Mary Gentle (81 page)

T
he Bishop of Luçon regarded me with alertness in his gaze as I rose to my feet. “And you, M. Rochefort? What payment do you desire for this? You are to be employed in your old capacity of spy, perhaps? For a new employer?”

Dariole made no pretence now of not listening. She gave me the very slightest lift of her shoulder and ruff.
Your call, messire.

I am ashamed to confess it: I felt tears prick behind my eyes. Where she gives her loyalties, her heart, she gives with the same reckless wholeheartedness as when she throws herself into a fight.

She might like it, I thought, amused. Rochefort and Dariole, agents of this devious politician-bishop.

“No, my lord,” I said. “Not precisely.”

Du Plessis appeared sceptical—albeit, not in the matter of which I had informed him. I thought him likely to have his own methods of ascertaining the quality of my intelligence—why else should an out-of-favour cleric haunt Paris?

He said, “You do this out of charity, do you?”

I told him a partial truth. “I do it in the first instance to make certain that Mademoiselle and I survive to do anything
else
.”

No smile crept onto those pallid young features. I thought, He will be a bad enemy and an uncertain friend, because no man will ever be allowed to know what he is thinking….

“I am not ungrateful, monsignor.” I bowed my head respectfully. “I hope I shall always be in a position to oblige you. Likewise Mademoiselle. But the Bishop will not wish to be associated with any breath of scandal, such as might come from connection with that M. Rochefort who betrayed M. de Sully.”

Du Plessis looked me up and down. “I believe we understand each other.”

“It is my desire, also, to come home to France from time to time,” I added.
No need to mention that I shall be engaged in another venture.
“A man does not like to be forever exiled from his country. For that reason, I have put myself at your disposal now.”

Thoughtfully, he nodded, put away his stole, and gathered the skirts of his purple robe about himself.

“We shall doubtless be in contact with each other again, Monsieur Rochefort. I trust you will take care of your health.”

“Good fortune to you, monsignor.”

Something about him seemed more the soldier than the priest, I thought, as he turned about and strode off. He had the expression of a man considering deep decisions.

Dariole stood beside me as I straightened up from my bow. We watched the diminishing figure as he moved away down the pleached alley, the shifting of the lime leaves casting on him random sunlight and shade.

Dariole’s gaze continued to follow the man, I saw her profile only. Perfectly composed, she said, “Doctors, messire. And then I think we ought to get out of town.”

Before Mlle Dariole could urge me towards the physicians of Paris, I unbandaged my eye to clean it, and found my vision blurring, but with colour and shape all present.

“I am for allowing Nature her turn,” I said.

One might judge Mlle Dariole’s depth of attachment, I thought, by how unmercifully she nagged me. I submitted myself to the expense of consultations, while feeling the need of leaving Paris with all due urgency.

The money spent to see five different physicians bought me five different opinions.

Each morning that I uncovered my eye brought me more sight. If tears ran down my cheek at the brightness of the sun—and from the poking fingers of inspecting doctors—still, and gradually, I gained focus and depth.

“
No
,” I remarked, as we left an expensive house in which the physician’s advice revolved around a poultice containing dead mice. “Mademoiselle, no more of this! I did not come so far to hand myself over to Marie de Medici, who would happily cure all my ills. We are leaving Paris.
Today
.”

She was far from content, until I took up a bated foil in the courtyard at the back of our lodgings, and set myself to touch every button on her doublet as I numbered it.

At about the ninth or tenth hit, she threw down her own weapon, and I had the great pleasure of seeing her completely torn between weeping for joy and swearing like a Swiss soldier.

“If there remains any fault, time will cure it,” I observed. “I am assured, if I may take rapier in hand and beat you, that I am not so poor a swordsman.”

She wiped her flushed face, the heat rebounding off the high Baroque stone buildings that surrounded the courtyard. “Was that a
compliment,
messire?”

“Possibly,” I assured her, with all due gravity, and felt my heart warm at her grin.

She picked up her foil, automatically running a kerchief over it to clean it, and looked up as she came up to me. “Messire—”

“Wait,” I said.

The sun dreamed down on us, raising the scents of dust from the flagstones. A cat jumped down from a capped well and padded silently off. Dariole’s eyes seemed full of light as she looked questioningly up at me.

That this might be the extent of my will, I had not known until now.

I saw it before me as clearly as her face.

“You will do one thing for me now, mademoiselle,” I said gently. “You will go home.”

Her face, that had been alive with excitement, darkened so that I thought a shadow had gone across the sun.

“
How
can you tell me to—” She broke off.

I shrugged, keeping every shadow of pain off my face, and managed to smile at her. I touched the button of her doublet, an inch under her chin. “Go home, back to Montargis; make your peace. You’ll come back to London and pick a quarrel with me for your revenge, I doubt not. But indulge me in this. Go back once, before you propose to leave it for ever. Be Mademoiselle Arcadie, one more time; say farewell to your father and brothers. Let them know you are well.”

I puzzled her, I could see it.

I made no more protestations about how unsuited she and I might be to each other. Merely, I ask her to pay a visit to her family home.

I can’t convince her by words.

Only let her be at home, I thought, with her father and brothers who have loved and missed her. Let her see what her boy-husband has grown into. Let her become used to wearing glorious clothes, and to having servants on every hand. It is not Caterina’s utopia of the people, but it is a paradise for those in Arcadie’s position.

When she has been Arcadie and not Dariole for a month, there will be one embarrassing letter from her, and I shall hear that she has changed her mind, and that it was only “Dariole” who was foolishly besotted with M. Rochefort.

