A little later, I married again, it being a matter of use to my family, who accepted me back without a word. My second husband, to our mutual surprise, gave me a child—a daughter. To become a mother was unnerving, and a betrayal. It seems to me that I was someone else, then, for upwards of sixteen years, until she married. I held fashionable salons in Paris and other cities, ostensibly for conversation on science and philosophy, but in fact to cover my association with the other members of the Rosy Cross. In all that time, while I directed them, and had the care of young Arcadie, I neither thought of, nor spoke of, Rochefort and our time together.
No, that is a lie. I swore to myself I would not lie here. Time is short, and I do not have the time for falsehoods. I missed M. Rochefort every day of my life. Thought of him every day. Hurt, like an aching tooth, in my heart. I surveyed the upbringing of my child, and coupled with my married husband, and ordered the affairs of the Rosy Cross, and none of it helped the pain.
I cherished it, in truth. It proved to me that I had once been alive.
The skills I had learned in my forty years, I kept in practise, also, in more domestic fields—it is not difficult, as a matriarch, to control much of the family wealth; as well as the power and position of the family into which my daughter married. This was done coldly, on my part. I am afraid either that she will have been discouraged by my example from doing this, or else that she will take to it also in a cold fashion, when I am gone—not knowing that scheming must be done hot, in the full joy of one’s talent, to be worth the doing.
When she had gone to live there, and our families were linked, I occupied some time in mourning for my wedded husband. He died at sixty. People said that I must have loved him more than I showed, so terrible was the grief here. I mourned, of course, for Rochefort, as I had never had the chance to do before. It eased something in me. Although I still grieve, the pain is no longer as sharp as a stone. It is sadness, and worse, in a way—I weep for him, and for me, that we are no longer together.
When my grandchildren began to approach an age of reason, I left off my mourning and began, suddenly, to teach them what I had learned in seventy years.
There are six of them, two girls, four boys. Of the boys, two are worth something. I have hopes for one of the girls. Of course, the others may surprise me. It is too early to despair of any of them.
M. Rochefort was both right and wrong when he said that I would want children. I did not want children. I did not—I can say this only here—did not love my daughter, although I trust I did honourably by her. My grandchildren are loveable, but I would love them were they no blood relation to me at all.
He was wrong. I did not want children. He was right. I only wanted his children.
That I could never have: he was correct that he could not sire a child. That was a relief to me, since a pregnancy would have been a sad interruption to our life together. I always imagined I would hate being with child, and indeed, when I was, I did.
That did not stop me, sometimes, wondering what we might have had. A bright-haired boy, perhaps, with wicked eyes, and a way of charming himself into anything he pleased. A girl with the look of Spain about her: lost, honourable, enviable, loving. I would have loved them, I think—although it would have made me no better a mother, so perhaps it is just as well.
They would have been a substitute to me, and what they would have substituted for was Rochefort’s presence after he was dead. And what is the use of that?
It was his wisdom I loved him for, and how he was at once so much older and so much younger than I. He would rock me to sleep in his arms; he would kneel at my feet, imploring me to rescue him. And he would, simply, look at me—I recall his face, as if I had his portrait, when he merely sat and looked at me, his chin on his hands, slightly smiling.
You are my punishment, he would say, at such times. I am scourged by you, daily. I should thank God daily, if I did not think that the Devil sent you.
Grief. He never mentioned that when he swore, sobbing, that we should not be together but he could not leave. That was not one of his reasons. Why should it be? We were both likely to die any time this twelvemonth, being duelists. And later, when, apart from service in the Rosy Cross, we gave some assistance to the little Bishop who became the great Cardinal—then, also, we assumed life both cheap and short. Who of us thought, then, what will the other do when one is gone?
I thought of killing myself, of course. That is a sin. I spoke in veiled terms to my confessor—a priest not much liked by his local bishop. This was a few months after I had returned, and wore skirts, and was dutiful to my still-living father, a man a year or so older than M. Rochefort. To the priest, I said, “If a person loved so much that they could not endure to be without the other, and that other was dead, would they not be right in following them?”
