Mary Gentle (42 page)

She stared at me.

“If you’ll accept it,” I said, “my apology consists of time and opportunity. Kill Robert Fludd. When you’re done—then, we’ll go.”

Her face twisted, as if she would have wept, but could not; hate and confusion and hurt all visibly present. “You…got obsessed, Rochefort, didn’t you? A woman kicks your arse a few times—well, more than a few times—and you decide you get off on kissing her boots.”

She didn’t pause for a response. I could not have given her one; my breath gone.

“Because of this—perverse—thing you have with women, Fludd could blackmail you. Right? Otherwise it’d be, oh, Mlle Dariole: just another person who got in the way of spy business. That’s
pah!
and a shrug, isn’t it? And now you feel guilty. That’s not worth
shit
.”

Her face flushed; not merely from the heat enclosed by the pavilion’s canvas.

“I don’t have anything to say to you, Rochefort. Door’s over there.”

One week became two.

My leg healed enough that I might walk without the help of the silver-topped stick. James Stuart remained resolutely away from the south-west of his kingdom; Dariole avoided my presence.

News came in by way of Fludd’s messengers: that his Majesty might travel south to Cranbourne Chase—and that therefore he, Robert Fludd, should soon send the young Prince to join me, so that an invitation could be extended to bring James Stuart westwards to the masque.

By the end of June, when I could exercise myself in combat practise again, a day came that I found Dariole still sitting and watching when I walked off the field from fighting
en chemise
.

I still carried my green-and-gold silk doublet over my shoulder. Awkwardly, with a wide stretch of my shoulders, I hauled the garment on, and halted, tying points and re-buckling my sword-belt. Dariole’s gaze, raised to mine, had nothing of pathos in it. That this must be handled correctly, I knew. If I but knew
how!
I thought.

From my informants in the players’ encampment, I knew that Mlle Dariole had occupied her time by interrogating (in no very subtle way) any man she thought might have an idea as to the location of Robert Fludd. Even those men who travelled between here and Aemilia Lanier at The Rose could not help.

That it would be twelve days and more since I had exchanged a word with her dried up my tongue, for all that Reason said it should not.

Dariole stood up.

Her last words excoriated me still.
Because of this—perverse—thing you have with women, Fludd could blackmail you
. And all I could have said was, Not
any
woman, mademoiselle. And that would hardly help.

Even standing, she must still look up at me. I gazed down into her face. Nothing came to me: no words of comfort or self-justification.

She pointed at the road that led north, out of Wookey Hole.

“I don’t have anything to say to
you
. But, you know what? I want to see this woman Saburo tells me about. This ‘Sister Caterina.’ Saburo says you’ll know where she is. So you’re going to take me to her. Now.”

T
he leather of saddles creaked, two stone horses ambling evenly over earth that the sun made hard as rock. Rock itself rose up to either side of us, the track running through great grey-sided clefts in the limestone hills. It was possible to see grass overgrowing the lip of the ravine, if one craned back to see up high enough.

Dariole looked all young man, in riding boots turned up to the canions of her trunk-hose, a small pie-frill ruff framing her face that the heat made pink. She rode well, controlling the bay’s desire to stray towards tufts of grass. I could read nothing in the line of her shoulders except tension.

The heat of the noon sun brought out the odour of horse, and the scent of leather from the saddle and tack, and of a sweet flower from some white blossom that ran riot in the scrub-brush to either side of the road. The cliffs on either side rose threateningly high. As the road turned, shade fell across us, even at noon. The mounts whuffled in the bee-heavy quiet. The faintest echo came back from the ravine faces.

She had ridden in silence since we rode out of Wookey, eight miles back down the road.

“Mademoiselle—” I reached out my hand.

She did not flinch, but every muscle went stiff.

A duellist is used to reading such things. I turned my offered hand, making it a gesture of emphasis. An ache twisted in my chest. It was at the same time a great and searing fury.
This, also, Robert Fludd has done to you.

“Mademoiselle, will you not tell me what you hope for, from this?”

“That’s my business.”

The chestnut stone horse lowered his head, and began to nip at grass in the shade of the great cliffs. Rock radiated heat. I eased his head up, touching a spur gently to his flank.

Her voice remained even. “Is your captain a man to put pickets out?”

“I would suppose so. Why?”

“Someone’s pointing a musket at me from halfway up that rock.”

It was not the sun that made my face pink as I stood in my saddle, waving my hat in the agreed signal.

Cecil’s cavalry troopers, under one Philip Spofforth, had indeed set pickets; after the interception below the entrance to Cheddar Gorge, we were brought to the captain. He nodded a friendly greeting.

