I passed my hand over the stubble on my cheeks.
“Vanity takes some very strange forms,” I admitted. “Yes. We have time.”
She came back from the inn with bowl and razor, but no mirror. I leaned my chin back, letting her put the edge to my throat with as much insouciance as I ever showed when Gabriel Santon did the same, and shave every part of my face.
“I can think of a time you wouldn’t want me with a blade here.” Dariole sounded amused.
“Behold my new-found trust in you, mademoiselle. My petticoats are dry.”
She wiped me roughly across the face, and threw the razor into the basin with a clatter. I looked up, seeing the red burn on her cheeks.
“I apologise; I am tactless.” I reached out, grabbing her hand before she could elude me. “Dariole—please. I beg your pardon.”
“Do you?” A smile crept back onto her face, although her cheeks still had two pink spots high up. “You ought to be on your knees for it….”
“Perhaps later,” I said firmly, and received her open grin. “Now, if you please, we’re ready. And—mademoiselle, don’t miss!”
She made a gesture that was old in the alleys of Paris when Louis Capet was a boy, and swaggered off to join the samurai.
Certainly, this is the least likely escape I ever made, I reflected, walking out onto the grass at the centre of the English hamlet. Geese and pigs scattered, honking. I shaded my eyes against the sky, brilliant blue now the rain had gone over. Suor Caterina, look down from heaven, tell me if you were correct in your figuring….
I began by taking a basket of cabbages that I had had brought to me, and throwing one of the vegetables high into the sky. I saw all men’s heads rise, watching it, and then follow it down.
With a flash as of a mirror in the sun, and a crisp sound, M. Saburo’s curved blade cleaved the cabbage in mid-fall into two parts—
Two more bright flashes of light on metal, and two successive crunches: the points of Dariole’s rapier and dagger hit home, both neatly skewering a half of the vegetable before it hit the ground.
She held up her loaded blades, brandishing them with a grin of sheer triumph. The fifty or so peasants broke out into laughter and applause.
Such was enough to make them watch Dariole and the samurai duel. The peasants formed a circle about them in the grass, drinking, and debating loudly on the virtues of broadswords, rapiers, and this strange foreign blade. As I passed behind the crowd, I heard technical discussions using terms common thirty years ago.
No one paid particular attention to me, it being assumed I arranged some other part of the show. I climbed up the church’s square tower, and shaded my eyes to stare across the Levels. North, east, south, west…in this flat land, a man can see for miles.
No followers, that I could see. No riders.
Are you correct, Suor Caterina? Is this so strange, so unlikely, that they’ve over-shot us on the way to Bristol, or gone astray elsewhere in the marsh? Or is it merely that the huntsmen don’t wish their quarry to view them, before the kill?
From this height, I could see the two tiny figures duel: Dariole springing about as she fought, searching out the oddnesses of fighting curved blade against straight, and Saburo spare of his movements, his effort, his cuts. I went back down. The two of them came to the end of their sparring—Saburo with feet set flat and wide on the turf, body curved, blade held high; Dariole down in a fighting crouch, dagger and rapier warding face and belly.
He cut, she moved; all in a heartbeat; cattan-blade and rapier disengaging as they sprang back to bow to the applause. The samurai sheathed his swords and stood with his arms folded. Dariole bowed to the villagers with a florid style she could only have learned on stage at The Rose.
She came away, walking up to me. “The King’s going to give his speech from the masque. What are you going to do?”
“I, mademoiselle?”
She began, slowly, to smile at me. “Don’t tell me you haven’t thought, messire!”
There was that in her demeanour that made me think her glad to assume my knees knocked under my silk petticoats. I made her a bow. The applause ended, and I walked past her, into the makeshift arena.
I have never been congratulated on any theatrical talents, outside of those natural to my profession, but a man learns somewhat in the army. Concluding that his Majesty of England would be severely offended not to go last and best in this array of tricks, I took my stance in front of the peasants and began to sing them a drinking song of surpassing filthiness that I learned in the Low Countries.
