Ash: A Secret History (169 page)

“No. I’ll manage.”

“Sooner we’re down, the better.”

Inhaling the scent of pitch and beeswax, and the dampness of stone and brick, Ash took a breath, set herself a mental pace, and began to walk down the stairs with as much ease as if they were defender’s stairs in any castle. The steps were shallow, worn away in the middle with the tread of countless years. At the corner of the shaft, the stairway made a sharp right-angle; continued on down. Her eyes adjusting more now to the light from below, she could see the sketched lines on the far walls: the glitter of mosaic: the stair that they would have to descend. She kept her gaze away from the dark void on her right-hand side. Down and turn. Down and turn. Down: turn.

“There has to be another way in!” Florian snapped, behind her.

“Maybe not. Who’s going to come down here but the priests?” Another turn. Pulling off her glove and letting her hand stray out to brush the wall, she kept her orientation; counteracting the pull of the drop. “There’s your qualification for the Duke’s chaplain, Florian – doesn’t suffer from vertigo!”

Another snuffling giggle from behind. “‘Duchess’s chaplain’!”

I wish it was that easy.
,

The yellow glow of candles encompassed them. Feeling their heat, Ash glanced up, realising that their light now blocked out the view of the Mithras grating above. She was no more than fifteen or twenty feet above floor-level now. Above tiles marbled red and black – no: terracotta, but with the traces of every day’s mass still spilling down from the plain stone block that is the altar.

The last corner: the last steps: the little wall ending; and she stepped out on to the bottom of the shaft, into the chapel, the skin on the pads of her fingers worn rough. Pulling her glove on, Ash said, “Thank God for that!”

Florian jostled her, coming off the stairway in haste. She reached up and wiped her sweating face. Her fair hair glowed in the light of dozens of candles.

“Thank God indeed,” a voice said, from the shadows beyond the altar, “but with more devoutness, possibly, demoiselle?”

“Bishop John!”

“Your Grace,” he acknowledged Floria del Guiz.

Surprised to find her knees a little weak, Ash took a few determined steps about the chapel that stood at the bottom of the sacrificial shaft. Now, in the candlelight, she could see that it was wider than the shaft itself to east and west: continuing on under a low brick barrel vault either end, one vault containing church plate, the other a painted shrine.

How long before we can ask him
why Burgundy?
And how long before he’ll answer?

A novice in a green and white cassock bowed his way past his bishop, carrying a lit wax taper, vanishing up the narrow stairs that clung to the walls. Ash smelled the sweetness of beeswax candles. Within a minute, every inch of this lower end of the shaft glittered. Masons had squared off the limestone; craftsmen had laid mosaics of the Tree, the Bull, the Boar, and – around the marble altar slab, dark with congealed blood – a square of floor taken up by an oval-eyed Green Christ.

With almost simultaneous movement, Florian reached up and dragged the linen coif from her head, and Ash pushed back her hood and took off her hat. She stifled a grin –
both of us have been dressing as men for too long!
– and felt her chilled body relax in the growing heat from the candles.

Beside her, Floria looked questioningly at the Burgundian bishop. “Do we celebrate a mass now?”

“No.”

The little round-faced man’s voice fell flatly.

“We don’t?” Ash realised that she could hear the footsteps of other priests or novices, the sound coming from above, through the grating; but neither the smell nor the sound of a bull-calf.

“I may be accused of trying to repopulate Burgundy on my own,” the Bishop of Cambrai said, small black eyes gleaming with something that might have been amusement, “and of loving the fair flesh far too much, but one thing I am not, Madame cher Duchesse Floria, is a hypocrite. I had the opportunity to observe not just your captain here, but yourself, during our meeting in the Tour Philippe. I need not repeat what you said. You’re so far estranged from your faith that I think it will take more than one night to bring you in charity with God again.”

“Surely not, your Grace?” Ash said smoothly. “The surgeon – the Duchess – here has always taken field-mass with us, and she works with deacons in our hospital—”

“I’m not the inquisition.” Bishop John shifted his gaze to her. “I know a heretic when I see one, and I know a good woman driven from God by the cruelty of what circumstances have caused her to do. That’s Floria, daughter, and it’s you too. If you ever had any faith, I think you lost it in Carthage.”

