Mary Gentle

by A Sundial in a Grave-1610

  I looked for Dariole. She stared off at the armed men gathering. I saw her visibly realise that she was being looked at by all three of us: spy, samurai, and King.

  “And your recommendation, mademoiselle?” I prompted. “You are still, as Caterina said, the unpredictable factor amongst us.”

  Her lips pressed together for a moment. “You tell me, messire. If you were Henry, in Whitehall, would you kill the King?”

  I found myself flushing scarlet. James gave me a look that let me know Cecil had spoken of my position in rumour, with regard to the late King of France.

  “As to that—I must admit it possible. And not merely by the Prince’s hand.”

  James Stuart nodded. “Cecil. Yon Northumberland. How many of his men do you suppose he has about him? And our Prince of Wales. He’s canny,” James sighed, “our elder boy. Harry’s canny. Takes after his grandfather a wee bit much for my liking, though. We think, if he has Cecil in support of him, we will not reach the steps of the palace alive. What day is it, monsieur?”

  A moment’s thought produced the answer. “July the twentieth, sire.”

  “The proclamation said he’d be anointed today.” The King glanced about, lines of weariness in his face. “And by this time next month, these men will be marching out to war with Spain, on behalf of a Protestant Crusade.”

  Dariole pointed at the men armed with longbows. “Not like that, they won’t!”

  “You did not yet give us your opinion on what you would do,” I reminded her. “Remember what Suor Caterina said. What is least likely, here?”

  Reluctantly, Dariole said, “Anything but Whitehall, I suppose. Your Majesty, when there was a king murdered in Paris—I left. I don’t know what the people did who stayed. Messire Rochefort, what about your Duke; what did he do?”

  It came together in my head, all of a piece.

  “The Bastille,” I said.

  Dariole nodded; the samurai and the King seemed confused. I looked up at James, in the saddle, silhouetted against the summer sky.

  “As a matter of some urgency, your men in these Bands here need to be better armed, sire. What Monsieur the Duc de Sully did on the death of the King was to retreat to the Bastille. We need a place which is impregnable, and, more importantly, gives us access to weapons. Sire, is there anywhere in London which is both castle and armoury?”

  Saburo grunted, loud and satisfied. James glanced at him, then at me. “Is it the Tower that you mean? Ay. Ay…but suppose they have no mind to let me in?”

  Dariole shrugged as the King looked down at her. “There might not be many men there. The Earl, Northumberland, he’ll be out of the place. So will all your prisoners, your Majesty. There might not be much of a guard.”

  In which case, they may have emptied the armouries of weapons…but those are still impregnable walls.

  “Master de Rochefort?”

  I looked around, smiling grimly. Perhaps four thousand men in the streets. The same again in women and hangers-on. If I had a company of musketeers, I could guarantee to break us at the first volley.

  But it is this or Whitehall—and I judge Prince Henry keen enough for his father to stay dead that he would have no hesitation in murdering him as a pretender.

  It appears it will not be as easy to capture Robert Fludd as a man might hope.

  “Your Majesty,” I said, “let us take the Tower.”

  They say when the Earl of Essex made his rebellion against the late Queen, he marched through London calling on the citizens to rouse out and support him. When the doors were bolted as he passed by, his support began to melt; by evening he was reduced to six men.

  James Stuart rode past on his white horse and windows flew open, then doors; the occupants of every parish came out cheering.

  They will have known him from his triumphal processions through their streets for this and that, I realised. They know their King by his face.

  Crossing London-bridge, I estimated us at eight or ten thousand strong. I walked at James’s bridle—since it was important that he be the one seen—with Saburo and Dariole, and turned us west onto Tower-hill, and the hulking castle beyond the stinking muddy moat.

  Warders peered over the crenellations as the mob came around the edge of the Tower. I caught Dariole’s eye. If they send word for help to Whitehall. If Cecil or Henry send out musketeers to clear the streets with a few volleys….

  Outside the Middle Tower gate, at the place where the moat runs into the Thames-river, James reined in. I dropped his bridle and stepped back.

