Mary Gentle (57 page)

Outside the Middle
Tower gate, at the place where the moat runs into the Thames-river, James reined in. I dropped his bridle and stepped back.

A well-dressed, elderly man in black, whom I assumed to be Sir William Waad, stepped out from among the yeomen warders, took off his hat, and fell to his knees in the hoof-churned mud.

“Take these, sire, and pardon us!” The man held up iron keys. His lusty voice must be carrying to more than the front of the crowd; they became quiet to hear him. “We believed your Majesty dead, and we see you are alive, and we thank God for it! Sire, come in and take your own again.”

“Rise, our Lord Lieutenant of the Tower.” James spoke strongly, success bringing out the best in him. He signalled the man to rise, took the somewhat grubby hand offered to him, and almost as an afterthought added, “Take into the Tower and properly arm these Trained Bands, who are our defence against the danger that threatens from treachery.”

“Yes, your Majesty!”

The shadow of the gateway felt welcome, walking under it. The hooves of James’s stone horse echoed back from the masonry of the arch, then clopped on the bridge across the moat, and the sun was bright again. Men’s voices echoed off the stone behind us.

Once past the Byward
Tower and inside the walls, James Stuart allowed himself to be helped down from his mount. He rested his hand on the shoulder of M. Saburo, although whether in friendship or for support, I couldn’t guess.

“Set the guns up on the walls, Lieutenant,” he ordered, as near to crisp as I had ever heard him come. “Cover the road from Westminster and Whitehall, and beware of approach by river.”

“Everything shall be done as your Majesty commands.” William Waad, a greying man, plumped down on his knees again; I couldn’t blame him for harvesting his corn when it was ripe.
Many men will wish they’d been where he is, if King James lives.

The sky was a hard blue above us. Gulls cried, over the river. The shadow of the millennially old stone was chill, and welcome in this heat. I could feel the strength in these walls. As many of the men filing in in their Bands could, doubtless.

“You may bring us to suitable quarters for our person,” James advised the Lieutenant of the Tower. “Have you those vile men Ralegh and Northumberland still here?”

“No, sire, the King—the Prince, I mean—sent an order for their release. It had the royal seal, your Majesty; I thought…”

“Yes, yes; never mind that now.” James waved the man’s protestations away, at which Waad (white now, at having seen himself likely to plummet from hero to traitor) gave a sigh of relief.

Saburo took a breath, expanding his shoulders, and by that means seemed to gain himself a space in the crowd. He dropped down on his knees, bent his head to the earth at James Stuart’s foot, and sat back on his heels.

“Should not come to shooting, here.
Not
good. Iago-
sama,
I am Ambassador from Nihon, I am not a threat to those men and the Prince. I will be your messenger, King-Emperor, if you allow. Your ambassador. I did service between my lord Kabayakawa Hideaki and the Shogun Tokugawa Ieyas’, the same.”

Ingrained habit meant that, difficult as Nihonese names are to me, I marked that one as not the same that he had mentioned before as his patron. I noted it for a later question.

The keen intelligence that one was occasionally allowed to glimpse looked out of James’s eyes. “Ay. There is a good idea. Come with us; we will give you words to say to our rebel son and the Earl.”

James swept off. I had not expected acknowledgement; my public part in the day being done. To my amusement, I saw Mlle Dariole appear to fume, as the great crowd of people moved away from us, past the Bell
Tower, held to the King as securely as if by ropes. Which was understandable, they having decided to sink or swim by him.

“The gratitude of princes,” I observed.

Dariole glared. “Is it better than the gratitude of dukes?”

“You have a way of taking your anger out on the man nearest to you, mademoiselle, that is not at all endearing!”

I found myself with my right hand flexing, in case I should be in a duel within ten rapid heartbeats.

She put her hands behind her back, looked down at the scuffed toes of her riding boots, and then back up at me. “I’m sorry, messire.”

