Mary Gentle (33 page)

“Who sent you here? Who told you about me?”

Wet snail-tracks marked her wrinkled eyes. She sounded breathless, as well she might, with my hand still about her throat.

“No man sent me. Unless God did. Long ago! I found the place, and waited. It’s all true. Because here you are!”

She looked up at me with eyes that I swear glowed in the lantern light. I realised I had slackened my grip. She regained her footing on the sandy floor.

“Valentin Rochefort!” Her gaze moved up and down me in a way that made me feel curiously discomfited. “I did not know you would be so tall—or so strong. And a skilled swordsman, that I might have guessed; I calculated you would be a soldier—that is all those pages, over there. Ostrega! And a brave man, and a clever one. You did not run from the witch; you sought her out. It is such a pleasure, and I am so relieved, and you will forgive a religieux her words, but this is…a miracle!”

Her ancient face looked, for a moment, like a child’s; a small child who has been given a gift for her saint’s-day or Twelfth Night.

“I am not used to being looked at in quite such a way,” I observed, standing undecided for a moment. “Why does every man—and now woman!—appear to think me some villain or hero that Fate brings them?”

Her smile curved into cheerfulness. “But no! There’s nothing
special
about you, Valentin. You’re a very ordinary man. You happen to be in a useful place, at a crucial time. That is what makes you a miracle!”

I confess I felt myself almost deflated.

“Fate has not chosen me?”

“Well, you are not to be France’s second Pucelle, one supposes.” Her lips moved as if she suppressed laughter. “I do not think you would make a splendid woman in armour, Valentin.”

“You are perhaps correct….” I did not sheath my sword. With my other hand, I felt in my breeches for the slit to my pocket-bag, and drew out a clean kerchief. I held it out to her. After a moment, she took it in a quivering hand.

She did not wipe her face. She folded the linen swiftly on a diagonal, and put it on her head, tying the corners under her chin, making something that if neither coif nor wimple, did at least cover her naked hair.

“Sit down, madame.”

“I am used to Suor Caterina. ‘Sister Caterina.’” She sank down to the cave floor and settled on the sand, gathering her multitudinous petticoats about her, so that I could not see her bare feet. Her chest rose and fell swiftly; I wondered if she might be about to have a fit and die. Suddenly she put her hands to her face, and then brought them down again, uncovering an uncommon stubborn expression.

“This.” I indicated the rat’s nest of papers. “Is all trash, Suor.”

“I knew this wouldn’t be easy. I was right.” She spoke as if I had not. “I am
right
. This was the test—if you didn’t come, if you weren’t Valentin Rochefort, if you were the character of a man who kills troublesome old women…I had no way to know: I’ve calculated you ‘soldier’ and ‘assassin’ and ‘spy.’ As to your behaviour, it seemed much more probable that you should be a mere murderer, not an honourable man.”

I shifted uneasily at “honourable.” “Are you confessing a failure of your foretelling? You know I have killed, but not whether I’m honourable, as men go?”

“I calculate a man’s actions.” She wiped her withered-apple face with her fingertips. “Not his mind when he does them. There is nothing in the Nolan Formulae to show a man’s heart.”

I stood very still, things stirring in the back of my mind. “I am less concerned with honour than you think….”

Squatting, I checked the lantern. Light for another half-hour. Should I go back to the mill? Is there something happening for which this is a planned diversion?

Except that I can think of nothing which will threaten
me,
rather than Fludd’s faction. And if his conspiracy falls down about his ears, my heart will not break.

The old woman smiled. It was obscure to me why an elderly nun whom I had just manhandled should regard me both with apparent affection and amusement.

“I work with the same calculations as the London Master, Roberto,” she said. “He and I were both students of the Nolan. I am hiding nothing from you, Valentin.”

She spoke a passable good French, with perhaps an accent of the Veneto, but she might as well have been speaking M. Saburo’s Nihonese.

“When you say ‘the London Master,’ you mean Robert Fludd.”

“Yes.”

“And this ‘Nolan’?”

