Mary Gentle (52 page)

“I…suppose you to be correct.” Since the hems were up about my knees, I could not trip over them. With the bulk of my skirts and petticoats fastened so, between my legs, they made merely another pair of vastly baggy breeches. To a casual eye, they might have been Dutch slops, particularly as I wore my boots beneath them.

Re-buckling my sword and dagger gave me confidence that I might now both draw and fight. A momentary chill breeze off the marsh made the exposed skin of my chest prickle with gooseflesh, above the bodice and stomacher. I regretted again that there had not been any man among Henry’s dead troopers large enough of their body to lend me a shirt or doublet.

From the waist up…
I am a centaur. Or Hermaphroditus
.

Saburo looked back, hesitating. I signalled to him to continue walking, guarding the King.

“May we go on? Are you done?” A little nettled, I looked down at the young woman. “Or did you not have sufficient poppets to dress, when you were a girl-child?”

“Aw, messire, you have to have guessed I played with my brothers’ toys….”

We smiled, each at the other.

Walking in the wake of the samurai and James Stuart, the slow pace of foot travel brought us at last under a line of wind-bent oaks and elms. The first cover in an hour.

Among the many things I do not know about mimicking a woman, I realised, is the effect of English July sunlight on my shaven, naked shoulders and chest. I looked down at my florid skin as we came into occasional shade.

For all it is only the English sun, and in no way so strong as it is in France, I have a fine colour
…The red skin was sharply separated from the stark white just under the edge of my stomacher, as if by a line. I stripped off my glove and rested a bare palm gently above it, feeling how hot it radiated.

“See, now.” Dariole grinned. “If you were a respectable woman and not a player, you’d have a pinner to go over that….”

I managed to seem icy. “You could not have told me this before?”

“Oh, like
you
don’t know what women wear!” She poked me with her forefinger, much where I expected, in the centre of the sun-scalded flesh of my chest. Expecting it, I was able to refuse her the satisfaction of a wince.

“It’s true, mademoiselle, I have in my time seduced many country girls….”

And I should be familiar with the white cloth they fold about their shoulders and bosom, and pin at the throat. Except that I had never assumed the pinner to have a practical function beyond hiding their breasts from men’s eyes.

Something in the movement of the air, and the smell of it, made me aware that we must soon come within a few miles of the sea. My back itched. I could not help looking about, behind me and to the side. I remarked no sign of Prince Henry’s men.

“They have to have missed us. They’ll be at Bristol,” Dariole said, un-emotionally; for a moment, I suspected her able to read my mind.

“Henry’s soldiers? I would suppose it a possibility for them to wait for us there. Or to take Cecil’s troops prisoner, if there are more of them in Bristol. Conceivably, both.”

Is Milord Robert Cecil alive?
Will I have, still, access to his intelligencers’ reports? Or is Spofforth correct—Spofforth, whom I would bet all my remaining coin is dead himself….

Dariole lifted her head, her gaze meeting mine. “Maybe Robert Fludd is with Henry Stuart’s soldiers right now. Maybe he’s doing mathematics to find out where
we
are. Maybe he did that ten years ago! I
hate
it that whatever we do, he might have thought of it first. I wish we had Suor Caterina alive.”

That, I could not deny. I felt a pang at the loss of Caterina. To wait so long, in darkness and non-existence, and then to have one’s act be cut so short….

Dariole, exasperated, added, “Or I wish we had another one of the Giordanisti!”

“Bruno’s students are gone: mad, or dead,” I said.

“All except Fludd.” Dariole scowled. “I hope he
knows
I’m alive. I hope he sleeps with two loaded pistols beside him. I hope I give him nightmares.”

It was on the verge of my tongue to remark that this was indeed probable, since God He knows she has given
me
nightmares enough.

May I be so flippant with you now?
I thought. Bruises fade, cuts heal; to outward appearance, she is the same young woman who sailed into London on the
Willibrod
two months ago. But that is outward.

I’m lost, I thought. I would protect her from every ill, if I could.

And, at the same time, I desire to bury my face in the wind-dried, creased linen of her shirt, where it is visible under her doublet; strip off the garment for the sweet flesh beneath. Except that she freezes, now, when any man’s hand approaches.

Dariole looked up at me. “You know what? It’s selfish, but I want Caterina here. I wish she hadn’t sacrificed herself.”

