Mary Gentle (15 page)
Authors: A Sundial in a Grave-1610
9
T
he weather changing again to foul, it took us eight-and-forty hours to cross the seas to London, and the sun only opened his eye upon us when we stood well within the estuary of the Thames-river. I spent that time tormented with a jealousy I never wanted, nor desired now that I had it.
Watching Mlle Dariole as she clung to ropes in the teeth of rain, and conversed with the captain in a boy’s cracked adolescent shout; or watching her in the cramped cabin, her face alive with enthusiasm as she questioned M. Saburo about his cattan-blades…. All of this is torment, I thought. That puts me out of mind of my duty.
The
Willibrod
moored at one of the many docks in the Pool of London, south of London-bridge with its houses and nineteen arches. I suppose that it took just under a hundred heartbeats for me to spot the spy watching the ship, but I do have the advantage of a career in such things.
He was no prime agent, in such a spot; merely the average tattle-tail maintained on a spy-master’s books, making himself useful by seeing who comes in daily from abroad. He leaned up against the wall of a low-doored tavern that the morning saw busy with captains discussing voyages, and merchants complaining about the rot crept into their cargoes. He would hire himself out as the traditional travellers’ interpreter, I guessed.
But not to me.
A very different arrival to my last, this; on the King’s barge with my master Sully, after a journey up from Dover. Making sure all the way that the damned English treated a Duc of France with sufficient respect—after the lord of Dover cozened M. de Sully into bringing our whole entourage with him on a visit to the castle, only so as to take the customary gratuity for seeing over the place from each and every one of us.
At that time we had landed west of the City, upriver; not here in the poverty-stricken wards to the east. The London streets looked as cold as I remembered. And the horizon beyond St Katharine’s Stairs was an endless procession of church spires, under a brisk May sky.
“There will be other spies,” I warned M. Saburo. “In any city with a royal court, the ground is always thick with informers.”
“Hai! Edo!” Saburo stood by me at the ship’s rail, his arms carrying the folds of his cloak bundled in front of him. I assumed he concealed the Nihonese war-helmet. It did not leave his person. He made a raw sound like a guffaw. “No matter they’re not looking for us in particular?”
“Quite.”
Upriver stood the battlements of a great fortress, like the Arsenal that M. de Sully commonly inhabits, although the English use theirs also as a prison. Beyond that royal Tower is a great Gothic cathedral, the spire lost to fire many years ago. It made me momentarily desire, first Paris and Our Lady, and then the rich house called “Arundel,” here in London, where all my master’s entourage had stayed before.
“Saburo-san. Be good enough to put back the hood of your cloak.”
It was, in fact, my cloak; my caped and hooded Spanish travelling cloak that I took off an unfortunate enemy trooper in the Low Countries. It has had more than a decade’s wear since then. No man would mistake us for wealthy travellers.
Saburo reached up, yanked the hood back, and stomped down the gangplank.
I picked up the saddlebags, swung them up onto my shoulder to hide my face, and slouched down the plank after him, stooping a little to disguise my height.
Tanaka Saburo was not strange enough that a man might immediately see anything wrong with him, but he was nonetheless apt to draw the eye. No man gazed at me as I disembarked. Nor at Mlle Dariole, I saw, as she followed after in her men’s clothing. The English spy watched only the man of Nihon, tongue-tip caught between his teeth like a child memorising Latin grammar.
Suppose I go now to Sully’s man here, Beaumont? But he may have been recalled. Arrested, even. No: first one sounds out the ground….
“The Medici will soon have agents here, if she does not now,” I observed, moving up beside Saburo. “And, if I know London, English spy-master Robert Cecil’s informers will be in the streets and taverns, along with other local amateurs.”
There will be agents of
I cannot use the name of Rochefort. Or Belliard. Ravaillac will have talked days ago.
“Quick, now, but do not appear hurried.” I ushered Saburo through the busy press of men on St Katharine’s Stairs, avoiding sailors unloading cargo, conscious of Dariole following.
Where I would have led us up into the streets, towards London-city and away from these out-parishes, a group of men luckily rolled out of an alley into our way. In the course of the scuffle avoiding them, I successfully lost the informer. I squinted behind me, seeing him borne back among lean men with the look of merchant-adventurers, towards the taverns. Thirst won out, or perhaps he waited thirty heartbeats too long. I had us away and lost in the crowds before he could catch us up, sweat hot under my shirt and falling bands.
Dariole caught up with a swagger, careless of the length of her sword behind her swatting at men’s calves. “That way.”
“I hope your memory for cities is better than for languages, mademoiselle….”
She shot me a look, and strode out in front, leading us by ways I dimly recalled from my more unofficial wanderings—by Hogges Lane to Tower-hill, where we walked between women laying out washing on the turf to dry, and then north-west into the city by Marck’s Lane. I lost my bearings somewhere south of More Gate, inside the city wall.
“You here, before?” Saburo’s sentence ended on a rising, interrogatory note as he looked at me. “We stay where stayed then?”
“The Duc de Sully was an honoured guest of the English King.” I shook off my thoughts, smiling grimly. “I don’t suppose us likely to be invited inside any great lord’s house, Messire Saburo. We must shift for ourselves.”
Leaving Paris ten days ago, I had been short of funds. Now, a week’s expenses after that, and passage on the
Willibrod
…. When a man is self-evidently leaving the country ahead of the authorities, he frequently pays over the asking price. The fee for a horse’s passage on ship is, by old custom, two and one half times the price of a man. The
Willibrod
’s captain, knowing a man in a cleft stick when he saw one, swapped me two passengers’ fares for the Andalusian jennet plus a little of my remaining silver.