“Magister Giordano Bruno, the Neapolitan; dead these ten years.”

The name roused no memories in me. “What did you study with him?”

“Heresy.” Her surprisingly sweet smile blossomed on the ruined face. “And the black art of mathematics.”

“Which leads you to prophesy?”

“Yes.”

That Fludd and this woman speak in similar terms means little, I thought. It is not anything unusual: France and the Low Countries have been full of sects and societies for as long as I have lived. Anabaptists, Brownists, Kabbahlists, Puritans. And now mathematicians.

Half-humorously, I enquired, “And what are
you
going to tell me, to convince me that you foresee the future?”

She gave me a stern look that brought to mind her claim to be a nun.

“I can tell you,” she said, “what has happened to Signore Gabriel Santon.”

G
abriel?

It stopped me like a blow to the chest.

“Madame, you have spent ten years in this cave? I believe not! Evidently you came by way of Paris on your road to
England
.”

She regarded me with stubborn refusal.

“You can
tell
me about Gabriel,” I added sardonically. “But there is no way that I can check the truth of it, which I suspect you count on.”

Her expression didn’t falter. “I know how it seems, Valentin. I thought this was the one thing that you could not know, that you would
want
to know. One thing I can tell you in thanks.”

“Thanks?” I said, incredulous.

“There was a great probability that you would come here. But a much smaller probability that you would be a man not willing to kill a mad old woman…I would like to do something
for
you, Valentin.”

The level chill of the caverns sank into my flesh.

If I ask her for any news of Gabriel, it will indicate a belief in her that I do not have.

I found myself oddly reluctant to gain her confidence that way, even were she mad enough to credit me.

“You and Robert Fludd,” I began, insistently.

She shrugged. “We were both students of the Nolan, Giordano Bruno. There were other students. Rome called us ‘Giordanisti.’ I believe they thought us a species of secret Hermeticist society.”

I shrugged. “The trouble with secret magical societies, madame, is that just because they hold to false ideas about the nature of the world, that does not mean the secret society itself does not exist. Or, that men will not take action on the basis of what they
believe
to be true. If you and Fludd and other men believe in some heresy of this Bruno…well, then, you do. But if I ask you to forecast what has become of my servant, that implies I give credit to your ideas, and not your mere existence. Madame, I regret I do not.”

The old woman reached and put her fingers on my arm, just above the gauntlet-cuff of my glove. I could feel her press down on the woollen cloth, against the muscle of my forearm.

“You needn’t commit yourself to any belief of mine, Valentin. You can consider it the ravings of a mad old woman. God knows, the rest of the Giordanisti have been lost now, to madness, or drink, or the sin of suicide…”

She seemed to collect herself.

“When King Henri died, Gabriel Santon at first got sanctuary in the Bastille with the Duc de Sully. He is now alone, in the Chatelet. Valentin,
no!
—he’s neither hurt, nor put to the question.” The old woman gripped me harder for a moment, then released my arm. “The Queen Regent took him out from the Duc’s train at the first Parliament, the day after the assassination. Now she doesn’t quite dare inflame matters between herself and the Duc, so merely holds him as a prisoner, while the Duc presses for his return.”

“You’re well informed about French politics for a woman who has spent the past decade in a cave.”

She smiled, her expression teasing. “I am. But I didn’t calculate the state of France. I read of it in a pamphlet printed here, before they were shipped up to London yesterday. I will never neglect a mundane source, just because I know how to use Bruno’s Formulae.”

“Convenient,” I remarked; sarcasm possibly too prominent in my tone.

“I didn’t learn of Gabriel Santon in a pamphlet! Cielo, Valentin, I calculate him a soldier, he’ll survive a prison!”

Gabriel in the Chatelet? The thought left a sour taste. Only a matter of time before they will put him to the question, if so.

And if M. de Sully can’t get a client freed from prison, his power is
greatly
lessened….

“Gabriel Santon is likely dead in one of the Faubourg kennels,” I said harshly. “I can verify none of this, Suor Caterina. You know that.”

She felt for her rosary. The lantern’s light moved with the air in the cave. Shadows chased over her face.

