Mary Gentle (36 page)
Authors: A Sundial in a Grave-1610
Translator’s Note
This document is the shortest of the documents not in M. Rochefort’s handwriting that have been put in with the Memoirs.
It’s also the one most damaged by fire, and therefore the one most subject to computer reconstruction. I’ve noted places where reconstruction fails with ellipses, […], and put the most conjectural reconstructions in bold type.
I
t’s difficult to remember, now, when everything hurts, and my hands are arthritic knots that can’t hold a quill-pen, that once I was capable of drawing a rapier and dagger from their scabbards while falling, and bounding up, and springing back into a fight. But it is true. I could and I did.
Write down everything, just as I tell it you.
Write down everything as I speak it.
Yes.
It’s the sin of pride, Father. For a woman, when she enjoys […]
[…] That’s better. As you have it there, on the paper.
If I can live with it happening to me, priest, you can live with writing it down.
[Two further lines scored out and burned]
[…] I was young, then. Paris and Zaton’s eating-house were a long way behind me. I ate in the Silver Martlet, with those from that company of players known as “Prince Henry’s Men.” All men and me, a woman alone; my protection was that I could have killed any one of them.
The samurai asked my help to go to James’s court. I didn’t want to admit I could help him. Sewing is a woman’s skill, not seemly in a young man. Then I was confused because the task seemed to need no skill! None of his clothes-pieces were shaped cloth, they were all plain long strips the width of my forearm from elbow to wrist. Then there
was
skill, about the collar and the shoulders. I sat on the floor of the lodging-house in Dead Man’s Place and swore, pricking my fingers, making what he called kimono and kosode and kagashina.
Monsieur Saburo bought wooden pattens and wore them over his feet, not over shoes like a Christian. His robes were all in layers, but splendid when he put them all on. I envied him his cattan blades, but he wouldn’t let me duel with them. He left for Whitehall-palace, for Mr Secretary again, leaving me to guard the kabuto helmet—which he sometimes called that, and sometimes akoda-nari, and either way wouldn’t leave alone, and couldn’t take with him to court yet.
At that age I’d have told you how ill in body I felt. My night before had been a long one at dice. I put an old man’s furred gown on over my shirt, shivered, drank small beer, and sat on my cot-bed to clean and sharpen my rapier.
No, Father. I’d been travelling alone for more than two years, by then. Remember, I grew up with five brothers? I’ve never forgotten how strong men are when I don’t have deadly weapons, even now when I’m old and it doesn’t matter. Half my joy in humbling or killing came with knowing how my skill put me beyond men’s reach.
Many a young man could say the same. A sword is a great leveller.
I cleaned, I polished, I sharpened my swept-hilt rapier, that I won from an Italian after three nights at dice because I was determined to have it, once having felt the superb balance. I undid all, the buckles on the hanger, the hanger and strap from the belt, so that I could oil the leather with neat’s-foot oil. If your life stood or fell by the weapons you held, Father, you wouldn’t trust another man to maintain or sharpen them.
At home it would be June, and hotter. Even in
I fell asleep over my weapons in the morning sun.
I don’t feel guilty. Everyone makes mistakes. I don’t blush when I think of it. I did, for a time afterwards. Then I made myself cold. I didn’t think the Astrologer-Doctor would know exactly when I’d do something stupid, why would I? He was Rochefort’s problem.
They must have drugged the dogs or bribed the handlers. Men came in through the window and kicked my weapons away, and rammed my head back against the plaster before I could wake up properly and get my dagger.
One man cuffed me against the wall, against an oak beam. I thought all the bones of my back broke. Maybe I spewed. I’m not certain. I must have been dragged out of Dead Man’s Place like a drunk with his “friends” holding him up.
There were tall stone walls. I don’t know if it was a long or short time later. The men had hold of me, my feet dragging in the mud. You could see the sky between towers. I couldn’t see when we went inside by a dark door. Their lantern dazzled me. For the first time I thought the word
torture
.
One man pulled out my shirt, and put his hand up inside to pinch my breasts, leaving bruises. My bare feet froze on the stone floor. I knew no man would think anything except that this was my fault. I was still virgin; I’d lain with men before, but used the back passage so as not to get with child. Father, you know from confession that I like that better. If I were inclined to carnal intercourse at this advanced age, I dare say I still should—although old people have other concerns, usually, about that area.
