Mary Gentle (82 page)

Will anything change, here, after all?

Have I just condemned a man to death? And any of these others, with him?

It has happened precisely as Fludd made claim for Bruno’s mathematics predicting—the boy’s desire to swim today; the other boy distracting him to a further game. Except that I am here, and I know how to prick the honour of a vain young man. So that what was the less-certain becomes the actual…

A light of Autumn fell like honey on the grass. The smaller and less hardy birds gathered in flocks in the trees that lined the river, ready to fly south—many a peasant in Brittany and Normandy will take meat for his pot out of that flock as it goes over. The sky, blue enough for Summer, had a white chill on the horizon.

In truth, I have myself swum on days far colder—in canals in the United Provinces, when we must break the ice to get to the water. We were foolhardy, and freezing blue by the end of it, but no man of us died.

Fludd’s prophecy is not to do with cold.

The Prince glanced up from being stripped of his clothes again by his body-servants, and beckoned me imperiously to the riverside.

A man or two behind me muttered at the sudden favour shown by the King’s son, and how a man might devise cozening tricks with his linen to be noticed…

“At least I
have
a shirt,” I remarked amiably to one proud courtier, who I suspected of wearing only cuffs and ruff under his doublet, so poor the scuffs on his boots proclaimed him. Under cover of the laughter that followed, I walked across the grass, all my sudden wariness at the summons concealed.

“Your Grace?” I removed my hat and bowed in the Dutch fashion.

Henry gestured his servants aside. From further off, it would seem that the Prince and the foreigner spoke over their jest on cold water. I met the hazel-green eyes he turned on me. Does he decline to swim, now?
Shall I out with my dagger instantly?

The young man said, “Monsieur Herault. I did not recognise you, at first.”

The gleam of wit in his eyes made me curse myself. Neither admitting nor contradicting, I made another bow, and watched him in silence. Let me hear what he has to say before I commit myself.

“That was a witty way to encounter me.” The Prince nodded back at the hall, barely visible across the meadows. “You have lost nothing of your skill, monsieur. I wish you to know, before anything else: I do not hold you at fault for the failure at Wookey. It is like my father to have most cowardly put on armour. You could not have known.”

What surprise I felt, I suppressed instantly. I assumed an expression of chagrin. “A man might have expected it, I suppose, your Grace.”

“Don’t concern yourself, Monsieur Herault. I value your attempt—it was most gallant. Then, at the Tower, I suppose old Dad too well guarded by his supporters? Yes. I guessed as much.”

Henry gripped my forearm, with a hand strong to wield the racket, or the sword, or the knife.

“The same is true now as was then. My father is a pusillanimous old man, with no concern for how Christ is daily spat on in these pagan Papist countries. You have a good Huguenot name, monsieur; I know this galls you as much as it does the rest of us.”

His gaze took in his followers.
Many are older,
I thought.
His faction is not all boys now.

“But do not fear,” Henry Stuart said, with a kindliness and gallantry that might have suited Henri IV in his youth—the Henri that this Henry claimed he most admired. Henri, who would have begun a pan-European war.

Prince Henry Stuart said intensely, “There will be another opportunity provided. This, your appearance, I take to be a sign. Where we failed, before, we will succeed now. But I will speak more of this to you, later. Come to Richmond-palace. I will summon you when it is convenient.”

Another gesture, before I could speak, and his servants came back to finish unpointing his doublet and breeches, and stripping off his shirt and under-linen. The shirt was silk, with blackwork embroidery about the armholes; he let it drop to the damp grass. The line of his body, from shoulder to hip, buttock to calf, was a sweep worthy of the Italian sculptors.

He gave me a smile of surpassing sweetness—and, if he had known it, one so very like his father, James—and loped into the shallow water, splashing and yelling; followed by a half of his court.

What I have done, I have done.

As to
what
it is that I have done—if I have acted out of knowledge that is correct, then I have chosen a road for Prince Henry that involves death, and for millions of other men that does not: circumventing another Hundred Years’ War.

The wind blew fine ripples over the river’s surface; dead leaves skittered past me.

If
. And, even so, I nor no man of us shall live to see the whole of it proved.

These things I thought for the next few days, while the Prince remained as healthy as a young ox.

And then the signs of approaching fever appeared in his cheeks.

