Mary Gentle

by A Sundial in a Grave-1610

  “I can show you.” The old woman put her dirty hand on my arm. “It isn’t far. I can show you why the….” Evidently a French word deserted her. “I can demonstrate that I have no need of a third party to tell me who you are.”

  “An invitation to go through a maze of black caves? I thank you.” I inclined my head mordantly to the Italian woman. “I think not.”

  Her gaze remained steady. She shook her head very slightly; it might have been a palsy. “I am not as skilful as the London Master. You will have to come with me and answer questions.”

  For one moment, I took it to be the term of a School of Defence.

  Fludd, I thought, a moment after.

  Plausible. But I have seen too much deceit in the past to be convinced by mere sincerity.

  At the worst, it is another dozen of Marie de Medici’s murderous gentlemen. If they have found I am in England, it is a likely place to murder me. However, I have a sword and a pistol; it will go hard if I cannot use these caves to avoid an ambush, if I know where it is set.

  And that, I believe, means that grandmère here must speak to me.

  I stood up briskly, offering her my hand. “Show me, then.”

  The hand she put into mine was bare of any glove, and had any number of old white scars and calluses on it, but it did not have the bundle-of-sticks feeling that old court ladies often have; it was still a little plump.

  “Valentin, Valentin, Valentin!” she almost sang. Her weight, as she used her grip on me to rise, was also more than I had anticipated. “I’m not mad.” The fingers of her other hand picked at her skirts. “Or witch. I am not strega. Follow me, now. You will need the lantern. Bring it.”

  “I have noticed, also,” I said, as I picked up the lantern, “that women are a little prone to giving me orders.”

  She put her hand to her mouth and giggled like a young girl.

  An appearance of compliance may win many things. Holding up the lantern, I gestured for her to precede me.

  She led me on and in, this cave proving low-roofed but long. The rock under my boots felt dry, barring two or three standing pools. I walked hunched over. Twice the ragged, pinnacle-studded roof soared abruptly up into heights so great that the lantern-light could not pierce the blackness—and once into a wider space, that echoed like the vastnesses of Our Lady in Paris. Rock showed runnelled and melted, like candle-wax. Beyond that, the roof came down low enough that even the old woman must hunch over. I took care to look back in the lantern-light at regular intervals, memorising the landmarks of our way. A shiver went through me, anticipating what I might meet in this labyrinth.

  “Here, Valentin. I live here.” The old woman ducked her head under a natural arch, and I followed, finding by lifting the lantern that I could stand up beyond it.

  The surface of the limestone walls shone cross-hatched in every direction. Not with scratches, I realised as I gazed. With signs of the type that are seen in geometric and occult books. Scratched whitely into the fine surface….

  “Calculations,” I surmised, somewhat ironically. “Mathematics.”

  “It was difficult when I first came here.” Her voice spoke beside me. “Later, I could steal paper and ink from the mill.”

  I raised a brow, sardonic. “Are you not afraid to leave your predictions here, for all future ages to discover?”

  “The river’s level will have risen before they can be understood, and all these caverns drowned.”

  The thought of this cave, and others, filled up with water to the roof, oddly disquieted me. She moved off into the shadowed end of the cavern. I walked in her wake, past the lines of writing scratched into the wall, not quite sure what I glimpsed beyond her.

  Paper.

  I reached out to touch one of the stacks, finding it slightly damp and gritty under my fingers. The lantern showed me that the ink hadn’t run, only spread a little into the fibres of the paper. All of it—I looked around at pile upon pile, higher than the woman’s head, stacking the end of this cave—all of it covered with hen-tracks, scribbles, equations, and diagrams.

  “Here you are.” She held out one undistinguished sheet of paper. “I use the Nolan method, you’ll observe. And that is my own proof of the Bruno Equations, there. I’ve been waiting for you these ten years and more.”

  “Of course you have.” I nodded reflexively, and sighed. True, there was a nest of blankets in one corner of the cave, torn and re-woven as a sow’s nest, but she might have slept in it for a decade, or only a handful of nights—or made it this morning.

