Mary Gentle (9 page)
Authors: A Sundial in a Grave-1610
Either way, a remarkable number of men now want me dead. I wish I might put the blame on something other than my own error.
The brandy made me feel treacherously warm. As the coldest part of the night came on, and it sank into my bones, I got up and walked about: the stable yard, the inn yard, and back inside the stables again, fumbling to light the lantern in my saddlebag. Both the dun and the roan were asleep on their feet. M. Dariole’s pallet was undisturbed.
“Her arm might be long,” I murmured in the dun jennet’s sheep-like ear. I had been assuming that I could communicate freely with M. the Duke when I reached a foreign capital, whether that were London or The Hague or elsewhere. Now I thought:
The Medici’s agents will persist; may in time look for me overseas
.
She needs me dead or missing, not alive.
I closed my eyes, for a moment entertaining what I knew, bleakly, to be a mere pitiful daydream: Sully’s position staying strong at court, his allies standing by him, and he calling M. Rochefort back to France to safely testify against Madame the Queen Regent.
The jennet slept on, his flank warm against my brow. I straightened up.
I
must
speak with Sully! He will regard the assassination as the greatest betrayal: how could
his
man do this to Henri? I must make him see that it was not intended, that it was calculated to fail, that it was by the smallest slight chance that it ever came
close
to success. I will take what punishment there is for my action, but I will not let him believe I have betrayed him.
The lantern glimmered and died, leaving me in pitch darkness, my hand invisible in front of my face. I groped my way out to the stable entrance and into the yard. In the dim grey of starlight, I could at least see shuttered windows, dark eaves of buildings, the stone water trough. I sat on the edge of that for a time, in the chill air, moist with the dew that falls before dawn. The cold penetrated my Spanish cloak, my doublet, my linen shirt.
Let it,
I thought. If my body has betrayed me, I can punish it. Perhaps it will be less eager in future.
At the very thought of M. Dariole I became somewhat warm, stirring where I sat. It was excruciating. I might hate the young man with all the venom at my disposal; a man’s prick is not so easily controlled.
If this is madness haunting me, well, it is easily solved: dead boys have few friends and no lovers
.
Infinitesimally, time passed. Eventually the grey pre-dawn light grew; became more distinct. Dew shone wetly on the clumps of grass that grew between the yard’s paving-stones. The first sounds of birds rang out under the arch of the sky. Feeling jaded, I heard the servants begin to move again inside the inn. The last of the brandy stung my mouth.
I threw the jack across the yard and looked down at my hands, as if I could find the life that had fallen through my fingers. The flesh was blue and white with cold. Pulling on leather gauntlets over my stiffened knuckle-joints, I winced at the pain of returning sensation and cursed myself for a fool: a duelist does not let his hands become cold and unsupple.
The light increased. I smelled cooking from the kitchens. Returning inside the stables, I sat down on the straw to sort a clean shirt from my pack, and momentarily leaned back against the bales.
An armful of straw hit me in the face.
I groaned, sat up—realised I had been laying down—and realised, then, that I had fallen asleep between sitting down to take off my doublet and unfastening the buttons. By the altered daylight, it had been no more than three quarters of an hour.
Dariole’s face grinned at me from where he stood by the roan, flicking bits of straw off the front of his own doublet. “Sleep well, messire? I did!”
Without a word I got up, stalked out of the stable, and put my head under the water in the horse trough.
When I wiped my sopping hair out of my face, shaking my head and suppressing curses, I saw that M. Dariole had followed. He leaned up against the wooden post of the stable entrance, arms folded, his lips pressed firmly together as if he repressed a smile.
“I would have woken you for breakfast, M. Rochefort, but…you looked very peaceful.”
Both the pommel of my dagger and the hilt of my rapier had been jammed into my sides as I slept; I could feel that much. I wondered if, had I fallen asleep without my weapons to hand, I would have woken to more than an assault by a handful of straw.
“Listen to me,” I announced grimly. “The men who follow us are looking for one man, not a pair of travellers; that is why I choose to keep you alive for the moment. From now on we will travel as a young man and his guardian—uncle and nephew, I think.”
The corner of his mouth curved up. “Hey, isn’t that incest?”
