Mary Gentle (45 page)

Conscious of the ludicrous spectacle I must make, I allowed Matthew also to shave me, and the dresser to persuade me to stand, and pin the folds of my farthingale skirt so that they draped to the floor. The boots did not show under the farthingale—there being no woman within fifty miles of a like size of foot, I was permitted to keep my own footwear.

A hysterical voice summoned Ned to another one of the caves. I realised,
We’re close on the hour
. Alleyne darted out, then stuck his head back around the rock and bellowed for the tailor and apprentices. In the silence left by their departing footsteps, I found myself tensing, waiting for the sound of Mlle Dariole’s voice.

“Come here.” Her voice sounded from further down the cave. With difficulty, I turned around, kicking my skirts and petticoats out as I walked. I felt myself growing hot about the face, knowing that the young woman must comment.

She stood facing away from me, looking down into the black, perfectly reflective surface of the pool. A drip of water plopped from the limestone pinnacle to the surface, ruffling it. I walked up to the edge, where stone rose up to form a natural rim, and looked down.

Yellow light blossomed to my side. She held up a pair of candlesticks—usefully, as a page might do.
She intends for me to see myself.
I did not dare meet her eye.

Masque-paint felt sticky on my skin. I barely recognised my own face. White skin, lamp-black eyes, and paint that shaped cheek and lip to something neither masculine nor feminine….

Haec vir,
I thought. And lo! there’s hic mulier beside me.

The noise of voices outside in the main banquet-cavern was somewhat muffled by the intervening passages. I opened my mouth to speak, and could find nothing to say that would not make me sound, as well as look, ridiculous.

I deliberately put myself into the frame of mind in which one enters a duel, or a battle in war. Her presence could not then disturb me so much. I glimpsed the Vices, outside in the passage, being checked a final time for costume, shoes, and identifying icons. Past them, I knew King James and Prince Henry and their courtiers banqueted. And soon I must go out and keep a man alive in the presence of his impious and patricidal son….

Who may
have
the throne, for all I care! If it weren’t for Doctor Fludd.

Dariole held up the candlestick. “It’s only for an hour more….” Demurely, she added, “You look very beautiful, messire.”

I braced to roar at her. She forestalled me. “Did you manage to stay armed?”

“One might as well wear a table!” I exclaimed, discharging some of my frustration. I reached into the heavy silken folds of my skirts, below the “table” of the farthingale. A cord hung from my belt, decorated with pearls—the tears that History sheds, or perhaps brings. Picking up a dagger from one of the chests, I fastened the scabbard to the end of the cord, making it both hidden and available.

“Better than nothing, I guess.” Dariole shrugged philosophically. She grinned, and nodded back at the joint-stool. “I didn’t like to say, messire, but ladies don’t sit with their legs wide apart. Or if they do, they’re not ladies….”

“That will hardly matter on stage,” I said stiffly.

“And you should walk from your hips. You’ll look more of a woman if you do that.”

I bit back a curse. “Mademoiselle, the wrong one of the two of us is about to go on stage.”

“Oh, I don’t think so. You’re
far
prettier than I am. Even if you are a bit of an Amazon….”

I recognised the smile that curved up the corner of her mouth.
I have barely seen it since she came here
.

Paradoxically, I found my heart lifting.

“I doubt a more curious reflection has ever been seen in this water, mademoiselle.”

The black pool below showed us in perfection, side by side. A young page, some sixteen or seventeen years of age, eyes wide, mobile mouth for once still. And beside him—in jewelled bodice and great farthingale, and with a great framing ruff behind my head, like England’s Gloriana—stood Clio, Muse of History.

Reflexively, I passed my hand above my shaven chin and upper lip. Clio’s face was adequately bare. I felt exposed. Clio’s features were also, I thought as I looked down, too large and too craggy for a woman.

