Mary Gentle

by A Sundial in a Grave-1610

  Gabriel made a face. “Jesu, Raoul! Ain’t a king alive can be trusted! What’s in your mind now?”

  The lick of small rain-drops on the leaded glass sounded increasingly loud. Gabriel, I saw, did not look concerned at my silence. And I know a time when he would be wondering if he had “presumed.” And if I were about to beat him.

  Dariole shifted about on her arse, and brought her leg across so that she sat squarely on the wooden bench; not one of her movements those proper to a young woman.

  “If he isn’t theirs….” Dariole shrugged, and leaned both elbows back on the table behind her. “The Medici bitch will stick Sully in the Bastille, won’t she?—if she doesn’t chop his head off. Otherwise, I could have nailed Fludd’s bollocks to the Theodora’s main-mast two months ago and we wouldn’t have this problem.”

  Her eyes glinted with humour, mordant as it might be.

  I felt myself moved to smile. “Not quite that simple.”

  The Summer rain beat more strongly against the window; drops hissed where they fell from the chimney down into the coals of the fire.

  “I have come to a realisation. Which is this. That it is no longer sufficient for me to say that I do not trust these men—if I intend to do nothing about it.”

  Gabriel stood up silently, and bent to take the iron kettle from the chain, where it bubbled with the thick sound of a dish all but cooked. He stood it down out of the hissing drops of rain. I saw him glance over his shoulder and catch Dariole’s gaze. She made a small movement of her mouth, which his expression answered.

  “I begin to feel like a man set between his wife and his mother!” I remarked with some asperity. “If you have something to say, speak!”

  Dariole gave me an innocent frown. “Which one of us is your mother, exactly?”

  I controlled my desire to wallop her behind, and momentarily cheered myself by managing a civil nod towards Gabriel Santon. He looked pleasingly affronted as he sat down again.

  “I ain’t yer Ma!” he rumbled. “And suppose you just tell us what you’re talking about?”

  I put my back to the hearth, so that I might look squarely down at both of them.

  “I have agents, still,” I said. “Or, at least, there are men whom I have so employed in the past. Were I a man unconcerned with prophecies…well then, there’s no need I should live either in England or France over the next few years. There is Italy, the Germanies, where a spy-network might base itself.” I shrugged. “The Turkish Mediterranean, if matters become dire. If I desired, I might eventually employ as many intelligencers as ever I did under M. de Sully.”

  Mlle Dariole and Gabriel exchanged looks.

  “And this has what to do with Giordano Bruno?” Dariole demanded.

  I took a pace or two back and forth over the trodden herbs and rushes on the flagstones; turned about, and faced the two of them again.

  “Too much has been foretold, too accurately. It seems to me…that it would be wise if there were—watchmen. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” At Dariole’s blank look, I glossed, “‘Who will guard the guards?’ Whether or not I believe Caterina was right in all she calculated for our future, Saburo had confidence enough to die for it. As did she. Fludd—” I gestured at the plain plaster of the ceiling, and by inference at the rooms above us. “He thinks his mathematical reasoning true, or he wouldn’t put himself into lifelong imprisonment now, for what he still hopes he can do to prevent his supposed comet that will destroy the world.”

  Because, even though the time has passed, I perceive he still—hopes.

  Dariole gave a shrug; Gabriel’s nod was one of more considered agreement.

  “I will set it out plainly for you,” I said, standing on the rush-strewn floor before their bench. “Sir Robert Cecil made a request of me: you both know this. I have Doctor Fludd at his mathematics, to see what his predictions say has changed with Prince Henry—and, meantime, I am using Cecil’s old agents to discover mundanely what information on Henry I can. I have no wish to kill the boy. But that is by-the-by, at the moment.”

  “It is?” Gabriel rumbled.

  “It is, because this cannot be the sole such occasion that will arise.”

  “And?” Dariole prompted.

  “And—murder is a blunt weapon.”

  Gabriel’s eyebrows shot up. “What?”

