Mary Gentle

by A Sundial in a Grave-1610

  The last of the ink scratched out onto the paper.

  Looking down, I saw the quill carved down to nothing, its split point splayed and feathered by use.

  No, I cannot write the rest of it. I cannot.

  Sitting back, I flexed my hand and wrist, aching with the tension that flowed through my body. The light from the window had grown grey, I realised, clouds coming up again from the west. I rose and reached a taper down to the fire, lighting candles in the noon-tide, careless of the expense.

  That done, I stood looking down at the papers for a moment or two—swept them up, and, holding each by the corner, and one by one, slowly fed each page to the nearer of the candles, and dropped the ash down to be ground into the floorboards under my boot.

  So it ends.

  I have business with Fludd, with Gabriel; with James Stuart and the Queen Regent, and whomsoever otherwise comes to my attention.

  The spark of encouragement and fortitude that appeared in my mind at that thought, I cherished.

  Saburo, Caterina, Cecil: gone. M. de Sully: gone as far as I am concerned. Men do this: pass out of our lives.

  But others will enter.

  And work is a sovereign cure for the melancholy—especially when it is as puerile a green-stick melancholy as a man might expect in a girl of fifteen, not a man over forty. Work is of use to a man. I have long known this.

  Paying my bill, and saddling my hired mount, I rode out of Montargis, cast about to see what road might lead me to the south-west—and, despite everything, turned the nag’s head towards that estate long owned by the de la Roncière family.

  Idiot. Moron. Fool.

  Yes, and the rest, I thought.

  A lesson which doubtless any of Mademoiselle’s brothers will be happy to drive home, if I provoke them beyond what Bruno’s Formulae allow.

  It passed through my mind as I rode to the borders of the de la Roncière estate, making a quiet entry, that I doubted any of her brothers had the intelligence to work out that even a “hardened killer” (a comment brother Ambroise had permitted me to overhear, the previous evening) or a “foul mercenary spy” (brother Ogier’s version), might find it awkward to kill the brothers of the woman he was in love with.

  It occurred to me, also, that I had gone to the last night’s festivities at the family château with all the even-mindedness of a twenty-year-old gallant embarking on his first serious affair—his heart on his sleeve, and his pride in his pocket. If I had not been twice twenty, with considerable experience in concealing my emotions, every man and woman present would have known it.

  How, then, have I managed to leave Mademoiselle Dariole under so false an impression?

  Even riding, I had only to think of the fluid expert motion with which she uses a rapier to find myself uncomfortable in the saddle. Even with the swelling curves of her breasts pinned down by the tight stomacher of last night’s gown, she had set my prick to feeling a familiar discomfort. And her hands in mine had been warm, but not soft—the calluses do not go in a few months.

  I shook my head, riding up to the stables behind the château. It was that noon hour when grooms are absent, round at the kitchens, drinking the dregs of their master’s wine while they can get away with it, before the family’s late rising.

  Must I abandon the thought of a Rosicrucian sister completely? Shall I be able to come here again?

  In a year, perhaps, to see their first child?

  It cut me like a knife.

  I cannot give her that.

  Dismounting and entering the stables, I stumbled over something in the meagre lantern-light; kicked it, swore, and held it up to the grey daylight flooding in from the entrance.

  A bundle of cloth.

  Twine tied it roughly. Linen and silk together—the finest translucent linen. And, looking closer, I saw a deep azure silk.

  I dropped the cloth, straightened up; every nerve taut to screaming pitch, my hand on my rapier hilt. Clothes bundled up so, it cannot have been an abduction—!

  She came out of the shadows at the end of the barn, leading a mount with the reins over her arm, and a bundle on her shoulder.

  She wore a grey velvet doublet and Venetian breeches. Neither garment particularly fitted her.

  “Rochefort?”

  She stopped, dead, and hastily hitched her dun mount to a wall-hook; watching me every second, her fingers fumbling.

  “Dariole,” I said.

