Mary Gentle (56 page)

I wished momentarily for Henri Quatre’s presence. It is a jest he would have enjoyed, and thrown himself into.

And M. de Sully would stand at the sidelines, scowling in bemusement
. Both at the loss of King Henri’s dignity, and why the King himself would seem to feel no discomposure at the lack of it…. Humour is not my master the Duke’s chief characteristic where it impinges on his worth and dignity.

I took a place silently behind the King, and to his left. M. Saburo stood my mirror image on his right, his arms folded across his chest, and a frown on his face.

Voices hushed.

Word has gone about the streets, I have made certain, but this…is still a shock.

A great cliff-wall of white faces looked down from the galleries, and men’s faces turned up from the pit, down at the level of my feet. Two, perhaps two and a half thousand men; and more cramming in the still open theatre doors. By far the majority stared at the King.

Enough men’s eyes fixed on me that my knees became useless.

This is not twenty men in barracks, or fifty peasants in a hamlet, or even five hundred men at the court in Fontainebleau or St Germain.

The full attention of a king’s court is something I have withstood in my time, and with panache; but there at least most men are on a level, barring only the King. Not even in church are men arranged as they are in an English theatre, so that a man feels himself the single and uninterrupted focus of all men’s eyes.
Theatre of the World,
Fludd calls it. Our actions the visible target of all the world’s attention.

I found myself frozen, standing before one of the painted pillars that supports the stage-heavens. I could not walk away over the floorboards. The square platform of the stage seemed to stretch out into a great expanse, with only me on it. Is this how Temperance and Prudence and those other young men felt, playing the King’s Ghost, and the Young Madwoman, here? Dear God, but I should have paid more respect to their performance had I known!

Coming back to myself a heartbeat or so after, I caught James’s backward glance, and nodded confidently. If I feel so, how must he feel? We should have Mademoiselle Dariole up here, I thought. The blurred faces before me refused to resolve into individuals. Her confidence would not be shaken by this.

She will mock me unmercifully!

The thought had the odd effect of diminishing my fright at where I stood. I looked out at the face-lined gulf.

The only face not turned to the stage showed itself instantly apparent to me.

A young man with all the panache of a duellist—Dariole. She stood at the main doors, her face turning from side to side, seeking any man in the crowd that she might recognise.

Seeking Fludd. John.
Luke
.

“Sovereign peoples of
England
!” James Stuart growled out. “For ‘sovereign’ I may truly call you—”

Some men jeered. His accent was not particularly intelligible. And there are always those of the mob who would prefer brawls and musketry and climbing on furniture.

I groaned internally.
Has he learned nothing from Somerset!

Saburo moved.

Before any man might prevent him, his curved cattan-blade flashed out, sliding up into the air—and curved down again, to rest the chisel-point on the wooden stage. Both his hands clasped on the curved hilt. “Hear great daimyo! Be silent!
Now!
”

The shock of his deep voice gained a silence in which you might have heard the rats in the thatch move.

James Stuart nodded. “We thank our faithful servant.”

He walked forward to the edge of the stage, with that lumbering, half-limping gait which was as individual to him as his face and shape.

James bellowed, “Will you stand here like dead
dogs,
while a black magician rips the heart out of
England
?”

Silence became complete attention.

I saw men arrested in mid-speech to their neighbour. James Stuart folded his arms, staring out at them.

“Ay, you will have heard we are dead. You will have heard our son is to be crowned King in Westminster. This is
witchcraft!
”

He roared it with complete conviction.

“Some of you have thought such a thing not to exist, but here is the proof of it. John Dee’s heir is amongst you. There is a lord of
England
who should be great in his virtue as he is great in his status—but he is vile! And you will have heard his name, each and every one of you: Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, traitor, and servant of the Devil!”

A rumbling murmur went through the theatre. Agreement, I realised.
Yes: they’ve heard of the Wizard Earl
.

I shot a glance at James Stuart, standing with Aemilia’s speech crumpled in his dirty fist, ready for prompt; wiping his wet mouth with his sleeve.

And no man knows of Robert Fludd, and so it will stay
. Yes, that is shrewd.

James shouted hoarsely. “This Wizard Earl is a fell beast who has attempted the life of your King, deceived your King’s son, and desires the rule of
England
for his own black purposes! We must put an end to him!”

Did Aemilia Lanier write this?

Yes, conceivably, I thought—But James has paid attention to more than the Muses of Parnassus since his journey outside London. Witchcraft, black-magician Earls, usurping Princes that are only ill-counselled, a throne to be re-taken…. Between the two of them, I’ll hazard they have their audience!

