Mary Gentle

by A Sundial in a Grave-1610

  Time passed; I was unaware of it. I roused when the fat actor playing the hero struck a rapier through the arras that hid the opening at the centre back of the stage. A pause, then a body fell through the curtains, landing flat, face-down. The blood-bladder hidden in his clothes made an unfortunately-audible squelch, blood squirting out to either side of him.

  “English!” I muttered, in disgust.

  Saburo burst into deep, loud, roaring laughter. “Kabuki!”

  In the silent theatre, the sound of him banging his hands down on the gallery rail echoed. The samurai’s body shook with mirth.

  A split second later, the rest of the audience began to laugh, the pit particularly raucous.

  “Oh well.” Dariole, beside me, shrugged. “They did steal it off another theatre—maybe it’ll work better as a comedy….”

  I thought the actors not so sanguine as she. The fat actor tried desperately to hold together the next scene with a “woman”; a boy younger than Dariole, in a matronly skirt and bodice, a modest ruff hiding his Adam’s apple.

  I put my elbows on my knees, and my chin on my fists.

  As a way to satisfy the complaints of Mr Secretary Cecil …I could not be faulted for such a rejection…am I inspired, or mad?

  I came to myself to realise I might not be the only pattern of madness present: on stage, the boy in a dress performed an interminable scene of supposed insanity.

  M. Saburo leaned past the woman in breeches and spoke civilly to me. “What will you do? This conspiracy. Will you do what minister wants?”

  Slowly, I sat up. “He’s my only access to news from France. That I must have, if I’m to do anything against the Queen Regent, and preserve Monseigneur de Sully. For the moment, then, it appears Mr Secretary has the matter his own way. Therefore, our Monsieur Astrologer Fludd must have his plan to assassinate the King…I’ll give him a plan.”

  “You will?” Dariole sounded doubtful.

  “You said it to me, Monsieur Dariole. Half the plays in London have king-killing as a theme. Well….”

  For all the awkwardness between us, I could not help smiling at her expression.

  I pointed out at the stage. “From where could it be better to steal a plot to kill a king?”

  I spent the next few afternoons in the theatres of Bankside and the City—in most of which, it appeared, Mademoiselle Dariole already had the entrée. Fludd did not contact me immediately, for which I was grateful. I need the time.

  Dariole did nothing other than what a foreign boy with a fat purse might do: that is, find herself welcomed into every crooked game of cards and dice that players play off-stage. She won as much as she lost.

  It annoyed me to note that, where I might not comment on her conduct in the slightest, these players might tease her as they pleased. As the second half of this English May grew hotter, and she acquired herself another wide-brimmed and high-crowned man’s hat to stop her nose pinking and peeling, the pock-marked actor remarked, “You are as careful of your complexion as a little girl, monsieur!” and had nothing for his pains but a rude gesture. I knew very well that, despite what had passed between us, had I said it, she would have drawn sword on me.

  At the thought that I must then have begged her pardon, I grew warm in the crotch. I abandoned her company for the rest of the day.

  I acted in all as if I were no man, who might be capable of desiring her. I was not prone to more of those waking dreams of submission. The ales of Southwark, while detestable in flavour, have at least the quality of making a man sleep without dreams.

  As I pursued the performance of plays, I watched young “Monsieur” Dariole make friends—acquaintances, rather—with the greatest of ease. She entered other people’s conversations with the finesse of a drunken soldier, appeared to think that she knew them down to the bone if they had passed a sleepless and drunken night together, and relied on the use of violence to get herself out of any trouble it might bring her. On the fifth night, I came back to the lodgings in Dead Man’s Place having seen her smack a broken-off dagger blade down the face of a foolish young man behind a tavern, ad I could not for some minutes discover the source of my shock.

  It is no different: broken blade in the face, or a length of noble steel rapier between the rib cage.

  But the boy did not deserve a damaged eye, fool though he was to attack her. Does she begin to be a tavern-bully, Mademoiselle de la Roncière? That is no different in kind to the red-faced, middle-aged husband who bellows and beats his wife. It is all the same pleasure in bullying.