  “I don’t much like Ambroise’s taste in clothes, but he’s nearest my size. Didn’t you tell me, anything criminal’s always less suspicious at noon than at midnight?”

  I startled. “Criminal?”

  “I’m running away.” A slow, broad grin spread over her face. “Messire Rochefort—I’m always meeting you in stables!”

  She ran forward and threw her arms around me, and whooped.

  I stood stock-still, her arms around my chest, and my own arms held out to the side so that I shouldn’t touch her.

  “Dariole, we must talk, we need—”

  I made as if to embrace her, snatched my hands away—swore under my breath, and closed my arms tightly about her body, pressing her to me and burying my face in her hair.

  Her muffled voice protested. “You’re—suffocating—me!”

  Instantly, I loosened my grip. I lifted my head, and gazed down at her, her flushed face, her smile so wide that it showed the one gap in her white teeth.

  “Messire.” She held my gaze. “I can’t stay here.”

  “But you looked happy. Happy!” I shook my head in complete bewilderment. “Why? How?”

  She kept her grip tight about me. The familiarity in the fit of belly and breast and thigh made me choke.

  “I can’t stay here,” she repeated emphatically. “I thought I could. I thought I could take this off with the breeches.”

  By this, I saw she meant the rapier and dagger belted on her, that I had noticed no more than to adjust my embrace to allow for it.

  “That isn’t me.” She nodded towards the house. “No more than it’s for Moll Frith, or Lady Arbella, or, or even that Lanier woman. She was a bitch and a whore but I understand her.”

  “I wish I understood you!” I ought to stop embracing this woman in public, I thought—or what might be public as soon as the grooms came back. “Your brothers will kill me!”

  “I’d like to see them try,” Dariole said, with genuine scorn, and I couldn’t prevent it: I flushed, both proud and embarrassed.

  “You can’t be what you aren’t,” she said quietly. “It’ll kill me, messire. I don’t care if you don’t want to come with me—I’m leaving. I’ll write to them but I won’t come back here.”

  “What….” I swallowed, and began again, lifting one hand so that I could smooth her hair back with my fingers. “What makes you suppose that I don’t want you, mademoiselle?”

  She pushed herself more tightly against me, to which my body responded. I followed the line of her lips with my finger.

  “I want you,” I said hopelessly. “Stupid bitch though you are, you know it.”

  “‘Stupid bitch’?”

  “Don’t make a joke of it. I can’t tie you to someone twice your age.”

  “More than twice.”

  “Dariole!”

  “I’m going away,” she said. The familiar stubborn set of her mouth did not amaze me. “Messire, if you want me, you should say so. If you want me to help you, you should say that, too. I’m not going to put you at sword’s point. You have to decide for yourself.”

  I sighed. For a moment I rested my lips on her hair again. “Am I so open a book to you?”

  “No. I can’t work out why you keep telling me to go away.”

  Aghast, I put her back from me a hand-span, so that I could see her face. Water brimmed on the lower lids of her eyes.

  “Is that what I seem to be saying to you?”

  “‘Go away,’ ‘find a young man,’ ‘you’re a silly little girl, stay with your husband, you’re not goo
d enough for a grown man’—”

  I slid down, awkwardly, my arms around her. The earthen floor of the stables was cold under my knees. I gripped her tightly around the thighs, and momentarily buried my face against her belly.

  She moved within my arms; I think in a shrug.

  “Weren’t you listening, messire? I can’t be a woman. It’s killing me by inches. This is what I am: I have to be what I am. I don’t know whether you want me or not!”

  With a sigh that shuddered all through me, I met her gaze. “Mademoiselle—I need to beg.”

  “What is it this time?”

  “I beg for a second chance.” I couldn’t help but grip her body tightly. “I desire a second chance. Because I love you.”

  I breathed out, finally, with a relaxation of my fingers, knowing I must leave her bruised. “You have, of course, only to say you have no love for me, and I will not mention it again, mademoiselle.”

  Her brows went up in familiar disbelief. “Really?”

