage-duels to watch. I guessed her to have made the rapid friendships of young manhood with them. She glanced back over her shoulder. “Watch me teach him something!”

  We began with no more introduction than that. The floor cleared. I ventured three, four, sudden and violent attacks—and in each case shortened my arm, by bending of the elbow, but subtly enough that she would not see. The muscle in my wounded arm twinged; settled. Briefly, I thought, This—no, this will not be like fighting M. Fludd….

  Dariole stepped forward, her feet, shod only in hose, sure-footed on the oak floorboards. She thrust.

  I evaded and immediately lunged.

  The holding-back of my arm had fooled her, body and mind; she stood inside my reach by a hand-span. I shot my point under her arm, and into the gap between doublet-body and sleeve, where her shirt showed linen-white.

  The rebated point thumped home.

  I hit her with force enough to bend the blade into a bow, pushing her back. She staggered two full paces. The hit would bruise, that was certain; would leave a black and purple mark on the side of her ribs—if I knew my mark, between the fourth and fifth rib: the opening through to the heart.

  “Sonbitch!” She gasped, either with pain or surprise, or both; her point came back up into guard; and she glared at me, her cheeks turning pink at the applause from the rest of the salon.

  “Careless—” I almost added, mademoiselle, which was careless of me. She looked the very picture of a young man outraged. Too young for a beard; not too young to defend his honour.

  “Putain!” Her accent thickened, and she slipped back into her native language. “You arse-licking, low-life son-of-a-whore!”

  It pleased me to have her insult me through temper, and without irony; it argues loss of control. And leads to my long-deserved victory.

  I smiled. “You are dead, I believe.”

  “Go fuck your mother!”

  “Alas.” I gazed down at her with all the annoying complacency I could assume. “I have not the resources. That would require necromancy, at the very least. Although, were I you, I would be hoping there was a way to raise the dead….”

  She had spoken in French, I in English, so it was I who gained the applause of the collection of badly dressed pupils. A grudge-match is always liable to draw an audience.

  And they are helping me by their presence, I thought. It is certainly time that M. Dariole’s pride was publicly humbled. Albeit, regrettably, I cannot kill her in this bout. But I can cause pain. I can punish her.

  A surge of energy went through me. I saluted briefly, gave the young “man” my shoulder, and immediately thrust in again to put her on the defensive. Each attack came close enough to make the heart jolt. Silence surrounded us: no noise but for the thud of hose-clad feet on the floor, and the dull clack of rebated steel. The sun striped the planks down towards the window, and I drove her thus far, until a white blaze of light covered her face.
I made a thrust that caught her weapon, bound it with mine; made to have it out of her hand by wrenching, full strength—

  She dropped the blade in avoiding me.

  I thrust again, determined to hit her while she was defenceless—and she caught her falling sword in her left hand, the steel guardrings reversed over her fingers, and parried me as no man should be able to do. Insult added to injury: with a sword that is badly balanced and not her own!

  She pushed the tip of her rebated blade up past my arm and into my chin, banging my lower jaw into my upper jaw so hard that my teeth clicked.

  The pain was surprisingly disorienting for such a stroke. I have bit my tongue, I realised. A bead of light slid in my vision; I realised it to be her blade driving for my face.

  By instinct, I evaded, but clumsily. I heard a man laugh.

  “Very well!” I spat blood on the floor, caught up a blunt dagger from one of the stands against the wall, and, with better timing than she, took her blade out of my way with the drop-hilt of the smaller weapon. “This is how I, Rochefort, fight—”

  I slammed a cut in with my rapier that dipped past her defence and rose, landing blunt edge first, full across her chest.

  Her face twisted in pain and she squealed heartily, stumbling back a pace. I could not help but smile. I, alone, of all men here, know why.

  I stepped forward and lifted my dagger up, taking her sword out of that uneasy left-hand grip. I flung the weapon skittering noisily across the floor. At the same moment I reversed my rapier and hit her a blow in the belly with the pommel, and with satisfaction saw her stagger back and come up hard against the wall with her shoulders, wheezing for breath.

  Any young man, or any experienced man, would admit himself defeated. Dariole came off the wall and into a fighting stance again, before I could thrust home; facing me with only her dagger.

  “Dagger against rapier and dagger?” I smiled, letting her have her moment to breathe—because it would make the next moment the sweeter. “You have a high opinion of your skills, boy.”

  A grin broke out on her features. “Yes. And my opinion’s justified!”