Mary Gentle (16 page)

I subdued my temper, with difficulty. “Go! Go get your cousin!” I added, in French, the brief codicil, “No need to alarm him by first turning up on his doorstep with an armed thug and a ‘demon.’”

Her mouth turned up at the corners. For a moment, she was neither boy-girl nor hic mulier. I could not put a name to what she was, wearing that gamin grin.

“You wait here!” She loped across the junction of streets.

These were all private houses for the most part; a merchant shop far down on the road to my left, but that was all. The streets were quieter, with few men walking past us. I subtly drew Tanaka Saburo back under the shadow of the nearby eaves with me.

The smell of London is different to Paris. Always the sea-estuary in the background, and the odour of cow-dung from the close fields. The sun felt warm on my back. The kennel or water-channel in the middle of the road was choked with slops and offal thrown down from above, and plainly it had rained of late. Water spilled out of the kennel and over the rough paving in places. Saburo and I trod through an inch or two of water to reach dry standing.

I glanced back and saw Dariole striding between a couple of Englishmen in servant’s blue, to the door of a building on one corner. It looked sufficiently well-to-do; built in the reign of some earlier king, and with upper storeys built of oak timber, jutting out into the street, all but meeting across the way with other houses. In my quarter of Paris it might have been broken up into lodging houses. Here it was plainly one family’s residence.

The Spring sunlight slanted down, raising steam from the cold muck of the road between her and us. I caught Saburo’s expression of disgust.

“Filthy gaijin!” he muttered.

“It’s a large city,” I temporised. “There will be fifty thousand souls here in London, messire; their waste must go somewhere.”

“And in Osaka, five hundred thousand!”

He will have lost track of his English numbers,
I thought.

“Half-million in Osaka—no filth! This garbage, it’s lain here
overnight
. For days!—What is that?” Saburo’s face screwed into anger, or perhaps only puzzlement. I followed his gaze.

Dariole stood in front of the great oak door, facing the Markham servants. Her voice came shrilly across the street as I looked:

“—see Messire Guillaume Markham!”

Guillaume. “William.”
No,
I realised.
One “Griffin
Markham
” is the man I am remembering
. They may be kin, or not, and if this continues, I must make investigation—the said Master Griffin being one of those traitors to the English crown of whom I recall hearing, on my last visit here.

“I want to see him!” By her emphasis, it was not the first or second time Dariole had said it.

The elder of the two men sneered, “I bet you do, boy!”

Merde!
I thought, wondering what remark I had missed in the moment it took me to speak with Tanaka Saburo.

“I’m his cousin, you imbecile!” Dariole glared up at the man, barely far from stamping her booted feet. “His cousin, from
France
—”

“Sure you are,” the second, more burly man cut in. “And I’m the Pope, amn’t I?”

“Bless me, Father!” A skinny Englishman slipped out of the doorway to join his fellows, with a rapidity that led me to guess he had been listening at the crack. He was another one in dark blue doublet and trunk-hose. There was a livery on his sleeve, but it did not match the one carved in stone above the door. So: new money. This third man wiped his nose on his cuff. “Who’s the whoreson brat?”

I read stiff outrage in Dariole’s shoulders.

“I’m Arcadie-Fleurimonde-Henriette de Montargis de la Roncière!
And now call out Monsieur Markham!”

The older man had cropped white hair showing under his wool cap. He chuckled. “‘Arcadie.’ A girl, are we?”

The skinny servant leaned forward as if to get his nose into the discussion. “You can’t tell with the French!”

The familiar tension that begins a fight made itself felt down my spine. Nothing more than lackeys quarrelling, but she will skewer one or two, or all three. And the English are squeamish about their servants, so this will make a visible scandal, which I should not be associated with.

“He looks enough of a girl, don’t you, girlie-boy!”

“Maybe he is a boy—a French bum-boy!”

The older man and the burly man crowded Dariole physically, one to either side, grinning. The insults were casual, but not, I thought, good-natured.

“But I’m
Arcadie!
Get Monsieur de Markham or you’ll be sorry! I’ll make him have you whipped!”

It is her accent.

Shrill, and almost comic in the distortion of her rage.

And a man or boy who loses his temper is always a figure of fun….

Dear God, I should never have entrusted anything to him—to her!

“Why do they treat her disrespectfully?” Saburo muttered, at my elbow. “Is there a quarrel inside her clan?”

