“How could I ever have thought I wanted this?”
Not until I saw her face change did I realise I’d spoken aloud.
In that second we were as close as if we shared one mind. I saw her remembering the School of Defence and M. Rochefort defenceless, on his knees to her, his prick as stiff as his sword. I saw her see me, now; prostrate, bloodied, helpless.
Tension informed her voice; the same tension that made her shoulders taut, her eyes too wide, her smile disturbingly bright. She said, “You disgust me.”
I found myself making a noise part laugh, part sob. I have desired her to be suitably disgusted with M. Rochefort. Now that she is, I can only wish that she weren’t.
“I often disgust myself,” I said, my voice coming out choked. “Dariole. Why?”
Her expression took me into a different realm from other duels. I saw, not anger, spite, nor sadism, nor even the efficient joy with which she had killed on the Normandy beach. Now is no time for mercy! and spare me! and please, mademoiselle, I’ll do anything!
“Please, mademoiselle,” I said gently, “why are you doing this?”
She looked down at me.
In the silence, a great fart cracked out of my breech.
It was loud enough to resound off the stable walls. I cringed. Every inch of me tensed, waiting for her sudden, scalding laughter. What will she say? How will she mock me? Will she kill me out of sheer contempt?
Dariole neither laughed nor moved. She only continued to look down at me, sword in hand. A faint impatience appeared on her face.
I felt myself flare hot with an embarrassment not at all erotic.
Had this happened before, she would have laughed like a street-brat. Now, she looks at me in the manner of an adult regarding a tiresome child. And I am not moved by any physical response.
“I cannot even beg in a way that is fitting,” I got out. “Mademoiselle—yes. I should have told you Fludd might imprison you. I am sorry.”
Her face altered. My mouth and throat closed up. I thought her features twisted like a child before it weeps—then: no, she is about to laugh.
She did neither.
She removed her blade with one skilful movement. No pain went through my hand. I realised it was undamaged. Swirls of straw-dust swam in the sunlight as she took a step back, a white figure against black shadow.
“Imprison,” She said, slowly. “Robert Fludd might imprison me….”
I couldn’t name the emotion in her voice.
“Get up,” she said.
I fought to get myself up off the earth, clutching at my thigh. Both my weapons lay on the stable floor, yards away. With my back pressed to the wall, I got myself half-upright, hunched over; both hands pressing the cloth of my breeches-leg into the wound.
“You’re bleeding.” A neutral statement.
I nodded, staring at her, dizzy with loss of blood. My boot sloshed, filled to the ankle. She can put her sword through me, I am disarmed, I can do nothing.
She put her rapier uncleaned back into her scabbard.
The soft click of the friction-fit of steel and wood veneer made me physically startle, like an old woman when the wind slams a door shut.
Dariole walked forward. In reach. I could have struck her.
“Is this…” I found it difficult to speak, “…this pain. Is this how it was, for you, with Fludd? He wrote that you’d been hurt?”
Her lips thinned as she pressed them together.
Before I could realise what she intended, she stepped close and ducked her shoulder into the pit of my arm, hauling my arm over her shoulder and straightening up.
If I could have laughed, I would. Short enough that she couldn’t prop me fully upright, she supported me hunched over. I didn’t like to consider how much of my actual weight I did, in fact, need to lean on her. And why does she aid me, now?
Without a word, she shifted her stance and pushed her shoulder into my chest, with her other arm about me; forcing me into a stagger towards the door. I abandoned the thought of weapons, the weakness of blood-loss washing through me. I smelled the delicate scent of her sweat. As we came within reach of the sunlight I could see she wore brown linen doublet and breeches, the colour making her face pallid and strained.
Under the lintel of the doors, she stopped, drawing a harsh breath. Her voice sounded metallic.
“Robert Fludd wants King James dead. That’s a good enough reason to keep James Stuart alive. I want Robert Fludd dead.”
Her tone did not shake or alter; her expression didn’t change. I searched her face, for one sickening moment not sure that this was Dariole.
I nodded down at the soaking leg against which I pressed my hand, trying to staunch the bleeding. “Do you want me dead?”
