Mary Gentle Read online

  A Sundial in a Grave: 1610

  Mary Gentle

  For Dean, my first reader;

  without whom, nothing.

  “[…] make

  The sons of sword, and hazard fall before

  The golden calf, and on their knees, whole nights, Commit idolatry with wine, and trumpets:”

  II.i. 18–20, The Alchemist, Ben Jonson (1610)

  Contents

  Translator’s Foreword

  Part 1

  Cipher Journal of Robert Fludd

  1 Rochefort, Memoirs 2 Rochefort, Memoirs 3 Rochefort, Memoirs 4 Rochefort, Memoirs 5 Rochefort, Memoirs 6 Rochefort, Memoirs 7 Rochefort, Memoirs 8 Rochefort, Memoirs

  Part 2

  Excerpt from the Report of the Samurai Tanaka Saburo to Shogun Tokugawa Hidetada:

  9 Rochefort, Memoirs 10 Rochefort, Memoirs 11 Rochefort, Memoirs 12 Rochefort, Memoirs 13 Rochefort, Memoirs 14 Rochefort, Memoirs 15 Rochefort, Memoirs 16 Rochefort, Memoirs 17 Rochefort, Memoirs 18 Rochefort, Memoirs 19 Rochefort, Memoirs 20 Rochefort, Memoirs 21 Rochefort, Memoirs

  Part 3

  Untitled

  22 Rochefort, Memoirs 23 Rochefort, Memoirs 24 Rochefort, Memoirs 25 Rochefort, Memoirs 26 Rochefort, Memoirs 27 Rochefort, Memoirs 28 Rochefort, Memoirs 29 Rochefort, Memoirs 30 Rochefort, Memoirs 31 Rochefort, Memoirs 32 Rochefort, Memoirs

  Part 4

  The Viper and Her Brood

  33 Rochefort, Memoirs 34 Rochefort, Memoirs 35 Rochefort, Memoirs 36 Rochefort, Memoirs 37 Rochefort, Memoirs 38 Rochefort, Memoirs 39 Rochefort, Memoirs

  Part 5

  Excerpt from the Report of the Samurai Tanaka Saburo to Shogun Tokugawa Hidetada, Third Son of Great Tokugawa Ieyasu

  40 Rochefort, Memoirs 41 Rochefort, Memoirs 42 Rochefort, Memoirs 43 Rochefort, Memoirs 44 Rochefort, Memoirs 45 Rochefort, Memoirs 46 Rochefort, Memoirs 47 Rochefort, Memoirs 48 Rochefort, Memoirs 49 Rochefort, Memoirs 50 Rochefort, Memoirs 51 Rochefort, Memoirs Untitled

  Afterword—Author’s Note

  Hic Jacet

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Cover

  Copyright

  Translator’s Foreword

  I t’s about sex, and cruelty, and forgiveness.

  None of this is apparent from our previous knowledge of the story.

  In 1687 the sole surviving manuscript of the Memoirs of Valentin Raoul Rochefort, French ex-gentleman and professional hired killer, was thrown on the fire by an outraged descendant.

  Although the manuscript must have been rescued from the blaze soon afterward, many pages were found to be blackened and unreadable, and most of Rochefort’s words were lost to posterity. It’s only luck that we have a complete document—both the burned and the undamaged pages shoved carelessly together into a wooden box, by some anonymous rescuer, together with a few other minor documents of the time.

  Now, after four hundred years, computer-assisted image enhancement can give us a version that is, 99 percent accurately, what Rochefort wrote.

  In the middle of the nineteenth century a French novelist took what was legible of the Memoirs and made a popular and eminently readable novel out of it. I suppose that these days most of us know Noblesse D’Épée (or, as the English translator called it, The Sons of Sword and Hazard) from children’s editions, or from a movie version of the story. The bare facts are well known. The novel was written in France, in 1860, by Auguste Maquet, famous as the collaborator of Alexandre Dumas on The Three Musketeers. (Scandal later claimed that Maquet was indeed the sole and only author of many of Dumas’ novels—but it did him no good financially.) We know that Maquet had read a chapbook version of the Memoirs early on in his life; he recycled the names of the protagonists as minor characters in his synopses for Dumas.