James Stuart’s voice echoed in the amphitheatre. “This vile man Henry Percy abuses the name of God in his occupation! His power comes not from God, but from the Devil, and the very proof of it is this—that he has taken advantage of the simplicity of our son the Prince, whom you love. This man holds him under foul spells and conjurations, so that he knows not his own father’s face, and believes us dead!”

Close at hand, I could see sweat on James’s forehead. His watery glance caught mine.
Shrewd, to take advantage of those who love a brave young prince.

“It is this Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, like Doctor Dee of Elizabeth’s reign, whose subtlety and deceit is inflicted on my poor boy. This Earl most saucily abuses Henry, your Prince; he it is who has brought about this principal folly of declaring us dead in the west of this land. Northumberland it is upon whom we shall exercise the high justice, and burn him for his treason!”

Under the noise of men cheering their King, I heard a
ch’k
of the tongue from Saburo. I followed his gaze.

Dariole no longer stood by the open theatre door.

Would she go to Whitehall?
She said that she understood…. And said also that I am wrong.

Does she take this to be her only chance to have revenge on Robert Fludd, before we capture him?

I could not move off stage without leaving James unguarded—enough men put their elbows on the edge of the stage, or beat their fists against it, that only the presence of Saburo and myself kept them from climbing up on it.

James Stuart strode with his limping gait up to Saburo, resting his hand on the samurai’s shoulder. He walked the samurai forward, to the very edge of the stage, leaning on the Nihonese man’s shoulder. Gazing out into the vast space of the theatre, he shouted, “Will you suffer this to happen? Will you suffer a vile male witch to rule your land? The Prince is deceived. His father is not dead. Here I stand.
Am I not your King?
”

A roar went up all around, sudden and deafening.

I stepped back, involuntarily, bringing my back up against another of the painted stage pillars. Sound hit like a blow. Only in war have I heard men’s voices with such impact—and here, the higher voices of women screamed out their approbation also, in counterpoint.

In a blur, I saw the men and women of Southwark, mouths opening and shutting, fists raised, hats thrown up into the air.

James Stuart stood with his head up, one arm extended, laughing with Tanaka Saburo, reveling in the storm of approbation breaking over his head.

“James! King Jamie! Jamie our bonny King!”

U
rgent as it might be to put James back on his throne, there will be no treaty, no saving of M. de Sully’s career and life, if there is no Hermetic mathematician to bargain with….

By the time I arrived, a mob had ransacked Robert Fludd’s Southwark house.

The English Trained Bands massed in the streets as I shoved my way through, men running up with ancient breastplates from medieval wars, and mail jacks kept in the local armouries; more pikes present than muskets.

At Tooley Street, the great garden gates stood off their hinges. The sundial was overturned. Wreckage hung out of every window, and books flapped open pages on the paths below them, broken-backed as shot birds.

The smell of the camomile lawn met my nostrils, trodden down as the grass was by the people of Southwark, delighted to do such destruction.

At the behest of what authority?

Half the books had gone—torn apart, page from page and cover from cover, handed from man to man in the crowd.

If there is but a corpse, here?

“Messire.”

Dariole’s voice.

It came from the destroyed lower floor of the house. I peered in, and entered, careful of broken floorboards underfoot. “He is here?”

“No.”

By her face, I could see at whose orders the crowd had stormed this house. I said, “This is your work.”

“I went to the taverns. I told them he was a servant of the Earl of Northumberland. And Hariot, Hues, and Warner, but I don’t know where they live.” Dariole added, “People wanted to see proof of a black magician’s arts.”

I squatted down by the fireplace. Gently, I teased out of the long-cold ashes a paper burned brown at the edges, and black in the centre. It had been written on, with Fludd’s peculiar mathematical signs. I could not read it, and it fell apart in my hands.

“I guess he knew this would happen.” Dariole gave a nod in the direction of the books strewn over the garden. “There’s nothing scribbled inside those. Anything with his writing on, like you got there? That was burned
long
before we got here.”

I did not truly know whether I felt furious, or merely taken aback. Standing, I said, “You did this,
why?
”

She had her fingers gripping her dagger hilt permanently, as if she did not trust the rioting men even now the crowd had passed on. I reached over and gently moved her hand.

She stepped back.

“I thought….” She tilted her head to one side, glancing up at me. “Thought I’d make sure Fludd had nothing to come back to. If that would make me feel…. But I don’t think he was ever coming back here, anyway. Everything important’s gone.”

