Mary Gentle

by A Sundial in a Grave-1610

  I held up a hand to forestall comment.

  “We shall, beforehand, have taken a servant, killed him, and dressed him in a costume identical to that of the Prince. When James is stabbed and killed, I shall, in my pretended rage, stab this ‘assassin’ and stop his tongue. Thus, a madman has impersonated the Prince to kill the King, and there is James, dead. Meantime, you shall also play a play here in the London theatres, to declare how great a king the Prince will be, and thus convince the citizens to be joyful. So you may declare ‘long live King Henry the Ninth’ and crown him with an easy mind!”

  I finished with a flourish, and waited for the sky to metaphorically fall on my head. I had my hand ready to draw, though no man could have told it, and my eye on both Hariot and John.

  A bigger bag of foolery you could not open! All the most ridiculous parts of every playhouse spectacle I have watched this last week, all mixed together into an obvious farrago of impossibilities! Now, tell me how great a lunatic is Monsieur Rochefort! I await the explosion!

  Robert Fludd spoke calmly. “For the masque, how if it were set in a great cave? Would that suffice?”

  Hues muttered something, fell silent at Hariot’s gesture; I saw both of them smiling with what seemed to be immense relief.

  “I know one, in the west country,” Robert Fludd went on. “Close by a property of mine. The hart and doe are hunted in the hills there, and there is a cave called by the rustics ‘Wookey’—a very great cave. There is your ideal setting, Monsieur Rochefort. A feast in the caves by torch-light, then the masque, and the regrettable sacrifice of James Stuart.”

  I stared.

  Enthusiastic faces looked back at me. Fludd reached up and patted my shoulder. “I could not tell you, Monsieur Rochefort. It had to be of your own devising.”

  “But,” I said.

  Aemilia Lanier, in her contralto voice, spoke over Hues and Hariot. “The masque is half-writ. You must look over it with me, Monsieur Rochefort.”

  Frankly bewildered, I said, “Masque? You have written a masque?”

  “Yes. I could not tell what would be required in detail. But I have more than half of it, and the rest will be quickly done.” She smiled with unaccustomed friendliness. “The masque is called ‘The Engineer of Shadows.’ And I have titled the play, for London, The Viper and Her Brood.”

  “But—a theatre—” I thought, you cannot take this to be serious!

  “Master Fludd took up the lease on The Rose, when it closed these five years past.” Aemilia Lanier beamed. “So we can have Prince Henry’s Men play The Viper there, as soon as I am done writing it.”

  Fludd took my unresisting arm. “Did you think I would not have calculated the future of this, also? Of course I knew what plan you would devise! I told you, you are our salvation—the man who will kill the King. We will devise more closely later who shall strike the blow. Let me take you inside the house, and bring out a map of Somerset, so you may see where the hunting country is, and where the hills, and the cave.”

  I stood silent with sheer amazement.

  Fludd smiled. “The property which I own there is a paper-mill. I bought it many years ago, when first I calculated where James Stuart would die. It has been a useful business to me. Those clothes and rags you see over there? They will be going down to Wookey, to be turned into paper. Later today, you should set out with them, and travel to Somerset. You will need to look out the ground before the killing of King James is set into motion, will you not?”

  Rochefort, Memoirs

  19

  M essire Saburo, it appears that I must leave London for a short time—”

  I stopped abruptly, seeing the man of Nihon kneeling on the floor of our lodgings, a doublet spread in front of him, reduced to its component parts of woollen shell, bombast stuffing, wooden belly-plates, quilted linen lining, and buttons.

  I blinked. “What?”

  “Want to wash clothes.” Saburo scowled ill-temperedly. “Sewed up too tight. All little stitches! You do this every two, three day?”

  “I don’t do this at all,” I said, with some fascination. “Why, in the name of the good God—no. Never mind. Messire, I shall be gone from London a week, ten days at most.”

  The samurai peered up at me, and sat back on his heels. “What goes wrong?”

  “What goes…?” For a second, I could have ripped out my hair by the handful. “What could possibly go wrong? It was a fool’s plan, an idiot’s plan; any man with a brain could see it can’t work!”