This place being as far behind the times as I thought, it was new to them, and that was sufficient to gain me approbation.
Looking across their heads, and seeing Dariole sitting up on the ancient wall of the boneyard watching me, moved me to sing again.
I sang a lament.
From taverns and camps, I have learned that a lament nearly always gains applause. This time was no exception. Perhaps, with the drinking-song, my woman’s costume provided a perverse extra fillip; with a lament, it became plaintive or irrelevant. There is an old ballad of my province and childhood, of a woman who ages and dies alone after her ghostly lover leaves her, and if the details were not those of Caterina, still, they could not help but bring her to mind.
I walked back to stand beside James Stuart. “Now, sire.”
He looked at me greenly.
“These are your people, sire.”
“I like not their flattery,” he grumbled. “It smells of their stale breath. Mark you, man, I will soon be done here!”
James Stuart squared his padded shoulders and moved off into the arena. He had the true monarch’s expectation that every man should get out of his way—and because of that, they did. I saw each man lean to his neighbour, and heard muttered congratulations about “the player that plays King James.”
My acquired friend with the penny whistle approximated a stately tune, and the King of England and Scotland moved in slow, formal steps on the damp grass.
Dariole appeared at my side. She gave me a covert look. Amazement? No—admiration?
“Mademoiselle—are you mocking me because I sang in women’s clothes?”
She rubbed the heel of her hand unselfconsciously across her face. “I didn’t know you could sing. You’re very good.”
I in an instant lost thirty years off my age, and stood awkward as a boy.
“Messire, are you blushing?”
There was no answer to that which would not have been a lie, or destroyed my composure, or both. I looked away from her, at James Stuart dancing.
“Your bum-boy and the demon are okay,” Constable Anselm’s voice growled, as he strolled up to stand beside me. “Can’t say I think much of your fat man.”
His accent was thick enough that I hoped James Stuart might be spared this insult by one of his subjects. The King moved himself into the position for his speech, facing not the members of his court, but a dozen families of peasants. Even ten yards away from him, I thought he looked sickly.
“—‘Thus, grave the Muse of History stood,’” James slobbered out, alone in the empty space in front of his people. His Scots accents was thick enough to be equally incomprehensible to them, I realised. If anybody’s knees are knocking, it is his….
“Rubbish!” Anselm bellowed. “Get off!”
“‘In reckoning up the line of Kings’—”
The fat Scotsman caught the catcalls from the crowd.
He limped a pace or two forward, glaring at them in a perfect transport of fury. “Do you mock me? Your King?”
“Fat old fart!” a voice yelled from the far side of the green. “Why don’t you break wind? It’ll make as much sense!”
I winced. James Stuart stared in what I saw to be complete and utter disbelief.
“What man said that! We’ll have him in the Tower! We are James, King of the ancient realms of Scotland and England; we will not be flouted like a common ninny!”
Cold s
weat crept down my back in the silence.
Dariole whispered, inaudible a yard away. “We’re going to be strung up from a tree….”
There were no trees in this flat land, but I thought these peasants ready to devise some reasonable, rapid substitute. I caught Saburo’s eye, and looked at the hilts of his swords. His lids closed slowly over his black eyes and rose again.
Take it at the charge: seize James Stuart, run—
One man clapped.
It broke out like wild-fire, rippling through the fifty or sixty men present; a dozen cheering and shouting for more.
James Stuart huffed, spluttered, and swung around to face us. “Yon Constable! Anselm, your name is? You see these men here, engaged in lèse majesté? We are your King! Arrest them, man, arrest them!”
Anselm lifted up his hands and clapped, nodding as if he received public acknowledgement. He smiled. Without taking his eyes off the fuming fat man, he said, “He’s very good. Got the King off to a T.”
“Yes,” I said. “Certainly he is the closest thing to James the First and Sixth that any man here will ever see.”
Dariole simultaneously spluttered, coughed, and buried herself in her kerchief.
The peasant constable continued, “No wonder you ain’t playing him in London! You could try over Bridgwater way.”
