Down: Pinhole (13 page)

They rode at breakneck speed until the horses could no longer take the pace and in a broad clearing, where the enemy might be spotted from a distance, the party pulled up and rested the animals. The ugly and unsmiling bearded soldier who had thrown her down by the hair took Marot’s place beside Emily. He smelled of cabbage and worse and said not a word. It was impossible to avoid Marot’s blood. Her feet stewed in it for the rest of the journey and as day became night the puddle became sticky, gluing her shoes in place.

She must have slept for the last few hours because she awoke startled when the carriage inclined sharply and finally came to a stop at the threshold of Castle Guise.

A soldier was calling into the darkness for the drawbridge to be lowered and when the heavy bridge thudded onto the earthenworks the carriage slowly crossed over the moat and entered the main bailey through the portcullis.

The bearded soldier tried to pull her down but she shook off his hand and climbed out herself. There was a raging fire pit which cast enough light for her to make out an enclosed ground. Jutting into the courtyard and rising above it was a rectangular stone tower, its entrance marked by a pair of basket-topped iron rods filled with burning tallow.

In the darkness, high over a further bailey was a round tower, black and ominous. It was here she was taken.

The bearded soldier opened a heavy wooden door, called up the dark stone stairs and Emily found herself in the company of women.

A skeletal hag with streaky-gray hair took charge of her. The old woman’s initial air of pique at being woken gave way to alarm when she realized that the night visitor was a different sort of creature.

The woman inspected Emily with a candle held high then rattled off something unintelligible to the bearded soldier in some kind of dialectic French. Emily made out part of the soldier’s reply, something to the effect that Captain Marot knew more about her than he did but had fallen in a skirmish.

The hag, who wore a loose-fitting linen shift, addressed Emily sharply. Emily responded that she couldn’t understand her and the woman migrated to a somewhat more modern form of French. It was apparently not her natural tongue because she spoke it slowly and deliberately.

“Come with me. I am Marie. I look after the girls. There is something not right about you, no?”

“So it seems,” Emily replied, following her up the tightly spiraling stairway.

On the first landing, Emily saw a single chamber scattered with mattresses and sleeping bodies. Up another spiraling staircase, the highest chamber was different. There was a single occupied wood-framed bed and some simple furniture against the round, bare stone walls.

Marie lit a few candles with her own, shook the sleeping figure awake and told her to get up. The woman under the blankets hurled a rich barrage of curses at Marie and sat up, searching the room with fiery eyes. She was young, about Emily’s age, with taut, ebony skin. Her French was modern and slang-infested.

“Who the hell are you?” she asked Emily.

Emily was woozy. “My name is Emily,” she said weakly.

The woman directed her anger at the old lady. “What’s going on here, you fucking bag of bones?”

Marie told her that a new girl had arrived. The woman replied sarcastically that she wasn’t blind, she could see that, but what did it have to do with her?

“She’s a special one,” Marie said. “She’s meant to have your bed.”

“The hell she will! I’m not giving up my bed.”

“I can sleep anywhere,” Emily said.

Marie shook her head and went down the stairs calling for the bearded soldier to come and help her.

Emily wobbled, unsteady on her feet.

“Is that blood on your shoes?” the woman asked.

“Yes.”

“Yours?”

“No.”

“Whose?”

“A Captain Marot.”

The woman frowned. “I fucked him a few times. Not a bad sort as men go around here. Pity.”

“Who are you?” Emily asked.

“Jojo. What’s with you, anyway? You look like you’re just off the boat but different.”

“Apparently I’m not exactly dead.”

Jojo pulled back her covers and stood to get a closer look.

“The fuck you say! You’re right. You don’t smell right. How’d it happen?”

“Do you think I might sit down? I don’t feel well at all.”

Jojo pulled a chair from the wall. She watched Emily shiver in the coolness of the chamber and sighing, pulled the blanket from her bed and threw it at her.

Emily thanked her and said, “I’m a physicist. I was conducting a research experiment outside London with a high-energy particle collider and…”

“I’ve already lost you, honey. Some shit happened, you’re here, you’re alive, that’s all I need to know. How’d you wind up at this shithole?”

“I’ve been passed around like a prize cow. Something about the duke here being quite a ladies’ man.”

