Mary Gentle

by A Sundial in a Grave-1610

  I can’t convince her by words.

  Only let her be at home, I thought, with her father and brothers who have loved and missed her. Let her see what her boy-husband has grown into. Let her become used to wearing glorious clothes, and to having servants on every hand. It is not Caterina’s utopia of the people, but it is a paradise for those in Arcadie’s position.

  When she has been Arcadie and not Dariole for a month, there will be one embarrassing letter from her, and I shall hear that she has changed her mind, and that it was only “Dariole” who was foolishly besotted with M. Rochefort.

  “Go home, for a little while, mademoiselle.”

  She slowly nodded agreement.

  My eye became used to sunlight, restoring itself, of itself, almost to normality—or, if not normality, at least something that I thought might heal towards that before the year’s end.

  A cold sweat of relief ran down my back.

  The late Summer months passed into Autumn: I heard nothing from her.

  Gabriel muttered under his breath from time to time, but I noted he kept Doctor Fludd and other bothersome trifles out of my way.

  On a day early in the month of October, I took my way to Richmond.

  I made a long arm over the barricade at the side of the tennis court, and reached my clean shirt to me.

  Nagasaki, I thought.

  I missed the bath-houses of Nagasaki, and their bizarre notion that a man scrubs down his body before getting into a bath. Above all, I missed the hot, clean water, and the heat that soaks into a man’s bones.

  But the chill I feel does not come from my flesh.

  It did not take me long to undo the buttons of my doublet and strip off my sweat-soaked shirt. A clean shirt is not a completely effective substitute for a hot soak, but pleasing to the skin. I pulled the linen garment on over my head.

  “A strange thing that you do,” a voice remarked beside me.

  Wrenching my arms down the sleeves, I got my head out and free to see who spoke.

  Henry Prince of Wales stood over me where I sat on the bench, half a hand-span taller than when I had seen him last in Wookey Hole. I rose to my feet, bowed; and set about tucking in my shirt, and shucking my doublet back up and on.

  This saves me from needing to strike up acquaintance with him.

  At eighteen, he is a young man, not a boy.

  Henry Stuart’s hair had grown considerably and he wore it brushed straight back from his forehead. En chemise, for playing tennis, I could see that he had filled out both in the shoulders and chest. His servants dressed him while he spoke, and he paid them no attention as they put on him a sparkling white ruff, that framed his Stuart fox-hair and his face, where his cheeks showed blotchy-red with exertion.

  “You shift your linen after a game?” he queried.

  “Yes, an it please your Grace.” I hastily buttoned my doublet.

  He gave the impression of gazing down at me, even though I had risen to my feet. A small frown momentarily constricted the skin between his brows. Whatever had sent a signal to him—and I suspected it was height, given my now-shaven face and dyed hair, and assumed Dutch accent—did not succeed in further alerting him.

  Disguises are sometimes a matter of sheer conviction: we have not met. He may think he knows me—but a Prince meets so many men.

  Conceivably, meets so many assassins….

  Light slanted down into the hall from the high windows, gilding the slanted roof of the courts, where it ran three-parts around the walls. The Prince’s court gathered there under the roof’s edge. Behind me I heard the usual sycophantic comments a man hears in the presence of royalty, no more sincere than they are considered. Henry’s match had resulted in his victory; so much I could confidently predict myself. Rumour did not have him one of those princes who desires to show himself human insofar as he might lose a sporting contest.

  The consciousness of recognition failed to appear in his gaze.

  I am the man who was to kill your father, who witnessed you make your wholehearted attempt to murder him, who struck you; and you don’t recall me?

  Ah, but I was a servant.

  “Your Grace might find it instructive to shift linen,” I said respectfully, “since it aids a man’s comfort.”

  “Perhaps. But you do not bathe?”

  I shrugged. “It is not my custom, your Grace.”

  “It is my custom to bathe in the river.” He nodded towards the hall’s door, beyond which lay the Thames-river, luxuriant and moving slowly here in Richmond. “Will you not join me, sir?”