  Have I damaged her, by what I am? Is this what I begin to see?

  Part of me watched, also, for men who might observe us. It would not have surprised me at any hour of the day or night to look up and see the face of Robert Fludd, or his three mathematicians, or the woman, Lanier. I know when we will meet again, he said.

  This night, I could see no spies.

  Struggling with flint and striker to light a candle, I succeeded, took my way upstairs in the house, and found, as I unlocked the door to our rooms, a flash of white upon the floor. I bent swiftly, picked up the sheet of paper, glanced rapidly about myself, and listened.

  Nothing moved in the silent lodging-house.

  I read: By Battle-bridge, Tooley Street.

  Nothing more. Not a time. Not a day, even.

  That will be his house, I thought, having now some familiarity with the streets of Southwark, having walked the ground. The message delivered at night, so I am intended to go the following morning.

  I put the candlestick down on the table, shooting a glance out of the mullion windows at the western sky. Something past eight of the clock, and the light almost gone.

  Unless I plan to wander streets full of barred and shuttered houses, the earliest I might make this supposed rendezvous would be after dawn on the morrow. When he will doubtless meet me. And, to his men, there is another of his successful predictions!

  I sat down on my cot-bed, pulling undone the strings of my falling bands, and removing the dust-grimed linen. After I had undone a few of the doublet’s forty buttons, I sat for a moment.

  Does it matter if he has this further triumph?

  In short, no.

  The sooner I arrive there, the sooner I give him this ultimate fool’s plan, the sooner he kicks M. Rochefort onto the street in disgust, and the better that will be!

  I finished undressing, smiling slightly. I can rely on an early rising. Although Saburo might be fast asleep on the floorboards, my cloak serving him for a thin mat, Mlle Dariole was not yet in—and I did not expect her before dawn coloured the streets.

  If she is not dead in the kennel somewhere, over a quarrel at hazard was my last thought before I slept.

  Congruent with my opinion, she staggered in at four of the clock, seeming disappointed that I was not displeased to be woken. I ate, and left M. Saburo for some unaccountable reason kneeling on the wide floorboards with a shirt and a pen-knife, and Mlle Dariole slumped, fully dressed, on the straw palliasse of what was plainly a servant’s bed. She was not asleep; I heard her rambling to the samurai as I walked down the stairs and out into the early light.

  I smoothed the plume of my hat, and set the hat on my head. The street address took me to where I had expected, across Long-Southwark, and down the street parallel to the river. Fludd’s house, now I saw it plainer, extended past the walled garden at the back, to the river, where a stream fed a small water-mill, and I could hear noises from artisan workshops.

  About to seek the house’s main entrance, I caught sight of a figure further down towards the Thames.

  The agent of the Earl of Northumberland, John. He gave me a curt nod, folding his arms and leaning against great gates, that I saw, as I came closer, led into a yard.

  Iron-shod wheels shrieked as I crossed the street. I had to stand back as a great ox-drawn wagon came into the yard, the early-morning moist dust not yet raised by the beasts’ hooves, but their breath steaming in the air.

  “Fo
llow me, master.” John shifted off the wall and walked in.

  I followed him through the yard behind the walled garden—you would not have known that the one property belonged to the other; that I supposed to be no accident. The open space beyond the gates seemed full of pack-horses; great bundles being tied onto the V-frames that hooked over their fat barrel-chests. Servants or workmen—it is difficult to tell with the English—ran about, loading and unloading; it was more chaos than I cared to deal with in my state of bewilderment. Over by the workshop door, great bundles were being slashed open. I glimpsed cloth, but not in bales; in sprawling bundles that looked like cast-off clothes. Voices rang through the morning. Cold air blew off the Thames-river.

  Doctor Robert Fludd, swathed in a gown of black velvet, turned to me smiling, with his sallow cheeks pinkened by the wind. “Master Rochefort! I congratulate you on your promptness.”

