Mary Gentle (75 page)

Cecil slumped back, propped up on the bolster, face feverish. “Master Fludd says there’s a chance Henry shall die young—when is that?”

Sounding startled, Fludd blurted, “October of this year, my lord; I can ascertain the day.”

Cecil turned towards me. “Make sure, if necessary, that such a chance comes about. You hear me? Swear me your oath, Master Rochefort.”

“I perceive you will make use of anything, Milord Cecil; even the pity a man may have for your death.”

Cecil gave me a disquieting grin, that showed all his death’s-bed teeth. “I have never spared myself more than any man. Come. Will you do it? I will give you introductions to some of my chief intelligencers. If Henry continues to conspire, you will know of it. And then—swear it, monsieur!”

“I will not swear.” I held his gaze. “I will…remember that you requested this.”

The amount of power concentrated into his tiny body, and the absoluteness with which he must now give it all up, informed the gaze with which he watched me. He gave a short nod.

“You had better take this man Fludd to the King.” Cecil slumped further down in the bed, for all he attempted not to. The great hollows of a man’s skull, underneath the eyeballs, showed clear as day in his face, even in the dim light. “If you will do me the honour of taking a message from me…. Send in my secretary. I’ll dictate his Majesty a letter. You may take it to him, Rochefort. I will write you letters of introduction, also.”

The light in him, having flared up, sank down. One of the doctors in the anteroom peered in through the door, gesturing for us to leave.

“Return for the letters in fifteen minutes.” Robert Cecil’s thin voice sounded sharp, in the dimness. “I believe I shall sleep. If I do not see you again before your departure, monsieur, I bid you farewell. And if you should chance to see his Majesty before I do…. Inform him that I have always regretted not seeing his venture onto the boards at The Rose—and in Somerset. That would have been a fine, fine thing to see.”

I bowed. Mlle Dariole, to her credit, managed a bow that would not have disgraced the Louvre palace. Ignoring the doctor’s ushering hands, I left the hospice room.

Downstairs, I signalled Gabriel to bring Robert Fludd with him out into the priory’s courtyard, and I stood and breathed in the sunlit air, under an open sky. “Can
nothing
be done?”

“Nothing.” Fludd put his fingers through his greying hair, and glanced up at the room with all its windows shuttered. “It is a stomach-tumour, of long persistence. But, truly, this country has used him up. Do you know, monsieur, he is forty-nine?”

“Jesu!” Gabriel winced.

I felt inclined to join him.

The heretic priest, Bowles, brought out the letters sealed with Robert Cecil’s ring. We remounted, rode on past Marlborough and further east, and stayed the night in another town.

I have lost my best ally; I must re-think my fledgling plans.

Towards the late afternoon of the following day, towns began to greet us with criers giving news to their populace—the latest news being the death of Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, Secretary of State, Lord Treasurer, and first minister to his Majesty King James.

B
y the week’s end, Fludd was settled in Cecil’s promised house in Cripplegate; myself his temporary gaoler and lodger. The house in Coleman Street made an excellently furnished gaol. Cripplegate itself holds all a man desires, I dare say, if that man may at any time exercise his free choice and leave it.

Those intelligencers bequeathed to me by Robert Cecil allowed me to see how unlikely it was that even Doctor-Astrologer Fludd would be able to escape his confinement, silken and invisible as it had been made.

“I see confusion on confusion,” I said to Gabriel—we having finished, between us, interviewing men of the late Earl of Salisbury; deciding who might prove trustworthy house-servants to guard Robert Fludd on behalf of James I.

“Think,” I said. “Firstly—this will not end here. If Master Fludd
is
right about Prince Henry…well, a man may guess there will be other men, apart from Henry Stuart, that Bruno’s mathematics will predict should be murdered, for the sake of the future. Kings, princes, popes. Or merely ordinary men who find themselves in significant times.”

Gabriel grunted; a noise which held both apprehension, doubt, and reluctant agreement. “So? You’ve got milord’s agents, until the English King puts a new spy-master in here. You can check up on this Prince, see if Fludd looks to be right.”

“The Prince, yes. If there are other men—they will not all be enemies of James or Marie.”

“You can’t
do
nothing, Raoul.” Gabriel paused, frowning. “You won’t have the contacts, or the agents, after this. Queen-Bitch Medici won’t hire you. Pity Milord Cecil’s dead. He would’ve. This English King,
he
might have. But not if you’re chasing his eldest son. I don’t reckon we can stay in England if that happens.”

Bruno’s formulae and the further future left to one side, I had a vision of my life after these next few months expired—my network of agents and contacts in France doubtless fragmented by now, and my skills offered for hire to any nation that would put me in a position to exercise my profession. At my age, what else may a man do?

“That,” I said aloud, confusing him, “is not a rhetorical question.”

