Mary Gentle (78 page)

“Monsiegneur, stop, listen, please!”

I bellowed in desperation at him; for all I know, he did not hear. It was not begging. For all the pain, I knew myself deserving of this. He held me with one hand in my hair, and thrashed the horse-whip down as hard as a man might on a vicious stone horse, while I rolled on the flagstones and screamed.

A whistling cut caught the edge of my lip: I cut off in mid-bellow and an explosion of blood.

He flung me bodily down. The hard stones were almost refuge. I ducked my head and pushed my face into the hollows where the stones joined, arms over my head, belly to the ground. His whip rained down sodden cuts on my shoulders, buttocks, and thighs.

“Pick him up.”

His voice sounded ragged, bursting with fury.

I wanted to crawl away; my legs would not push me. I heard him thickly apologise, and dismiss his noble guests. And I felt the guards grab my lacerated shoulders. They hauled me onto my feet.

Upright, the world was a bright, dizzy blur. Blood trickled down from a cut across my temple that I hadn’t registered. One of the men holding me upright was M. Andre. Something trickled from my hair to my torn ruff, dripping red. I could not clear my vision. I could not speak: my mouth felt as if stuffed with wet cloth.

Maximilien de Bethune, Duc de Sully, stood a yard away, his whip clasped in his left hand now. With his other hand, he punched me in the face.

Knees sagging, held up by his guardsmen, I was no taller than he. He might land his punches where he pleased. His knuckles impacted on my cheekbone, and I heard—through a blaze of pain—how he swore. A soldier’s rough language.

The Duc gestured. “Take him away; I will see him.”

I did not faint, nor become unconscious, but I seemed to pass into a state of preoccupation. A sensation of warmth came from somewhere. I could not see out of one eye. The odd sensation on my skin was blood running down it: one doesn’t feel it, being of the body’s own heat.
I hope to God it is blood alone.
I seemed to hang in some place out of time. An urge went through me: I bent forward and vomited up all of my last meal, and blood ran from my nostrils.

Fludd had time for rough calculation only. I will return alive.

But he claimed nothing of what state I might be in.

Both my ears were singing. I could make them into voices if I chose. I chose to hear them as Mlle Arcadie de Montargis de la Roncière.
Are you punished enough?
her voice whispered to me.
Or will you beg him to hit you again?
Henri is still dead. However much pain he inflicts on you, it changes nothing.

“No, but he has the right.” No man could have made out what I mumbled, through lips already swollen.

Sully gave orders. Through my sick dizziness, I recognised his voice. Painful grips tightened on my shoulders: I became aware that I was dragged, boots trailing along the flagstones. Carried, more than dragged. I had no idea of where, or for what. There was a hiatus that might have been two minutes, or twenty, or two hours: I snapped from it with a shout as someone threw me down on a floor.

I lay on my face for a space of time, I don’t know how long, dimly surprised to find myself alive. Something under me was hard, not cold enough for stone. If I stayed perfectly still, the pain ebbed a little. I could see, in one corner of my vision, my arm, with the cloth cut into strips; and red gouges showing in the flesh underneath, set in black-and-blue bruises. Still I could not see out of one eye. I stank of puke: it stuck my ruff to my doublet.

Hands jerked me upright.

I have been here long enough for blood to dry,
I realised, sucking in air, as every ripped shred of cloth tore stickily out of whip-cuts.

“Stand up,” the Duke’s voice said. Both scornfully and accurately, he added, “You will not die of a beating.”

This grave Gascon duke, usually so controlled…I heard fire in his voice, damped down now, but ready to flare up at any moment.
He has by no means done punishing me for my failure.

I managed to stay upright, if hunched over a little. When I put the back of my wrist delicately to my mouth, I felt lips painfully split, and my nose swollen. My eyes closed into slits, the left worse than the right; a fear of blindness cut through me like icy water. A moment later, I thought:
Fludd can be wrong.
If he hangs me I shall have little time to worry.

“Rochefort,” the Duc de Sully said.

He stood by a carved, armed chair, turned aside from the desk under the window. The chamber was large and palely lit.

I thought,
Does he know, I wonder, that he has that fine line of red spots decorating his ruff?

I stared at the droplets of my blood.

Andre and musketeers stood in the doorway; the Duc swore at them to leave. The door shut behind them. I heaved in a breath; smelled the familiar scents among which I have taken my orders these past fifteen years: sun-warmed beeswax, wood fires, old ink, and amber. The light on the pale linen-fold panels made one of my eyes run. I fel a rush of chill in my belly.
Now I must tell him. Now I must tell the truth I’ve come so far to tell.

I got out, “I’m sorry, Monsiegneur.”

It provoked reaction: I knew it would. There was no way of avoiding it. For a split second I saw Robert Fludd in Dariole’s arms, and the flash of light off her sharp knife. Maximilien de Bethune, Baron Rosny, Duc de Sully, swore like a priest and hit me in the mouth.

I just managed to keep my balance. Blood dribbled from my mouth; I spat, and did not clear my ruff. “I don’t blame you. Monsiegneur…I don’t blame you. I’d do the same.”

It sounded almost wry, but I in no way felt comic. I hurt more for him than for me.

“I came to tell you the truth.” This time I got my head up, and managed to look him in the face. “No other man but I can tell you.”

Strain and age were written incomparably deeper into his round face than they had been two years ago.
Grief has not died, nor hatred.
I saw it in that face.

“What
truth?
” he exclaimed, with sudden disgust, and snatched his gloves from his hands. Both were red across the knuckles. “You try to betray me again. A trap. As if I were not watched close enough already!”