“I don’t know.”
The blank truth in that made me shudder.
“If you’re here….” The implications of her presence came to me sluggishly. “Dariole, there’s nothing to tie me to this lunatic assassination, now! I will find some way around Milord Cecil. We can leave here.”
She nodded her head in a vaguely north-westerly direction. “Go to Bristol. You and Saburo both. You can get ships. I’m staying here.”
“Here….”
She looked up at me, from under my shoulder. Her hair fell over her forehead. “You’re leaving. You got me into enough already. Just get out while I settle this!”
As her voice got loud, it grew higher, and wavering. I reached to grab the pillar of the doorway, part-supporting my own weight. “Dariole….”
She dropped her hold on me, stepping away.
“You know what? This?” She hauled the new, plain English rapier out again, brandishing it in the sunlight. Her face turned up to me, white in the light, gaunt and drawn. “This doesn’t matter. It’s a cheat. It’s not there when you—It’s nothing! It can’t do anything! Because I’m only one person, and where was it when I needed it?”
She took a step back, into the open yard. My left side felt cold. I tightened my grip on the door-frame, too late. I slid down to the flagstones, collapsing, blood from my thigh welling up over my fingers and soaking my gloves. Pain rose up, drenching me with sweat.
“You know what?” she snarled.
She turned and I thought the stained blade would go straight through my heart.
“Fuck this!”
Dariole dropped her point down to the flagstones in the yard, stooped over, and put her foot on the blade.
I shouted. In the same moment, she trod down, and yanked the hilt of her sword up.
The forged metal snapped like a pistol-shot, six inches down from the ricasso.
Rochefort, Memoirs
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I had never seen her stand as she did now: shoulders hunched up, head down. For thirty heartbeats, she stared down at the broken hilt.
Slowly, she squatted and picked up the snapped blade from the flagstones.
“He should have known,” she said, exhaustedly. “He should have known you wouldn’t care if I was kidnapped. If he’d known that, he wouldn’t have done it. Why didn’t you tell him?”
It was barely a question, said under her breath, but I answered it. Slumped down on the flagstones and bleeding as I was, I said simply, “I suppose because he would not have believed it, mademoiselle.”
There was no sound but the mill-wheel, turning leisurely and unstoppably.
Her head came up. Her eyes fixed on me. She straightened, the broken hilt of her sword in her right hand, and the blade in her left.
“You lie for your living. You could have made him believe you.”
She lifted the halves of her sword and threw them down. Hard metal skittered off the flagstones and into my legs, catching me with pain.
“I got raped,” she said. “Not ‘imprisoned.’ Raped.”
She turned and walked out of the yard.
The master of the mill sewed up my wound.
Dazedly, I thought that a man like Field père, with the machinery here, shoul
d be capable of doctoring accidents to the standard of a barber-surgeon; I therefore permitted it. He cut away the cloth of my breeches and drawers, and set about washing the bruise-blackening wound out with wine, and sewing the torn flesh together, at front and back. The thrust through had missed the great bone, and the arteries.
I vomited from the pain, despite the brandy he fed me.
Leaning back in a battered armed chair, in one of the mill’s upstairs chambers, I reached for the glass at my elbow. Blood seeped into the linen bandages bundling my right thigh. I thought, dizzily, It will indeed be necessary for M. le tailor to complete my other clothes today.
One of Field’s servants cleaned the floorboards, and opened the windows; Field himself packed his ancient instruments and left.
I looked up at Saburo. “I thought her at first only in a fit of wounded vanity. Hurt pride, that she’d been captured: the ‘great duelist’ Mlle Dariole….”
Saburo’s brows came down in a ferocious scowl. “A samurai does not break her blade out of vanity or misplaced pride. Only disgrace, Rosh’fu’-san. Not in defeat. Only in dishonour. Dishonour, inflicted on her body.”
On her body.
I felt numb, in the way that a man is numbed when he strikes his elbow or knee against an iron bar on a Winter morning: waiting for the impact of pain.
“It’s…common,” I got out, “for a man to accuse his enemy of just that same vice which he, alone, cannot perceive in his own character. I was too vain to think she could be—assaulted—while in the company of M. Rochefort.”
