Mary Gentle

by A Sundial in a Grave-1610

  Three weeks. Precisely: three weeks and three days. June coming into its last week.

  Is this to be how it is? Diminishing enquiries as weeks become months, become years?

  Cecil’s latest curt missive lay under my doublet, against my shirt; a word or two confirming that the Lord Lieutenant’s enquiries—so far as they might go without causing suspicion—found nothing.

  Found nothing yet, I corrected myself.

  From this higher station on the path to Wookey Hole, I could count at least a hundred men among the tents: some being actors, dog-handlers, props-masters, armourers, and sword-instructors, but the most of them servants, boys, and a number of women too well-dressed or idle to be anything but harlots, waiting the time when King James’s hunting party should finally be persuaded to join us. Where is he now? Bedfordshire? No, Devon. Both Cecil and Fludd—unknown to each other—agree.

  As the last pack-horse went past, and I could walk on down the track, I smelled the not-unpleasing scent of horse-droppings, and the sun on dry grass. A skylark sang high in the pale sky. I know where none of them are, I thought. Gabriel. The Duc. Only Cecil’s reports assure me M. de Sully still walks unharmed. As for Dariole….

  Echoes of loud, harsh language disturbed me as I approached the mill. Englishmen standing in groups, talking the one with the other, but their faces further apart than is common in France, and with little of that aid to discourse that gesture gives. Cold-blooded English, in high-necked doublets, and wide stuffed trunk-hose, all in the court fashion—men crowding and hurrying about their business, in and out of the mill, up and down between the tents and the bridge over the mill-stream, rolling barrels of stage-decorations to be brought up to the main cave.

  And no man knows whether we must be ready today, or a month from today. How long must I allow myself to be compelled to stay here?

  Leave aside, ‘Where is King James?’ I thought, stepping with some care in the straw. ‘Where is our young Prince?’ Would it not be amusing if Fludd has miscalculated, and his Henry Stuart is a picture of filial piety, and never arrives here?

  As I set foot on the mill-bridge, the mill-owner’s son came hurriedly towards me. Ned Field did his best to meet my gaze. I politely did not draw attention to the fact that he had not, as yet, re-entered the Wookey caves. Even though his Witch was nowhere to be found—I having taken the precaution, when I first arrived, of removing her eight miles north, to where Cecil’s company of thirty horsemen, under one Captain Spofforth, concealed themselves in a great gorge in the limestone rock.

  Sister Caterina had been waiting ready to move in the first cavern, when I rode up to the Wookey caves, with her most essential documents wrapped in rags.

  “At least be decent,” I had instructed her, passing the skirts and bodices I had brought with me from London.

  She dropped a woollen skirt over her head, despite the summer heat, and thrashed her way up through it, buttoning it with nimble fingers, and lacing the bodice. “You are concerned only that I should not be a disgrace to you, Valentin?”

  “Precisely.”

  “Ostrega!” she had remarked, but would not consent to tell me why she laughed.

  “I have no belief in your prophecy,” I said as we climbed the chiseled steps to the open air, craning my head to avoid the hanging limestone spikes. “But, if you have overheard anything from the mill-workers, or seen anything…do you know anything of where Mlle Dariole might be? Is it possible they have brought her here?”

  Caterina’s limpid dark eyes shifted away from me. The sunlight outside showed her face dirty and evasive. “Sometimes it is better not to know what is possible, Valentin. Better to wait, and discover what is.”

  Exasperation moved me to rant—to plead, even; and to swear oaths a man should not in front of a religious woman. I could not persuade her. I put my hand down and closed it around her small shoulder. “You will have used your mathematics, signora, don’t tell me you have not! Is she alive, at least?”

  “That, I cannot tell you for certain. It is…possible.”

  Her tone was not that of a woman who finds it inarguable good news.

  “Possible? ‘Alive, but imprisoned?’ ‘Alive, but not for long?’ Come—what? Tell me!”

  She only shook her head, refusing to say anything more.

  I told myself I need not believe her any more infallible than I believed Robert Fludd to be. That, I resolved in my private mind, as I set up and began rehearsals of the assassination-masque.