I should not let her know my every defence at once collapses—she being a woman much given to finding weakness and exploiting it for pain. All the same, I could not help it: I smiled down at her.

“I’m directed to search the quarters in the Martin
Tower in which the Sieur Northumberland made his home before today—since Monsieur the King is stubborn enough to hold there must be witchcraft left behind.”

She gave me a cynical look. “Or something that’ll tell you where Robert Fludd is.”

“I suspect him where I cannot, yet, hope to reach him—at Westminster, with ‘King’ Harry’s musketeers and pikemen. If I were in his physician’s robes, that’s where I should be,” I said frankly, “with my only ally. But will you come with me now, and assist?”

I found myself watching Dariole against the background of the sunlit crowds. Her eyes glanced about constantly. Perhaps she will find John, I thought. Or Luke.
To kill a man who’s harmed her would greatly aid her, at the moment.

“He knows,” she said.

Lost in my imagination of her revenge, I gave her a startled look.

“Fludd. I think he still knows. I
know
Caterina said, but…I don’t think we’re outside his conjurations yet.”

That is a doubt I do not wish to dwell on.
I prompted her with straight-faced irony, “You think we’re not yet random, irrational enough?”

Her brow went up. “I didn’t say
that,
messire…”

I could not help but laugh.
Might we mend our differences?

“I’ll…show you something, messire.” She fell in beside me as I walked north.

I did not need to push my way against the flow of the crowd. They parted before us, and closed up behind; anxious to fill up all the space inside the walls and cheer their returning King.

The plain, ancient walls of the Martin
Tower took the sun’s light, something glinting high up. Dariole glanced up at the ramparts, and rapidly away. “That’s where I was walking. When I met Lady Arbella.”

“Mademoiselle—”

She increased her pace toward the stark, round-arched door at the foot of the tower. I followed her in, climbing the stairs. Sun dazzled as I stepped out from the darkness of the stone steps, onto the rampart behind her.

Shielding my eyes, I said, “Mademoiselle, is it that you are pleased to imagine Robert Fludd all-foreseeing because…then he will not be captured? And neither of us shall have him?”

Dariole stood, her head tilted back, hand shadowing her face, gazing up at the wall of the tower above our heads. I could not decipher her expression. She said, “Can you see?”

Squinting, I made out at what she pointed. A sundial-face, set flat into the masonry; the gnomon giving the time as three o’clock.

Cast into the bronze around the square dial, I saw on one side an hourglass with wings, and on the other, rearing up its sting, a scorpion.

There was no Latin inscription but I thought it must imply tempus fugit.

Dariole lowered her hand, looking at me. “He told me Thomas Hariot made it for him. The Earl told me. This is where he had me escorted, when I walked.”

I glanced to either side. Between the crenellations and down to the stinking moat, or off the walk and down to the cobbled surface of the yard below: either fall could kill a man.

“It would be a short step, for a woman in despair. Yet…you did not take it.”

She walked back towards the door.

We searched among the few remaining chattels of the Earl of Northumberland without result. Mlle Dariole parted my company when M. Saburo made his first return, to debate with the King how his son took the news of his father’s return.

I went briefly outside the Tower, to Knight-Rider Street, to see if Fludd had left clews in that household, but, as I surmised, he had not.

Plague indeed empties the streets,
I thought.

Evening light gleamed, the reflections of houses rocked in the river. I rode back towards the Middle
Tower gate along Thames-side, the warm Summer air touching my face, where I began to be able now to cultivate a small point of beard and moustaches. The stenches of Eastcheap rose up around me.

It’s more than early to think it, but—let me contemplate what success would bring. When we do find Robert Fludd, if we do. Well, and then?

Then, I thought, Mademoiselle Dariole and I will quarrel.

The ambling hack’s pace slowed as I ceased to concentrate on him. I gazed at the river, the wind stirring my hair, so that I must put one heavy coil of it out of my face.

