Mary Gentle

by A Sundial in a Grave-1610

  “The Rosicrucian Brotherhood? There is no ‘Rosicrucian brotherhood’! Everybody knows that! Are you mad? No, I don’t need to ask, do I? Of course you are….”

  “Listen to me!” He sounded shaky; I was, on a sudden, put in mind of the fact that he was a handful of years younger than I. “Rochefort!”

  “That’s ‘Messire Rochefort’ to you. ‘De’ Rochefort,” I added emphatically.

  Fludd seized another of the half-emptied jugs from the table, banging it down for emphasis. “I know the Fama Fraternitatis contains nothing more than a heap of Hermetic trash!”

  I stared at him blankly.

  As if it explained all, Fludd said, “It’s a joke—I always believed—a philosopher’s joke. And not a good one.”

  He leaned over from the bench, taking yet another pamphlet from his sleeve, and held it out.

  The cover, indeed, proclaimed itself Fama Fraternitatis, for all I could squint my eyes in the candle-light to read it.

  Fludd snatched it back, underlining a passage with his thumbnail. “Here! This ‘utopian’ society that the self-styled ‘Rosicrucians’ write of. It’s all that Signora Caterina thought possible to achieve! It would barely surprise me if this were her joke, perpetrated out of the press at Wookey!”

  I snatched at his second pamphlet to consign it to the fire. Having hold of one corner, I found it falling open at a folded-down page—at a woodcut of wheels, guns, castles, and philosophers, all in unlikely juxtaposition.

  “This,” I said, with great dignity, “makes no fucking sense!”

  Fludd prised the pamphlet back from me, his face sharp in the fire’s light. “But—the ‘Brothers of the Rosy Cross’! Think what a cover it would be! For your genuine organisation of agents.”

  Finding I had slid over to have one elbow on the raised hearth-stones, I wiped my mouth on my other sleeve.

  Robert Fludd jumped to his feet, pointing an ink-stained finger down at me. “You have said you’ll do this! A brotherhood, to act as you’ve acted with Henry—have I not proved it to you, that I can’t keep such an assembly of men, nor organise them? But you have practise in commanding such bands—spies, soldiers…Rochefort, I can help you.”

  If I have ever heard humiliation in a man’s voice, I am hearing it now.

  He persisted in the face of my silence. “Here is the name of a ready-made organisation for us, that a few men believe exists, that in fact does not—and that most men will by habit dismiss as a mere theory of conspiracy. Or dismiss as harmless, lunatic scholars.”

  In the cold kitchen, I gazed up at him for a very long moment. I drank from the jack I had forgot I held, the wine spilling stickily over my hand and linen cuff. I licked at grimy skin.

  “If I am tired of one thing,” I said, “it’s over-enthusiastic amateurs. And the fact that there is no longer any wine in this jug. No, that’s two things.”

  I threw the leather jack: it struck the table’s corner and rattled off into the dark.

  My head is by no means as numb as I might desire it.

  I sighed, rolling away from the fire’s heat where it began to scorch my doublet’s shoulder. Too little wine.

  I came lightly up onto my feet, as duelists do—and found it necessary for my balance to reach out and grab the rack of cooking-irons on the wall. Metal clattered and rang. I looked down at Robert Fludd, where he stood.

  Candles wavered in November draughts, their light not driving back so much of the night now. The corners of the room stayed hidden. Shadows covered the plaster ceiling and the fire-irons; the pewter plates stacked on the end of the scrubbed table. The coal’s glow touched the extremities of Fludd’s face.

  He said quietly, “I know you can’t trust me. Or, you can only in hindsight, when you see the results of my—of your—actions. Rochefort, I’m willing to take students. I’ll give you men who can check, for you, if what I claim for my mathematics is truly there.”

  Chill wind and circumstance made me force my mind to sharpen. I looked into the dark corners of the room, alertness and memory making unwelcome return. Robert Fludd stood looking up at me, seeming aware of how I over-topped him. This man whom Saburo out-manoeuvered, and Dariole hurt. Here he still is.