I ignored his taunt. “I made enquiries of the landlord. As I hoped, there are a number of fishing villages on the coast north of here. We may reach them in under a week, with haste. Once at sea, I may be deemed to have gone to any country, without any man knowing which. Once we reach the coast, we are free of the necessity of each other.”
Dariole pointed to his forehead, under the brim of his hat. His skin in the morning sunlight was as smooth as a girl’s. “What does it look like I’ve got written there, messire? ‘Idiot’? I know you have to kill me. You can’t leave me behind, in case they get what I know out of me. And I’ve guessed a
lot
.”
I studied his face. His expression held scorn, joy, and delight; all together. He did not take seriously the thought of his own death, I saw that.
I made to walk back into the stable, towards the jennet, and he moved off the door-post to keep a few yards of space between us. No, not an idiot. Although if the feather-brained young man had to have another of his rare moments of thought, I could have wished it to happen at some other time.
“Messire Dariole, you want final proof of which of us is best with the sword. Wait until we get to the coast,” I directed. “There, we will fight our last duel. If I win—you are dead, and your silence is assured. If you win—then, neither the Duc de Sully nor the Queen Regent is in any more danger from me. Is this fair?”
He looked at me with something approaching seriousness. As if automatically, his fingers stroked the guards of his rapier. He gave a short nod.
I went back in to saddle up the Andalusian.
Messire Dariole is young,
I thought. To give him credit, Messire Dariole is brave. But he is, nonetheless, a fool.
I stroked the arched neck of the Andalusian stallion. Among his less evident qualities is one not common in a young mount: I have taught him to act as a stalking-horse while I hunt game, in place of some tired old mare or cut-horse. He is very used to the noise of a hunting gun or fowling piece being fired off beside him.
Yes, we will duel before I sail for
Or rather, we will ride out to a secluded place, and when we dismount to draw sword, I will have two loaded and checked pistols in my saddle holsters. And under cover of dismounting I will draw both of them, and, over the beast’s withers or under his belly, I will shoot Messire Dariole dead.
6
W
e rode out with the waning moon.
A certain equanimity should come with age. If there is anything that ought to differentiate a young man such as M. Dariole and myself, it is twenty-odd years of experience. The ability to put aside anger and hatred, and think what it is necessary to do.
Anger, hatred—and lust.
I am not such a fool as to ignore my own infatuation when it torments me. But however importunate a man’s prick, that does not mean he must submit to it.
The moon’s crescent shrank. League on league, the suspicion of pursuit forced me further west—much further west than I wanted to go. In the last reliable moonlight I rode all through one night, doubling back on ourselves, and then heading north.
The anxiety of men dogging my footsteps still moved me. On the sixth day from Ivry, when the dark of the moon fell, I tried again to ride day and night without pause other than to rest the horses.
The ostensibly slow pace fretted Dariole. He had ridden the roan stone horse with exasperation, surprised when night came on and I did not seek out an inn. The same slow progress—two hours of riding, two hours of resting the mounts—continued on past sunset, and all through a darkness that, before dawn, split apart in lightning-fire and storm. If it had not been open moorland, with chalk-white paths dimly visible under the horses’ hooves, we could not have inched forward in the breaks between torrential rain.
Nonetheless, we were in the coastal port by nine of the following morning.
I rubbed my hand over my cheeks, feeling stubble rasp under my gloved palm. When Gabriel Santon is not there, I can make shift to shave myself—but this last night I could not heat water. My eyes were gritty with fatigue. I had the consolation, however, of thinking that any pursuers would, by now, be at least twelve hours behind us.
Effort counts
when
it counts, I thought, as I concluded my business in what had turned out to be a surprisingly large fishing town, rather than village.
There is always the significant moment
.
Dariole spoke. “All right, messire—are we going to settle this now?”
I had just come out of the quay’s most reputable tavern. I shaded my eyes to look out at the glittering morning sea, now quiet, although a wreck or two had been rumoured in the night.
The merchant brig
St Willibrod
out of Hamburg stood at anchor in the bay, narrow stern towards the land. She could not come into the quayside until the tide came in, and there was depth for her keel. I had had to sell the roan stallion to pay passage for myself and the dun Andalusian jennet; that, frustratingly, meant I could not have myself rowed out to the ship by boat and leave immediately: I must wait for the noon tide, and lead the jennet up a gangplank here.
