Mary Gentle (67 page)

“We might finish this game later,” I offered Kenshin.

Studying the board, where he had just opened a new area to play, it was evident to me that I needed a move in hand to suppress this new skirmish—and, of course, I did not have one. I should have to spend my move to combat defeat in the area I was already fighting in.

“Every game is a metaphor,” I sighed, managing not to smile at Dariole as she bounced up onto her knees on the mat. “Monsieur Kenshin, even giving me nine black counters to place in advance won’t see me winning this war. Why
not
train her?”

Kenshin also smiled. “Hai!”

Dariole stayed entirely in Nihonese dress, out of respect to the heat, going barefoot, or in waraji straw sandals. In kosode and kabakama, she reminded me of nothing so much as peasant children at home running about in just their shirts.

Like peasant children, Dariole had a dislike for giving her clothing up once she had it. I found a constant source of amusement in observing Mama-san’s mistress-of-the-wash and other house-servants watch their chance, and abstract Dariole’s clothes from her room every two or three days. By the time the young duellist would come, fuming, to wear her “lucky” kosode, the tacking stitches would have been undone and the garment reduced to cloth panels for washing. I dare say she had never been so clean.

That, I suppose, moved me also to abandon the stuffed, sewn, and flea-ridden doublets I had brought, and wear Nihonese kimono over the long hakama-breeches—albeit I found the shapeless garments something of an embarrassment when, as now, I must shift my legs as I sat tailor-fashion, so that the state of my unruly member should not be exposed to any other.

I desire her still,
I thought.

And I desire more than that she punish me….

“Get bokken.” Kenshin pointed.

Dariole dipped her forehead to the tatami mat, bounced up onto her bare toes, and ran into the house.

Catching my amazed stare, he observed, in his improving French, “I succeed in teaching her manners—some time!”

So that he should not see me smile, I returned to studying the go board. Minutes passed in silence.

“Raoul!” Gabriel Santon hailed me from the corner of the veranda.

I nodded to Kenshin and rose, picking up my rapier and dagger that I had placed beside the board, and walked over to where Gabriel stood. The street outside showed a pale pall of smoke or dust hanging in the air. As ever, the space was packed: men, women, horses; one of the rarely seen wheeled carts, screeching; slaves and palanquins.

“He’s watching us,” Gabriel said. “Want me to sort him out?”

I saw a young Nihonese man not attempting to hide himself, in particular; he stood between a seller of astonishingly coloured foodstuffs, and a writer of letters, his gaze fixed on the lodging-house.

Kenshin rose and bowed, discreetly retiring into the lodging-house. Dariole came out onto the empty veranda and looked puzzled, wooden bokken in hand. I beckoned her.

“A man. He may have information. God He knows, I’ve put enough money about.”

Gabriel looked grim. Neither of us said
assassin
; I would have put money on both of us thinking it.
Perhaps that truly would mean Fludd is in the country—or Saburo.

Dariole dropped down into a very samurai-like position, watching the courtyard. She sat back on her heels, forearms resting on her thighs. With the cloth band that pulled her kosode against her body, it was clear that she had both breasts and hips. The local inhabitants might tactfully assume that hair grown just long enough to touch her collar meant she was, as a matter of course, male. I couldn’t see a European now making the same mistake.

The young Nihonese man entered the courtyard and walked towards us. Reaching the bottom of the veranda steps, he bowed to me.

“Rosh’-fu’-san desu ka?”

“Close enough. Hai! I’m Rochefort.”

“Message.”

I did not meet Gabriel’s eye. A look would send him piling into the Nihonese boy despite the cattan-blades at his waist. I nodded. The young samurai bowed again, and placed a sealed paper packet on the steps.

As he turned and strode off, Gabriel slid down and into the crowds behind him. We have worked together long enough that I need not signal him obedience in such matters.

“I doubt he’ll follow him to anything useful,” I observed. “Although it’s true Gabriel has less of a European look in those clothes than many gaijin…. Mademoiselle, I have a suspicion. It occurs to me that I have, in my life, had at least one too many letters from M. Robert Fludd. I suspect this to be another.”

Dariole rose to her feet, and padded down the wooden steps, her eyes fixed on the paper. “He’s written here?”

“I believe I recognise the hand that superscribes it.” I took the letter as she handed it up to me. “Yes. I know it well. Fludd’s handwriting.”

Dariole made a face. “He’s had nine months on ships to do his mathematics: of
course
he knows where we are….”

I broke the seal.

“Well?”

“A place and a time. The name of the place is not familiar, but I imagine we can find it. He says nothing else besides
Let us talk
.”

“Talk!”

“It’s not for five days. I imagine the place is some distance away.”

