Mary Gentle (76 page)

“But within a space of twenty-five years, a man might begin again.”

Robert Fludd lifted his gaze, and I looked into his pale eyes. He carefully placed down pen-knife and quill. “What is it you intend to say to me? What is this?”

Being weary of bending away from the low beams, I seated myself in the window embrasure. The light must hide my features, I knew, in the same way that it fell full on his.

“My business has taken me of late to St James’s palace,” I said. “Your Prince, that you would have mentored, is being called Macedon’s son come again: an Alexander who will lay the world under his heel, for Britain and for the heretic—I beg your pardon, ‘Puritan’—cause. They see him as armed with all the arts of empire, which,” I added, “is no mean feat for a boy barely eighteen; I therefore take many man to have an interest in him being so. You, I assume, would have taken advantage of this?”

“At sixteen, he could have been steered, instructed!” Robert Fludd’s face seemed light-dazzled.

Merlin to Henry’s Prince Arthur.
I shifted the scabbard of my rapier, where the window-frame drove it into my hip, and took the opportunity to watch his expression become unguarded. He put his hand out, resting his sun-browned fingers on stained papers.

Papers covered in line after line of tiny crabbed figures, many of which I did not recognise as Roman or Arabic. Caterina’s work, covered by the stains of grit and mould from the Cheddar caverns. He picked with one bitten fingernail at the rough surfaces.

The sound of her death is easy to call to the surface of my mind. Her tiny face as white as the moon’s under which she sprawled.

“I met Elena Zorzi first in Venice, with Magister Bruno.” Fludd’s hand left the sheet of paper, and his gaze went past me, to the window; perhaps beyond the glass. He put his hands across his all-but-shaven scalp, digging the fingertips into what grey hair remained. His eyes shone grey as glass in the pupil, but yellow in the whites like an old man. “I thought her lost so many years ago. Or else she could not have….”

I watched his face. “Did it occur to you that this may not have been about us, monsieur? About England? Or France? King Henri, or King James? Or about Europe, either, if it comes to that?”

“Ah? Yes…Tanaka Saburo. You think this was directed in the end to his need, and not mine?”

“He had more, I dare say.”

“Four islands blackened….” Fludd looked back at me, painfully. “That’s not the same, messire. Not as all the foundations of the earth being burned away, by lack of our ability to act against it.”

Except that, by Caterina’s reckoning, we are as capable of burning the foundations of the earth as any comet. Fludd’s perspective is somewhat narrow….

The parts of a decision began to come together in my mind.

“One thing you might consider,” I said, “is the instructing of other pupils—in secret, since I doubt James or the Medici Queen would approve.”

“Other…?” Fludd gazed up from his desk at me.

True, I thought he might be uncertain about passing on Bruno’s teachings.
But we have Caterina’s papers.
And it will be possible, supremely possible, to tell when a student is well-instructed—because he will then, accurately, predict.

“It is possible,” I said, “that I shall be away from here, for a week or two.”

He looked more startled at my apparent change of subject.

I added, “I need to know, therefore, Monsieur Fludd—how long will it take you to calculate whether I can go and return with safety?”

“Watch Fludd. I have a plan for which I’ll need him when I return,” I instructed Gabriel. “You must stay here. If you go to France, they’ll hang you.”

“France?”
Gabriel’s brows shot up towards his receding hairline. “And if you go, they won’t hang
you?
”

“No. I shall return alive. I have it on—excellent authority.”

Speaking of it to Dariole, I found her cynical. She leaned her shoulder up against the damp brickwork in the courtyard-garden, that having been where I found her; and gave me a look that spoke volumes about her resolution not to be deceived.

“You trust him? And you’re going
where?
” she said.

I must stay for the thunderstorm to break over my head, I knew. Or else she—and doubtless Gabriel, too—will merely follow to me France, and go by the shortest way to Montfaucon.

“Step inside,” I said. “Conceivably it’s time that I explained something to you—both of you.”

Gabriel stood bending over the hearth as we entered the kitchen, sniffing at meat broiling over the fire in the iron kettle. He glanced at me, clattered the hot lid back on the small cauldron, and straightened up.

Dariole pulled a wooden bench towards the hearth by one end, and straddled it; white hands down and clasping the sides. Eyes bright, she said, “Tell me!”

Gabriel moved towards the door.

I signalled to him. “Sit down.”

He looked at me, I think to see what I intended; then wiped his hands on the rag he kept in lieu of a kerchief, and eased himself down on the bench beside Dariole. The wood creaked.

At a loss where to begin, I spoke the thought that had been occupying my mind earlier in the day. “Giordano Bruno’s students are—almost—all dead.”

I looked from the young woman’s face to the older man, seeing their confusion.

“The only such man that we
know
remains alive is a pet, now, of James Stuart and Marie de Medici.” I paused. “Perhaps of her favourite Concini, also; perhaps not. Likewise, I doubt James is foolish enough to make Doctor Fludd known to Robert Carr.”

Gabriel gave his curt nod, that compressed the folds of fat under his chin. He watched me with the half-insolent, half-admiring suspicion that I have had from him since Breda. It says, clear as daylight,
Now what crazy idea has the boy come up with?

I walked across to the hearth. Uncomfortably, I said, “Does it seem to you, either of you, that Marie de Medici, and King James as he is now, are the best to be trusted with the knowledge that Doctor Fludd can give them?”

Gabriel made a face. “Jesu, Raoul! Ain’t a king alive can be trusted! What’s in your mind now?”

The lick of small rain-drops on the leaded glass sounded increasingly loud. Gabriel, I saw, did not look concerned at my silence.
And I know a time when he would be wondering if he had “presumed.” And if I were about to beat him.

Dariole shifted about on her arse, and brought her leg across so that she sat squarely on the wooden bench; not one of her movements those proper to a young woman.