Sunlight through the broken lattices of the window let me see her face, smut-stained with the remnants of ash.

“I thought I could hurt him
somehow
.”

“Mademoiselle—”

“And, you know what?” Dariole wiped her wrist across her mouth. “This is just…petty. Pointless. It’s
him
I need to….”

She kicked a way past me, between broken fire-screens and joint-stools, heading for the outdoors.

My boots crunched over glass as I followed her.

Without looking back, she said, “And
you
don’t talk to me about revenge. You spent long enough trying to kill
me,
Rochefort, remember?”

“I am no example for you.”

She shrugged. Outside, now, in the garden, the sun’s brilliance showed me that some man, more literate than his fellows, had daubed
CONJUROR
on the empty plinth of the sundial; I did not pause to enquire with what substance. One is always at a risk, rousing a mob, as many factions in Paris have found to their cost.

Dariole trod over the collected wisdom of Paracelsus, Bruno, and Dee, pages sticking to the bottoms of her boots. She scraped them free on the gravel path. I kicked shattered fragments of the oak gates aside. After a moment, she joined me in the Southwark street.

“There’s no comparison,” I said quietly, “with what he did to you. Mademoiselle, you know, if I could both hand him over to you
and
keep him for the Queen Regent, I would!”

Her lips moved; and if it was small and uncertain and regretful, it was at least a smile.

“You don’t know, messire. What it’s like.” She glanced up at me. “We should go. They need you for the march on Whitehall-palace. Find out how many supporters Prince Henry has when his father’s riding down the street. I’m just sorry for the old man—he’s still going to have that little snot as a son.”

How am I to find Fludd, and do all I have set my hand to, here!

Walking back into the heaving crowds, I found the air full of men bellowing; women shouting in shriller tones. Children ran around underfoot as more of the Trained Bands—“Untrained Bands” would have been more accurate—assembled in the streets. As we came back towards The Rose, I spoke what I thought aloud: “Every shop-keeper who has ever trained with a pike is out today, thinking he has a real war on his hands.”

“Catso!” Dariole gave a sudden wry grin. “I hope not! Look over there….”

One band, assembled around a standard, carried neither a pike nor a musket-piece between them. What they held in their hands, I saw, were Welsh longbows.

“Body of God!”

“You got it,” Dariole said, as suddenly grim again. “If these people die—that’s because of Fludd, too.”

If the mob find him first—he may die before ever I see him!

Song broke out as we came back to The Rose. Alleyne stood up on a projection of the doorway, leading James’s most vociferous supporters in a rousing chorus, the words of which I could not distinguish, but trusted they must be good for morale. Saburo’s linen allowed me to pick him out of the crowd—he stood with some man’s grey-stone horse, brought out of who knows what stable in Bankside; James Stuart being hoisted by half a dozen pairs of hands up into the saddle.

I took the bridle from the samurai, removing my hat and bowing briefly to his Majesty. “Over London-bridge, sire, and then to Whitehall?”

It was a rhetorical question. A moment later, I thought, Why have I not learned better than to give such opportunities to men in power!

“Not to Whitehall!” James Stuart said firmly, and thickly. He pointed a blunt finger at me. “Have you not heard the messengers?”

“What messengers, sire?”

He snapped his plump fingers. “Bring him out!”

Alleyne, muscular under his fat, jumped down and brought forward, by the ruff and collar of his doublet, a skinny page. The young man was of an age to have hands, feet, and nose too big for his body, and he turned alternately red and white at the mistreatment the player-manager was giving him.

“Cowards!” The boy half-wept with anger.

I put out my hand and turned his chin toward me, so I might see him clearly. His face showed full of rage. The livery colours he wore were those of Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury.

“What message is it you spread?” I demanded.

“You won’t deceive us! The lords at Whitehall are turning out every armed man they have!”

James Stuart remarked, from the grey’s saddle, “It’s apparent that Robert Cecil lives, Master Rochefort. Mr Secretary has put out a proclamation, to be read in every parish in London.”

I had withdrawn my attention: the page twisted his chin free of my grip. In a voice that cracked, but carried, he yelped, “Lord Cecil desires all men to beware of you conspirators! King James is
dead,
God rest him. And this man is only a playhouse impostor!”

Dariole, beside me, muttered not quite loud enough for James to hear up in his saddle. “Now is that Milord Secretary
believing
his old King is dead—or covering his arse with the new one?”

Or is it Fludd?

“Your Majesty cannot let this deter you,” I urged James, gripping the horse’s bridle. “We have your Majesty’s gallant subjects here—”
Even if their weapons wouldn’t frighten a cat!
“—and I am assured that troops in Whitehall will never fire on their King.”