“It’s as well,” she said. “Even my meeting you here, Valentin, by the knowledge I’ve gained this way, makes my further calculations difficult…I believe that the act of calculation
itself
makes the future uncertain.”

Her dark eyes shifted. “When two people, myself and the London Master, both set about calculations for a single event—then, how possible it is to bring about that future becomes…cloudy. And so I can tell you little more about the Duc de Sully, and nothing more about Monsieur Santon.”

If she had said
nothing more yet,
I would have assumed that to be the hook within the bait.

“I have a problem with unsupported testimony,” I remarked. “One woman’s word, without evidence, is worth nothing.”

“One
man’s
word.” The old Italian woman looked up from the water-shaped limestone. “Worse than nothing. With Ravaillac dead, who is to say that the Queen Regent desired him to kill Henri, except you? And you’re known as Sully’s man.”

It chimed so well with my own unspoken thoughts—put aside until I might consider matters at home more fully—that it was ten heartbeats before I realised what she had said.

I stared at her. “Dear good God—
is there anybody who doesn’t know!
”

Exasperation does not, perhaps, lend a man all the gravitas he could wish.

“Ostrega!” Suor Caterina giggled. “It must seem so, to you. I apologise, Valentin. I was thinking aloud. I’ve become used to talking to myself here.”

“Or perhaps Fludd rides down here to talk to you? He must, by his own claims, know you’re here. Or if he does not, is that not proof positive of his charlatan-hood?”

Her laughter faded. “He calculated me long ago as one of the Giordanisti who make their home in a cave, in rags, and so must be mad—this isn’t the first such cave I’ve lived in. Now…you’ll be familiar with that ruse of war, to hide where the enemy won’t look for you, because they
know
it’s theirs? I’ve made as few predictions about this place as I can, of late years, for fear he’ll find his calculations about it becoming cloudy, and see me under his nose.”

The woman calling herself Suor Caterina stood up slowly, and with care.

“I’ll show you a way out of the back of the caves,” she added. “Such a thing will be useful for you to know.”

I did not entirely discount the possibility of a dozen men with swords in some back corner of the caverns, but I nodded and followed, ready enough with sword and lantern for any ambush that might lurk in these white-and-ivory passages, among the glittering minerals and the still pools.

“Do I take it you prophesy an escape for me, through here?” I asked sourly, taking my landmarks. “I promise you, I don’t plan to be here long enough to need one.”

“Few men read the future.”

She sounded slightly smug. I shortened my stride, so as not to outdistance her. Half in jest, I said, “But you do—and Monsieur Fludd. Or is yours yet another method of astrology to his?”

“You’ll have heard something from the London Master, but this is the truth of it.” She spoke as she walked, sure-footed on the convex rock floor. “The calculations were devised back in the ’80s by Giordano Bruno the Nolan and his students. I’d been a follower of his for some years before they imprisoned him. That was in Venice, in ’92….”

Blackness lay ahead, deceiving my eyes until I saw a curl of light reflected, and knew it for water.

“The method was being worked out.” The old woman’s stride did not falter; she walked on into the water. “The equations yielded results better for a hundred years in the future than for a present today, but even so, some present-day results could be calculated….”

I moved close to the water’s edge as her voice faded, holding the light higher. Beneath the surface, crystalline pinnacles gleamed. The pool or stream went into the dark, out of sight. Caterina’s back was diminishing ahead, into darkness, moving more slowly now. I guessed that the depth increased. If it was indeed the River Axe, both the current’s speed and the possibility of deep caverns beneath us did not entice me.

“Presumably, signora, you do not intend to drown us?” I eased myself into the water, feeling it cold even through the leather of my boots.

Her chuckle came out of the darkness. “Feel below the water. There is a rope to guide you. I don’t need it. I have been here long and long.”

I sheathed my rapier, and lifted the lantern for a last look at landmarks on this shore. The light showed me black and red patches on the cave-walls, some coincidentally taking the shape of beasts. With my free hand, I felt under the water’s still surface. I touched a taut rope.
Anchored under the water, out of sight; she is suspicious—and perhaps rightly so.

