He and I: both in the same position. And he has made his choice.
I closed my hands over the salt-drained wood of the ship’s rail, gazing at the horizon.
Since I woke in Paris and set out to kill King Henri, I have been at the beck and call of other men. No matter whether I have played my hand well or badly, the pack of cards has not been mine.
I have the knowledge of Doctor Robert Fludd’s skill, and the possession of the man himself. This card that I may play on the Duc de Sully’s behalf. And then, also…I do not know how I will do this, yet—but it is plain to me that I cannot turn my back and pretend I must leave the greater matter in the hands of kings and princes.
Kings, princes, ducs, comets.
Who else knows, and has the power to act, now, except I?
I shoved Robert Fludd brusquely across the deck of the Santa Theodora, and into the cabin ahead of me, ducking my head to avoid the beams.
If I am to do anything, I must first make sure that all the loose ends are tied.
Where she lay on her back in the box-bed, Dariole startled up onto her elbow—onto her right arm—with a muffled exclamation.
“Mademoiselle. This is a doctor.”
Dariole stared at me, incredulous. “You think you should bring that anywhere near me?”
Robert Fludd snatched in his breath and spoke thinly. “You need not have trust in me. I’m certain Master Rochefort will kill me if you don’t heal, whether that stems from sabotage of your wound or mere Nature.”
Slowly, Dariole sat up. Her wounded left arm fell naturally into her lap, as if she were learning to cradle it there. “Whose idea was this?”
I gave her a nod of acknowledgement.
“And you think I’m going to let him near any wound of mine!”
Robert Fludd frowned. “I swore the physician’s oath.”
“Does that have anything in it about having women raped?” Dariole kept her eyes on me, although she spoke to him. “Or kicking men in the stones, if it comes to that?”
Fludd’s face coloured. I should as soon not have been reminded myself. He gazed at her for a long moment, glanced at me, and then stared down fixedly at the knots in the oak planks of the deck.
The rhythmic creak of the ship filled the silence.
“You’re right.” Fludd broke the quiet. “I chose to ignore my oath. All the remorse in the world won’t change what happened to you, Mistress Dariole.”
Dariole’s voice was cold. “That’s right.”
She rested back tailor-fashion in the box-bed, shifting with the movement of the vessel, her spine against the hull. She looked at the English physician, finally, acknowledging his presence. “Why are you here?”
He shrugged and spoke with what I thought was honesty.
“I prayed, when I began this, that I was right. That even if I was damned by what I had to do, that I could save the others. But—the Unborn are not here, are they, Mistress Dariole? One day they’ll be as much flesh as you are. One day we, and all this, will be dust in a grave. But this is this day, and you are alive—and hurt. Of all I’ve done, I regret your suffering the most.”
Dariole looked flatly disbelieving. “Why me?”
I saw him pull back his shoulders, straightening up in rigid pride. “Because you had no part in this except suffering. I pity you, Mistress Dariole, as blameless—”
Dariole laughed.
I winced at the depth of cynicism in the sound of it.
Not enough light fell from the unshuttered glass casements of the cabin into the enclosed bed to make her expression clear. Dariole leaned forward, her face becoming more than an unfocused blob. She stared levelly at me.
“Messire, what happened in London wasn’t my fault. Maybe. I’ll give you that. But nobody made me kill Saburo.”
She jerked herself clumsily forward to the wooden edge of the bed, the arm evidently paining her. She stabbed a finger at Robert Fludd.
“You didn’t make me the person who’d go straight through Saburo to get to you. That was me. All me.”
“Saburo desired it,” I said shortly.
Dariole shifted her gaze from Fludd, looking up. “He was my friend!”
“And now you have arrived at the time in life when you have killed not only enemies and casual attackers, but also a friend. What did you think it would mean, mademoiselle, when you took up the sword? Did you think revenge would be unmitigated good?”