  Saburo put down his pen-knife. He rose to his feet, making a face. “Fura-da is a fool?”

  “Just such a fool.” I swung about, pacing the room, ignoring the dismembered garment. “You tell me, Messire Saburo—a plan that depends on having the King’s son stab the King in open view of the audience! That will have a servant to put blame on, wearing the same costume as the Prince—which expensive garment it seems no costumier will remember sewing!”

  “You stab servant,” Saburo put in. “Who is already dead. Two death wounds, Rosh’-fu’.”

  “Yes, that too!” I fetched the wall a hefty kick, and turned about to sit on the open window sill, the dogs bawling twenty feet below. Their warm scent drifted up. “But—I can see no way to placate Monsieur Secretary Cecil except by undertaking this journey….”

  I concluded my explanation of Somerset by asking, “Shall I leave you more of Monsieur Fludd’s money?”

  “Hai.” Saburo’s head jerked curtly. “Every man want coins. I am having to pay now, not have credit until the rice-harvest in Nihon, then pay. Money will take longer to get here, but my credit’s good. Is not right. They don’t trust me!”

  “Welcome to the way of the world—here, at least.” I took my purse from my belt, weighing it, and turned the coins out on the table, the better to divide them. “Have you news of your audience with the King, yet?”

  “Hai. Lord-daimyo Seso invites me to court again. There are many men to talk to. Says I shall get see King-Emperor James soon.”

  “That will be the court soon. I doubt you will have seen James before my return.”

  Likely it’s as well I shan’t see Cecil before I leave, or else my tongue might lead me into comment on this stupidity of travelling into the English provinces on his supposed business, now of all times! I need further news of Paris….

  A clatter of boots on the stairs distracted me. Mlle Dariole barged backwards into the room, her arms full. “I’ve got it, but I can’t sew—oh, hello, messire!”

  She dumped down a heap of what was not old clothes, or bed linen, as I at first thought, but plain cloth.

  I finished dividing up the contents of my purse. “Monsieur Saburo, I imagined you would be fitted for English court clothes.”

  He lifted up a spare shirt in one broad hand. Sweat had marked the fabric yellow at armpits and neck. He shook the shirt at me. “Bug eggs!”

  “Bug eggs?”

  “The—” He ran his thumbnail down the garment’s side seam, evidently not having the word for it. “Full of bug eggs!”

  “Those are flea’s eggs, messire,” I said reassuringly. “You may burn them out over a candle. That destroys any such mites as you may have.”

  “Filthy gaijin!”

  The unsewn doublet scattered across the floor at his kick. I prudently left him his coins without mention of them, and set my pack in order.

  “Going somewhere?” Dariole looked out from behind a length of pale linen as she held it up, and the samurai fingered the weave of the fabric. “Did Fludd throw you out, like you thought?”

  Tanaka Saburo lifted his head and looked at me, silently.

  I said, at last, “I needs must take Doctor Fludd a little further into deception.”

  Dariole’s eyes shone mischievously bright. “Oh—he didn’t like the plan? He did? Mordieu, he did!”

  She yelped with laughter. I could not help but sound stiff and on my dignity. “Mademoiselle, while I’m gone, you will attend on M. Saburo in the office
of a page.”

  It may be difficult to swagger while picking up another bolt of linen and flinging it over one’s arm for a samurai’s inspection, but she managed it. “You just don’t want to tell me where you’re going….”

  Somewhat ironically, I said, “I am traveling to look at a hole.”

  She stopped, stood still; her head cocked to one side. The buttons of her doublet were undone again, almost up to her high standing collar. White shirt showed, and I had a sudden uncomfortable apprehension of how warm the cloth would be, how hot her skin beneath it.

  “A hole?” She tried to repress a grin and visibly failed. “A woman’s hole, would that be, messire? Or a man’s hole?”

  “A hole in the ground,” I said crushingly. “It seems Monsieur Fludd owns a cave.”