I reached for the green glass again, and sipped at the brandy. It will not do well to be drunk, given the apology I must make….
“There can be no apology, can there?” I said softly. “She blames me for this. Conceivably, she’s right to do so.”
“She blame Furada, when I see her in the castle.” Saburo turned, correcting himself. “In the Tower.”
I stared at him. “Northumberland did have her in the Tower? That’s where she’s been? How did you discover it? How did you get her free of the place safely?”
Saburo gave me a triumphant look. “I went to King-Emperor’s court, to find the Lady-daimyo we saw at Darioru’s kinsman-house. I think that she maybe know Darioru, because she was in clan-household, with Markham. I heard rumour, she knows six languages already. So I ask if she want to learn another. She tell me she’s wanted to learn language of Nihon, so I begin to teach her. Her name,” Saburo added succinctly, “A-be-ra.”
The glimpse I had of her: red wiry hair, a look of joy that made an ugly face beautiful. Ar-bay-rah…. “‘Arbella?’” I choked out. “Lady ArbellaStuart?”
“Hai. The King’s cousin, Daimyo Abera.” The corners of his mouth turned down. “I find she doesn’t know Darioru-sama. But, the wedding we saw, there at Markham house? Abera, there, she marry a man King-Emperor James not like. Young man, from the wrong clan, with a claim to King-Emperor James’s throne.”
I roused myself from physical pain and shock, as much as I might. “That has what to do with Dariole, monsieur!”
Saburo folded his arms. “Not long later, they come and arrest Abera-sama. But not execute her—I haven’t understood why gaijin do this. Then, she’s taken into Tower!”
He gave me an unnerving beam.
“Some days go by, then Lady Abera-sama ask to have me come in, continue with lessons in language of Nihon. I judge that is safe, ne? Furada’s men, if they watch, they see I have no choice to come in Tower. I am not suspect.”
Pain and shock might confuse me, I thought. “How could that make it safe for you to search the Earl’s quarters for Dariole?”
“No need. When I say I am look for her, describe her how she looks, Lady Abera-sama says, ‘There is a young servant woman who is ill. This young woman is like your Darioru-sama. I have her here with me. Come see if it is she.’”
I stared.
“She—? How?”
The samurai shook his head after the European fashion; I supposed his time at James’s court to be having an effect on him.
“Darioru told me, after. She sees Markham come to visit the Lady-daimyo Abera in the Tower. She doesn’t trust him, but when Darioru walking on the battlements, she finds a way and speaks with Abera.”
“I…” I frowned. “Walking on the battlements?”
“Under Earl’s guard. Furada hopes Darioru-sama jump off, kill herself.” The samurai gave a pragmatic shrug. “What man takes notice of what women talk? Darioru can say to Abera, she is not servant, but prisoner of cruel man. Lady Abera say to Northumberland—”
Saburo mangled the name sufficiently that I recognised it only by whom it surely must be.
“—say to him, ‘This woman, she is servant of yours—she is very sick, she has been violated, I will care for her.’ Lady Abera-sama told me, the Earl-daimyo already think noblewomen do charity too much. Like black-crow priests. So he think this ‘caring for a servant’ more charity. Doctor Furada probably not hear yet,” Saburo added, “because Earl-sama won’t want tell him he lose Darioru-sama. Furada think she’s in the Tower, because Abera says, ‘Darioru probably die from sickness of rape, so she can be in bed for a long time.’”
Out of the dizziness of pain, I snatched at one fact. “But she’s not sick?”
Saburo gave a curt shake of his head.
“As soon as Darioru sees me, she ask for maid-servant’s clothes, and we go out with Darioru disguised as woman.”
“Disguised?”
I snorted, on the brink both of laughter and something that tightened my throat. A girl disguised as a boy disguised as a girl….
“But—she has been raped?”
For a brief irrational moment I allowed myself to hope it only a part of their pretence. I would have shouted down the sky in my joy.
The pain biting into my leg spoke otherwise.
Saburo grunted. “I think she violated. She afraid of having a baby. Maybe her blood-flux comes, on the journey here. Not certain.”
