Gabriel grunted; a noise which held both apprehension, doubt, and reluctant agreement. “So? You’ve got milord’s agents, until the English King puts a new spy-master in here. You can check up on this Prince, see if Fludd looks to be right.”
“The Prince, yes. If there are other men—they will not all be enemies of James or Marie.”
“You can’t do nothing, Raoul.” Gabriel paused, frowning. “You won’t have the contacts, or the agents, after this. Queen-Bitch Medici won’t hire you. Pity Milord Cecil’s dead. He would’ve. This English King, he might have. But not if you’re chasing his eldest son. I don’t reckon we can stay in England if that happens.”
Bruno’s formulae and the further future left to one side, I had a vision of my life after these next few months expired—my network of agents and contacts in France doubtless fragmented by now, and my skills offered for hire to any nation that would put me in a position to exercise my profession. At my age, what else may a man do?
“That,” I said aloud, confusing him, “is not a rhetorical question.”
He scowled at me. “Raoul, have you got some crazy idea in your head?”
“Not yet,” I said. “But I’m trying.”
“How does James know he won’t lie?” Mlle Dariole grumbled at me, as we investigated the courtyard-garden of the house.
“I dare say he may. But if I were James Stuart, I would torture him the first time I so suspected it.”
She checked in her walk. After a moment, she put her fists on her hips, looking about the tiny brick courtyard. “How are they going to keep him here? He can calculate his way out!”
“His calculations take time. A man might change the pattern of guarding him, at irregular and quick intervals.” I smiled at her. “Perhaps guided by the throw of a pair of true dice.”
The young woman laughed. Not, as I thought, at my pleasantry. I realised that, as she pointed to the wall.
A sundial-face had been cut into stone, and the slab set flat into the brickwork; perhaps twice the height of a man above the ground. I saw the bronze gnomon, crusted green with verdigris, cast a shadow down across the grooves cut into the marble, marking us not far past ten of the morning.
I saw also that, under the Roman-numeral hour-marks, the stone-cutter had put—as is indeed more traditional— CARPE DIEM .
“I hope the hours go slow for him.” Dariole rested her right hand back on her dagger’s pommel, her left arm hanging free, as she now customarily stood. I watched her lift her face to the sky and close her eyes. “Real slow.”
Slow or fast, I thought, the hours do pass. Until the future arrives.
Doctor Fludd once established in the house, I set about business of my own—sending agents of Cecil’s employ into France, to ask discreet questions; and applying to the court at Greenwich for private audience with King James. The first matter did not immediately flourish. For the second, the late Earl’s name gained me a remarkably quick entrée.
Brought in for an audience, I bowed, maintaining myself impassive to the changes in his Majesty. James differed greatly from when I had last seen him. Fatter and greyer, yes, but more to it than that—he leaned upon the shoulder of his favourite, Viscount Rochester (as Robbie Carr had lately been made), metaphorically as well as physically. It was with an appearance of reluctance that James Stuart sent the blond Carr and his other lackeys away, as far as the door of the medieval hall.
“Doctor Fludd will foretell now at your command,” I said, “under the cover of being a physician and scholar.”
“Tell him,” James First and Sixth rasped, “that if we dislike his manner, we shall send him to the Tower, and yon two wizards, he and Northumberland, can concoct their Devil’s work together. Do you understand, Master Rochefort?”
“I do: Master Fludd shall,” I said. “Or, if not, I shall explain to him how a man behaves when he is on permanent leave from execution.”
The King’s gaze dropped to my shoulder; I guessed he considered the brand-scar he knew to be there. He wiped at his mouth, and gave a sombre nod.
For all the warmth of Greenwich’s red brick and fine tapestries, his skin carried a constant hint of grey under the surface. James watched me a long moment, his eyes more blurred and watery than I remembered.
“We have lost our right hand,” he said. “The sadder because we were estranged. You saw him, Master Rochefort, before he died?”
“The day before. He spoke of your Majesty. I think, if he had one regret, sire, it was that he, also, was not set on the road to Bridgwater.”