“Or it’s a distraction, and they’re going to ambush us!”

“Or that.” I folded up the paper, putting it away in my kimono-sleeve, and looked down at her. Rhetorically, I demanded, “How do you hunt down a man who always knows precisely where you are?”

Her skin waxen under the burn of the sun, Dariole completed my thought:

“You wait until
he
finds
you
.”

W
ell, it will be a trap,” I remarked to Gabriel, before I retired. “The question is, can we turn it about? Make it a trap for him?—for
them
. I have a quarrel to pick with that whoreson Tanaka Saburo.”

“Crucifixes.” Gabriel Santon mournfully stretched out his hand, and mimed the striking of a hammer. “You wait and see….”

Having made it my business to visit the execution grounds, wondering if I might see Fludd’s corpse, I was now in a position to correct him. “In fact, they tie you up there. Rope. Can’t afford the nails. Which, in your case, would truly be many.”

Gabriel made a grimace halfway between humour and that apprehensiveness which the cruelty of the local lords had impressed on him, and I went to my room.

Nothing occurred in the evening, or the night; I heard the night-soil collectors going about with their buckets, and then after that was silence, not even a rat in the rafters.

About the wolf’s hour (which here they call the hour of the hare), when false dawn brightens the sky, I became aware of a shadow in the interior doorway. It did not perturb me: I recognised it from the first glimpse.

“Mademoiselle.”

I crawled across the tatami mats to the sliding door, and pushed the panel aside, so that I could see her face in the grey light. I paused, heart in my throat.

“These screens, that are thin—you’ll find the people here see only what it is desired and seemly that they see. We have privacy, if you desire it.”

I stuttered on the word
desire
.

Not even the shadow of a smile rewarded me.

Dariole took my hand as I silently offered it, and in no weak woman’s grip. “I wanted him to be dead. That would have solved all of this.”

The light through the shoji screens only let me see a little of her expression. I did not draw aside the screen to the veranda.

“I wondered that you didn’t pursue this man Luke,” I said softly.

She shook her head, a touch of impatience in the movement. “He was Fludd’s hands, Fludd’s eyes, Fludd’s cock. Fludd didn’t even stay to
watch
.”

I frowned. “That would have been better?”

“I could have understood it!”

Possibly more had gone on in Les Halles, during the time she stayed with the whores, than she has ever told me. Two years back, I thought her fool enough to try to turn a trick for the fun of it.
Her understanding of men is partial—but, where it exists, painfully acute
.

She climbed past me, over the mats and into the room, moving to slide the outside shoji screen an inch or two ajar. Warm air eased in. I moved back to my bed-roll. She settled herself at my feet, without a word, and despite the warmth of the departing night, what of her flesh brushed me felt ice-cold.

“We might consider,” I said, “how appalled your assailant Luke would have been, to find himself with a master who
calculated
on his base character…. Would it not make a man remarkably wary in his employment?”

I do not know any woman other than Mlle Dariole who responds so readily to that half-serious and half-mocking contemplation of a topic. There was no confusion in her face as she smiled, very faintly.

It faded. “There is a ‘we,’ is there, messire?”

“All the time that I am
messire
to you, and you desire to have me on my knees, or—however else it pleases you.”

Her eyes were large and dark in the shadows of the empty room. It was not possible to say whether they darkened with fear, or arousal, or both.

“Suppose I never can bed a man?”

“Hush. Mademoiselle.” I did what I had been aching to do, sitting in my bed-roll, and put out my hand to her. “You are so young! What’s a year, say? Nothing! You were
hurt
. I can wait longer than your ‘never.’”

She leaned forward and put her lips on my mouth, inaccurately in the poor light. She felt warm, and soft; smelling all of honey. I felt her shudder before she sat back, which served to quell my rising reaction.

With something between malice and affection, she said, “You’ll have been to whores since we last met, messire, right?”

“I have no desire for the pox!”

It was not quite true. The blatant lewdness of the Nihonese people—or perhaps their refusal to find anything sexual embarrassing—had led me to a woman at Kenshin-san’s recommendation. She laid me down, beat me hard enough that I thought it must be a game of submission, until my muscles relaxed under her pummelling; and then by skill of her fingers, lips, and cunny, moved me to spend twice in one afternoon. It was after that that a fear of indisposition kept me away from her and her sisters.

The low but growing light showed me Dariole’s look, which I thought held both scepticism and acceptance. My heart thudded in my ears. I thought of what I had dreamed, on the ships from England: that we would meet, and she would strip my dignity from me with her wicked hand.

“You’re going after Fludd,” she stated.

I nodded.
The less converse we have about this man, this moment, the happier I will be!

