1610: A Sundial In A Grave

by Mary Gentle

Genres: Fantasy; Dark Fantasy; Historical Fantasy

Synopsis

The year is 1610. Continental Europe is briefly at peace after years of war, but Henri IV of France is planning to invade the German principalities. In England, only five years earlier, conspirators nearly succeeded in blowing up King James I and his Parliament. The seeds of the English Civil War and the Thirty Years War are visibly being sown, and the possibility for both enlightenment and disaster abounds. But Valentin Rochefort, duelist and spy for France's powerful financial minister, could not care less. Until he is drawn into the glittering palaces, bawdy back streets, and stunning theatrics of Renaissance France and Shakespearean London in a deadly plot both to kill King James I and to save him. For this swordsman without a conscience is about to find himself caught between loyalty, love, and blackmail, between kings, queens, politicians, and Rosicrucians, and the woman he has, unknowingly, crossed land and sea to meet.

Release date: February 27, 2014

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 608

Sample

It’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 afterwards, 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, ninety-nine per cent 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 Snr 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 re-make is my personal favourite, 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 Di Caprio 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 plot of the novel owes more to gossip and rumour), there were at least 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-mediaeval scholarship. However, it was at that university that I first discovered people using computer techniques both to analyse mediaeval and post-mediaeval 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 Gadzooks!, 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 flavour 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 unflinching 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 novel). 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.

27th January, year of Our Lord 1608, Julian calendar (6th 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 schoolmaster 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 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 player, 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 seashore, 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.

[Translator’s Note This would seem to be the best place to put another of the miscellaneous documents found with Rochefort’s Memoirs. The second section of the Memoirs follows immediately after.

The Memoirs make extremely idiosyncratic use of respectful forms of address (dono, tono, etc.), which may result from a misunderstanding of the language. Therefore, for this translation, I’ve substituted the more familiar (if not so authentic) Edo period san and sama, to make the narrative more accessible to modern English and Japanese readers.]

There was one, once, who had the misfortune and bad taste to live past the climactic moment of his life.

The best of deaths was offered to me and I missed it. My lord missed it, also, but had the fortune to die within two years, when some of the gold still clung to him and gave him the shine of glory. Lord Kobayakawa Hideaki. He was two-and-twenty years old when I stood at his grave. I was forty-seven.

The pinnacle of our lives, two years before, had been a battle, and a great one – the great battle of our lifetime. When one has had the privilege of fighting with and against all the greatest daimyos of the lands of Nihon, when one has changed the future for all time by a simple and decisive act, what else is left?

At Sekigahara, my lord and I fought. At the crucial moment of the battle, we went over to the side of the Eastern Army and your father, Lord Tokugawa Ieyasu, who by that victory was made Shogun. My lord Hideaki was rewarded with Chikuzen province. I was rewarded by being allowed to accompany him.

We took a part in the last echoes of the war, as the great Shogun subdued outlaw lords and rebels, but it was anti-climactic. My lord wrote poetry on the subject. How a cherry blossom, holding on to the stalk into the heat of June, goes brown and rotten; better if it had fallen in the fullness of its white glory, in May.

I have no place to criticise my lord Hideaki, and if the subject and treatment seemed hackneyed to me, I would have attributed it to his youth and excused it. On the field of battle, he was god-like. At court, among conspiracies, he did not shine. He turned from them, disgusted, spending more time with women, and gambling all night while emptying jug after jug of warm saké.

So death came for him and was timely – an illness, not treachery, so he need fear no dishonour. We interred him when the yellow leaves fell. I passed into the service of his cousin, the new lord of Chikuzen province. So things stayed for six or seven years.

I was a captain of ashigaru, under my lord’s cousin, and no longer the companion of a lord. That was well, I argued to myself at night. What lord wishes an old man as his companion, when that man is not particularly wise, or skilled, or devout? Passing into my fifties, I could expect in time to be replaced as captain of the foot soldiers, and I might hope to be retired to a small farm, with servants enough to work while I spent my days overseeing them.

On such nights I would patrol the grounds of my lord’s house – which I could never think of as his cousin’s house. I paced slowly, checking the sentries at odd times, and earning myself their respect and unmalicious dislike. I would walk by the gravel-garden, watching the shifting of the moon’s light on the crags, and smelling the moss and trees growing around the raked expanse. Invariably I would end at the top of one of Chikuzen’s low hills, looking north to the sea, as the sun rose out of the unknown east.

