Mary Gentle (3 page)

“If you go back to the Arsenal tonight,” the middle-aged woman went on huskily, “Sully will be killed. If you go anywhere
near
the Duc, he will be killed. If you send messages to him, he dies. You will not go back to his household now; you will make no contact with him until after Henri is dead.”

The feeling of sick catastrophe in my stomach became submerged by anger.
I
am to be manipulated by threats to the Duc;
I
am to be compelled and blackmailed?

“You will be watched, Rochefort. Every moment. If it seems that you speak to any man you should not, then Sully will be killed, inside his house where he thinks he is most safe. You will not find another master,” she added. “I will see to it that your enemies have you.”

I almost laughed out loud. Am I supposed also too stupid to see she must kill me, afterwards, as a witness to this? Who do they think they
have
, here?

I lost control, swearing, momentarily—but that might be all to the good; she would take it as a craven reaction. Thinking quickly, I gave her a silent look into which a man might read hesitation and apprehension. “He is the King.”

I deliberately did not say
my King
.

A dead man is a great convincer in arguments; she might believe me intimidated by Maignan’s murder, or subject to some mixture of self-interest and cowardice. It was not important
what
she thought, only that she be sure enough of me to send me about her business.

Once I am out, I can warn the Duke. Or kill the traitor in his house myself.

She spoke again. I strained to hear her under the noise of distant drinking and quarreling in other rooms.

“If it is Sully who dies,
you
will get the blame for it. Speak to no man.”

Her men were too close. I doubted I could kill her before they brought me down, even if I could allow myself that self-indulgence.

Hoping that I imitated a man who was both cowed and desperate, I said, “I must speak to
some
man, madame, or how else am I to arrange a killing!”

“Yes. We will be watching,” Marie de Medici said, her voice a whisper in the stinking, butcher’s-shop obscurity of the inn room. “You have the hours of darkness to arrange this. Now go.”

On the way out I dropped back from her men and visited the jakes—much to their amusement—and in the necessary-house slipped a livre and a verbal message to the pot-boy, telling him to run straight to the Duc at the Arsenal after the courtiers had left.

I made my way from the Les Halles district, furiously thinking. Two more of her faction met me as I did so, making signs that a blind and deaf man would have noticed, and it was plain that I must make some stab at looking conspiratorial while waiting for my message to be acknowledged.

I had no option but to find a man who immediately came to mind—since I had been gathering evidence on him before I made it a matter of an arrest—and have a clandestine conversation in his lodgings. And now they would be watching him, also.

The night went on. I could discover no way through the cordon of the Queen’s agents. No word came to me from the Arsenal.

What is happening at the Duc’s household? Has Maignan been missed? Is there a paid spy, a servant, a killer, even now in the same room with my master Sully?

Time.
Time
. If I had more than these few hours; if she didn’t want it done
tomorrow!

And that is not wit, on her part. She doesn’t do this because she knows it leaves me too little time to act. She does it because she’s drunk on today’s ceremony, because she has just been crowned queen, and she’s too impatient to wait a minute longer to have her husband murdered.

By the time I was shadowed back to my lodgings, I had reached a towering fury. Two separate attempts to leave secretly, in the early hours, failed. On the second, when I set out plainly to walk to the Arsenal, one of the Queen’s hired men accosted me. He said smilingly that he would not let M. Rochefort’s temper rob the Duc of his life, and I put my sword through the upper part of his lung.

That led his dozen or so followers to escort me at a distance back to my street, where I found the pot-boy, half-senseless and bleeding, on the steps of the house.

“She gives you this one chance,” one of the departing courtiers said: a short man with a Florentine accent. “No more messages. Do as you are told.”

I sent the boy limping away with another two livres, and stamped upstairs to kick Gabriel awake to make me mulled wine, and sit scowling by the light of one candle.

Wit must sometimes stand amazed before foolishness. On the face of it, an attempt to turn her enemy’s chief agent, and in person—the stupidity! If she is being manipulated by one or other of the King’s enemies and she leaves proof,
there
is a scandal to satisfy even
Spain
.

But she can deny it, knowing the worst that may happen to a queen is exile to some provincial château for a year or two.

And if she were to
succeed
in turning me, what does she get out of it? A husband dead, good: she is then Queen Regent on behalf of her boy-Prince, Louis. Or else Sully compromised completely, because his man has attempted to kill the King. Also good: a most powerful enemy obliterated. She must think she can’t lose.

But it will fail,
I concluded then, in the early hours—and now, coming back to the morning sunlight and Gabriel flinching from my backhanded blow.

Because I have arranged it so
. I have no intention of killing King Henri! This will fail as the other sixty-odd attempts have. And as it does,
then
I can warn Sully, in the confusion, that the Medici has an agent in his house.

Something in me still insisted that Gabriel Santon be got out of the way.