I will have no more than two English pounds by the time I have changed coin
.
Saburo grunted. “Go to court soon?”
“For any hope of success at court, you need money enough to grease the courtiers’ hands, and a suit of decent broadcloth at the least. I would say satin, save that this is the English rather than the French court….”
He looked at me shrewdly. “You’re thinking, you should leave us now we are in London, Rochefort-san. Exception is, we’re still a difficulty for you.”
Saburo made a wide shrugging motion.
“How long before it’s no matter whether some lord-sama tortures out what I know? And she know? Or, always matter?”
“That,” I admitted, “is a question I’ve been asking myself, Messire Saburo.”
I had a momentary analepsis, seeing again the decapitated head that thudded down into the sand beside me. It was not that I trusted the man of Nihon, or took him to be honourable as I would understand it; more that his ways were strange enough that I thought it difficult for an enemy to suborn him without it being obvious.
He will follow his own interests, true.
And I ought to be cautious of developing too much sympathy for this foreign duelist, destitute, and far from home.
I said, “Monsieur, I would not have blamed any man for seeing odds of twelve to two, or twelve to one, and deciding to make up thirteen or fourteen on the other side. Even I cannot kill twelve men in a fair sword and dagger fight. I admit that, if not for you, I would now be dead back in Normandy.”
He first smiled, and then inclined his head in admission; both gestures very small and subtle.
I added, “As it stands, I’m currently committed to the foolishness of not having killed either of you. So much is at stake that I can’t trust you from my sight.”
It was a relief to speak at least this much with no double motive—to treat him with even this much of a gentleman’s behaviour. It has been many years since I could behave so.
And why do I think of that, now?
“What about me!” Dariole demanded.
My mood shattered. Chill wind whipped the ends of my hair into my face, undeterred by the hat brim. I looked down at her where she walked with her arms folded across her body.
“What about you, mademoiselle?”
“I—hey! You ought to still call me ‘monsieur.’”
“You expect to pass for a man, here?”
“Why not?
You
do!”
I could be thankful, I reflected as I watched Mlle Dariole wheezing herself into incapacity at her own jest, that M. Saburo’s grasp of French was as yet poor to non-existent.
She added finally, “Messire, I’d have thought whatever’s the local equivalent of Les Halles would be where you wanted to go.”
The equivalent names came back to me effortlessly after six years: Southwark, and the Liberty of Bankside, on the other side of the river.
“You’re right, Monsieur Dariole. That is the type of place that an agent would hide. For that very reason…let Marie de Medici’s agents search Southwark while I’m in a respectable quartier of London.”
She responded only with a sound like a mare’s soft snort.
I had spoken no more than ten words together to Mlle Dariole during our crossing of the sea that the English call the Channel. It irked me to realise that she did not notice this, or notice that I was again addressing her—that she was so beguiled with her new “demon” that M. Rochefort was quite abandoned.
That both moved me internally to sardonic laughter, and angered me.
I should not care what this sexually lax young woman does or does not do!
I should not find myself—as now—watching her lithe, epicene figure as she strides through the London mud, pushing between apprentices, shop-men, clergy, and women out to shop; gesturing as she floods the air with her chatter to the samurai. Least of all should I look at her weather-stained linen doublet and consider that it contains her woman’s white paps, which I have never seen, and now will not….
I am bedeviled by women!
I found myself chewing at my lip as I walked behind the woman and the man of Nihon.
Ten days, and all I have of Paris is ship-board rumour
. I
must
make contacts, as soon as I safely can. I can take no action until I have sound knowledge.
The two curved short scabbards of the foreigner’s swords stuck out, making an odd shape of his cloak; I had noted them jammed through the cloth sash that wrapped his waist, in such a way that they did not fall. To a man used to the long scabbards of rapiers, he might seem to be unarmed. Dariole was not dressed richly enough to be a magnet to the cut-purse. I myself would look to be nothing more than any other street-ruffian with a Saxony rapier and hat worn in the French style.
Mlle Dariole came to a halt, where three narrow and two wider roads opened into a space. We were among better houses, now, with the ground floors of stone and only the upper of brick and plaster, and a fair way from the agues that would attend being close to the city’s river.
She frowned. “I remembered it bigger….”
“You will introduce me as ‘M. Herault.’ A good Huguenot name. For now, M. Saburo and I will await you here.”
“Giving orders, messire?” Her voice sounded mild, but her eye glinted white, turning towards me. “You want me to hand your ass to you again?”
The coldness of the Normandy shoreline came back to me with fierce impact. I found I desired to slap her, as one does a woman, not strike her as one does a man.
“Mademoiselle…was I ever truly defeated?”
“Were you—”
“You must admit: you are a woman.” I raked her up and down with my gaze. She stood no higher than my collar-bone.
I decided to speak of what I had been considering on board ship:
I could break her with my bare hands
. “Mademoiselle, think: some part of me must always have sensed that—and held back. How else, despite any skill, could a weak woman defeat a strong man?”
“Held back.” She repeated the words flatly. “Messire, you’re an idiot. Is this why I didn’t find you sneaking up behind me at the ship’s rail and pushing me over? You actually think you can beat me?”
Her eyes were bright with mockery. My breath came harsh in my chest. The insolence of her look made me clench as if all of me were a fist. “I must have known!”
She shifted her stance—and I moved. Moved as a man does by habit, to put himself and his sword in the most advantageous place. Her eyes creased into slits in the brilliance of the May sun. Her face spoke a taunt she did not voice.