Her eyes closed for a moment. Her face shone tired and white in the gloom. I wished I had cut my tongue out rather than spoken so to her. “Dariole, understand it or not: Messire Saburo desired to die. You gave him what he wanted.”
Tears showed in her eyes as she opened them again; glimmering in the tenebrous light. She rubbed the heel of her hand against her eye-socket.
“I know…. You’re right, messire.” Dariole shook her head: defiant. “I didn’t want to murder him, and I could hate him for that—Saburo, I mean. And I don’t want to. Because I did it. Not him.”
There was nothing else I might do other than put my hand out and touch her cheek.
She did not pull back. Her skin felt warm and damp with sleep-sweat. And also somewhat of a fever about her, I judged.
Determined, resting my hand heavily down on the shoulder of the silent physician, I said, “You will let this man treat you, mademoiselle. None of Saburo’s people would countenance seppuku by neglect.”
Dariole’s shoulders hunched. She looked smaller, more alone, seated in the enclosed bed. “But—Fludd?”
“There’s no European doctor within a thousand miles that we may use. And besides, mademoiselle, he is here and he is alive—and I intend to have it continue so.”
Fludd bit at his thin lip, absent in thought, for all that Dariole looked at him with apprehensiveness in her face, and quiet murder.
She said, “You do, do you?”
I did not react to her challenge, signalling to Fludd.
He said, “Show me your wound.”
At that hint of the authority of the physician, she reached up, single handed, and pulled undone the tie on her shitage-undershirt.
Knowing what would be the response if I offered help, I contained myself in patience, shifting with the movement of the ship. When she attempted to shuck kimono and shitage down in one I did move forward to the box-bed, loosening her obi, and easing both sleeves together down her left arm. Better I do it than he.
The crumpled cloth falling into her lap, although still held in place by her obi, did not conceal the pale curve of her shoulder and the swell of the top of her left breast. Seeing her naked flesh, I thought, I wish I could desire you as I do when half-waking from sleep at night.
For once, my gaze was not fixed there. She ripped the dressing off her forearm. Yards of cotton, wet with yellow fluid. I could only stare. Angry scar, swollen flesh: everything from the elbow down misshapen, red, white, weeping. She is nowhere near as healed as she has pretended!
I managed not to look away. “Can you move your hand?”
The merest twitch of movement in her fingers accompanied the satirical look she gave me. “I thought he was the doctor?”
Robert Fludd reached out. I let my hand stay on my dagger hilt. She permitted him to take the fingers of her cold, unused hand, and lift up her arm, flexing it at the elbow. He pushed very gently against the black-edged crevasse in her flesh, that ran from below her elbow, halfway to her wrist.
I saw fear in her gaze, but I doubted it was of Fludd. Of being crippled from this her seventeenth year onwards, perhaps. She watched him with a keen and absolute hate, that grew over the minutes that he examined her.
Fludd rested her arm down in her lap with surprising gentleness. “Fetch me a bucket of water, from over the side of the ship. I need to wash out the wound. Mistress Dariole, I warn you: this will hurt you.”
Her brows went up. She gave him a look of such sardonic irony that I was not surprised to see him flush.
His hand still holding her
fingertips, Fludd blurted out, “I’m forsworn in everything, I know, but I am a physician!”
The creaking of the planks sounded loud in the silent cabin.
She did not move. I made a signal to Fludd that he should proceed.
He glanced at Dariole. “I’ll need paper, and the master’s navigation charts, so that I may see where we lie in relationship to the constellations. I may need to buy herbs at the next port, if they have them not in the ship’s galley. There will be local substitutes for those I can’t get.”
Dariole lifted a shoulder—her right—and dropped it again, with the air of a Paris duellist showing how little he cared for the cast of a die.
“Do what you want. But I’ll tell you this, if you need telling. It doesn’t change anything between us. Not a thing. Don’t ever believe you can apologise to me.”
It is a beginning, I thought.
Whatever I do—and for very different reasons—I cannot afford to lose either of them.