His squat body was peculiarly relaxed. In a European, I would have thought him as far from a fight as from the moon. With the beach in Normandy in my mind, I recalled vividly how he had gone from stillness to strike, all in a second. From just such relaxation as this.

I would have put a restraining hand on M. Saburo’s arm, but I thought that unwise. “Leave this to her to settle.”

“Get—my—cousin!” Dariole bellowed with her head down, like a farm bull at the charge. On the last word, her voice went high and ragged. Her hands made fists at her sides, nowhere near her sword and dagger. “You’re servants—cochon! Get out of my
way!
”

Even from these ten yards away, I could see her face shine with sweat and temper. In Paris she would have drawn her rapier by now. And she would not have lost her temper. Which she has: she has lost her composure completely.

Why is she not fighting?

It came to me suddenly:
She has forgotten who she is
.

Who she is, now, is not who she was when she was last here. When she was a child….

“Cousin Guillaume!” Dariole shouted, lifting her head and staring at the casement windows of the first floor. “Wil-li-am! It’s Arcadie, your cousin Arcadie, Therese’s child—come down here!”

Her body was poised between male and female. It did not surprise me that the three men-servants laughed. They must see her (as I had) as something monstrously ugly: a combination of effeminate boy and a plough-horse of a girl.

She bellowed, “Come out here!”

The nail-studded oak door opened again. I moved my hand towards my sword-hilt. Another man came out.

By his bottle-green satin doublet and trunk-hose, and the fine lace on his ruff, this must be the master of the house. He did not look at Dariole at first, but snapped his fingers at the burly servant.

“Thomas, what’s this?”

The man looked instantly contrite. “Sorry, master. We were just having some fun.”

“Have it quietly, and not on my doorstep!”

“Sorry, master.” The servant bowed his head, and turned back to Dariole.

I tensed, waiting for a brawl to start—and she did not draw sword: she merely stared at the man in green.

“Cousin Guillaume?”

In clear London English, he prompted: “And you are—?”

“Arcadie de la Roncière.” The line of her shoulders altered. Discouraged? Puzzled? “You must remember! I came here with Maman. I was of five years of age—”

“‘Arcadie’ is not a boy’s name.” The Englishman was older than the satin made him look. His point-cut beard was dyed an improbable chestnut. He did not wear a sword, nor did he carry a cudgel in his belt like his servants. A man of the middling sort, at peace in his own house, and now disturbed by this…
by this what?
I suspected him to be wondering.

The shadow from the eaves was not enough in itself to keep me from their notice. What does, as I have long had cause to know, is utter stillness. It surprised me to note the same motionlessness in the man of Nihon.

“Arcadie.” The Englishman’s voice was ironic. “And your servants are—where?”

The young woman’s head dipped again. I tensed, in case she should look towards us. I read in the line of her shoulders and stiff spine:
she has forgotten us, forgotten everything except this man in front of her
.

“I don’t have any servants with me.”

“Or baggage?”

“
Or
baggage!”

“And—let me guess—you require my hospitality and a trifling loan?”

I swore under my breath, not knowing whether to be angry, or applaud this man’s shrewd unwillingness to be cozened or tricked.

The man folded his arms. I saw Dariole open her mouth, and shut it again without finding anything to say.

“Thomas, see to this.” William Markham turned, and walked back into the house. The oak door closed behind him.

I only focused on Markham for a split second. The burly servant already had his arms clamped around Dariole’s upper body. The older man, together with the skinny man, neatly and simultaneously plucked out rapier and dagger from her scabbards, and I thought, Dear God, they have disarmed her! And with such ease.

“Guillaume!” Dariole didn’t struggle. She only craned her neck to see past Thomas, to see the closed door of the house. “Guillaume, I’m your cousin—”

She broke off on a high-pitched squeal.

“’Ere, she
is
a girl!” The skinny English serving-man laughed. “Or he ain’t got no prick; one of the two!”

“Woman turns up in man’s clothes, no servants, no baggage, wants to borrow master’s money, says she’s master’s cousin—aye,” the man Thomas grunted, with a wealth of scorn. “Likely, ain’t it? Sorry we can’t oblige yer French ladyship!”

“Cochon!”

I watched her thrash about, arms pinned to her sides, still trying to get to the closed door. There was more shrill disbelief in her voice than fury. I caught a breath. This is not M. Dariole, this is not the duellist—

I watched as she clawed, scratched, and kicked like a child or a whore.

The men shoved her from one to the other, all but sick with laughter.

