Mary Gentle

by A Sundial in a Grave-1610

  Gabriel gave her the look I have seen him give young recruits in the United Provinces army, and she gave him a grin that was both brat and young woman together. He snorted. “You ain’t surprised—guessed Monsieur Raoul would be here, did you, mademoiselle?”

  She cocked her head a little to one side, in that gesture which I had pictured so constantly. “If I’d thought about it, I probably would have realised he’d get here first. Luck being what it is.”

  As if all were agreed and arranged, Gabriel scooped up her bed-roll. “I’ll take that.”

  He rested it on his broad shoulder, and made a bob of the head that would not have passed for a servant’s bow in Paris.

  She looked at him for a moment. “All right. Lead on.”

  He turned and began to walk towards our lodgings.

  Unless I would be left standing, I must move. Two long strides caught me up with her. “Mademoiselle—your journey—your health—”

  She mercifully cut me short in my babbling.

  “Rochefort, since you are here—we’ve got a problem.”

  Something of common sense began to return to me. “I would suppose so. You’re intent on killing Robert Fludd.”

  For answer, she merely nodded. Under the surface of her brusqueness, I thought I detected excitement—at the newness of Nihon to her, perhaps. She gazed about at the rising green landscape and mountains beyond. The town was nothing but up-and-down, all single-storey buildings on the sides of steep hills, mixed in with trees. The roads between the peak-roofed houses teemed full: crowds of men and women—whom I could not always tell apart, for their dress—and children and chickens, the latter much the same as Southwark. It did not occur to me until I watched her see these things how much I missed the smells of Paris and London over the strangeness of the cooking-smells of Nihon.

  Dariole abruptly side-stepped, dodging men dressed in fundushi loincloths alone, carrying heavy boxes hung off yokes between each pair of men. With a skip, she turned about and walked backwards for a pace or two, watching them go.

  “That’s the way to dress in this heat! Hey, maybe I should do that….”

  For a moment, I saw that familiar tilt of the very corners of her mouth—at my outrage, I suspect. She about-faced, and walked at my side again.

  I looked down at her. “You will have had time to re-consider. You—I do not wish to begin with a quarrel—”

  “So don’t.”

  “You know I cannot permit you to kill Monsieur Fludd!”

  “Can’t ‘permit’ it?” She drew in a breath and let it out, pressing her lips together. Very deliberately, she said, “He had me raped. I intend to kill him. I didn’t come all this way for my health! Are we clear?”

  The eight or nine months since leaving Europe had left me oddly ill-at-ease with the manners of Fontainebleau or St Germain, I found. Abandoning manners for honesty, I said, “Mademoiselle, I know how much this is to ask of any man. If you might begin to see beyond your personal concerns—”

  “‘Personal concerns!’”

  “Hey!”

  Gabriel Santon’s booming voice cut her off, his broad forefinger pointing straight at her. She dropped her hand from her rapier-hilt in what I took to be astonishment.

  I realised he glared at me, also.

  “Cut it out!” Gabriel said curtly. “Raoul, why don’t you go ahead and see if Mama-san has an extra room for mademoiselle here?”

  I stopped in the street, towering over the people about me, and stared at him.

  Dariole put her hand up over her mouth, thumb and fingers each to either side of her jaw. My heart raced, recognising that she in that familiar way hid the beginning of a grin.

  “I tell you what, messire—you certainly can’t get the servants these days….”

  I felt my lip twitch. “Mademoiselle—do you suddenly have a feeling that you are one of two squabbling children?”

  Without pausing for her response, I dropped Gabriel the salute of an infantry trooper, and thrust ahead between men and horses.

  She lives. Doctor Fludd, if he lives, is still a resource—and, if I may bring him back from Nihon, the one guarantee of M. de Sully’s safety. Nothing has changed. Nothing! And yet, she lives.

  It will be a year, soon, since Henri’s death. Not knowing what goes on at home, now, is enough to put a man into a fury. Does Sully live; has he been hanged; what?

  Gabriel Santon is a wise man in not wanting to see his master begin a quarrel he may not press to its extremity. I still cannot harm her.

