Ash: A Secret History (167 page)

Rickard automatically began to scribble on a sheet of paper.

Floria added, “They could attack us at any time. So send out the heralds. But send out – was it the Sieur de Loyecte’s men? Yes. Them too.”

“Florian—”

De la Marche said, “Your Grace—”

“It’s my responsibility.”

The surgeon-turned-Duchess held up a pale hand. For all the white samite that covered the back of it, it remained what it was: the hand of a woman who lives out of doors, and who handles sharpened steel.

“My responsibility,” she repeated. “Even if it’s only for today, then the ultimate responsibility is
mine.
”

Ash stared. After a moment, both de la Marche and Bishop John bowed their heads.

“Just as well you got a surgeon,” Floria added, sardonically. “I’ve had to take responsibility for men dying long before this. All right. Send out your killers.”

For all her certainty, there was a dazed numbness in her expression that Ash recognised.

“Having someone die when you’re digging an arquebus ball out of their stomach isn’t the same as ordering a death. Florian, I was going to order it anyway.”

“She is either Duchess or she is not,” Philippe Ternant said, speaking without opening his fragile closed eyelids. “Demoiselle Ash, you must act with her permission.”

Ash bit down on a raucous remark.
Florian doesn’t need that right now.

Florian rubbed her fingers one against the other. “Ash, I have never had the least desire to be Duchess. If I had any taste for Burgundian politics, I would have come to court, here, when I was a girl.”

Ash glimpsed momentary dismay on several faces.

Still decisively, Floria announced, “I’ll come into the palace daily, but I can’t run the company hospital at a distance. Baldina isn’t good enough unsupervised. I’m staying at the company tower. I’ll be talking to the abbots about additional hospices for the civilian wounded. Ash, I’ll be taking over the ground floor, too. The men can sleep in the cellars.”

That isn’t the way to do this! These guys want you here: you’re their Duchess…

Holding back a desire to yell at her surgeon, Ash said, “You wouldn’t rather put the wounded in the cellars, given the bombardment?”

Floria nodded, sharply.

“Okay, I’ll get that sorted.”

A distant roar sounded outside. Ash paced over to one window, then the next, peering through the gaps between shutter and frame. One gave her the glimpse of dragon-tail fire, arcing through the sky.

“Isn’t that nice. The Nones bombardment. You could set the town clock by that crew down at the south bridge. Angeli, you got a point about this tower. No need to make it
easy
for them.”

The atmosphere relaxed a little at that.
But I don’t want to be mending fences all the time…
Meeting Floria’s green gaze, she saw the raw edge of panic that underlay her determination.

“Okay, guys. That’s given us a framework to work in. Ten minutes’ stand-down, for beer and bitching.” She grinned. “Then back here, and we’ll start working things out in detail.”

Hidden under the noise of their chairs scraping back from the table, Florian said shakily, “I need Margaret’s army soon. Don’t I?”

The council went on past the early November sunset, and into evening. Servants brought in sweet-smelling pure wax candles, and Ash sighed, in the middle of a discussion, suddenly breaking off to think
This is luxury!,
remembering the noxious tallow tapers that are all the company’s stores now hold.

Rank has its privileges.
A cynical smile pulled up one side of her mouth, and she caught Romont’s unwary, amazed look, and went back to thumping the table and shuffling gold plate on the tablecloth into the disposition of Burgundian companies around Dijon’s walls.

“Half his men are merchants’ sons!” one of the
centeniers,
Saint-Seigne, thundered. “I will not put my knights at the same gate as Loyecte’s men!”

Barely withholding the words, Ash sighed internally.
Oh for fuck’s sake!

“This is a council of weariness,” Olivier de la Marche said tactfully. He turned to Florian. “Your Grace, none of us have slept. There is much to do, to make certain we are as fully prepared as we can be. Half of us will sleep through the day, now, half through the night.”

“Except the Maid of Burgundy, who’ll be up until Matins, and rise at Lauds…” Robert Anselm whispered to Ash.

“Ah, bugger off,
rosbif!
”

He gave a happy, rumbling chuckle.

“Christ, you
do
need sleep!” Ash elbowed him. “Florian—”

“Don’t go anywhere yet,” the surgeon said bluntly, over the noise of men rising, bowing, and withdrawing themselves from the ducal chamber.

