Mary Gentle

by A Sundial in a Grave-1610

  Her eyes gleamed with humour when I looked down. Many men will try to be second husband to a widow. With her warmth resting against my chest, and her curving weight supported by one of my arms, I thought it a pleasure to be holding something so womanly.

  “But a playwright, madame?”

  “Poet,” she corrected. “This masque and this play of Fludd’s take time, but the work he assures me I shall be known for is partly done: ‘Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum.’ It is a poem devoted to virtuous women in the Bible, and, by extension, recounts how wrong are men today when they would blame every ill on women. I shall dedicate it to the Lady Arbella Stuart.”

  That name was familiar to me as a cousin of the Stuart King, whom my master the Duke considered to have had as great a claim in ’03 to the throne as James. Aemilia would get small pence dedicating her poetry to a lady kept as the King’s pensioner, and not highly fed.

  I affected surprise. “Will such a thing still be necessary? If you’re the fellow-conspirator of the man who puts King Henry the Ninth on the throne, won’t you be an influential woman under the new reign?”

  We rode out of the habited lands now, where apples were green and hard on the trees. She spoke with a delicate, acid irony. “I suppose I might gain a small pension, proportionate to a woman’s talent.”

  “You will not be a Henriette d’Entragues?” The Marchioness of Vernueil, being notorious for conspiracies, might not be the best example, I thought only as I spoke. Being so much a whore as she is. “I mean, for political influence?”

  Aemilia Lanier supported herself by an arm around my back, and with her head down I could not glimpse her expression.

  “Things are different in England,” she said finally. After a moment, she remarked, “I notice that you do not ask Doctor Fludd one question, monsieur. You do not ask him when you will die.”

  That made me raise my brows. “I would not be so foolish. Have you?”

  She nodded. A black curl crept out from under her linen coif; I took so much liberty as allowed me to tuck it back under the cloth with my gloved finger.

  “These are tales to scare babies with.” I brushed her cheek with my knuckle, seeing her skin smooth, and unpainted, for all the creases at the corners of her eyes. Put her in court dress, she would have admirers at St Germain.

  “He told me I might choose between a long life with poverty under King James, and short, moderate fortune but a name if I follow the fortunes of Prince Henry. If James lives, I am to be one of those who use the pen and pass away unknown. If Henry rules….” She lifted her head, and fixed mewith shiny eyes. She did not weep, but there was moisture in the corner of her eye. “It seems a small thing to you. I have always written, since I was little Aemilia Bassano being raised by the Countess of Sussex and beaten for unwomanly pursuits. I would sell my soul to be in Master Jonson’s place and write for the court. Sometimes I think I have done that very thing. Fludd is a good man, and what we do is just, but he knows more than any man should.”

  I desired to rally her, but I contented myself with putting the reins into my left hand, and patting her own white hand with mine. “Why would I ask him a question that men ask of hedge-wizards and village conjurors?”

  “Master Hariot said the same. I think I am the only one to have asked, and he calls me weak and womanish. I have thought…” her dark eyes lifted, “…that Master Hariot may have too much belief in Doctor Fludd to ask.”

  I laughed. “Or too much sense! What man wants to know the day? It’s enough knowing we must die.”

  The roads of England are worse than any in Europe. The weather stayed sunny and dry, however, so that the train of pack-horses progressed faster than they otherwise might, although much slower than a single rider. We had little enough company on the road through the country called Surrey—indeed, I noticed that we seemed to be avoided by such other travellers as we met.

  Aemilia Lanier roused herself from her meditations to answer my question. “Where do you think old clothes come from? They’re from the dead, monsieur. Fludd’s workers strip them off the plague corpses. A look at the parish records will tell you how good business is of late.”

  I have never been unwilling to take up my sword to duel or go into battle. Imagining myself caught in the arid, deserted streets of London during a plague outbreak…now there is a bad death, I thought. And one I can see any man asking an astrologer-conjuror how to avoid.