The smell of fresh fish filled my nostrils; spilled guts from the steps by the fish shambles. The wind tugged at my salt-heavy hair. I gazed down at the boy—whose eyes were as red as I supposed mine to be; he had not, this last long night, been willing to sleep in my company.
“Yes,” I said. “This is far enough from civilisation that they will be used to seeing gentlemen fight their private illegal duels here; I don’t suppose we shall be disturbed. Will the beach suit you, messire?”
Low promontories went out into the sea on either side of the town. Around the westernmost one was another bay, empty and secluded, where the tide flickered in surf and wavelets, halfway out on the expanse of white sand. It would be far enough from the fishermen’s huts not to cause disturbance. They would not hear a shot.
“I went out to look. It’s flat, past the rocks.” Dariole shaded his eyes with his hand. “Like a salon of defence. Sure. Let’s do it there.”
He was more sober this morning than he had been the previous few days. As we made our way across to the next cove, I walked in his wake, leading the Andalusian, not willing to risk riding the stone horse over the weed-slicked flat stone. Like a boy, M. Dariole peered into every rock-pool as he passed—but I noted that he kept one hand flat on the hilt and hanger of his rapier, and he was always far enough in front of me that I could not have drawn sword without giving him time to react.
The two wheel-lock pistols rested in the Andalusian’s saddle holsters, loaded, spanned, cocked, and ready.
So my obsession ends.
M. Dariole leapt from rock to rock with a light-footed expertise, and strode out onto the white sands beyond. He walked with a duellist’s strut, cockily aggravating in so young a man. I was not disarmed by his too-charming smile. The wind blew at his hair, where his hat kept it fixed back and out of his eyes. If we had been going to fight, there would have been no chance of it blotting out his vision at a crucial moment.
I put the thought out of my mind with a shake of my head. It is not my honour and my self-esteem that I need to think of now.
If it were, I would take care now to discover whether I or M. Dariole is the better in combat. Have him submit to me, perhaps on his knees, and admit
my
superiority—that is what I badly need, to take the acrid flavour of humiliation out of my mouth.
But none of that is relevant. A man of my age knows that some things must go unresolved.
I must stay alive, so that in time I can speak out; he must die, so that he can’t
.
I spared a glance back at the sleepy town, vanishing behind the edge of the cliff. With the first rush of the morning’s work over, fish gutted, packed, on their way to be sold, the boats had gone out again. There was a surprising amount of gossip about Henri’s death for a place so far from Paris, and a week behind with most of the news—as I’d discovered, talking to the retired infantry sergeant who supervised the guard on the town gates. The town hall armoury, evidently opened up, resulted in his men being armed in ancient mail, and brandishing the halberds and heavier swords of a previous age of
M. Dariole might not stay alive here if it were suspected he had anything to do with King Henri’s death, I reflected.
Nor I, if they attached the name
Rochefort
to me.
Or “Belliard,” if Ravaillac has confessed that alias. He must have! I would more probably swing from a lantern-beam than go back to Paris under arrest. Or be tortured, as no doubt Ravaillac is being, if he has not yet died of it.
I looked back to M. Dariole, where he walked out from the rocks and onto the sand, skirting bales of sea-weed washed up by the night’s storm. Sea water clung in hollows around the mats of bladder-wrack: that uncertain ground would be excellent to drive a man back onto, during a fight.
There will be no duel!
Men have each their qualities born within them: much as I hated him, I had to admit that. This boy “Dariole” might be another Crillon, another so-famous duelist, if I left him alone to grow older, resume his real name and noble status; or another marshal of
He may be an Alexander, a Caesar!
And all that potential would die here, this morning. Does it matter if he dies with a pistol-ball through his skull, rather than a sword-blade pushed into his heart?
I will not have beaten him,
I thought, as I led the Andalusian down off the slippery rocks and onto the sun-dried sand. I looked for a chunk of basalt to set on the stone horse’s trailing reins; saw none.
We have not ever had an uninterrupted fight on ground that favours neither man.
It is cowardly, to kill him like this
.