In a stone corridor inside the tower, one man pulled a door open and the other threw me through it. That was when I realised there weren’t more than two men. No more than two. I could have killed them in seconds, Father, if I’d had a sword. They came the one minute that I didn’t, the one moment when I was too stupefied to run away.
Then I knew I deserved everything that would happen to me. My father and our priest told me, from when I was small, that it would happen to me one day, to be put in my place as a woman.
Yes, but that’s why you’re my confessor, Father.
I fell face-down on wet, sharp-smelling straw. Urine. Light from a high window.
Nothing but straw: no fire, no irons, no thumb-breakers.
The door creaked. One man knelt down by it, holding it closed, and with his eye to the crack, watching outside. The other came over and put his knee in my back, and pulled my robe up. I remember to this day. He was a fair-haired man, his beard close-shaven. His flesh smelled of the outdoors and horses.
The other man had a dark beard, and very bright eyes in the low light. I remember he whispered.
What if he finds out, Luke?
The man Luke said,
He knows, or he would have ordered us not to.
I screamed. I tried to fight as if I had a dagger, but with my bare hands. The man called Luke put his palm on the back of my head and smacked my face onto the flagstones. Part of a tooth cracked and came away in my mouth.
Luke had bitten black nails on his hands. He scratched my breasts. He used his nails to tear up my thighs when he pushed them apart as he lay on top of my back, crushing me breathless. He kept my thighs forced open with his knees.
Father, I was a virgin as a woman. I was very tight.
He forced one of his hands up inside me and his ragged nails cut me in there, so that I began to bleed.
That made me slippery enough for him to lie with me.
22
T
he way a sword sits in the hand is a comfort, even when a man is cleaning it. I wiped the flat of the Italian rapier’s blade, holding it up to the light and examining the edge.
This will need sharpening
.
The body of the steel shone silver, with an undertone of grey in the grain and scratches. It held blue in the depths of it, under this natural light, the polish on the steel mirroring the sky outside.
Such a beautiful object. And so different—or is it
no different?
—when the metal is smeared with clots and runnels of blood. Even that thin film of red that comes from a straight thrust has ended or ruined a man’s life. Yet I rarely feel better than when I am holding a rapier or broadsword, a dagger or stiletto.
A man may fall in hate as swiftly as he falls in love, with the same intensity, and in the same momentary space of time.
I will kill the Englishman Robert Fludd
.
I lifted her hollow-ground Italian blade up and inhaled, gently. It had the metallic, half-burned scent to the metal that always takes me back in memory to bladesmiths’ forges.
Church clocks chimed outside the window. The noise of women calling children and apprentices in to their noon meal sounded as loud in the Southwark streets as in Paris. After stabling Fludd’s horse covertly, I had walked back to Dead Man’s Place—chickens and dogs got out of the way of my boots, and no man failed to give me the wall as I passed. It may have been evident that it was preferable to step down into the kennel than give me excuse to vent my emotions.
I found the weapons of Mlle Arcadie de Montargis de la Roncière laid out on her cot-bed, along with the Nihonese man’s helmet. Still in place from a week ago.
The helmet, not forged in one piece of steel as a Spanish morion or caboset is, but made up of many narrow sections, was painted in bright enamels, catching the stripes of sun that came in around the half-shuttered window. I thought, I have not seen it out of Saburo’s company until today.
Where is he? Have they taken him, too?
I must see Cecil. In a moment….
I sat down and cleaned her swept-hilt rapier, her dagger, and put together her gear; the scabbard going into the hanger with the buckles pulled closed, the fittings slid back onto the belt. The leather under my fingers felt still slick with a residue of oil, as it does when it has not long ago been cleaned.
A line marked a border between that leather which had been oiled and that still dry, halfway around the thin waist-belt.
I will kill Fludd. And the men who took her.
“Better yourself, if you want the real culprit,” I said aloud, and sat with my hands for a moment full of the loops and curves of straps, staring at the stained plaster of the wall without seeing it.
What happened in this room?
I took up her swept-hilt rapier again, stroking the sharpening stone at an angle along the edge. The repetitive sound seemed tiny in the empty room. My fingers found it difficult to be at ease on her hilt. Her hand will be something smaller than mine is; the grip is shorter.
Pin-points of silver dazzled off the curves of the ring-guards.
The room door swung open.
I sprang up, her sword in my hand.