  “No.” I sighed, getting to my feet. “I shall be foolish enough to say it again, you know that.”

  She moved her hands to my chest, pressing her body against me, and leaned her chin on her fingers, gazing up at me. In Afric lands they have great cats that lay along branches in a similar manner, to drop on unwary travellers; I daresay with something of the same expression.

  “Dariole, I love you to distraction. I have no idea how a liaison between us could work! I’ve tried to find you a life that will make you happy. The boy loves you. Philippe. I know I am worth nothing. I am a bad man—and….”

  She stroked hair back from my face. “Philippe and I would kill each other. Even if—you’re quite right, messire: he does love me. And I’m married to him. But it seems to me I’ve been married to you for far longer.”

  She touched me, a smile spreading over her face as her fingers stroked my healed eye. As I gazed down at her, her smile faded.

  “Do you like me best in skirts?” she asked. “Or in breeches?”

  “There are two answers to that, and neither is the right one. In both,” I confessed. “You’re boy and girl. What’s the use of loving half of you?”

  Her face broke out into a great smile.

  “There is something I must ask, though I have no right,” I said. “You, mademoiselle. If you feel…you say all of love, and pity, and nothing of—need.”

  She leaned her forehead against my chest. “When I couldn’t find you. When I thought Sully had killed you…. When I was looking, and looking, and I almost gave up…I wanted to die. You were gone, messire. The thing I needed was gone out of the world. I would have given anything to have you back. Even if it was only to tell you, don’t go, I can’t do this without you now.”

  She leaned her head back, while she stayed within the compass of my arms. I could not speak, looking down at her.

  She said, “Messire…I’m not at all brave. It wasn’t until I saw that you could love—when I saw how much you love M. de Sully—that I let myself know I loved you. I’m sorry. I should have said.”

  I put my hand to her face, too white and strained for tears.

  “Dear God,” I said unhappily. “I think you will kill me in a moment, mademoiselle, for allowing myself to dream of what I can’t have—acting as if I am the man who could stay with you—”

  “Why not?” Her eyes widened. “You said you love me. It wasn’t a lie. I know.”

  “Yes, you know.” I looked down into her face. “There is something more that I should have said. Dariole…”

  I recounted to her everything that I had written, and destroyed an hour ago, of the death of Etienne.

  “That…” Dariole’s eyes shone, clear and puzzled, looking up at me. “Do you still blame yourself? This Etienne—he died of being stupid, messire. You do know that?”

  I could barely hold back a wry laugh. This is so much Dariole!

  “In a way, yes.” I shook my head. The warmth of her body, that I felt through the palms of my hands, would leave such a chill when she moved back; I knew it. “But my guilt is not for that.”

  “What, then?”

  Her familiar ability to demand moved me. I welcomed it, astonishingly. She will allow me no evasion.

  “My guilt,” I said, “is that you are not the first to whom I have knelt and—submitted in that way. When I humiliated myself before Etienne, I discovered that I…responded to it. Loathed it, but responded. I…thought much of it, afterwards. How could I turn my friend’s death into an occasion of corruption? Finally, I made myself put it from my mind; eradicated it.”

  Her gaze did not leave mine. “You didn’t.”

  “Dariole, I swear I did—”

  “Caterina.” She frowned, evidently calling back the Italian woman’s words to her memory. “Caterina said, ‘There are men of violence who make worship of power.’ I didn’t understand, then. ‘Men who go in awe of any man more violent than they are.’ Are you sure that wasn’t you and Sully?”

  It took my breath, as hard as the blow of boot or pommel.

  “If it was,” I said numbly, “I am even less suited to be in your company than I thought.”

  Her body moved under my hands as she shrugged, there in the de la Roncière stables.

  “Your friend’s dead, messire. It can’t matter to him what you think now. And if you understand what you want to do—then I don’t suppose it’ll drive you. It’s not like it hurts anyone, messire. Not even you.”