And, if I can devise no way to avoid it, I will come to the point with Mlle Dariole and M. de Sully where I must choose between the two.

O
nce inside the Tower, I threw my reins to a waiting servant, and crossed the grass within the extensive walls. I put the ill mood from me.

Besides, I reflected, there’s every chance I may look forward to being killed in the fighting about Whitehall-palace! If, indeed, this attempt to restore James doesn’t begin that great revolt and civil war that Caterina spoke of. And there are all my problems solved, in perpetuity!

By this bright hour of six post-meridian of an English Summer day, tents had gone up on the grass, within and without the Tower, and now smoke rose from camp-fires, and men’s voices were loud and cheerful. I caught a nod or two, here and there, Ned Alleyne and the players evidently having put my name about.

It made me smile, albeit somewhat grimly. Truly, what with “King James’s Demon” from Nihon, and now “the King’s Monsieur-Frenchman,” I wonder if James Stuart’s reputation will survive, never mind his life….

“Don’t tell me where you’re going to
be,
will you?” a voice complained. I turned to find Mlle Dariole walking up to me through the crowds.

“Nothing?”

“Nothing,” she grunted. “When Northumberland and Ralegh went, they took everything.”

Her gaze went past me, down toward the Byward
Tower. I heard shouts from the gate-house.

“Hey! Saburo’s back. Again!”

I knew there was no point in attempting to question him on his way through the crowds. I turned about and made my way to James’s quarters in the White
Tower.

Dariole caught me up as I stepped out of the spiral staircase, and fell in at my side as I walked to make my bow to James. “He’s not there! Saburo says they don’t have him! Messire, there isn’t a hope of finding where Fludd is, if he isn’t with Prince Henry!”

“They may well be lying.” I stepped back out of the way as a dozen of one of the Trained Bands (on enthusiastic, if not completely efficient, guard duty) ushered Saburo through to the King.

“Yeah, they
may
be.”

Beyond the great arrow-slot windows of the tower to the east, the river and the Pool of London gleamed below us, bare now of the ships about which M. Saburo had waxed enthusiastic, on one of his occasions in the afternoon while he waited to carry James’s next message upriver to Whitehall. So tall is the White Tower that, from the windows on the western side, a man’s gaze might pass above thousands of peaked house-roofs; nothing as tall until the blocky height of St Paul’s.

Downriver, the water curved east, cut by London-bridge. Somewhere in the dusty gold haze upriver, to the west, must be the spires of Whitehall-palace and Westminster Abbey.

“I still say Fludd
knows
.” Dariole lowered her voice as she stepped out of the crowd of courtiers, joining me in the window embrasures. With her sword on and her velvet bonnet off, she had even more the look of an adolescent boy. “For all you know, we’re still doing exactly what he wants us to.”

A little sardonically, I ventured, “Returning King James to his throne?”

“Maybe this is the way James has to die. The masque at Wookey just had to happen to
get
us here. You remember he said you’d strike the blow. Maybe that’s why he agreed to Henry trying to kill his old Dad in the masque. Because he knew it wouldn’t hurt—that it’d still be you doing it, later.”

“Or he may have lied,” I contradicted. “Merely because a man can foresee the future, that doesn’t make him honest in all he says! Or, your choices may already have taken us out of the road of his prophecy. Or—A man could go mad trying to out-think this!”

Dariole grunted.

“And you,” I said, “have been too much in communion with that samurai!”

As James Stuart ordered the room cleared, M. Saburo’s short figure became visible through the courtiers. The King’s brief signal to the guards that we should be allowed to remain, I took as an order to come forward.

Huge and dark as the interior of this medieval fortress was, it required the tapers lit despite the light still outside. Light clustered about the Stuart King. They had found, from somewhere, an ancient chair I thought might have been new about the reign of Francis I, to serve him as a throne.

The samurai fell on his knees on the ancient oak boards, the sound echoing from the medieval masonry walls.