  She added, “Once the clothes have been through the boiling and the shredding at Wookey, they lose the contagion. Perhaps before that. The pack-horse men never seem to die of any disease. Then, the rags come back to London in the shape of paper: sermons, tracts. Play-books—which the Lord Chamberlain regards as an equally vile contagion!”

  She smiled. She wore a bum-roll under her petticoats, that I could feel against me when she swayed as we rode. Her bodice was full, nipped in to her farthingale waist. The weather remained hot enough that her travelling cloak stayed rolled up with mine, tied behind the saddle. The simple coif that covered her hair was dazzling white in the sun, like the pinner that covered her shoulders and the upper slopes of her breasts.

  What I could see of her skin there was a little slack with age, but pleasantly rosy as she realised that she was watched. There was some grey at her temples, not covered by the coif, but as I put my arm about her pliant waist, I felt she had an uncomplicated ease with her body that any woman of the French court might have envied.

  Towards later afternoon, coming to an inn at the village where we would stop for the night, she dismounted and met me again after I had stabled and cared for my own beast.

  “Is there a reason for two rooms?” She spoke directly, with none of the teasing and bargaining of a whore. “I have given your name as Master Lanier, but if you do not like it, say so, and I will tell them that you are my brother.”

  It is not the habit of the God-fearing English to be so forward. This smacked more of court life, and her Italian name. Bowing, I said, “You honour me, madame,” and took her arm.

  I like her honesty; I am in two minds about her forwardness.

  Perhaps she suspected as much; it was all the forwardness I got from her. We ate in our rooms, and her way of looking at me bashfully over the meal reminded me that I was a man, a tall man, bodily stronger than she, and a cultured Frenchman besides. I set myself to charm her; she was duly charmed, and when we retired for the night, I upped with her skirts, and went no further forward with my own undressing than undoing of my breeches.

  With her thighs smooth under my hands, a disquieting thought pushed its way into my mind. Is this but a desire on my part to wipe out the first image of me from her memory? No man likes to feel at so much of a disadvantage, being seen helpless, beaten, and kicked.

  My prick woke to the feeling of her warmth under my palms, and I condemned the thought to oblivion. I drew out of my pocket a linen prophylactic, and tied it about my member, concealed from her view by her skirts and petticoats—I doubted it tactful to mention my certainty that, if she would offer her goods to me, they were likely more than a little shop-worn, and I had no desire to find myself boarding a fire-ship.

  When I had her dancing on my stiff cock, her self-possession stripped away, and when I used my hand on her (having learned somewhat in Paris in my years), and brought her to uncontrolled release, I swallowed her shout with my mouth and felt obscurely vindicated.

  At the same moment, perhaps by some awkwardness of my body, or lack on her part, I felt my own climax departing unsatisfied.

  I fell beside her, unspent, as my breathing subsided in the long evening light. Frustration tensioned my muscles—and she has not noticed, I saw. Lost in her own pleasure.

  Poor bitch . My anger deflated with my prick. She will be past the age to give sons, and a widow with no money…no wonder she will play the whore to gain allies wherever she can.

  Aemilia’s voice broke the silence. “Are you thinking that Doctor Fludd bid me do this, so that you would talk to me af
ter sex?”

  I rolled over and smiled at her. “If he’s right in what he ‘calculates,’ I have no secrets from him. No, I was not thinking that, Madame Aemilia. I was assuming—perhaps all too confidently—that Madame has entertained herself with me for her own pleasure.”

  She chuckled. It was a ladylike sound for one so recently abandoned to grunting, heaving pleasure. Still, as the proverb has it, No court lady does not shit.

  “That’s not too great a confidence, monsieur. You’re a tall man of your hands, and I rather think I have been entertained indeed.” She rolled over onto her side, her soft breasts shifting on her rib cage, and slid her hand from the hollow of my neck, over my chest, and down the hair of my belly towards my male parts. This distance being too great for her—she was not a tall woman—she had to sit and lean forward, by the time she reached toward my balls.

  I took her hand and put it away from my prick.

  Besides the undiplomatic presence of a prophylactic, I will not risk such a failure twice.