  With a crack in his voice, Fludd said, “I’ll tell you. When I was at Oxford, I desired to be a Paracelsan physician. A doctor that would heal what we are. Heal history, and the future…. Do what I could to mitigate the effects of war, disease, plague, starvation. To think in terms of charity and healing.”

  I made myself his memento mori. “A shame you did not think of that when you considered methods.”

  Robert Fludd flinched.

  “There is more than misery at stake, M. Rochefort. Survival. A man who has suffered is better than one who is dead.”

  He smoothed the folded pamphlet between his fingers.

  “I suppose my desires have not been so unlike the rules of this Order. To be a physician. To heal the sick—although necessity means I can’t do it freely, as they would. And I can’t prolong life, as they also would, or transmute metals, or know the secrets of the Cabala.”

  His unshaven chin lifted; he looked at me.

  “For the rest, believe me, they sound very like intelligencers! The Brothers wear no distinguishing marks, following the custom of dress of each country. They’re rumoured to know what passes in distant places.”

  Fludd smiled wryly.

  “And if you read this, you’ll read that the Brothers of the Rosy Cross discover hidden things by ‘the science of numbers.’”

  That brought a snort of laughter that hurt my ribs—being bruised, I supposed, from my earlier impact with bench and floor. “If this was Suor Caterina writing, she’s openly described your Giordanisti!”

  He held up the Fama pamphlet. “May not this ‘Rosy Cross’ come to be a redeemed Giordanisti? I—you went to de Sully, Rochefort; you understand atonement!”

  “You do not mention his name.”

  Robert Fludd kept silent for a minute and more.

  Subdued, he said, “You and I both wish to leave something on hand that will steer, unseen, the course of history, so that we do not all die—all; every man and his heir in this world when the comet strikes.”

  “Still, you hope.” I stared at him. “It needs must be done, not as you would have it, some autocratic empire. But a word here, a word there—”

  “—to work against war, where necessary; towards it, where unavoidable. Do you not feel the same? Rochefort, I ask for your help!”

  There are nights when it does not matter how much a man drinks, he remains stubbornly sober.

  I sighed. “I have personal cause to dislike you. I know the future may be changed. I am left with a debt to Saburo, to Caterina, to Milord Cecil—”

  To this man, I will not say to Sully.

  The draft under the kitchen door seeped into me, even through the warmth of the wine. I desire to have Dariole here, and to have this conversation; or Gabriel, if he would return. There is but Fludd and I.

  I turned to the hearth, holding my hands out over the coals.

  “Yes,” I said. “This is precisely what I have known I must do.”

  A new Giordanisti, hidden by a scholars’ joke. Caterina would approve, at least.

  “I neither like nor pity you,” I said, “but I understand what it is to fail.”

  Glancing back over my shoulder, I caught the moment his head turned towards me; his eyes catching the fire’s light.

  Roughly, I said, “I’m no doctor. I handle death. That…doesn’t mean I can’t make use of other tools.”

  Having taken wine, words came freely.

  “I have few skills. Those I do are the arts of a civilian murderer. It might be that…I might desire to put those skills at the service of a worthwhile end. Compromised as it may be.”

  Robert Fludd wiped a hand down his face with the smile of a man weary, a little inebriated, and encouraged beyond hope. Drunk as he and I might be, I thought, I see no deceit
in him.

  “Say that this ‘Rosicrucian’ organisation might be set up,” I said. “Say that the Giordanisti continue under this new name. To set us up under such a cover…to have you calculate for it…. To recruit…. It would be a handful of years before we might begin to know, fully, where we should go. And even then, we risk doing as great a wrong as right!”

  Fludd drank from the jug, wine spattering in shilling-sized drops on the flagstones. “I know. I know.”

  Reaching out to the masonry of the fireplace, I supported myself upright; all but cracking my head against the plaster of the smoke-hood by misjudging distance.

  Under my gaze, red and orange flickered among the black extinguishing coals.

  I said, “You must know, also—we will be dead and dust, either way, before your ‘comet.’ Each of us, every man, every woman. Here, or as far as Nihon and the New World. We will have died, been buried, rotted away; our bones put into piles in catacombs, then those decayed. Men will have breathed in and breathed out our dust before any of this comes to fruition. We will never know if we are right.”