  Dariole reached up past my arm, touching her fingers to my cheek. By the chill of her skin, I knew her to be in shock. Her eyes were wide, her pupils dark.

  She said, “Do you hate me, because I like it?”

  I could find nothing bitter in me. “Dariole—no!”

  “Well, then. That’s enough.”

  A kind of clarity filled me, in the wake of my admission. Courage, perhaps.

  There is she, also. I have not forgotten that.

  I said, “If you should ever desire to—lay down your own dignity, mademoiselle…know this. You can trust me.”

  Her eyes caught reflected light from the stable doorway.

  Very clearly, she said, “Luke. I cried. I begged him not to.”

  I could see this was the most painful thing that she had ever admitted aloud.

  Dariole lifted her chin, looking at me with great directness. “Can you teach me how to do it? Make something of what he did to me?”

  A transformation of humiliation to satisfaction. I thought of Etienne: of the simple indignity of penetration.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Dariole…I can try. If it succeeds…. If it doesn’t succeed, I can attempt anything else you choose. Although abstinence will be difficult.” I paused. “I don’t think I could hurt you.”

  The faintest of smiles coloured her voice. “I don’t think I can ‘abstain.’” And then she added, seriously, “No. Thank you.”

  This time, when she kissed me, her tears were warm and wet against my face.

  “But I am too old,” I said, hoping against hope that she would deny it.

  “I know,” Dariole said. “We’re duelists. Duelists don’t make old bones. Nor spies. Messire, we’ll probably both be dead inside two years! What’s the use of thinking about getting old?”

  I could only say, quietly, “Mademoiselle…when did you become wise?”

  In the tones of Southwark, Dariole said, “You’re an arse, Rochefort.”

  “Your English is not so much improved that you can adequately insult me.”

  “Yeah, that’s true!”

  “Ah, mademoiselle.” Attempting not to smile, I said, “You do my reputation no good at all! What else have I but reputation?”

  She looked me up and down. “Being two yards high and built like a brick outhouse has to help.”

  That she could make me laugh, at such a moment—and know why such a thing might be necessary—moved me unbearably.

  “I may be acting badly, but I cannot be apart from you,” I said. “
I risk everything for both of us on the wager that, no matter how happy you are here, I can make you happier. I am old and poor, and will never have the protection of the son of a Marshal of France to offer you, but I cannot do without you! And—perhaps, in the future, I may improve our fortunes.”

  She said, “Perhaps…!” but she gripped my hand.

  It took a short enough time to mount up and ride off the estate, without public notice of us, that we were a mile down the road before I truly realised it.

  “All the same,” Dariole said thoughtfully, looking back from her saddle at me, “I should have made you beg to come with me. On your knees, messire. Properly humbled. Maybe later. You’ll like that. So will I.”

  “I perceive I am to live my life in abject subjugation,” I said.

  “Only if you ask me very nicely.”

  “Abominable brat.”

  She grinned.

  I returned a smile, and then could not but speak seriously.

  “Do you know what I am with you, mademoiselle?”

  I saw her deciding not to make a joke of it. She looked at me with clear eyes as I rode up knee to knee with her. “What?”

  “Naked—and ashamed—and accepted.”

  She hesitated for a moment, clearly thinking.

  “Yes, messire. Me too.”

  She gave me that small nod and smile that I may see with my eyes closed, or at dark of night, and which I carry always with me.

  Untitled

  Translator’s Note

  This document, although not dictated, I believe to be authored by Mlle de la Roncière. The handwriting is fragile, difficult to read, but determined, the pen’s quill having dug deeply into the surface of the paper. I place it in the late 1680s, when Dariole would have been in her nineties.

  The survival of the text, its freedom from burning, perhaps indicates it was always kept safe, and not placed in the box with the other documents until after the abortive attempt made to destroy them.

  History survives by such accidents as these; by the chance acts of unknown men.

  M. Rochefort lived to a good old age: he was a little over seventy when he died. I was in my mid-forties. I took off my breeches after the funeral and have worn nothing but petticoats since.