“If he
isn’t
theirs….” Dariole shrugged, and leaned both elbows back on the table behind her. “The Medici bitch will stick Sully in the Bastille, won’t she?—if she doesn’t chop his head off. Otherwise, I could have nailed Fludd’s bollocks to the
Theodora
’s main-mast two months ago and we wouldn’t
have
this problem.”

Her eyes glinted with humour, mordant as it might be.

I felt myself moved to smile. “Not quite that simple.”

The Summer rain beat more strongly against the window; drops hissed where they fell from the chimney down into the coals of the fire.

“I have come to a realisation. Which is this. That it is no longer sufficient for me to say that I do not trust these men—if I intend to do nothing about it.”

Gabriel stood up silently, and bent to take the iron kettle from the chain, where it bubbled with the thick sound of a dish all but cooked. He stood it down out of the hissing drops of rain. I saw him glance over his shoulder and catch Dariole’s gaze. She made a small movement of her mouth, which his expression answered.

“I begin to feel like a man set between his wife and his mother!” I remarked with some asperity. “If you have something to say, speak!”

Dariole gave me an innocent frown. “Which one of us is your mother, exactly?”

I controlled my desire to wallop her behind, and momentarily cheered myself by managing a civil nod towards Gabriel Santon. He looked pleasingly affronted as he sat down again.

“I ain’t yer Ma!” he rumbled. “And suppose you just tell us what you’re talking about?”

I put my back to the hearth, so that I might look squarely down at both of them.

“I have agents, still,” I said. “Or, at least, there are men whom I have so employed in the past. Were I a man unconcerned with prophecies…well then, there’s no need I should live either in England or France over the next few years. There is Italy, the Germanies, where a spy-network might base itself.” I shrugged. “The Turkish Mediterranean, if matters become dire. If I desired, I might eventually employ as many intelligencers as ever I did under M. de Sully.”

Mlle Dariole and Gabriel exchanged looks.

“And this has
what
to do with Giordano Bruno?” Dariole demanded.

I took a pace or two back and forth over the trodden herbs and rushes on the flagstones; turned about, and faced the two of them again.

“Too much has been foretold, too accurately. It seems to me…that it would be wise if there were—watchmen. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” At Dariole’s blank look, I glossed, “‘Who will guard the guards?’ Whether or not I believe Caterina was right in all she calculated for our future, Saburo had confidence enough to die for it. As did she. Fludd—” I gestured at the plain plaster of the ceiling, and by inference at the rooms above us. “
He
thinks his mathematical reasoning true, or he wouldn’t put himself into lifelong imprisonment now, for what he still hopes he can do to prevent his supposed comet that will destroy the world.”

Because, even though the time has passed, I perceive he still—hopes.

Dariole gave a shrug; Gabriel’s nod was one of more considered agreement.

“I will set it out plainly for you,” I said, standing on the rush-strewn floor before their bench. “Sir Robert Cecil made a request of me: you both know this. I have Doctor Fludd at his mathematics, to see what his predictions say has changed with Prince Henry—and, meantime, I am using Cecil’s old agents to discover mundanely what information on Henry I can. I have no wish to kill the boy. But that is by-the-by, at the moment.”

“It is?” Gabriel rumbled.

“It is, because this cannot be the sole such occasion that will arise.”

“And?” Dariole prompted.

“And—murder is a blunt weapon.”

Gabriel’s eyebrows shot up.
“What?”

“A blunt weapon, and one of last resort.” I wished I might sit. I felt, if I must confess it, too nervous under their Gemini-twin gazes. “The skill in spying is in using information and manipulating a man’s behaviour. Witness my lord the Duc. Murder should be the last weapon to hand.”

I put my hands behind my back, clasping them to keep them still.

“Robert Fludd,
if
he continues, will make many predictions. If a man desired to avoid murder, wherever possible, but desired also to steer clear of the worst of wars and other disasters…. Well, then: a man might useagents to monitor, to over-watch, and to step in, where need is, with just sufficient force or fraud. And, if judgement demands it—kill. Men die in duels and wars with not one-tenth the reason this would have….”

In silence, rain hissed beyond the open kitchen door.

“How can I judge the interests of five hundred years in the future? I do not know, truly, whether the world will end in comet-fire. I can’t conceive of it. I
do
think we ourselves best placed to step outside the narrow interests of France and England, and consider how this great war of Europe might be avoided.”

“You,”
Dariole said. She stood, her thumb hooking itself under her sword-belt, and her chin lifting as she stared up into my face. “This is
you
you’re talking about. Isn’t it?”

I shrugged helplessly. “There would be others, in time, recruited carefully; those who could be trusted with the knowledge of Fludd’s prognostications—”

“But you!”

Gabriel looked up. “You take orders better than you give ’em, Raoul.”

Conceivably I stiffened; it was no great difficulty to look down at him, where he sat. His expression did not waver. Gabriel Santon is no longer afraid of his master in any way.

“Yes,” I admitted. “That has been true.”

Gabriel smiled wryly at me.

I said, “But, consider where I stand now. If Fludd said one true thing in his lifetime, he spoke it before Master Cecil—a man cannot ‘un-know’ what he knows.”

I gestured; Gabriel moved along the bench; I sat down beside him. It was necessary for me to sit. Leaning forward, I linked my hands together so that no man should see them shake.

“If I foresee a thing, and don’t prevent it, am I not responsible for it?”

Dariole said nothing, only watching me intently, her arms folded across her body.

Gabriel protested, “You can’t do
everything
.”

“True enough. I’m no ambitious man.” I smiled, somewhat twistedly, at Gabriel. “And it may be true that I make a better servant than master. Who knows how long this enterprise would last; or if it could succeed—in anything? But, if I don’t do this, who else will?”