Ash’s lips pressed together for a second. “Long before
that.
”

“Yes?” His soft black brows went up. “But you’ve come back from Carthage talking of machines and devices, a woman bred like one of Mithras’s bulls – and nothing at all of the hand of God in this. ‘Maid of Burgundy’.”

Ash shifted, under her cloak, rubbing one fist absently across her belly under the demi-gown.

Bishop John turned back to Florian. “I can’t withhold communion if you ask for it, but I can strongly advise that you don’t ask.”

Beside Ash, Floria del Guiz huffed an exasperated breath, folding her arms across her body. The cloth of her full gown fell down in sculptured folds about her, trailing on the uneven terracotta tiles. The warm light of the candles put a deeper gold into her hair, that fell to her shoulders now it was unconfined by her linen coif; limned her profile; but did little, even warming her skin-tone, to hide the gauntness of her face now.

“So what
do
we do?” Floria asked acidly. “Sit around down here for the night? If that’s all, I could be much more use to your duchy if I had some sleep.”

Bishop John watched her with a brilliant gaze. “Your Grace, I’m a man of the church, with a very large family of hopeful bastards; and more to come, I should think, flesh being what it is. How should I cast the first stone at
you?
Even without a mass, this is still your vigil.”

“Which means?”

“You’ll know that, by the end of it.” The Bishop of Cambrai reached out, touching the altar as if for reassurance. “So will all of us. Pardon me if I tell you that Messire de la Marche is as anxious as I am to know what you make of this.”

“Bet he is,” Ash murmured. “Okay, so no mass: what
does
she do, your Grace?”

The flames of the candles flared and dipped, shadows racing across the mosaic walls. The acrid smoke caught in the back of Ash’s throat, and she stifled a cough.

“She takes up the ducal crown, if God wills it. I advise some time be spent in meditation.” Bishop John bowed his head slightly to Floria.

Ash gave way and cleared her throat with a hacking cough. Wiping at her streaming eyes, she said, “I expected this all to be planned out, your Grace. You’re saying Florian can do what she likes?”

“My brother Charles spent his night in prayer here, in full armour, fourteen hours without a break. That told me, at least, what Duke we were getting. I remember my father told me
he
brought wine, and roasted the Bull’s flesh.” The bishop’s small pursed mouth curved in a smile. “He never said, but I suspect some woman kept him company. A night in a cold chapel is a long time to be alone.”

Ash found herself grinning appreciatively at Charles’s half-brother; Philip’s son.

“You,” he added, to Floria, “bring a woman with you; one who dresses like a man.”

Ash’s smile faded.

“As you’ve guessed,” Bishop John of Cambrai said, “your aunt Jeanne Châlon has spoken to me.”

“And what did she say?”

A quite genuine distress showed on the churchman’s face at Florian’s sharp demand. Ash – who has enough experience of men like this, in positions of power like this – thought,
What’s that old cow been saying to him? Two minutes ago it was ‘Madame chère Duchesse’!

The bishop spoke directly, and with distaste. “Is it true that you have had a female lover?”

“Ah.” There was a smile on Florian’s face, but it had very little to do with humour. “Now let me guess. There is a noblewoman and a spinster – her niece is made Duchess – but there’s a terrible scandal in the family. She comes to tell you before it all gets out as rumour. Tells you she
has
to confess all this, it’s her duty.”

“Cover your ass,” Ash rumbled, startled to find herself sounding very like Robert Anselm. She added, “Jesus, that cow! You didn’t hit her hard enough!”

Floria did not take her eyes off the bishop.

“More or less,” John admitted. “Should she have preferred family loyalty to warning me that as well as dressing like a man, you act like a man in other ways?”

A few seconds of silence went by. Floria continued to stare at the bishop. “The technical charge was that she was Jewish, treating Christian patients.”

“‘She’?”

“Esther. My wife.” Florian smiled very wryly, and very wearily. “My female lover. You can find it all out in the records of the Empty Chair.”

“Rome’s under darkness, and you’d never make the journey,” Ash cut in. “Don’t say anything you don’t want to say.”

“Oh, I want to say it.” Florian’s eyes were fiery. “Let the bishop here know what he’s getting. Because I
am
Duchess.”