  “A blunt weapon, and one of last resort.” I wished I might sit. I felt, if I must confess it, too nervous under their Gemini-twin gazes. “The skill in spying is in using information and manipulating a man’s behaviour. Witness my lord the Duc. Murder should be the last weapon to hand.”

  I put my hands behind my back, clasping them to keep them still.

  “Robert Fludd, if he continues, will make many predictions. If a man desired to avoid murder, wherever possible, but desired also to steer clear of the worst of wars and other disasters…. Well, then: a man might useagents to monitor, to over-watch, and to step in, where need is, with just sufficient force or fraud. And, if judgement demands it—kill. Men die in duels and wars with not one-tenth the reason this would have….”

  In silence, rain hissed beyond the open kitchen door.

  “How can I judge the interests of five hundred years in the future? I do not know, truly, whether the world will end in comet-fire. I can’t conceive of it. I do think we ourselves best placed to step outside the narrow interests of France and England, and consider how this great war of Europe might be avoided.”

  “You,” Dariole said. She stood, her thumb hooking itself under her sword-belt, and her chin lifting as she stared up into my face. “This is you you’re talking about. Isn’t it?”

  I shrugged helplessly. “There would be others, in time, recruited carefully; those who could be trusted with the knowledge of Fludd’s prognostications—”

  “But you!”

  Gabriel looked up. “You take orders better than you give ’em, Raoul.”

  Conceivably I stiffened; it was no great difficulty to look down at him, where he sat. His expression did not waver. Gabriel Santon is no longer afraid of his master in any way.

  “Yes,” I admitted. “That has been true.”

  Gabriel smiled wryly at me.

  I said, “But, consider where I stand now. If Fludd said one true thing in his lifetime, he spoke it before Master Cecil—a man cannot ‘un-know’ what he knows.”

  I gestured; Gabriel moved along the bench; I sat down beside him. It was necessary for me to sit. Leaning forward, I linked my hands together so that no man should see them shake.

  “If I foresee a thing, and don’t prevent it, am I not responsible for it?”

  Dariole said nothing, only watching me intently, her arms folded across her body.

  Gabriel protested, “You can’t do everything.”

  “True enough. I’m no ambitious man.” I smiled, somewhat twistedly, at Gabriel. “And it may be true that I make a better servant than master. Who knows how long this enterprise would last; or if it could succeed—in anything? But, if I don’t do this, who else will?”

  The warm scent of broiled meat mixed with that of soot washed down the chimney by the rain. The coals on the fire-stand sputtered in the silence. I sighed, and shook my head.

  “I have been deciding, these last days…at least in the matter of Prince Henry. After that—” I shrugged.

  Dariole, her dark eyes hooded, watched me in the rain-light of the kitchen. “How would you do this? How would you start? How would you pay for it?”

  Fear, exasperation, and tension exploded through me; I threw up my hands, leaning back on the bench, the hard edge of the kitchen table cutting into my spine.

  “Mademoiselle, I have no idea! I’m as yet no further than knowing it should be done. Who knows: perhaps James’s next spy-master will be a man of as great a mind as Robert Cecil—or Viscount Carr will transmute himself into a statesman! And then we may leave this matter entirely, and go back to our lives!”

  Gabriel gave a basso profundo chuckle, which I
took to be a response to my exasperation. I glared at him.

  Mlle Dariole leaned over the bench, and made a long arm across the table, snaring the wine jug and crockery drinking-bowls.

  Pouring the wine, she said, “Maybe we don’t have to think of it now. Not until Prince Henry—”

  She stopped and looked at me.

  “With all this—Henry; Fludd; what you’ve been talking about, watchmen—you’re going away? Going where?”

  I reached for one of the wine-bowls, and drank for courage. “I am going to France, to speak to M. de Sully.”

  Dariole exploded. “You’re Badlam-crazy!”

  “‘Bedlam,’” I corrected.

  “I don’t care!”

  “She’s right,” Gabriel Santon observed with a sigh. “I ought to pack.”

  “You stay here. You keep your eye on Robert Fludd. And your fist if he needs it. I have his mathematical assurance of my return.”

  Dariole snorted. “You’re trusting your life to Fludd’s prediction?”

