Mary Gentle

by A Sundial in a Grave-1610

  Even so, I have caused the death of his best and oldest friend. If not for Fludd’s mathematical assurances, it would neither surprise nor disappoint me if he had me hanged from the justice-tree on his own estate.

  I turned the nag’s head to ride parallel with the Loire, on the north bank. Soon, the road widened. A few other travelers passed: monks, a group of noblemen riding back from the hunt, two women, a small child playing happily in the mud left after the rain. Houses began to appear here and there, and a small town at the end of a Loire bridge, which I would ride around in case any man should ask questions.

  The country is quiet, I marvelled. No war with Jülich-Cleves. All men do not travel in groups, with firearms. I occupied myself for a few miles in turning over in my mind the news and rumours I had heard. Henri’s “Grand Design,” whatever conquests he intended by it, had died with his death. Is it conceivable that in terms of peace, the Medici is a better ruler?

  It was almost an hour before the sky cleared totally, and I saw the red-tiled roofs of the château of Villebon over the trees ahead.

  How can I leave her, to perform this act of stupidity?

  How can I not?

  I touched a spur to the nag’s flanks and he ambled at a slightly faster pace.

  My master the Duke is retired from the council, he is no longer surintendant de finances and first minister of France. He is still a lord with the high, low, and middle justice. This is not Suor Caterina’s revolution of the people. This is a land where a man may be hanged out of hand: as much property as a beast is.

  The sun warmed my near-dry cloak.

  My stomach churned, seeing Villebon come closer. It would not take much to have me turn about, I thought, as I rode into the small town that attached itself to the château. It was remarkably crowded, and it took me some time to persuade my nag through the streets.

  I rode directly to the gates of the château, which stood open in the sun. The marks of many hooves indicated that a large party had passed out, some two hours ago; Monsieur de Sully might not be back for some time, I concluded. Although it is always possible that it is not the Duc who has ridden out.

  “You!” a voice bellowed, close enough that, if the gelding had been a spirited horse, I should have found myself dumped on my arse in the mud. As it was, the beast shuffled sideways a few steps, and I reined him in and looked down.

  The guards were not faces I knew.

  The young man in fashionable doublet, I knew well.

  At least one of his secretaries stayed with him, I thought. “Monsieur Andre.”

  He called out urgently, a dozen men with muskets flocking to him from the gate-house. I sat my mount, watching. He snarled, “You can’t get away!”

  “Would I be here if I wanted to?”

  Speaking more mildly than I felt—M. Andre has been always a pompous and humourless young man, but he has at least shown himself loyal—I held up my hands to demonstrate myself unarmed, and got down from the saddle.

  “I’m ready,” I said. “You may take me to him.”

  Andre scowled, confused. He shot a glance across the courtyard, towards the château’s main door. Slowly, I unbuckled my sword-belt, and held both sword and dagger out to the boy.

  “Search him!” Andre ordered the men shrilly; and to me: “I hope he sticks you in the pillory before he hangs you. Offal and flints, Rochefort, and I hope you lose an eye to it!”

  A shame you were not the Queen Regent’s spy and murderer, I reflected, while two of the musketeers took me by the arms and shoulders, and a third searched me.

  Even more mildly, I remarked, “The late King never failed to call his enemies ‘monsieur,’ no matter how vile he thought them. It’s a shame younger men don’t follow his example.”

  The younger man bristled. I resolved to give up baiting him. I am here for the Duc, not him.

  The young man, Andre, took hold of the shoulder of my doublet, reaching up to do it. I thought he would not have, had his musketeers not been holding my arms behind my back.

  The anger in his face was so pure, I all but looked aside in shame.

  “We executed one traitor, a year or more past,” he got out, “when the Goddams thought fit to warn us M. Gost had sold himself to the Medici. He was only a spy. You—I hope you hang as he did, but may it take you an hour to choke!”

  I should not have thought of Daniel Gost, I confess—but, on reflection, the Duc’s kitchens are not so pleasant that a man working in them cannot be tempted by a bribe. Gost had been in the household longer than I. I felt a certain sense of anti-climax. But then again….