In the half-light of the shuttered room, I caught profile and bulk in the doorway.
The Nihonese man, linen clothing wide at the shoulder, his hair clubbed and tied up in a foreign fashion, the two curved scabbards of his weapons thrust through his cloth belt.
I got out, “
Where is she?
”
His hand went nowhere near the hilt of the cattan-blades. Taking two steps forward into the room, he dropped down on his knees hard enough to shake the wide oak planks. Before I could react, he put his hands palm-down on the floorboards, and dipped his head down between them, his brow resting against the wood.
Until then, I had harboured some faint hope.
He spoke loudly and roughly, his expression not visible. “I failed in duty. She is my servant; I owe her obligation, protection. Giri. Fail!”
The hot, half-shuttered room smothered me; I gained barely enough control to keep from swinging my foot back and kicking him in the face.
“I cannot offer death.” Saburo sat back up on his heels, looking at me with tar-black eyes. “Only when I Hidetada return. Then you take my head. I apologise; I beg forgive.”
A sudden electric shiver in my skin brought me to the realisation: I am standing here as she was standing, he is kneeling as I was kneeling—or as I wished to kneel to her. To prostrate myself.
This is not the same as with Mlle Dariole. My prick does not respond to the Nihonese man on his knees before me. That absurd, delicious, shameful pang in the gut at submission is not there.
At least I can still tell the difference. Now, when it may all be irrelevant—
I threw her rapier down on the cot-bed, crossed the room, and flung the shutters fully open. Warm air flooded in, and the racket of dogs; sixty or more of them suddenly barking at the disturbance. Did she depend on the bull-and bear-baiting dogs for a warning?
“Where have you looked for her?”
The short, broad man got up off the floor. He eyed me as if there were something he could not make out. “Wherever I can walk. London is not as big as Osaka, Edo. But too big. I ask Seso-sama, help me to look for my page. He thinks, not the enemy’s fault. Thinks, a young man out drinking and fucking will come back soon.”
“A week. A week is not ‘soon.’ She’s
hurt!
” Crossing the room, I threw down the letter the heretic priest gave to me. “Can you imagine them taking her without needing to incapacitate her?”
The samurai glanced at her weapons, on top of the men’s clothes that littered her cot-bed. Following his gaze, I noted her ruff still present, grime around the inside, and the linen drooping for lack of starch.
“They must—they took her all but naked!”
“Kimono.” Saburo tugged at his own sleeve. “Heavy. Animal skin—fur.”
“Ah.
Yes
. I know it.”
I saw in my mind’s eye Mademoiselle Dariole, over the chops and small beer of the breakfast table, bundled up in a furred gown fifty years out of fashion, pallid with the night’s dicing and drinking. Those few mornings before I left for the provinces, I had maliciously sought to impose on the process of her recovery with wit. While she could rarely manage a reply in the same vein, she had at least never been short of verbal abuse. If I had paid attention, I would have felt suspicious at how easily those interchanges amused me. And why.
Any man may be angry when an associate of his is ill-treated by his enemy. Especially if it is an associate for whom he has, once, felt a perverse and guilty infatuation.
No, I will not lie—one for whom he still, disastrously, feels so.
Saburo broke the silence, his speech garbled from shock. “Could be, the enemy has killed her already—don’t take the chance she escape, then.
You
can’t take the chance she’s not alive. Must continue with Furada his work.”
Slowly, I nodded. “That’s true.”
The samurai frowned; an expression that pulled his brows and the corners of his mouth down.
I continued, “That, however, will not stop me finding her.”
His frown vanished. He jerked his head in a nod of satisfaction. “We look.”
“Yes. We look. Quickly.”
I reached down to pick up her rapier, and slot it into the scabbard; speaking without looking at the samurai.
“This was done to me once, by the Queen Regent Marie de Medici, using M.de Sully. What kind of an imbecile must a man be, not to see that it can be done to him twice?”
Upon the Sunday, the young man Henry Stuart made his triumphal entrance into London by water to Westminster, and upon the Tuesday he was made Prince of Wales in the Abbey. On the Sunday, also, a water-masque played out on the Thames-river:
Tethys’ Festival
—of which I recognised but one thing, and that apparently stolen from Madame Lanier: “We poor engineers for shadows,” who “frame only images of no result.”
She perhaps refers to we poor mortals,
I thought acidly,
and not to M. Robert Fludd….