“Oh yeah, he’s a real stud for a five-hundred-year-old piece of dead meat. I was his favorite. Until now, maybe. He took a couple of the other girls tonight which gave me a break.”

Marie returned with the bearded soldier who began shouting at Jojo to find a place to sleep in the lower chamber. Jojo would have nothing of it and shouted back, brandishing a candlestick to reinforce her position.

“I can sleep downstairs,” Emily said by way of defusing the situation, but Marie countered that orders were orders. “Look, here,” Emily said, “the bed is large enough for two. If it’s all right with Jojo perhaps we can share it.”

Jojo shrugged, Marie shrugged, and the negotiation was over. Soon the two women were left alone.

“There’s a basin of water there and a cloth which isn’t too dirty. You can sleep in the raw or you can use one of my nightgowns. There’s wine over there. Help yourself. Downstairs, off the main room there’s a privy that basically dumps into the moat. That tells you a lot about this fucking place.”

Emily began to slowly undress. Her cotton skirt had wooden buttons that had made the passage, and her top, a cotton pullover, was also intact. The same wasn’t so for her cotton bra that, missing its plastic clasp, flopped uselessly under her shirt.

Jojo laughed. “Same exact thing happened to me. But I was worse. My skirt had a metal zip and it fell off completely.”

“My pantyhose didn’t make it,” Emily said. “Or my wristwatch and rings.”

“I was so fucking pissed off,” Jojo said, nodding. “It was bad enough getting murdered but I was wearing some really good jewelry at the time which went missing. I wonder where all that shit goes?”

“It seems that nothing metallic or synthetic survives the passage,” Emily said, peeling off her bra.

“Give it here. I’ll have the smithy make me a clasp. Near enough my size,” she said, inspecting Emily’s breasts.

Emily thought it best to give it freely under the circumstances.

“Have you been here long?” Emily asked.

“You mean in Castle Pathétique or in Hell?”

“Both I suppose.”

“Hell, for about five years now. This dump around four.”

Emily began washing herself. The water was cold but felt good. “What happened to you, if I might ask?”

“My boyfriend’s best friend shot me.”

“Goodness. Why?”

“I ripped off his stash. Seems a bit harsh, don’t you think, killing someone for stealing their dope? I was in La Courneuve when it happened and out I popped in the same spot here. You probably know how it works, right? I mean it didn’t look a fucking thing like La Courneuve. It was more like a shitty village. Well, because I’m a young, attractive woman, I had all the scum of the Earth trying to get a piece of me but I eluded the lot of them for a time. Once I worked out how things go around here I knew, I just knew, that my boyfriend was going to be settling the score and that scumbag who killed me was going to be arriving in the area any time.”

“And did he?”

“He did, with his baggy pants on the ground, ’cause the snaps were gone. Really comical, that look on his bastard face, seeing me coming at him with a big piece of iron. I crushed his skull real good. Hope he enjoys the next fifty million years in a rotting room.”

Emily slipped into Jojo’s nightgown and poured a cup of wine. She sipped at it over and over, hoping for some numbing. “What did you do to warrant coming here?” Emily asked.

“In Mali I was a hooker, you know. I killed a few johns there. I thought it was justifiable homicide and all but I guess it wasn’t justifiable enough.”

Emily finished the wine and said, “I’ve got a lot of questions, Jojo, but I’m terribly tired. Do you think I could get into bed now?”

“Hop in. Don’t worry about your questions. We’ve got all the fucking time in the world.”

Francis, Duke of Guise and master of Castle Guise, was given the news of Emily’s arrival the moment he awoke in his chamber above the great tower hall. Two of his concubines were still sleeping under the covers and he roughly kicked their rumps out of bed when it was clear that it would be no ordinary day.

“Not dead?” he asked the bearded soldier, as a manservant hastily dressed him.

“It seems not, my lord.”

“How remarkable. You say she’s young?”

“Yes.”

“And pretty?”

“In my opinion, yes. Very pretty.”

“Was she violated?”

“Not to my knowledge, my lord. Certainly not in our company.”

“And how much did D’Aret pay?”

“I was told five hundred crowns.”

“A huge sum! I’ll have his head if it was poorly spent. And what of Marot?”

“He took one of Clovis’s spears as we passed through a forest.”

