Mary Gentle (79 page)

I felt as if I had been kicked in the stomach. I couldn’t help lifting my head, staring at him. The Duc looked back at me, his expression without rage, but with a stern contempt.

He sighed.

“If not you…they would have found another man. Paris is full of weak, brutal men who can be coerced by threats and violence. Go back to wherever it is you have come from, Valentin Rochefort.”

I would not see him again; I knew that. No matter how long either of us will live, the Duc de Sully and his man Rochefort will not meet again.

Scrambling forward to his chair, I fell down on my knees and seized his hand, and kissed it.

“Neither pardon nor forgiveness,” he said coldly. “I understand you. Be content with that.”

He raised his voice.

“Andre! Throw this gentlemen out.” He paused, and then added, “See men are warned. He is to leave Villebon alive.”

I
still
thought I was only going to find a grave.” Mlle Dariole stripped off her riding gloves as she walked into the room. “And men like you don’t get graves.”

I stared up from the truckle bed.

After a breathless second, and with massive effort, I managed to sound both sardonic and normal. “No, indeed, mademoiselle. Only their bodies dumped behind out-of-the-way hedgerows, or face-down in a ditch. Hardly identifiable.”

A truckle bed is, in all honesty, too small for a man of my stature; even when I scrambled painfully upright, as now, to prop my back against the wall at the head of it. I thought,
How can she be here?

Could
Fludd
—no, there has not been enough time—

Her voice interrupted the panicked chatter of my mind.

“I asked after you in Sully-sur-Loire. And Rosny. And eventually Villebon….”

Her boots made the floorboards dip by a fraction and creak, as she crossed to the window. I saw her reach up to the shutters, body becoming lean as she stretched; and take one down.

Sunlight flooded in.

She turned, but even with my hand up to shade my face, I could see her only as a black silhouette. Her level voice came out of the brightness.

“An inn-keeper at Villebon said they’d ‘hunted a man a mile or two downriver. For the sport of it.’ You came a long way after that.”

I lowered my hand. The strength of the sun flooded my vision, my eye stinging.

“Christ,”
Dariole’s voice said, out of the brilliance, so strong with urgency that I could not tell it for revulsion or pity. Neither one of which I like. She said again, “Christ Jesus!”

“He ordered them to let me live.”

“Son of a
bitch
. Your eye….”

“It is an eye. So the doctor says.” I kept my voice level, deliberately not reaching to touch the bandage. “I will not know whether I can look out of it until the swelling goes down.”

Dariole stayed silent. I felt a stab of selfconsciousness, in night-shirt and bandages as I was.

She spoke with a deliberate lightness. “So that’s why you’re hiding here? Don’t tell me—you’re too vain to be seen looking like this.”

“That and not desiring to be hanged out of hand.” I shaded my eye again, attempting to make her out, and added sourly, “I
thought,
at least, that I was hiding.”

So much of a man is the company he keeps. If I had been still Valentin Raoul St Cyprian Anne-Marie de Cossé Brissac, she would have known instantly to look for me among the nobility, in the châteaux of the Loire valley. If I had masqueraded as a merchant, then the bargees or the ferrymen on the trade routes might have told her; if as a bourgeois, then asking among lawyers and doctors would have done it. Valentin Rochefort himself would keep company with those who serve the nobility, in the great towns hereabouts: gamblers and prostitutes and duellists in Blois and Tours.

I assumed myself anonymous, here among peasants,
I reflected. Whom I thought I had in any case bribed well enough not to betray me.

Dariole walked back from the farmhouse’s window. Close, now, I could make her out clearly. A young man in a spruce, small ruff, the cloth pressed up under her chin by the high collar of a fashionable embroidered doublet. She wore trunk-hose, and rapier and dagger at her belt; she had made no effort towards disguise other than using dye to subtly shade the colour of her hair; and, by avoiding her usual marking of her upper lip, appearing now to go clean-shaven.

I desire to touch her warm hands,
I thought, looking up from the truckle bed as she stood over me.
And I must not
.