I lifted my hand again and wiped at my mouth, trying to clear my voice. Pain went through me. I tried to think that it would clear my head.

He has no way to know who sent a message to Paris by way of Cecil’s ambassador, warning him of a Medici traitor. To his mind, no reason to think it might be M. Rochefort, who vanished after a few warning letters. I gritted my teeth, and tried to speak words that would make him listen.

“The Queen Regent did not send me.” I straightened, every inch of my body burning with the lashes. “If you want to kill me without more blood on your hands, monsiegneur, give me over to her. She’ll hang me as soon as she can, because I’m witness against her.”

Sully glanced down. I wished I could see his expression more clearly. I dared not put fingers to that eye, to see if he had crushed the eyeball in its socket.

“Must I hear words from you?” De Sully spoke with a combination of weariness and hatred that cut me deeply. “What will you say? That it was for his
wife
that you had Henri killed?”

My heart jolted. Two years after Henri’s death and his grief is still as hot. Hotter, now he has the man responsible.

“Yes, monsiegneur. Marie de Medici wanted me to kill the King.”

“I will hang you,” Sully said. “That you dare come here and say this to me….”

“Monsiegneur,” I began. Trying to straighten my thoughts in my throbbing head. I am as guilty of the King’s death as if I put the knife in him myself; I am guilty of the death of François Ravaillac; but it was accident, all accident.
Madame the Queen held your life ransom.

I managed not to fall down on my knees. It is not for me to beg forgiveness, or absolution. It is for me to tell the truth. I looked at the Duke my master, Maximilien de Bethune. Soldier for the dead King Henri, servant and financier for the dead King Henri; most of all, friend to the late King Henri.

“Well?” he snapped.

There was a small oblong painting over his chair, fastened to the panelling; a painting, or perhaps an engraving, I could not quite make out which. Henri IV, Henri of Navarre: that profile-face which all men recognise, his lively eyes, his jutting beard.

Here is where Sully works, and he is never more than a yard from King Henri.

I cannot tell him.

It burst on me with all the force of the obvious.

How can I tell him that
he
is the thing that the Queen Regent used, to force me into killing the King?

Shock made my handicapped gaze steady. Though shadows of blood, I saw de Sully clearly: tall, dignified, brilliant, stubborn; grieving still for his friend, who came in the end of their lives to be King of France.

If I tell you that Marie de Medici threatened your life to compel me….

…You will blame yourself for Henri’s death.

No matter that it happened by chance, in the end. That, I think, would be more painful to you than if I had put the knife in the King’s body myself. No matter.

He will not blame Queen Marie. He will not even blame Valentin Raoul Rochefort.

Himself.

M. de Sully will blame himself.

He could live another thirty years,
I realised. With
this
?

“Speak, if you have to,” he growled. “Quickly, Rochefort!”

Sully’s black dog.

Pain and something else put a bloody tear running to drip down on my hands.

I didn’t come here for him.

I didn’t come to clear my debts by telling him a truth he could in no other way find out.

I came here to clear my own name, with him. And for absolution.

From the beginning, I must always have envisaged him forgiving me.

It sent me dizzy. The older man peered into my face, frowning. My mouth was open to blurt out the whole story.

All I wanted to prove to him, I realised, is that I did not betray him. Not for money, not for threats; I was his man, I was loyal!

And if I tell him what truly happened, he will forever know that there was a choice between his life and Henri’s, and a man chose Henri to die in Sully’s place.

It will break his heart.

Sully would have died, willingly, for Henri to stay alive; he would die now if it would bring him back. How can I tell him—

My hands shook.

I must tell him
something
.

The muscles in my legs went to water. My knees hit the floor.

Painfully, I lifted my head, and managed to meet his gaze.

“The Queen threatened me, monsiegneur.”

Though a head like fog, I pieced it together.

“She had me taken off the street. Half-killed. She
did
kill Maignan.”

The slightest widening of his eyes made words tumble out of me.
I have to do this well
.

“Monsiegneur, I was afraid! She gave me money enough to go to the New World, but I came back. It’s on my conscience, monsiegneur; I
had
to tell you!”

Sully’s expression altered.

He had had hope, I saw, for all his brutal violence; a jot of hope that he had been mistaken in what he thought about me.

I lowered my head to the floor and wept. Not in a dignified way, as I had heard Sully wept at Henri’s funeral, but hiccuping, spilling blood and mucus from my nose, and biting at my wrist so that the pain would let me speak.

“Your justice on me,” I got out. “I came to beg you for pardon, monsiegneur, and I cannot!”

His voice soft with shock, the Duc said, “You, a coward? Yes…that, too, I should have known.” His bushy grey brows came down. “You are the man who begged for his life when I first met you.”

The mindless anger was gone. He looked sad, even grief-stricken, but self-possessed. As he locked gazes with me, I saw both disgust in his face, and pity.

He lowered himself down into his chair. I thought he would not speak again.

He looked at me. “I expected too much of you.”

I bit at the torn lip his horse-whip left; only that stopped me crying out.

“I misjudged your character. I saw Valentin Rochefort and I thought him something more than the usual ex-soldier and killer…something worth saving from a just hanging. When you served me, monsieur, I thought you of a particular courage. Which, I see, you are not.”

If I said, while on my feet, that the Queen Regent intimidated me, he would not believe it. With M. Rochefort on his knees, he can picture it in every detail. And he believes—oh, he believes!

More than anything on earth, I wanted to speak up, to say,
I never betrayed you!
I chewed at my ragged lip, and put my head on my arms, and wept.

He will think it fear.

“You sent me letters,” he said quietly. “I remember them now. Your guilty conscience? But…therefore, I shall not hang you.”