“That ancient bastard. I swear I’ll gut him one day and use his intestines for sausage jackets.” Guise dismissed the soldier with a backhanded wave. “You are my captain now.”

“Thank you, my lord.”

Guise had died in his prime, cut down by an assassin’s sword, though in truth he passed away six days following the assault, over-bled in his sick bed by his surgeons. In his day he had been considered a titan, a most un-French, French lord owing to his extraordinary height and his blonde mane, which had set tongues wagging about foreign, perhaps Germanic blood in him. He was also ruthless, a man who, when crossed, was certain to extract a terrible revenge.

The house of Guise had reigned supreme throughout the sixteenth century. Francis’s father, Claude, the first Duke of Guise had been given a ducal seat by the king. Staunchly Catholic, no one group feared the Guise dynasty more than the Protestant Huguenots, whom the Guises sought to annihilate at every turn. Francis’s eldest son, Henry of Guise, had founded the militant Catholic League and, inspired by the writings of Machiavelli, had perpetrated the infamous St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre in Paris that had caused the deaths of seventy thousand Protestants.

Guise intrigue continued after death. Francis arrived in Hell to find his father busily seeing to improvements on an old castle on the River Marne near the earthly spot of the family seat. Claude had assembled a group of newly arrived cronies to attack the local lord’s castle. The lord was a rough old codger who had clung to power there since his fourteenth century arrival. The coup d’état complete, Claude had petitioned the king for recognition and had received it. Francis, upon his entry to Hell, was initially embraced by his father with talk of creating a dynasty capable of taking the king’s throne one day, but Francis, a duke in his own right, was not content to play second-fiddle to his father. Now, thanks to the malicious machinations of his son, Claude lay headless in a state of profound and agonizing decay in a warehouse by the river.

When Francis’s son, Henry, also came Down, his father, fearing his equally ruthless son, had Captain Marot take Henry’s head before he could cause trouble. There could be only one Duke of Guise.

Francis rejected one outergarment after another, sending his servant scuttling back and forth to his wardrobe until he was clad to his liking befitting the occasion. He possessed the only large mirror at the castle and he checked himself before making an appearance in the great hall. Though tall and slender in physique the layers of garments made him appear fuller-figured. A long-sleeved tunic, pulled over the head and fastened at the neck with a silver brooch was topped by a sleeveless pale blue surcoat, which was in turn topped by a royal blue embroidered and fur-lined mantle. His legs were sheathed in white hose attached to his belt under knee-high lounging boots.

In the meanwhile, Marie had rousted Emily from Jojo’s bed. Bleary and utterly disoriented, Emily was rushed through some basic morning ablutions. When she asked for her clothes she was told they’d been taken during the night and burned.

“Why?” she asked indignantly.

“They were very ugly,” Marie told her, equally indignant, “and not suitable for a duke.”

Jojo was watching Emily’s makeover from her bed, amused by the spectacle.

She taunted Emily. “They dress old school here, you might as well get used to it. Francis likes to remove a lady’s clothes like he’s peeling an artichoke. That’s the part that takes a while. The screwing part is over in a flash. He’s got no staying power which is a blessing if you want to know. By the way, I hope you like it doggy-style.”

Emily trembled and seethed at the same time. “I’ll kill him if he lays a hand on me.”

Jojo melted into laughter. “Go for it, girl. Power to the people.”

Emily’s more immediate battle was with Marie who kept fighting to add successive layers of under and outergarments and finally wore her down by screeching like a wounded bird until Emily was virtually immobile inside a casement of cotton, taffeta, damask and ermine.

“Bloody hell,” Emily said, getting a look at herself in a small, wooden-framed mirror that yielded a somewhat distorted image. “I feel like I’m off to a mad fancy dress party.”

“Don’t you go getting yourself butchered too quick now,” Jojo said, waving her off. “You and me have a lot of talking to do. While you’re off, I’ll be here, swanning about, enjoying my holiday from the little royal cock.”

In the light of the day Emily was able to get a better look at the castle. It rose above her, gloomy as the morning, gray blocks of stone, dry-laid into walls and towers without visible attempt at style or decoration. It was purely functional, a fortress, plain and simple. Dull-faced men were laboring in the baileys, chopping wood, tending to goats and chickens, butchering and hanging sheep. They snuck glances at her but seemed too fearful to look harder.