“Rosh’-fu’-san….”

“They’re peasants.” I put it into terms I thought Saburo might understand. “They tend to use cudgels. No man ever gained honour from fighting servants or apprentices.”

“We should cut, walk away.” His hand came down on his silk-woven hilts.

“No. It’s her fight, messire.”

And besides, why should I stop it?

I hid a smile.

All plans will have to be re-made, but for the moment….

For the moment, why not enjoy what I see?

The thin man held her rapier and dagger high over his head, out of her reach. She struggled in the burly Englishman Thomas’s grip, jerked up on her toes to grab—and slipped, comically; swept back into his embraces.

“Son-of-bitch!” she yelled in English, kicking up behind her, catching Thomas in his groin.

“That does it! You!
Out
. And don’t come back here! I’ll have the parish constable whip you out of More Gate!”

He shifted his grip to the back of her collar. The stained linen doublet was not a garment any respectable man would wear, not now; let alone any respectable woman. I tensed, waiting for her to hit him.

He placed an expert kick in the crease of her knee.

She instantly fell as her leg involuntarily bent; and dangled in his grip, choking.

He gave a great laugh, lifted her by her doublet collar, and I saw him grab the slack material at the seat of her breeches. Her arms flailed at him without the slightest effect. She dug the toes of her boots in: they skidded across the wet cobbles.

Saburo exclaimed something in the language of Nihon. I found myself with my hand gripping my rapier hilt.

The servant yanked the material of her breeches up, and she squealed as it caught her in the fork of her legs.

He ran her out across the street, and threw her.

She was off the ground completely for a heartbeat: I saw the sunlit mud underneath her as she flew.

A great wave of brown muck splashed up as she hit the ground—hit the surface of the kennel that ran down the centre of the street, rolled, and measured her full length, face-down, in the shit.

S
he was up in a heartbeat, screeching and spitting—up, drenched, her clothes running with evil brown and yellow liquid, rivulets of excrement flying off her into the air.

“Cochon!
Bitchfuck!
” This last in bad English, and she broke off, spitting and blowing repeatedly; loud gobs that I thought must be the most foul-tasting of muck.

Steel flashed.

Rapier and dagger, idly tossed by the thin servant into the kennel beside her.

The three men walked back, not particularly quickly, to the Markham house, and went in and closed the door.

Dariole lurched forward, slipped; jerked herself up onto her feet again, from one knee, and ran across the street. I could hear her boots squelching. She banged the pommel of her dagger on the door, sobbing and yelling incoherently. That she could leave her rapier unnoticed was sign enough to me of the rise of hysteria in her.

She looked small against the great door. I watched her pound on it. Mlle Dariole: all slime from hair down to boots. Her linen doublet was drenched brown from tabs to collar; her Venetian breeches first soaked and bagging, and then—as filth drained out of them—clinging wetly to her thighs and buttocks as if glued.

She stinks, even from here.

Morning rain had made the kennel a river, clotted with unidentifiable lumps; deep, maybe, as a man’s arm is long. Shit soaked her, head to foot. Strands of her wet hair flew and spattered as she yelled and thumped on the door.

A casement window briefly opened over her head, and emitted a burst of male laughter, and the contents of a chamber-pot that splashed across the cobbles.

They will come out again, and silence her.

I watched her soaking, spoiled, weeping with fury; and was, for a moment, in a quandary. Is it so easy to reduce her to this? How could I not do it myself!

Her hat lay in the mud, a hefty footprint crushing it irrevocably out of shape. Her sword was half-sunk, neglected, in filth.
That will need swift cleaning, if it is not to rust.

Saburo hitched at his cloth belt, under the cloak. I shook my head.

“Wait.”

“For what?”

For me to finish my enjoyment of this spectacle
. I did not say it aloud. I caught him frowning out of the corner of my eye.

“Men will come, will look at us,” he protested.

I was far from sure that he had been thinking just that. Still, I saw a pair of apprentice boys stop, down one of the side streets, and turn to look at the shit-soaked youth battering on the door of the house. And London has a city Watch.

“Giri,” Saburo stated, his voice harsh, moving forward.

Obligation? Honour? Something of the sort.
It seems he is not a man to forget his debts
. I paused, undecided for my best move.

If he lops off a head or two, there’s enough notice paid to any man; we become embarrassingly public….