  The owner of the lodging-house—or perhaps whorehouse, I had never been quite sure—accepted my explanations in Dutch, Portuguese, and makeshift Nihonese that we should have another guest, and promised to make a room ready. Dariole and Gabriel arrived somewhat later than I thought they should have, which led me to suspect one or the other of them desirous of speaking covertly with the other.

  “Here, mademoiselle.” I knelt and slid back the screen blocking off her room.

  “It’s empty.” Dariole turned about and about on the wooden corridor, looking into the other rooms with their interlocking white mats on the floor. “And flat. And there isn’t any furniture.”

  I smiled at her reaction. Tatami mats on the floors; shoji panels, like windows, that slide aside instead of doors…and the constant flat wall-screens that divide up the houses. Yes: empty, to my eyes, when we first came here. Since then, I have acquired more than (as soldiers do) the beginnings of the language. I left Dariole squatting inside her door, bed-roll beside her, sliding the screen back and forth, her boots leaving dusty imprints on the matting. Behind her in the room was only a niche in the wall, and something that might have been a joint-stool, had it been wider, or stood higher above the floor.

  “Gabriel?”

  He emerged from an inner room—that, nonetheless, was not dark. The houses here are much brighter inside than in France, where rush-lights might stink and a dozen together give no better illumination than a rain-heavy sky.

  “Thought you might want something to eat.” He put a deep tray down on the mat, and squatted down, very ungainly.

  The porcelain dishes held an odd mixture of Nihonese cooking and European dishes, which I suppose in Nagasaki is not so amazing. I ate, and about halfway through the meal Mlle Dariole came wandering down the passage, and entered to join us.

  She ate in silence. I saw her glance from time to time at Gabriel Santon. At last, almost politely, she said, “What do you think, Messire Rochefort—is Fludd still mathematically forecasting us, or is travelling to the Japans just desperation on his part?”

  I wanted to touch her, to hold her to me. Her face had the glaze of memory. Fludd, in the Tower; Fludd, and Northumberland’s men Luke and John, whom he did not command to stay their hands or their desires. She did not say so, but I thought it unlikely she had been had only by one of the pair of them.

  “It’s difficult to say,” I confessed. “From what I observe…he may be a man who knows, to the hour, when his pursuers will arrive where he is, and so he leaves before we arrive. Or—he may be lost.”

  She wiped at her nose and made a tiny snort of humour.

  I passed her a cup of the cha that Gabriel had come to like, although, for reasons I didn’t begin to comprehend, his serving of it made the Japanese guests in the lodging-house wince. “Mademoiselle, I am willing to set the matter aside until such a time as we know where Fludd is, but, you will not kill him.”

  She stopped chewing at the rice and fish, prodded it with an eating stick, and gave me a long look.

  Without speaking, she went back to eating.

  I looked at Gabriel.

  Ah—I understand. He has directed her not to quarrel with me.

  I desired above all things to put my arms around her, as I had done in London; that, I knew, would be if anything more disruptive than a quarrel over an as-yet non-existent Robert Fludd.

  Leaning back out of the door, I bellowed into the depths of the house for a flask of sake.


  Days passed. The rest-house in which we lodged, if it was one of ill repute, was discreet. As well as European merchants, local samurai came to drink the disgusting cha beverage, and talk, and play at games. I made myself amiable to all, as far as I might, improving my knowledge of Nihon’s languages, and seemingly the more welcomed because of it.

  Search where I might, inquire as we may, no man claimed to have heard anything of Robuta Furada. Or of Tanaka Saburo.

  Venturing to the court of the King of Japan is not what I desire, I thought. Because if he hears of Fludd, he will want him. But I can see I shall be left with no alternative.

  When we first landed, I had sent messages via a Dutch merchant to one Master William Adams, an Englishman rumoured to be high in the service of the retired King of the Japans, Ieyass. By what would have been May at home, rumours were current that this retired Shogun had marched down to Kyoto with fifty thousand men at his back—and then, confusingly, this was supposed to have been to watch Nihon’s old “Emperor” retire, and the new one take his throne. That would be part of the impenetrable politics of this land, I supposed. Still more impenetrable to me, since I had assumed a “Shogun” to be their Emperor-King.