The word triggered a harshness in me, having had time to contemplate the Italian woman’s actions. “‘Sacrifice’? Mademoiselle, Caterina was a fool!”

At Dariole’s appalled look, I continued rapidly.

“Yes, I owe Caterina my life. Conceivably, we all do. But only consider. ‘Six minds in Europe,’ she told me, that were capable of understanding this Bruno’s Formulae. And she decides to get one of the remaining two spattered up the walls of Wookey caves! Mademoiselle, I doubt any man would count it a fair exchange: one of Europe’s predictive mathematicians dead in exchange for the Duc de Sully’s spy!”

Dariole’s mouth hardened in the stubborn lines I recognised. “Well, we’ve got what we’ve
got,
messire. They’re all gone except Fludd. And finding him—
oh
. James is bait. Fludd still wants him dead.”

I picked grass-stems from the verge as we walked under the spindly trees’ shadow. “I won’t say I had not considered that. But—”

She interrupted, no less precipitately than Prince Henry Stuart, but with more honest passion. “We have to do it! Use James Stuart to get Robert Fludd back out into the open—he’s
got
to want the King dead, still. We get James to London…Fludd is in London, I know.”

Braiding the stems of grasses gave me somewhat to look at that was not her impassioned face. “You seem very certain.”

“Oh, no one’s going to have noticed him. He’ll just be one of those shadowy men around the Prince—the new King. Henry Nine. But I’m going to find him. You and Saburo can do the putting-back-on-the-throne with James.”

The grass-braid twisted, broke. I abandoned it.

“Mademoiselle, I have nothing more to do with James Stuart. Except in so far as, if we’re
not
now captured, and I am able to assist him to his throne, he might prove a very useful ally against the Queen Regent.”

“‘Against?’” Dariole glanced up at me, incredulous. “Marie de Medici and James Stuart? Never! They’re way too alike. Peace at any price, both of ’em! He won’t fight her, and she won’t fight him!”

“Not warfare, mademoiselle. Influence.”

Frustrated, I added, aloud, what—some few weeks ago—I would have been least likely to say to her, of all men on Earth.

“Dariole, all my entanglements with James and with Robert Fludd are serving merely to divert me from my real purpose! This is not why I left Paris. Understand, I do not blame you—”

Her eyes flashed, but she spoke with a dry humour. “That’s good.”

“—and it is
possible
I’ve informed M. de Sully well enough that he can uncover the traitor in his household, but I cannot confirm it. That is not the end of the matter! The Queen Regent will never stand a rival like M. de Sully at court: she’ll try again. If I can’t use James Stuart to help him, then I’m useless in James’s company. I’m useless here!”

“No.” Dariole turned her head to look at me, as she walked, mouth set stubbornly. “You’re not useless. I asked you, messire, would you help me find Robert Fludd—and I realise now, you didn’t answer.”

Out of nowhere, a thought came to me so strongly that I checked as I walked.

I was dimly aware of Mlle Dariole continuing on a few steps further, before she stopped and stared back.

“I…am to thank you, mademoiselle, I think.” Resting my hand down on the Saxony rapier’s hilt, I called the young woman’s words of a few minutes ago into my mind. “Yes. The Giordanisti, gone; dead or mad—as you say: ‘except Fludd.’”

She came back a pace. “There was only him and Caterina. Unless you think she was lying?”

“Lying? I doubt it of her. But it’s possible even she had insufficient knowledge…no man may calculate
every
possibility.” The wind off the Levels brought marsh-smells to me, and dappled shadow shifted on the path. “If, at some time in the last ten years, the House of Austria or the Society of Jesus found and took one of the Giordanisti into their custody…and hid him away….”

“What?” she demanded, frustrated.

She demands my thoughts as if she had a right. As if we are as close as friends….

I looked away from her, up into the shade and brightness of the heavy-leafed trees. If I don’t look into her face, perhaps she will read nothing in mine.

“Mademoiselle. Say there
are
only Robert Fludd and Sister Caterina left. Caterina is now dead. That, as I say, was a foolhardy act—a waste.”

Dariole made a protesting noise; I ignored it.

“If that’s so, then Robert Fludd is now the last of the living students of Giordano Bruno; the last Giordanista. I grant you, other men may read this ‘Regiomontanus’ and the rest, and rediscover what Bruno knew—but, also, they may not. And we
know
one man has this knowledge. Therefore…”

I turned my head, to meet her clear, cold gaze.