Dariole slammed the flat of her left hand against the nail-studded door, hard enough to bruise bone. Stained palm-prints overlapped on the wood. Her right hand banged her dagger pommel against the door, leaving dints and depressions in the grain. In a cracked voice she called out, “Open it! Open this fucking door!”

She had forgotten her English. It was angry French, and with an admixture of the lowest Parisian French, at that. Her brown cheeks were streaked, blubbered with tears, in an utter lack of control or dignity.

I smiled, becoming wry.

The truth is, as she said, that I should have sought the dark of the night watches on board the
Willibrod
and cut their throats, and put the bodies overboard.

But, since I have not done that….

I walked up beside Saburo, catching him easily with my longer stride. “You get her sword.”

His brows came down at the order. For a moment I thought I would have a duel to fight. Then his mouth tightened and he nodded, once. As he bent to pick up the rapier from the kennel’s shit, I walked forward to where Dariole was slamming both hands against the oak door.

I grabbed her dagger hand neatly. That done, I rapped her knuckles smartly against the wood. The dagger dropped out of her hand. I left it to Saburo. I twisted her arm up behind her back, grabbing her around her sopping-wet body with my other arm, and lifted her up off the ground bodily.

She squealed. “Don’t you
do
that!”

Shifting my grip, I got her cradled: one of my arms pinning both of hers to her sides, and my other arm clamping her thighs and knees together. I felt myself to be holding a bag of live eels. “Dariole! Mademoiselle!”

She fell utterly still and limp—could almost have fainted, except that her breathing felt too rapid, against my chest.

Saburo caught me up, the dirty weapons swathed distastefully in his cloak. My cloak, rather. I walked briskly off, taking side-street after side-street, getting us far enough away from the area that would attract the curious.

Why—why in the name of the good God am I doing this!

It was almost more disturbing that Messire Saburo did not question my action.

Automatically, I turned my face south by the sun, weaving a way through the more deserted alleys towards the Thames-river. I looked down at Arcadie-Fleurimonde-Henriette de Montargis de la Roncière, in my arms. She made a hot, wet, and heavy bundle. Shit soaked through her breeches, and caked her boots. Her drying hair might have been mud-soaked, if it were not for the vomit-inducing smell. Yellow-brown excrement soaked wetly through her doublet—and into mine.

There was shit all over the front of my red velvet doublet, which I had put on as best suited for meeting English relatives. My point-ribbons and the lace of my cuffs were stained, and the ties of my ruff. Where her forehead rested against my chest, she was getting shit into my hair, also.

She could not move, since I gripped her tightly, but she did not attempt it in any case. Her head rested forward; I could not see if she wept or not. Her breathing against my chest felt ragged. Chill wetness soaked through the elbow-creases of my doublet.

I could, of course, gloat
.

Her scabbard dangled from her hanger, irretrievably broken in two places; the wood veneer cracked right through. Only the leather covering held it together. I shot a glance at Saburo, stalking along beside me. He clasped Dariole’s rapier and dagger distastefully in one hand.

“Kitsune,” he grunted. “You would not leave her.”

“Nonsense! Preposterous!”

Dariole seemed deaf and blind to comment. The faint quivering I felt throughout her body indicated her lost in humiliation, deep as the sky. But I did not care to reflect on the impact that the samurai’s words had on me.
I am holding her, in my arms
.

The stench almost made me gag. Clouds of flies buzzed around me. Early in the season, but I could not fault their taste. The Spring sun brought out the stench of shit even more strongly. I felt the young woman quiver suddenly in my grip. Misery? Shame? Or anger, at being carried bodily, and by M. Rochefort, and not being able to prevent it?

“Is there public bath-houses?” Saburo said.

“Not inside the city, since syphilis grew so strong.”

His face might be alien, but it spoke volumes of disgust. “Where we clean?”

The roofs grew less crowded ahead. I felt pleasure that my memory for direction had not played me false, for all it must be six years since I had last trodden London streets.

“There.” I saw a narrow way between two buildings, and sun on the water beyond it.

He grunted. “If her kinsmen turn her away, she has a right to be angry. To show it so—that is the stupidity of youth.”

The hic mulier was no light weight in my arms. I tightened my grip as I carried her down the alley.

Saburo added, “A wise man would keep his silence—and go back tonight, and burn down the house, and not be caught.”

The unpredictable mixture of his honour and pragmatism caught me again. Out of habit and fatigue, I spoke in French, and it was just as well. “Somewhere to the east, dear good God, there is a whole country entire of men like you!”