Within moments, the light shone only on water.

The cave walls were lost outside the lantern’s reach. I began to slide the soles of my boots carefully over the rock surface, under the water. For all the guide-rope reassured me—dripping cold now that I brought it up to the surface in my grip—I perceived how easily a man might lose his bearings here.

“The Nolan Formulae,” Caterina said, her voice a whisper ahead in the dark. “It’s to my credit that I devised a way they could be used close at hand, to foretell the near days. Robert Fludd, whom Master Bruno had met in England, refined it again, to see further: four or five centuries ahead.”

Her form emerged from darkness, waiting for me. She turned her head, gazing back. “Our first task was to stop the execution of Master Bruno by the church: we held out for nine years, and then failed.”

“If you knew the future, how could you fail?”

I expected her answer to be Fludd’s:
A man may know all, but not do all.

She nodded and smiled, as a dominie will with a boy who asks a clever question, and began to walk on beside me. She must push against the water’s weight, it coming up nearly to her hips.

“Bruno’s Formulae give only what
may
happen. Puts into mathematical calculation what is probable, and what is less likely, and what is all-but-impossible. If I desire an all-but-impossible thing, I can calculate what sequence of remarkable events would first need to come to pass, before it can happen. Then those events can be brought about by the actions of men.”

Water numbed me cold from the knees down; I could not tell if it were merely temperature, or if the seams of my boots leaked. The implication of what she said came suddenly to me. “I might have
avoided
what Fludd had rehearsed for me?”

I had not meant to blurt out such an unprofessional display of anger. I chewed at my lip for a moment.

She lifted her shoulders in a very Italian shrug. “The London Master has had the ten years since Bruno burned to make his calculations. He won’t have been content with first-order calculations! Ostrega! The iterations he will have been through. All his traps will be very thoroughly laid, to make events come out to his wishes.”

The level of the water lowered, gradually; I noticed the rope grew taut, anchored to some underwater rock surface as it must be. I let it slip through my fingers, following the old woman up the shallowing slope. She dripped, stepping ashore. I adjusted the hilt of my rapier, where the flat black ribbon-guard and pommel bit into my hip. Every thrust, every ward,
known.
…

The lantern illuminated another cave. I followed her, past smooth pinnacles. She pointed ahead. I realised that the slope increased—that we climbed, passing between narrowing walls. I held the lantern down close to the steep, dusty rock-face. No tool-marks on the stone. Limestone worn down by water.

I thought that appearing suddenly from the back of Wookey would fit my brief as Fludd’s scout, should Madame Lanier observe me. All the same, I should prefer not to be seen. If I
must
follow Mr Secretary Cecil’s orders and forward this conspiracy, I have a liking for an ace-card slipped down the top of my boot.

I saw natural light ahead, not far short of mid-afternoon. The grit of a short, steep climb grated under my boots. The Italian woman scrambled up the rock-slope in front of me with unexpected sinewy speed, and I emerged behind her into the open air, and weather as much like Spring as it gets in England.

Ahead and to the right-hand side, a bank of woodland. I shot a glance to the left—dust-heavy hedges and green corn shoots ran down a slope to flat open territory: the Somerset Levels.
And so that must be south.

No peasants, fortunately; the English peasant being more violent and undisciplined than the French, and not much cowed by a man’s rank.

The old woman walked a few yards into the woods ahead, and seated herself on a fallen trunk under other silver birch trees, breathing hard, and wringing water out of her petticoats.

I went on, relying on the heat to dry my boots and hose, finding a few animal-paths. Within moments, I pushed through solid brush; looking suddenly down on a slope that dipped into a steep-sided valley, with a disused track at the bottom.

Returning, I found the Italian woman still present—and not, as I had briefly entertained the hope, the result of my banging my head on some rock-protrusion. By sunlight, she looked dirtier and plumper. Her smile was both ugly and beautiful. I could see her as an abbess. Or, more likely, some elderly nun who was the bane of her Abbess.