A foolish thing for a samurai to do, you will say. I agree, I concede the point. My fingers were not skilled enough to cast the colours on a scroll, and my poetry, when I attempted it, had nothing of the delicacy of the masters. Perhaps I reached a point of satisfaction when I would strip off my armour and drill with my sword, there in the brightening light, celebrating the coming of the day with the only skill I have.

Whether it was this evidence of individuality that caused my lord’s cousin to choose me, I do not know. He called me to him, ordered me to Edo with a small troop of soldiers, and told me to obey his son in the capital as I would himself. It was an unnecessary slight, but not enough to bring the total to a point where I might cut off the man’s head. He was not worth my own death.

At Edo, I was given a place with the man’s son: we were to go on a ship, and sail for the land of the foreign barbarians. He was to be Ambassador. They so often come to us, merchants and priests for the most part: now we were to go to them.

I looked at the sea, when we embarked, and wondered if, on all those mornings, I had been watching my grave.

I was not sorry to leave Nihon. My dead lord Kobayakawa Hideaki rested; I had no obligations there. His successor was unworthy: I did not consider myself obligated to him, either. And the son was a man of nothing much in any quality: neither brave nor cowardly, rash nor wise, decisive nor cautious. If I dislike any man, it is the hesitant one, who changes his mind according to whomever last spoke to him: a feather for every wind that blows. Such men, daimyo though they may be called, do not have the right to demand the service of honest samurai.

The sea inflicted me with a grave illness from the first hour that we set our sails and left port.

I know, therefore, very little of the first few weeks. By the time I had recovered, we had met with a Dutch ship, and hove to to exchange news – that there would be little more trading, as we of Nihon listened more and more to those who said foreigners were malicious and harmful. And there was more. But as I came out of my illness, that was what stayed with me. That here was another point of decision, that I might be part of: keeping Nihon open to the world, or closing it, pure and secret, within itself. What we brought back from the land of the Europeans would sway this, I thought. As decisively as Sekigahara, even.

I worked the ship, in the months that followed, taking time to learn from the ship’s master in the arts of navigation and sailing. It is necessary for a samurai to add to his skills, so that he may be a credit to his lord. I thought my lord Hideaki would have approved. I made sure the escort that I led, as the Ambassador’s guard, made regular practice with their weapons on the swaying deck, and led them gladly against pirates when we were twice attacked.

Slowly the world grew hotter, grew colder; coasts appeared like grey ribbons on our horizons and faded away again. The Ambassador had no interest in what might lie ashore: we collected food, news, and sailed on. There were lands where men were darker than the aboriginal Ainu of Nihon, and plague came in on every wind. And then one coast, much later, which the ship’s master declared to be Espaine, the home of so many of the black-crow priests. I stared at it over the ship’s rail, not regretting that we would not land there.

By this time, I had with my new lord’s permission acquainted myself with all the languages of Europe that I could. The crew of the ship sufficed to teach me a few words of Dutch and Gaelic, much English, and also much Portuguese, which I understood (mistakenly, perhaps) to be much like Spanish. I puzzled out Latin in a holy book of the black-crow priests, liking less and less what I understood of it; their worship of a criminal who had been given an untouchable’s death, and then became a kami whose place is everywhere and nowhere. The wise man placates spirits, he does not abandon himself to them.

Grey waters, cold mists, heavy wool clothing that we must wear at all times – this was the burden of the next few weeks, while the ship fought to come north, turning and tacking again and again. The winds were against us. I found it more difficult to practise my sword drills on the icy wet deck, and whereas, as a young man, I would have welcomed this challenge, now I drilled with precise efficiency, and could not prevent myself longing for the heat of Chikuzen province.

The seventh or eighth week in those waters, the ship’s master announced to me that we had made the opening of a great channel which had our destination – England – upon one side of it, and another country on the other. I was bold enough to ask my lord the Ambassador if we should prepare for instant landfall. He instructed us that we were to stay on board ship: that we should sail further on, to the capital, and there be received as befitting a daimyo.