His face abruptly altered, as if he would have both laughed and wept together. “Ah, Robbie. Can you imagine him singing before four dozen stinking farm-workers? We should like to have seen that. We should.”
I bowed, to hide my expression; a man of affairs should not show himself sentimental.
His look of gloom reasserting itself, James said, “Tell Fludd, we will be advised of what questions Queen Marie asks of him.”
“Yes, your Majesty.” Conscious of the glare of courtiers observing me, I sent an urbane glance around the Gothic hall. “Your son the Prince of Wales is not presently at court?”
James looked more sour, were that possible. “He has his own court, now. At Richmond, and St James’s palace, if you must seek him out. There are few enough men you’ll see at his court and ours, Master Rochefort. His are all Puritan upright men, who will have no swearing of oaths, or revelry at banquets, but prayers twice a day.”
With the skill of old practise, I kept my expression impassive.
“Your Majesty.” I wondered how far I might try him. “Do you have a first question for Doctor Fludd, now, that I might take back for you?”
James gave a heavy shake of his head. “We do not. Not yet.”
He did not look me in the eye.
“Has it not occurred to you, Rochefort, man? That some questions are better without answers?”
The Summer rain fell as a wherry-man sailed me back from Greenwich, up the Thames-river. I watched the flow of the river, speckled with the unfolding circles of the droplets; so many of them that it would take a lifetime to calculate all their intersections. And by then, they will be gone.
Responsibility.
Which, if there is no power to act, is only a curse.
Back at Coleman Street, I found myself with another question for Robert Fludd.
“If you have not already done it,” I said, “calculate the day upon which you now die.”
Over the next four days, while Fludd worked, and I worried my problem as a hound courses a hare, I saw a number of shabby or gentlemanly souls; none with ought in common save that they would pass unnoticed in a crowd. I sequentially entertained this score or more of the late Secretary’s intelligencers in the dirty-floored downstairs chamber that was the best a Western building could offer.
The last man—sailing in from The Hague, but by his own account able to be within the Louvre-palace in a fortnight—I found myself staring at, at the same time that he carefully studied me. I supposed him to be about fifty; his dress English, his skin fair, his hair bright chestnut.
At the same moment that he suddenly seemed stunned, I realised that we had met before. And at that time his chestnut hair had been dyed—further red—with henna.
“Disguising one’s true appearance with the appearance that the truth itself is false?” I said. “When I saw you last, were you not William Markham?”
He flushed; his complexion so light he could not disguise it. “My name is Griffin Markham. William is my brother.”
Ah. That, I suppose, is what puzzled Mlle Dariole.
“I recall I was informed, by the late Lord Cecil, that Sir Griffin Markham was his chief spy upon the continent.” I kept a level gaze on the stout man. “Which seems wise, monsieur, since I recall you to have been near-hanged and then exiled from England for treason, in the year ’03…”
Griffin Markham coughed. “William and I are very like. He lives lawfully in London. I
am here, and he is in The Hague in place of me now.”
Lady Arbella Stuart was still imprisoned in the Tower, after a hapless escape attempt organised by her husband. I wondered if she might yet escape out of England. Her cause might be thought a good enough reason for brothers to change their identities, especially if they had advanced the marriage in the first place.
I thought of Arbella; her kindness to Dariole.
“If I were you,” I said, “I would go to France, and send me word from there on the subject of the Queen Regent. The sooner you leave England, the better.”
William—rather, Griffin—Markham scowled. “Ay. With Cecil dead of the pox, there are his successors who would arrest me.”
I bowed him from the room, not about to mention that it was not King James’s fledgling spy-masters he should worry about, with Dariole in the country.
Some two or three minutes after that, Dariole herself came in at the back door, knocking mud off her boots and scabbard onto the kitchen flagstones. She grinned at me.
“If your face stays like that, you’ll frighten the gargoyles off St Paul’s! What’s the matter? James too busy creeping up Robbie Carr’s bum-hole to see you again, messire?”