  The gnarled mathematician, Hariot, stood with him, in soft leather doublet and Venetian hose; an outfit that would both suit the court and wear well in travel. Investigation among servants at the fringes of court brought me enough gossip to know that Thomas Hariot, for all his paper-profession, had crossed the Atlantic to the New World. The skinny Hues, and small, ancient Warner, men knew less of.

  “The Wizard Earl’s Three Wise Men,” I said, nodding to them, and watching to see if that sobriquet would cause them irritation. Only John glared, and I suspected that to be for the insult to his master.

  “You’re not a man of superstition.” Fludd stated it as though it were incontrovertible fact. “Some study of the Hermetic Arts and magia will not lead you to despise these Three Magi.”

  By the subdued laughter from Hariot and Hues, I guessed he had made a joke. I merely frowned, folding my arms. The flash of a white pinner made me turn my head. Aemilia Lanier stepped between the pack-horses, a stack of paper in her hands—no, not paper, I realised, but pamphlets, such as are sold at St Paul’s churchyard and all through the city.

  “I have what you desire, Doctor Fludd,” I said mildly. “Where will you discuss the matter?”

  “Let us stand out of the way.” He led us, Lanier following, down to the far side of the yard, where a brick wall and pilings held back the waters of the Thames-river. Over on the far side, the rising sun gleamed on the black Gothic spireless church of St Paul’s.

  “Now, Master Rochefort,” Fludd said, rubbing his hands briskly, I thought against the cold. He looked at me with bloodshot eyes. “How is it to be done?”

  The presence of the Thames-river was useful, so close. At a push, I might kill Fludd with one rapier-thrust, and dive in; the river here would be easily crossed by a strong man swimming. Conceivably one of the Magi might be carrying a pistol, but the hope of firing it and hitting me at distance was low enough to make the attempt not unreasonable.

  You do not know it, Monsieur Fludd, but you owe a great debt to Mr Secretary Cecil.

  I nodded downriver, indicating the crennelations of the Tower just rising through woollen river-mist. “I take it your patron won’t be joining us?”

  Common but accurate gossip had the Earl of Northumberland living there in better conditions than most men live out of prison: with his wife visiting, his servants to wait on him, his books, his laboratory instruments that gained him the name of Wizard Earl among uneducated men.

  “I see that he leaves you to take the risks, Doctor Fludd.”

  “There are no risks. Everything is calculated.”

  Fludd spoke as if it were no great matter—so mundanely that I saw there was no way to shake him by suggesting, as seemed true, that Monsieur the Earl could back out of this conspiracy merely by denying he ever heard anything of it. Why should Fludd care, being “assured” of success?

  It comes as second nature to me to attempt the fragmentation of a conspiracy I have joined with the intent to ruin. True, I need not bother with that here. However, it may make them more ready to dismiss the company of M. Rochefort, and that will be fortunate….

  Fludd said amiably, “It is enough for you to know that the Earl supports us, monsieur.”

  “Or to know that you say he does.”

  Thomas Hariot lifted his bearded chin and curtly interrupted. “Henry Percy is with us. He’s our support for putting the young Prince on the throne, in place of the coward, his father—”

  “He is in prison,” I cut in. “Where he can offer no help. You are all men of words and figures. This is why, I think, you need a man of action to carry out your assassination for you and your Wizard?”

  I managed the imitation of a man prickly of his honour well enough. Hariot bristled up at once.

  “Calling him Wizard is as accurate as calling you ‘gentleman,’ Frenchman! Any man of learning and education is like to be called a wizard here. If you insult him on that account—”

  Robert Fludd laughed aloud, holding up his hands. “What did I tell you, Tom?”

  Hariot snorted. “Oh, you were right. I confess it. I have temper enough for two, and the Frenchman irks me.”

  “You are not required to be brothers.” Fludd’s smile softened. He lifted his head to look up at me. I could have done without his amusement. For the plan I proposed, an atmosphere of prickly suspicion would best serve my purpose, not one of reconcilement.

  I raised my brows. “Did you require my assistance, Doctor? Or have you nothing better to do than talk, as is common with conspirators?”