“Bridgwater?”
“’Bout five mile, that way.” He pointed. Further west, I realised. “You might even get a boat up to Bristol.”
The sun burned hot on my bare shoulders and chest. A wind brought me the smell of the marshes. No scent of horses, no sound of hoof-beats or horns. Bridgwater?
I let the Stuart King stutter on for another minute of raw, thick, completely unintelligible, but very popular Scots insult; I then stepped forwards beside him, bowed to the peasants, and got my arm under his.
“We should leave now, sire.”
“Insolence!” James allowed himself to be backed away bodily towards Dariole and the samurai. “Our own subjects! They say we are a bad false king!”
Saburo gave a grunt. “No. Good false king! Better to be called good, by own subjects. Would be dishonour for them to call you poor imitation, ne?”
James spluttered himself into red-and white-splotched breathlessness. Saburo met my gaze. Mordieu! I thought. Does the Nihonese man make a joke?
“You said we might attempt Bridgwater,” I said to Anselm. “Are we so close to the coast?”
“Bridgwater’s inland a ways. River-port.” Constable Anselm suddenly chuckled. “You’d make a packet. There’s one or two loyal Stuart men here, but in Bridgwater—when it comes to November, they don’t burn an effigy of Fawkes, they burn one of James Stuart! You might earn some passage money.”
“We shall go,” I said, “and I thank you, monsieur.”
“And I you, Mon-sewer Not-Man-Not-Woman.” He grinned at me. True, we four could not fight fifty men with cudgels; but, also true, Anselm would have been the first victim of our swords, and he plainly knew that.
“I don’t want to see you on my parish again, right?” With his black-toothed grin, Anselm added, “It was a good jig. If anybody asks me, I ain’t seen you. But if anybody do come asking…I can’t answer for the rest of ’em blabbing.”
With the heat of the early afternoon sun on my left hand, I ushered Saburo and James Stuart on foot away from the tiny hamlet.
If the hamlet were richer, I might have asked Anselm for the loan of horseflesh, but I’d seen none. We’re at least travelling in an unexpected direction. But slowly!
Mlle Dariole fell into step beside me, behind the samurai and the King of England and Scotland. She slitted her eyes against the sun. We walked between high-waving wild grasses that lined the drainage ditches to either side of the track.
She snapped an ox-eye daisy out of the verge as she walked. “How are we going to do it?”
“Do what, precisely?”
“Get James back on the throne, idiot!”
I glanced ahead. James I judged to be out of earshot, striding along beside Saburo, and—from his visible gestures—haranguing the samurai with exasperation.
Dariole plucked off white daisy petals. “If we do get him to London…his allies are probably dead, like Cecil. And you can bet Northumberland’s free by now.”
The shredded flower littered the rutted earth as we walked. The thought of Northumberland will not bring her pleasant memories.
“I hadn’t thought so far, mademoiselle, I confess.”
“Why not?”
Her dark eyes lifted, meeting my gaze. To my perplexity, I found myself reluctant to disappoint her.
“Truthfully, mademoiselle?” I shrugged. “Because…Dariole, you must pardon me. Much as James Stuart impresses me outside his court—it is not my concern who is on the throne of England.”
She snorted. “You worked hard enough to get James out of Wookey alive!”
Honesty can be painful. I know what thought this next matter must bring to the forefront of your mind.
“My concern was for your safety. With that assured…my ties with James Stuart are cut. And you will remember that I have, besides, M. de Sully to consider.”
Dariole gave me an oddly thoughtful look. The faintest cool wind moved the grasses that over-topped the sedge, pressing up against the edge of the track, leaving us less exposed to a casual eye. I looked about me again, in case I might see horsemen, and saw nothing.
“Death of God!” I stumbled as my foot caught a clod of earth, knocking it apart into damp fragments; and trod down the toe of my other boot into my petticoat-hems. Cloth ripped. I exclaimed bitterly, “How do you women manage!”
Dariole snorted. “You’re asking me?”