“I am unworthy, great King-Emperor!” Saburo bowed his head to the floor. “Very regrettable: I have failed. I cannot get Seso-sama to agree to come within the Tower walls. Will only agree to King Henry’s room, in house by the Middle
Temple.”

James raised his shaggy brows. “He’ll allow a royal bodyguard, now?”

“Yes, King-Emperor. But, he says, must be samurai. Not trust countrymen.”

The Stuart King nodded slowly. I could perceive it: a compromise that neither drags Cecil into the Tower, nor James into Whitehall-palace; both sides to bring their own limited number of armed men, and the aim to be talk rather than war….

“Monsieur Saburo has succeeded greatly for your Majesty,” I said, bowing to the King. “I see only the problem of those men. Would that we did have more men like M. Saburo—and more cattan-blades.”

Saburo blinked in the candle-light. “Sword is the soul of the samurai. You others, take teppo!”

Mademoiselle Dariole snickered; a sound to which I would have objected, had not the King made a similar one.

And James knows the Nihonese word for “guns”: now there is a matter for thought
. And a shame I could not overhear any of their trade discussions….

Dariole made a French page’s insolent bow. The smile that spread over her face made me apprehensive even before she spoke. “
I
know how it can be done. We go, disguised! So we can scout the ground with Cecil, see if he’s loyal or not.”

And find Fludd?

I blinked. “You…continue to deserve your reputation for unlikely suggestions.”

James Stuart harrumphed over his fat fingers. “If Master Secretary Cecil truly believes us dead, then he will in any case
seem
disloyal, Henry being his only King.”

James got up, shifting himself from his chair, and beckoning Mlle Dariole to him. He began to limp up and down the boards, his fat arm about her shoulders, whispering in her ear.

James’s wee favourite Robert Carr is like to poison Mlle Dariole if we ever restore these English to normality!
I stifled a snort. My humour faded, seeing from the set of her shoulders that she found his embrace uncomfortable—a fact of which he appeared entirely unaware.

Briefly, I considered informing James Stuart that his latest boy-favourite had that within his breeches which would not, if common rumour was correct, please the King in the slightest. A consideration of Dariole’s immediate reaction was enough to make me reject the idea. She would still act so as to put me on my belly to her, in front of the First and Sixth James.

Besides, there’s no harm in him, I reflected. And she will welcome no interruption from me; not with Fludd still a point of contention between us.

The Stuart King stopped abruptly, and lifted his hand from Dariole’s shoulder. “How could it be done, so we are not exposed and murdered? We would risk much in entering the city. How shall we be unobserved?”

“As Messire Saburo’s guards. Your Majesty, you’d have all of us with you.”

She is not…she
is
suggesting that James Stuart disguise himself in the same dress as M. Saburo. Dear God.

“You,” I remarked, “have been watching too many plays!”

“Perhaps plays bring us good fortune?” James Stuart gave it the tone of a question, but I knew it very well for a friendly rebuke.

Bowing allowed me to hide my face from him long enough to expunge the emotion I felt.
He’s gone mad!
Stage a play of the disguised duke, that goes to oversee his erring counsellor? It seems to me that, between his performance in Somerset, and his acting at The Rose, James Stuart is a sight too favourably inclined towards any suggestion that includes play-acting. Does he not realise the swords and pistols will be real?

Well, but so’s the loss of his throne, without
some
action on his part.

It made me smile, that he should be so daring—and then be sober, thinking how he found his courage in the rebellion of his son.

Dariole made a bow to the King that was a mere flick of her head. The candle-light shone gold from the curl-ends of her hair. Her expression showed at one and the same time cool and excited.

“You
need
to observe Milord Cecil, your Majesty. And how else can we get you in the same room with him, to judge him?”

I noted that James Stuart gave no order to the Lieutenant of the Tower to perform some sensible action, such as throwing young Dariole head-first into the moat.

James observed, “It will take more than Master Alleyne’s doublet to disguise us.”