He scowled at me. “Raoul, have you got some crazy idea in your head?”

“Not yet,” I said. “But I’m trying.”

“How does James know he won’t
lie?
” Mlle Dariole grumbled at me, as we investigated the courtyard-garden of the house.

“I dare say he may. But if I were James Stuart, I would torture him the first time I so suspected it.”

She checked in her walk. After a moment, she put her fists on her hips, looking about the tiny brick courtyard. “How are they going to keep him here? He can calculate his way out!”

“His calculations take time. A man might change the pattern of guarding him, at irregular and quick intervals.” I smiled at her. “Perhaps guided by the throw of a pair of true dice.”

The young woman laughed. Not, as I thought, at my pleasantry. I realised that, as she pointed to the wall.

A sundial-face had been cut into stone, and the slab set flat into the brickwork; perhaps twice the height of a man above the ground. I saw the bronze gnomon, crusted green with verdigris, cast a shadow down across the grooves cut into the marble, marking us not far past ten of the morning.

I saw also that, under the Roman-numeral hour-marks, the stone-cutter had put—as is indeed more traditional—
CARPE DIEM
.

“I hope the hours go slow for him.” Dariole rested her right hand back on her dagger’s pommel, her left arm hanging free, as she now customarily stood. I watched her lift her face to the sky and close her eyes. “
Real
slow.”

Slow or fast, I thought, the hours
do
pass. Until the future arrives.

Doctor Fludd once established in the house, I set about business of my own—sending agents of Cecil’s employ into France, to ask discreet questions; and applying to the court at Greenwich for private audience with King James. The first matter did not immediately flourish. For the second, the late Earl’s name gained me a remarkably quick entrée.

Brought in for an audience, I bowed, maintaining myself impassive to the changes in his Majesty. James differed greatly from when I had last seen him. Fatter and greyer, yes, but more to it than that—he leaned upon the shoulder of his favourite, Viscount Rochester (as Robbie Carr had lately been made), metaphorically as well as physically. It was with an appearance of reluctance that James Stuart sent the blond Carr and his other lackeys away, as far as the door of the medieval hall.

“Doctor Fludd will foretell now at your command,” I said, “under the cover of being a physician and scholar.”

“Tell him,” James First and Sixth rasped, “that if we dislike his manner, we shall send him to the Tower, and yon two wizards, he and Northumberland, can concoct their Devil’s work together. Do you understand, Master Rochefort?”

“I do: Master Fludd shall,” I said. “Or, if not, I shall explain to him how a man behaves when he is on permanent leave from execution.”

The King’s gaze dropped to my shoulder; I guessed he considered the brand-scar he knew to be there. He wiped at his mouth, and gave a sombre nod.

For all the warmth of Greenwich’s red brick and fine tapestries, his skin carried a constant hint of grey under the surface. James watched me a long moment, his eyes more blurred and watery than I remembered.

“We have lost our right hand,” he said. “The sadder because we were estranged. You saw him, Master Rochefort, before he died?”

“The day before. He spoke of your Majesty. I think, if he had one regret, sire, it was that he, also, was not set on the road to Bridgwater.”

His face abruptly altered, as if he would have both laughed and wept together. “Ah, Robbie. Can you imagine him singing before four dozen stinking farm-workers? We should like to have seen that. We should.”

I bowed, to hide my expression; a man of affairs should not show himself sentimental.

His look of gloom reasserting itself, James said, “Tell Fludd, we will be advised of what questions Queen Marie asks of him.”

“Yes, your Majesty.” Conscious of the glare of courtiers observing me, I sent an urbane glance around the Gothic hall. “Your son the Prince of Wales is not presently at court?”

James looked more sour, were that possible. “He has his own court, now. At Richmond, and St James’s palace, if you must seek him out. There are few enough men you’ll see at his court
and
ours, Master Rochefort. His are all Puritan upright men, who will have no swearing of oaths, or revelry at banquets, but prayers twice a day.”

With the skill of old practise, I kept my expression impassive.

“Your Majesty.” I wondered how far I might try him. “Do you have a first question for Doctor Fludd, now, that I might take back for you?”

James gave a heavy shake of his head. “We do not. Not yet.”

He did not look me in the eye.

“Has it not occurred to you, Rochefort, man? That some questions are better without answers?”

The Summer rain fell as a wherry-man sailed me back from Greenwich, up the Thames-river. I watched the flow of the river, speckled with the unfolding circles of the droplets; so many of them that it would take a lifetime to calculate all their intersections. And by then, they will be gone.

Responsibility.

Which, if there is no power to act, is only a curse.

Back at Coleman Street, I found myself with another question for Robert Fludd.

“If you have not already done it,” I said, “calculate the day upon which you now die.”