  A well-dressed, elderly man in black, whom I assumed to be Sir William Waad, stepped out from among the yeomen warders, took off his hat, and fell to his knees in the hoof-churned mud.

  “Take these, sire, and pardon us!” The man held up iron keys. His lusty voice must be carrying to more than the front of the crowd; they became quiet to hear him. “We believed your Majesty dead, and we see you are alive, and we thank God for it! Sire, come in and take your own again.”

  “Rise, our Lord Lieutenant of the Tower.” James spoke strongly, success bringing out the best in him. He signalled the man to rise, took the somewhat grubby hand offered to him, and almost as an afterthought added, “Take into the Tower and properly arm these Trained Bands, who are our defence against the danger that threatens from treachery.”

  “Yes, your Majesty!”

  The shadow of the gateway felt welcome, walking under it. The hooves of James’s stone horse echoed back from the masonry of the arch, then clopped on the bridge across the moat, and the sun was bright again. Men’s voices echoed off the stone behind us.

  Once past the Byward Tower and inside the walls, James Stuart allowed himself to be helped down from his mount. He rested his hand on the shoulder of M. Saburo, although whether in friendship or for support, I couldn’t guess.

  “Set the guns up on the walls, Lieutenant,” he ordered, as near to crisp as I had ever heard him come. “Cover the road from Westminster and Whitehall, and beware of approach by river.”

  “Everything shall be done as your Majesty commands.” William Waad, a greying man, plumped down on his knees again; I couldn’t blame him for harvesting his corn when it was ripe. Many men will wish they’d been where he is, if King James lives.

  The sky was a hard blue above us. Gulls cried, over the river. The shadow of the millennially old stone was chill, and welcome in this heat. I could feel the strength in these walls. As many of the men filing in in their Bands could, doubtless.

  “You may bring us to suitable quarters for our person,” James advised the Lieutenant of the Tower. “Have you those vile men Ralegh and Northumberland still here?”

  “No, sire, the King—the Prince, I mean—sent an order for their release. It had the royal seal, your Majesty; I thought…”

  “Yes, yes; never mind that now.” James waved the man’s protestations away, at which Waad (white now, at having seen himself likely to plummet from hero to traitor) gave a sigh of relief.

  Saburo took a breath, expanding his shoulders, and by that means seemed to gain himself a space in the crowd. He dropped down on his knees, bent his head to the earth at James Stuart’s foot, and sat back on his heels.

  “Should not come to shooting, here. Not good. Iago-sama, I am Ambassador from Nihon, I am not a threat to those men and the Prince. I will be your messenger, King-Emperor, if you allow. Your ambassador. I did service between my lord Kabayakawa Hideaki and the Shogun Tokugawa Ieyas’, the same.”

  Ingrained habit meant that, difficult as Nihonese names are to me, I marked that one as not the same that he had mentioned before as his patron. I noted it for a later question.

  The keen intelligence that one was occasionally allowed to glimpse looked out of James’s eyes. “Ay. There is a good idea. Come with us; we will give you words to say to our rebel son and the Earl.”

  James swept off. I had not expected acknowledgement; my public part in the day being done. To my amusement, I saw Mlle Dariole appear to fume, a
s the great crowd of people moved away from us, past the Bell Tower, held to the King as securely as if by ropes. Which was understandable, they having decided to sink or swim by him.

  “The gratitude of princes,” I observed.

  Dariole glared. “Is it better than the gratitude of dukes?”

  “You have a way of taking your anger out on the man nearest to you, mademoiselle, that is not at all endearing!”

  I found myself with my right hand flexing, in case I should be in a duel within ten rapid heartbeats.

  She put her hands behind her back, looked down at the scuffed toes of her riding boots, and then back up at me. “I’m sorry, messire.”

  I should not let her know my every defence at once collapses—she being a woman much given to finding weakness and exploiting it for pain. All the same, I could not help it: I smiled down at her.

  “I’m directed to search the quarters in the Martin Tower in which the Sieur Northumberland made his home before today—since Monsieur the King is stubborn enough to hold there must be witchcraft left behind.”