“My lord Cecil said we might have a young man with us.” Here he nodded to Dariole. To me, he added, “She’s where she usually is; I’ll get Thomas to take you.”

The troop and horses being quartered in the gorge and attendant caves, Suor Caterina had preferred a low-roofed abandoned farm hut in the woods that backed on to it, and guarding it was the only current activity of the men. Leaves and greenery surrounded the cob-walled single room, and the trooper Thomas abandoned us outside with a mutter—as scared of the nun as Ned Field was of the Witch.

As I am of the seer, I thought.

Will she tell Dariole that Dariole is to die? Will she speak of the rape, and blame me for it?

The inside of the cob walls had been painted white, making it bright despite the tiny windows. The silver-haired woman—considerably more clean—stood at our entrance, her hands clasped under her chin.

“No,” she said, before I could speak.

Dariole questioned, “No?”

“No. You’re healthy and you heal like a young dog, signorina. What poison there was, your body overcame. And—no. The greater flux you had, on the road, at Richmond? Had it been fated by God to be born, that would have been your child.”

I grabbed Dariole by both shoulders and steered her so that she sat on the bench, rather than dropping down to the packed-earth floor. She stared at Caterina, and I could see every minute dot the sun had brought out on her cheeks under her eyes.

“I’m not carrying a child,” she said flatly.

“No. Albeit a woman need not be a seer of the future. We had midwives, staying at the convent. I learned the signs of a pregnant woman.”

I expected Dariole to burst into tears. I felt, instead, how the muscles of her shoulders went limp under my hands, and a great silent sigh went through her body.

The elderly Italian woman pushed her palms flat against the table, helping herself to rise. “But, of the other matter—shame! My Valentin!”

Standing, she reached out both her hands to Dariole.

“Cielo! But you enjoy the game much too much, little signorina. Too much to be without telling him of it!”

It was incomprehensible to me at first hearing. I began to recall certain words between us in the past.

Mlle de Montargis de la Roncière developed the pinkest of cheeks. “I don’t!”

Dariole took the nun’s hands between her own. Caterina’s were smaller, and not covered in old white scars. If you saw them together, you could not have told both—or perhaps either—as female.

“All right.” Dariole had the air of a man conceding a great deal. “Not as much as
he
does, though.”

“Ostrega! Men!”

The atmosphere between them inexplicably lightened. I could not understand why. I felt it lighten me, nonetheless.

“Pardon me,” I said feelingly, “but if I find myself de trop among you women, I will be only too pleased to remove myself!”

Both laughed.

Dariole laughed,
I thought.

And shame-facedly, at that.

“No, no; stay. Stay!” Suor Caterina gestured me towards a joint-stool in the same way that a farmer’s wife flaps her napron at hens. I seated myself with what dignity a man may manage in such a situation.

“You didn’t tell me this woman was mad.” Dariole took her hands back from the nun. She hitched herself upright on the oak bench, putting her elbows on the table.

“You have the manners of a young man in a tap-room,” I rebuked her automatically.

The glance she shot at me made me think I would have swallowed the words back if I could.
Rochefort the fool!
I apostrophised myself.

For my part, I’m willing to bring you to this woman because I think only another woman can comfort you for the rape. And now…you are not with child, and you are happy, and something passes between you that I do not understand; but what do I do? Embarrass you in front of that same woman….

“I know what you want,” Dariole said, as prompt to read my thoughts as Robert Fludd. “You want me to break down and cry in her lap. You understand what to do when women cry. But I’m not going to do that.” She looked half-defiantly at Caterina. “Am I, signora?”

“I doubt it, child.”

Dariole folded her arms across her breast, and I thought of her woman’s body inside the man’s doublet, as indeed I could not help but do, now I had her under my eye again.

“Women get their ease by tears,” I proposed, stubbornly. “Suor Caterina, the girl here does not weep in the slightest.”

“Let me guess. She says nothing of what she has suffered, but demands vengeance for it, and wants to kill the man or men responsible?” At my nod, Caterina turned her black bright eyes on Dariole. “You have learned to be a man in all things.”

I made to speak, and cut myself off. Nothing I could say would do anything but leave me in trouble, whether it were “That’s in no way the behaviour of a man!” or “But she is a woman!”

“I won’t force you to weep. Ostrega! Why should I?” She looked at Dariole’s expression and gave a laugh. Her braided silver hair took the sun brilliantly. She smoothed it back with fingers on which the knuckles began to be knots, and then seated herself slowly and carefully on the bench beside Dariole. Reaching for the papers on the table, she pulled one from the stack. “Here is what you need.”

The boy-girl leaned over and frowned. “What’s that supposed to be? Something to make me weep and wail?”