The priest, who before then I had not much noticed, said, “If you intended to die, Madame Arcadie, you would have stayed in Paris, in breeches, and died on some young idiot’s sword-point—would you not?”
That rocked me. I knelt in the confessional, thinking dazedly how odd it felt to be addressed as Arcadie. And he was right. Of course he was right. Although I would not have found a man capable of killing me in a duel unless I fought to lose.
“What am I to do, then?” I whispered, at the age of forty-six.
The priest, who looked nothing more than a meek boy in daylight, spoke in the shadows of the church.
“You have been a man. Why not try being a woman, madame?”
And, when I remained silent, stunned, he added, “Why not? There is nothing else that men do that you have not done, except father a child and a dynasty, and that is beyond even Mlle Dariole. If you intend to stay alive with your grief, you might as well. God may have surprises for you yet.”
Some short time after that, I married, and took with me to my husband’s home my private confessor, thereby saving the young man from a disturbing quarrel with his bishop. It is true I regarded him with some wariness, ever after. I am not accustomed to be spoken to in that manner. After a little reflection, I smiled. I have become M. Rochefort, I thought. Who also was not accustomed to be spoken to in such an impertinent manner, but who dearly loved it. And who knew wisdom when he heard it.
If neither child nor dynasty, the Rose Cross might stand as my monument, I decided, if so stony a word can be applied to so formless an organisation.
Shortly after that, Chance surprised me with a pregnancy.
I am sorry now that young Arcadie was only a means of bringing about my grandchildren. If Rochefort were here, he would have told me to do better by her. But we cannot control where the heart goes, only do what is honourable if there is no affection there.
I am an old woman. I am not sorry I lived this long. I miss him every day, still. There is nothing to be done about that. A proverb of the Spanish says, Take what you want, and pay for it.
If I believed in God and a life afterwards as my little priest does, I would hope to find myself young again in it. In good health of mind and body. And—vanity being what it is—with all my old skills.
And I allow myself to imagine sometimes that it is so. For hours at a time, sitting by this latticed window, prayer book in my lap, looking out at the gardens which I have planted, in small, in the fashion of the gardens of the Luxembourg. For hours, I make believe that there is an afterlife, and that M. Rochefort and I meet there, in a garden. While my children believe me at my prayers, I stare out of the window and imagine I am in carnal intercourse out of doors with the man I love.
My second husband was a man pleased to have mistresses, and a wife who wanted him for procreation and no more, and who was otherwise a faithful friend to him. I was fond of my husband. I was fond of my dogs. No man has disturbed me since Rochefort went, unless it is that sexless priest, so much my junior.
I allow myself to hope, wickedly, that I disturb him; that something rises under that cassock when he hears me whisper in the dark of the carnal sins of the young
M. Dariole. I doubt it. Men of age are distinguished. Women of age are disgusting. I shrug. If I knew I would have grown this old, I would have tried harder to die young.
I am old. M. Fludd is long dead, a year or two before that civil revolt he desired to stave off, and from which Caterina foresaw such liberty arising. I did visit Fludd, on pretence of journeys to my English relatives, while we were about the business of the Rosy Cross; and if I was never at ease with the man, I could at least tolerate him. He was a colleague of M. Rochefort; a friend to him, in his way. And if we could speak of nothing else, he and I, we could speak of Messire Rochefort. We could speak of him.
Still, now, I am in no hurry to die. When the light of self goes out, there will be no man nor woman left who remembers Valentin Rochefort as I do.
My hands hurt. I will take down my sword from the wall. I will sit holding it. I will look out from this high place, down at the dusty road that leads to Paris, and I will remember him.