“Go home, for a little while, mademoiselle.”

She slowly nodded agreement.

My eye became used to sunlight, restoring itself, of itself, almost to normality—or, if not normality, at least something that I thought might heal towards that before the year’s end.

A cold sweat of relief ran down my back.

The late Summer months passed into Autumn: I heard nothing from her.

Gabriel muttered under his breath from time to time, but I noted he kept Doctor Fludd and other bothersome trifles out of my way.

On a day early in the month of October, I took my way to Richmond.

I made a long arm over the barricade at the side of the tennis court, and reached my clean shirt to me.

Nagasaki,
I thought.

I missed the bath-houses of Nagasaki, and their bizarre notion that a man scrubs down his body
before
getting into a bath. Above all, I missed the hot, clean water, and the heat that soaks into a man’s bones.

But the chill I feel does not come from my flesh.

It did not take me long to undo the buttons of my doublet and strip off my sweat-soaked shirt. A clean shirt is not a completely effective substitute for a hot soak, but pleasing to the skin. I pulled the linen garment on over my head.

“A strange thing that you do,” a voice remarked beside me.

Wrenching my arms down the sleeves, I got my head out and free to see who spoke.

Henry Prince of Wales stood over me where I sat on the bench, half a hand-span taller than when I had seen him last in Wookey Hole. I rose to my feet, bowed; and set about tucking in my shirt, and shucking my doublet back up and on.

This saves me from needing to strike up acquaintance with him.

At eighteen, he is a young man, not a boy.

Henry Stuart’s hair had grown considerably and he wore it brushed straight back from his forehead.
En chemise,
for playing tennis, I could see that he had filled out both in the shoulders and chest. His servants dressed him while he spoke, and he paid them no attention as they put on him a sparkling white ruff, that framed his Stuart fox-hair and his face, where his cheeks showed blotchy-red with exertion.

“You shift your linen after a game?” he queried.

“Yes, an it please your Grace.” I hastily buttoned my doublet.

He gave the impression of gazing down at me, even though I had risen to my feet. A small frown momentarily constricted the skin between his brows. Whatever had sent a signal to him—and I suspected it was height, given my now-shaven face and dyed hair, and assumed Dutch accent—did not succeed in further alerting him.

Disguises are sometimes a matter of sheer conviction:
we have not met
. He may think he knows me—but a Prince meets so many men.

Conceivably, meets so many assassins….

Light slanted down into the hall from the high windows, gilding the slanted roof of the courts, where it ran three-parts around the walls. The Prince’s court gathered there under the roof’s edge. Behind me I heard the usual sycophantic comments a man hears in the presence of royalty, no more sincere than they are considered. Henry’s match had resulted in his victory; so much I could confidently predict myself. Rumour did not have him one of those princes who desires to show himself human insofar as he might lose a sporting contest.

The consciousness of recognition failed to appear in his gaze.

I am the man who was to kill your father, who witnessed you make
your
wholehearted attempt to murder him, who struck you; and you don’t recall me?

Ah, but I was a servant.

“Your Grace might find it instructive to shift linen,” I said respectfully, “since it aids a man’s comfort.”

“Perhaps. But you do not bathe?”

I shrugged. “It is not my custom, your Grace.”

“It is my custom to bathe in the river.” He nodded towards the hall’s door, beyond which lay the Thames-river, luxuriant and moving slowly here in Richmond. “Will you not join me, sir?”

His words went through me with a blade-like stab.

So must Fludd have felt, I thought. The first time that he heard a man speak the words calculated in his predictions.

I have only to say no.

I have only to invite Henry to a better thing; distract him; sell him a horse, offer him a bet on a cock-fight; begin to press a suit for a supposed needy relative at court—all of these things would cause him to leave here and forget his notion of swimming after this exercise today.

It is not murder. But if I stood by and watched as a man with a pistol shot him, and made no move to prevent it, even if I did not hurt him myself, I should not be innocent….

“If it please your Grace, I will not swim.” I hesitated barely a moment before continuing. “A poor gentleman like myself should not swim in company with a prince.”

His head dipped; Henry absently nodded agreement to that. In another mood, I would have smiled.

Under the edge of the tennis court roof, one of Henry’s noble friends turned around. A dark-haired young man, whom I recognised.
Robert Fludd notes him the next probable actor in this.

He called out, “My lord—let’s wager on one more game before we’re done here!”

And now both possibilities are here before me, just as Fludd foretold.

This moment: here, now
. When this otherwise undistinguished young man saves the life of his future King by distracting him…

I knew that it would need to be not merely an act of omission on my part.

So I stand where Robert Fludd and Caterina of the Giordanisti have stood before me, seeing in solid reality what was—only moments before—mere supposition. Is this how she felt, in the heartbeat as the pistol’s muzzle touched her head? How he feels when he sees it
certain
that he may act to tip a balance?

Before Henry could react, I chose to speak.

With a hint of challenge, I said, “I will not swim, but, if your Grace pleases, I will come to witness a Prince who is hardy enough to bathe in such weather.”

Outside the door, as it opened, a man might glimpse the early October sunshine; it was, nonetheless, chill as well as clear.

“Such weather?” Henry gave a scoffing laugh. The young men about him echoed it. “Shall we show this Dutchman that we are bred hardy, here?”

A chorus of agreement echoed in the tennis hall.

I moved slowly in their wake: outside, and across the wide water-meadows to the river.