I would have cheerfully been received as the lowest of my ashigaru if I could have slept ashore. The sickness that had tormented me after leaving Nihon threatened again. After giving orders for the ashigaru to stand guard as usual on the gifts we had brought for the English Emperor, I went to my place below and attempted to sleep.

I woke to the crash of a rock stoving in the side of the ship.

No man who has been in a wreck ever forgets it. I jumped up, cast off my own armour, and made at a run for the cabin where my lord the Ambassador kept his gifts. There, I ordered my ashigaru to protect the Ambassador with their lives, and I put on one of the gift armours, believing that I could swim in it, were that necessary. I could not tell what to do with the other. For a moment I was near to despair, with men screaming and running, and the sea crashing loudly, and the suck and grind of the breaking ship sounding over it all.

After a few precious seconds had expired, I rolled up the armour plates and stuffed them in a sack, together with the helmet, and tied it all around my waist. That done, and my swords thrust in their scabbards down the front of the armour – which was too big for me – and tied there, I began to climb up to the deck with the intention of jumping into the sea.

Foaming waters broke down the steps as I attempted to mount them.

Holding to the rail with one hand, mouth clamped shut on what air remained, I determined to swim out of the sliding wreck. I had missed one good death. This was no substitute. If I were to die, it would be after bringing home the news which was required from the Anghrazi – the Englishmen – and not before.

I lived. But when I woke on the cold, solid sand of the shore, the sea had stripped me of armour and baggage. Unconsciousness took me again as I realised this, in the middle of swearing a vow to any god or kami that might be listening: that I would find the Ambassador and whoever remained of my men, and carry out my orders, no matter what. My honour rests on it: there is nothing else that I can do.

[Translator’s Note This document is the shortest of the documents not in M. Rochefort’s handwriting that have been put in with the Memoirs. It’s also the one most damaged by fire, and therefore the one most subject to computer reconstruction. I’ve noted places where reconstruction fails with ellipses, […], and put the most conjectural reconstructions in bold type.]

It’s difficult to remember, now, when everything hurts, and my hands are arthritic knots that can’t hold a quill-pen, that once I was capable of drawing a rapier and dagger from their scabbards while falling, and bounding up, and springing back into a fight. But it is true. I could and I did.

Write down everything, just as I tell it you.

Write down everything, as I speak it.

Yes.

It’s the sin of pride, Father. For a woman, when she enjoys […]

[…] That’s better. As you have it there, on the paper.

If I can live with it happening to me, priest, you can live with writing it down.

[2 further lines scored out and burned]

[…] I was young, then. Paris and Zaton’s eating-house were a long way behind me. I ate in the Silver Martlet, with those from that company of players known as ‘Prince Henry’s Men’. All men and me a woman alone; my protection was that I could have killed any one of them.

The samurai asked my help to go to James’s court. I didn’t want to admit I could help him. Sewing is a woman’s skill, not seemly in a young man. Then I was confused because the task seemed to need no skill! None of his clothes-pieces were shaped cloth, they were all plain long strips the width of my forearm from elbow to wrist. Then there was skill, about the collar and the shoulders. I sat on the floor of the lodging-house in Dead Man’s Place and swore, pricking my fingers, making what he called kimono and kosode and kagashina.

Monsieur Saburo bought wooden pattens and wore them over his feet, not over shoes like a Christian. His robes were all in layers, but splendid when he put them all on. I envied him his cattan-blades, but he wouldn’t let me duel with them. He left for Whitehall-palace, for Mr Secretary again, leaving me to guard the kabuto helmet – which he sometimes called that, and sometimes akoda-nari, and either way wouldn’t leave alone, and couldn’t take with him to court yet.

At that age I’d have told you how ill in body I felt. My night before had been a long one at dice. I put an old man’s furred gown on over my shirt, shivered, drank small beer, and sat on my cot-bed to clean and sharpen my rapier.

No, Father. I’d been travelling alone for more than two years, by then. Remember, I grew up with five brothers? I’ve never forgotten how strong men are when I don’t have deadly weapons, even now when I’m old and it doesn’t matter. Half my joy in humbling or killing came with knowing how my skill put me beyond men’s reach.

Many a young man could say the same. A sword is a great leveller.

I cleaned, I polished, I sharpened my swept-hilt rapier, that I won from an Italian after three nights at dice because I was determined to have it, once having