She pushed down on the pommel of her rapier, lifting her scabbard up behind her out of the way, and sat down on the side of the bed. The frame creaked; the straw palliasse shifted. Her eyes moved with her gaze, travelling constantly all across my face.

“I begin to regret the lack of a mirror,” I said, attempting the satirical.

“Sully
didn’t
forgive you!” She had a partisan glare in her eyes, I saw, that made me both ache and desire to laugh—had laughter not been so likely to pain me.

“No, mademoiselle,” I said.

“But he
must
have understood!”

“He understands that Valentin Rochefort is a servant who, through cowardice, allowed himself to be coerced into betraying him.”

She opened her mouth for some outraged remark; I silenced her by reaching out and taking her hand. This one indulgence, touching her, I will allow myself. No more.

“Mademoiselle—there are worse things M. de Sully could think. He made a mistake in the character of a hireling. That is all.”

Dariole looked down at my fingers, and I felt her thumb slide lightly across the bruises. They were yellow and sickly green, now; not the black they had been a week ago. It surprised me that her touch on the healing scabs did not pain me.

She said, “You didn’t tell him.”

I sighed. “No. And you will not say anything to the contrary, Dariole.”

Her gaze flicked up from under her bright lashes. “Well…maybe this time it’s all right for you to make a decision for someone else.”

I had kept in my mind, as a tiny solace, that M. de Sully had been correct in his initial view of me, even if now he did not think so. Seeing in Mlle Dariole’s eyes that she might approve of my action nearly unmanned me.

Dariole, seeming to deliberately change the subject of our discourse, said, “I’ve talked to the barber-surgeon.”

I had suspicioned the peasant family called in a doctor, or horse-leech, or something of the sort, when my fever reached its height; but remembering nothing of those few days very well, I had not considered the consequences of it.

Weakly, I swore.

“None of this is
anything!
It’s healing up, as a man’s injuries do; I have had worse in duels. I imagine I frighten small children, but you, mademoiselle, are not a small child!”

“About time you realised that!”

I had not loosed my grip on her hand, I realised.

The corner of her mouth crept upward. Lacing her fingers into my bruised ones, she looked at me, and spoke in a very whimsical tone.

“Do you know that M. Rochefort has been seen duelling in France, while we’ve been in England and the Japans? I heard a lot of gossip, coming down here. A few people think The Spaniard’s dead in a field behind some convent or other. Most of them think you’re alive, maybe as a galley slave, or a pirate, or down south as some Florentine Duke’s assassin….” Her lip quivered. “I had no idea of your reputation, messire.”

“Clearly, you haven’t been paying attention.”

She broke out in a smile. Not a wistful smile, nor yet the bitter one I had seen so often after the Tower in London; but the same wide, happy smile that she wears when she fights—a bright-eyed, triumphant grin.

The small size of the truckle bed made this young woman need to sit so close that I could smell the outdoors on her clothing. And her.

“Dariole!” I leaned forward with an involuntary groan and threw my arms around her.

She fell forward against me, grabbed at my arms, my chest; sprawling on top of me and apologising as I winced at every touch. She tried to kiss me without pressing against my swollen lip. I put my hand to the back of her head and held her still, swallowing her mouth with mine, kissing until we must both have tasted my blood.

“Rochefort!” she said. She was all in the small truckle bed with me, now, every inch of her; laying on top of me with her hilts and scabbards jabbing into my body. “Messire! I thought I’d
lost
you.”

“Dariole—”

She silenced me again. I need not have let her. The sweet smell of her fingertips on my mouth, the touch that made my heart lurch, even as it stung my cuts and bruises, this is no reason for a man to be quieted.

A few more seconds,
I thought, pulling every inch of her body tight up against me.

The scent of hay and the slight ripeness from the stable drifted in through the open window, together with the clucking of poultry. I bore the weight of her on my bruised body. Slowly, her smile grew wider.

“You’re still proud, messire….”

Part of me is, at any rate.