  “Well, I am to trust other men’s deaths to it.”

  I rose to my feet. If I could have turned my back on her, I would; it would have made words easier to say. She let me clasp her wrist. I felt the heat of her skin under my fingers, so soft, even through my gloves; and the muscle beneath hard and strong.

  “The present debt outweighs the future.”

  I reached out and took her left hand, moving the lace cuff and her doublet sleeve until the end of her scar was just visible.

  I said, “‘A man must be loyal to his lord.’ I find myself in agreement with Tanaka Saburo—if I do not plan to end the same way that he did. Mademoiselle, first, I must do this. Wait for me to return. I will be done within two or three weeks.”

  “You’ll be dead within two or three weeks.” Her mouth set. “I don’t care about mathematics! The Medici bitch won’t have forgotten! If you set foot in France, she’ll have you killed.”

  I braced myself for a long quarrel. “No, mademoiselle. I go, and I go alone. I…have a truth that must be told.”

  She lifted her chin, with that stubbornness with which I am so familiar. “Why? Why must it?”

  What did I say of Henri’s assassination, that May two years past? It will fail, because I have arranged it so. I smiled privately and satirically.

  “Hubris on my part, mademoiselle. That is why.”

  Dariole scowled at me.

  “There is the man to whom I owe my life,” I said. “Even if, by now, he will have regretted saving me, and desire another gallows-tree. I take every shred of responsibility for Henri’s death. It was I who brought Ravaillac to the rue de la Ferronnerie; it was I who did not guard him well enough, so that he could put home his knife into the body of Henri of Navarre. That I admit to, and I will submit to justice—but I am no traitor. And Sully must know that. He must be told!”

  Gabriel stood up, also; wiping his hands down the front of his breeches. “Raoul, you think he’ll absolve you for King Henri’s death?”

  I smiled, shaking my head. “Henri was his friend and master from the ’80s on; Sully knew Henri from not long after St Bartholomew’s Day. They fought together, governed together…no, the Duc will not absolve me. Rather the reverse.”

  He grunted. “Why go, then!”

  “Because I must tell him the truth. Before I do anything else.”

  There is no justice in politics; that is hardly news to me—still, it sickens me that Marie de Medici flourishes, she who killed her husband and will now never answer for it. Marie de Medici: who will be Queen now, until Louis is allowed to come of age.

  If I were a blade of a different temper, I would make my way back to France and see if it is as easy to kill a Queen by design as it is to kill a King by accident.

  Gabriel shrugged his heavy shoulders, smelling of sweat and Cripplegate. “You were lucky to get out of it last time, Raoul. You messed up!”

  Dariole interrupted him, glaring at me. “Robert Fludd gets to stay here on a pension, and you get to go back to Paris and be hanged?” Her palm and fingers curved comfortingly around her dagger’s pommel. “Caterina was right. Where’s the justice in that!”

  I managed a smile, although her outrage touched me. “Mademoiselle, I would say you are very young, to ask that question. Were it not that I am inclined to ask it myself, of late. But I shall not be hanged; I trust Fludd’s predictions that far.”

  The young woman lifted her head, closing her eyes. Cripplegate, in the Summer’s warm rain: the water at least laid the dust that commonly blew into the kitchen. Outside the open door and beyond the courtyard, two dogs, wet and yelping, ran in squabbling circles down the cobbled street, and vanished into the distance.

  Watching Dariole’s face, I said, “You may console yourself with this, at least. Doctor Fludd will never have friends. Likely, he will not marry. His servants will be his unacknowledged gaolers. This is his life, for as long as he lives it. Because he knows the secrets of kings.”

  Dariole opened her eyes and looked up at me.

  Without any apparent acknowledgement of Gabriel’s presence, she said, “Is that what it’s like for you?”

  Flustered, I could only echo, “Me, mademoiselle?”

  Gabriel watched Dariole, a deep crease across his forehead.

  She said, “Alone. Is that going to be your life?”

  I saw the crevasse that opened up before my feet.