  Maquet ignored—because there was, then, no way of reading them—the oddest and most disquieting parts: the Rosicrucian conspiracy theories of the early seventeenth century, and a form of futurology that makes Nostradamus look an amateur.

  The Memoirs themselves lapsed into obscurity. Ironically, when Maquet wrote Noblesse D’Épée, he had the frustrating experience of finding it dismissed as bad Dumas pastiche. This is perhaps why the novel never had a great success in France, and—along with its source—remains practically unknown. In England, however, Maquet was translated by Stanley J. Weyman, himself a notable author of historical Romances, and The Sons of Sword and Hazard was an immediate success. Edward Rose adapted a version for the stage before the First World War, and a silent-movie version appeared not long after the war ended. Indeed, that first movie, made in black and white, starring Conrad Veidt as Rochefort, and Fritz Leiber Sr. as the Duc de Sully, was almost as great a success as the book version (which reached its twenty-first printing by 1906). Other movies followed through the twentieth century. The Richard Lester early 1970s remake is my personal favorite, since it has a good deal of the unbuttoned extravagance of the original, even if it does make hay with what we knew of the plot.

  I should speak personally here. I have always loved The Sons of Sword and Hazard. I love Weyman’s book. I love all the lace-and-steel movie versions, up to the Leonardo DiCaprio vehicle it has most recently become. (Although a more unlikely Rochefort I cannot imagine. The Russell Crowe/Angelina Jolie version currently filming will, I think, be rather more true to the original.)

  And in the Spring of 1986, I first discovered that the protagonist (it is awkward to call him the “hero”) of The Sons of Sword and Hazard was a real historical person.

  It is possible that both Maquet and Weyman were not aware of this.

  That’s not as incredible as it sounds. To take the obvious example, Alexandre Dumas clandestinely lifted the plot and characters of The Three Musketeers from the work of a late-seventeenth-century historical novelist, Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras. Dumas loved to claim historical reality for his D’Artagnan, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis—but it seems likely that he remained convinced that his characters were works of fiction. In fact, research now shows that (even if the novel’s plot owes more to gossip and rumor), there were at least historical musketeers in the King’s forces who went under those names: Charles de Batz-Castelmore, Sieur of Artagnan; Armand de Sillégue, Seigneur d’Athos et d’Auteville; Isaac de Portau; and Henri d’Aramitz.

  The “novelist” Courtilz was, however inaccurately, a biographer.

  Likewise I discovered The Sons of Sword and Hazard is history inadvertently presented as fiction. Rochefort—Valentin Raoul St Cyprian Anne-Marie Rochefort de Cossé Brissac, to give him his full name—is, at the very least, based on a real man.

  That fact formed the seed of an obsession.

  All of it was old news among literary critics, true; or among those few of them interested in the “sensation” adventure novel. The complete Memoirs existed only in their damaged form, and it was by pure accident that the fire-blackened pages were not thrown away. I managed a trip to Paris on a student’s grant, and saw the original manuscript; my schoolgirl French not helping me much with the (very kind) curators, nor with the crabbed Early Modern French of Rochefort’s spiky handwriting.

  Ten years later, having managed to force a fair amount of that version of French into my brain—I’m notoriously bad at languages—I was on a second Masters degree which had nothing to do with post-medieval scholarship. However, it was at that university that I first discovered people using computer techniques both to analyze medieval and post-medieval handwriting, and to enhance images to uncover previously “lost” damaged texts.

  I had had it in mind, before that, to translate a new edition of The Sons of Sword and Hazard; but that doesn’t seem necessary, given the freshness of both Weyman’s and Maquet’s writing. For those who expect Prithee! and Gad
zooks!, this is always a pleasant surprise.

  I knew instantly that I wanted to apply the new technology’s techniques to Rochefort’s Memoirs.

  So, this translation of the Memoirs is an adjunct to the classic novel. I’ve tried to translate Rochefort’s recovered narrative into modern English, keeping a flavor of the original terms, but making it a story we can easily read.