  Now, on the mill-bridge, with machinery rumbling dully in the air around us, I turned to business with Field fils. “I’ve timed the walk. Royalty will be getting their banquet cold, if they must use the mill-kitchens. But that’s a constant ill with court feasts. Fontainebleau is the same.”

  “Sir.” Ned Field nodded. He muttered words. I at last made them out to be, “Your tailor’s looking for you, Master Herault, sir.”

  Neither my height nor my face should, ideally, be the first things noticed by men; both being aids to identification, and so not helpful to a spy. Noticeable clothing is better, distracting from all else. I’d commandeered a tailor who came down with the players, and (despite their complaints about leaving masque costumes unfinished) had him make me a suit in oak-green satin, with gold silk ribbons and points; the doublet slashed to show a gooseturd-green lining. Only the final fitting now remained. Then, with the feathers in my hat dyed a similar colour, I should have all of Fludd’s men despising the foppish Frenchman. That never hurts, either.

  “He wants me? Good.” I slapped Field on the shoulder, and followed the direction he indicated, down among the tents. I brushed off other men’s requests as I walked, with a curt, “Later!” I had taken the precaution of making a roundabout trip of the camp be my business every day, and so made men used to my presence at irregular hours. Some of my perambulations took me south, into the endless flats and marshes of the Levels; some towards Wells, or round by the hillocks north of Wookey, towards the great cleft stone gorge. That enabled me to contact Captain Spofforth. A man who is anywhere at any time is nowhere suspicious.

  Where, in desperation, might a man begin to look for Mlle Dariole? I thought.

  If I’m to consider the unlikely, perhaps she’s escaped their custody and traveled back to France. I could forgive her an impatience with England and my business. She is rash enough, also, to think the Queen Regent would not have an interest in her. Perhaps she is even now back on the estates of de la Roncière….

  The English sun fell hot on my back. I wiped away sweat. My thoughts by association went from Queen Regent Marie de Medici to my master the Duke. Of whom I know nothing certain since a month after Henri’s death—only Cecil’s acknowledgement that the English Ambassador has met briefly with him at the Arsenal, and a warning been passed on.

  To be too dependent on one patron is another reason to dislike my position in England, I considered, as my stride ate up the ground.

  Lost in thought, I was not aware of the tailor until the small man himself tapped my elbow. I stopped. He smiled, gap-toothed, panting.

  “I will pay you when it’s done,” I said automatically, as one does with tradesmen. The little man’s name escaped me; I recognised him mostly by the pale strawberry mark on his left cheek. “Is it done?”

  “Monsieur can have it this time tomorrow. But I didn’t come for that, sir. I thought you might like to know—there’s a countryman of yours just turned up. Talks the same French language you do, sir.”

  A man spying at Wookey who speaks French—

  Expansively cheerful, the tailor added, “And I wondered if you might recommend me to him, sir? He wasn’t what you’d call court-dressed.”

  It’s the Medici! I realised. At first cold as Winter ice with rage, and then burning with a savage joy. The Queen Regent has at last found where I am, and sent another man to kill me.

  “Where?”

  The tailor had his gaze focused about my twelfth button, possibly because he found it pai
nful to look up at a taller man. He startled at the harshness of my question. Wilting slightly, he pointed at the paper-mill.

  “Down there, sir; I saw him go to stable his horse.”

  I set off downhill without a word, heels skidding on the hot grass, yanking the Saxony rapier out of my scabbard as I went. Too much time spent as quartermaster and Colonel of this play-actors’ regiment! Now let me relieve myself of anger by taking up the Medici’s gauntlet—and letting her know what she may expect from Valentin Rochefort.

  Mud and worse splashed up my boots as I crossed the mill’s paved stable-yard, half-running. I plunged into the stables.

  The light shining in at the entrance, succeeded by dimness, blinded me for a vital second.

  As my vision cleared, I saw a man looking round from hitching up hay into his mount’s manger. A man in a strange masque-costume all of layered linen over-robes tied with a sash, his black hair drawn up in a brush-shape at the back of his head.