  She gave me a cynical look. “Or something that’ll tell you where Robert Fludd is.”

  “I suspect him where I cannot, yet, hope to reach him—at Westminster, with ‘King’ Harry’s musketeers and pikemen. If I were in his physician’s robes, that’s where I should be,” I said frankly, “with my only ally. But will you come with me now, and assist?”

  I found myself watching Dariole against the background of the sunlit crowds. Her eyes glanced about constantly. Perhaps she will find John, I thought. Or Luke. To kill a man who’s harmed her would greatly aid her, at the moment.

  “He knows,” she said.

  Lost in my imagination of her revenge, I gave her a startled look.

  “Fludd. I think he still knows. I know Caterina said, but…I don’t think we’re outside his conjurations yet.”

  That is a doubt I do not wish to dwell on. I prompted her with straight-faced irony, “You think we’re not yet random, irrational enough?”

  Her brow went up. “I didn’t say that, messire…”

  I could not help but laugh. Might we mend our differences?

  “I’ll…show you something, messire.” She fell in beside me as I walked north.

  I did not need to push my way against the flow of the crowd. They parted before us, and closed up behind; anxious to fill up all the space inside the walls and cheer their returning King.

  The plain, ancient walls of the Martin Tower took the sun’s light, something glinting high up. Dariole glanced up at the ramparts, and rapidly away. “That’s where I was walking. When I met Lady Arbella.”

  “Mademoiselle—”

  She increased her pace toward the stark, round-arched door at the foot of the tower. I followed her in, climbing the stairs. Sun dazzled as I stepped out from the darkness of the stone steps, onto the rampart behind her.

  Shielding my eyes, I said, “Mademoiselle, is it that you are pleased to imagine Robert Fludd all-foreseeing because…then he will not be captured? And neither of us shall have him?”

  Dariole stood, her head tilted back, hand shadowing her face, gazing up at the wall of the tower above our heads. I could not decipher her expression. She said, “Can you see?”

  Squinting, I made out at what she pointed. A sundial-face, set flat into the masonry; the gnomon giving the time as three o’clock.

  Cast into the bronze around the square dial, I saw on one side an hourglass with wings, and on the other, rearing up its sting, a scorpion.

  There was no Latin inscription but I thought it must imply tempus fugit.

  Dariole lowered her hand, looking at me. “He told me Thomas Hariot made it for him. The Earl told me. This is where he had me escorted, when I walked.”

  I glanced to either side. Between the crenellations and down to the stinking moat, or off the walk and down to the cobbled surface of the yard below: either fall could kill a man.

  “It would be a short step, for a woman in despair. Yet…you did not take it.”

  She walked back towards the door.

  We searched among the few remaining chattels of the Earl of Northumberland without result. Mlle Dariole parted my company when M. Saburo made his first return, to debate with the King how his son took the news of his father’s return.

  I went briefly outside the Tower, to Knight-Rider Street, to see if Fludd had left clews in that household, but, as I surmised, he had not.

  Plague indeed empties the streets, I thought.

  Evening light gleamed, the reflections of houses rocked in the river. I rode back towards the Middle Tower gate along Thames-side, the warm Summer air touching my face, where I began to be able now to cultivate a small point of beard and moustaches. The stenches of Eastcheap rose up around me.

  It’s more than early to think it, but—let me contemplate what success would bring. When we do find Robert Fludd, if we do. Well, and then?

  Then, I thought, Mademoiselle Dariole and I will quarrel.

  The ambling hack’s pace slowed as I ceased to concentrate on him. I gazed at the river, the wind stirring my hair, so that I must put one heavy coil of it out of my face.

  And, if I can devise no way to avoid it, I will come to the point with Mlle Dariole and M. de Sully where I must choose between the two.

  Rochefort, Memoirs

  35

  O nce inside the Tower, I threw my reins to a waiting servant, and crossed the grass within the extensive walls. I put the ill mood from me.

  Besides, I reflected, there’s every chance I may look forward to being killed in the fighting about Whitehall-palace! If, indeed, this attempt to restore James doesn’t begin that great revolt and civil war that Caterina spoke of. And there are all my problems solved, in perpetuity!

