Mary Gentle (50 page)

“I believe you, mademoiselle.” I pointed towards a bend in the lane, coming up ahead of us. “Do me the favour, if you will, of scouting ahead. You and M. Saburo.”

She gave me a concise nod, as if there were no dread in her; and turned and walked backwards while she beckoned the samurai.

“No more than fifteen minutes,” I warned, “as close as you can judge it.”

Our riding and walking both seemed to have made no impression on the land, in terms of distance. I drew the King into the cover of the hedge as Dariole passed me, with Saburo. Their footsteps faded under the drumming rain.

I stepped back out into the lane, unable to be still.
With no sun to judge by, I will have to give them leeway
….

I stared east, as the minutes ticked past in my mind, keeping the rain out of my eyes with my hands. A grey line marked the horizon.

Now that I see them again, are the Mendip hills smaller? How far west have we come?

Somewhere between us and those hills—and, if we are unlucky, beyond us as well—Prince Henry’s men are searching. With as many remounts as they need.

If we fail in rounding the end of their cordon…What’s west of us, here? Sea? Against which we may be trapped?

James Stuart thrust his head out through the thick-leafed hawthorn hedge to peer into the lane. His oyster-coloured silk banqueting doublet and hose were now something better described as mud-colour; he was no less wet than I. Rain clotted his spade-shaped beard into soggy clumps. He blinked wide and already-watery eyes at me.

In an almost unintelligible Scottish accent, he asked, “Where are they? Are they back yet? Is there anyone here?”

“I’ll look, sire. Wait here.”

He glared soggily at me, not liking to be instructed, evidently. “Are we to be left to lie up, like a deer, in this hedge?”

I would have felt sorrier for him, accustomed to courts as he was, had I not been equally filthy. “My apologies, sire, for your discomfort.”

“We do not care for spoiled clothes, or the rain.” James wiped water out of his eyes. “We have been wetter, colder, more uncomfortable, in the hunt. But never so uncomforted. We had not believed our son would raise a hand to us. We were wrong.” He glanced at me, his flabby face determined. “That wrong requires we right it.”

I begin to see what qualities my master the Duke perceived in this man.

James stuck his head further out of the hedge, looking about him. “Now we’re being driven south-west. That is no way to Bristol, Master de Rochefort.”

South
-west? Ah—hunters have an eye for the countryside. He hunts, obsessively, and he will know how far we’ve come, to within half a country mile; whereas I have no hope of being accurate to within a league. He’ll know by the sun, by the side of trees with moss growing on them, whether we’ve come north, south, east, or west. It’s his country, not mine. He’ll be a help to us.

As if he precisely followed the process of my thought, James said, “The men following us will have our hunting skills. We have seen our son at the chase, though it is no sport he loves. He will run us to ground if all we can do is walk. We sorely need to go east and north.”

“We need to move faster, sire, that’s true.” I took a step or two forward in the lane, hauling up the front of my long skirts with my dagger-hand, and trying to keep the rain out of my eyes with the other. I disliked to be out in the open, exposed, even for a short amount of time.

Through the falling water, I could see more hedges, and deep ruts where carts had been down this road in the recent past. Past the hedge-tops, I saw what looked like willow trees, trailing branches of long, spear-point leaves.

And willow trees mean more water, more rivers, more
marsh,
God in His mercy help us! More marsh to get lost in, dragging my skirts through it at barely a mile in every hour, and knowing—
knowing
—they can’t be more than two or three hours behind us. Catching up fast.

The bearded head spoke again from the rain-beaded twigs. “We are concerned. The samurai and your compatriot. Have they been taken?”

I would have thought it cowardice on his own behalf, were he not a different man out in this open country from the James of the court. “I believe them both capable of holding their own, sire—”

The sound of metal on metal rang out, thirty feet away in the rain, down the track.

That is a noise that will wake me from a deep sleep if I hear it three streets away.

The slide of edge on edge: razor-sharp lengths of metal moving faster than vision. Sliding, striking, and parrying. Licking in to bring blood flying out, in a liquid arc on the air.

My free hand went to my breast, leaving the drooping wet black skirts of my farthingale to tangle my feet. Desperation had moved me to carry one loaded pistol in the front of my bodice, down behind the stomacher. Only a fool carries one so, I grant. Unless the only other way out of the situation is to go tied in a sheet with a knot at your head, or however they bury people in this heathen country.

