Mary Gentle

by A Sundial in a Grave-1610

  Dariole rose to her feet, and padded down the wooden steps, her eyes fixed on the paper. “He’s written here?”

  “I believe I recognise the hand that superscribes it.” I took the letter as she handed it up to me. “Yes. I know it well. Fludd’s handwriting.”

  Dariole made a face. “He’s had nine months on ships to do his mathematics: of course he knows where we are….”

  I broke the seal.

  “Well?”

  “A place and a time. The name of the place is not familiar, but I imagine we can find it. He says nothing else besides Let us talk.”

  “Talk!”

  “It’s not for five days. I imagine the place is some distance away.”

  “Or it’s a distraction, and they’re going to ambush us!”

  “Or that.” I folded up the paper, putting it away in my kimono-sleeve, and looked down at her. Rhetorically, I demanded, “How do you hunt down a man who always knows precisely where you are?”

  Her skin waxen under the burn of the sun, Dariole completed my thought:

  “You wait until he finds you.”

  Rochefort, Memoirs

  41

  W ell, it will be a trap,” I remarked to Gabriel, before I retired. “The question is, can we turn it about? Make it a trap for him?—for them. I have a quarrel to pick with that whoreson Tanaka Saburo.”

  “Crucifixes.” Gabriel Santon mournfully stretched out his hand, and mimed the striking of a hammer. “You wait and see….”

  Having made it my business to visit the execution grounds, wondering if I might see Fludd’s corpse, I was now in a position to correct him. “In fact, they tie you up there. Rope. Can’t afford the nails. Which, in your case, would truly be many.”

  Gabriel made a grimace halfway between humour and that apprehensiveness which the cruelty of the local lords had impressed on him, and I went to my room.

  Nothing occurred in the evening, or the night; I heard the night-soil collectors going about with their buckets, and then after that was silence, not even a rat in the rafters.

  About the wolf’s hour (which here they call the hour of the hare), when false dawn brightens the sky, I became aware of a shadow in the interior doorway. It did not perturb me: I recognised it from the first glimpse.

  “Mademoiselle.”

  I crawled across the tatami mats to the sliding door, and pushed the panel aside, so that I could see her face in the grey light. I paused, heart in my throat.

  “These screens, that are thin—you’ll find the people here see only what it is desired and seemly that they see. We have privacy, if you desire it.”

  I stuttered on the word desire.

  Not even the shadow of a smile rewarded me.

  Dariole took my hand as I silently offered it, and in no weak woman’s grip. “I wanted him to be dead. That would have solved all of this.”

  The light through the shoji screens only let me see a little of her expression. I did not draw aside the screen to the veranda.

  “I wondered that you didn’t pursue this man Luke,” I said softly.

  She shook her head, a touch of impatience in the movement. “He was Fludd’s hands, Fludd’s eyes, Fludd’s cock. Fludd didn’t even stay to watch.”

  I frowned. “That would have been better?”

  “I could have understood it!”

  Possibly more had gone on in Les Halles, during the time she stayed with the whores, than she has ever told me. Two years back, I thought her fool enough to try to turn a trick for the fun of it. Her understanding of men is partial—but, where it exists, painfully acute.

  She climbed past me, over the mats and into the room, moving to slide the outside shoji screen an inch or two ajar. Warm air eased in. I moved back to my bed-roll. She settled herself at my feet, without a word, and despite the warmth of the departing night, what of her flesh brushed me felt ice-cold.

  “We might consider,” I said, “how appalled your assailant Luke would have been, to find himself with a master who calculated on his base character…. Would it not make a man remarkably wary in his employment?”

  I do not know any woman other than Mlle Dariole who responds so readily to that half-serious and half-mocking contemplation of a topic. There was no confusion in her face as she smiled, very faintly.

  It faded. “There is a ‘we,’ is there, messire?”

  “All the time that I am messire to you, and you desire to have me on my knees, or—however else it pleases you.”

  Her eyes were large and dark in the shadows of the empty room. It was not possible to say whether they darkened with fear, or arousal, or both.