“Consider me abashed,” I said gravely, for the pleasure of seeing her whole face light up with mischief and desire.

Ah, no, that’s a bad error of judgement
. “Mademoiselle Dariole….”

We were so close, her chin on my chest, that I could smell the sweetness of her breath. I ached to reach down and undo her buttons and points; strip off my night-shirt. She spoke all but into my mouth, the skin of her lips so nearly touching mine.

“I’m not leaving, messire.”

Twice her age, and, if I am unlucky, half-blind.

I closed my hands about her upper arms, feeling the stiffness of her left shoulder as I did so. Neither of us is without scars. Her weight on me was a blessing, for all the pain it was causing my body.

“Mademoiselle…
listen
to me.”

Not able to rest with my gaze on her shining face, I looked aside. I had not intended to have this conversation with her yet; had been putting it off, in London.
And now, here it is.

I said, slowly, “This has been a time between us that I shall not forget. What was true, however, is still true. I am twenty years your senior.”

She tapped my cheek softly with two fingers. Startled, I looked back at her. She grinned.

“Messire,
do
shut up about that.”

“But,” I began.

“You can tell me all that later.
This
makes a second good reason….” Dariole cupped her palm and shaded my bandaged eye. Her fingertips brushed against my skin. Possibly I saw a little less light than before she covered it.

“Second good reason for what, exactly?” I demanded.

“We’re going to Paris.”

“Paris!”

I realised my voice had shot up the register. Manoeuvering in an undignified fashion, I got the cross-hilt of her rapier out of my ribs. The amount of willpower necessary to push her up, so that she knelt back, straddling my legs, felt considerable. I glared at her.

“You stupid girl—”

“They have the best doctors there!”

“The Queen Regent will have me killed, and you too, since she won’t doubt M. Dariole knows all that I do!”

She looked stubborn. “No, she won’t have us killed. She won’t find us.
We’re going to Paris
. You think I’m leaving you to some local horse-butcher, here?”

Impasse.

Dariole gave a great stretch of her arms over her head, like a boy; her fingers reaching up towards the house’s low ceiling. Unlike a boy, it pushed her breasts into prominence behind her doublet. With a sigh, she relaxed.

I couldn’t help but break into a smile. “Are you so anxious to march me into Zaton’s at sword’s point?”

“You’d
love
that!” She leaned back and set about untangling herself and her scabbards, and managed finally to climb out and stand by the bed.

“Dariole.”

She shot me a glance, the while she brushed the tabs of her doublet down flat.

“I dislike being brought to confess it,” I said, with a sigh, looking up at her. “You are not a completely stupid young woman. Yes, your face, is less known than any of us—Gabriel, I take it, is still keeping a watch on Doctor Fludd in London?”

She nodded; I went on without a pause.

“If I appear in Paris, Madame the Queen Regent will finish what M. le Duc began.”

Dariole gave me the slightest shrug of her left shoulder. “Trust me, messire.”

A man of my years does not put himself in the hands of a young woman such as Dariole.

I have, in my work, made use of the shock of physical punishment, and how it may make a man self-destructive, wilful, or weak. The moral as well as the physical effects of a beating will make a man co-operative. If I feel any urge to trust her, it will be that, I thought.

Leaning my head back against the cob wall for support, I realised I could not console myself with that theory.

“It is worse,” I said aloud; and, at her raised brow, added, “I find myself indeed with the strangest desire to trust you.”

“Catso!” She grinned, and I saw how anxious she had been. “What’s happened to Messire Rochefort’s pride?”

“I said I felt the desire, mademoiselle, not that I would act on it!”

Her amusement did not lessen. “We can do it. I’ll put you in dark blue. Nobody looks at servants. I’ll go in skirts, and you can be my groom. ”

“Groom!” I restrained the volume of my voice; hearing the movement of the peasants in the single room beyond this.

Dariole, in faux innocence, remarked, “Haven’t you always wanted me to treat you as my lackey, messire?”

An answer to that, short of falling at her feet, turning up her arse to be beaten, or fornicating her speechless, eluded me.