Above them, what seemed an improbably complex nest of braids was contained by a net of gold and margery-pearls; the false braids making my head ache where they were pinned in to my own hair. The hairpiece held a tiara of fake gems, mostly pearls, and they sprayed up on wires, giving me a radiant halo.

“Conceivably the only halo I shall ever have,” I remarked.

“Very pretty!” In the water, Dariole’s grin reflected against the blackness. Startled, I saw it had as much wistfulness as malice about it. Does she envy a woman her role? I thought, starkly amazed.

“I wish I could show you to our court like this,” she observed. “King Louis’s court, I guess it is now.”

“The Medici’s court.” I tried not to scowl, for the sake of the face-paint, and wondered suddenly how many emotionless beauties of Henri’s court had seemed that way for that very reason. How small a thing, to have such an effect.

“I’d like them to see you at Zaton’s! Arnaud. Andre. Maignan. Sully.” She stopped her rapid-fire recitation. In another tone entirely, she said, “Sorry, messire.”

When I had control of my voice, I said, “That, I believe, is the second apology I have had from Mademoiselle Dariole. The shock may do me harm.”

She smiled. I did not look at her, but at her image. Two white faces, reflected in black water. It appeared that she came barely higher than my breastbone.

I turned away from the pool to look at her profile.

How have I not seen before, that she is beautiful?

Admitted, it is not a beauty that yet shows without careful examination, but she has the most infallible mark of it: eyes set widely apart. Eyes almost sea-dark in the cavern’s candle-light as she watched me.

“Accidents will happen, mademoiselle.” My voice sounded rough, to me. “If I can persuade you to nothing else—as: you should now leave Wookey until this is done and over with—can I persuade you not to enter the caves? Wait outside; guide Captain Spofforth.”

“Saburo-san can do that.” She spoke carelessly, but there was nothing careless in the way she looked at me. “Why so anxious to keep me out of danger, messire? Feeling guilty again?”

I startled myself by exclaiming, “You got yourself into this by your own stupidity!”

I took a breath.

“That, and a desire to hand me my arse on a plate, as the English saying is. If you had not been so anxious to humiliate me, you would not be in this country—”

“You started it.” Her oval eyelids lifted, showing me her dark eyes. “The quarrel. You started it. Otherwise I wouldn’t have come looking for you that morning.”

Outrage left me speechless.

“Mademoiselle,” I managed at last, “was it not you who decided that M. Rochefort was a duellist who deserved defeat at the hands of a younger—man?”

“If you mean I saw a great lean streak of a man who needed taking down a peg or two….”

“It is not my fault you are in England,” I emphasised. It is difficult for a man to tower commandingly in a dress. I settled for holding her gaze.

After a moment, I looked away.

“So much is true,” I said. “That much is your own fault. The…reason that you have, to kill M. Fludd…that is my fault.”

She reached out and stroked the black silk ruffles at the rim of my farthingale. Her fingers were bare, gloves clasped in her other hand. She felt at the fabric, mercer-like—and as if she had never seen or thought of women’s clothes before. As if she reassessed skirts, bodice, petticoats….

She raised her eyes, gazing up at me: the ruff that sat supported on my shoulders, and the braided hair that I saw reflected in the pool.

“You won’t fight easily in that, messire.”

“No. I doubt any woman could.” The last remark, intended as self-deprecation to put her at her ease, I suddenly wished I had not said. What happened to her, happened when she was in gear easily mistaken for women’s clothes.

Her eyes glinted. She reached into the folds of silk hanging down from the farthingale’s supporter, and I made no move to prevent her. She took the dagger and bared it, the blade slipping into her hand like a living thing. With an odd smile, she stretched out her arm to threaten my midriff.

“A little higher,” I said helpfully. “The bodice feels as if it is made of steel. You may usefully stab me in the crotch, if you can find it through these petticoats, or the thigh again. My throat is at your disposal.”