“…therefore, mademoiselle, what is he? What is Robert Fludd?”

Dariole said, “The man I’m going to kill.”

“No.”

Raw pain showed on her face, blanking it into something no more expressive than a pale wax death-mask.

“No,” I repeated, hating what I must say, but seeing it far too clearly. “Robert Fludd is a man to be
used
.”

A coldness pierced me, at her stare. And a sensation as of falling—what, in another man, I might have called fear.
I have broken the accord between us. Perhaps permanently.

I realised that Saburo and the King had walked back to us only as James Stuart’s shadow loomed in my vision.

“Well, Master Rochefort?” he demanded. “There is a path ahead, by which we may see roofs; do we go on?”

Forcing myself to apparent confidence, I gave his Stuart Majesty a bow. “I believe so. Sire, this Bridgwater is a port, according to Monsieur Anselm; one not much less significant than Bristol. If you’ll take my advice, when we arrive, we won’t sail north, to Bristol—but take ship from Bridgwater direct to London.”

T
he
Martha
crewed eighteen men—a mere fifty-ton ship, square-rigged and tiny, with an old-fashioned high stern and forecastle.

Royal beggars can’t be choosers,
I reflected, watching Dungeness pass to the north of us, over a whitecapped sea.

One of the seamen on the
Martha
being of truly gigantic proportions, I had bought his best doublet from him (at an inordinate price), and it hung comfortably loose across my shoulders. Another of the sailors being handy with his needle, I had had him make Dame Clio’s voluminous skirts into true Dutch slops, since expensive silk looks very well for a pair of breeches.

“Yon French courtier is a sight too concerned with his clothes,” King James remarked cheerfully to Saburo as I entered the narrow stern cabin, ducking my head to miss both the beams and the swinging lanterns. James Stuart chuckled. “Master de Rochefort, you are none so young, sir, to be thinking of fashion. I think that Master Dariole would scrub up well. A king should have brave young men about him in his court.”

Dariole, who had been peering out of the leaded casement at the sea, made her bow to the King at this jovial compliment, and mumbled something about air and the deck. I stood aside as she passed. She did not lift her head or meet my eye.

Were it possible, I would have teased her gently; asked if she thought “Monsieur” Dariole would be considered such an ornament at James’s court were he Mlle de Montargis de la Roncière (the Scotsman’s admiration seeming not in the slightest aware of her womanly qualities).

But I fear it not possible, given she has not spoken to me since the
Martha
quit Bridgwater.

Crowding into the narrow cabin along with Saburo, I found the grizzled and somewhat dazzled ship’s captain of the
Martha
also keeping company with James Stuart. The King gestured. “This stout subject of ours, Captain Arnott, has assured us we shall be in the estuary of the Thames-river within the day.”

I nodded approval. Arnott—a captain fortunately not local to Bridgwater—remarked, “Even so, your Majesty! The wind and tide themselves conspire to bring your Majesty home safely.”

James flinched. An unlucky choice of words, that
conspire
. He waved his hand dismissively. “You may leave us, for the moment, Captain Arnott. And you, Monsieur Tanaka. De Rochefort, you wished to speak with us?”

“Yes, sire.” Given how time presses.

Allowing the ship’s captain and the samurai to shuffle past me in the narrow way, I entered, and at James’s gesture seated myself on the ledge of the stern window. Sunlight and the hull shifted gently. The last four days, James had kept both Dariole and Saburo close at his side—the former to help in the interpretation of the latter, I thought, while the samurai and the English King spent considerable time in discussion of Nihon and trade.

Well enough, if it allows James Stuart to distract himself from the knowledge that he is not, yet, back on his throne. And that Fludd and Prince Henry will not have been idle.

“Well, man?” the Scotsman demanded. “What would you say to us?”

After this, there is no going back.
I may succeed or fail, but the matter is broached.

As mildly as possible, I said, “Your Majesty must be hoping to arrive in London before the usurper Henry is crowned. Establish at Whitehall-palace that your Majesty is indeed not dead.”

“Yon man Fludd,” James growled. “He, we will have hanged outside our window, to wake up and see every morning afterwards for a month.”

And I am choosing this moment to suggest the contrary….

James wiped at his mouth with his sleeve. His oyster-satin looked much the worse for wear, after skirmishes and the march across the Levels—but no other garment could match it for expensiveness, and so the King wore it still. True, it had indeed gone some way to convincing Captain Arnott that James was who he claimed to be.