If I’m seen or arrested, or—body of God!—
caught,
while apparently setting up an assassination, they’ll put my servant to the question.

I picked Gabriel Santon up off the floor by the neck of his linen shirt, dragged him to the door, and hauled him through it.

“Messire!” he protested, gasping and laughing, for all a slug of blood trickled down from his nose. “Messire Valentin! That wasn’t insolence. Not to the Duc. I meant nothing. Sit down: I’ll fetch breakfast.”

He was a stocky man, and strong, if now in his middle fifties; and it moved me unexpectedly to find I could bundle him along so easily. Reaching the outer door, I unbarred it, hauled it open, and thrust him through it with much of the strength of my arm. He bounced off the wall opposite, tipped down the stairs, and fell like a sack of meal.

I remained stern-faced as his body thudded on the treads; and when he rose shakily up onto hands and knees, in the building’s entrance, I shouted, “You’re dismissed, you thieving idle son of a bitch!”

“But, Monsieur Valentin!”

“Didn’t you hear me? You’re dismissed!”

I saw the moment when belief touched his face.

“Sir! Monsieur. Monsieur Rochefort!” A pause. “My things! Sir! My belongings!” Gabriel Santon bellowed. “You can’t do this! It’s—
stealing
. Those are
my
things! Sir, you can’t—”

“Get off my street, Santon. I will come out with a sword if I hear you speak one more time!”

I slammed the door, so that my watcher across the street should be in no doubt of my feelings.

It took me a bare few minutes to prepare, folding up the razor and putting that, and spoon and jack and other necessaries, into a leather bag. I put what money I had loose under the floorboards into a belt that I wore tied around my waist, under the band of my breeches.

The leather bag I tied by its cords to my belt, but wore inside my trunk-hose—in the year 1610, men wore them wide and capacious to mid-thigh, from where they were close-fitting, and gartered above the knee. I do not say I ever did as some, who (afraid of thieves, or lacking lodgings), instead of the fashionable stuffing of horsehair and bran, wore their kerchiefs, wigs, and bedding in their trunk-hose. I do remark that it was easy enough for me to store several small objects and a spare pistol, and still appear nothing more than a gentleman out for a morning’s walk.

Out for a morning’s walk to kill the King.

I cast a glance around the two rooms; there was nothing I could not leave without a look back. I make it a principle to live so.

By that time, Gabriel’s pleas, kicks, and angry yells had ceased, although not before a stone rattled off the shutters. I waited another count of five hundred to be sure, my eyes on the stout oak of the door. I thought what it must be like on the other side. A door that, up till now, has been nothing more than the barrier between home and the street: something which can be freely passed. Now it is a locked door, and he has no more right to enter than any passing visitor. He has been shut out of his familiar life.

Let it drive him to anger. Best of all, let it move him to report my odd behaviour these last twelve hours to someone in authority. That way no man except me will be held responsible for my actions today.

I went out briskly into the observed dawn streets.

T
here is the King.” I did not point, such gestures being identifiable even in a crowded Paris street.

François Ravaillac, beside me, tranquilly followed my gaze. “Yes, M. Belliard, I see. His carriage. The King.”

I had had two likely men to choose from: one a soldier who had served in Venice, and with the Holy Roman Emperor’s forces against the Turks and Berbers in North Africa; the other this provincial Catholic school-master. True, the soldier from Rouen, Pierre de la Jardin, Sieur de la Garde, would have been more apt to turn his hand to this job—indeed, he had been showing some skilled enthusiasm towards the supposed “Jesuits” who approached him.

But he would be more likely to succeed than M. Ravaillac here,
I thought, gazing down at the man by my side. And that is the last thing required.

It is true I should have preferred a man a little more the archetype of a pedagogue. Ravaillac wore his red hair shaggy to his shoulders, and he had the hands of a builder, not a user of wax tablet and stylus. It was some consolation that if any man proved a witness, they were more likely to recall a square-shouldered man with Judas-coloured hair than his companion agent of the Duc de Sully: tall and Spaniard-complexioned though I might be.

“School-master.” I touched his shoulder. “Are you listening to me, or listening to God again?”

“To you, Messire Belliard,” he said in an easy monotone. “You and He are both saying the same thing. Kill the King.”

Fifty yards away, the box-shaped cart upholstered in deep red velvet jolted up the street from the Louvre, towards us.

I rehearsed him again in an undertone. “Stand close behind me; I’ll go up to the carriage when it stops and ask the King if he’ll receive your petition; the rest is up to you.”

So much had worked to kill the third Henri of Valois, twenty years ago; when a monk presenting a petition had presented, instead, a knife out of the sleeve of his robe. It seemed clear to me that this latest Henri’s men were smart enough to be suspicious of random petitioners. Ravaillac had a freshly sharpened knife on him; I’d seen to that. Once they found it, and I had the confusion of an arrest and a full alert…

I glanced behind me.