I gestured towards the area of exposed, fresh-shaven skin between my nipples and the hollow of flesh above my collar-bone. It felt ridiculously exposed, even without a female duelist pointing a dagger at it.

She smiled, as I hoped and intended.

She stepped forward, well within my reach if I should have desired to attack her, and lifted the dagger. I did not respond. She laid the point of the blade between the pushed-up flesh bulging over the top of my bodice.

Never having been possessed of a cleavage before, I do not know if women are particularly sensitive to temperature in that area. I had all I could do not to squeak.

With that realisation came a familiar heat. I shifted a little, foot to foot, without volition.
To have my cock stand, in all this women’s gear, will be beyond disgraceful!

Mlle Dariole was not, now she was close, so small as she appeared in reflection. The top of her head came just below my collar-bone. It put her eyes directly on a level with the top of my bodice.

She flicked her gaze up, unfortunately catching me staring down with an expression of consternation.

“That is…cold,” I said lamely.

“Messire.” Equal amounts of wistfulness, deviltry, and affection seemed present in her voice. The last made me ache, at chest and crotch both.

She pressed the flat of the blade against my flesh, at the top of my pearl-covered bodice. “Would you like me to put you on your knees? I could make you beg a bit. And I doubt it would show through all these petticoats if you spent in your drawers.”

I spluttered inelegantly.

Her eyes were very warm, when I met her gaze.

I would have slumped, had the laced pair-of-bodies permitted it.

“To tell you the truth, mademoiselle…I would like nothing better.” The sound of my voice in the cavern, louder than the crowd’s noises out in the banqueting cave, made cold sweat trickle down my back under my chemise.

I held her gaze. “I dare say that having a man of hard reputation at your feet, begging for your mercy, will give you—whatever it is that women call a stand.”

What had begun to be a hard grin on her face faded to a smile, with so much unselfconscious affection in it that it frightened me.

“I like doing it.” Her eyes were clear. She seemed to have no shame in making her admission: I envied her as much as I have ever envied man or woman. “I’ve known that ever since Zaton’s. It gave me a feeling, down
here
.”

Equally unselfconsciously, she gestured at where, in boy’s breeches, she should have had her cod.

“I wanted to do it again.” Her eyes met mine. “You know why? You needed humbling, messire. And you weren’t humbled at Zaton’s, you just
lost
. It’s not the same thing. I like the thought of you at my feet. I like that you
hated
it.”

I put the back of my hand to my face. “What distresses me, mademoiselle, is that this is the precise dress for a womanly blush….”

She spluttered into laughter. The heat in my face did not diminish, but I confess it did not distress me.

I said, “If having me humbled will steady your nerves before tonight—” Which, privately, I think may be a disastrous blood-bath, should it go amiss: fighting indoors is ever a bad thing, “—then, mademoiselle, I am at your feet.”

She pressed the tip of the dagger against my skin, in no wise hard enough to draw blood. It pricked. She said, “Especially when you have the disadvantage of being a woman….”

I risked all, saying quietly, “Yes, I can see it is a disadvantage.”

She shut her lips together, hard enough that the flesh around them went white. With a movement economic and sure, she sheathed the dagger and dropped it to the end of its cord, concealing it in the folds of my farthingale again.

She looked up directly into my face, her voice neither cracking nor breaking. “I could have forgiven him if he’d raped me himself. He
knew
what would happen, and he left me with his thugs. He
knew.
He didn’t even have the balls to order it done.”

“Perhaps he thought it would leave you tractable and obedient.” I shrugged when she stared at me. “Men have thought such things before now, when it comes to women.”

“At least he kicked you in the cod himself.” Her lashes dipped, rose. “You’re a man. He has to intimidate you personally—”

“Try to,” I interposed. The rigidity of her expression broke. She let a second pass, and then nodded, her face soft.

“Try to intimidate you personally.” An actual smile came to her lips. “Though why he thought Messire Rochefort would be amenable to that….”