“Messire Saburo’s got a lot of samurai clothing.” In an explanatory aside that seemed to encompass all the foreign man’s eccentricities, Dariole added, “He likes to wash it. Every
day
…If you’d wear that, your Majesty, everybody would look at the costume, not the man. All of us could go as attendants on the Ambassador, sire.”

I saw a gleam in James’s eye that I would rather not have seen.

“You’re canny with that cattan-blade of yours, Master Ambassador?”

“Hai.”

If I read M. Saburo’s monosyllable aright, it translated as
Only because you are a king, and my King needs you, do you live after offering such an insult!
James Stuart merely beamed at him—and at me.

“Monsieur de Rochefort, don’t look so long-faced! Mark this well—we have our life, still, by reason of Signora Caterina, and by reason of the choices of Master Dariole. You and he and M. Saburo have swords skilled enough to defend our person. Let us venture on this chase. We will take pleasure in seeing with our own eyes if Master Secretar’ condemns himself out of his own mouth. ‘King’ Henry’s room, forsooth! Master Saburo—show us these garments of yours.”

Saburo as messenger going back and forth again to Whitehall-palace took up most of the long, light evening.
We will do nothing until morning, it seems
.

There had been occasions to visit the yeomen warders’ barracks, and to meet with the Trained Bands; I was, by the time I finished for the evening, more than ready to sit out in the open, by one of their fires, to get their temper, and check rumour as a spy must. I drank more than was prudent.

“It all depends on Cecil….”

Dariole dropped down onto the earth beside me, not too close to the fire.

The fire itself was more for cooking than warmth; she gave the cooking woman a look that gained her a griddle-cake and her ear pinched. Chewing, she added, “I think, if anyone knows where Fludd is, that man does.”

When did it become natural to her to do this?

At some time in the last few weeks,
I realised, the grass seeming to slowly spin under me. It has begun to seem natural to her to seek me out. And merely to sit and talk, not to attempt to kill me.

“If we can see Cecil, we’ll see Henry—and then, I think we’re home and dry,” she added energetically.

I shifted my rapier scabbard to a more comfortable position. “When one says
that,
matters are invariably about to go catastrophically wrong.”

She curled her lip at me. It became a delightful smile, that showed the merest hint of her white teeth. The just-visible gap back in her jaw made me ache for her pitifulness.

And it may be we will both die before any of this matter of kings and mathematicians is resolved….

Moved by impatience, desire, and stupidity—and with my tongue loosened by the drink I had, perhaps for this purpose, over-indulged in—I leaned over on the grass and spoke quietly.

“Mademoiselle…I desire to lie with you tonight. Will you consent to share a bed with me?”

An instant of stillness froze her body—instantaneously gone; but I am a duelist, used to having men’s reactions by their bodies speak clearly to me.

“Dariole….” I put my head in my hands. “Dear God! Before you say anything—I’m sorry!”

Her shoulder, where it touched mine, had tensed as if her body was about to move. I felt it fractionally relax.

Lifting my head again to look at her, I said, “Forgive me. I know I shouldn’t ask. There are so many reasons…. Forgive me. I was overcome, I am drunk—”

She gave me a look that stopped me speaking.

“Aside from anything else,” Dariole said, her tone clipped, “I am
not
a substitute for your Aemilia Lanier, now she’s run off somewhere!”

Blinking, owl-like, I demanded,
“What?”

“Yes, she puts plays on, yes, she’s beautiful—I
suppose
.” Dariole glared fiercely at me. “Yes, she’s experienced and intelligent and speaks six languages and walks on water, for all
I
know.
And
she fucks you like a Dutch courtesan. Well, go find yourself an English whore instead!
I’m
not in the queue here!”

I gawped, both stunned and lost for words. Were I less off my guard and drunk, I would have realised how quickly gossip must travel within a players’ company, and how comradely she was with them.
That still does not help me to a realisation of Dariole’s resentment.