  “Regrettably, I am not a young man, madame. But if you would be entertained otherwise, you have only to let me know.”

  I chased her shivers down her soft belly with my tongue, playing with that woman’s mouth that God has set in their lower parts, until she clawed at the mattress, sweating and wrenching herself about.

  Unawares, I felt myself overcome by an odd feeling of contempt. We are none of us dignified in sexual congress, but to have this older woman as abandoned to pleasure as any young maid….

  “Some woman taught you this!” she gasped.

  I had a sudden image of Aemilia, her streaked hair uncoiled as it was now, with a woman’s head between her cool, plump thighs.

  And if it were Dariole, in her men’s clothing, whose face lifted bright-eyed and breathless from a woman’s secret parts—?

  Madame Lanier underwent that convulsion which in the female denotes pleasure, and I astonished myself by spending, helpless, with as much violence as if it came up from my toes; shooting my seed into the linen and the depths of the mattress, taken helpless and unaware by my sudden imagining of Arcadie de Montargis de la Roncière with a female lover.

  An hour after noon the following day, I rode ahead on the poor excuse that I wanted to scout the countryside. A high covering of cloud left the sky grey, but the world warm and remarkably clearly lit. I slowed to a walk after my initial gallop.

  If Madame Lanier has her best days behind her, where are mine? I doubt her a handful of years my senior. If she is clownish for desiring to feel desirable…ah, but she is a woman! For men, it’s different.

  The pebbles and rocks in the ruts of the road stood out clearly. The sound of the mount’s hooves on the earth, the rustle of wind in thick-leafed hazel hedges, the sun’s heat on the woollen broadcloth of my sleeve, and the slight soreness of my prick, fretting against my under-linen; all these were present to me in a clarity of light, pressed down on by the unforgiving sky.

  Denial is impossible. All my obsession is still for a young woman who is less than half my age. For a young woman who is more a young man than she is a demi-whore like Lanier.

  Even the rocking motion of the saddle made my flesh hot, stirring at the thought of Mlle Dariole.

  You are well over twice her age. Any man at court would take you for a rich shop-keeper, in search of a poverty-stricken noble family who will sell him their child-bride!

  I felt my face heat, with more than could be accounted for by the Spring sun.

  Marry her? Dariole would howl in her scorn.

  And middle-aged shop-keepers with fat purses do not seek out boy-girls who look at their best in breeches, I reflected. Why not take Lanier? Separate her out from Fludd when Cecil and his men take the conspirators; let her express her gratitude and warm my bed back to Europe! She’s perfect: a woman of experience, age, favourable looks, intelligence; not liable to be shaken by my profession of conspiracy…

  I could not get out of my mind the memory of Dariole bawling like a five-year-old in front of the house in More Gate, all her dignity and young pride gone with the shit soaking her clothing, and running off her boots over the cobbles. At that moment, my sympathy went out to her, moved by nothing more rational than a kind of…fellow-feeling, one might call it.

  And she abandoned even the memory of being humbled within an hour of it happening!

  Oh, I don’t doubt she plans to hurt this Guillaume Markham if she can, but still, to come back so quickly from such a catastrophe to her pride….

  My ruminations stopped as the dun stallion paused. We stood on the crest of a hill, at a forked road. The light made the ranks of receding western hills in front amazingly clear. I turned in the saddle, seeing the pack-horse train curving slowly up the bottom of the slope, and shortened the reins so I might wait for the guide.

  Clear as the diminishing hills, I saw one thing which I could not hide from myself.

  Rather than bed Aemilia Lanier again, you would be in Guillaume Markham’s place, and take whatever humiliation it is that Mlle Dariole is devising for him.

  It is not so easy as a matter of will, to abandon a woman with whom one is perversely besotted.

  But it’s done and over; I have made my apologies to her; there’s no more to be said.

  I should watch over her, I thought. As well as the need for her discreet silence, justice would have me see her safely back to Paris—but at the moment she is safer away from the Queen Regent here. Although Marie de Medici will have agents in London soon, if she does not now….