The Theodora strove against the waters: I made Dariole swim every night in the warm seas, when we hove-to, watching her scarred flesh under the clear swell, and keeping a loaded pistol by me in case of sharks.
“Caterina was correct,” I remarked, as she climbed back up the side of the carrack, rope finally gripped in both sun-browned hands. “You heal like a young dog.”
She swam in shirt and drawers, her hair sleeked wetly back. Some of the crew, the men of south-east Asia, at least, I thought might know her for female. The Portuguese did not. She carried a knife and a grin always, as if she desired to kill a man—any man—and the Theodora’s crew avoided her not out of cowardice, but out of the same fear a man feels in the company of the insane.
She stretched out her arm in the sun, in sarcastic display. A mass of lumpy tissue clumped below her elbow, on upper-and underside of her arm; turning from red to pink around the great scar that vertically cleaved her flesh. “Pretty, isn’t it?”
“You have tendons, still,” I remarked.
“I know. It won’t ever be what it was.” She looked at it as if it only rationally fascinated her; jumped to the warm deck, and padded off, leaving dark, drying footprints on the oak.
Some things are apparent to the meanest intelligence, when a man is willing to look at what’s under his nose.
I am not done yet. She is broken in more than her flesh: I must find some way to heal her.
I made my way to where Robert Fludd stood at the stern rail, Gabriel beside him—Gabriel with the smile that plainly says, He won’t drown while he’s with me. Until you want him to.
I can at least trust Gabriel not to be precipitate.
“What else can you do for Dariole?” I demanded.
Robert Fludd shook his head in the manner of physicians. “I can do nothing now but let Nature heal her.”
“Nature is rarely kind,” I observed, and let my height provide a more subtle threat than putting my hand to my sword.
Robert Fludd’s thin mouth twisted. He raked me with his gaze, and sighed, as when a master meets a stupid pupil. “And yet—these things are not so terrible, when you consider what vast amounts of misery and disaster happen to the great mass of mankind, every day.”
Bitter self-mockery sounded in his tone.
If this is an end loose and difficult to tie, the more need of my attention.
“One thing, at least, I can conceive of, that you might do,” I said. “Will you tell me you were lying, and have spent no time thinking of how you might apologise to her? Atone?”
The marks of journeying were on Fludd, his blond hair lightened by grey at the temples. He had chopped his hair short and shaved his beard down to the minimal before Nihon; all things to confuse those who might recognise him, if by chance they arrived where he was.
Has “chance” haunted you, monsieur?
Now he went clean-shaven. He could not disguise his pale eyes, or the lineaments of his jaw and forehead: I would have known him under the weather-darkening of his skin if I saw him one in a thousand men. Let him slip away at some port and I will still find him.
“Yes. I have thought,” Fludd said quietly. He looked me in the eye. “You see how she is. I think she will kill me if I try again to offer her an apology.”
A nod from me had Gabriel’s arm locked into his, so that the scrawny man had no chance of removing himself.
“We will see if we can settle for a little less than that,” I observed.
Need him as I might do, I still cherished the expression on his face. I need not like this man.
“Gabriel, lead Fludd to ‘Monsieur’ Dariole’s cabin. I am to warn the captain that this physician’s latest treatment of ‘his’ arm is liable to cause pain—and that should the captain hear any man crying out, he should ignore it.”
Fludd looked sweatily white. Gabriel gave me a complicitous grin. I sought out the Theodora’s master and gave my message.
I found the first mate’s cabin crowded already when I returned, with the presence of Dariole, Gabriel, and Fludd. The noon’s damp heat sent condensation rolling down the wood of the hull. I ducked my head away from the beams again, looking at Dariole where she stood by the casement.
“He is yours, mademoiselle,” I said quietly.
She looked up, startled. “Mine?”
“You did not die of the rape,” I said bluntly. “Therefore, he should not die of your revenge. That is all I stipulate—because I need him alive. For the rest, settle it as you need to. Before we move on.”