  I should perhaps warn the unwary new reader that the complete text of the Memoirs contains passages that are, to twenty-first-century eyes, erotic or pornographic, according to the reader’s definition. Rochefort, writing some forty years after Montaigne, follows the pattern of the Essais by his un-flinching confession of his own conflicted sexual life. If The Sons of Sword and Hazard is a story of Machiavellian politics and romance, the Memoirs are, among other things, the story of a sexual obsession.

  But perhaps that is the same thing. Any reader of Stanley J. Weyman, Rafael Sabatini, Georgette Heyer, and Dumas must admit that the popular historical Romance has a powerful unacknowledged erotic subtext, from which it draws secret potency.

  In some ways, that is also the answer to the question: why a new edition of the Memoirs now? I doubt it could have been published in 1894, even if it had been known. However, we don’t now face the censorship, or the self-censorship, of Victorian England. Rochefort’s confessions can perhaps be read with sympathy and understanding—if, also, with some amusement.

  I should note here that the strangest parts of the Memoirs are invariably those that have the most fire damage—to the point where I suspect this can only be deliberate. Someone desired to burn the parts of Rochefort’s narrative that are to do with his sexual life. Someone also attempted to destroy almost all of what Rochefort wrote about the prognostications of the English physician and Rosicrucian theorist Robert Fludd (who barely appears in the novelizations). One can only speculate why.

  Here, then, is the rediscovered and retranslated story, separated from us by one language and four centuries. The recovered Memoirs, rendered as fully as I can. Or perhaps it would be more reasonable to say: as adequately as Time permits.

  And where it seems necessary—where they shed light on the writings of Valentin Raoul Rochefort—I have added to the history those other documents that were included in the wooden box that contains the manuscript of the Memoirs.

  With one of which, we begin:

  Mary Gentle

  London, England

  Part 1

  Cipher Journal of Robert Fludd

  27th January, year of Our Lord 1608, Julian calendar.

  (6th day of February 1609 by the Gregorian calendar that is to come.)

  The work continues well. The troubles in Jülich-Cleves look set to become war within another year, perhaps a year and a half. I am leaving the French King no option about what he says and does. And that man of his, Sully, and his foolish Grand Design—what does he know of designs, a French duke who came to manhood in the wars of religion, and who understands finance, violence, and very little of men’s minds?

  Sully builds canals. How infinitely sad. Builders are always fighting against the stream of time that erodes away what they do. Here in London, two streets away from my house, the spireless Cathedral of Paul stands ancient and immutable, and yet I calculate that within half a century or so, fire will destroy it, and another set of builders will raise another temple in its place. And that too will fall, half a millennium later. Assuming I am correct.

  28th January 1608 (7th February 1609 Gregorian)

  Assuming I am correct. What man writes those words without a pang? True, I can see the partners of the dance coming together. Our King James keeps Robbie Cecil close to his heart—closer than it seems in court, since I hear rumours that Cecil and the Scotsman quarrel constantly over money, like a housewife bickering with her lord and master. But there they are, where I said they would be—and when I said it, Cecil was only Burley’s hunchback son, not the first lord of this kingdom.

  And the others, I assume, are coming together in France. The woman who would be queen. The Catholic school-master who will have his name written up large in history, although he cares as little for that fame as I do. Doubtless my spy-master is also in Paris at this time, skulking in the shadows and serving Sully’s purposes.

  I do not doubt. I do not doubt. How can I?

  The man, the spy, came to London with Sully’s embassy six years ago, in June and July of ’03, but I was still from England then. I could not help my self-doubt: I went to Paris afterwards, and the court of His Majesty Henri IV, to get a look at Sully’s agent. A poor scholar, I. A reader of books, a writer of books. And this man a man of war—well, he was no different from any other soldier-turned-spy. A tall man, a head taller than any other of Sully’s thugs, and with a dark look of Spain about him, although French in truth. Not a face to be easily read. I did not watch him for long: soldiers have an instinct for something that appears more than idle curiosity. I walked back to my lodgings from the Louvre palace, through the muddy streets, my head swimming. Is this the man? This unremarkable man? Is he?

