Mary Gentle (32 page)

Too many years as the Duke’s agent have left me with a predilection for seeing plots and rendezvous where there are none. Instead, here is an old peasant woman, probably driven out of her village, and probably seeking nothing more than to beg food.

In the lantern-light, I saw a fat, clear drop of water well up in her eye. It rolled down her cheek. She neither moved nor made a sound. It was barely obvious that she breathed.

Another tear succeeded the first, running down her dirty cheek. Another. I opened my mouth to speak, and was interrupted. She spoke, loudly. Her voice made such a dry mangling of her words that it was a moment before I realised she had spoken neither in English nor French.

“No ghe credo!”

One of the languages of Italy, I finally recognised through her weeping. From Padua, from Venice…Mordieu! At least not Florentine, like Concini!

The old woman reached down, staring at me. She pulled up the hem of her top petticoat at the back. I could not work out why she showed me her filthy under-petticoats—and then she hooded the back of it like a shawl, covering up her uncovered hair.

A modest woman will always have her hair covered. That this evident madwoman could remember so much was almost as surprising as being addressed, here, in a foreign tongue.

“Who are you, grandmère?” I repeated it quietly in French, English, and the smattering of Italian tongues I had picked up visiting Savoy.

“Son Caterina….”

“Catherine.” Slowly, so as not to alarm her, I knelt down. She continued to crouch against the wall, as if it were all that held her up, still shorter than I although I knelt. Her eyes lightened as she slitted them against the lantern’s candle. Her hands, prominent with veins and knuckles, clenched the material of her petticoat together under her chin. Without the silver hair showing, she could have been anywhere between fifty and seventy.

And what will she do, when Fludd’s men arrive here?

I felt a stab of pity. There are such women called witches in France; some have irrational fears that every man is seeking to harm them, or speak constantly to voices that no other man can hear. Some claim to hear the voice of Monseigneur God, as Ravaillac did, and keep the priests busy working out whether they do or whether it is the Devil.

“You should go,” I began.

“Mi son Caterina!” she exclaimed.

I am Catherine, Caterina.
A wandering madwoman who remembers that once she had a name, and that it mattered what it was. I gave her a nod of acknowledgement and rose slowly to my feet. The chape of my scabbard scraped the rock wall behind me, and I froze. After thirty heartbeats it seemed that she had not noticed—that it would be possible to back out of this cavern without causing her to break out into a cat-scratching fury.

“Ti xe’ Valentin Raoul St Cyprian Anne-Marie Rochefort de Cossé Brissac!”

I stopped.

The woman’s black eyes lifted, gazing up at me where I towered above her crouching body. She repeated, “Ti xe’
Valentin
. Ti xe’ Valentin Raoul Rochefort de Cossé Brissac….”

“Not
another
one!” I bellowed.

She flinched back from the echoes in the surrounding dark. Her mouth trembled. I held out my rapier, the blade glinting as if it were oiled.

“Whose trick is it
this
time? Fludd, again? Lanier? Come
out
, Aemilia! I will not take this foolery a second time!”

A few soundless black shadows whirred through the lantern’s light, disturbed by noise. I heard nothing that indicated the presence of another man. Or woman.

“Very well—what did they pay you?” I reached forward with my free hand, hauled the woman upright with my fingers knotted into her shift, and slammed her back against the rough stone wall. “Play-actor! Stop this and talk, madwoman!”

She gazed up at me, over my fist at her neck. Tears slid out of her eyes. Tremulously, unmistakably, she smiled.

“Oh, cielo, misericordioso, voi non potete credere quanto mi fate felice!” She slipped into an educated, accented French. “Oh, good merciful heaven, you can’t believe, sir, how happy you are making me!”

I put my rapier blade across her chin, close to the hilt, just above my fist, so that the edge brought out a trickle of blood on her skin. “Who told you my name!”

Her smile didn’t waver. Her pale tongue darted out, and licked up her own tears as they ran down the wrinkles about her nose and mouth. She gazed up at me as she wept, her eyes shining with absolute joy.

I snapped, “I was correct, at the first. You
are
mad!”

“You don’t hurt me.” She did not move a fraction under my blade. “Here you are, here you are….”

Spontaneous joy is a difficult sensibility to fake. Tears, fear, disgust, or liking are easier. Whoever put her here, she is…genuinely overjoyed to see one Valentin Raoul Rochefort.

Why?

“Does Fludd think two fortunetellers will impress me more than one?” I demanded. Her black eyes in her pallid face shone dizzily at me. She beamed. I do not like to hit an old woman, but a pawn of Fludd’s…I shook her, harshly, keeping the hank of her makeshift shawl in my fist.

“You can tell me, grandmère, or I can beat it out of you! He told you my name. Now you tell me his!”

“I put myself here, Valentin.” She hung in my grip, voice husky, gazing up at me with wet eyes. “I have been waiting for you. Ten years I have waited. And now…no ghe credo! No matter how sure I was…. It is you; it is Rochefort; it is you….”

I removed my sword and let go of her.

Immediately after, I grabbed and caught her arm as she slid down the cave wall.

Exasperated as much with myself as with her—why should
I
care if old bones are brittle?—I squatted down before her as she folded into a kneeling position. Her petticoats fell down, her head uncovered, and her smock shifted. Something caught the light at her waist.

A rosary. Old, polished dark wood, hanging from the cord serving her as a belt, evidently familiar to the fingers. The metal crucifix winked in the lantern-light.

I raised my brows. “Not all of England is heretic, but still, not a wise thing to be wearing. You were waiting for me. And now you, also, are about to tell me my future. And I am supposed to believe this?”

She laughed.

A small sound, in the emptiness surrounding us, but it left me open-mouthed in incredulity. At last, I managed to observe, “It seems to be my lot in life, to be mocked at by women.”

“Poor Valentin!” Her bright eyes seemed almost tender. That, I thought, is more frightening than her pretence of having been waiting for me.

I looked at her sternly. “So. You followed me here. Superstition keeps out the peasants. You have been told my name, or a name you suppose me to go by. Be careful I don’t lose patience with this farce. Whatever your actions mean, they will be irrelevant once you are dead.”

I held my rapier with the point out to the side, ready either to cut at an attacker from the darkness, or slash back at the hag.

“You have never killed old women, Valentin. You will not begin now.”

I glanced about the small, yellow-lit cave. Lanier, Fludd; they will have no reason I can see for wishing me delayed here. Cecil—no, too baroque even for Milord Cecil. What then? The approach of another, as yet unknown, enemy?

“I can show you.” The old woman put her dirty hand on my arm. “It isn’t far. I can show you why the….” Evidently a French word deserted her. “I can demonstrate that I have no need of a third party to tell me who you are.”

“An invitation to go through a maze of black caves? I thank you.” I inclined my head mordantly to the Italian woman. “I think
not
.”

Her gaze remained steady. She shook her head very slightly; it might have been a palsy. “I am not as skilful as the London Master. You will have to come with me and answer questions.”

For one moment, I took it to be the term of a School of Defence.

Fludd,
I thought, a moment after.

Plausible. But I have seen too much deceit in the past to be convinced by mere sincerity.

At the worst, it is another dozen of Marie de Medici’s murderous gentlemen. If they have found I am in England, it is a likely place to murder me. However, I have a sword and a pistol; it will go hard if I cannot use these caves to avoid an ambush, if I know where it is set.

And that, I believe, means that grandmère here must speak to me.

I stood up briskly, offering her my hand. “Show me, then.”

The hand she put into mine was bare of any glove, and had any number of old white scars and calluses on it, but it did not have the bundle-of-sticks feeling that old court ladies often have; it was still a little plump.

“Valentin, Valentin, Valentin!” she almost sang. Her weight, as she used her grip on me to rise, was also more than I had anticipated. “I’m not mad.” The fingers of her other hand picked at her skirts. “Or witch. I am not strega. Follow me, now. You will need the lantern. Bring it.”

“I have noticed, also,” I said, as I picked up the lantern, “that women are a little prone to giving me orders.”

She put her hand to her mouth and giggled like a young girl.

An appearance of compliance may win many things. Holding up the lantern, I gestured for her to precede me.

She led me on and in, this cave proving low-roofed but long. The rock under my boots felt dry, barring two or three standing pools. I walked hunched over. Twice the ragged, pinnacle-studded roof soared abruptly up into heights so great that the lantern-light could not pierce the blackness—and once into a wider space, that echoed like the vastnesses of Our Lady in Paris. Rock showed runnelled and melted, like candle-wax. Beyond that, the roof came down low enough that even the old woman must hunch over. I took care to look back in the lantern-light at regular intervals, memorising the landmarks of our way. A shiver went through me, anticipating what I might meet in this labyrinth.

“Here, Valentin. I live here.” The old woman ducked her head under a natural arch, and I followed, finding by lifting the lantern that I could stand up beyond it.

The surface of the limestone walls shone cross-hatched in every direction. Not with scratches, I realised as I gazed. With signs of the type that are seen in geometric and occult books. Scratched whitely into the fine surface….

“Calculations,” I surmised, somewhat ironically. “Mathematics.”

“It was difficult when I first came here.” Her voice spoke beside me. “Later, I could steal paper and ink from the mill.”

I raised a brow, sardonic. “Are you not afraid to leave your predictions here, for all future ages to discover?”

“The river’s level will have risen before they can be understood, and all these caverns drowned.”

The thought of this cave, and others, filled up with water to the roof, oddly disquieted me. She moved off into the shadowed end of the cavern. I walked in her wake, past the lines of writing scratched into the wall, not quite sure what I glimpsed beyond her.

Paper.

I reached out to touch one of the stacks, finding it slightly damp and gritty under my fingers. The lantern showed me that the ink hadn’t run, only spread a little into the fibres of the paper. All of it—I looked around at pile upon pile, higher than the woman’s head, stacking the end of this cave—all of it covered with hen-tracks, scribbles, equations, and diagrams.

“Here
you
are.” She held out one undistinguished sheet of paper. “I use the Nolan method, you’ll observe. And that is my own proof of the Bruno Equations, there. I’ve been waiting for you these ten years and more.”

“Of course you have.” I nodded reflexively, and sighed. True, there was a nest of blankets in one corner of the cave, torn and re-woven as a sow’s nest, but she might have slept in it for a decade, or only a handful of nights—or made it this morning.

I put the lantern down, reached out, and took the old woman under the chin, my fingers and thumb extending to either side of her throat. Her fingers scrabbled at my glove. I lifted her up on her toes, violently enough that her remaining teeth clicked together.

So close, she smelled appalling. I looked into her white-rimmed eyes. “All I have to do is close my hand and you will cease to breathe. I assume you wish to live: most men do. Tell me who you are, why you are here, and who told you my name?”

Her eyes gazed with brilliant warmth. Courage and ease are difficult to fake, so close. Her heartbeat was a little fast under my hand, but not more so than could be accounted for by physical exertion.

“Who are you?” I demanded.

“Suor Caterina, born Elena Zorzi, of the Veneto, not far from Padua; but living in Venice most of my life.”

I had not expected to be answered so easily. “
What
are you?”

“I am a Sister of the Poor Clares.” There were vertical lines in her face that all pulled together and met at her mouth when she pursed her lips. “I don’t want to lie to you, Valentin. I was dismissed from the Clares. But I still consider that I am a bride of Christ.”

The dignity of her words went ill with her stinking clothes, half-naked state, and matted hair. I tightened my grip a fraction and moved my hand upwards, lifting her higher onto her bare toes.