We came out of the narrow alley to the banks of the Thames-river itself. An old broken-down quay had mostly collapsed into the river. Pilings jutted up from the clear water, beyond what remained of the board-walk. Fish darted against a background of gravel—I could see them under my feet, between the wooden boards, as I walked out onto the quay.

“Pardon me, mademoiselle.” My heart began to thump in my ribs at addressing her; I could not have said why I felt that sudden apprehensiveness.

Her clotted, thick voice muttered, “Fuck off, Rochefort!”

She was a sullen weight in my arms, wet, soggy, and warming in the sun, and breathing out a stench quite unbelievable. Her head stayed turned away from me. I could not tell if she looked around at the river, the boats, the houses. I braced my feet apart on the ruined quay and used my strength to straighten my arms, so that I held her right out from my body, over the Thames-river.

I opened my arms.

She dropped like a stone.

“Rochefort!”

I turned away from the subsequent splashing and language, the loudness of it telling me that she could swim. I had wondered.

This was a deserted backwater—side-water, rather; it being at an angle to the main river, and hidden between buildings. I took the opportunity to unbutton and unpoint my doublet, and take it off; likewise to untie the strings of my cuffs and ruff, and see what I could do to clean my linen. The wood was cool where I knelt. The man from the Japans sat back on his heels in a way that looked painful. He set about cleaning Dariole’s rapier and dagger in the river, with an expression of extreme distaste—which I thought effeminate for so stout a soldier: no man loves shit, but no man can avoid contact with it.

The man-woman reached and pulled herself up from the river, sitting herself clothed and soaking on the boards at the end of the quay. A pool of water grew around her. I found myself checking distance, just as I might if she were still armed, anticipating that she might think about revenge. The memory of Zaton’s stung me, as it habitually did.

But not,
I realised,
as much
. What is this?

She wrenched off her boots, rinsing them in the river. A passing wherry-man gave her a look and called out something in an indistinguishable English. She ignored the tone. I watched her discard sword-belt, broken hanger, and garters, and rapidly unbutton the forty or so cloth-covered buttons down the front of her pale doublet.

I became aware that I was frozen in position, no longer cleaning the mess from my clothes. The stables at Ivry came back to me with an intensity that made me feel dizzy. The smooth warmth of her skin against mine; the flex of muscle under it. The hot, tight, dirty wetness of her arse encompassing me.

She slid doublet and Venetian breeches and hose off together, leaving them in a sodden heap on the planking. The May wind blew cold. She rubbed her hands up and down her arms, rucking the linen of her shirt—and lifted up her shirt-hem, stripping the garment off bodily over her head.

Men’s linen netherhose or under-breeches were still tied at her waist, covering her down to just above the knee. The sun shone brightly on her pale flesh. The flare of her hips, the indentation of her waist, all with the puppy-fat curves of the young…. Her breasts were small and round, tipped with small brown-pink nipples. They had the same luxurious flesh of middle adolescence, when life has not hardened flesh to the angles of the body, or childbirth slackened it.

Instant desire stiffened my prick.

She grinned widely enough to show all her white teeth, and leapt off the planking, hitting the river with an immense splash.

I returned to sponging and dabbing at my doublet and hose, and took advantage of that to shift my aching flesh to where it was not so easily noticeable.

“This was not conduct I was aware of,” Saburo remarked, nodding towards the pale, swimming young woman as she dolphined about in the water. “Gaijin in the Japans are shamed by naked bodies.”

“It’s considered sinful.” I finished what cleaning-up could be done, concluding that I had been left with a doublet fit only for rag-pickers. More steadily than I felt, I said, dry-mouthed, “She does it to provoke, messire. Ignore her.”

The young woman swam back and pushed herself up in the water, hanging on to the edge of the jetty with her fingers. All except her head and hands was underwater, and her hair was slicked back, making her look like an otter. She made blowing motions, as if she shivered. She nodded at the pile of her clothes, and lifted her face to me.

“Rinse that lot out, will you, messire? You’re supposed to be the one playing servant!”

I stood.

I could not prevent myself from staring down through the clear water.

The river-bottom was ochre gravel. Between that and the rippled surface hung Dariole, her body foreshortened, and her skin made unnaturally white by the water, but her bare upper body plainly visible. The curve of her breasts made me think, all in a second, of how cold and water-dappled her flesh will be when she leaves the river, and how my hands would feel, large and warm, if placed against them.