I reached for the pistol.
Am I confident of successfully firing in this weather?

“Come into cover, Master Rochefort!” James’s bulk shot back into a tangle of spines, shaking leaves and wetness down onto his ruined clothes. He pried at the twigs with mud-stained gloves to see if I followed. “Come, sir! They shall not lay hands on this old fox, nor you neither!”

“Sire…”

I couldn’t keep exasperation out of my tone.

“It’s—not hunters, sire.”

If I hadn’t known how I looked—a man in bedraggled female-player clothes—I would have made a fist of my free hand and used it on one or other of my returning companions.

Their shapes came clear through the rain.

“I don’t know why I ever doubted it!” I snarled. “Who
else
would be stupid enough to spar with live blades, in the middle of a downpour, in the middle of the Somerset Levels, in the middle of a chase that, if we’re caught, ends with all four of us killed out of hand!”

James Stuart raised his brows at my rhetorical question—spat with more venom than is usual in philosophy—and detached himself from the hawthorn spines. Brushing down his ripped satin doublet as he stepped into the lane, he growled, “Is the way clear, boy?”

“I certainly hope so, sire!” Dariole, her cherry-red breeches brightly visible through the lessening rain, grinned, all the while keeping the rapier and dagger in subtle threat and motion.

I snarled at her, in part for discipline and exasperation’s sake, and in part because she seemed cheered by it. “Dear good God! Why in His Saints’ names do you choose to duel in the high road! There is cavalry out there, looking for us—we need to travel
without
drawing attention to ourselves!”

“Apology, domo arigato.” Saburo shot me a glance, carefully sober. Startled, I realised,
He knows, also, that this builds her morale, reckless as it is.

And she—yes, she knows the same of him.

Because it will need every man of us to stand a chance at escaping the Prince’s huntsmen.

Dariole, her grin widening, stepped back from the sparring and lowered her sword. “I’m
so
sick of walking. Messire Rochefort, pull your skirts up, and flash an ankle at the next coach! That’ll get us a ride!”

“Be cautious, mademoiselle. I might think it worthwhile taking exception to that.”

I turned back to hide a smile and help the Scottish gentleman out of the hedge—which, with his mass, and my unhandiness in my clothes, involved more effort and taking of God’s name in vain than might otherwise have been hoped for.

Tanaka Saburo sheathed his bright cattan-blades, that shone like broken mirror. Above us, the clouds were splitting. Some of the late morning sun shone through. I put James Stuart safely into the road.

It pleased me to see that Dariole smiled behind her hand. She made a bow to what any passer-by (I hoped) would take merely for a bewildered and middle-aged Scotch gentleman, and said, “We’ll escape, your Majesty. You’ll see. I just wanted to….”

She made an explanatory gesture with her rapier. James flinched, no more at home with naked blades in his presence out here in the wild. I could think of no words to explain to him how the feel of a live blade might comfort her.

By way of reassurance, I said only, “Sire, we’ll get to London. All of us. Mademoiselle, let us stop standing out where any man can see us debating this! I take it you found nothing?”

“Nothing.”

Saburo gave me a contemplative look. “We could steal horses. Find farm. Or we can kill local bandits and take theirs. That is faster than walking through mud.”

“Horse-thieves, now!” It came out aloud, as a groan. “Just
how
did I get into this?”

Dariole smiled brightly and knowingly. I turned and made a bow to the Scottish King of England. “Sire, if it pleases you to advise us on direction—”

A sudden crackle of twigs brought me swinging about.

A heavy sound of boots punched through puddles.

Inside ten heartbeats, rain-soaked men surrounded us on all sides, flushed and grinning with the success of their ambush. Their voices rose in a babble.

If a man is not keyed up in preparation, spontaneous reaction comes much too late.

We have been exactly as foolish as fugitives often are, when they have been tense for so many hours that the nearness of danger becomes numb and forgotten.

Over the noise and shouting, I rapped out, “No weapons!”

Saburo gave me a curious look; so also Dariole.

I said, “They’re peasants!”

Not men in hunting gear; not men in the Prince’s livery. Not men with muskets, or rapiers. Or horses. Men on foot, with cudgels hacked out of hedges, and long rustic coats, and leather breeches. Countrymen.

“Eh,” Saburo grunted. “Don’t kill farmers, yes.”

If I had a silver coin with me, I thought, I might win us out of this. Nothing is easier than to persuade Jacques Peasant with money, and I take it to be the same with the English. However, the handful of Fludd’s pennies left in my boot-linings will not accommodate us in this desire.