  “A…cave. Right….” Dariole glanced from me to Saburo: the Nihonese man currently on his knees with linen stretched between his two hands, sniffing at it. He ignored our interchange. She added, in tones of contempt, “In the provinces, somewhere?”

  In French, I said, “Go to court with him, mademoiselle. You are familiar enough with Fontainebleau and St Germain that you can act the part.”

  She offered another out-flung length of cloth for M. Saburo to inspect, and nodded, making no further complaint.

  Instinct moved me to instantly demand, What have you in your devious mind?—whether merely anticipation at Saburo’s admission to the English court, or whether (as I thought) she planned some social atrocity of which Guillaume Markham would be the centre.

  Reason, contradicting instinct, told me she was better left alone. If she has no wickedness in her mind, a question from me will be enough to set her concocting something.

  I continued to pack, watching them bicker over bolts of linen, and felt a sensation unfamiliar to me—of separation, perhaps. I knew it for foolishness. The samurai, irrevocably alien, and therefore excluded from many of this country’s political machinations, I may leave unguarded for a week or two, knowing Cecil has him under observation. The female duellist…am I to leave a young woman who knows half the truth of Henri’s assassination here in London, to make up what she doesn’t know and boast of it the first time it takes her humour to do so? Am I mad?

  No. Not mad. I approach sanity for the first time, I thought grimly.

  There is Mr Secretary Cecil for her, also. And Tanaka Saburo. The samurai is best guard to her, as she is best guard to him—given what’s passed between she and I, a better one than I could ever make.

  Within the hour, I left.

  “Aemilia will finish your masque. She has the play half-done, also.” Fludd stood beside me, his hands clasped behind his back, while I engaged to look over the ambling horse he proposed to have me ride to the west of England.

  I rubbed the dun stallion under the jaw, and the stone horse responded by gazing at me with luminous brown eyes as if he had no idea of a contest of wills with me. “M. Fludd, you tell me that there is a play, to be put on at…”

  “At The Rose,” the doctor completed. “To arouse the citizens from their supposed misery at James’s death, as you said, and to send them out onto the streets in support of Henry. It shall play the same day that the masque is played at Wookey, and that James dies, and then until the coronation. We have a number of the Lord Admiral’s Men—Prince Henry’s Men, as they now are—already at their rehearsals.”

  I am too old for this business, and as great a fool as M. de Sully ever rated me! I never caught any of Fludd’s men listening at the playhouse.

  He plays me, as if I were an amateur—but you will find, Monsieur Fludd, that this will stop, very soon.

  Robert Fludd bowed to the woman Lanier as she walked up between the train of pack-horses, readied for the journey to the paper-mill.

  “So much better to have it done by a genuine poet,” Fludd added, “rather than one of those hacks at The Fortune or The Globe.”

  Lanier gave him a derisory look, as if being cloaked for a journey loosened her tongue. “You can’t afford Ben Jonson, Doctor, to write you a proper court masque! And you fear that Masters Heywood and Decker would put vulgarity into a play—which a woman, of course, will never do.”

  I made her a bow of greeting, concealing a sudden and cheerful amusement at Fludd’s expression. Evidently women are not as easily predicted as the future.

  “You’re writing both play and masque, madame?” I said. “I congratulate you on your skill.”

  Her dark eyes lifted, under lashes that were still thick despite her age. Twenty years ago, men would have thrown themselves under her pretty feet to stop mud getting onto her embroidered shoes and shoe-roses. Now, she reached out for the stout arm of a servant, and swung herself up onto the small sideways-facing platform on the lead pack-horse. I reached up a steadying hand; her fingers warm on mine.

  “A writer has parts of plays and masques always about the place.” Her smile briefly dazzled. “I shall rely on you to look at this cave, of which I have been told much, and instruct me where you wish the players to enter, exit, and give their speeches, for your purposes.”

  “I would have thought Monsieur Fludd might foretell that with ease.”

  Fludd folded his arms. With Aemilia Lanier on the side-saddle, and my height, he now must look up to both of us. It did not seem to discomfit him.