  In the background, Aemilia Lanier did not speak but she smiled. There was ink on her fingers, and smudging the white front of her pinner. I thought: I would sooner put my fool’s plan before Fludd and his mathematicians alone, not with this woman here.

  Fludd spoke. “How do you plan for us to do this, Master Rochefort?”

  “Ah, no, too fast.” I held up a hand. “Hear what I plan to do after it.”

  Fludd inclined his head. The dawn coloured his face. I could not tell whether he was amused, puzzled, or anxious.

  “Your demands?” Now he sounded faintly amused.

  “Money. Passage on a ship.” I shrugged. “Anything else is death for me, Monsieur Fludd, and I am not a suicide.”

  “Far from it. Assume all can be arranged to your satisfaction. How will you proceed with the assassination of King James?”

  I couldn’t help but wince. “Monsieur, if you must speak of it, don’t speak so loud.”

  “No man hears us. I have calculated this. We may, for this time, and in this moment, speak in perfect secrecy.”

  That secrecy was not my concern, I did not wish him to know. My nod of agreement was therefore reluctant. I stood for a moment looking down at him. He crossed his arms, within the hanging sleeves of his robe, and smiled encouragingly.

  “You will think me a fool.” I made it a flat statement, so that they would be ready to disbelieve my apparent false modesty. And be the more outraged, when I sounded a true fool.

  Take me for an incompetent; dismiss me out of hand from this! I can afterwards avoid being killed by your men; I know the precautions to take….

  “As to the plan,” I said. “I tell you what I will not do. I will not work with more men than there are here today, and I will not attempt to kill more men than James Stuart himself. Where many men are to die, there is always one conspirator who will warn a friend. We will have no more Powder Conspiracies.”

  The mathematicians nodded. Thus far, sense.

  “I will not, either, seek out a fanatic madman, such as the man Ravaillac was. Your King James is more…wary…than the late Henri of Navarre.”

  I saw how for wary they all appeared to hear fearful, and were content.

  “James is alert to threats in his carriage, in his bed-chamber, and in court-audience.” Here I gave a shrug. “His weakness, messires, is that he loves both hunting and ceremony. My plan is to take advantage of both.”

  I caught the man John’s eyes on me, dark and intense with suppressed emotion. Whether he took offence at this devil-may-care ex-soldier assassin I play-a
cted, or whether it was ought else, I did not know.

  I swept the group of men with my gaze. “This, then. When James Stuart is next away from court at the chase, let Prince Henry the king-to-be send his father a message, to say that there is good hunting in the county he is in. It may tax you, I suppose, to find somewhere the King has left harts and roebuck alive?”

  To my surprise, the elderly Warner grinned at this.

  “Let the Prince send that message,” I continued, “and when King James is there, let the Prince say that he has arranged a feast and a masque in the King’s honour. You must tell me somewhere in this countryside where there is a grotto, or cave, or clearing, where a masque may be set up. Now every man knows your King James’s love for masques, and how he and his Queen and their children like nothing better than to join in and take their own roles in masques at court.”

  So long as the masque glorifies the Stuart royal line, as I recall from my visit with Sully. But that is hardly a fault restricted to one royal house.

  “Prince Henry shall invite his father to the feast.” I took an imperceptible breath, calm as when I throw at hazard for a great sum. “Courtesy then demands that, since he is present, there is an invitation to the King to take part in the court masque. I advise the role of some ancient divine king for James. And, under cover of the masque—thus!”

  I made a jerking movement with my right hand, at which Hues and Warner jumped.

  “Two inches of steel between doublet and breeches, into the royal kidneys, and King James is as dead as any monarch you have buried in your Westminster church.”

  The sound of iron wheels, oxen, horses, and the oath-laden shouts of the workmen: all seemed forbidden from this small area and group of men. Aemilia Lanier watched me with eyes so brilliant as to glow.

  I gave them no time to think.

  “You said I must strike the blow, you are wrong. Prince Henry must do the deed, since he will be on the stage of the masque with the King and dancers—only he can do it. I shall hide his retreat as the alarm breaks out, then ‘discover’ him bound and captive elsewhere, and so not guilty of his father’s murder.”