  “Suppose I never can bed a man?”

  “Hush. Mademoiselle.” I did what I had been aching to do, sitting in my bed-roll, and put out my hand to her. “You are so young! What’s a year, say? Nothing! You were hurt. I can wait longer than your ‘never.’”

  She leaned forward and put her lips on my mouth, inaccurately in the poor light. She felt warm, and soft; smelling all of honey. I felt her shudder before she sat back, which served to quell my rising reaction.

  With something between malice and affection, she said, “You’ll have been to whores since we last met, messire, right?”

  “I have no desire for the pox!”

  It was not quite true. The blatant lewdness of the Nihonese people—or perhaps their refusal to find anything sexual embarrassing—had led me to a woman at Kenshin-san’s recommendation. She laid me down, beat me hard enough that I thought it must be a game of submission, until my muscles relaxed under her pummelling; and then by skill of her fingers, lips, and cunny, moved me to spend twice in one afternoon. It was after that that a fear of indisposition kept me away from her and her sisters.

  The low but growing light showed me Dariole’s look, which I thought held both scepticism and acceptance. My heart thudded in my ears. I thought of what I had dreamed, on the ships from England: that we would meet, and she would strip my dignity from me with her wicked hand.

  “You’re going after Fludd,” she stated.

  I nodded. The less converse we have about this man, this moment, the happier I will be!

  “How are you going to stop me following you and killing him?”

  Moved, aroused, bemused; I shook my head. “I have conceivably learned one lesson, mademoiselle—I do not plan to make any man’s plans for him. Come with Gabriel and I. If I cannot persuade you that M. de Sully’s life matters—”

  She lifted her hand and hit me.

  I did not resist.

  In the next hour, I let her bind my hands and do what she would. If, outside this room, I had been “Messire Rochefort,” inside it I was a thing she kept tied for her pleasure—which, in the most, consisted of remembering her hurts and inflicting pain. If I were to walk the next day with a certain stiffness, I thought, it would not be through a Castilian dignity, but from bruises and wrenched muscles.

  I felt the fear in her blows. I wondered if she had had similar fears and dreads before committing herself to a duelist’s life in Paris, and if that was where she discovered that action and skill removes her disquiet.

  That, also, was the only hope I had for carnal satisfaction.

  A man might have supposed that a thing such as I, desiring to be humbled for my lewd enjoyment, would have found that shadowy room a heaven. I did not, at first, realise the source of my disquiet. At the beginning, tied and helpless, my body reacted to her acts of vengeance with a squirming avidity, and if she called me dirt and animal, I could only agree with her. Only a little later did I discover that, spend as I might, what I gained from it was not pleasure.

  She is not happy, I thought, as I shed sweat and blood. She might thrash me into pleading incoherence where I was, but there was none of the liveliness with which she had tormented me in Paris. None of the joy.

  “You deserve this!” she whispered, as hard-eyed as any fanatic beating novices in a monastery.

  I miss her insolence, I realised.
/>   She does not call me by name.

  That, I saw, was because it was not I that she had in her mind.

  She did not pursue any contact of flesh, keeping herself aloof. The most she did, as the hour wore on, was to thrust her hand inside her own breeches.

  I have become the men who raped her, I thought, and there is no liking for M. Rochefort here—no realisation that I am here at all.

  Shamed, I confess what I realised: that I miss her insolence, her swagger, her smile; above all, I miss her desire to put M. Rochefort on his knees in the dirt. At this moment I could be any man, any male flesh; so long as she punishes some man, she does not care.

  And yet, I care, I thought.

  I might hire a whore in Les Halles to beat me—they are used to every perversion of men there, and if some move them to merriment afterwards, they will let themselves be well paid enough that they do not show it to a man’s face. If I paid a woman, she might put me into torment—but she would not mean it.

  Under the hard blows of Dariole’s hand, I put my face into the tatami matting, wincing more at the realisation I arrived at. A whore will have no reason to care whether I am a proud gentleman brought down to kissing her boots and weeping for her mercy, so long as she gains her livres at the end of it.