  I put the lantern down, reached out, and took the old woman under the chin, my fingers and thumb extending to either side of her throat. Her fingers scrabbled at my glove. I lifted her up on her toes, violently enough that her remaining teeth clicked together.

  So close, she smelled appalling. I looked into her white-rimmed eyes. “All I have to do is close my hand and you will cease to breathe. I assume you wish to live: most men do. Tell me who you are, why you are here, and who told you my name?”

  Her eyes gazed with brilliant warmth. Courage and ease are difficult to fake, so close. Her heartbeat was a little fast under my hand, but not more so than could be accounted for by physical exertion.

  “Who are you?” I demanded.

  “Suor Caterina, born Elena Zorzi, of the Veneto, not far from Padua; but living in Venice most of my life.”

  I had not expected to be answered so easily. “What are you?”

  “I am a Sister of the Poor Clares.” There were vertical lines in her face that all pulled together and met at her mouth when she pursed her lips. “I don’t want to lie to you, Valentin. I was dismissed from the Clares. But I still consider that I am a bride of Christ.”

  The dignity of her words went ill with her stinking clothes, half-naked state, and matted hair. I tightened my grip a fraction and moved my hand upwards, lifting her higher onto her bare toes.

  “Who sent you here? Who told you about me?”

  Wet snail-tracks marked her wrinkled eyes. She sounded breathless, as well she might, with my hand still about her throat.

  “No man sent me. Unless God did. Long ago! I found the place, and waited. It’s all true. Because here you are!”

  She looked up at me with eyes that I swear glowed in the lantern light. I realised I had slackened my grip. She regained her footing on the sandy floor.

  “Valentin Rochefort!” Her gaze moved up and down me in a way that made me feel curiously discomfited. “I did not know you would be so tall—or so strong. And a skilled swordsman, that I might have guessed; I calculated you would be a soldier—that is all those pages, over there. Ostrega! And a brave man, and a clever one. You did not run from the witch; you sought her out. It is such a pleasure, and I am so relieved, and you will forgive a religieux her words, but this is…a miracle!”

  Her ancient face looked, for a moment, like a child’s; a small child who has been given a gift for her saint’s-day or Twelfth Night.

  “I am not used to being looked at in quite such a way,” I observed, standing undecided for a moment. “Why does every man—and now woman!—appear to think me some villain or hero that Fate brings them?”

  Her smile curved into cheerfulness. “But no! There’s nothing special about you, Valentin. You’re a very ordinary man. You happen to be in a useful place, at a crucial time. That is what makes you a miracle!”

  I confess I felt myself almost deflated.

  “Fate has not chosen me?”

  “Well, you are not to be France’s second Pucelle, one supposes.” Her lips moved as if she suppressed laughter. “I do not think you would make a splendid woman in armour, Valentin.”

  “You are perhaps correct….” I did not sheath my sword. With my other hand, I felt in my breeches for the slit to my pocket-bag, and drew out a clean kerchief. I held it out to her. After a moment, she took it in a quivering hand.

  She did not wipe her face. She folded the linen swiftly on a diagonal, and put it on her head, tying
the corners under her chin, making something that if neither coif nor wimple, did at least cover her naked hair.

  “Sit down, madame.”

  “I am used to Suor Caterina. ‘Sister Caterina.’” She sank down to the cave floor and settled on the sand, gathering her multitudinous petticoats about her, so that I could not see her bare feet. Her chest rose and fell swiftly; I wondered if she might be about to have a fit and die. Suddenly she put her hands to her face, and then brought them down again, uncovering an uncommon stubborn expression.

  “This.” I indicated the rat’s nest of papers. “Is all trash, Suor.”

  “I knew this wouldn’t be easy. I was right.” She spoke as if I had not. “I am right. This was the test—if you didn’t come, if you weren’t Valentin Rochefort, if you were the character of a man who kills troublesome old women…I had no way to know: I’ve calculated you ‘soldier’ and ‘assassin’ and ‘spy.’ As to your behaviour, it seemed much more probable that you should be a mere murderer, not an honourable man.”