Over the next four days, while Fludd worked, and I worried my problem as a hound courses a hare, I saw a number of shabby or gentlemanly souls; none with ought in common save that they would pass unnoticed in a crowd. I sequentially entertained this score or more of the late Secretary’s intelligencers in the dirty-floored downstairs chamber that was the best a Western building could offer.

The last man—sailing in from The Hague, but by his own account able to be within the Louvre-palace in a fortnight—I found myself staring at, at the same time that he carefully studied me. I supposed him to be about fifty; his dress English, his skin fair, his hair bright chestnut.

At the same moment that he suddenly seemed stunned, I realised that we had met before. And at that time his chestnut hair had been dyed—further red—with henna.

“Disguising one’s true appearance with the appearance that the truth itself is false?” I said. “When I saw you last, were you not William Markham?”

He flushed; his complexion so light he could not disguise it. “My name is Griffin Markham. William is my brother.”

Ah.
That, I suppose, is what puzzled Mlle Dariole.

“I recall I was informed, by the late Lord Cecil, that Sir Griffin Markham was his chief spy upon the continent.” I kept a level gaze on the stout man. “Which seems wise, monsieur, since I recall you to have been near-hanged and then exiled from England for treason, in the year ’03…”

Griffin Markham coughed. “William and I are very like. He lives lawfully in London. I am here, and he is in The Hague in place of me now.”

Lady Arbella Stuart was still imprisoned in the Tower, after a hapless escape attempt organised by her husband. I wondered if she might yet escape out of England. Her cause might be thought a good enough reason for brothers to change their identities, especially if they had advanced the marriage in the first place.

I thought of Arbella; her kindness to Dariole.

“If I were you,” I said, “I would go to France, and send me word from there on the subject of the Queen Regent. The sooner you leave England, the better.”

William—rather, Griffin—Markham scowled. “Ay. With Cecil dead of the pox, there are his successors who would arrest me.”

I bowed him from the room, not about to mention that it was not King James’s fledgling spy-masters he should worry about, with Dariole in the country.

Some two or three minutes after that, Dariole herself came in at the back door, knocking mud off her boots and scabbard onto the kitchen flagstones. She grinned at me.

“If your face stays like that, you’ll frighten the gargoyles off St Paul’s! What’s the matter? James too busy creeping up Robbie Carr’s bum-hole to see you again, messire?”

“Something of that. It occurs to me, mademoiselle—that Henri of Navarre and Cecil are dead, M. de Sully retired, James Stuart much changed, and we are left with the Medici Queen Regent and young Prince Henry. A pair of vipers. Worse—vermin.”

The amusement in her eyes metamorphosed into cynicism. She gave one slow nod of her head, rain-water dripping from her hair and velvet cap. “Won’t argue with you, messire. But what can you do?”

“That is what I desire to discover…. You may,” I added, “be interested to know that Monsieur William Markham is walking down Old Jewry, at this moment, on his way to a ship for the Low Countries. You may know him better as…what would it be…‘Cousin Griffin’?”

Surprise, realisation, and a fierce grin went across her face in the space of seconds.

“Let him live!” I added hastily. “He may be of use to—the Lady Abera-sama.”

“Oh, the kennel will suffice, messire!” Dariole’s voice came back rich with amusement, drowned out by a banging door and departing footsteps over the cobbles.

What is it that I can do?
I wondered, dismissing the Markham brothers from my mind.

I would give every groat of Cecil’s pension to have Caterina alive, and her mathematics a check on Fludd’s. The future—and the far future….

I made my way upstairs, ducking my head under the twisted beams, to the upper room where Robert Fludd now kept his books, his papers, himself.

“Twenty-five years,” he said as I bent to come in under the lintel, without looking up from his desk at me. “Was there a reason you wished to know my remaining time on this earth, other than to torment me?”

If he is so exact, I thought, he will have begun doing his mathematics on the ship home, to know this as fact by now.

“I have my reasons,” I said. “You are an Englishman. Tell me your honest opinion, now, of James Stuart.”

Fludd gave me a thin frown. He leaned back in his chair. “The heart has gone out of him.”

“Well, as a Frenchman, I will tell you likewise my opinion of Marie de Medici—which is, that she is Florentine to the core. And these are the people for whom you foretell the future. These, who take decisions for millions.”

After a moment, Fludd reached for his pen-knife, and began to slice minutely and carefully at his quill. So sharp an edge a pen-knife has that I automatically calculated and extended my distance from the tiny blade.

Fludd said, “You have not merely come to complain at me.”

“Indeed, no.”

“You are no more a friend to me than you ever were.”

I inclined my head. “Also true—why, a man might suppose you possessed of foreknowledge, messire!”

He winced.

“Not in this.” Fludd looked down at the spoiled quill. “A decade of mathematics; all of my work…is useless, now, Master Rochefort. Now that the year 1610 is over, and we are on a different path.”