Mary Gentle (35 page)

The woodpecker’s rattle made a staccato echo to her words.

“War is a brutal advancer of industry and science when it doesn’t wear it down completely. I can’t swear on my beads that the great extinction will be avoided—I can only say it’s possible it will be.”

“So you do nothing?” I asked.

She stood up, for once able to look down at me where I sat on the fallen tree. “Misericordioso!
No
, Valentin. I work. I am working. And…it’s ironic. What
I
need, for my purposes, is for a king to stay alive.”

“Which king?”

Her smile returned to her dirt-marked face, very wry. “James Stuart, of course! If James lives now, and rules for another twenty years, it’s not Henry, but James’s second son Charles who will rule after him. King Charles is incompetent enough to lose royal power, and hand it over to this country’s parliament. If that revolutionary step’s taken, then there’ll be a commonwealth; Diggers, Levellers…The ordinary man will govern himself freely—
the ordinary man,
Valentin. And it’ll spread from this land to others. Abolishing aristocracy, tyranny, kings…spread to France, even. To the New World.”

“Men of power will not give up power easily. I don’t imagine your revolution to be bloodless…the removal of restraint can be a terror.” I rose to my feet; by that action towering over her. “The thought of France without a monarch cheers me only if it’s Marie de Medici…. You should go home, Suor Caterina. You should in any case leave
this
place.”

I do not like to confess it, but I suppose that her moon-struck gallantry moved me. I added, “If you come with me, I will offer to conceal you out of the way while—events—play out. And afterwards, if you keep silent, you may well go back to Venice.”

“Where they will burn me, as Rome burned Bruno!” she said tartly. “Where is your sense, Valentin! No, I am safer here—”

Silence impressed itself on me.

The woodpecker
.

I looked down at the old woman.

She gave a slight nod, as if there were a concord between us. She stood, rubbed her hands down her skirts, and turned towards the entrance in the scrub that had grown up over the cleft in the rocks.

If Fludd’s conspiracy were mine, I should certainly be obliged to silence her. But since it is not….

With her back to me, and in a low voice, Caterina said, “One thing more. Petty, when we’ve been talking of centuries and millions. And I dislike to do this to you…Misericordioso! Valentin, I am so sorry. I must warn you of this. If the English King James is killed, here—Mademoiselle de la Roncière dies, too, within six months.”

I took my way down the southern slope—and, as I rounded the hill towards the main cavern entrance, met with Aemilia Lanier in stout boots with six mill-workers behind her, all of them carrying torches and cudgels.

“The caves are adequate to our needs.” I cut off her questions. “Unless you need to know more, madame, we might set off back to London tomorrow morning.”

“I haven’t had time,” she protested. “I need at least a pair of days—”

I walked on, leaving her standing.

Bristol seems good,
I thought.

The port lay a few miles to the north, according to the pack-master as we had travelled down the road from the city of Bath. In times when the roads to London were impassable, Fludd sometimes sent his pamphlets by ship. Second greatest port of the kingdom (although not a match for our La Rochelle), it had, also, vessels bound for Portugal, the Baltic, North Africa, the New World….

What might a man do in Virginia? Own slaves, become rich, live free under a different name. Leave any number of dead kings behind in Europe.

You do not believe her, do you? That Mlle Dariole’s death and the English King’s murder are somehow bound one with the other?

The feel of my sword effortlessly evaded, and the pull of the healing scab on my arm, served as Fludd intended, bringing into my mind the fight with both him and the Abraham Men.

Fludd knows something,
I conceded.

I do not see how a reasonable man can deny it.

But—the mistake would be to think that, because his knowledge may give him a little of a man’s future, that it gives him any
more
than that.

Have not I, myself, often fooled men by the addition of a small amount of truth to a great lie?

Suor Caterina, speaking of Dariole, so obviously wishes only to draw me to support her own cause.
That has no touchstone truth in it,
I reflected. It’s as likely that I’ll return to London and find Dariole on some whim long gone on the next ship to the Indies!

The slight tension always present in me on this journey sprang from an unacknowledged expectation, I realised. That I will turn about and find Dariole having followed me to this place, out of sheer curiosity, if nothing else.

As well she did not. She’s not wise enough to know I’m unwise company for her.

My stride had brought me down to the bridge over the mill stream. Crossing it, and coming to the mud-rutted mill yard, I walked directly but not particularly quickly into the stables.

Recovering the dun stone horse’s saddlebags from where I had hid them, I made a quick job of tacking him up. I led him out into the sun, glancing about to see if there was anybody to whom I should make my excuses—that I was only exercising the mount.

Not one night here!
I thought fiercely. No more of the honey-trap of Madame Lanier. No more mad Italian nuns!
Let
her confuse Fludd, when he comes to set his plot in motion down here. I wash my hands of it! I am off back to London, to discover what else Master Cecil can now tell me of M. de Sully.

The stone horse set a slow pace, having rested no more than four hours since morning, and being besides bad-tempered at leaving a comfortable stable for the breezes and stony roads. I followed the way north in the middle hours of the June afternoon. A number of skylarks sung overhead. When the dun would have picked up speed, snuffling the air, I reined him in—he was not good for so many more leagues without a regular ambling pace. It seemed a short time, however, until I came to the Bath-London road, with Bristol to the west of me, and London to the east.

West is Bristol, freedom, another name by which no man knows me. And a great chance of drowning in the Atlantic, dying in a New World Winter, or being devoured by savages….

