Mary Gentle (84 page)
Authors: A Sundial in a Grave-1610
Between satin doublets and picadil-supported ruffs I glimpsed her, smiling up at her husband, Philippe, as they passed.
I looked from her face to his, seeing the joy on his unfinished features that made the boy, for the moment, a man.
The pain of the obvious went through me, worse than any sword thrust.
She has, indeed, consummated her marriage.
And why should she not?
I thought, when I had my breath again; knowing that I kept my expression bland in front of her guests.
I sent her back here to be happy. That act, if she is now capable, is a happiness for her; how can I regret it?
I am no hypocrite: it was evident to me that I would have put a sword through this Philippe and stretched him dead at her feet, sooner than it be he, rather than me.
Any wise man would have left, then.
I tormented myself with observing how she joked and laughed with her brothers, and spoke with affectionate respect to her father. After all, I thought to myself, do I not still have business to speak of, with her; business that is nothing to do with myself?
I tried, as hard as possible, not to listen to the cynical voice in my head which remarked,
You are, as ever, M. Rochefort, too late.
I felt as if I had been ripped open from heart to groin. While I was waiting for the time to ripen—the time has already passed.
She is happy. There will be others I can recruit.
I did not wait for the music to bring us together—then I must join my hand with hers, and walk behind the dancers to the hall’s end. I let the turn of the pavane bring me close to the chamber-door, and without attracting notice, slipped from the room, and from the house.
The mundane daylight of a November morning does not lend itself to emotional excesses.
I sat at the table of the inn, the weak sun falling through the leaded window, and carved with precision at the point of my quill pen.
If I should depart
How can I leave without speaking to her?
What am I to write to her, for my farewell?
Dariole, mademoiselle, I love you to the degree that breathing is difficult, and leaving you makes all the years of my life to come appear a wasteland to me?
That amount of self-indulgence will not endear a man to a married woman content with her young husband.
I need your sword, your wit; your knowledge of what has happened at Wookey, at London, in the Japans?
If she is to be no Brother (or Sister) of the Rosy Cross, she cannot safely know for what reason I would need those things.
Outside, the mud of recently passed rain covered the street. The kennel shone, full. As I watched, a man in riding boots turned up to the thigh strode through it, splashing, and ducked into the tavern opposite. Two women with their heads and baskets both cloth-covered walked arm-in-arm, giggling. Their breaths just showed upon the chilling air.
Soon I shall not hear French spoken in the streets; I shall be in London, or perhaps Heidelburg. I look forward to the travelling. Merely, I do not look forward to the leaving of this place.
I will have this last indulgence,
I thought, with a wry smile, dipping my quill-point into the ink and scratching at the paper.
Which, in any case, I need never send.
I wrote:
These are not things that it is wise for a man in my profession to commit to paper. Still, mademoiselle, I give you this—the knowledge of me that you yet lack: how I lost my place, and came by the lily-flower.
I was born Valentin Raoul St Cyprian Anne-Marie Rochefort de Cossé Brissac.
Rochefort
is at least part of my true name, mademoiselle—my mother, being near her time, was in a coach hurrying home to Château Brissac, but was overcome by labour pains some three or four miles short, in a village called Rochefort. She gave birth to me there in the Church of the Trinity. I suppose she thought that a good enough omen to give me the place’s name as part of my own.
There is a reason why I do not offer you the protection and power of a son of a Marshal of France.
You will have heard rumours of the court of the late Third Henri Valois. They are all under-statements. Whatever you have heard is less libertine than the truth.
It may amuse you to know that I was a handsome boy in my early years. No—pretty. I had many opportunities to discover whether I liked best to give or receive…favour. All of Henri’s boys did so; it was no less than what was expected of us. It was not that which caused my father to disinherit me and strike me out of history.
I mention it because I suspect you will enjoy the portrait of the young de Cossé Brissac boy on his knees, servicing others of Henri’s feline young men. Yes, you will smile at that. I was just the kind of precieux that you despised in Paris.
I committed the murder for which I was branded when I was close on twenty.
It still surprises me that it turned out the way it did. Even in the court of Third Henri, there were not many noblemen of twenty whom a court would convict of murder.
The man that I murdered, Etienne de Gombeau, was my closest friend and sometime lover. We had been golden boys, all of us.
You will understand that this did not except us from the usual rules of honour.
Honour has no logic to it. We all of us, sons of the nobility, lived by petty theft because our fathers kept us short of money—and yet a gambling debt was considered sacred! Women were to be remorselessly wooed; but if they succumbed and lost
their
honour…Mademoiselle Dariole, in the light of that, you may consider us deserving of everything we got.
Personal honour—the honour of physical courage in the duel—was as strict. However many edicts the King made against duelling, it was then as it is now: every man felt himself compelled to ignore the prohibition. You yourself will conceivably laugh, given your liking for the sword, at the idea of the law forbidding it.
What happened is quickly told. My friend Etienne, for reasons best known to himself (but that I suspect to include sheer stupidity), decided to cheat me at cards one evening. We played in one of the court salons. I detected him, and shook the marked cards out of his sleeve in the view of all men.
In the course of this, I—well, I did not strike him; I shook him for being a fool and pushed him away, the heel of my hand to his chest. God He knows I would have
given
Etienne the money! But
asking
me for money would have been dishonourable.