“How are you going to stop me following you and killing him?”

Moved, aroused, bemused; I shook my head. “I have conceivably learned one lesson, mademoiselle—I do not plan to make any man’s plans for him. Come with Gabriel and I. If I cannot persuade you that M. de Sully’s life matters—”

She lifted her hand and hit me.

I did not resist.

In the next hour, I let her bind my hands and do what she would. If, outside this room, I had been “Messire Rochefort,” inside it I was a thing she kept tied for her pleasure—which, in the most, consisted of remembering her hurts and inflicting pain. If I were to walk the next day with a certain stiffness, I thought, it would not be through a Castilian dignity, but from bruises and wrenched muscles.

I felt the fear in her blows. I wondered if she had had similar fears and dreads before committing herself to a duelist’s life in Paris, and if that was where she discovered that action and skill removes her disquiet.

That, also, was the only hope I had for carnal satisfaction.

A man might have supposed that a thing such as I, desiring to be humbled for my lewd enjoyment, would have found that shadowy room a heaven. I did not, at first, realise the source of my disquiet. At the beginning, tied and helpless, my body reacted to her acts of vengeance with a squirming avidity, and if she called me
dirt
and
animal,
I could only agree with her. Only a little later did I discover that, spend as I might, what I gained from it was not pleasure.

She is not happy, I thought, as I shed sweat and blood. She might thrash me into pleading incoherence where I was, but there was none of the liveliness with which she had tormented me in Paris. None of the joy.

“You deserve this!” she whispered, as hard-eyed as any fanatic beating novices in a monastery.

I miss her insolence, I realised.

She does not call me by name.

That, I saw, was because it was not I that she had in her mind.

She did not pursue any contact of flesh, keeping herself aloof. The most she did, as the hour wore on, was to thrust her hand inside her own breeches.

I have become the men who raped her, I thought, and there is no liking for M. Rochefort here—no realisation that I am here at all.

Shamed, I confess what I realised: that I miss her insolence, her swagger, her smile; above all, I miss her desire to put M. Rochefort on his knees in the dirt. At this moment I could be any man, any male flesh; so long as she punishes some man, she does not care.

And yet, I care,
I thought.

I might hire a whore in Les Halles to beat me—they are used to every perversion of men there, and if some move them to merriment afterwards, they will let themselves be well paid enough that they do not show it to a man’s face. If I paid a woman, she might put me into torment—but she would not mean it.

Under the hard blows of Dariole’s hand, I put my face into the tatami matting, wincing more at the realisation I arrived at. A whore will have no reason to care whether I am a proud gentleman brought down to kissing her boots and weeping for her mercy, so long as she gains her livres at the end of it.

“Merde!” I yelped, lifting my head, wincing. “That hurts!”

I think that Mademoiselle Dariole, to Messire Rochefort, would have said,
Yes—it’s supposed to!
This hard-eyed woman only met my gaze with impatience, planting the palm of her hand over my mouth, and using her other hand for pain.

“Mademoiselle,” I said, stiffly and painfully, after she untied me. “Be pleased to remember, I am
not
the man who raped you.”

She grunted assent, not looking at me, but swept all my bedding into a nest on the mats, and curled up under it; sleeping while the light of dawn came over the city roofs down the slope below us, and the blue waters of the harbour.

Understanding came to me, whether out of my outrage and frustration, or whether from pity, or experience, I do not know.

One cannot pay a whore and beg her to
like
a man.

What’s missing from Dariole is affection, I reflected, wiping at myself with my kerchief. A man may not beg for that. Not without killing the very thing he desires. I had thought, in London, it existed between us—conceivably in Paris, though most well-hidden….

She said something unintelligible in her sleep: a stream of muttered words. I rose and leaned over her, and stroked the pads of my fingers across her brow. Her unquietness gradually ceased.

I lay back on the tatami mats, leaning on one arm and watching her, attempting not to fall into sleep. With my free hand, I brushed the hair out of her eyes.

Am I to bind myself to such a woman?

What has he made of her, Robert Fludd? He, and her vengeance together?

The morning brightness told me I had slept a half-hour or so, when I next opened my eyes. I found myself looking at Mlle Dariole, out on the veranda in the delicate light, brushing out her too-short hair and attempting to tie it up behind as the samurai did. In the timelessness of dawn I lay caught between doubts of encumbering myself, and the sheer enjoyment of watching her arms lift with the brush, and the rise of her breasts under her kosode.

Mademoiselle, I understand how much you need to kill Robert Fludd.

She spoke curtly, without turning her head. “Gabriel needs to buy us horses. It looks like a long journey up to this ‘Chikuzen province.’”