  “Merde!” I yelped, lifting my head, wincing. “That hurts!”

  I think that Mademoiselle Dariole, to Messire Rochefort, would have said, Yes—it’s supposed to! This hard-eyed woman only met my gaze with impatience, planting the palm of her hand over my mouth, and using her other hand for pain.

  “Mademoiselle,” I said, stiffly and painfully, after she untied me. “Be pleased to remember, I am not the man who raped you.”

  She grunted assent, not looking at me, but swept all my bedding into a nest on the mats, and curled up under it; sleeping while the light of dawn came over the city roofs down the slope below us, and the blue waters of the harbour.

  Understanding came to me, whether out of my outrage and frustration, or whether from pity, or experience, I do not know.

  One cannot pay a whore and beg her to like a man.

  What’s missing from Dariole is affection, I reflected, wiping at myself with my kerchief. A man may not beg for that. Not without killing the very thing he desires. I had thought, in London, it existed between us—conceivably in Paris, though most well-hidden….

  She said something unintelligible in her sleep: a stream of muttered words. I rose and leaned over her, and stroked the pads of my fingers across her brow. Her unquietness gradually ceased.

  I lay back on the tatami mats, leaning on one arm and watching her, attempting not to fall into sleep. With my free hand, I brushed the hair out of her eyes.

  Am I to bind myself to such a woman?

  What has he made of her, Robert Fludd? He, and her vengeance together?

  The morning brightness told me I had slept a half-hour or so, when I next opened my eyes. I found myself looking at Mlle Dariole, out on the veranda in the delicate light, brushing out her too-short hair and attempting to tie it up behind as the samurai did. In the timelessness of dawn I lay caught between doubts of encumbering myself, and the sheer enjoyment of watching her arms lift with the brush, and the rise of her breasts under her kosode.

  Mademoiselle, I understand how much you need to kill Robert Fludd.

  She spoke curtly, without turning her head. “Gabriel needs to buy us horses. It looks like a long journey up to this ‘Chikuzen province.’”

  Rochefort, Memoirs

  42

  A row of single-storey tea-houses ran down the side of the steep street, their backs to the sea.

  I let Gabriel get on with using his mount to shoulder away the female touts who tried to drag us inside for their custom. At the foot of the hill, over the peaked roofs, a metallic dark sea ran out to what might be a line of islands—but, if the directions were correct, would be a promontory.

  Dismounting, I bought rice balls from a bare-legged street seller, and pointed. “Is that Hako?”

  He grunted assent.

  I remounted, and offered the food to Dariole. She turned away in her saddle. For all the clenched muscles of my gut, I ate. A man should not be weak before he goes into combat. Chewing, I rode through the villagers; between men weighed down with boxes that they carried on shoulder-yokes, on towards the sea.

  The dark blue began to lighten as we rode along the shoreline. Out on the water, white sails marked fishing boats—who may hold any man, I thought. Fludd. Spies of the Shogun. Saburo’s hashagar soldiers.

  Two wheel-lock pistols were thrust under my obi, inside the body of my kimono, where the loose garment makes makeshift but readily accessible pockets. For the rest, I had not taken to cattan-blades. My rapier being well fitted to my hand and eye, I will not risk a new weapon yet.

  Gabriel touched his heels to his horse’s flanks and caught up with me. “Who do you reckon’ll meet us?”

  “Troop of pikemen?” I had been searching for the shapes of morion or cabaset helmets against the horizon. “Led by a Jesuit Father? A troop of soldiers in Tokugawa colours?”

  “Plenty of cover out there, Raoul.”

  Long grass grew up to the edge of the sand, the wind passing over it now in great whispering waves. We would not see or hear men approaching through it. Hako Promontory looked to be forested in pines, of the kind peculiar to the Japans.

  “It all says ‘welcome to the ambuscade,’” Gabriel remarked. I did not contradict him.

  South and inland of us lay hills; far, far to the south-west, Nagasaki. If I have a choice, I thought, I will bribe some fisherman to take us back from Chikuzen province by a sea route. My arse is sore.