  Did Daniel sweat when he knew Maignan was dead, by reason of him? Did he have nightmares, and half welcome the rope when they brought it?

  Men scurried about at Andre’s command. The musketeers, being ordered to hold me on the spot, did exactly that. I looked about me. Villebon was not a place I had visited often—when I have seen my master the Duke at his homes, it has more commonly been Sully-on-Loire and Rosny. I imagined I would see him, here, in much the same kind of chamber as there, or at the Arsenal. Some small, dark panelled room, with Sully seated behind a desk piled high with papers in perfect order.

  And wide oaken floorboards, I thought, upon which I may drop down on my knees and beg his pardon.

  A man cannot apologise for this.

  I suppose I may, like Doctor Fludd, at least make explanation.

  At the same moment that I raised my eyes to the white walls and peaked red-tiled roofs of Villebon, wondering where in the building I might find that room with Sully, words suddenly burst out loudly behind me.

  Andre turned about, staring. I heard a disturbance at the edge of the town. Cheering? Or some other sound?

  A number of horsemen burst out of the town at the gallop, a grey horse leading. The Duc, I thought, suddenly all ice. The stallion’s hooves threw up yellow mud; landed so hard that I could feel them jar the ground. They echoed from the walls of the courtyard as Maximilien de Bethune rode up, slid down from the saddle, and threw his reins behind him with the assurance of a man who knows there will always be a servant there to catch them. He strode towards us as his mount danced backwards in the grip of the groom, and the other riders and mounts milled around at the gate.

  His beard has gone white, I thought, as he came close upon me. Under the velvet bonnet, his hair showed iron grey. He did not, despite that, look the handful of years over fifty that he must be—he strode still like the man who rode with Henri at Arques and Ivry; the gown that he wore over his sober doublet and trunk-hose flying out in the wind, his riding whip cracking at the side of his boot.

  “Monsiegneur Duc.” I did not attempt to move out of the grip of the musketeers who held me. Behind Sully, other men were dismounting, and a few women in noble dress. I could only stare down at the man as he came closer: Henri’s confidant, the Medici’s enemy, retired governor of France. His round Gascon features were pale and set.

  He stopped in front of me. I began again, “Monsiegneur—”

  He raised the horse-whip still in his hand and lashed me across the face.

  It caught me too fast, too much by surprise, for even a duelist’s reflexes to avoid more than the very worst of it. The lash caught me from forehead to cheek, over one eye, in one knife-thin stroke. I yelled.

  “Let him go!” he bellowed.

  The soldiers stepped rapidly back.

  His face glowed with recognition and hatred. He raised the whip again and struck, leather and cord catching me horizontally across my cheeks. I tasted sweet iron; spat a mouthful of blood.

  “Monsieur Duke!” I yelled, desperate. He sliced two more blows down on my head, where I had not even had the chance to remove my hat; the second one cut my scalp so that blood ran.

  I stumbled down on one knee, arms up to protect my face. The Duc de Sully’s whip lashed me full in the ribs, slicing doublet and shirt as if they were nothing.

  “Monsiegneur!” I shouted. “Listen! Listen to me!”

/>   “Bastard traitor.”

  Sully’s voice was unrecognisable. I dared not look up. Blood ran down my face. Something was wrong with my vision; the flagstones blurred, spattered with blood. I saw his boots beside me. A hand grabbed my hair.

  For all he was fifteen years my senior, and a head shorter, he threw me forward bodily.

  I did not resist. Bleakly, inside the pain, a small thought surfaced: I deserve all he can do to me. I fell down on my hands and knees, and yelled again as the whip caught me across the small of the back.

  Shouts came from beyond the two of us; people watched; I could not have said who. Nobles; commoners. Some cheering, some alarmed.

  I huddled my head down between my arms.

  The whip is made to get commands through the thick skin of a horse. Human skin is different. With the bare protection of doublet and breeches, I rolled on the ground, and the whip caught me again and again, slicing cloth to rags. It lashed open my calf, my thigh, my wrist; the sharp excruciation curling about my ribs and leaving a bloody weal from nipple to throat.

  “Monsiegneur, stop, listen, please!”