“Ay, but who’s King here?” James demanded. “An impostor, Master Rochefort. They call us a mere player! Damned Robert Cecil or our wicked son—their troops will shoot the ‘impostor,’ and then we are buried in a pauper’s grave as a pretender!”

The royal
we
might well include the unroyal
us,
I considered. Given one man willing to obey orders and use his musket-piece against his King….

Over the trumpets which a number of the Trained Bands appeared to have brought to their muster, I said, “Your Majesty is very wise.”

“Ay. We know. But what now, Master Rochefort?”

Saburo gave a preliminary grunt, and offered, “Take a castle in different part of country, gather army, come back and fight a battle. Take the capital.”

I looked for Dariole. She stared off at the armed men gathering. I saw her visibly realise that she was being looked at by all three of us: spy, samurai, and King.

“And your recommendation, mademoiselle?” I prompted. “You are still, as Caterina said, the unpredictable factor amongst us.”

Her lips pressed together for a moment. “You tell me, messire. If you were Henry, in Whitehall, would
you
kill the King?”

I found myself flushing scarlet. James gave me a look that let me know Cecil had spoken of my position in rumour, with regard to the late King of France.

“As to that—I must admit it possible. And not merely by the Prince’s hand.”

James Stuart nodded. “Cecil. Yon Northumberland. How many of his men do you suppose he has about him? And our Prince of Wales. He’s canny,” James sighed, “our elder boy. Harry’s canny. Takes after his grandfather a wee bit much for my liking, though. We think, if he has Cecil in support of him, we will not reach the steps of the palace alive. What day is it, monsieur?”

A moment’s thought produced the answer. “July the twentieth, sire.”

“The proclamation said he’d be anointed today.” The King glanced about, lines of weariness in his face. “And by this time next month, these men will be marching out to war with
Spain
, on behalf of a Protestant Crusade.”

Dariole pointed at the men armed with longbows. “Not like that, they won’t!”

“You did not yet give us your opinion on what you would do,” I reminded her. “Remember what Suor Caterina said. What is least likely, here?”

Reluctantly, Dariole said, “Anything but Whitehall, I suppose. Your Majesty, when there was a king murdered in Paris—I left. I don’t
know
what the people did who stayed. Messire Rochefort, what about your Duke; what did he do?”

It came together in my head, all of a piece.

“The Bastille,” I said.

Dariole nodded; the samurai and the King seemed confused. I looked up at James, in the saddle, silhouetted against the summer sky.

“As a matter of some urgency, your men in these Bands here need to be better armed, sire. What Monsieur the Duc de Sully did on the death of the King was to retreat to the Bastille. We need a place which is impregnable, and, more importantly, gives us access to weapons. Sire, is there anywhere in London which is both castle and armoury?”

Saburo grunted, loud and satisfied. James glanced at him, then at me. “Is it the Tower that you mean? Ay. Ay…but suppose they have no mind to let me in?”

Dariole shrugged as the King looked down at her. “There might not be many men there. The Earl, Northumberland, he’ll be out of the place. So will all your prisoners, your Majesty. There might not be much of a guard.”

In which case, they may have emptied the armouries of weapons…but those are still impregnable walls.

“Master de Rochefort?”

I looked around, smiling grimly. Perhaps four thousand men in the streets. The same again in women and hangers-on. If I had a company of musketeers, I could guarantee to break us at the first volley.

But it is this or Whitehall—and I judge Prince Henry keen enough for his father to stay dead that he would have no hesitation in murdering him as a pretender.

It appears it will not be as easy to capture Robert Fludd as a man might hope.

“Your Majesty,” I said, “let us take the Tower.”

They say when the Earl of Essex made his rebellion against the late Queen, he marched through London calling on the citizens to rouse out and support him. When the doors were bolted as he passed by, his support began to melt; by evening he was reduced to six men.

James Stuart rode past on his white horse and windows flew open, then doors; the occupants of every parish came out cheering.

They will have known him from his triumphal processions through their streets for this and that, I realised. They know their King by his face.

Crossing London-bridge, I estimated us at eight or ten thousand strong. I walked at James’s bridle—since it was important that he be the one seen—with Saburo and Dariole, and turned us west onto Tower-hill, and the hulking castle beyond the stinking muddy moat.

Warders peered over the crenellations as the mob came around the edge of the Tower. I caught Dariole’s eye.
If they send word for help to Whitehall. If Cecil or Henry send out musketeers to clear the streets with a few volleys….