  His words went through me with a blade-like stab.

  So must Fludd have felt, I thought. The first time that he heard a man speak the words calculated in his predictions.

  I have only to say no.

  I have only to invite Henry to a better thing; distract him; sell him a horse, offer him a bet on a cock-fight; begin to press a suit for a supposed needy relative at court—all of these things would cause him to leave here and forget his notion of swimming after this exercise today.

  It is not murder. But if I stood by and watched as a man with a pistol shot him, and made no move to prevent it, even if I did not hurt him myself, I should not be innocent….

  “If it please your Grace, I will not swim.” I hesitated barely a moment before continuing. “A poor gentleman like myself should not swim in company with a prince.”

  His head dipped; Henry absently nodded agreement to that. In another mood, I would have smiled.

  Under the edge of the tennis court roof, one of Henry’s noble friends turned around. A dark-haired young man, whom I recognised. Robert Fludd notes him the next probable actor in this.

  He called out, “My lord—let’s wager on one more game before we’re done here!”

  And now both possibilities are here before me, just as Fludd foretold.

  This moment: here, now . When this otherwise undistinguished young man saves the life of his future King by distracting him…

  I knew that it would need to be not merely an act of omission on my part.

  So I stand where Robert Fludd and Caterina of the Giordanisti have stood before me, seeing in solid reality what was—only moments before—mere supposition. Is this how she felt, in the heartbeat as the pistol’s muzzle touched her head? How he feels when he sees it certain that he may act to tip a balance?

  Before Henry could react, I chose to speak.

  With a hint of challenge, I said, “I will not swim, but, if your Grace pleases, I will come to witness a Prince who is hardy enough to bathe in such weather.”

  Outside the door, as it opened, a man might glimpse the early October sunshine; it was, nonetheless, chill as well as clear.

  “Such weather?” Henry gave a scoffing laugh. The young men about him echoed it. “Shall we show this Dutchman that we are bred hardy, here?”

  A chorus of agreement echoed in the tennis hall.

  I moved slowly in their wake: outside, and across the wide water-meadows to the river.

  Will anything change, here, after all?

  Have I just condemned a man to death? And any of these others, with him?

  It has happened precisely as Fludd made claim for Bruno’s mathematics predicting—the boy’s desire to swim today; the other boy distracting him to a further game. Except that I am here, and I know how to prick the honour of a vain young man. So that what was the less-certain becomes the actual…

  A light of Autumn fell like honey on the grass. The smaller and less hardy birds gathered in flocks in the trees that lined the river, ready to fly south—many a peasant in Brittany and Normandy will take meat for his pot out of that flock as it goes over. The sky, blue enough for Summer, had a white chill on the horizon.

  In truth, I have myself swum on days far colder—in canals in the United Provinces, when we must break the ice to get to the water. We were foolhardy, and freezing blue by the end of it, but no man of us died.

  Fludd’s prophecy is not to do with cold. />
  The Prince glanced up from being stripped of his clothes again by his body-servants, and beckoned me imperiously to the riverside.

  A man or two behind me muttered at the sudden favour shown by the King’s son, and how a man might devise cozening tricks with his linen to be noticed…

  “At least I have a shirt,” I remarked amiably to one proud courtier, who I suspected of wearing only cuffs and ruff under his doublet, so poor the scuffs on his boots proclaimed him. Under cover of the laughter that followed, I walked across the grass, all my sudden wariness at the summons concealed.

  “Your Grace?” I removed my hat and bowed in the Dutch fashion.

  Henry gestured his servants aside. From further off, it would seem that the Prince and the foreigner spoke over their jest on cold water. I met the hazel-green eyes he turned on me. Does he decline to swim, now? Shall I out with my dagger instantly?

  The young man said, “Monsieur Herault. I did not recognise you, at first.”

  The gleam of wit in his eyes made me curse myself. Neither admitting nor contradicting, I made another bow, and watched him in silence. Let me hear what he has to say before I commit myself.