Mlle Dariole tensed, her hand going to the swept hilt of her Italian rapier.

Which will get a number of these peasants killed, for no good reason, and possibly our swords and heads broken by cudgels—and may, besides, get James Stuart killed as dead as Robert Fludd could ever desire.

“Careful of your decisions, mademoiselle!” I rapped out.

She halted. I saw her weigh up my expectation of her actions.

Very slowly, she put up her sword, and took her hand away from the hilt.

I raised my voice. “Who is your chief man, here?”

A man pushed to the front of the gabbling crowd. He wore a leather hood, dripping in the lessening rain. It showed the front of his head, his hair cropped unusually short. His eyes were much lined at the corners, I supposed from spending his times out of doors.

A year or two in the Low Countries, where shop-keepers have been killing the Spanish nobility for a generation now, cures a man of the preconception that a gentleman cannot be killed by a commoner. I looked at the newcomer.
In a duel I should take you out at the first pass, for fear you should kill me at the second.

He was something over my own age, in his middle forties, and he squinted through the diminishing rain at each of us in turn.

He demanded, “What the
fuck
are you?”

I found his accent all but unintelligible. Indeed, I was barely sure that he spoke English.

I looked down from my greater height and said peaceably, in London English, “We might ask the same question, Master….”

“Richard Anselm. Constable of this parish.”

An idea began to form itself in my mind.

I made him a bow with something of a flourish to it.

The tone of small-town civic authority is something I have heard too often in my life to like it. There is often nothing more dull, more stupid, or more stubborn.
Fortunately,
I thought,
this Anselm sounds none but the last.

I indicated my companions, opening my mouth to introduce us.

Anselm did not permit it.

“You’re under arrest,” the constable said. “The lot of you. For vagrancy.”

T
raveling players,” I announced.

The flagstones of the church floor felt cold underfoot. By the thickness of the stone walls and the oak door I now stood at, we had been put into the place for lack of any better prison in this hamlet—or for miles in all directions.

“Traveling
players?
” the parish constable, Richard Anselm, repeated.

Dariole came up to my elbow and gave a smile far too winning for a young man. Either she thought this Anselm prone to the English vice (underestimating the conservatism of the peasantry), or she thought he had seen her to be a woman. “We won’t be a charge on your parish rate, sir. We’re just passing through.”

How long have we been in here? A half-hour by the church clock? That means Prince Henry’s men now less than two hours behind us, at best….

The constable Anselm did not close the church door; I thought my idea might be appealing to him.

We look flamboyant enough,
I thought, keeping a civil look on my face. And since I must find a reason to excuse my own dress and escape this custody….

Surreptitiously, I made what attempt I might to tidy my hairpiece. I suspected I still resembled the comedy-jig that, in an English playhouse, comes on before the main play.

“
Traveling
players?” Anselm emphasised.

I gave him a piece of comment I had picked up from Aemilia Lanier. “There’s to be bad plague in London. We prefer to tour the countryside, away from any chance of contagion.”

Saburo, standing behind me in the church doorway, had his arms folded and a scowl on his face. I thought him not entirely clear on why we had been brought here—
which is as well, if it stays any outbreak of violence.
James, shielded behind the samurai, watched us intently but did not speak.

“We travel on to Bristol,” I said. “There’s a ship waiting there for us. No, we will not be a charge on you.”

Anselm grunted, in a tone so like Saburo’s that I must pass my hand over my face to hide a smile. “You’re out of your way.”

“The more reason we must hurry.”

The peasant constable folded his arms and gave me a sardonic look. I saw a heretic priest behind Anselm, flapping his hands, and making some accented protest that I could not decipher—about sinful actors in God’s house, I imagined.

“Frog, ain’t yer?” Anselm glared up at me. “How come you know about the parish laws? Used to going on the rates as paupers, by any chance?”

“By no means. We need urgently to leave here, if we’re to catch our ship.”

Dariole gave her dazzling smile, at my elbow. “We have friends in the theatres in London, constable. They warned us, when we came over from France, to avoid being whipped out of country parishes.”

“So what do you do?”

Before I could speak, Dariole said, “We could show you? Give you a little performance, before we go off to Bristol? We wouldn’t ask for more than our food….”