“Something of that. It occurs to me, mademoiselle—that Henri of Navarre and Cecil are dead, M. de Sully retired, James Stuart much changed, and we are left with the Medici Queen Regent and young Prince Henry. A pair of vipers. Worse—vermin.”
The amusement in her eyes metamorphosed into cynicism. She gave one slow nod of her head, rain-water dripping from her hair and velvet cap. “Won’t argue with you, messire. But what can you do?”
“That is what I desire to discover…. You may,” I added, “be interested to know that Monsieur William Markham is walking down Old Jewry, at this moment, on his way to a ship for the Low Countries. You may know him better as…what would it be…‘Cousin Griffin’?”
Surprise, realisation, and a fierce grin went across her face in the space of seconds.
“Let him live!” I added hastily. “He may be of use to—the Lady Abera-sama.”
“Oh, the kennel will suffice, messire!” Dariole’s voice came back rich with amusement, drowned out by a banging door and departing footsteps over the cobbles.
What is it that I can do? I wondered, dismissing the Markham brothers from my mind.
I would give every groat of Cecil’s pension to have Caterina alive, and her mathematics a check on Fludd’s. The future—and the far future….
I made my way upstairs, ducking my head under the twisted beams, to the upper room where Robert Fludd now kept his books, his papers, himself.
“Twenty-five years,” he said as I bent to come in under the lintel, without looking up from his desk at me. “Was there a reason you wished to know my remaining time on this earth, other than to torment me?”
If he is so exact, I thought, he will have begun doing his mathematics on the ship home, to know this as fact by now.
“I have my reasons,” I said. “You are an Englishman. Tell me your honest opinion, now, of James Stuart.”
Fludd gave me a thin frown. He leaned back in his chair. “The heart has gone out of him.”
“Well, as a Frenchman, I will tell you likewise my opinion of Marie de Medici—which is, that she is Florentine to the core. And these are the people for whom you foretell the future. These, who take decisions for millions.”
After a moment, Fludd reached for his pen-knife, and began to slice minutely and carefully at his quill. So sharp an edge a pen-knife has that I automatically calculated and extended my distance from the tiny blade.
Fludd said, “You have not merely come to complain at me.”
“Indeed, no.”
“You are no more a friend to me than you ever were.”
I inclined my head. “Also true—why, a man might suppose you possessed of foreknowledge, messire!”
He winced.
“Not in this.” Fludd looked down at the spoiled quill. “A decade of mathematics; all of my work…is useless, now, Master Rochefort. Now that the year 1610 is over, and we are on a different path.”
“But within a space of twenty-five years, a man might begin again.”
Robert Fludd lifted his gaze, and I looked into his pale eyes. He carefully placed down pen-knife and quill. “What is it you intend to say to me? What is this?”
Being weary of bending away from the low beams, I seated myself in the window embrasure. The light must hide my features, I knew, in the same way that it fell full on his.
“My business has taken me of late to St James’s palace,” I said. “Your Prince, that you would have mentored, is being called Macedon’s son come again: an Alexander who will lay the world under his heel, for Britain and for the heretic—I beg your pardon, ‘Puritan’—cause. They see him as armed with all the arts of empire, which,” I added, “is no mean feat for a boy barely eighteen; I therefore take many man to have an interest in him being so. You, I assume, would have taken advantage of this?”
“At sixteen, he could have been steered, instructed!” Robert Fludd’s face seemed light-dazzled.
Merlin to Henry’s Prince Arthur. I shifted the scabbard of my rapier, where the window-frame drove it into my hip, and took the opportunity to watch his expression become unguarded. He put his hand out, resting his sun-browned fingers on stained papers.
Papers covered in line after line of tiny crabbed figures, many of which I did not recognise as Roman or Arabic. Caterina’s work, covered by the stains of grit and mould from the Cheddar caverns. He picked with one bitten fingernail at the rough surfaces.