  29th January 1608 (8th February 1609 Gregorian)

  Today I drank wine at the tavern at the end of my road, and did not tell any man why. It is one of my most weighty calculations—this day, forty years ahead, and still by the Julian calendar, my English people will raise their King up on a dais and chop off his head. The first King to die at the hands of the rabble who will be considered justly executed.

  Other things inevitably follow: other Kings killed. Eventually, all kings dead, and only despots left to rule—warlords and petty criminals masquerading as statesmen. They will bring three of the greatest atrocities of the world down on us, sights and dreams to give even poor Nostradamus pause. After that, worse will follow. And all from that seed, the judicial execution of the English King.

  There must, therefore, be a different king. One they will not kill. A just man, a temperate man, a man of principle.

  I am left, unfortunate I! with the royal line of Stuart. With which I must do what I can.

  While drinking in Barkley’s Inn, I smiled, and no man understood why. I was thinking that it might have been worse. I might have been given the French royal house of the Valois.

  30th January 1608 (9th February 1609 Gregorian)

  New calculations. A new factor, at this late stage? How can it be? And yet either all I have calculated is wrong, or else there is a new player on the stage! I do not understand.

  2nd February 1608 (12th February 1609 Gregorian)

  Candlemass. Death of innocents. Yes, I bite my lip until it bleeds, attending the services in St Paul’s. Like Herod, I am to kill innocents. Unlike Herod, I hope to spare more by so doing.

  I wept, kneeling in the shelter of one of the tombs. The stone was so cold under my knees. Death comes to all, death is final; I have so short a time to do what I can, before I too die.

  It is no advantage to know that you must die upon a certain date. I have perhaps two years, if things go badly wrong. Fourteen, if I can put the right king on the throne. That must be enough, surely? To guard, to guide, to mould his mind into true kingship—stewardship of his people, as his name implies?

  Even so, that is the most I can expect. To die in December of 1611, or May of 1623. I am not yet of thirty-five years of age. My body shakes with an ague when I think on it.

  It would be an injustice to seek to divert the flow of time to give me a longer life. I will not—will not—make those calculations.

  If I were of the Old Religion, I could go to confession. Any priest would think I was a madman, but at least I could confess to another human being.

  Note to self: that loneliness, and the desire for intercourse with another soul, are the greatest dangers to this work. If the contents of this journal are not wise, still there is wisdom in the keeping of it. I must learn to be more solitary.

  4th February 1608 (14th February 1609 Gregorian)

  More calculations. Yes, there is another new playe
r, although I cannot see what he will do. Perhaps that means his ship will sink and he be killed. Time shows me these dead-ends. Improbabilities. Fates that will never be. At any rate, there is nothing I can do until he comes further within my sphere of influence. I have not known a man come from so far, before this.

  The woman will have left her home by now.

  Jülich-Cleves progresses towards crisis. There are troop movements in Savoy. I did not expect my man to be sent to oversee them—that was a very minor possibility—and yet he has been. There is a smaller chance that he may die there. If so, what then am I to do? Something, surely, but what?

  Time is a sea, vaster than the Atlantic. I am a man attempting to control its tides. How futile am I? A madman raving on a sea-shore, as in a play I attended? Only the progression of the days will tell.

  18th February 1608 (28th February 1609 Gregorian)

  All calculations re-done and complete. Yes, it will work. It is time for me to attempt my own communication here, with those of my countrymen who must be involved in this. Once that is done, and the necessary months expended to gain their trust, I can do nothing but wait for events in France. They will bring themselves to me, and then I will act.

  I walk in my other garden now, awaiting the signs of Spring, which are late this year. Frost still ornaments the marble, and the sun rarely casts a shadow from the gnomon of the sundial. I wish that I had the luxury of believing in omens.

  Influence is being exerted to have me finally made a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, so that I may practise my healing with their authority. I have learned to be solitary; now I must learn to be in company again, but wearing a flawless mask, which I must not let slip.

  One chance. The year 1610, which is the pivotal year. Next year. One chance to divert the avalanche that thunders towards us. God—if there is a God—guide my hand.

  Rochefort, Memoirs