  Smiling, I reached down and flicked her cheek with my gloved finger. “Doctor Fludd is confined to a house, and under observation. A man may find companionship in cities, when that is not so. If I have not the companions of Zaton’s, or the girls of Les Halles, be assured, I will find others, elsewhere.”

  Dariole turned her back on me and stalked out into the warm rain.

  I watched her lean back against the soaked courtyard wall and look up at the beam-and-plaster frontage of the house, under its grey veil of new lime-wash. Every line of her body shouted hurt.

  Gabriel, at my shoulder, advised, “Leave her.”

  I can do nothing else: it is for the best. I trust Fludd’s mathematics.

  Else it would be irresponsible of me to go.

  Rochefort, Memoirs

  47

  S ully has retired to a château on the Loire.

  I picked up word both from Cecil’s men, and one of my old contacts in the court of the Archduke and Archduchess in the Netherlands, and reflected that at least I should not face entering Paris while the Queen Regent was there. Sully had gone in January last year, they said, when he retired from the royal council.

  They spoke also of how unwillingly he had gone.

  History has its ironies—I re-entered France by retracing almost the exact route that M. the Duc D’Enghien, the Prince Condé, used when he fled with Charlotte de Montmorency from the attentions of the late King Henri IV.

  Condé and the Princess Charlotte, it turned out, had left again for France almost before Henri’s body grew cold to the touch. In some ways, I regretted it. In that November of 1609, when they fled to Brussels, Charlotte de Montmorency was both a minx and sixteen years old. I would have welcomed a word with her.

  I reflected on it as I made a covert and sidelong way south and west, across country towards the river Loire. Charlotte’s family had set the sixteen-year-old girl on to the ageing King—he was then near sixty—in the hope of favours. Henri had acted from the first moment like a man completely besotted. My master the Duke had thought it unamusing, and a political danger.

  At the time, I had been blackly amused by the spectacle of an old man making a fool of himself over a teenage girl.

  I am not within twenty years of Henri’s age! I protested in my mind, with present chagrin, as my sway-backed and broken-winded mount trudged through the rain.

  I am nowhere near such a spectacle as that old goat, besotted over a mere cock-tease!

  The Prince Condé, married off to Charlotte to give Henri an excuse to lie with her without scandal, had
taken his husbandly duties entirely too seriously, and fled with his beautiful wife when he was twenty-two.

  I am hardly twenty-two, either, I thought.

  If the question could have been asked without my being killed the moment I set foot in the Queen Regent’s court—and without getting my face slapped, and myself into a duel—I should like to have ask Charlotte de Montmorency: how did she find her marriage now? Now that she has attained the greater age of eighteen, going on nineteen?

  After two years, do the caresses of her husband, and the other young gallants she entertained in the Netherlands, satisfy her? Does she ever miss the experienced wooing of a man like Henri of Navarre? Does she ever take older lovers: soldiers, statesmen, adventurers?

  Dear God, but I am pitiful!

  It would do me good to have Mlle Dariole present to kick my arse.

  Ah, but that’s the problem.

  The weather both suited my mood and seemed to be what I deserved. Rain dripped from my hat onto the cloak I had bundled about me, and the mud from the gelding’s hooves plastered my boots to the thigh.

  Even worrying at the subject of Dariole brought pictures into my mind. Naked and dressing herself on the ship from Goa, the roll of the vessel making her stagger like a drunken man. I shifted uncomfortably in the saddle.

  A young man might have inspired her to a quicker healing. She might, by now, have been desirous of a lover’s touch.

  I know Mlle Dariole will not miss M. Rochefort over-much, although she might now think so. How can she help but be disgusted, in a year or two, by an old besotted fool slobbering over her? A young man like Condé will appear—and if she cannot marry, still, she will be a glorious mistress….

  The rain began to clear a half-hour later. I found myself in no more buoyant frame of mind.

  I betrayed M. de Sully, I thought grimly. No matter how inadvertently. There is nothing I can do, now, but make my confession to him, so that he knows that one man at least was not disloyal to him. That what happened was disastrous, but it was not done by any traitor’s hand.