Cut down to the river and reach the Arsenal, before the Medici’s agents find out what’s happened in the confusion. And if her agents are in my way, do some justice on Maignan’s behalf as I go through.

Now, when what happened during that early afternoon on the fourteenth of May is a matter of fame and common knowledge, rumour gives many facts that never happened. They say that the King’s coach was held up by the Carmelite Convent, opposite a tavern with the sign of the Crown and Pierced Heart, whereas I watched it come to a rocking halt—one wheel in the kennel-gutter in the centre of the road, the opposite one raised up—thirty feet away. I suspect the tavern keeper of venality after the fact.

One hand on Ravaillac’s shoulder, I forced him down between the shopping booths that cluttered the rue de la Ferronnerie, and made it such a narrow way despite any edict. Since he and I were both tall enough to see over other men’s hats, we both witnessed Henri grope at his breast for his spectacles, wave a dismissive gesture, and signal to the Duc d’Epernon sitting beside him to read a letter aloud while they waited for the jam to clear.

Any man, even a stranger to court, would have known Henri at once from the coinage, and from the jutting white beard that went up as he laughed at something Montbazon said. The Duc de Montbazon was seated on the other side of him from Epernon. The coach’s leather curtains had been drawn back, letting in the heat and Spring wind, and the stench of the streets. I could guess at those men sitting with their backs to us: La Force and Laverdin.

“De Praslin isn’t with him,” I confirmed. Four hours of waiting for palace rumour to be proved true, that Henri is indeed taking out his carriage. Now, I could see that what I had bribed one of the pages into informing me was also the case. Charles de Praslin, captain of the guard, was at Henri’s orders overseeing the readiness of the palace for Marie de Medici’s official entrance, tomorrow, as Queen. Which left nothing but footmen and a few outriders.

History says the King’s cart was stopped by a collision between two carters’ wagons, and the advent of a herd of swine, and that is true. History does not add that those three men were paid very well for their obstruction, although I have reason to know that it is so.

As the squealing pigs rounded the corner of the street, shoving men and women irresistibly aside, I saw an occurrence I could not have paid for—all of Henri’s footmen ducking into the Cimetière des Innocents, evidently using it as a short-cut to wait for their master further down the road, beyond the stuck wagons.

Of Henri’s two coachmen, one shoved his way into the crowd, bitterly complaining and waving his hands at the cart-drivers; the other bent over to re-tie his garter. It was a bottle-green strip of silk, none too clean; I remember it to this day.

The horsemen-outriders will suffice to take Ravaillac,
I thought, looking to see where they rode behind the King’s carriage.

One of them caught my eye.

There are times when it is no advantage to be the tallest man in the room or the street. The rider on the bay, one of d’Epernon’s men whom I knew slightly from Zaton’s, pushed himself through the crowds and pulled up beside me, his mount’s hooves sounding both hollow and solid on the spilled grain, muck, and litter of the street.

“M. Rochefort!” De Vernyes gazed down. “Did M. the Duke send you out to meet his Majesty? Can you help shift these
peasants?
”

I am used to controlling my expression. I thought my face showed nothing of the shock that coursed through me at being addressed in front of M. Ravaillac by my own name—and at being told that it was my master the King desired to visit.

“Don’t look like that.” The rider leaned on his saddle and grinned at me. “You’ve got nothing to worry about. Unless Sully
has
had his hand in the till. No, it was a
joke,
Messire Spaniard; don’t draw! Help me get this damn coach on the way to the Arsenal again.”

I realised abruptly that François Ravaillac was not beside me: that was why d’Epernon’s man did not react to his presence.

Where the hell is the man!
I swore, while making some anodyne remark; and Montbazon screamed like a girl.

Movement took my eye.

Ravaillac stood on the risen wheel of the coach.

His hand went up, arched down; went up again—and a fine, perfect arc of droplets went through the air. Droplets of blood.
They have to be,
I thought, dazed.
Dear good God: he has actually hit the King!

Ravaillac’s fist around the handle of the knife punched down twice more; d’Epernon threw himself across the King’s body; Ravaillac stood down off the coach’s rear wheel, hands at his sides, as if all his energy had drained out of him.

I had a second to look at d’Epernon, and think that this corpulent middle-aged gentleman who is my master’s enemy had courage, even if he had begun his court career as one of Henri III’s catamites.

François Ravaillac looked across at me from between Epernon and Laverdin, and said in a calm questioning tone, “M. Belliard?”

He should have failed!
my mind protested as I stared at the body in the coach, as La Force threw a cloak over Henri’s face. How could something this casual
succeed?

I felt as winded as a man thrown from a horse. Henri’s men were supposed to take Ravaillac before he got anywhere near the King. If they were inefficient,
I
would be standing next to François Ravaillac, and I would kill the man myself.