The practical result of the festivities was that, try as a man might, he could not get to speak with Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, until the Wednesday. Even the new entrée of M. Saburo to James’s court could not effect anything quicker.
Reluctant to cool my heels before then—driven, in fact, by a passionate, impatient fear that I did not in the least desire to examine—I occupied the time in checking over the most obvious locations for a kidnapped young woman.
“Which must include Mademoiselle’s Cousin Guillaume,” I observed to Saburo, as we found the streets of More Gate all but deserted on Sunday, June third; every citizen down at the river to welcome their prince.
Surprisingly, I could hear the noises of festivities inside the Markham house; the sound of voices, and women laughing, and a viol and rebec in concert. Hammering on the door brought me, finally, not one of the lackeys who had thrown out Mademoiselle Dariole, but a man with a dyed-chestnut beard that I recognised to be William Markham himself.
“Well, sir?” His eyes moved; he shot glances behind me, up and down the street, and stared at the cloaked Nihonese man with a more than usual suspicion. Clearly he did not recognise either of us.
Before I could answer, a woman spun into view down the sunlit room behind him.
I did not take her to be a woman who spun or danced or cavorted in the normal way of things; she had rusty hair and a horse-face, and must have been past thirty-five years of age. The brilliance of the smile she gave us made her beautiful for this moment.
“Is it guests?” she asked William Markham, looking at me curiously. “I thought all our friends were here?”
A younger man appeared around the doorway, fair and in his twenties; muttered, “Come away!” and led her off by her arm in a determined manner.
“What do you want?” Markham demanded icily of me.
He had been a handsome man once, so much was visible in his remains. Sweat stood on his pale forehead and under his eyes. Possibly it was his age, but I thought it not the heat of the day, or even the dancing I heard going on within doors.
Shifting my stance enabled me to see casually further inside the room. “A boy came here, a while back. Your men threw him out.”
His suspicion gave way to startled surprise. I had to bite back an expression of disappointment.
Whatever bothers him, it is not Mademoiselle ‘Arcadie.’
“He’s robbed you, has he?” William Markham gave me a look of amusement. “The cozeners and Abraham Men are getting younger every day. He attempted it with me; I was too clever for him.”
“I have reason to desire to speak to him.” Although it was useless to ask, I added the question: “You haven’t seen him again?”
“No, sir, or I would have called the parish constable. He is no part of my family, I assure you, and has no right to the Markham name. Now, if you’ll excuse me….”
We made the appropriate flourishes and farewells. Saburo, silent, walked away down the cobbled street beside me.
“He lie?” the samurai remarked hopefully.
“Not about Dariole, I think.” I frowned. “Although a man might call this an odd day to have a feast at home, with every other city family down at the river. And then again….” I had made note of this, through the open door. “To what festivities does a man usually invite a priest?”
“Priest?”
“A heretic one,” I corrected myself. “Messire Saburo, it had the look of a wedding party to me, and not one that wants itself known—else why choose the day of the Prince’s celebrations? But as for whether that would concern Dariole….”
“They not want strangers.”
“True enough. Unless Fludd knows Markham, mentioned a family duty…no.” I shook my head. “I’m missing something, and this is not it.”
Walking on through the eerily deserted streets—which reminded me unhappily of towns emptied by plague—I came to a dead halt, and seized Saburo’s arm, and pointed over the roof-tops.
“There.”
The samurai brought his brows down in the most ferocious scowl. “What?”
“The Tower.
Northumberland
is prisoner in the Tower.” I looked down at Saburo. “The Earl who is Fludd’s supposed patron—well, whether he is the puppet, or Fludd himself, either way: what better place to keep a woman imprisoned? They say he has his servants in and out of the place. If a man were to bring her in, secretly, conceal her from the guards….”
Saburo gave a sharp nod. “Maybe. If so, how we’re find her? And how we get her out?”
The answer was not one that I liked. “It means more waiting, monsieur, but, since visible attempts at entry or bribery might move them to kill her—
if
she’s there—we have only one card to play. Cecil.”
Walking on down the noisome road, Saburo broke out of a brief reverie, and prodded me sharply in the arm.
“Monsieur?” I said mildly, having ascertained that we were not in the process of being attacked.
“Tower is not just prison?”
“Ah. True, a man might appear to go to the menagerie, or see the armouries or the jewels—but one sighting by Northumberland’s Luke or John and I’m recognised.”