  I shifted uneasily at “honourable.” “Are you confessing a failure of your foretelling? You know I have killed, but not whether I’m honourable, as men go?”

  “I calculate a man’s actions.” She wiped her withered-apple face with her fingertips. “Not his mind when he does them. There is nothing in the Nolan Formulae to show a man’s heart.”

  I stood very still, things stirring in the back of my mind. “I am less concerned with honour than you think….”

  Squatting, I checked the lantern. Light for another half-hour. Should I go back to the mill? Is there something happening for which this is a planned diversion?

  Except that I can think of nothing which will threaten me, rather than Fludd’s faction. And if his conspiracy falls down about his ears, my heart will not break.

  The old woman smiled. It was obscure to me why an elderly nun whom I had just manhandled should regard me both with apparent affection and amusement.

  “I work with the same calculations as the London Master, Roberto,” she said. “He and I were both students of the Nolan. I am hiding nothing from you, Valentin.”

  She spoke a passable good French, with perhaps an accent of the Veneto, but she might as well have been speaking M. Saburo’s Nihonese.

  “When you say ‘the London Master,’ you mean Robert Fludd.”

  “Yes.”

  “And this ‘Nolan’?”

  “Magister Giordano Bruno, the Neapolitan; dead these ten years.”

  The name roused no memories in me. “What did you study with him?”

  “Heresy.” Her surprisingly sweet smile blossomed on the ruined face. “And the black art of mathematics.”

  “Which leads you to prophesy?”

  “Yes.”

  That Fludd and this woman speak in similar terms means little, I thought. It is not anything unusual: France and the Low Countries have been full of sects and societies for as long as I have lived. Anabaptists, Brownists, Kabbahlists, Puritans. And now mathematicians.

  Half-humorously, I enquired, “And what are you going to tell me, to convince me that you foresee the future?”

  She gave me a stern look that brought to mind her claim to be a nun.

  “I can tell you,” she said, “what has happened to Signore Gabriel Santon.”

  Rochefort, Memoirs

  21

  G abriel?

  It stopped me like a blow to the chest.

  “Madame, you have spent ten years in this cave? I believe not! Evidently you came by way of Paris on your road to England.”

  She regarded me with stubborn refusal.

  “You can tell me about Gabriel,” I added sardonically. “But there is no way that I can check the truth of it, which I suspect you count on.”

  Her expression didn’t falter. “I know how it seems, Valentin. I thought this was the one thing that you could not know, that you would want to know. One thing I can tell you in thanks.”

  “Thanks?” I said, incredulous.

  “There was a great probability that you would come here. But a much smaller probability that you would be a man not willing to kill a mad old woman…I would like to do something for you, Valentin.”

  The level chill of the caverns sank into my flesh.

  If I ask her for any news of Gabriel, it will indicate a belief in her that I do not have.

  I found myself oddly reluctant to gain her confidence that way, even were she mad enough to credit me.

  “You and Robert Fludd,” I began, insistently.

  She shrugged. “We were both students of the Nolan, Giordano Bruno. There were other students. Rome called us ‘Giordanisti.’ I believe they thought us a species of secret Hermeticist society.”

  I shrugged. “The trouble with secret magical societies, madame, is that just because they hold to false ideas about the nature of the world, that does not mean the secret society itself does not exist. Or, that men will not take action on the basis of what they believe to be true. If you and Fludd and other men believe in some heresy of this Bruno…well, then, you do. But if I ask you to forecast what has become of my servant, that implies I give credit to your ideas, and not your mere existence. Madame, I regret I do not.”

  The old woman reached and put her fingers on my arm, just above the gauntlet-cuff of my glove. I could feel her press down on the woollen cloth, against the muscle of my forearm.

  “You needn’t commit yourself to any belief of mine, Valentin. You can consider it the ravings of a mad old woman. God knows, the rest of the Giordanisti have been lost now, to madness, or drink, or the sin of suicide…”

  She seemed to collect herself.