Afterword—Author’s Note
W hen it comes to the question of historical accuracy, I can do no better than to quote Charlotte Lennox, the first translator of the Memoirs of the Duc de Sully into English, when she writes in 1755:
One would imagine, that upon a fact so public and so recent as the assassination of Henry IV, there would be found a perfect conformity in the histories and memoirs of the time; yet many of the contemporary writers do not agree either as to the number of persons who were in the coach with this prince when he was assassinated, the wounds he received, nor many other circumstances no less essential.
If those original witnesses are no more reliable than witnesses to the average car accident, and even M. de Sully can present us with a non-existent “Wednesday May 17th 1610” for the date of Henri’s death—a mere paragraph after he refers to a “Monday May 17th,” which isn’t it either—then I think Rochefort’s small errors of memory can be forgiven. Even during the fortnight’s interrogation of Ravaillac before his execution, the record shows that the attorney-general, president, and counsellors persistently get the day of Henri’s death wrong.
Where Rochefort isn’t in “perfect conformity” with history as we know it, I’ve silently amended some of his errors, and left untouched those that are impossible to sort out.
I’ve also left alone his habit of concealing certain French (and other) families under obvious pseudonyms. While I could make a guess at which families are encrypted this way—it’s probably more tactful not to.
Keen students of historical records will also be aware of differences between Rochefort’s Memoirs and other contemporary sources. Where these difficulties cannot be resolved, I give the benefit of the doubt to Rochefort, who, although he may be mistaken, I take always to have been as honest as possible, even if it is a less naive honesty than that displayed in the Memoirs of his master.
Hic Jacet
(what became of them)
Shadows we are, and like shadows depart —sundial, Pump Court, Middle Temple
T he Bishop of Luçon, ARMAND-JEAN DU PLESSIS , returned from his exile in 1614, after being elected as member to the States-General. There he attracted the attention of Marie de Medici and became her protégé. She appointed him to her council of state, and his fortunes rose and fell over the next few years with her, and with Concini.
After Concini was assassinated, du Plessis transferred his power base to the young king Louis XIII, and was responsible for at least one of Marie de Medici’s periods of exile. In 1622 he was made cardinal, and was de facto ruler of France (and King Louis) from the mid-1620s onward. Born in 1585, Cardinal Richelieu died in 1642, only a year after Sully.
MAXIMILIEN DE BETHUNE , BARON ROSNY , DUC DE SULLY (1560–1641), spent the thirty years after King Henri’s death writing his Memoirs. In his old age, he continued to wear the fashions of his youth, and small children chased after him in the street. He kept peacocks on his estate, whose noise upset his neighbors, but—being, by then, very deaf—this did not bother Sully in the slightest. The Memoirs are both touching and entertaining, if not always (one suspects) in the way that Monsieur the Duc intended.
JAMES I / VI did not die until 1625, but he was never the same man after the loss of ROBERT CECIL . He succeeded in keeping Britain out of the Thirty Years’ War by a policy of lending every assistance short of actual help—something that did not go down well with the “war party” at court, but they had no convincing leader in the years after PRINCE HENRY died of typhoid fever.
James’s cousin ARBELLA STUART , having married William Seymour, was kept at various locations under “house arrest” until 4 June 1611, when she tried—dressed in men’s clothes, and with the help of one “Markham”—to escape from England with her husband. Seymour escaped from his confinement in the Tower, safely reaching the continent, but he made enough of a cat’s ear of it that Arbella was recaptured alone in the Straits of Dover, and brought back to the Tower, where she eventually went mad and died in 1615.
William Seymour later reconciled with James I, married again, and became the Duke of Somerset at the Restoration of Charles II.
James’s son CHARLES STUART was executed on 30 January 1648 (1649 by the Gregorian Calendar), his disastrous autocratic rule having given rise to the English Civil War, and the following American and French revolutions, through the political philosophies that opposed him.