A grin broke out over her features. I glared at her.
Almost apologetic, she said, “Messire, it’s just—you look…you look….”
Bizarre as any masquer by daylight, I surmised, feeling my cheeks grow warm, as they had not in front of the English peasants, nor when I sought previously to amuse Mlle Dariole.
“Do you laugh?” I demanded, for all the world like a duelist in the Palais Royale.
“Messire, would I laugh? Would I?”
My embarrassment faded, without warning. I looked down at the young woman. Something moved painfully in my chest.
“Of course.” I smiled. “God sent you as a rod for my pride; what else would you do?”
“It’s a very splendid farthingale.” She regarded me, straight-faced. “But I’m not sure it’s your best colour.”
“You imagine that I would take Mlle Dariole’s advice about skirts?”
She did not trouble herself to hide her smile. Surveying me from head to toe with a practical air, she remarked, “You could kilt them up. Out of your way.”
“I could?”
“Stop. Don’t move a minute.” Dariole strolled around behind me as I halted. Turning my head, I saw her squatting down in the track, at the rear of my silk and satin skirts and petticoats.
She lifted the hems.
I felt her hands move up my boots towards my arse.
“Mademoiselle!”
“Hold still!” Her dagger slashed.
The broken farthingale-frame’s ties came away. Willow-wands and cloth, that had caused me great discomfort in the saddle and after, fell at my feet. I stepped out of them.
“You’ll walk easier.” Dariole, frog-squatting, reached and took handfuls of my skirts’ cloth, and thrust it all through my legs, between my ankles. “Hold this!”
I bent forward to do so. As I straightened again, that pulled the back of my skirts and petticoats up between my legs. Dariole rose and came around to my front, yanked my belt forward, took the cloth from me, and stuffed it down between my belt and body. What seemed to be several acres of cloth tightened between my legs.
I grunted, reaching down surreptitiously to adjust myself. “Is this necessary? Or are you merely entertaining yourself?”
She re-buckled my belt tightly over the s
kirts to hold them in place, her tone satisfied. “You won’t fall on your arse so easy now.”
“I…suppose you to be correct.” Since the hems were up about my knees, I could not trip over them. With the bulk of my skirts and petticoats fastened so, between my legs, they made merely another pair of vastly baggy breeches. To a casual eye, they might have been Dutch slops, particularly as I wore my boots beneath them.
Re-buckling my sword and dagger gave me confidence that I might now both draw and fight. A momentary chill breeze off the marsh made the exposed skin of my chest prickle with gooseflesh, above the bodice and stomacher. I regretted again that there had not been any man among Henry’s dead troopers large enough of their body to lend me a shirt or doublet.
From the waist up…I am a centaur. Or Hermaphroditus.
Saburo looked back, hesitating. I signalled to him to continue walking, guarding the King.
“May we go on? Are you done?” A little nettled, I looked down at the young woman. “Or did you not have sufficient poppets to dress, when you were a girl-child?”
“Aw, messire, you have to have guessed I played with my brothers’ toys….”
We smiled, each at the other.
Walking in the wake of the samurai and James Stuart, the slow pace of foot travel brought us at last under a line of wind-bent oaks and elms. The first cover in an hour.
Among the many things I do not know about mimicking a woman, I realised, is the effect of English July sunlight on my shaven, naked shoulders and chest. I looked down at my florid skin as we came into occasional shade.
For all it is only the English sun, and in no way so strong as it is in France, I have a fine colour …The red skin was sharply separated from the stark white just under the edge of my stomacher, as if by a line. I stripped off my glove and rested a bare palm gently above it, feeling how hot it radiated.
“See, now.” Dariole grinned. “If you were a respectable woman and not a player, you’d have a pinner to go over that….”
I managed to seem icy. “You could not have told me this before?”
“Oh, like you don’t know what women wear!” She poked me with her forefinger, much where I expected, in the centre of the sun-scalded flesh of my chest. Expecting it, I was able to refuse her the satisfaction of a wince.
Mary Gentle Page 49