I didn’t know M. Dariole had been out of Paris and in the company of peasants.
Her tone was a fine mix of innocent and guileful: the cunning actor swindling a village out of a few onions and loaves of bread, while vaingloriously happy to show off her player’s skills….

“All of us!” she added brightly.

“Hmm.” Anselm nodded. “Yes. I suppose. Yes….”

All?

I dared not look at James Stuart.

The constable turned to confer with the priest. Their nearness gagged my tongue. I gave Mlle Dariole a look that should have reduced her to begging my pardon on her knees. She grinned sunnily back at me. I could not help my gladness that her resilience yet survived, albeit I found that combined with a strong desire to slap her.

“Give us a few moments,” she said to Anselm, “and we’ll put something together.”

The constable nodded agreement. He offered his hand for her to shake.

“We shall need our swords back,” I said.

The constable looked suspicious. “You will?”

“Two of our company do a demonstration bout with the foils, the like of which no man in England has ever seen.”

He grunted a sceptical acquiescence.

Armed, and out of this prison. That’s the good. The ill….

It must be a brief show. Or we shall have an audience we do not want.

“
And
small beer!” Dariole eased herself up on her toes, and then down on her heels, looking appealingly at the constable.

I rested my hand on her shoulder, quieting her, and nodded to Anselm. “Perhaps some bread, monsieur?”

Anselm took off his leather coif, rubbed his shaven head, and finally gave a grunt of assent. “See what I can do.”

Dariole murmured at my elbow in our native tongue as he walked off, her tone a dreamily innocent mimicking of court manners. “Ah, that a son of the de Cossé Brissacs should beg his bread from an English peasant….”

I nodded equably. “I have not been a de Cossé Brissac for a considerable time. Certainly long enough to be hungry. As it seems a de Montargis is thirsty….”

Dariole gave an appreciative grin.

I felt myself confident of adding, “I did not realise you so readily remembered my family’s name—since you never give me the
de
.”

Her eyes shone. “Why would I, messire? You’re not a gentleman.”

I gave her a quelling glare.

Dropping her voice low enough not to be overheard by the Stuart King, she added, “You know, one day you really are going to have to tell me that scandal….”

“What scandal?”

Unquelled, she grinned. “Ah—it’s a
good
one. I knew it must be.”

Outside, the parish constable turned about, and, to the priest’s delight and my relief, beckoned us all out of the heathen church.

“It’s a deal,” Anselm announced, eyes narrow as he watched us. “A trick or a jape out of each of you, and I’ll get the landlord to feed you, and you can be on your way. You’ll be gone before the sun’s past the yew in the boneyard, there.”

Squinting at the bright sky, I judged it somewhat less than an hour. “Agreed.”

“All right, vicar, you give the church bells a ring, call up an audience. Start in half an hour, yeah?”

The only other major building of the hamlet was the inn, to which we were taken; Dariole leading the silent and bemused King.

“It is interesting.” Saburo walked up beside me. “Is like the story of a kabuki play. But with fewer ghosts.”

I considered the possibility that M. Saburo might be learning his humour from Mlle Dariole. Or at least, in her company.

“You and Dariole can show them swordplay,” I directed, in an undertone. “As for him….”

It will only take one peasant to shove against his royal Majesty, and James will have us all under arrest again—as soon as Anselm hears him “pretending” to be the King of England.

“Do his dance.”

“What?”

Saburo pointed at my stomacher and skirts. “King. Do King’s dance from yesterday, in the cave.”

After a moment, I nodded, making a resolution to find the one man in this village who could play a penny flute. There is always one.

As the gathering peasants of the hamlet debated the likelihood of the samurai being a tame demon, I advanced to speak with James Stuart.

“Your Majesty might repeat your part from ‘The Engineer of Shadows,’” I finished.

I have, on occasion, experienced the cold and fishy eye of an offended French monarch. This Stuart had him beaten by leagues.

“Very well.” James prodded me with a fat, dirty finger. “Foolery, but very well. We understand necessity—and we are a nimble dancer, when not…distracted. Mind, Monsieur Rochefort: nothing will ever be spoken of this. Do you understand me, now?”

“Completely, your Majesty.” I glanced down at my dress. “Don’t worry, sire. This is such a romancer’s tale that if any man heard of it, it would not be credited. It could not even be put on stage at The Rose.”

Dariole folded her arms as she overheard, walking up to us. “But that’s what we want, messire! How unlikely is this? If Fludd ever predicted
this
…I’ll eat
your
hat!”