There was an amount of furore: they parted us. By the rules of honour, we had both unalterable cause to kill the other—I, because he had been proved a cheat; he, because I had “struck” him. As I calmed, I said I would forgo my right to call him out; he might apologise for the cards and that would be the end of the matter.
Etienne, of course, had a dozen foolish young men yelping in his ear about the code duello: that no man may apologise for a blow, it is not sufficient. He said he would fight. I went to him privately that night to argue sense into him.
When young men have their pride and courage called into question, common sense and friendship take second place. He ended by saying, stiffly, that he would apologise on the ground the following morning, if I would follow the requirements of the code.
And yes, mademoiselle: it was then as it is now. A blow is something for which no verbal apology can be given. If a man comes penitent to the field, he must come prepared to kneel down and beg pardon of the injured party. And he must bring with him a cane, to be used on his own back—as a man beats a servant.
I have only seen such an occurrence once: the man was thrashed and afterwards shunned for cowardice.
If it happened now…I would simply go abroad for a year or two. But I am Rochefort, and there is little that has not been thrown in my face, to my complete disregard of it. The de Cossé Brissac boy…he had a spotless record of courage, and a fear of public scorn: in short, he had a sense of honour.
He also loved his friend Etienne, but Etienne would not be implored to see sense that night.
I thought of going to the ground, fighting, skewering him somewhere relatively safe. But Etienne…his stubbornness had always been a familiar joke amongst us. He would not give up at first blood, or second. I knew that.
I met Etienne the following dawn, with half the court there to see us. That also was foolish, the King having sworn to hang the next duellists he caught.
Mademoiselle, I am a proud man. You know that. I was no less so as a boy; more, perhaps. Conceive of how I felt when I tell you that I took a cane to the ground with me.
I did what was required. I got down on both my knees in the wet grass, and I humbly begged his pardon for striking him. And I offered him the cane, and begged him to use it on my own back.
Sometimes we do not like our friends very much, but I did not want Etienne dead! So I humbled myself. I suppose, to tell you all the truth, I thought that he might be content with a token touch of the cane to my shoulders.
He refused to take the cane.
He said it was not a gentleman’s weapon.
As soon as I knelt down, it had been silent enough to hear the beginning of bird song. Now, a great cheer went up from the court gentlemen there. My own seconds pulled me back up onto my feet.
I was shocked beyond belief—I have always had too high a concept of my own dignity, but to be fair, mademoiselle, honour teaches us to rate it no less. To have sacrificed my dignity, my name, my reputation, and
still
to have to fight him? And after he had begun by cheating
me?
He was a good swordsman. I was incomparably better. I took him with my blade clear through his heart—you will know the thrust. He was dead before he had finished falling to the ground.
I was arrested by the King’s marshals. Because I had killed my man in a duel, I was convicted of murder. Because I had knelt down on the duelling ground and begged to be caned, my father disowned me. The Sieur de Brissac expunged all records of the birth of his oldest son.
Either someone of influence spoke up, or, more likely, the magistrates still feared the de Brissac family. My sentence to be hanged was changed to branding. They put the lily-flower on my shoulder.
The initial verdict was just, because I killed the boy when I could so easily have let him live.
Two years ago I would no more have told you this than I would have given you a loaded pistol and invited you to point it at my head—
The last of the ink scratched out onto the paper.
Looking down, I saw the quill carved down to nothing, its split point splayed and feathered by use.
No, I cannot write the rest of it. I cannot.
Sitting back, I flexed my hand and wrist, aching with the tension that flowed through my body. The light from the window had grown grey, I realised, clouds coming up again from the west. I rose and reached a taper down to the fire, lighting candles in the noon-tide, careless of the expense.
That done, I stood looking down at the papers for a moment or two—swept them up, and, holding each by the corner, and one by one, slowly fed each page to the nearer of the candles, and dropped the ash down to be ground into the floorboards under my boot.
So it ends.
I have business with Fludd, with Gabriel; with James Stuart and the Queen Regent, and whomsoever otherwise comes to my attention.
The spark of encouragement and fortitude that appeared in my mind at that thought, I cherished.
Saburo, Caterina, Cecil: gone. M. de Sully: gone as far as I am concerned. Men do this: pass out of our lives.
But others will enter.
And work is a sovereign cure for the melancholy—especially when it is as puerile a green-stick melancholy as a man might expect in a girl of fifteen, not a man over forty. Work is of use to a man. I have long known this.
Paying my bill, and saddling my hired mount, I rode out of Montargis, cast about to see what road might lead me to the south-west—and, despite everything, turned the nag’s head towards that estate long owned by the de la Roncière family.
Idiot. Moron. Fool.
Yes, and the rest,
I thought.
A lesson which doubtless any of Mademoiselle’s brothers will be happy to drive home, if I provoke them beyond what Bruno’s Formulae allow.
It passed through my mind as I rode to the borders of the de la Roncière estate, making a quiet entry, that I doubted any of her brothers had the intelligence to work out that even a “hardened killer” (a comment brother Ambroise had permitted me to overhear, the previous evening) or a “foul mercenary spy” (brother Ogier’s version), might find it awkward to kill the brothers of the woman he was in love with.
It occurred to me, also, that I had gone to the last night’s festivities at the family château with all the even-mindedness of a twenty-year-old gallant embarking on his first serious affair—his heart on his sleeve, and his pride in his pocket. If I had not been twice twenty, with considerable experience in concealing my emotions, every man and woman present would have known it.