Ash thought the Bishop of Cambrai flinched at that one.

“Esther and I became lovers when I finished studying medicine at Padua.” Floria folded her arms, the cloth of her robe bundled up to her body. “She never, not for one instant, thought I was a man. When we were arrested in Rome, she’d just had a baby. We weren’t getting on too well. Because of that.”

“She had a
baby
—?” Ash stopped and blushed.

“Just some man she fucked one night,” the surgeon said contemptuously. “He wasn’t her lover. We had fights about that. We had more fights about Joseph – the baby. I was jealous, I suppose. She gave so much time to him. We were in the cells for two months. Joseph died, of pneumonia. Neither of us could cure him. The day after that, they took Esther out and chained her up and burned her. The day after
that,
I had a message that Tante Jeanne had paid my ransom:
I
was free to go. So long as I left Rome. The abbot there said they’d have to burn male sodomites, but what did it matter what a woman did? So long as I didn’t practise medicine again.”

Floria’s words dropped into the cold air of the chapel, delivered with a numb bravado that Ash recognised.
We do that, all of us. After a field of battle.

“My aunt’s been creeping round me since I got back,” Florian said. “Bishop, did she tell you that the last thing I did when I was here in August was punch her? I laid her out in the public street. I’m not surprised she’s gone behind my back to you. But did she tell you? – she could have paid Esther’s ransom too. She just chose not to.”

“Perhaps…” John of Cambrai was evidently struggling; he stared away at the mosaics. “Perhaps there was too little money for her to do anything but rescue family?”

“
Esther
was ‘family’!” Florian’s tone lowered. “My father wasn’t dead then. She could have written to him, if she wanted money.”

“And the Abbot of Rome,” John went on, “would have been looking to burn Jews – if I remember the time right, there were bread riots; blaming it all on a Jewish woman would have been an acceptable crowd-pleaser. He would have been more wary of burning a Burgundian woman who had been born noble, and who evidently had noble family still alive. No matter how she was behaving at the time.”

Seeing his face, how he simultaneously seemed to want to hold out his hands to Floria, and to back away, Ash understood.

He’s a man who chases women. But he can’t chase Florian: Florian’s not interested in men. I’m not sure it’s a church thing at all with his Grace of Cambrai.

As if to confirm it, John of Cambrai gave her a conspiratorial glance. It lasted no more than a second, but it was gravely and heterosexually flirtatious, invited complicity; said, without words,
you and I are not like this, woman. We’re normal.

Momentarily intimidated by green robes and rich embroidery, Ash looked away.

Godfrey would never have said any of that. Robes don’t make a priest.

She shrugged one arm out from under her cloak, and put it around Florian’s shoulders. “That poisonous old cow’s been mischief-making, but so what? I was there: Florian made the hart. She’s Duchess. If Jeanne Châlon doesn’t like it, that’s just tough shit.”

“If she spreads it around,” Floria started.

“So what if she does?”

“In the company, last summer—”

“That’s soldiers. And they’re all right with you now.” Ash brought her other arm out from under her cloak, and put it on Florian’s other shoulder, turning the woman to face her. She spoke with great intensity, driving her point home. “Understand this. Olivier de la Marche will do what you say. So will his captains. And there’s an army outside Dijon. Internal dissent would be suicidal right now, but the chances are that it won’t happen. People have got other things to worry about. And if there are some people who still want to make trouble – then you put them in jail, or you hang them off the city walls. This isn’t about them approving of you. This is about you being their Duchess. That means keeping everybody rounded up and pointed in the same direction. Okay?”

Whether it was Ash’s intensity, or the sheer confusion on the bishop’s face, Florian started nervously to smile.

“The Burgundian army has provosts,” Ash added, “and the Viscount-Mayor has constables. Neither of them have them for the fun of it.
Use
them. If it comes to it, the bishop here can be ‘retired’ under house arrest to the monastery up in the north-east
quartier.
”

Bishop John approached. “Understand me.”

Ash, not sure how much of his change of tone was a response to the thought of military power, backed off.

He reached out and took Floria’s hands. “Madame cher Duchesse, if I’m aware of your – spiritual difficulties – then equally I’m aware that I have … difficulties of my own. Whatever you are, I am your father in the church, and your servant in the duchy.”