King James spluttered a wet laugh. “The boy’s right, now.” His expression softened. “Mistress Caterina has given her life to rescue us, papist though she was. Since you tell me this was her counsel and advice, we are inclined to continue with it, sirs.”

What pang I felt at the Italian woman’s death, I put aside until we should be more secure.

Having ate, with the swiftness of soldiers pausing on campaign, I set about my preparations for this farce, and was done before long. Wherever the low cottages did not block the view of the marsh, I searched the horizon for moving mounted figures.

I felt Mlle Dariole’s hand on my bare shoulder.

“Let me fix that.” Her hand pushed me down to sit on the churchyard wall, and I felt her nimble fingers move in my bedraggled hair. From behind me, her voice said, “You don’t look much like a Muse, messire. Although you amuse me.”

“I believe you’re taking a player’s role much too seriously, mademoiselle!”

It made my heart ache to hear her. In the middle of this most dangerous of moments, when none of us could keep our eyes from the horizon, she spoke to me in a tone of boyish comradeship.

Her lips pressed together in concentration. She walked around to stand in front of me, between my spread knees, disguising the damage done to the pearls ornamenting the wig. So close, I might smell her: the faint scent of her body, and the sun on the wool of her stolen breeches.

With the disguise the full red slops gave her, and her doublet buttoned up to her ruff, she might have been any boy of seventeen or eighteen. The bloom of her skin, despite the mud on it, and the perfectly shaped brows, accurately mimicked that moment of a boy’s beauty before he passes into his twenties and becomes a man.

I felt my prick stir, under my petticoats, and put my hands demurely in my lap. She was too taken up with mending my jewellery to notice.

“Do you want me to shave you, messire?”

I passed my hand over the stubble on my cheeks.

“Vanity takes some very strange forms,” I admitted. “Yes. We have time.”

She came back from the inn with bowl and razor, but no mirror. I leaned my chin back, letting her put the edge to my throat with as much insouciance as I ever showed when Gabriel Santon did the same, and shave every part of my face.

“I can think of a time you wouldn’t want me with a blade here.” Dariole sounded amused.

“Behold my new-found trust in you, mademoiselle. My petticoats are dry.”

She wiped me roughly across the face, and threw the razor into the basin with a clatter. I looked up, seeing the red burn on her cheeks.

“I apologise; I am tactless.” I reached out, grabbing her hand before she could elude me. “Dariole—please. I beg your pardon.”

“Do you?” A smile crept back onto her face, although her cheeks still had two pink spots high up. “You ought to be on your knees for it….”

“Perhaps later,” I said firmly, and received her open grin. “Now, if you please, we’re ready. And—mademoiselle, don’t miss!”

She made a gesture that was old in the alleys of Paris when Louis Capet was a boy, and swaggered off to join the samurai.

Certainly, this is the least likely escape
I
ever made, I reflected, walking out onto the grass at the centre of the English hamlet. Geese and pigs scattered, honking. I shaded my eyes against the sky, brilliant blue now the rain had gone over.
Suor Caterina, look down from heaven, tell me if you were correct in your figuring….

I began by taking a basket of cabbages that I had had brought to me, and throwing one of the vegetables high into the sky. I saw all men’s heads rise, watching it, and then follow it down.

With a flash as of a mirror in the sun, and a crisp sound, M. Saburo’s curved blade cleaved the cabbage in mid-fall into two parts—

Two more bright flashes of light on metal, and two successive crunches: the points of Dariole’s rapier and dagger hit home, both neatly skewering a half of the vegetable before it hit the ground.

She held up her loaded blades, brandishing them with a grin of sheer triumph. The fifty or so peasants broke out into laughter and applause.

Such was enough to make them watch Dariole and the samurai duel. The peasants formed a circle about them in the grass, drinking, and debating loudly on the virtues of broadswords, rapiers, and this strange foreign blade. As I passed behind the crowd, I heard technical discussions using terms common thirty years ago.

No one paid particular attention to me, it being assumed I arranged some other part of the show. I climbed up the church’s square tower, and shaded my eyes to stare across the Levels. North, east, south, west…in this flat land, a man can see for miles.

No followers, that I could see. No riders.

Are you correct, Suor Caterina?
Is this so strange, so unlikely, that they’ve over-shot us on the way to Bristol, or gone astray elsewhere in the marsh? Or is it merely that the huntsmen don’t wish their quarry to view them, before the kill?