Caterina shook her head. “No. This was my calculation on your likelihood of escape, once Roberto took you. You will see here and here, and here at the end, what conclusion I came to.” After a pause, her bird-head rose. “You don’t speak Italian?”

“I don’t speak mathematics!”

Suor Caterina gave a rich chuckle.

“I’ll read it for you,” she said, becoming serious. “This is what the London Master will have calculated, so I find it a little distorted and cloudy. Valentin will explain that to you later, as to why that is. Now, see. I had no expectation of you coming here—nor the foreign man, either. Saburo Tanaka.”

“Tanaka Saburo,” I corrected.

“‘Saburo’ is his given name.” She sighed, as if at a hopeless pupil, and kept her attention on Dariole. “The chance that you would escape from the prison in London, once he had you in there and abused you, was so small as to be nothing!”

Dariole didn’t speak. For fear the old woman should be offended, I murmured a comment. “Few enough people escape from the Tower, true.”

“So unlikely!” Her perfectly shaped nail underscored squiggles and cabalistic signs on the paper. “But here is something that is—that
was
—likely.”

Dariole took the paper and held it up to the light. The sun cast a pale shadow on her face. The rims of her eyes were bloodshot, I noticed.
She still does not sleep
.

“Is that where he raped me? Luke. Is that where he lay me down?”

“Yes.”

“And I was supposed to—what?” She thrust the paper back at Caterina. “Die? Hang myself in my garters?”

Her tone was acid and abrasive; self-protective, I thought. The nun launched into a full flood of mathematical explanation.

“Whoa!” Dariole held up both hands. “In French, please! Or English, or Spanish, or anything but mathematics!”

She had a hectic flush to her cheeks.

“Wait.” Caterina caught the girl’s wrist. Appalled, I reached out, a heartbeat too late.
The boy-girl will react with a duelist’s reflexes,
I had time to think.

Dariole’s hand stopped, jerkily, and did not snap up in such a way as to break the old woman’s grip and possibly her wrist.

“These calculations are to do with Roberto’s plans.” Caterina slowly loosened her fingers from Dariole. The two of them looked at each other. Dariole gave a short nod; I read only brief consent in it.

Caterina went on. “Here are the final calculations. He had planned it so carefully that it was almost inconceivable that he could not take you, given the moment he would be looking for. No one can live without slackening their watch, if only for sleep.”

“I was careless.” The young woman’s voice rang like iron.

“You could make no mistakes, little one, until you are the age I am, but you would still die at the end of it.”

“I don’t care about dying when I’m
old!
”

The Italian woman gave a great ringing laugh. I put my head in my hands, briefly.

“Excuse her, Suor,” I said, looking up. “She is a mannerless brat, and I have been meaning for some time to turn up her behind and wallop some manners into her!”

“Yeah, like you
could
….” For the first time in two weeks, Dariole’smouth curled up at the corner.

“I see I don’t convince you.” The older woman sat with a nun’s quietness, and air of being self-contained. She made me look over-large and over-violent, even sitting at the table as I was, and Dariole…
the young duelist looks a thug,
I concluded in my own mind.

Caterina leaned forward, looking into Dariole’s face. “People will not
always
attack you, the moment your guard’s down, little one. I haven’t calculated that, but I know it’s true.”

“So tell me.
Do
I live to be old?”

“Dariole.” I protested her interruption, not desiring her to hear the answer. “Sister Catherine, if you care to continue with what you were saying—”

“Your fortunes are tied in with the Stuarts. If James is dead, your life is not long.”

“How long?”

“Dariole,” I began again. She ignored me superbly.

“
How
long?”

“Merciful heavens, what a girl! If you want to hear it, then: less than a year.”

The young woman took it without a blink.

“What about if we keep James alive?”

“Longer, then. But a word of warning: you cannot win every duel you think about fighting. No man can.”

Dariole, with her arms folded tight across her chest, jerked her head towards me. “What about him? When does messire die?”

“From embarrassment?” I put in. “You see me dead a good half hour already, mademoiselle!”

Suor Caterina did me the kindness to laugh. Dariole glared.

“He has not asked me,” the Italian woman said.

Dariole switched dark eyes to me. “Coward. But hey, we all knew
that
.”

The blood rose in my cheek. I know where these outbreaks of spite have their source. Why did
I
never think to ask her if a bastard had been inflicted on her womb?

I spoke with deliberation to Caterina. “Let her insult me, if it eases her. Sister, I have no desire to know the day of my death, even should you have it among your papers.”

“It would be a paradox,” Caterina admitted. “You might begin to live in such a reckless way that you die sooner, thinking you can’t die. Or you might think you need to be so careful, to bring it about, that you hang yourself out of sheer disgust at the tedium!”