Under the coach, the filthy street gleamed with liquid that pattered down and ran between the cobbles and into the kennel. Blood rushing in a slaughterhouse stream.

That is not a casual injury.
I stared. If Ravaillac were killed in the attack, one could bluff. Or if the crowd battered him to death.
But he’s taken; he will be interrogated; he will break. I can be proved to have been in his company
.

And the King was on his way to see Sully:
Dear God! What more could the Queen ask for?
Henri assassinated on his way to ask the Duc about supposed accusations of financial malfeasance!

Squealing and screeching like the swine of Gehenna, young weaners fled every which way through the crowds, forcing men back, spooking horses. In the same moment, d’Epernon screamed at the coachman to turn the cart and ride for the palace and the doctors, Laverdin took tighter hold of François Ravaillac, and I turned and shoved my way brutally out of the packed street, into the gateway of the Cimetière des Innocents.

Marie de Medici is at the Louvre!

There with the garlands going up for her entry tomorrow as Queen. I will denounce her where she stands.
There
is Henri’s killer,
there
is the murderer!

Under these circumstances I hate cities. The business of agents is an underground war; I would rather have my wars in the open country. If that involves marching through intemperate heat and foul rain in the day, sentinel duty and alarms at night, and the disastrous result of pike and musket-piece on a man’s body, still at least a man is free of streets in which he cannot move for the shoulder-to-shoulder press of other men—or if he is not, he can out with his short rapier or poniard and hack a way through them.

I shoved my way through the crowd pushed back into the gates of the Cimetière des Innocents, broke out into the empty space beyond, started down the narrow white paths between the sepulchres—and heard de Vernyes hail me.

Glancing over my shoulder, I saw him behind me with sword in hand, sticking prick-spurs deep into the bay’s flanks, and so forcing market-women, burghers, and street-brats out of the way with much more celerity than I could. He shouted something unintelligible. I thought
I have no time for this,
and ran, hurdling the fallen monuments as if anger could make me fly.

The expensive sepulchres stand close together in the Cimetière, mausoleums higher than a man’s head; there is no seeing over their peaked roofs. I ran between them as silently as I could, picking my way east, halting where the ground opened up to flat tombs no higher than a man’s waist, judging my direction.

Two men on horseback clattered out from the monuments and tombs behind me: de Vernyes and another of the King’s horsemen.

They split, instantly, to go one either side of me and block off my way. Behind, I could hear a great howling roar now, in the streets: the news of the assassination attempt spreading out from the rue de la Ferronnerie.

“Sully’s man!” de Vernyes’ companion shouted; a young burly man wearing the most fashionable doublet and ruff over the body of a thug. He pulled at the waist of his doublet, trying to hold his reins with the hand that held his rapier. The unmistakable shape of a pistol’s butt was visible hooked over his belt.

De Vernyes himself reined up, staring at me down the length of his blade. “You’re under arrest: Throw down the sword.
Now!
”

My hands had gone by instinct to my hilts, cross-drawing rapier and dagger in a single movement. I backed away fast, circling to keep from being trapped on the paths in that narrow space between the tombs. “I? Why am
I
under arrest?”

De Vernyes’ companion shouted down, “You were
with
him, murderer!”

This second horseman was having difficulty forcing his mount in among the tilted stones and monuments. In the fumbling moment while he tried to unhook the pistol’s butt-hook from his belt, I made a leap up onto one of the flat-topped graves so that I was level with him where he sat in the saddle, and gave him a thrust that went through his chest just under the armpit, and put six inches of wet steel out of the back of his ribs.

“Bazanez!” De Vernyes shouted to his friend and swore at me. His horse curveted. Hooves rattled on cobbles; tack clinked. He abruptly dropped the reins, freed himself from the stirrups, and slid down from the saddle without using his hands, they being both occupied with rapier and dagger.

I tightened my grip through my rapier’s finger-ring, twisted, and recovered my blade from Bazanez’s chest.

Heads were turning at the edge of the Cimetière.

I caught a flush on de Vernyes’ face; he looked as though he wished it any man but me.

“Give up, Rochefort! You will speak as loud as a dead witness as you will alive.”

“Not quite true,” I said grimly, “as you may find by asking any of these men around us.”

Skull-ornamented stones stood up in the bright day: jaws and femurs and time-glasses carved on monuments, along with weather-obscured names. The only men close by were dead men, but it might not be more than moments before live men came to investigate.

“Truly convenient, if I should lose,” I remarked, jumping down from the gravestone, between hysterical laughter and absolute fury.
How can this happen!

It may have been the confusion of the attack on the carriage. It might be that men thought us engaged merely in an ordinary duel. No man started to cross the Cimetière des Innocents towards us. I saw de Vernyes glance that way, make as if he would call out, and then think better of it.