  “That was a witty way to encounter me.” The Prince nodded back at the hall, barely visible across the meadows. “You have lost nothing of your skill, monsieur. I wish you to know, before anything else: I do not hold you at fault for the failure at Wookey. It is like my father to have most cowardly put on armour. You could not have known.”

  What surprise I felt, I suppressed instantly. I assumed an expression of chagrin. “A man might have expected it, I suppose, your Grace.”

  “Don’t concern yourself, Monsieur Herault. I value your attempt—it was most gallant. Then, at the Tower, I suppose old Dad too well guarded by his supporters? Yes. I guessed as much.”

  Henry gripped my forearm, with a hand strong to wield the racket, or the sword, or the knife.

  “The same is true now as was then. My father is a pusillanimous old man, with no concern for how Christ is daily spat on in these pagan Papist countries. You have a good Huguenot name, monsieur; I know this galls you as much as it does the rest of us.”

  His gaze took in his followers. Many are older, I thought. His faction is not all boys now.

  “But do not fear,” Henry Stuart said, with a kindliness and gallantry that might have suited Henri IV in his youth—the Henri that this Henry claimed he most admired. Henri, who would have begun a pan-European war.

  Prince Henry Stuart said intensely, “There will be another opportunity provided. This, your appearance, I take to be a sign. Where we failed, before, we will succeed now. But I will speak more of this to you, later. Come to Richmond-palace. I will summon you when it is convenient.”

  Another gesture, before I could speak, and his servants came back to finish unpointing his doublet and breeches, and stripping off his shirt and under-linen. The shirt was silk, with blackwork embroidery about the armholes; he let it drop to the damp grass. The line of his body, from shoulder to hip, buttock to calf, was a sweep worthy of the Italian sculptors.

  He gave me a smile of surpassing sweetness—and, if he had known it, one so very like his father, James—and loped into the shallow water, splashing and yelling; followed by a half of his court.

  What I have done, I have done.

  As to what it is that I have done—if I have acted out of knowledge that is correct, then I have chosen a road for Prince Henry that involves death, and for millions of other men that does not: circumventing another Hundred Years’ War.

  The wind blew fine ripples over the river’s surface; dead leaves skittered past me.

  If . And, even so, I nor no man of us shall live to see the whole of it proved.

  These things I thought for the next few days, while the Prince remained as healthy as a young ox.

  And then the signs of approaching fever appeared in his cheeks.

  I followed him through the public occasions that followed, in the October of 1612; until on the 25th he retired to his bed, and an apprentice of Dr Theodore de Mayenne—not as immune to money as his master—informed me how Prince Henry looked hollow-eyed, pale, and spoke strangely. Eleven days later, on the evening of November 6th, after continual worsening and physicians’ treatments that I would not wish upon a dog, the boy died.

  Public panic suggested poison; only a few of his doctors claimed it to be the bad vapours of Thames-river, and blamed it on his swimming. The men of England discovered their golden prince taken from them, and mourned as if Christ had for a second time been crucified.

  James Stuart did not come to his son’s death-bed.

  “I have given it out I am afraid of the sickness,” he said to me in private audience. “But, man, what father can look his son in the eye and tell him he is hated? Better to let him go easy.”

  Catching some expression I did not intend to show, the old man reached up and gripped my shoulder.

  “It was meant to be. He has swum there a hundred times before. God’s Providence chose now to strike him down, as a traitor and Judas. God willed it.”

  “Certainly a man may take comfort from your Majesty’s words,” I said.

  But, regrettably, I am not that man.

  Everything I have done, I have done. I do not excuse it, now, on the grounds that another man gave me such-and-such orders. I am no man’s hand, and my own are not clean.

  A man cannot ignore knowledge once he has it.

  Or if he can, I am not, either, that man.

  Rochefort, Memoirs

  50

  W hen Mr Secretary Cecil died, six months before, it was not a day before the first lampoons and epithets appeared. Whore-master. Embezzler. Tyrant. Thief.