  “When King Henri died, Gabriel Santon at first got sanctuary in the Bastille with the Duc de Sully. He is now alone, in the Chatelet. Valentin, no!—he’s neither hurt, nor put to the question.” The old woman gripped me harder for a moment, then released my arm. “The Queen Regent took him out from the Duc’s train at the first Parliament, the day after the assassination. Now she doesn’t quite dare inflame matters between herself and the Duc, so merely holds him as a prisoner, while the Duc presses for his return.”

  “You’re well informed about French politics for a woman who has spent the past decade in a cave.”

  She smiled, her expression teasing. “I am. But I didn’t calculate the state of France. I read of it in a pamphlet printed here, before they were shipped up to London yesterday. I will never neglect a mundane source, just because I know how to use Bruno’s Formulae.”

  “Convenient,” I remarked; sarcasm possibly too prominent in my tone.

  “I didn’t learn of Gabriel Santon in a pamphlet! Cielo, Valentin, I calculate him a soldier, he’ll survive a prison!”

  Gabriel in the Chatelet? The thought left a sour taste. Only a matter of time before they will put him to the question, if so.

  And if M. de Sully can’t get a client freed from prison, his power is greatly lessened….

  “Gabriel Santon is likely dead in one of the Faubourg kennels,” I said harshly. “I can verify none of this, Suor Caterina. You know that.”

  She felt for her rosary. The lantern’s light moved with the air in the cave. Shadows chased over her face.

  “It’s as well,” she said. “Even my meeting you here, Valentin, by the knowledge I’ve gained this way, makes my further calculations difficult…I believe that the act of calculation itself makes the future uncertain.”

  Her dark eyes shifted. “When two people, myself and the London Master, both set about calculations for a single event—then, how possible it is to bring about that future becomes…cloudy. And so I can tell you little more about the Duc de Sully, and nothing more about Monsieur Santon.”

  If she had said nothing more yet, I would have assumed that to be the hook within the bait.

  “I have a problem with unsupported testimony,” I remarked. “One woman’s word, without evidence, is worth nothing.”

  “One man’s word.” The old Italian
woman looked up from the water-shaped limestone. “Worse than nothing. With Ravaillac dead, who is to say that the Queen Regent desired him to kill Henri, except you? And you’re known as Sully’s man.”

  It chimed so well with my own unspoken thoughts—put aside until I might consider matters at home more fully—that it was ten heartbeats before I realised what she had said.

  I stared at her. “Dear good God—is there anybody who doesn’t know!”

  Exasperation does not, perhaps, lend a man all the gravitas he could wish.

  “Ostrega!” Suor Caterina giggled. “It must seem so, to you. I apologise, Valentin. I was thinking aloud. I’ve become used to talking to myself here.”

  “Or perhaps Fludd rides down here to talk to you? He must, by his own claims, know you’re here. Or if he does not, is that not proof positive of his charlatan-hood?”

  Her laughter faded. “He calculated me long ago as one of the Giordanisti who make their home in a cave, in rags, and so must be mad—this isn’t the first such cave I’ve lived in. Now…you’ll be familiar with that ruse of war, to hide where the enemy won’t look for you, because they know it’s theirs? I’ve made as few predictions about this place as I can, of late years, for fear he’ll find his calculations about it becoming cloudy, and see me under his nose.”

  The woman calling herself Suor Caterina stood up slowly, and with care.

  “I’ll show you a way out of the back of the caves,” she added. “Such a thing will be useful for you to know.”

  I did not entirely discount the possibility of a dozen men with swords in some back corner of the caverns, but I nodded and followed, ready enough with sword and lantern for any ambush that might lurk in these white-and-ivory passages, among the glittering minerals and the still pools.

  “Do I take it you prophesy an escape for me, through here?” I asked sourly, taking my landmarks. “I promise you, I don’t plan to be here long enough to need one.”

  “Few men read the future.”

  She sounded slightly smug. I shortened my stride, so as not to outdistance her. Half in jest, I said, “But you do—and Monsieur Fludd. Or is yours yet another method of astrology to his?”