Mary Gentle Read Online Free Page B

laughing, for all a slug of blood trickled down from his nose. “Messire Valentin! That wasn’t insolence. Not to the Duc. I meant nothing. Sit down: I’ll fetch breakfast.”
    He was a stocky man, and strong, if now in his middle fifties; and it moved me unexpectedly to find I could bundle him along so easily. Reaching the outer door, I unbarred it, hauled it open, and thrust him through it with much of the strength of my arm. He bounced off the wall opposite, tipped down the stairs, and fell like a sack of meal.
    I remained stern-faced as his body thudded on the treads; and when he rose shakily up onto hands and knees, in the building’s entrance, I shouted, “You’re dismissed, you thieving idle son of a bitch!”
    “But, Monsieur Valentin!”
    “Didn’t you hear me? You’re dismissed!”
    I saw the moment when belief touched his face.
    “Sir! Monsieur. Monsieur Rochefort!” A pause. “My things! Sir! My belongings!” Gabriel Santon bellowed. “You can’t do this! It’s— stealing . Those are my things! Sir, you can’t—”
    “Get off my street, Santon. I will come out with a sword if I hear you speak one more time!”
    I slammed the door, so that my watcher across the street should be in no doubt of my feelings.
    It took me a bare few minutes to prepare, folding up the razor and putting that, and spoon and jack and other necessaries, into a leather bag. I put what money I had loose under the floorboards into a belt that I wore tied around my waist, under the band of my breeches.
    The leather bag I tied by its cords to my belt, but wore inside my trunk-hose—in the year 1610, men wore them wide and capacious to mid-thigh, from where they were close-fitting, and gartered above the knee. I do not say I ever did as some, who (afraid of thieves, or lacking lodgings), instead of the fashionable stuffing of horsehair and bran, wore their kerchiefs, wigs, and bedding in their trunk-hose. I do remark that it was easy enough for me to store several small objects and a spare pistol, and still appear nothing more than a gentleman out for a morning’s walk.
    Out for a morning’s walk to kill the King.
    I cast a glance around the two rooms; there was nothing I could not leave without a look back. I make it a principle to live so.
    By that time, Gabriel’s pleas, kicks, and angry yells had ceased, although not before a stone rattled off the shutters. I waited another count of five hundred to be sure, my eyes on the stout oak of the door. I thought what it must be like on the other side. A door that, up till now, has been nothing more than the barrier between home and the street: something which can be freely passed. Now it is a locked door, and he has no more right to enter than any passing visitor. He has been shut out of his familiar life.
    Let it drive him to anger. Best of all, let it move him to report my odd behaviour these last twelve hours to someone in authority. That way no man except me will be held responsible for my actions today.
    I went out briskly into the observed dawn streets.

Rochefort, Memoirs
2
    T here is the King.” I did not point, such gestures being identifiable even in a crowded Paris street.
    François Ravaillac, beside me, tranquilly followed my gaze. “Yes, M. Belliard, I see. His carriage. The King.”
    I had had two likely men to choose from: one a soldier who had served in Venice, and with the Holy Roman Emperor’s forces against the Turks and Berbers in North Africa; the other this provincial Catholic school-master. True, the soldier from Rouen, Pierre de la Jardin, Sieur de la Garde, would have been more apt to turn his hand to this job—indeed, he had been showing some skilled enthusiasm towards the supposed “Jesuits” who approached him.
    But he would be more likely to succeed than M. Ravaillac here, I thought, gazing down at the man by my side. And that is the last thing required.
    It is true I should have preferred a man a little more the archetype of a pedagogue.