I followed him through the public occasions that followed, in the October of 1612; until on the 25th he retired to his bed, and an apprentice of Dr Theodore de Mayenne—not as immune to money as his master—informed me how Prince Henry looked hollow-eyed, pale, and spoke strangely. Eleven days later, on the evening of November 6th, after continual worsening and physicians’ treatments that I would not wish upon a dog, the boy died.

Public panic suggested poison; only a few of his doctors claimed it to be the bad vapours of Thames-river, and blamed it on his swimming. The men of England discovered their golden prince taken from them, and mourned as if Christ had for a second time been crucified.

James Stuart did not come to his son’s death-bed.

“I have given it out I am afraid of the sickness,” he said to me in private audience. “But, man, what father can look his son in the eye and tell him he is hated? Better to let him go easy.”

Catching some expression I did not intend to show, the old man reached up and gripped my shoulder.

“It was meant to be. He has swum there a hundred times before. God’s Providence chose now to strike him down, as a traitor and Judas. God willed it.”

“Certainly a man may take comfort from your Majesty’s words,” I said.

But, regrettably, I am not that man.

Everything I have done,
I
have done. I do not excuse it, now, on the grounds that another man gave me such-and-such orders. I am no man’s hand, and my own are not clean.

A man cannot ignore knowledge once he has it.

Or if he can, I am not, either, that man.

W
hen Mr Secretary Cecil died, six months before, it was not a day before the first lampoons and epithets appeared. Whore-master. Embezzler. Tyrant. Thief.

“But Henry, Prince of Wales…
Henry
was ‘the boy-King Arthur,’” I remarked muddily to myself.

I tilted the leather jack and drank, conscious of the warmth in my gut that now did not feel the draught up the kitchen chimney, nor the memory of men dropping to their knees in the street with grief.
His funeral will be monumental.

“Monsieur,” Fludd’s voice said.

I looked up in surprise at seeing him having come down to this, the kitchen of the Coleman Street house.

I smiled crookedly, and could not keep amusement on my face. “It is not the moment.”

“It is,” Robert Fludd persisted, even as he eyed me warily. “I will begin by saying that you should see this.”

What he held out to me, I ignored. “I do not desire to see any more of your papers. Or Caterina’s, if it comes to that. Not today.”

Every man outside this house is drinking for grief of the Prince of Wales. I drink to—not to Henry. To the death of innocence.

I upended the stone jug, and sent the last drips into the jack, which was the best item I might find to drink from—it did not break when I threw it against the wall. Crack, yes, so that sour wine seeped into the pitch-lined leather; but not break.

The red embers of the fire, and two remaining candles, left in shadow the corners of the kitchen. They gave light enough for me to see Fludd’s gaunt features.

I turned away, slumping on the bench, considering how soon Gabriel might make his way back from the Windmill-tavern with more wine.

“Rochefort!”

The astrologer-doctor’s slippers trod silently among the rushes of the floor; I did not realise he stood behind me until he spoke. I startled wildly, shifting too rapidly about on the bench.

The wood of it I supposed to have been made slippery by Gabriel’s incessant cleaning; certainly I slid, missed my footing on the floor, and ended falling flat among the rushes in front of the hearth.

Pushing myself up into a sitting position, I peered at the inch of wine unspilled from my mug. “Have some of this. Wine. No—
have
some.”

Fludd looked down at me; I witnessed him think better of any attempt to help me up. “Why are we drinking, Monsieur Rochefort?”

“As a medicine.”

His mouth began to frame the word, and I saw a light of intelligence come into his eyes.

“Correct,” I observed. “You are the only man in England who will not have been out into the streets to hear it—Henry Prince of Wales is dead.”

Slowly, he reached out his hand to the table, and eased himself down onto the bench. I watched him in focused fascination. He lifted each of the bottles and jugs to weigh it, found one that dipped in his grip, and drank straight from it, trickles of red wine running into the stubble of his chin.

“Now I know how
you
feel,” I observed. After a pause, while I formulated the thought, I said, “I do not thank you.”

“You will not, no.” Fludd spoke half-breathlessly. He held out a jug.

I took it from him, refilled my jack, and set the jug beside me.

“I’m nowhere near struck into the hazard yet,” I observed, shifting my back comfortably against the stones of the fireplace. “I can still understand your English tongue…I think this will require more assistance from whatever Gabriel has been able to buy: wine, spirit, or ale.”