“Prince Henry,” I felt my way carefully, “has no authority, I think?”

The fat man lifted his head, somewhat white about the eyes at the motion of the boat. Seeming to cast aside his pride, he said, “Don’t rebuke us, Master de Rochefort. We had left the royal seal with Mr Secretary, while we costumed for the masque. If Master Cecil’s dead, then the usurper has it. Likewise if Master Cecil, alive, proves a turncoat and sides with the usurper.”

“Perhaps too many men will be suspicious of what occurred in the banqueting cavern, sire.” I shrugged. “Including Milord Cecil, if he lives. Henri of Navarre, at least, left a visible corpse.”

James looked grey—at the prospect of Cecil being dead, I surmised, for all his words about the man’s potential treachery.

“Sire, if he finds evidence, Cecil will have the Prince impeached as a regicide. And if Cecil
does
live, Doctor Fludd can’t kill him without arousing suspicion.”

I smiled, mordantly, wondering just how angry it would make Mr Secretary Cecil, finding himself precisely in the Duc de Sully’s position.

“If we reach the end of this voyage today or tomorrow, perhaps your Majesty shall see yourself returned to your throne with rejoicing, sire.”

“Perhaps.” James looked sad. “Good men have already died in the hope of it. Yon Philip Spofforth, God rest him. And the poor gallant souls with him.”

James glanced up at me. A man may not always choose his causes. Pure need of Milord Cecil’s information led me originally to support of this man; I have not M. Saburo’s requirement of James Stuart on the English throne for his Nihonese King to deal with. Need of help for M. de Sully leads me to ally myself with James Stuart. But from time to time comes a moment when I consider that I might do so in any case.

“Sire,” I said, “I desire, before we reach London, to open a matter with you.”

“And that is?”

Three days spent searching for the right moment have brought nothing; I am therefore determined to plunge in.

“Doctor Fludd, sire. He being a regicide, a murderer—”

James grunted. “You have proof? Of a murder?”

“I’m in no court of law,” I said mildly, wedging myself into the stern window embrasure—which was, in truth, a little small for a man of my stature—and resting my arms on my thighs. I met James’s gaze. “I speak of what we both know, sire. Fludd’s a conspirator, a murderer, and gives the orders for worse things; albeit he doesn’t carry them out with his own hands. You’ve said hang him. True, he’s deserving of death. However—”

“Kings do not like that word ‘however,’ Master de Rochefort,” James Stuart remarked, equally mildly, but with a gleam in his eye.

He is willing to listen, despite his carping, I thought. The knowledge of Dariole out on the
Martha
’s deck momentarily gave me pause.
I am, however, decided
.

“Doctor Fludd,” I began, “whatever else he is, is also—as far as any man knows—the last living pupil of the Neapolitan heretic Giordano Bruno. The inheritor of his knowledge. And, now, the last practitioner of precognitive mathematics.”

James lifted a blurred gaze to me. I pressed on.

“You say he’s fit for death: I don’t disagree, sire. But I do say he’s fitter for something else, which is—to be used. His skills, used to our advantage.”

The wooden walls of the cabin creaked as we came about, tacking up the Channel. The smallness of the ship was no reassurance, remembering Monsieur Saburo’s shipwreck. I attempted to put the swaying lamps out of my mind, and fix my attention on England and Scotland’s still-dishevelled King.

James frowned. “Use yon Fludd? And you’d do this? You’re no Englishman—and while we know there are ancient bonds between France and Scotland, that’s scarce enough to make us think you deserve a voice in this.”

I looked down past my hands at the solid oak of the cabin floor, and the play of shadows moving as the stern came around. “You must know—Milord Cecil will have told your Majesty—that I am the servant of the Duc de Sully. He is my chief concern in this matter, being my patron these fifteen years.”

The fat Scotsman unexpectedly nodded. “Ay. Robbie said you were loyal. It’s a valuable quality in a man.”

The deck began to tilt, slanting the other way as we came about, the bright sun sliding across the curving planks of the hull.

“Doctor Fludd,” James prompted.

“Doctor Fludd is…valuable.” I chose my words carefully. “His ability to use Bruno’s mathematics to predict the future might be invaluable to many men—say, a King and his Minister, for advice known only to them. Were he at any time to lie, it would be quickly apparent. Say we assume, sire, that Fludd’s not killed when we arrive at London, and fails of any escape, and is taken.”