  Two weeks and more since I have set eyes on him: he seems newly strange to me . Especially in his silence. “Saburo?”

  His black eyes shone, unreadable in the dimness.

  A slighter figure stepped around the horse, that had lowered its head to champ, and threw down the brush that had just curried the beast.

  Realisation jolted through me.

  Dariole.

  “I…am forever meeting you in stables, mademoiselle!” A stab of joy went through me. I stepped forward, intending to swing her up into my arms. “Messire Saburo, indeed you are to be congratulated!”

  The samurai grunted. He stepped between me and her, swinging saddlebags over his broad shoulders—and walked past me energetically enough that I must step hastily out of his way.

  I turned about, staring after him. “Saburo…?”

  Pain slammed through the back of my thigh.

  As if I had been struck a blow with a workman’s sledge-hammer. I recognise such pain.

  I looked down.

  Something glinted in the light from outside.

  It took me a moment to realise what I was seeing.

  A black metal blade wide as my thumb, and twelve inches long, stuck out of the front of my trunk-hose.

  Out of the front of my thigh.

  Metal dripping with red blood…that ran down the flat of the steel, and trickled from sharpened edge and point. Wet red blood spreading out almost invisibly, but fast as spilt water, into the burgundy cloth covering my right leg.

  Pain wrenched through me so hard that I could not cry out.

  A rapier . Struck through the thigh from behind, with a sword. Oh dear God, the artery?

  Blood ran and dripped, pooling in front of me, soaking into the yellow straw inside the stable. I tilted, slowly; fell—did not desire or intend to; knew, even as I did it, what the cost in pain would be—but fell, as a weakness went through my leg and took it out from under me.

  The dripping blade jerked back, vanishing inside my leg; then pulling away with a sickening sucking noise.

  I pitched my shoulder against the wooden wall of the stable, full weight hitting it, hearing it creak. I tried to look about me; tried not to fall on my own sword that I held.

  A dark silhouette stepped towards me, in the light from the stable doorway. Pain blurred my vision. I could not see her face. A harsh, absent part of me realised, Such strength in her wrist and shoulder, to put her point clear through a man’s limb! The rest of me stood on the point of freezing like a green boy. Seeing the blood-dripping sword sticking out of my flesh before my rational mind identified it broke me out in cold horror-sweat.

  I yelled out in anguish. “Dariole, why?”

  Her sword caught the light, flashing forward.

  I brought my Saxony rapier up and took her edge on the flat metal ribbon guards. No more than the triggering of instinct. The screech of sharpened metal against metal set my teeth on edge. I tasted blood—had bitten my lip, when the sword thrust clean through wool and linen, skin and muscle; piercing the meat of my thigh a span below my groin.

  “Dariole! It’s me! Rochefort!” For a heartbeat I had hope that, yes, she had mistaken me for another man; that this was error on her part.

  She flicked into a return; her sword going for my chest.

  I shoved with my shoulder against the wooden wall, hard enough that impetus got me upright, balanced in a swordsman’s stance, all weight on my left leg. I parried, swords clashed; her guard catching and bruising my thumb-joint.

  So close to death, salt sweat ran down into my eyes. I felt blood pooling in the leg of my drawers. Not the pulsing spurt of an arterial wound. I am not a dead man standing here. Yet.

  “What are you doing!” I yelled, fending her off as the dark figure thrust, my other hand by instinct drawing my dagger. And yet I cannot hurt her. The wall at my back held me upright. “Dariole! Stop!”

  The light caught on her blade as it licked out. I got a waft of the smell of blood, my own blood, that tightened my throat. She dropped her point swiftly under my hand and cut.

  Cloth ripped across my belly as, with a frantic reflex, I slashed her blade out and away with my dagger. Every muscle tense, waiting for my stomach to fall open and spill intestines—

  No pain.

  In peripheral vision below, I caught the flapping of slashed wool below my belt, trunk-hose opened, stuffing leaking out.

  She took a step closer. I saw her face in the brown-gold light. She frowned like a child engaged in school-work. There was not time to think that I was fighting to live: her sword cut back, curving up from the straw-strewn earth towards my groin.

  I caught her blade under mine, forced it down—relaxed the necessary fraction that would bring her sword sliding up the length of mine in a rebound, and made the twist to catch it between my guard and cross-hilt, that must either disarm her, or break her blade—

  She thrust her dagger-point into my ring-guards instead, ripping up the brown kidskin of my gauntlet; locked her hilt with mine, and kicked me hard up on the outside of my wounded right thigh.

  Pain whited out my vision, my thought.

  Pain in my hands did not tell me I fell; I was too disorientated to recognise the earth under me. Dagger gone, sword gone; wrenching myself over with a choked gasp, so that I did not lay on my butchered leg—

  “You son of a bitch.”

  The voice of Dariole, Arcadie de Montargis de la Roncière, hissed at me, I couldn’t tell from where. Ahead? Behind? I scrabbled with my left leg, to put myself against the wall and be defended.

  I put my right foot down, to push myself upright.

  Blood squelched in my boot. Pain shot through me from knee to hip, harsh enough to rip a scream out of my throat. I fell heavily back down.

  “You never told me.” Dariole’s whisper filled the silence, after my shriek. “You never told me he could use me as a hostage.”

  Her voice came from beyond anger. I couldn’t see. Coming laggardly to the reason why, I wiped streaming tears of pain hastily out of my eyes.

  Sunlight flooded the dusty shadows of the mill’s stables. I lay with my back to the wall. Past her now, closer to the exit. The light fell full on her.

  She stabbed at my face with her rapier. A shaft of sunlight caught some brightness about her face—her teeth exposed in an expression that would be ludicrous in cold blood. A mad clown’s grin.

  Grunting, without sword or dagger, I flailed wildly with my arms, praying the wool of my doublet might absorb some of the cut. Eighteen inches of her blade, from tip to near mid-point, dripped dark. I spasmed to avoid it. “Dariole!”

  Cloth ripped down my right arm. I could neither see, nor judge, nor get up from where I huddled. Her sword’s point skewered into my biceps, close by the healed scar that Fludd left.

  I’m going to die here, I thought, with such perfect clarity that I was not afraid. Disturbingly, I felt relief. The death-wish of the professional duelist: it’s over, it’s done, I need not keep fighting, I can rest.

  No,
I have never given in to that.

  The tip of her sword blade entered my focal distance and paused.

  The brown shade in the stables only let me see the white of her ruff above her dark body. Light ran up her blade as she lowered the tip.

  Calculations went through my mind unnoticed. Grab her sword and I’ll be gutted by the dagger from her off-hand. Kick her legs from under her, and a foot of steel goes into my belly. If I can kick.

  “Rochefort,” she said.

  I heard a ragged, raw, new edge to her voice, just in that one word. Her stance was economical. I saw the abandonment of any flourish that was not directly aimed at killing. By her face, it could have been a week since she last slept.

  The automatic instincts of a duelist assessed her. Sleepless, she’ll lack stamina; but she’s the more dangerous because half-crazed.…

  As Valentin Rochefort, the man and not the duelist, I wanted to push myself forward and sprawl on my face, at the toes of her boots.

  You did not tell me.

  She could have put her point into my throat and I would not have noticed. It was realisation that went through me.

  I did not beg.

  I choked out, “I’m sorry!”

  Something in her expression altered. In the brown-gold light, I saw her lips pull back from her teeth, like a man eating something that produces in him the greatest disgust.

  Sweating, feeling the weakness of my wound bleeding heavily, I managed to separate in my mind the young woman holding this sword from the last dozen inches of its length. Which is nothing more than plain English forged steel; a blade she may have picked up in any bladesmith’s workshop. Except that if I do not speak the right words to this woman, that part of this blade will be what painfully kills me.

  Without thought, I reached out and closed my right hand around the blade, where it hovered in front of my gut.

  Only my glove kept the edges from slicing open the webs of flesh between fingers and thumb. My breeches-lining was all that lay between her razor-point and the shrinking flesh of my belly.