Fludd took a folded paper out of his hanging sleeve. A little dazed in his appearance, he leaned forward and offered it. “This is one of my publications. You may recognise the Wookey mill’s paper.”

I drank deeply from my jack, and peered closely at the title page; rubbing the distinctive flecks in the paper’s texture between thumb and finger. “‘An appeal to’—to
what
?”

“To the Rosy Cross Brotherhood.”

I stared.

I made some noise that—were I not a man—I might best describe as a giggle.

Robert Fludd’s back stiffened, where he sat. “It’s a letter I published in the same year that you and James went to Wookey cavern. A vain attempt to contact these ‘Brethren.’”

“Very likely!” I agreed. With my legs stretched out in the mud and rushes, and looking up at Robert Fludd, I felt an incongruous desire to laugh.

He frowned. “This letter—”

I crumpled it swiftly in my fist, and dropped it in the fire. Fludd stared at the brief flash of the dying coals, as the flames ate it.

“The
Rosicrucian Brotherhood?
There
is
no ‘Rosicrucian brotherhood’! Everybody knows that! Are you
mad?
No, I don’t need to ask, do I? Of
course
you are….”

“Listen to me!” He sounded shaky; I was, on a sudden, put in mind of the fact that he was a handful of years younger than I. “Rochefort!”

“That’s ‘Messire Rochefort’ to you. ‘
De
’ Rochefort,” I added emphatically.

Fludd seized another of the half-emptied jugs from the table, banging it down for emphasis. “I
know
the
Fama Fraternitatis
contains nothing more than a heap of Hermetic trash!”

I stared at him blankly.

As if it explained all, Fludd said, “It’s a
joke
—I always believed—a philosopher’s joke. And not a good one.”

He leaned over from the bench, taking yet another pamphlet from his sleeve, and held it out.

The cover, indeed, proclaimed itself
Fama Fraternitatis,
for all I could squint my eyes in the candle-light to read it.

Fludd snatched it back, underlining a passage with his thumbnail. “Here! This ‘utopian’ society that the self-styled ‘Rosicrucians’ write of. It’s all that Signora Caterina thought possible to achieve! It would barely surprise me if this were
her
joke, perpetrated out of the press at Wookey!”

I snatched at his second pamphlet to consign it to the fire. Having hold of one corner, I found it falling open at a folded-down page—at a woodcut of wheels, guns, castles, and philosophers, all in unlikely juxtaposition.

“This,” I said, with great dignity, “makes no fucking sense!”

Fludd prised the pamphlet back from me, his face sharp in the fire’s light. “But—the ‘Brothers of the Rosy Cross’! Think what a cover it would be! For your
genuine
organisation of agents.”

Finding I had slid over to have one elbow on the raised hearth-stones, I wiped my mouth on my other sleeve.

Robert Fludd jumped to his feet, pointing an ink-stained finger down at me. “You have said you’ll do this! A brotherhood, to act as you’ve acted with Henry—have I not proved it to you, that
I
can’t keep such an assembly of men, nor organise them? But you have practise in commanding such bands—spies, soldiers…Rochefort, I can help you.”

If I have ever heard humiliation in a man’s voice, I am hearing it now.

He persisted in the face of my silence. “Here is the name of a ready-made organisation for us, that a few men believe exists, that in fact does
not
—and that most men will by habit dismiss as a mere theory of conspiracy. Or dismiss as harmless, lunatic scholars.”

In the cold kitchen, I gazed up at him for a very long moment. I drank from the jack I had forgot I held, the wine spilling stickily over my hand and linen cuff. I licked at grimy skin.

“If I am tired of one thing,” I said, “it’s over-enthusiastic amateurs. And the fact that there is no longer any wine in this jug. No, that’s two things.”

I threw the leather jack: it struck the table’s corner and rattled off into the dark.

My head is by no means as numb as I might desire it.

I sighed, rolling away from the fire’s heat where it began to scorch my doublet’s shoulder.
Too little wine
.

I came lightly up onto my feet, as duelists do—and found it necessary for my balance to reach out and grab the rack of cooking-irons on the wall. Metal clattered and rang. I looked down at Robert Fludd, where he stood.