I flinched, that being too much like common court gossip at St Germain. Swallowing, mouth dry, I said what, if I had not been subject to pain and brandy, I would not otherwise have spoken aloud:
“If you were—in part—responsible for such a thing…what would you do?”
“Kill self.”
The answer came so prompt, along with a stab of guilt that took my breath away, that I might almost have laughed. “Forgive me, messire, that’s an answer to all too many questions in your country!”
“How else to make such an apology?”
In Saburo’s land, men prostrate themselves with equanimity, by way of habit. I wished, for one moment, that this was Nihon. I might prostrate myself in front of her and beg her forgiveness for my part in this. Nothing of passion or perversion in it, only remorse.
“I…don’t wish purely to make an apology,” I said. “That would only ease my conscience. She….”
The brandy stung my mouth as I sipped, but my head only grew clearer, as if alcohol could have no effect on me at the moment.
I began again. “She desires that you and I leave here.”
“Hai. She told me on the road. I don’t leave. Giri.”
If I could not feel the brandy, I could certainly feel pain. “But if she remains here, in this lunatic’s conspiracy, waiting for Fludd—”
Saburo’s head came up. One hand rested on his curved hilts.
Thumping footsteps outside the door gave way to Edward Alleyne, his face between his copper hair and beard reddened by the sun.
Alleyne gave me a manic grin, in which was some relief at seeing his play-manager not dead. “Duelling again, Master Rochefort? I heard from Master Field that you’d been in need of surgery. Catso! Should I ask, how does the other man look?”
“No.”
His shaggy brows rose at what he took to be my irritation. He nodded civilly to Saburo. A little uneasily, he said, “Then…if you are well, Master Rochefort…all’s well, I suppose. When you’
re ready, may I have your assistance? There’s a quarrel between the joiners and the carpenters over the masque-engines. They’ve stopped work. It’s the kind of dispute Master Henslowe was wont to solve….”
Like Alleyne, I regretted the lack of his partner and manager, Philip Henslowe, who had had the sense to refuse Fludd’s blandishments and stay in Southwark, making money from bear-baiting. My head clear despite the last of the brandy, I considered that I also might be better dealing with wild bears than what faced me.
I sighed. “I’ll be there, monsieur. In a moment.”
He closed the door as he left. I heard his footsteps die away down the stairs.
The ache in my thigh grew. I resisted the urge to rub at the bandages, and reached out for the stick that Field senior had brought, saying it had been his grandfather’s; a stout thing of ebony wood with a silver top, not unlike that carried by Mr Secretary Cecil.
With a push against the wooden arms of the chair, I got myself standing upright. The hot winds of June blew in through the open casement, making me sweat; Wookey and Wells’s peasants would be out getting the last of the hay harvest in.
I looked at Saburo. “Your business, let us be honest, is with King James. You accompanied Mlle Dariole here out of obligation. I, also, have obligations elsewhere—the Queen Regent is digging herself more securely into power with every day that passes. But you speak of ‘giri’…and debt. Mlle Dariole is determined to stay here until Fludd shows himself; the least I may do is attempt to persuade her that waiting is useless: he will not come. And…make what apology I can.”
Saburo rested his hand—small for a man—on the hilt of his cattan-blade. “Rosh’-fu’, I don’t think she’ll listen.”
“No? No, you may be right. But—I must speak to her.”
I am a man, not an impatient boy; I know, better than many, how unwise it is to pursue a woman when she truly does not wish a man’s company.
It would, besides, be humiliating, I thought. She can run faster than I can limp.
And I need to think.
The next few hours I spent seated on one joint-stool, leg resting up on another, resolving disputes with the construction of the masque-engines in the great cavern. I then supervised rehearsals. With a considerable part of the company back in London learning The Viper and Her Brood, the masque had every remaining actor doubling parts, and sometimes taking three. In truth, I found it an experience not so different from siege-works in the Low Countries—much carpentry, much confusion, and never enough men skilled in the right occupation. As one of the boy-actors stepped on his hem, ripping his costume for the third time, I reflected, at least, so far, no one is shooting at us.
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