  “Yes.” His voice was thin.

  I turned away from the hearth, facing him. “But if I don’t make some attempt to prevent the ills you may predict, then I am responsible for every suffering man. Generations of women treated as beasts. Children born to starve at a few months old. And even with your calculations, I cannot prevent it all. I have both knowledge and responsibility—and far too little power.”

  Robert Fludd brushed down his robes. That did nothing but leave wet smears in the velvet. He met my gaze. “I often think—the Nolan Master ruined the brightest minds of a generation. No man can bear that responsibility that Magister Giordano Bruno gave to us. It belongs to God.”

  “You, also, do not sleep well.”

  “No,” he said.

  Shadows crept in from the ceiling-beams and the gap under the door, the candles sputtering to their end.

  “It was the hinge on which all turned,” Robert Fludd said, his eyes bright and piercing. “That year, two years past. There will not come another such year. Nor another single such act as James’s assassination. There will need to be a million acts, now, over generations; you and I will not see the end of them, Rochefort.”

  “Perhaps that is no bad thing,” I said. “Let those who are the ‘Rosicrucians’ at that time make their own decisions.”

  He staggered slightly, walking towards the door to the house.

  “Time the destroyer,” Fludd added, now blinking repeatedly. “Fleeting time, the vanity of all things. Or Man, self-sufficient, the arbiter of his own destiny, the shaper….”

  “You’re drunk.” I pushed him in the direction of the door; he went complaisantly enough. “Go and sleep it off.”

  Behind me, I heard the noise of the back door’s latch lifting.

  The door opened as I turned about.

  Gabriel sloped in, a guilty look on his face, and three full, stoppered jugs in his arms.

  “Raoul?” He dumped the jugs down on the table, and shot a wary glance at Robert Fludd.

  Moved to a more buoyant mood, I smiled at Gabriel. “You might as well sit down. I have explanations to make.”

  Doctor Robert Fludd, clinging white-faced to the lintel of the door, exclaimed in bemusement, “You’re telling a servant?”

  “If Gabriel agrees,” I said, “I am telling the next brother of the Rosy Cross.”

  Fludd’s mouth gaped open.

  Gabriel gave me a look I have recognised, since the Low Countries, as indicating the desirability of a rapid explanation, complete in all details.

  Reaching an equilibrium of mind that had long been denied me, I sat down on the bench, and reached to pour wine for Gabriel Santon.

  “It will be no reflection on you if you refuse the part,” I said to him. “This will be dangerous, but I believe you have a right to know.”

  I paused, putting the jug down.

  “And—there will be a fourth one of us—if she will let me bring her home.”

  Rochefort, Memoirs

  51

  T he pearl-sewn silk sleeve covered her scar.

  Any other man, I believe, would have looked first at her face, skilfully augmented with pigments as it was; or at the soft expanse of flesh, covered only by the finest lawn cloth, between her throat and her bodice.

  I read in her stance that slight favouring of her left shoulder that any Master of Defence would require she train out of herself on the instant.

  The great dark panelled chambers at the Montargis estate were made hot by the press of gallants, courtiers, prelates; ladies of the family and those belonging to visitors; all crowded in among the great stands of candles that shone down on satin and jewels, ruffs, and hats. Under the loud chatter, I heard her voice quite clearly.

  “Monsieur de Herault,” Dariole said, and held out her naked hand.

  The touch of her fingers, even offered with that sarcasm, was welcome to me. I put my lips lightly to them—and found myself all but undone by the scent of her skin.

  One of her brothers, at her shoulder, rumbled questioningly, “And you, monsieur, are here because…?”

  “Here at Montargis?” I smiled at him. Ambroise, I think; all her brothers look very alike. She must take after her mother.

  “I have a keen interest in history,” I remarked, urbanely. “Is it not the case that one of your towers, here, is supposed to have held Jeanne the Pucelle, on her way to be tried at Rouen? But then, perhaps you do not approve of warrior women?”