The PUTNEY DEBATES came to a violent end two years before, in 1647. What it was that the men of the army debated is stated fairly at the beginning, by one Colonel Rainborow:
I think that the poorest he that is in England has a life to live as the greatest he; and therefore truly, Sir, I think it’s clear, that every man that is to live under a Government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that Government; and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that Government that he has not had a voice to put himself under.
Universal suffrage was not to arrive in England—and into the life, also, of the poorest she—until nearly three centuries later, in 1918.
It is recorded of DOCTOR ROBERT FLUDD that he never left England again, and that he lived on Coleman Street, close by the headquarters of the Masons Company in Cripplegate, until he died in 1637, at the age of sixty-three. It is not recorded that he ever married.
His works include the Apologia Compendenaria Fraternitatem de Rosae Cruce (A Compendious Apology for the Fraternity of the Rosy Cross), and the monumental two-volume Utruisque Cosmi Historia (History of the Macrocosm and History of the Microcosm); the latter published by the firm of De Bry in the Palatinate. This German publishing house produced many books connected with the mainstream of Hermetic Rosicrucian philosophy—a philosophy which perhaps had its most concrete experiment in Bohemia in 1619–20, under King Frederick and his wife, Elizabeth Stuart, daughter of James I. It failed catastrophically, and began the Thirty Years’ War.
After their brief appearance in print from 1610 to the 1620s, the BROTHERS OF THE ROSY CROSS became apocryphal. Rumours of links to the Masons, the Templars, the Acception, and to almost every other secret society known to European history have since attached themselves to the name of Rosicrucian.
More mundanely, Rosicrucian thought, largely via Sir Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis and the Royal Society, invigorates the Intellectual and Scientific Revolutions of the later seventeenth century in England, which ultimately bring about the Industrial Revolution.
HENRY PERCY , 9 TH EARL OF NORTHUMBERLAND , the “Wizard Earl,” was sentenced to life imprisonment in the Tower of London after his involvement in the Gunpowder Plot (1605). He stayed imprisoned there until 1621. After this, he lived in retirement on his estate in Petworth, still forbidden to travel more than thirty miles from his home. He died in 1631—on November 5th.
Until his death in 1621, THOMAS HARIOT lived in Syon House, supported by the Earl of Northumberland, while he worked on his observations of sunspots, invention of navigational instruments, and algebra. He wrote the first book on
the English colonisation of the Americas, the Brief and True Report of the new-found land of Virginia (1588). Like Marlowe, he was an atheist. Had he published his findings, his reputation might have rivalled Galileo’s. (See Siderius Nuncius, 1610).
John Aubrey notes that, while the Earl was in the Tower, “to HUES (who wrote On the Use of Globes) and to MR . WARNER , he gave an annuity of but sixty pounds per annum. […] They had a table at the Earl’s expense, and the earl himself had them to converse with, singly or together.” (Brief Lives)
AEMILIA LANIER died in 1654, at the age of 84, having been kept out of the sheerest poverty by her son, a musician to Charles I, and (eventually) a Crown pension. She thereafter sank into obscurity. If she wrote again, it was not under her own name, and she survives in history only as the author of “Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum”—and as the supposed “Dark Lady” of Shakespeare’s sonnets.
Of the PLAY titles mentioned in Henslowe’s account books for The Rose Theatre, perhaps one-third survive as texts. The other two-thirds are lost to us, all except their titles, and they include the most prized work of dramatists such as John Webster. One of the titles mentioned is The Viper and Her Brood, to whom no author is ascribed. Webster’s plays, like Marlowe’s, and Shakespeare’s, were the trash of history; and where they have not gone to line pie dishes, it’s pure lucky accident.
No records remain of Elena Zorzi/Suor Caterina, but the WITCH OF WOOKEY is currently reputed still to inhabit Wookey Hole caves. The paper mill continues to exist, and up until a few years ago still made paper commercially.
GABRIEL SANTON , according to a faint but decipherable marginal note in the Memoirs, eventually married the landlady of his local tavern, and lived to a ripe old age, fathering children into his eighties.
Mary Gentle Page 81