  By this bright hour of six post-meridian of an English Summer day, tents had gone up on the grass, within and without the Tower, and now smoke rose from camp-fires, and men’s voices were loud and cheerful. I caught a nod or two, here and there, Ned Alleyne and the players evidently having put my name about.

  It made me smile, albeit somewhat grimly. Truly, what with “King James’s Demon” from Nihon, and now “the King’s Monsieur-Frenchman,” I wonder if James Stuart’s reputation will survive, never mind his life….

  “Don’t tell me where you’re going to be, will you?” a voice complained. I turned to find Mlle Dariole walking up to me through the crowds.

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing,” she grunted. “When Northumberland and Ralegh went, they took everything.”

  Her gaze went past me, down toward the Byward Tower. I heard shouts from the gate-house.

  “Hey! Saburo’s back. Again!”

  I knew there was no point in attempting to question him on his way through the crowds. I turned about and made my way to James’s quarters in the White Tower.

  Dariole caught me up as I stepped out of the spiral staircase, and fell in at my side as I walked to make my bow to James. “He’s not there! Saburo says they don’t have him! Messire, there isn’t a hope of finding where Fludd is, if he isn’t with Prince Henry!”

  “They may well be lying.” I stepped back out of the way as a dozen of one of the Trained Bands (on enthusiastic, if not completely efficient, guard duty) ushered Saburo through to the King.

  “Yeah, they may be.”

  Beyond the great arrow-slot windows of the tower to the east, the river and the Pool of London gleamed below us, bare now of the ships about which M. Saburo had waxed enthusiastic, on one of his occasions in the afternoon while he waited to carry James’s next message upriver to Whitehall. So tall is the White Tower that, from the windows on the western side, a man’s gaze might pass above thousands of peaked house-roofs; nothing as tall until the blocky height of St Paul’s.

  Downriver, the water curved east, cut by London-bridge. Somewhere in the dusty gold haze upriver, to the west, must be the spires of Whitehall-palace and Westminster Abbey.

  “I still
say Fludd knows.” Dariole lowered her voice as she stepped out of the crowd of courtiers, joining me in the window embrasures. With her sword on and her velvet bonnet off, she had even more the look of an adolescent boy. “For all you know, we’re still doing exactly what he wants us to.”

  A little sardonically, I ventured, “Returning King James to his throne?”

  “Maybe this is the way James has to die. The masque at Wookey just had to happen to get us here. You remember he said you’d strike the blow. Maybe that’s why he agreed to Henry trying to kill his old Dad in the masque. Because he knew it wouldn’t hurt—that it’d still be you doing it, later.”

  “Or he may have lied,” I contradicted. “Merely because a man can foresee the future, that doesn’t make him honest in all he says! Or, your choices may already have taken us out of the road of his prophecy. Or—A man could go mad trying to out-think this!”

  Dariole grunted.

  “And you,” I said, “have been too much in communion with that samurai!”

  As James Stuart ordered the room cleared, M. Saburo’s short figure became visible through the courtiers. The King’s brief signal to the guards that we should be allowed to remain, I took as an order to come forward.

  Huge and dark as the interior of this medieval fortress was, it required the tapers lit despite the light still outside. Light clustered about the Stuart King. They had found, from somewhere, an ancient chair I thought might have been new about the reign of Francis I, to serve him as a throne.

  The samurai fell on his knees on the ancient oak boards, the sound echoing from the medieval masonry walls.

  “I am unworthy, great King-Emperor!” Saburo bowed his head to the floor. “Very regrettable: I have failed. I cannot get Seso-sama to agree to come within the Tower walls. Will only agree to King Henry’s room, in house by the Middle Temple.”

  James raised his shaggy brows. “He’ll allow a royal bodyguard, now?”

  “Yes, King-Emperor. But, he says, must be samurai. Not trust countrymen.”

  The Stuart King nodded slowly. I could perceive it: a compromise that neither drags Cecil into the Tower, nor James into Whitehall-palace; both sides to bring their own limited number of armed men, and the aim to be talk rather than war….