  “You two can go back.” Dariole’s light voice interrupted my scanning of the landscape for soldiers. The wind blew her hair into her eyes, now it had grown just long enough. She appeared to me as half-samurai, half-gaijin; the weapons at her thigh, her rapier and European dagger.

  “Girl’s no brighter than you, is she?” Gabriel grunted. “Sieur.”

  “I’m ‘sieur’ again? I must be in your bad graces….”

  Gabriel smiled crookedly. Dariole did not respond at all.

  I wish that she would boast more, and mean less.

  “You don’t charge in and get yourself killed,” I ordered. “You don’t kill Fludd. Mademoiselle, as far as I know, you have no wish to harm Gabriel.”

  She gave me a puzzled scowl and finally spoke. “No.”

  “Which is why I will tell him to take you off that beast and tie you hand and foot, if I think you’re about to commit folly.”

  Gabriel raised his brows and blew out his lips. Dariole for a long moment locked gazes with me. She might well escape Gabriel, but not without wounding him; plainly both of them knew this.

  A perceptible tension went out of her shoulders. “If you want to hear what he has to say, before—”

  “—I have no interest in what Doctor Fludd has to say.” The edge to my tone surprised me. Collecting myself, I added, “I want only to be sure what guard M. Saburo has thought to bring with him. His estate isn’t far from here. This is ‘neutral territory’ only by courtesy.”

  Gabriel put in gloomily, “And we’re doing this, why?”

  Dariole, surprising me, spoke out.

  “Because now we know where he is. If he’s here. Just for this minute, we know where he is—instead of him always knowing where we are. If we miss him here, if we go back, we’ll never catch him again.”

  She did not add, Therefore, it is the time that I can kill him. I did not mention M. de Sully’s name. I perceived how these things hung heavy and unspoken between us.

  Waiting until she looked at me with attention, only her shifting weight controlling the dun beast she rode, I said, “By that same logic—Fludd would not be here if he calculated he will come to any harm.”

  Slowly, she inclined her head in assent. There was something of the duellist even in that simple movement. I wished for an inte
nse moment to roll her out of the saddle and into the sea-grasses, and bury my face against her naked skin.

  Were I not a complete fool, I thought, I would wait until she paid me the compliment of a moment’s inattention, and have her off horseback and into that sack I have long promised her.

  Except that, after Dead Man’s Place, I do not believe I can violate her will in that way.

  My hope must be that the situation doesn’t permit murder. Which I admit, were I Doctor Robert Fludd, I would make as near certain as humanly possible—and his humanity is less fallible than most. Therefore it’s probable, at least on this occasion, that I can prevent she and I from coming to open conflict.

  “Swords, pistols, wits,” I said. “Depend on them; watch each other’s backs. Now: we ride.”

  In a scuffle of sand, we galloped the beasts up from the sea-grass, slowing as we rode under the pines of Hako Promontory. A scatter of sampans fished where the water broke over rocks, twenty yards out from the land. I moved us deeper into the trees. No reason there should not be a man with an arquebus out there.

  The further out along the promontory, the scarcer the pine trees grew. The hooves of the horses thudded on rich green grass, eaten down by deer. Briefly, I was taken back to the hunting chases cut through the forests of King Henri. The smell of this sea reminded me how very far away I was from France.

  Glancing back towards the mainland showed me only the village; the small peaked roofs alone distinguishable in the haze. Not a hunting chase, I thought suddenly.

  Prompt on that, Dariole spoke, her eyes bright. “Normandy, messire. Doesn’t it remind you of that beach, in Normandy?”

  “I see them,” Gabriel interrupted, with a slight movement of his head that a man watching would not notice. “Directly ahead. Two of them.” He paused. “Only two of them.”

  Towards the end of the promontory, the pines clumped; then thinned down first to open earth, and a strip of white sand beach. A torii gate showed half-hidden in the last grove of trees. Past that, two men stood on the beach, with only the sea beyond.