  I bellowed in desperation at him; for all I know, he did not hear. It was not begging. For all the pain, I knew myself deserving of this. He held me with one hand in my hair, and thrashed the horse-whip down as hard as a man might on a vicious stone horse, while I rolled on the flagstones and screamed.

  A whistling cut caught the edge of my lip: I cut off in mid-bellow and an explosion of blood.

  He flung me bodily down. The hard stones were almost refuge. I ducked my head and pushed my face into the hollows where the stones joined, arms over my head, belly to the ground. His whip rained down sodden cuts on my shoulders, buttocks, and thighs.

  “Pick him up.”

  His voice sounded ragged, bursting with fury.

  I wanted to crawl away; my legs would not push me. I heard him thickly apologise, and dismiss his noble guests. And I felt the guards grab my lacerated shoulders. They hauled me onto my feet.

  Upright, the world was a bright, dizzy blur. Blood trickled down from a cut across my temple that I hadn’t registered. One of the men holding me upright was M. Andre. Something trickled from my hair to my torn ruff, dripping red. I could not clear my vision. I could not speak: my mouth felt as if stuffed with wet cloth.

  Maximilien de Bethune, Duc de Sully, stood a yard away, his whip clasped in his left hand now. With his other hand, he punched me in the face.

  Knees sagging, held up by his guardsmen, I was no taller than he. He might land his punches where he pleased. His knuckles impacted on my cheekbone, and I heard—through a blaze of pain—how he swore. A soldier’s rough language.

  The Duc gestured. “Take him away; I will see him.”

  I did not faint, nor become unconscious, but I seemed to pass into a state of preoccupation. A sensation of warmth came from somewhere. I could not see out of one eye. The odd sensation on my skin was blood running down it: one doesn’t feel it, being of the body’s own heat. I hope to God it is blood alone. I seemed to hang in some place out of time. An urge went through me: I bent forward and vomited up all of my last meal, and blood ran from my nostrils.

  Fludd had time for rough calculation only. I will return alive.

  But he claimed nothing of what state I might be in.

  Both my ears were singing. I could make them into voices if I chose. I chose to hear them as Mlle Arcadie de Montargis de la Roncière. Are you punished enough? her voice whispered to me. Or will you beg him to hit you again? Henri is still dead. However much pain he inflicts on you, it changes nothing.

  “No, but he has the right.” No man could have made out what I mumbled, through lips already swollen.

  Sully gave orders. Through my sick dizziness, I recognised his voice. Painful grips tightened on my shoulders: I became aware that I was dragged, boots trailing along the flagstones. Carried, more than dragged. I had no idea of where, or for what. There was a hiatus that might have been two minutes, or twenty, or two hours: I snapped from it with a shout as someone threw me down on a floor.

  I lay on my face for a space of time, I don’t know how long, dimly surprised to find myself alive. Something under me was hard, not cold enough for stone. If I stayed perfectly still, the pain ebbed a little. I could see, in one corner of my vision, my arm, with the cloth cut into strips; and red gouges showing in the flesh underneath, set in black-and-blue bruises. Still I could not see out of one eye. I stank of puke: it stuck my ruff to my doublet.

  Hands jerked me upright.

  I have been here long enough for blood to dry, I realised, sucking in air, as every ripped shred of cloth tore stickily out of whip-cuts.

  “Stand up,” the Duke’s voice said. Both scornfully and accurately, he added, “You will not die of a beating.”

  This grave Gascon duke, usually so controlled…I heard fire in his voice, damped down now, but ready to flare up at any moment. He has by no means done punishing me for my failure.

  I managed to stay upright, if hunched over a little. When I put the back of my wrist delicately to my mouth, I felt lips painfully split, and my nose swollen. My eyes closed into slits, the left worse than the right; a fear of blindness cut through me like icy water. A moment later, I thought: Fludd can be wrong. If he hangs me I shall have little time to worry.

  “Rochefort,” the Duc de Sully said.

  He stood by a carved, armed chair, turned aside from the desk under the window. The chamber was large and palely lit.

  I thought, Does he know, I wonder, that he has that fine line of red spots decorating his ruff?