  “Consider this,” he said. “Suppose I tell you, monsieur, that I have calculated by my mathematical skill that you shall return from Somerset to London upon a certain day. What happens then? Conceivably you decide that you shall not, and take great care to arrive back before or after the day I have set. Conceivably, also, this upsets plans I have in hand, and I must do my calculations again, which is no short work. Now given this, Master Rochefort—if you knew a vast deal about how a masque may be successfully used to murder King James, would you speak to the principles about it? You would not. Knowing they know their business…” here he bowed after the English fashion, “…you know they are best not interfered with, and left to arrange matters in their own fashion.”

  “That is easy prediction,” I refuted him. “See what a man does, and then afterwards tell him that thus you predicted he would act!”

  Fludd reached across and took my arm, drawing me down towards the gate of the mill yard. The stallion followed at a twitch of the rein, hooves clopping hollowly in the morning mud.

  “You have more confidence in my predictions than you allow to appear in your speech.” His grasp on my arm did not loosen. “I judge you spoke so to Mr Secretary Cecil.”

  His remark did not come as so great a shock as he wished. Albeit it was less likely Saburo and I should be known to have met Cecil, it occurring outside of the court, a quite mundane intelligencer could have discovered the matter by careful questioning.

  “If all’s foretold…” I shrugged. “If I speak to Milord Cecil, or even your King James himself, it would hardly concern you—you have already predicted the matter, and know you shall succeed, no matter what!”

  Fludd let go of my arm and stepped back, looking up into my face, his eyes slitted against the dazzling sun. “It takes no calculation to tell that Mister Secretary Cecil would forbid you to either kill or openly betray me, yet. He wants all his coneys in one net. A snare to take astrologers, mathematicians, and noblemen, all in one. Does he not?”

  Indeed, you do owe Mr Secretary a great debt. You are neither armed, nor accompanied by armed men, at this moment; I should out with my blade and stick you through the throat like a hog-butcher.

  Quelling disquiet aroused by a memory of how he had eluded me when we fought, I shrugged again. “If I had indeed spoken of you to Milord Cecil, do you suppose I should have returned here?”

  “Any man might guess as much.” Fludd smiled sadly.

  He is a madman, I thought, not letting it show on my face. A few cunning guesses; the putting together of prophecies from gossip and observation…how many such charlatans have I seen attempt the French court? Except that he believes it all, pa
radoxes notwithstanding.

  The sooner Cecil has him under the Tower’s interrogators the better. Then I am done with these perplexities!

  “I leave you in Madam Lanier’s hands,” he said. “Travel down with the rag-carts; you are less likely to be attacked, or to get lost. The leader of the pack-horse train knows the way, fortunately. Our roads are much inferior to those the Duc de Sully so pleases to build in France.”

  The pin-prick stung, but I did not bother to think whether or not it was malice. I was for that moment too bent on calculating how soon I might go and return, how long news commonly takes to get to Robert Cecil from Paris, what actions the Duke my master might take now that Henri’s government seemed to have fallen apart at a stroke…Ravaillac’s stroke.

  How long will the Queen Regent leave him alone? The more it looks that all have abandoned him—Jeannin! and Arnaud!—the less she needs him dead. But if he should recover and come about? Ten days in the countryside is a torment to me now!

  Well, then; I shall make it as short a time as is possible.

  A growing babble of men’s voices made it clear the pack-train was about to leave. I put my foot in the stirrup and swung up into the saddle, easing the stallion’s head down so that he should have no chance of exercising his willpower against mine. I did not look back at Robert Fludd.

  I fornicated with Aemilia Lanier the first night out of London.

  Madame Lanier proved a spiky but surprisingly literate companion on the road. The small platform on her pack-horse put her in close proximity to the very odorous bundles of clothes that made up its load. She, by the time we had skirted the Lambeth Marshes, appealed to my chivalry, and I rode west out of the London suburbs with her seated sideways before me on the dun-stone horse. He had none of the incomparable virtues of my lost jennet, but he was stout enough to carry two.

  “A widow,” she said, not long into our naturally following conversation. “Signore Alphonse Lanier was musician to her late Majesty. It seems that guarantees no pension under her successor.”