I stood up from hobbling the horse. The wind blew stiffly off the sea, bringing a faint spatter of sea-water in the air. Birds cried overhead.
The figure of M. Dariole, spot-lit by the sun on his crumpled linen doublet and much-marked velvet Venetian knee-breeches, paced up and down. From time to time he stamped on the sand to feel the texture of it: a good surface to dig in the heels, knees flexed. He wore his weapons still in his scabbards, but his feet on the sand took up the duellist’s stance as if it were second nature. Forward foot a little advanced, back foot turned to the side; balance squarely down through the centre of the body, so that a man may move instantly in any direction without shifting his weight first.
He would have called men in off the street to witness my humiliation.
“Messire,” I shouted across to him, lifting one hand, and as I did so walked around behind the Andalusian, between sodden mats of sea-weed, so that I was on the far side of the stone horse from him. I saw him turn.
“Changed your mind?” He grinned, walking back towards me. “I thought you’d fight, messire, not chicken out! What’s the matter? Decided to stop running, and turn Sully in to the Queen Regent?”
He knows where to plant a barb
. I said stiffly, “Even if I were inclined to it, she would not let me live.”
“Ah, but you’re
Sully’s man
.” He jeered the last two words; a boy winding himself up to fight. “I often wondered, messire—just what
is
it makes you his dog?”
That Maximilien de Bethune, Duc de Sully, was more than a dull Gascon duke with the soul of an accountant, it had taken me very little time to learn. Wars racked
“You might better ask,” I said ironically, “why the Duc de Sully permits M. Rochefort to be in his service. But that is not a story for young ears, messire boy.”
He put his hand on his sword as he walked towards me. “I wouldn’t worry, Rochefort—soon, it’ll be ancient history!”
He approached the out-flung strand of weed on the sand that I had picked as my mark. Pistols are inaccurate much beyond arms-length, although the damage a one-inch lead ball makes smashing through a man’s body more than makes up for that disadvantage. Out of his line of sight, I took one wheel-lock pistol out of the nearer holster and hooked it to my belt, and held the other ready to clap to his chest as he walked around the Andalusian’s head.
A pistol is sure, I thought. When it fires. But there is no skill in it.
I will not ever know if I could have beaten him. All I will know is that I was like a frightened boy, too scared to put it to the test.
And this, also, is a humiliation.
Which, out of necessity, I will bear
.
Dariole approached closely enough for me to see his eyes slitted against the sun and wind, his expression bright. He grinned. “Is this where you make some attempt to put me in the ground?”
I looked at him over the horse’s withers. “Some attempt, yes.”
“I don’t seem in much danger, do I? Even if you do have a very impressive—weapon. Is your flesh upright again, messire?”
His smile was a miracle of covert amusement and knowing complicity. I suppose that I coloured a little, it being beyond a man of my age to blush.
The cold sea-wind blew into my face, and it was the smell of freedom. I spared a glance north, for the long glitter of water, the
St Willibrod
. From here to London, to Zeebrugge, to the Scandinavian countries, to the New World: merely a step. I felt as if the brisk wind that tugged at my hair could blow everything away.
And then I saw his boot come down on the sand. The next step would bring his foot to the strand of sea-weed; I would step forward and shoot.
He was not pretty, so much is true. His eyes, set wide apart, were the only things that gave distinction to his face in repose. Otherwise he was nondescript. What brought his features alive—with malice, with wicked amusement, taunts, triumph—was his smile. At this precise moment, that smile vanished in favour of a look of priggish seriousness.
“I can kill you, you know, Messire Rochefort.”
He was an inch or so taller than when I had first laid eyes on him in Zaton’s, a year ago. His hair was now cut shorter, just touching the ruff that made a piquant frame for his face. Although he still had the puppy-fat of an adolescent young man, the practise of swordsmanship gave him a balanced poise.
A man is as old as his actions,
I told myself. M. Dariole has been killing men in duels for a year to my knowledge, and doubtless longer, given that his skills did not come to him in an instant. He is old enough to pay for gratuitously intruding himself into conspiracy.
I shifted my weight back, momentarily hidden by the Andalusian jennet’s shoulder, and checked the cocking of the pistol. I set my finger to the trigger, brought the barrel down, and stepped forward, out from the cover of the stone horse.