Candles wavered in November draughts, their light not driving back so much of the night now. The corners of the room stayed hidden. Shadows covered the plaster ceiling and the fire-irons; the pewter plates stacked on the end of the scrubbed table. The coal’s glow touched the extremities of Fludd’s face.

He said quietly, “I know you can’t trust me. Or, you can only in hindsight, when you see the results of my—of
your
—actions. Rochefort, I’m willing to take students. I’ll give you men who can check, for you, if what I claim for my mathematics is truly there.”

Chill wind and circumstance made me force my mind to sharpen. I looked into the dark corners of the room, alertness and memory making unwelcome return. Robert Fludd stood looking up at me, seeming aware of how I over-topped him. This man whom Saburo out-manoeuvered, and Dariole hurt. Here he still is.

With a crack in his voice, Fludd said, “I’ll tell you. When I was at Oxford, I desired to be a Paracelsan physician. A doctor that would heal what we are. Heal history, and the future…. Do what I could to mitigate the effects of war, disease, plague, starvation. To think in terms of charity and healing.”

I made myself his
memento mori
. “A shame you did not think of that when you considered methods.”

Robert Fludd flinched.

“There is more than misery at stake, M. Rochefort. Survival. A man who has suffered is better than one who is dead.”

He smoothed the folded pamphlet between his fingers.

“I suppose my desires have not been so unlike the rules of this Order. To be a physician. To heal the sick—although necessity means I can’t do it freely, as they would. And I can’t prolong life, as they also would, or transmute metals, or know the secrets of the Cabala.”

His unshaven chin lifted; he looked at me.

“For the rest, believe me, they sound very like intelligencers! The Brothers wear no distinguishing marks, following the custom of dress of each country. They’re rumoured to know what passes in distant places.”

Fludd smiled wryly.

“And if you read this, you’ll read that the Brothers of the Rosy Cross discover hidden things by ‘the science of numbers.’”

That brought a snort of laughter that hurt my ribs—being bruised, I supposed, from my earlier impact with bench and floor. “If this was Suor Caterina writing, she’s openly described your Giordanisti!”

He held up the
Fama
pamphlet. “May not this ‘Rosy Cross’ come to be a redeemed Giordanisti? I—you went to de Sully, Rochefort; you understand atonement!”

“You do not mention his name.”

Robert Fludd kept silent for a minute and more.

Subdued, he said, “You and I both wish to leave something on hand that will steer, unseen, the course of history, so that we do not all die—all; every man and his heir in this world when the comet strikes.”

“Still, you hope.” I stared at him. “It needs must be done, not as you would have it, some autocratic empire. But a word here, a word there—”

“—to work against war, where necessary; towards it, where unavoidable. Do you not feel the same? Rochefort, I ask for your help!”

There are nights when it does not matter how much a man drinks, he remains stubbornly sober.

I sighed. “I have personal cause to dislike you. I
know
the future may be changed. I am left with a debt to Saburo, to Caterina, to Milord Cecil—”

To this man, I will not say
to Sully
.

The draft under the kitchen door seeped into me, even through the warmth of the wine. I desire to have Dariole here, and to have this conversation; or Gabriel, if he would return.
There is but Fludd and I.

I turned to the hearth, holding my hands out over the coals.

“Yes,” I said. “This is precisely what I have known I must do.”

A new Giordanisti, hidden by a scholars’ joke. Caterina would approve, at least.

“I neither like nor pity you,” I said, “but I understand what it is to fail.”

Glancing back over my shoulder, I caught the moment his head turned towards me; his eyes catching the fire’s light.

Roughly, I said, “I’m no doctor. I handle death. That…doesn’t mean I can’t make use of other tools.”

Having taken wine, words came freely.

“I have few skills. Those I do are the arts of a civilian murderer. It might be that…I might desire to put those skills at the service of a worthwhile end. Compromised as it may be.”

Robert Fludd wiped a hand down his face with the smile of a man weary, a little inebriated, and encouraged beyond hope.
Drunk as he and I might be,
I thought,
I see no deceit in him.

“Say that this ‘Rosicrucian’ organisation might be set up,” I said. “Say that the Giordanisti continue under this new name. To set us up under such a cover…to have you calculate for it…. To recruit…. It would be a handful of years before we might begin to know, fully, where we should go. And even then, we risk doing as great a wrong as right!”

Fludd drank from the jug, wine spattering in shilling-sized drops on the flagstones. “I know. I know.”