The sound of her death is easy to call to the surface of my mind. Her tiny face as white as the moon’s under which she sprawled.
“I met Elena Zorzi first in Venice, with Magister Bruno.” Fludd’s hand left the sheet of paper, and his gaze went past me, to the window; perhaps beyond the glass. He put his hands across his all-but-shaven scalp, digging the fingertips into what grey hair remained. His eyes shone grey as glass in the pupil, but yellow in the whites like an old man. “I thought her lost so many years ago. Or else she could not have….”
I watched his face. “Did it occur to you that this may not have been about us, monsieur? About England? Or France? King Henri, or King James? Or about Europe, either, if it comes to that?”
“Ah? Yes…Tanaka Saburo. You think this was directed in the end to his need, and not mine?”
“He had more, I dare say.”
“Four islands blackened….” Fludd looked back at me, painfully. “That’s not the same, messire. Not as all the foundations of the earth being burned away, by lack of our ability to act against it.”
Except that, by Caterina’s reckoning, we are as capable of burning the foundations of the earth as any comet. Fludd’s perspective is somewhat narrow….
The parts of a decision began to come together in my mind.
“One thing you might consider,” I said, “is the instructing of other pupils—in secret, since I doubt James or the Medici Queen would approve.”
“Other…?” Fludd gazed up from his desk at me.
True, I thought he might be uncertain about passing on Bruno’s teachings. But we have Caterina’s papers. And it will be possible, supremely possible, to tell when a student is well-instructed—because he will then, accurately, predict.
“It is possible,” I said, “that I shall be away from here, for a week or two.”
He looked more startled at my apparent change of subject.
I added, “I need to know, therefore, Monsieur Fludd—how long will it take you to calculate whether I can go and return with safety?”
“Watch Fludd. I have a plan for which I’ll need him when I return,” I instructed Gabriel. “You must stay here. If you go to France, they’ll hang you.”
“France?” Gabriel’s brows shot up towards his receding hairline. “And if you go, they won’t hang you?”
“No. I shall return alive. I have it on—ex
cellent authority.”
Speaking of it to Dariole, I found her cynical. She leaned her shoulder up against the damp brickwork in the courtyard-garden, that having been where I found her; and gave me a look that spoke volumes about her resolution not to be deceived.
“You trust him? And you’re going where?” she said.
I must stay for the thunderstorm to break over my head, I knew. Or else she—and doubtless Gabriel, too—will merely follow to me France, and go by the shortest way to Montfaucon.
“Step inside,” I said. “Conceivably it’s time that I explained something to you—both of you.”
Gabriel stood bending over the hearth as we entered the kitchen, sniffing at meat broiling over the fire in the iron kettle. He glanced at me, clattered the hot lid back on the small cauldron, and straightened up.
Dariole pulled a wooden bench towards the hearth by one end, and straddled it; white hands down and clasping the sides. Eyes bright, she said, “Tell me!”
Gabriel moved towards the door.
I signalled to him. “Sit down.”
He looked at me, I think to see what I intended; then wiped his hands on the rag he kept in lieu of a kerchief, and eased himself down on the bench beside Dariole. The wood creaked.
At a loss where to begin, I spoke the thought that had been occupying my mind earlier in the day. “Giordano Bruno’s students are—almost—all dead.”
I looked from the young woman’s face to the older man, seeing their confusion.
“The only such man that we know remains alive is a pet, now, of James Stuart and Marie de Medici.” I paused. “Perhaps of her favourite Concini, also; perhaps not. Likewise, I doubt James is foolish enough to make Doctor Fludd known to Robert Carr.”
Gabriel gave his curt nod, that compressed the folds of fat under his chin. He watched me with the half-insolent, half-admiring suspicion that I have had from him since Breda. It says, clear as daylight, Now what crazy idea has the boy come up with?
I walked across to the hearth. Uncomfortably, I said, “Does it seem to you, either of you, that Marie de Medici, and King James as he is now, are the best to be trusted with the knowledge that Doctor Fludd can give them?”
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