  “But Henry, Prince of Wales…Henry was ‘the boy-King Arthur,’” I remarked muddily to myself.

  I tilted the leather jack and drank, conscious of the warmth in my gut that now did not feel the draught up the kitchen chimney, nor the memory of men dropping to their knees in the street with grief. His funeral will be monumental.

  “Monsieur,” Fludd’s voice said.

  I looked up in surprise at seeing him having come down to this, the kitchen of the Coleman Street house.

  I smiled crookedly, and could not keep amusement on my face. “It is not the moment.”

  “It is,” Robert Fludd persisted, even as he eyed me warily. “I will begin by saying that you should see this.”

  What he held out to me, I ignored. “I do not desire to see any more of your papers. Or Caterina’s, if it comes to that. Not today.”

  Every man outside this house is drinking for grief of the Prince of Wales. I drink to—not to Henry. To the death of innocence.

  I upended the stone jug, and sent the last drips into the jack, which was the best item I might find to drink from—it did not break when I threw it against the wall. Crack, yes, so that sour wine seeped into the pitch-lined leather; but not break.

  The red embers of the fire, and two remaining candles, left in shadow the corners of the kitchen. They gave light enough for me to see Fludd’s gaunt features.

  I turned away, slumping on the bench, considering how soon Gabriel might make his way back from the Windmill-tavern with more wine.

  “Rochefort!”

  The astrologer-doctor’s slippers trod silently among the rushes of the floor; I did not realise he stood behind me until he spoke. I startled wildly, shifting too rapidly about on the bench.

  The wood of it I supposed to have been made slippery by Gabriel’s incessant cleaning; certainly I slid, missed my footing on the floor, and ended falling flat among the rushes in front of the hearth.

  Pushing myself up into a sitting position, I peered at the inch of wine unspilled from my mug. “Have some of this. Wine. No—have some.”

  Fludd looked down at me; I witnessed him think better of any attempt to help me up. “Why are we drinking, Monsieur Rochefort?”

  “As a medicine.”

  His mouth began to fra
me the word, and I saw a light of intelligence come into his eyes.

  “Correct,” I observed. “You are the only man in England who will not have been out into the streets to hear it—Henry Prince of Wales is dead.”

  Slowly, he reached out his hand to the table, and eased himself down onto the bench. I watched him in focused fascination. He lifted each of the bottles and jugs to weigh it, found one that dipped in his grip, and drank straight from it, trickles of red wine running into the stubble of his chin.

  “Now I know how you feel,” I observed. After a pause, while I formulated the thought, I said, “I do not thank you.”

  “You will not, no.” Fludd spoke half-breathlessly. He held out a jug.

  I took it from him, refilled my jack, and set the jug beside me.

  “I’m nowhere near struck into the hazard yet,” I observed, shifting my back comfortably against the stones of the fireplace. “I can still understand your English tongue…I think this will require more assistance from whatever Gabriel has been able to buy: wine, spirit, or ale.”

  Fludd took a folded paper out of his hanging sleeve. A little dazed in his appearance, he leaned forward and offered it. “This is one of my publications. You may recognise the Wookey mill’s paper.”

  I drank deeply from my jack, and peered closely at the title page; rubbing the distinctive flecks in the paper’s texture between thumb and finger. “‘An appeal to’—to what?”

  “To the Rosy Cross Brotherhood.”

  I stared.

  I made some noise that—were I not a man—I might best describe as a giggle.

  Robert Fludd’s back stiffened, where he sat. “It’s a letter I published in the same year that you and James went to Wookey cavern. A vain attempt to contact these ‘Brethren.’”

  “Very likely!” I agreed. With my legs stretched out in the mud and rushes, and looking up at Robert Fludd, I felt an incongruous desire to laugh.

  He frowned. “This letter—”

  I crumpled it swiftly in my fist, and dropped it in the fire. Fludd stared at the brief flash of the dying coals, as the flames ate it.