  And if Milord Cecil decides I am more useful being exchanged for some favour of the new Queen Regent, he’ll send me back with any Frenchman with whom I am associated. That is my risk; it should not be Dariole’s.

  But it is.

  I’ll write a report that’s all M. Cecil could wish, I reflected, as the pack-train creaked and whinnied its way up towards me. If I didn’t think at least one of these horse-drivers to be Cecil’s spies, I’d abandon this journey and make it up.

  I need a gap within which I can slip back into France, and bring M. de Sully what I know. Any delay may be fatal: who knows when Madame the Queen Regent will decide herself safe enough to do without him? If his influence weakens, is he in less danger, or more?

  Heavily laden pack-horses passed me. I touched heels to the stallion’s sides, having him out of a clump of new grass, and fell in behind the train.

  We spent that night in a deep, steep-sided valley, but Madame Lanier had cause to be disappointed when I bid her hire two rooms at the inn: one for herself and one for her “brother.”

  Her cheeks flushing at the insult, she said, “That is the disadvantage of older men. They have the much more skill, but they are so rarely up to the occasion!”

  Choosing to deliberately sever relations, I returned, “I hope your poetry for the masque is less stale than your insults, madame,” and had the bitter content of seeing her march off, head high. It would, I thought, be less wearisome to quarrel than to spend nights I did not desire to, fucking her.

  She is no prophylactic for me, against desires for Dariole. I will therefore withstand all on my own.

  On the sixth morning out of London, we passed a town called Wells, graced with a heretic cathedral, and came to Wookey. Madame Lanier left me without a word, to go in company with the miller’s wife and cousins, while the pack-train began to unload. I found the miller, and showed him the letters Robert Fludd had given me for the purpose.

  “Certainly, Master Herault.” The heavy-set man filled leather lungs and sent a shout cracking across the mill yard. “Edward! I’ll loan him to you now, master.”

  A yellow-haired youth, fat and red-faced in the English way, trotted from the horses towards us.

  The miller added, unselfconsciously, “He can take you up to look at the Witch’s Cave.”

  Rochefort, Memoirs

  20

  W itch’s cave?”

  I suspected a game of “cozen the foreigner,” even conf
ronted by this serious-faced English yeoman.

  “Up at the Wookey Hole. Witch has been there since my great-grandfather’s time. Though I suppose Doctor Fludd and her, they’d get along well enough. Ned! Get over here, you dummock, and do what the master wants. Master Herault, this is my son, Master Edward Field.”

  The English boy bobbed a rustic bow. I had supposed some man would be set to watch me, and report back to Aemilia Lanier if I did anything Fludd might not like. A twenty-year-old boy with a cudgel at his belt instead of a sword? I raised my eyebrows. I have never entirely understood whether this brand of Englishman is a gentleman or a peasant.

  He led me north. The land to the south was all apple trees now, white blossoms laying across the green Levels; less advanced than the northeastern country that we had come from. We strode up the track from the mill to the cavern, he in front. I reflected that I had no inn’s man-servant to clean this mud off my boots. Edward Field remarked on the unusual late Spring, and twisted off a sprig of hawthorn flower from the hedge that we passed. He tucked it into one of his button-holes.

  I pointed at his russet doublet breast. “Why, monsieur?”

  “No reason in particular, master.” He began to babble of apple-fields, coppiced trees, and the height of the stream for turning the mill-wheel—anything except answer my question about something that had all the hallmarks of peasant superstition. He did not have his father’s equanimity.

  If the peasants locally think like this boy, it will be of use to Fludd in keeping any man out of the caves.

  My interest in agriculture and arboriculture is less than minimal. I observed that the road up to the caverns was a mere track, full of flints and loose stones, and streams of rain-water running down over our boots. Half a day of courtiers and servants up and down here and it’s a stream-bed, a marsh, a bog!

  I reined in my thoughts. But then, that is no true concern of mine.

  It’s an incurable problem of the agent playing a false game: so much concentration brought to bear often makes it a true one.