“When was it your business to settle my affairs?” she demanded, her voice rasping.
Robert Fludd moved forward, two steps in the tiny cabin, to stand on the sun-spotted planks directly in front of Mlle Dariole. In the bright light from the partly open doorway, he seemed to grow hot from his ruff to his hat.
“Mistress Dariole,” he said, his voice croaking.
Dariole stared.
He reached up and removed his hat, and—awkwardly, almost over-balancing—knelt down on the deck in front of Dariole.
I shot her a look. She seemed too taken up in his presence to acknowledge anything belonging to night-games.
He said, “I apologise. I will atone.”
She spoke almost over his voice. “What are you going to offer me? I want to know. What…what do you think you could do, to make up for…?”
“You were violated.” Fludd brought the word out with real courage, considering how close she was to him. Stress made his face look strained. “Because of my actions. Or lack of them. I know that you are of good family. I made calculations, Mistress Dariole. You were a virgin, even after your marriage, and now your maidenhead is taken by a man not your husband. Your family will disown you for having lain with a man unlawfully.”
An ugly red blotched her cheeks. “So?”
His thin face peered at her, his expression resolute.
“The papist marriage you made in France cannot be annulled—any examination would show you no longer virgin. However, your husband, Philippe, will not interfere if you remain outside France. Come back to London. I will give you back your honour. It’s all I can do to atone. Allow me—allow me to offer you my family name. I will marry you.”
Surprise stunned me.
I cannot grab her dagger-hand in time to stop her killing him; have not room enough to draw, myself, in his defence—
Dariole turned about—and opened the window, letting in warm air, and the sound of the slop of waves along the sides of the ship. Her head came back: she breathed deeply in.
Without looking round, she echoed, “‘Marry’…”
“I know it is not what you want.” Fludd spoke surprisingly gently, where he knelt. “A woman has only her good name, and I offer you mine. What else can I give you?”
I caught sight of Gabriel Santon, crammed up against the doors of the closed box-bed, his mouth a round O of amazement. I realised there must be little difference between he and I.
“Marry,” Dariole repeated.
&nb
sp; “In name only!” Robert Fludd sounded momentarily flustered. He gave her a look of despair. “Bruno’s Formulae tell me a man’s action, not his mind. Still less a woman’s mind. I am no better than the next man when it comes to dealing with the outliers in a group. I see what people will do, but I am unskilled at telling why they will do it.”
Dariole turned about. Her gaze crossed mine, so intensely that it took my breath away.
She looked down at the astrologer-doctor.
By her face, I judged that she had no words for how deep was the misunderstanding between them.
I said, “I require him to be able to work, mademoiselle.”
Other than the by-now bone-deep reflex of shifting with the Santa Theodora, Dariole did not move. I heard orders shouted outside: some or other of the sails on the ship’s three masts needing adjustment. Sunlight from the casement began to move across the deck, illuminating patches of ill-shaved white stubble on Robert Fludd’s cheek. I glanced at Gabriel.
The wide-shouldered man shifted, automatically, to block any exit from the cabin. He rumbled, “You can do a lot to a man without killing him.”
I spoke, over Fludd’s head, to Dariole. “Choose. Leave him alive, but choose. What will you do with him?”
Dariole stared down at the kneeling man.
She made a gesture that started tentatively, and ended with authority. “Hold him up.”
I have experience moving the recalcitrant bodies of men. I easily got my hand to Robert Fludd’s wrist and elbow, lifted them up behind his back, and brought his thin body sharply up onto his feet.
He cried out.
She drew back her empty hand and slapped him across the face.
Blood spattered my sleeve as his lip split under the impact.
I rode back with it, holding him in that grip that, if he attempted to wrench himself out of it, would dislocate the big joint of his shoulder. Bloody spray filled the dim brown-gold air as Fludd tried to speak. He seemed barely to know I held him: all his attention focused on Dariole.
“‘Marry.’ ‘Apologise,’” Dariole echoed. “Atone.”
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