  I realised I would have no answer, nor no help, from Adams.

  “These people may not know one namban from another,” I said to Gabriel, as late Spring came to Nagasaki. “You would think, however, they would know one of their own. There’s no word of a Tanaka Saburo.”

  “Maybe they drowned on the way. Him and Fludd.” Gabriel looked cheerful at the thought. “Tell her that, Raoul, then we can go home.”

  Dariole ordered a local tailor to make her a suit of what I remembered Tanaka Saburo calling kosode and kabakama: his shirt and breeches. Contrary in all things, the chemise opens at the front, and the loose, unconfined cotton breeches at the side.

  Dariole, wrapping a long cloth belt about her waist, looked—other than the boiled colour of her skin—no different to the thronging crowds outside the lodging-house.

  “Dressing as a man still, mademoiselle,” I remarked, handing her her hat—a great wide straw dish, to be worn upturned on the head.

  “Haven’t you noticed?” She pointed again at the crowds passing by. “They all wear the same.”

  A slow grin spread across her face, and I could not express how glad I was to see it.

  “You might as well say that you and Messire Gabriel could try dressing as women….”

  “You might say it, but I wouldn’t say it in Gabriel’s hearing,” I observed. “I judge that despite equality of dress, and their bearing of weapons, women here are not any less ill-thought-of than they are in Europe.”

  She snorted at that, but fell silent, and after a while her hand moved down to rest against the guards of her rapier. The which, I may say, did not sit easily in appearance with her Nihonese dress.

  “Shirts and chemises are no dress for a soldier!” I remarked to Gabriel a day or two later, as he finally copied her and put on kosode and hakama.

  “I heard a proverb in their drinking houses.” Gabriel grinned at me, hitched up his loose trousers, and thunderously broke wind. “‘In breeches and boots, what escape for a fart?’”

  He slapped his thigh and laughed hard enough to rupture himself. Such things are embarrassing in servants—as I considered remarking to Mlle Dariole, who leaned at the entrance to the house, and spluttered into laughter with a young man’s complete abandon. I decided against any comment. Forty years have taught me something in the way of caution.

  And besides, to see her laugh is a joy; she does it so rarely now.

  “Ro-bu-ta Fu-ra-da.” She practised it, and looked over at me. “He might have a different name, I suppose.”

  “There is description, too.”

  Gabriel snorted. “All I get is, ‘you gaijin all look alike’!”

  Dariole smiled again. I realised that he was deliberately cheering her. I believe he has taken to the boy-girl.

  Nagasaki held gaijin enough that he and I—and she—might go around the gambling-houses without being remarked. The weakness of sake gave me an advantage that the unfamiliarity of their games of chance did not quite negate. I found myself almost hoping that the bizarre Summer might extend indefinitely.

  The slightest hint of Robert Fludd—and our truce is over.

  Monsieur Kenshin was a samurai of perhaps fifty years of age, a frequent habitué of the rest-house; he and I had fallen into the habit of playing games of chance on the veranda overlooking the courtyard, while I improved my Nihonese.

  It being late afternoon, and cooler, Dariole sprawled on the tatami matting inside the open door-panel to the house. She fidgeted, switching about to sit first one way and then the other, all under pretence of watching the samurai and myself play at the game he called “go.”

  “Do you wish that we practise again?” Kenshin offered Mlle Dariole.

  She had at least the grace to blush, albeit I thought she looked as hopeful as a puppy. “I wouldn’t want to interrupt your game, Messire Kenshin….”

  The samurai, it seemed, practised with wooden swords curved as their own cattan-blades. It was inevitable that Kenshin find himself training Dariole in their use. She enthused. She had constructed also a wooden European sword, with a simple cross-piece in the fashion of a hundred years past, which she sometimes used to demonstrate rapier technique to Kenshin.

  With the cattan-blade, she was at that stage where desire outstrips technique, and Kenshin regularly knocked her arse-over-crown in the dusty courtyard below the steps. While this afforded me much amusement, I was gratified that she should have found an enthusiasm that ate up every waking moment, gave her such evident pleasure, and—I thought—kept her mind from Fludd’s injuries.