  I stared at the droplets of my blood.

  Andre and musketeers stood in the doorway; the Duc swore at them to leave. The door shut behind them. I heaved in a breath; smelled the familiar scents among which I have taken my orders these past fifteen years: sun-warmed beeswax, wood fires, old ink, and amber. The light on the pale linen-fold panels made one of my eyes run. I fel a rush of chill in my belly. Now I must tell him. Now I must tell the truth I’ve come so far to tell.

  I got out, “I’m sorry, Monsiegneur.”

  It provoked reaction: I knew it would. There was no way of avoiding it. For a split second I saw Robert Fludd in Dariole’s arms, and the flash of light off her sharp knife. Maximilien de Bethune, Baron Rosny, Duc de Sully, swore like a priest and hit me in the mouth.

  I just managed to keep my balance. Blood dribbled from my mouth; I spat, and did not clear my ruff. “I don’t blame you. Monsiegneur…I don’t blame you. I’d do the same.”

  It sounded almost wry, but I in no way felt comic. I hurt more for him than for me.

  “I came to tell you the truth.” This time I got my head up, and managed to look him in the face. “No other man but I can tell you.”

  Strain and age were written incomparably deeper into his round face than they had been two years ago. Grief has not died, nor hatred. I saw it in that face.

  “What truth?” he exclaimed, with sudden disgust, and snatched his gloves from his hands. Both were red across the knuckles. “You try to betray me again. A trap. As if I were not watched close enough already!”

  I lifted my hand again and wiped at my mouth, trying to clear my voice. Pain went through me. I tried to think that it would clear my head.

  He has no way to know who sent a message to Paris by way of Cecil’s ambassador, warning him of a Medici traitor. To his mind, no reason to think it might be M. Rochefort, who vanished after a few warning letters. I gritted my teeth, and tried to speak words that would make him listen.

  “The Queen Regent did not send me.” I straightened, every inch of my body burning with the lashes. “If you want to kill me without more blood on your hands, monsiegneur, give me over to her. She’ll hang me as soon as she can, because I’m witness against her.”

  Sully glanced down. I wished I could see his expression more clearly. I dared not put fingers to that eye, to see if he had crushed the eyeball in its socket.

>   “Must I hear words from you?” De Sully spoke with a combination of weariness and hatred that cut me deeply. “What will you say? That it was for his wife that you had Henri killed?”

  My heart jolted. Two years after Henri’s death and his grief is still as hot. Hotter, now he has the man responsible.

  “Yes, monsiegneur. Marie de Medici wanted me to kill the King.”

  “I will hang you,” Sully said. “That you dare come here and say this to me….”

  “Monsiegneur,” I began. Trying to straighten my thoughts in my throbbing head. I am as guilty of the King’s death as if I put the knife in him myself; I am guilty of the death of François Ravaillac; but it was accident, all accident. Madame the Queen held your life ransom.

  I managed not to fall down on my knees. It is not for me to beg forgiveness, or absolution. It is for me to tell the truth. I looked at the Duke my master, Maximilien de Bethune. Soldier for the dead King Henri, servant and financier for the dead King Henri; most of all, friend to the late King Henri.

  “Well?” he snapped.

  There was a small oblong painting over his chair, fastened to the panelling; a painting, or perhaps an engraving, I could not quite make out which. Henri IV, Henri of Navarre: that profile-face which all men recognise, his lively eyes, his jutting beard.

  Here is where Sully works, and he is never more than a yard from King Henri.

  I cannot tell him.

  It burst on me with all the force of the obvious.

  How can I tell him that he is the thing that the Queen Regent used, to force me into killing the King?

  Shock made my handicapped gaze steady. Though shadows of blood, I saw de Sully clearly: tall, dignified, brilliant, stubborn; grieving still for his friend, who came in the end of their lives to be King of France.

  If I tell you that Marie de Medici threatened your life to compel me….

  …You will blame yourself for Henri’s death.

  No matter that it happened by chance, in the end. That, I think, would be more painful to you than if I had put the knife in the King’s body myself. No matter.

  He will not blame Queen Marie. He will not even blame Valentin Raoul Rochefort.