Mary Gentle (31 page)

I could not get out of my mind the memory of Dariole bawling like a five-year-old in front of the house in More Gate, all her dignity and young pride gone with the shit soaking her clothing, and running off her boots over the cobbles. At that moment, my sympathy went out to her, moved by nothing more rational than a kind of…fellow-feeling, one might call it.

And she abandoned even the memory of being humbled within an hour of it happening!

Oh, I don’t doubt she plans to hurt this Guillaume Markham if she can, but still, to come back so quickly from such a catastrophe to her pride….

My ruminations stopped as the dun stallion paused. We stood on the crest of a hill, at a forked road. The light made the ranks of receding western hills in front amazingly clear. I turned in the saddle, seeing the pack-horse train curving slowly up the bottom of the slope, and shortened the reins so I might wait for the guide.

Clear as the diminishing hills, I saw one thing which I could not hide from myself.

Rather than bed Aemilia Lanier again, you would be in Guillaume Markham’s place, and take whatever humiliation it is that Mlle Dariole is devising for him.

It is not so easy as a matter of will, to abandon a woman with whom one is perversely besotted.

But it’s done and over; I have made my apologies to her; there’s no more to be said.

I should watch over her,
I thought. As well as the need for her discreet silence, justice would have me see her safely back to Paris—but at the moment she is safer away from the Queen Regent here. Although Marie de Medici will have agents in London soon, if she does not now….

And if Milord Cecil decides I am more useful being exchanged for some favour of the new Queen Regent, he’ll send me back with any Frenchman with whom I am associated. That is my risk; it should not be Dariole’s.

But it is.

I’ll write a report that’s all M. Cecil could wish,
I reflected, as the pack-train creaked and whinnied its way up towards me.
If I didn’t think at least one of these horse-drivers to be Cecil’s spies, I’d abandon this journey and make it up.

I need a gap within which I can slip back into France, and bring M. de Sully what I know. Any delay may be fatal: who knows when Madame the Queen Regent will decide herself safe enough to do without him? If his influence weakens, is he in less danger, or more?

Heavily laden pack-horses passed me. I touched heels to the stallion’s sides, having him out of a clump of new grass, and fell in behind the train.

We spent that night in a deep, steep-sided valley, but Madame Lanier had cause to be disappointed when I bid her hire two rooms at the inn: one for herself and one for her “brother.”

Her cheeks flushing at the insult, she said, “That is the disadvantage of older men. They have the much more skill, but they are so rarely up to the occasion!”

Choosing to deliberately sever relations, I returned, “I hope your poetry for the masque is less stale than your insults, madame,” and had the bitter content of seeing her march off, head high. It would, I thought, be less wearisome to quarrel than to spend nights I did not desire to, fucking her.

She is no prophylactic for me, against desires for Dariole. I will therefore withstand all on my own.

On the sixth morning out of London, we passed a town called Wells, graced with a heretic cathedral, and came to Wookey. Madame Lanier left me without a word, to go in company with the miller’s wife and cousins, while the pack-train began to unload. I found the miller, and showed him the letters Robert Fludd had given me for the purpose.

“Certainly, Master Herault.” The heavy-set man filled leather lungs and sent a shout cracking across the mill yard. “
Edward!
I’ll loan him to you now, master.”

A yellow-haired youth, fat and red-faced in the English way, trotted from the horses towards us.

The miller added, unselfconsciously, “He can take you up to look at the Witch’s Cave.”

W
itch’s
cave?”

I suspected a game of “cozen the foreigner,” even confronted by this serious-faced English yeoman.

“Up at the Wookey Hole. Witch has been there since my great-grandfather’s time. Though I suppose Doctor Fludd and her, they’d get along well enough.
Ned!
Get over here, you dummock, and do what the master wants. Master Herault, this is my son, Master Edward Field.”

The English boy bobbed a rustic bow. I had supposed some man would be set to watch me, and report back to Aemilia Lanier if I did anything Fludd might not like. A twenty-year-old boy with a cudgel at his belt instead of a sword? I raised my eyebrows. I have never entirely understood whether this brand of Englishman is a gentleman or a peasant.

He led me north. The land to the south was all apple trees now, white blossoms laying across the green Levels; less advanced than the northeastern country that we had come from. We strode up the track from the mill to the cavern, he in front. I reflected that I had no inn’s man-servant to clean this mud off my boots. Edward Field remarked on the unusual late Spring, and twisted off a sprig of hawthorn flower from the hedge that we passed. He tucked it into one of his button-holes.

I pointed at his russet doublet breast. “Why, monsieur?”

“No reason in particular, master.” He began to babble of apple-fields, coppiced trees, and the height of the stream for turning the mill-wheel—anything except answer my question about something that had all the hallmarks of peasant superstition. He did not have his father’s equanimity.

If the peasants locally think like this boy, it will be of use to Fludd in keeping any man out of the caves.

My interest in agriculture and arboriculture is less than minimal. I observed that the road up to the caverns was a mere track, full of flints and loose stones, and streams of rain-water running down over our boots. Half a day of courtiers and servants up and down here and it’s a stream-bed, a marsh, a bog!

I reined in my thoughts.
But then, that is no true concern of mine.

It’s an incurable problem of the agent playing a false game: so much concentration brought to bear often makes it a true one.

This once done,
I thought,
I took note enough of landmarks on the way here
. I can abandon the pack-train and cover the ground back to London in half the time.

“Has your father handled business for Master Fludd long?” I asked, with an eye to Cecil and his ever-present curiosity.

“This last few years, sir.”

“And your presses are not seized?”

“No, sir.”

He didn’t seem to think it an odd question. I wondered if my suppositions about why Monsieur Fludd might own a paper mill and printing press in such an out-of-the-way place were unfounded. An ideal way to print heretic pamphlets, occult books, revolutionary political tracts….

Well, I will check the pack-train before they set out back.
Suppose I cannot prove conspiracy—I’m certain that Mr Secretary Cecil will be as pleased to suppress a black magician or political agitator.

The hill was high and steep above us. Green with grass and slippery moss: no approach for armed men that way. I glanced back, pausing to breathe. The mill itself can be easily taken, where it straddles the stream. And it has a better road than most of the farms we passed, since they need to bring the pack-train in and out. Cavalry might get to the mill easily, but then there is the river between them and the cave….

You will not do Milord Cecil’s job for him.

I smiled to myself; then sobered. I do this because I habitually do it for M. de Sully: take note of all, no matter what, because there may be ways found to make use of it.

We climbed a steeper section of the path. It opened into a flat, wide space in front of the rearing face of the hill. The entrance to the caves was dark, plain, and usefully larger than I had expected.

“Here, master.” Ned Field took two pitch torches out of his bag and set flint to steel, and handed one lit torch to me. I followed him in.

Light became dimness, and I stopped to let my sight adjust. Just inside the lip of the cavern entrance, cool air touched my face. Water dripped, the sound magnified. My boots slipped a little on the moss-covered rock. Holding the torch up, I saw the path drop steeply in front, and I glimpsed hewn parts of the stone walls. Light sent the shadows of rock-formations skittering ahead.

The Field boy’s hand closed hard over his sprig of hawthorn. I saw a spot of blood on his glove as he released it. His eyes, gazing at me in the torch-light, showed white all around.

“We don’t come up here. Except we leave offerings for the witch. It’s a bad place.”

I wonder you don’t tell me it’s like Broceliande, haunted by fairies!
I kept the scorn off my face, and nodded for him to precede me. Fludd has doubtless owned his property here long enough to make sure the witch legend spreads and is properly emphasised.

Passing the walls, I reached out to touch them. Dry, gritty; and the torch-light made them sand-coloured, with swirls of darker rock. White dripping stone had fallen in many places, and hardened to pinnacles that hung down from the cave roof. Rather than grow used to flinching away, I hunched my shoulders. The English court would be well enough in here, few being as tall as I. I made mental notes for the report that would do duty both for Fludd and Cecil.

We descended a set of hacked-out steps where the passage narrowed. I heard Ned Field’s breathing in the quiet. A bigger darkness opened up ahead. With only the scrape of his boots to guide me as he drew ahead out of torch-light, I followed him into a cavern. The pool of flame showed a floor, half-shale, like a river-bed. At that thought, I glimpsed running water off to my right, deep and with a deceptively still surface.

“River Axe,” Field muttered. “Carry you under if you fall in. Sometimes water’s up, ’n you can’t come in here.”

Stones crunched under my boots as I followed him up away from the underground river, climbing a slope between folds of rock, into a lower-roofed cavern.

Off to the sides, still pools reflected both our torches and the hanging and standing pinnacles of stone. The air felt cool—would feel no warmer in Summer, I guessed, and no colder in Winter.

With a covert smile, I reflected that it would make some nobleman a fine wine cellar.

“Here.” Field lifted his torch and stopped.

Ahead, the passage opened up into a great cavern, large enough to be any man’s banqueting hall, with a ceiling that no man except I should consider low. I walked forward, felt my boots splash in water as I came to the centre of the cavern, and lifted the torch to disclose a shallow small stream bisecting the floor. A tributary of the Axe?

Beyond it was a great flat space. Small caves led off that. To my left, a great silent pool flashed back gold light from the torches.

“Are there more caves beyond this?”

“Yes.” The boy’s teeth clattered as he spoke.

He may be leading me into a trap,
I thought, crossing the shallow river, careful of my footing. Just because I know no reason why he should doesn’t mean he won’t….

He came up with me as I came out of the smaller caves abutting on the main ones. There was sweat on his forehead, under his ripe-corn hair.

“It’s ideal,” I confirmed. “The large cavern for a banquet and masque, the small caves for actors, servants, cooks. Will it be possible to have men up from your mill or the village, to put temporary wooden bridges where the river may rise?”