  Dariole—“Arcadie,” I should say—eyed me with a level and unrelenting stare. Her brother snorted.

  She spoke. “I can deal with this.”

  He gave her the look which a man gives a woman when he has lost a long-fought argument, and turned to lose himself in the press of bodies.

  The two of us standing together were not shielded from men, except by the windows at our left hand. The mild afternoon of the second week in November pressed against the glass, the sun not yet gone from the sky.

  “Who have you said that I am?” I asked.

  “Some man that ‘Dariole’ knew. Why are you here?” she demanded.

  My gaze followed Ambroise—or Blaise, or Ogier; whichever of the brothers he was—and I saw him now speaking to another man, younger, and not possessed of the family features. Dark, with a pale skin, and something of that look about him that women like.

  And yet the entertainment is being held here, and not at his family estate.

  “That will be your husband, Philippe,” I said. And, because I felt reckless enough, followed that by a question. “Have you consummated your marriage with him?”

  Any other woman would have gasped, or welled up with tears, or struck me; I expected at least the last of those reactions from Mlle Dariole. Not, perhaps, from Madame Arcadie—who only continued to look at me, with perfect self-possession.

  She said, again, “Why are you here?”

  I closed my eyes very briefly. The noise of the musicians could barely be heard above the provincial chatter of her guests. I might say what I pleased and not be overheard, here, in this moment.

  Gazing down at her, and her eyes that had been shadowed by some maid’s skilled hand, I smiled.

  “What would you expect of me?” I said. “I’ve come to beg.”

  Possibly I would have abandoned all if there had been no response from her.

  Her eyes flickered, and she stroked the pearl-strung cords that hung from her neck to the waist of her farthingale. Her index finger tapped them, irritably. That made me desire to smile more.

  “Well?” she demanded.

  I raised a brow.

  She glared at me. “There are six men in this room who’ll issue you a challenge if I slap your face—seven, if you count my husband—”

  Restraint failed me; I grinned at her.

  Her eyes became slits. “You know what I mean!”

  “Oh, truly.” I made her a small bow, worthy o
f Fontainebleau for style. “But I did not know you disliked your family so much as to wish them all dead by the same sword….”

  She made a tiny sound, like the squeak of a young kitten, that appeared to take her by surprise.

  “Rochefort…”

  The warning note in her voice pleased me, if only because I recognised it as that of Mlle Dariole.

  I watched her for a moment or two, as I ceased to smile. Her farthingale was blue silk, under the pearls. Her bodice, cut flat across her breast, served as foundation for the great fragile ruff that curved up behind her head. There were diamonds in the web of lace.

  I felt the old terror that I had felt riding here, that was naught to do with whether my disguise would hold against the hostile world. She has not written or otherwise sent word: how can I dare to see her? And when I come not just to offer, but to demand something of her?

  Between she and I, there can be no secrets.

  “As to that,” I said, “I have, first, apologies to make to you.”

  She gave me a suspicious look, and moved her body’s stance unguardedly in response; settling back so that she stood with her weight on one hip, and her head cocked very slightly to the side. She folded her arms, like a young man. In farthingale and stomacher, it looked ridiculous.

  “Apologies,” she said flatly—paused, and added, “More than one?”

  The note of provocation crept back into her tone.

  I reached out, soberly, and took her hand again.

  “Mademoiselle, I must apologise for two actions of mine, at the least. No, three. Firstly, that I decided that I would not permit you to kill Robert Fludd. It was your right; I made the decision; I am sorry for it.”

  She frowned, interrupting. “You think I should have killed him?”

  “No, mademoiselle. I believe him extremely valuable—for a reason which I shall later fully explain. I should, however, have taken more care to bring you to my opinion, before I decided out of hand that he should live.”

  Her face, that I had barely recognised under the rouge and kohl, relaxed into a rueful expression that was all hers. “I dare say I wasn’t in the mood to be argued with.”

  My hand tightened on hers. By an effort of will, I loosed it. There may not be many more minutes we may spend in conversation, I thought, registering two more of her brothers now speaking with her husband.