The King nodded. “He’d therefore be under English law.”

Although it was difficult to bow while seated, I made a creditable attempt. “Pardon me, sire; there may be complications. Say, if Fludd flees, and is taken by a Frenchman, outside of England.”

The expression of the Scottish King grew more dour.

“Let me put myself in your hands, sire.” I leaned forward, in emphasis. “I confess to you, sire, these last two months I would cheerfully have been a regicide, could I have found a way to the woman Marie de Medici.”

He flinched, at the calling of a crowned Queen “woman.” “The crown ennobles; makes divine!”

She declared herself Queen Regent illegally; she has not the wit of a hen; for France, she is a disaster.
I refrained from saying it aloud.

James Stuart gave me a watery glare. “Even if she is a woman, she is a ruling Prince, and next therefore to God, monsieur!”

I perceive where Henry Stuart gained his ideas of eternal kingship, and not merely from Doctor-Astrologer Fludd. Albeit I think Henry believes in practise what James believes only in theory…I looked suitably chastened.

“Go on, Master Rochefort.” James nodded for me to continue.

I spoke carefully. “The relevance of the Queen Regent is this. Robert Fludd is a man to be used. I’ve searched my mind for a way it may be done. Say, only for argument’s sake, that he fell into my hands. I can’t take him into the Queen Regent’s France. She has a Jesuit for a confessor. It is as in any Catholic state in Europe: the Jesuits will merely take Fludd to Rome, as they did with Bruno, and burn him alive. While that would be justice, it robs the world of his skill.”

The ship heeled over a little, so that I must brace one foot on the floor to keep myself in the window embrasure. I watched him closely.
Would that I had Mr Secretary Cecil here, to advise me in the best ways to persuade James Stuart.
But, failing that, I have nothing but the truth.

“A thing occurred to me, sire, while we struggled in the Somerset marshes, and I have had time to think on it. You may be aware I bear a considerable grudge against the Queen Regent, she having been always an enemy to my master the Duc. Now, suppose that I—leave aside my personal grievances.”

It was pain to phrase it so.
Would that I might plainly tell James that she’s a regicide.

“It seems to me,” I said, “vengeance once put aside, that I might best help the Duc de Sully, not by seeking to contest or overthrow the Queen Regent’s reign, but by accepting Marie de Medici as Queen, and making use of that.”

James’s shaggy brows rose. “She
is
your anointed queen, man! It’s not for you to think of rebellion or revolt.”

I said painfully, “Men see that she has legitimacy as Queen of France. Marie de Medici is dead Henri’s widow, dead Henri’s Queen, and the living King Louis’s mother. No man can argue that.”

And with Ravaillac dead, it’s the word of a spy and murderer alone to prove her an assassin.

The realisation lay cold as stone in my belly.

I think I will never, now, convince any man who does not know me, of the part the Queen played in Henri’s death.

I said, “As to whether she’s a monarch
sufficient
to follow Henri of Navarre…Sire, I’ll say this. She’s a woman and a mother as well as a Queen. Therefore, she’s a monarch who does not desire war. As I understand it, the troops for Jülich-Cleves are already recalled from the border.”

Briefly, I considered what the woman Mlle de la Roncière, with her sword, might say about the woman Marie de Medici desiring or not desiring war. I might have smiled, were it not for the fact that, sitting here with James Stuart, I am betraying Mlle Dariole.

“Your Henri was a warrior.” James nodded, slowly. “But, if France is to be for peace, now…we think that may be no bad thing.”

I made him another seated bow of acknowledgement. “You, sire, as ‘the British Solomon,’ will surely appreciate this quality in the Queen Regent.”

James nodded, seeming entranced. I’d heard the epithet applied to him on my prior visit with Sully to these shores; now seemed an appropriate moment to utilise it.

I clasped my hands together, leaning forward, gazing at him. “Europe’s on the verge of war, sire; you know this. Why else seek to marry your son to a Catholic, and your daughter to a Huguenot? Those who desire peace and balance, like yourself and the Queen Regent, should be aided in it as much as possible. What better help and assistance could there be than Robert Fludd, forecasting the path that other nations will take, and so allowing you to avoid or cut short conflict, or anticipate it where it may not be avoided?”