“A man could feel that to be very restful!” I leaned forward and rubbed the stone horse behind his ears. He shifted his hooves in the dust, not as fiery as my lost jennet. I moved him on, turning his head to the east, through the unrelenting green of the English countryside; abandoning the daydream.

The Italian nun is mad, but harmless. Fludd is a madman, and dangerous.

Anger rose in my belly. He has beaten me, had me beaten, and sent me about his business as if I were his servant!

“I begin to think Monsieur Fludd’s life-line runs only until Milord Cecil is done with him,” I said aloud, touching a spur softly to the stallion’s flank. “Then ‘Doctor’ Fludd will vanish. Or, Southwark being such a lawless suburb, he will be found in the kennel, his throat most unfortunately cut through by thieves.”

I had taken the precaution of abstracting the more recent news pamphlets from Wookey mill before I left, and the immediate road east proved easy enough that I might scan them in the saddle. What they said of France was no more than I had seen from the notes of Cecil’s intelligencers: that there were reports of merchants in Bruges getting news of Henri’s death a week
before
the event; that de Loménie, the Secretary of State, had apparently told Father Cotton he and his Jesuits killed the King; and that “good Catholics” in Burgundy, Normandy, and Maine were defacing gravestones in Huguenot cemeteries, and hurling abuse at their funerals, although these only took place after sunset. There was no mention of M. de Sully.

I do not know if that is good or ill, I reflected.

Water-drops smacked the paper, lightly, and I looked up to see the weather shifting quarter.

Hard summer rain set in almost immediately I passed Bath. I took most of it in the face, riding east through waterlogged muddy tracks barely worthy the name of highway, the horse and I equally plastered dun-coloured when we stopped at night. I missed my way once only, losing but an hour. The ride was hard, but of superlative time. From when I set out from Wookey, to when I rode in by way of the poorer outskirts to Southwark, took me only three days.

I looked about me as I rode in. Fewer women chattering in the street, fewer hens fluttering out from under the stone horse’s hooves. I spurred on into Bankside from the west. More front doors slashed with paint. More houses with shutters up, closed by the owners while they fled to the country.

At the parish church, I dismounted briefly to read the list of weekly deaths pinned to the door. Seeking the skyline, I saw The Globe and The Rose still had flags up.
Evidently the plague is not yet bad enough for the theatres to be closed.

Impatience urged me to Dead Man’s Place.

No. Business first
. Whitehall-palace. Find Fludd, see what further lunacy he has to tell me, in this little over a week I have been gone; then I am up to date in my report to Cecil, and cannot be taken unawares.

I swung back into the saddle. The noise of Southwark resounded in my ears: church bells, a quarrel inside the open window of an Ordinary; eight or nine children playing with a sewn-up linen ball, and the high-pitched screaming of dogs at the bull-baiting. As I kneed the stallion into quiet behaviour, and eventually turned down the street of lime-washed houses, I saw the great oak gates of Fludd’s sundial garden ahead of me. Closed.

I rode closer.

Lichen grew green and golden on the flagstones outside the front of the gate.

I swung down from the saddle, taking it all in in one glance. The garden’s gate not opened for some time; shutters up on all the house’s windows.

Breathless, but not from exertion, I loped down the side wall, to the Thames-river and the yard by the mill. The great yard gates stood shut—barred with iron, by the way they clanged under the impact of my shoulder.

No man answered when I shouted.

Striding back to the house door, I hammered on it with my fist. The empty echo returned. I beat on the nearest window shutter with the hilt of my sword, and peered to see if I could see through the crack—nothing. Straightening, I walked down to the yard gate, seeing the leaves of the apple trees over the top of it. A leap let me catch the top of the gate one-handed, and peer over long enough to see un-scythed grass swaying, half hiding the sundial in its overgrowth.

I dropped down to the flagstones again, sheathing my rapier. No good to charge his front door: two-inch oak, and not to be got through without powder.

Has he done what I would wish him to do, and vanished?
Has some other man killed him while I was gone? Has he merely pissed his physician’s gown at the thought of plague, and left Southwark for his other house by St Paul’s? Does Cecil have him in the Tower, now, along with Northumberland? How far must I look!

A stranger’s tentative voice said, “Are you Master Rochefort?”

I startled and swung about so violently that the man stepped back.

Not, as I had half-expected, Northumberland’s John, or Hariot, or one other of the mathematicians. A face I did not know. I looked a short, elderly man in dull, dusty black robes up and down—realising at last that he must be a heretic priest.

Halfway between satire and hysteria, I put my fists on my hips. “Does
everybody
know my name? Yes, I’m Rochefort. What of it?”

“Master Fludd has gone into the country.”

“So much is obvious, I think.” I shook my head. In the middle of a conspiracy to kill his King, gone. In the middle of a play-rehearsal, gone. His house shut up, his plans abandoned—gone.

“My name is Edwin Slaughter.”

I had to choke back laughter at that. Any man less like a slaughterman it would be hard to imagine—although as a priest, I dare say he had enough to do with death of late.

“And?”

“I’ve been waiting, Master Rochefort.” His eyes were anxious. “Master Fludd said you would return this afternoon. He gave me your description: ‘a Spaniard-looking man, something above two yards high’—pardon me, master! He was most anxious that you should have this letter.”

Said I would return this afternoon. Is this another of Fludd’s calculations, or his lies?

The priest continued to make polite noises. I took the folded paper out of his fingers, ignoring his remonstrations. The wax seal cracked under my hand.

I saw it dated the day I had left London with Aemilia Lanier: May 26th, by the old calendar; June 5th, by the new. A week old, now.

I read: