Mary Gentle (4 page)

With an impatience I cannot quantify, I realised that the fool could have called to any of the King’s horse-or footmen that might still be left in the area—although that in itself was doubtful—or any help available from the citizens of Paris. Instead he preferred to make it a duel; preferred to have the “greater honour” of taking me alone.

“I have no need to kill you.” I gave de Vernyes my shoulder as I stood sideways to him on the narrow flagstone path. “It would only be wasteful.”

“Merde!”

Dueling is endemic; I had a name for it myself, although it was my master the Duc who put forward the Edict of ’02 that declared it illegal. Ironically, in law, de Vernyes and I might both be hanged now, and our property confiscated—although that would doubtless be of more concern to this rich young sprig of the nobility than to me.

Henri will pardon him,
I reflected—and, with a shock as of cold water, thought of Henri now perhaps dying. The King grants his clemency to duellists and men of honour on average once a day; I have had cause to be grateful for that myself, although it made Sully grumble.
And now the King may be dead, at his wife’s hand, and this fool will not get out of my way!

I let habit take me into that flat gaze that does not focus on any one man or weapon; that takes in point, edge, pommel; riderless horses; a wounded man; stone crosses, white marble cornices against the sky, the paths that are exits from this narrow place; all with equal lack of emotion.

De Vernyes engaged my blade at once, driving for my face. As one of the King’s horsemen, he wore a cuirass; a close cut quilted doublet of mail made in a rich black velvet. That and his voluminous dark Venetian breeches did not give me much of a target unobscured by cloth, but the body rarely is; his friend Bazanez had presented me with a chance opportunity.

“I am sorry, messire,” I said, stepping in and taking his edge on mine, and wrenching the blades around in a disarm. At the same time I smashed the pommel of my dagger into his forehead with a fracturing crack.

De Vernyes stumbled back up against a tilted tall monument. The clatter of steel announced his rapier hitting the path six yards away. I kept both my points covering him. He slumped onto his knees and slid down sideways, laying by a knot of flowers and an icon of Our Lady, his eyes open to the blue sky.

The second horse, evidently well-trained, stood with its head down, the rider slumped over the pommel of his saddle, arms loosely hanging, the reins slipping to fall under the hooves. I did not turn my back to him.

I could have killed both of them in cold blood. I have done as much before.

But I need not,
I realised.

The damage is already done.

The Duc de Sully is implicated, without their testimony on top of all. If d’Epernon himself does not remember Ravaillac speaking to me, then Ravaillac will incriminate “M. Belliard” as soon as he is tortured. De Vernyes and his companion are merely an additional inconvenience.

How could such a fool’s assassination succeed!

Grimly, I picked up my hat and spent a moment or two trying to straighten the brim.

How much time has passed? A quarter-hour? More? The coach will have got back to the palace. She’ll know, now, to have herself guarded. I won’t get near enough to make an accusation before I’m arrested.

I put the hat back on my head, and stood for a moment with my sword in my hand.

Henrimaynotdie. But…that isn’t a throw a man would sensibly bet on at dice.

Breathing hard with the exertion of the fight, I backed away from the horses and the fallen men, and ducked into the narrow paths that led towards the east side of the Cimetière. I did not take de Vernyes’ mount, knowing it might be recognised by another guardsman. I thrust my way out into the most crowded streets, among the greatest concentration of guards, armed men, and noblemen’s households, towards the palace. Here, any man might conceivably recognise “the Spaniard,” but—

I
must
know. Henri may still live.

Church clocks struck faintly as men galloped through the shouting crowds, waving drawn swords. An hour gone past since the blow; it felt as if it had evaporated in seconds. Every possible rumour went from man to man as I elbowed through the crowd. Henri’s alive; he’s dead; d’Epernon has been seen weeping over his body, the Queen has spirited Henri out of Paris, the Spanish did it, no, the rebel Huguenots; no, the Queen has been seen running through the palace, weeping and crying
le roi est mort!

I thrust through to the railings at the Louvre at the same moment that a guardsman nailed up a proclamation.

He was dead, Henri of Navarre, Henri Quatre, dead. He had died, I guessed, between Ravaillac’s hand putting the knife into his chest in the rue de la Ferronnerie and the carriage jolting back through the palace gates.

As I stood with the Spring sun hot on my back, grave bearded men to either side of me began to weep openly, tears running down their faces. A silence spread out until the only voices were at the distant edges of the crowd, where men could not fight close enough through the streets to learn the news.

Henri is dead, I thought as I gazed over the heads, through the railings, at courtiers swarming around the palace gates, beyond the guards.

Henri is dead.

I began to ease back into the press of the crowd, letting other men come in front of me. What I felt—I confess it with shame—was almost an emotion of relief.

Now…Sully may be safe
.

Henri is dead.
Two
suspicious murders in one day—no, that would point a finger more thoroughly than the Medici bitch will risk!

I gritted my teeth, needing more certainty than I had for that conclusion. Every impulse urged me to go straight to the Arsenal now. The saner part of my mind remarked: Even in this chaos, the Medici’s men will be waiting there, where they
know
you will come….

She has a spy in Sully’s household. She will leave the man there. But then, the next time the Duke is a threat to her, he is in danger.

No. The King, his friend, is dead. She doesn’t need to kill Sully to get rid of him, now. This changes everything.

As soon as I am arrested—there is Sully accused of the King’s murder.

As soon as Ravaillac is broken, there is the proof of M. Rochefort’s involvement. There is Sully indicted.

Time. It cannot be undone. A man is dead. It has happened.

I swore out loud, passing unnoticed in that heaving crowd; swore and made a gesture, and only then realised that I still held my rapier, bloody and naked, in my hand.

I fought out towards the edges of the crowd, heaving against the current of men pushing in, arriving panting and dishevelled by narrow alleys. I risked one look back at the palace roofs. There was no way to see through to the river and the Arsenal. I could only guess that the news by now must have reached the grave Gascon Duke.

I cannot help the Duc now; I can only harm him. Let me get away safely, so Sully can reasonably claim I acted without his knowledge. Out of the city; out of
France
! Then let me send word to him—proof of her guilt—

I have saved the Duc de Sully, I thought, suddenly cold. How may I tell him that I have saved his life by killing his friend the King?

A
man of unreasonable affairs should have a reasonable mount, one that will not stay in the mind of observers. I kept at that time two horse: a roan of seven years that was known in the city as “the Spaniard’s,” and a dun so unremarkable that men did not even notice it for a jennet, a superlative Andalusian of the true arched-neck breed.
It is on the latter I should leave Paris,
I thought, pacing down the empty cobbled street towards the stables, with my breath in my ears.

I did not like to put the sword away bloody, both for cleanliness and because the stains would speak against me. The best I could do was slam my back against the masonry wall of the convent and stare about, dragging my kerchief the length of the all-but-dry blade. I dropped the cloth in the kennel and trod it deeply under the black, sticky mud that is peculiar to Paris.

With a grim humour, I thought: If Gabriel has returned I shall have to shoot him to save him from himself. It will be kinder than what they’ll do to any man linked to King Henri’s killer.

At last I ducked through the gates into the stable yard. It had the same farmyard appearance as any stables then in Paris. It came to me all in a second’s glance: the dusty earth and single plum-tree, the steaming manure heap, the worn paddock in front of the stables themselves. Everything silent. Everything empty.

News has run this far: the grooms have gone to see if their King is dead.

“Safe!” I muttered under my breath, and it said something for my frame of mind that I instantly took the loaded and spanned pistol off my belt. I trod down towards the stable-entrance with the wheel-lock pistol in my left hand and the naked rapier in my right.

They were not good stables; few men would have frequented the large, barn-like structure if they cared for their mounts to be kept in stalls, or if they cared anything about neatness. It was for that reason I kept my horses there—that, as well as cheapness, I might benefit from the lack of general traffic. Great beams supported the roof, and equipment was stacked carelessly there on shelves. Under the entrance, on the stone floor, I saw the usual litter of straw and discarded woven baskets, rakes and trugs. I could just glimpse the shine of a horse’s flanks towards the great manger on the back wall, and see the slow flick of the ass’s ears, where it was tied up to the wooden hurdle at one side.

Apart from the absence of swearing grooms, it might have been any other ordinary Spring day. Flies buzzed on the muck-heap as I passed it. There was no clamour from the street beyond the high walls of the yard. I smelled nothing but horse, mud, muck, and hay—the scent of blood must purely be in my mind.

How could it work!
I seethed.
How could a hulking young idiot like the school-teacher succeed where sixty-two other men have failed! How!

Merest chance. A man is looking to the left, not the right; someone turns to speak; a guard is inattentive for a moment. All nothing, even taken together. Chance.

Although, of course—I reflected ironically as I stepped from harsh sunlight to dimness, under the overhanging roof of the stables—in this case one man did his best to
create
that chance. To have fortune on his side. Valentin Raoul Rochefort, mordieu!, who contrived much about that “chance” scene.

The roan stirred, further back by the manger, and the Andalusian dun shifted his great round hooves. Both are stone horses; I expect them to be a little restless and excitable.

There was a faint glint of light in the corner of my vision.

Nothing more than as if the white sunlight out in the yard had glinted on some piece of horse-brass—and I shot into a reverse on the heartbeat. I shifted my weight onto my rear foot and took a whole pace backwards on the cluttered floor, bringing up my pistol. The dun and the roan are restless not for me, but because there is someone in here; the glint not from brass but from steel—

A sword’s razor-tip made a
wk!
-sound as it split the air in front of my eyes.

I brought the pistol up, sighting down my arm at the man’s silhouette.
He will have been behind something—a ladder, a pile of bottels of hay. Or standing in amongst the woven baskets hanging on the walls, or the struts by the corner of the ass’s pen.
From habit I halted my breathing as I squeezed the hard trigger.

The wheel-lock pistol gave a sharp, shattering whirr and a loud clatter.

Bemused for a split second, instinct had me bringing the rapier up into guard. I realised what had happened. The flint had shattered as the spring freed it to strike.

The mechanism is therefore clogged with fragments of stone, no fire has been sparked, and the powder is as useless to me as if I had none.

“How in God’s name—!” I had been going to demand:
did you get here before me?
I stopped, my eyes adjusting to the shadow.

I had been looking too high. It was not one of d’Epernon’s men. Or the Queen’s. Or—as I feared more than I could tell—the Duc’s. A figure halfway between young man and boy stepped lithely and sure-footedly across the cluttered floor.

“In a hurry? Somebody must have pulled
your
tail,” a lazy, too-familiar voice observed.

If I am to be taken by
any
man, it will not be him!

Anger and hatred felt like vitriol in my chest. In that moment I would have given my right hand for another loaded pistol. The sheer satisfaction of terminating this encounter by blowing the young man’s brains across the wooden wall of the building—

“M. ‘Dariole,’” I said caustically, while I listened expertly. Nothing up in the rafters; nothing out in the yard. Evidently he had come alone, without his lordling friends. That argued such conceit that it left me breathless. I am Rochefort: men do not capture me singly, still less half-grown boys.

His pale, plump face became clearer against the noon light coming in through the ass’s pen behind him. His unbleached linen doublet stood out against the brown shadows, amid the ruck of rubbish—rakes with broken wooden tines, leaking leather buckets, withy-hurdles on their sides. He looked malicious, cheerful, and with the duelist’s common contradiction of seeming both excited and relaxed.

He doesn’t know,
I realised.

No man can fake that amount of innocent venom. He does not know, yet, that the King has been killed.

I might have asked,
Why are you here?
Instead, I said, “Get out of here before I kill you,” and took another step back, and made as if I lifted my blade as an invitation to walk past me.

The surge of anger that had blinded me faded away. Urgency took its place. Men may be close behind me—they
may
be here any second—and I can’t afford to let a chance encounter with this young fool delay my leaving the city!

He smirked as boys do; noble ones worse than the rest. “You’re in a hurry, Rochefort. What happened to the bit where you tell me how much of an upstart brat I am? I don’t mind. Let’s get to it. You don’t really think I’m going to fall for
that,
do you?”

The munching of the dun and roan broke the silence after he spoke. The two stone horses stood shoulder to shoulder by the huge manger, lifting their heads up to pull down hay; companionable as long use can make two entire mounts. Having heard my voice, they were no longer restless. The boy was between me and them—and also between me and the old battered wooden chest in which it has long been my habit to keep spare sets of tack and saddle locked, for the times when I might not safely return to my lodgings to get them.

I snarled,
“Out of my way.”

His mouth began to curve up at one corner. I knew why. Anything except a sudden breaking into violence speaks of lack of confidence: I should not have spoken and given away my impatience. I should merely have knocked the yard-and-a-quarter swept-hilt rapier out of his hand, where he loosely held it, and put my blade through his chest.

The young man smiled with infuriatingly sunny insolence. “You know, I
thought
if I hung around here, I’d find you wanting to ride out some time. And now you have to get at your horse past me. Think you can do it?”

I wanted to yell in his smug, young face,
Don’t you know how serious this is?

While you’ve been sleeping off having spent the night drinking yourself sick and losing money at dice, your King has been killed, the whole balance of power is shifting—and you are still a nobleman’s stupid young son out to pick duels for the fun of it.

I drew in my breath as if I collected myself. With a nod of my head, I lowered my sword still further towards the hay-strewn paving stones, began, “Messire Dariole,” on a rising interrogative tone—and threw my heavy pistol full into his face and fell forward, rapier thrusting into a lunge at his eyes.

I do not know that I have ever hated a rival as I hated Dariolet.

I underestimated him at our first meeting. It was a piece of stupidity on my part.

This was at Zaton’s, a gambling house, in the Ordinary or dining-hall, where I sat with a number of my fellow gamblers after a successful afternoon’s play. Most of the company were male, and likewise most of them soldiers, or professional gamblers; duellists and the like—all with too much time to kill, and too little money. Dariole (as he had rapidly been nicknamed) came in with a gang of other very young men.

I thought him no more than fourteen or fifteen, an adolescent, which was my mistake. He began to make comments as I passed to get more wine, moving from cheeky over-familiarity to the edge of insult, and I ignored it.

He had a set of weapons on him, but they were brand-new; I guessed the leather still squeaked. Papa’s boy, with the first good sword he had ever owned; the rest having been training-hall knock-abouts.

My silence silenced him at that point. Reputations are sometimes useful. It was a quarter of an hour or so later when he began again, calling me “Rochefort” without the courtesy of a “sir” or “monsieur.” He was closer to sixteen or seventeen, I noted, on closer study. A rather overweight young man in wheat-coloured doublet and slops, his hair hacked unusually short for a gentleman—just below his shoulders—and the merest shadow of hair on his upper lip. He twisted about on the bench on his well-upholstered buttocks, asking me how good a duelist I still was, after all this time, at my age.

This is hardly a new experience, and I caught the eye of some of my companions and smiled. They smiled back. Any duelist with a reputation gets this. Young men with testosterone in their bodies, fizzing for an outlet; looking to challenge anyone with a name for being a man-killer. Since I had earned my reputation, I felt justified in ignoring the boy again.

This went on until I went up to the kitchen-hatch for more wine, and the young man and his group of cronies began to mock directly.

“Sully’s black dog,” he said, grinning like a dog himself. Plainly he meant my hair, my complexion, and habitual dress. “Bark, messire! Your master wants you!”

Even if I had been inclined to let a personal insult pass—and why should I, when he was so plainly looking for a fight?—Sully was my patron.

With the benefit of later wisdom, I see that I should have taken Dariole seriously.

“Dariolet” was fairly plainly a pseudonym—the boy being evidently of noble descent, and equally evidently full of romantic dreams about coming to Paris and making his name as a duelist, or soldier, or whatever else boys dream of at sixteen.
Da Riolet,
“by the river”; it indicated that the noble family in question had an estate on one of
France
’s great rivers; the Loire, by his accent.

He was seated at the long table, with one of the pastries that had got him his nickname of
dariole
barely begun before him, and in the event I decided to exercise my wit. He, having insulted me to my face, to no response, was content to turn around on the bench again with his back to me and snigger; and when he did so, I politely handed my wine to a bystander and put Dariole’s face down into his flan.

I was a foot taller and several stones heavier than the boy; it was no hardship for me to lean my body over his, so that he was trapped against the table. Encouraged by the whistles and shouts of onlookers, I used my grip in his hair to lift his head up again, and then to wipe his face back and forward in the mess, with a slow, malicious deliberation that I trusted played to the crowd.

That done, and the boy held immobile, but spitting and swearing, I used my other hand to grab him by the back of his belt. Lifting him by that and his hair, I hoisted him off the bench and threw him bodily across the room.

It was a child’s punishment, and he should be glad of it; if I had taken the adult response it would have been a killing matter. At the best, I would have run him through a time or two. He would probably land with no more than bruises, though I would not have regretted it if he had broken an arm or his nose.

Cheers came from the older men present, and shouts of an indeterminate nature from Dariole’s young friends, and I am not stupid enough to turn my back on a man I know is not dead. I put my fists on my hips and waited for him to pick himself up and wipe the mess off his face, and listen to my sound advice about provoking fights with older, heavier adults who might not have my whimsical temper.

Dariole hit the floor and bounced up onto his feet and came back at me with his sword out.