He flinched as if I sang a bawdy song in church. “If you pay them well, master. They won’t like coming here.”

A flight of soundless dark shadows flickered across the torch-light.

Field shrieked.

A man instinctively reacts to the sound of human panic: alarm thrilled through me. In a fraction of a heartbeat, I had the explanation. “They are bats, monsieur! No need to—”

He screamed as a man does when he cannot suck any air into his lungs, and pointed. His torch hit the rock floor and rolled in a cloud of evil-smelling smoke. My remaining light illuminated what he stared rigidly at, below and beyond us. A white, wide-mouthed face, entirely not human—

“Ah!”
He grabbed my arm, knocking the torch. Before I could recover it, it fell; rolled into the water before me and was extinguished. “I saw her!
I saw her!
”

Field’s shrieks echoed off the walls. I shut him out, let myself remember direction, and groped on the floor for the fallen torch. I put my left hand on it, and coaxed it to light again.

“I’ll
die
now,” the English boy whispered.

The velvet jerk and rustle of wings made me duck. Heart hammering, I muttered, “Only if I slaughter you out of lack of patience, messire!” and sheathed my rapier—only then realising that I had drawn it.

“Come.” I got a hand under Ned Field’s arm and, since he wouldn’t walk, set about hauling and dragging him after me. I crossed the narrow stream and left the cavern. I was unsure, bumping him up the steps to the open air, finally, whether I had drenched his russet breeches in the stream’s water, or whether he had done that himself when he saw what he took to be a witch.

With a great deal of trouble, I got him down the hill to the paper-mill. His was a genuine shock. I have seen as much in skirmishes against cavalry in the Low Countries. A man’s mind can produce it as well from imaginary enemies, I thought, as I handed Ned over to his father, for his mother and aunts to lead away.

“I saw nothing,” I said when the bluff Englishman picked up the hawthorn twig that had fallen from his son’s doublet.

“You’re certain, master?”

“So certain that I will return and complete what I have begun.”

The man protested, both troubled and distrustful. I briefly wished I had a cross of the true religion with me—although on reflection I am not sure which the elder Field would have felt more devilish: a witch or a papist cross.

“The Devil gives her power,” he said as if he discussed the price of turnips. “Excuse me, Master Herault. I’m going to take my son to the parish priest. To see she hasn’t bewitched him into losing his manhood.”

I thought that, at the worst, Ned Field had lost only the contents of his bladder, but I doubted his father would find this a comforting remark. I bowed silently and left.

Bats are unnerving, well called the Devil’s bird. With that and the fact that he had lived with the legends all his life, I did not doubt that Ned Field had seen his witch. My heart had hammered. But now, the initial shock gone, I realised what it was that was so inhuman about the white face.

It was upside down, I thought. Reflected in water, in front of us. And however supernatural the witch may be, she was solid enough to ripple the water when she departed.

Ghosts and demons do not splash.

I abstracted a lantern from the stables without being seen by the mill workers or Lanier, and entered the Wookey caverns again some hour or so after I had left. I felt the air moving against my cheek. The roosting bats would have some access to the top of the hill, for their dusk and dawn flights, but I supposed that to be rock-chimneys not accessible to a man.

The calm chill of the cave sunk into my gloved hands as I held the lantern up. I became aware that the muscles across my back tensed. As silently as I could, I drew my sword before I entered the banqueting-cavern, and then stood still, letting the silence return.

My gaze took in cave wall, rock-spires, and a patch of white in the left-hand corner of my vision, about where the pool of water must be.

Cautiously, I turned my head.

Again, a white face reflected in the water, the eyes wide, the mouth reversed in the upside-down image. Masses of loose white hair shone in the unbroken surface of the pool.

I broke the silence. “Don’t be afraid.”

The reflection vanished. Rock scraped against another rock. A pebble plopped into the pool.

I took several swift strides, shattering the surface of the water, splashing through it; ducked, and came up under the lip of rock that I had guessed must be there—or else we should have seen the person standing there to listen, and not merely their reflection.

Halting, I opened the lantern-door.

She blinked in the yellow light.

A woman of short stature, with a livid face, and silver hair that hung down uncombed and uncut. She crouched down, back to the rock wall, putting out her hand.

“Excuse me, grandmère.” I spoke quietly, but did not yet put my sword away. I stood the lantern in a natural limestone niche. She seemed an old woman, of the sort that peasants may well call witch.

She knotted her hands in her grubby bleached linen petticoats, staring up at me. One withered dug hung almost out of her smock. I doubted she would stand four and a half feet tall if she stood up. All that was dark about her was her eyes, and they blinked at me with a quick, irregular rhythm more reminiscent of a frog than a woman.

A madwoman.

“Excuse me,” I repeated soothingly, mocking myself in my thoughts. “I had thought you something I should put in my report, but I see that is not so. I apologise, I will leave.”