  “We might finish this game later,” I offered Kenshin.

  Studying the board, where he had just opened a new area to play, it was evident to me that I needed a move in hand to suppress this new skirmish—and, of course, I did not have one. I should have to spend my move to combat defeat in the area I was already fighting in.

  “Every game is a metaphor,” I sighed, managing not to smile at Dariole as she bounced up onto her knees on the mat. “Monsieur Kenshin, even giving me nine black counters to place in advance won’t see me winning this war. Why not train her?”

  Kenshin also smiled. “Hai!”

  Dariole stayed entirely in Nihonese dress, out of respect to the heat, going barefoot, or in waraji straw sandals. In kosode and kabakama, she reminded me of nothing so much as peasant children at home running about in just their shirts.

  Like peasant children, Dariole had a dislike for giving her clothing up once she had it. I found a constant source of amusement in observing Mama-san’s mistress-of-the-wash and other house-servants watch their chance, and abstract Dariole’s clothes from her room every two or three days. By the time the young duellist would come, fuming, to wear her “lucky” kosode, the tacking stitches would have been undone and the garment reduced to cloth panels for washing. I dare say she had never been so clean.

  That, I suppose, moved me also to abandon the stuffed, sewn, and flea-ridden doublets I had brought, and wear Nihonese kimono over the long hakama-breeches—albeit I found the shapeless garments something of an embarrassment when, as now, I must shift my legs as I sat tailor-fashion, so that the state of my unruly member should not be exposed to any other.

  I desire her still, I thought.

  And I desire more than that she punish me….

  “Get bokken.” Kenshin pointed.

  Dariole dipped her forehead to the tatami mat, bounced up onto her bare toes, and ran into the house.

  Catching my amazed stare, he observed, in his improving French, “I succeed in teaching her manners—some time!”

  So that he should not see me smile, I returned to studying the go board. Minutes passed in silence.

  “Raoul!” Gabriel Santon hailed me from the corner of the veranda.

  I nodded
to Kenshin and rose, picking up my rapier and dagger that I had placed beside the board, and walked over to where Gabriel stood. The street outside showed a pale pall of smoke or dust hanging in the air. As ever, the space was packed: men, women, horses; one of the rarely seen wheeled carts, screeching; slaves and palanquins.

  “He’s watching us,” Gabriel said. “Want me to sort him out?”

  I saw a young Nihonese man not attempting to hide himself, in particular; he stood between a seller of astonishingly coloured foodstuffs, and a writer of letters, his gaze fixed on the lodging-house.

  Kenshin rose and bowed, discreetly retiring into the lodging-house. Dariole came out onto the empty veranda and looked puzzled, wooden bokken in hand. I beckoned her.

  “A man. He may have information. God He knows, I’ve put enough money about.”

  Gabriel looked grim. Neither of us said assassin; I would have put money on both of us thinking it. Perhaps that truly would mean Fludd is in the country—or Saburo.

  Dariole dropped down into a very samurai-like position, watching the courtyard. She sat back on her heels, forearms resting on her thighs. With the cloth band that pulled her kosode against her body, it was clear that she had both breasts and hips. The local inhabitants might tactfully assume that hair grown just long enough to touch her collar meant she was, as a matter of course, male. I couldn’t see a European now making the same mistake.

  The young Nihonese man entered the courtyard and walked towards us. Reaching the bottom of the veranda steps, he bowed to me.

  “Rosh’-fu’-san desu ka?”

  “Close enough. Hai! I’m Rochefort.”

  “Message.”

  I did not meet Gabriel’s eye. A look would send him piling into the Nihonese boy despite the cattan-blades at his waist. I nodded. The young samurai bowed again, and placed a sealed paper packet on the steps.

  As he turned and strode off, Gabriel slid down and into the crowds behind him. We have worked together long enough that I need not signal him obedience in such matters.

  “I doubt he’ll follow him to anything useful,” I observed. “Although it’s true Gabriel has less of a European look in those clothes than many gaijin…. Mademoiselle, I have a suspicion. It occurs to me that I have, in my life, had at least one too many letters from M. Robert Fludd. I suspect this to be another.”