The verdant-robed Bishop of Cambrai rose from his chair, as the rest did. Instead of moving towards the chamber door, Bishop John walked back down the table towards the surgeon-Duchess Floria.

“Bishop John.” Florian stabbed a long, white finger towards Ash. “About tomorrow night – this is the witness I want at my investiture.”

He beamed. “Madame cher Duchesse, of course.”

Aware that Anselm and Angelotti were waiting for her, talking urgently to the readmitted escort, Ash protested, “I haven’t got time to spare to go through another damn hours-long public ceremony, Florian!”

The Bishop startled. “Public? The people don’t need to see this. They know who the
Duchesse
is. They recognise her in the streets. Taking the ducal coronet is between her and God.”

“Another good reason why you don’t need me,” Ash said dryly.

“The
Duchesse
wishes you to stand private vigil with her, and myself, and the other two witnesses, through the night. The following morning’s mass gives her the crown, but nothing men can do can make her less, or more, than she already is.”

“I’m busy! I’ve got a fu— a company to run! No, an army! I’ve got to look through all the duty-rolls of the Burgundian companies—”

Florian’s hand closed over her arm, with all the strength of surgeon’s fingers. “Ash. I want a friend there. You don’t have to tell me you think it’s a load of cock.”

Startled, Ash rapped out, “You don’t have to tell me you think exactly the same thing!”

Floria smiled painfully, ignoring the churchman’s expression. “That isn’t the point. Remember when you talked to Charles? You want to know ‘why Burgundy’. So do I. I’m Duchess, Ash. I want to know, why Burgundy – and, why me?”

Ash blinked. Sleeplessness shuddered through her. She put the weakness to the dark back of her mind where she loses such things. “Will this ‘vigil’ of yours tell us why Burgundy?”

Florian switched her gaze from Ash to the Burgundian bishop. “It better had.”

VII

She slept an hour in one company’s guardhouse, down by the south gate; another hour in the armoury, while clerks sorted out inventories. The rest of the night and the following morning saw her among hackbutters, archers, squires to knightly men-at-arms; judging their morale, hearing their officers’ reports, but most of all, letting them see her.

“A Pucelle?” one noseless veteran of Duke Philip’s campaigns remarked. “Quite right too – God sent one to the French, the least He could do was send one to us!”

His spoiled speech gave her the option of appearing not to understand. She merely grinned at the billman. “Granddad,
you’re
just surprised to find there’s still a virgin in Dijon.”

That was being repeated, with embellishments, before she left that barracks, and it followed her all the way to the Viscount-Mayor’s hall, where it was received with less delight and more shock. By that stage – talking all the time to two, three, four men simultaneously – she was past caring what civilians thought.

At noon, back at the tower, stripped to her shirt by her pages, she sat down suddenly on her pallet, dizzy enough that she tipped over slowly and sprawled face forwards; asleep before she was conscious of touching the straw-filled linen.

She slept through the short light hours of the afternoon, waking once at the noise of her pages, three nine-year-old boys huddled around the great hearth, polishing the rust-spotted plates of her armour: cuirass, cannons, vambrace, pauldrons… The smell of neat’s-foot oil being worked into the leather straps roused her enough to lift her head off the bed, blinking.

Across from her, on the other side of the hearth’s heat, Robert Anselm lay slumped asleep on a truckle-bed; one huge, immobile, silent lump. She hitched one elbow in, to get her arm under her and push herself up.

“Boss.” Rickard squatted down beside her palliasse. “Message from Captain Angelotti: ‘You’re not indispensable, the company is managing perfectly well without you: go back to sleep!’”

Ash grunted an indistinguishable protest; was flat face-down and asleep again before she could properly voice it. When she woke for the second time, one of the pages was cutting bread by the hearth-fire and nibbling crusts, and Angelotti was sprawled on the truckle-bed – asleep on his back, with a face like an angel, and snoring like a hog in a wallow.

Rickard looked up at her from where he knelt, scouring her sallet-visor with the finest white sand.

“Boss, message from Captain Anselm and Messire de la Marche: ‘You’re not indispensable; the
army’s
managing perfectly well—’”

“Ah, bollocks!” she said thickly.

She did not dream: there was no hint of the scent of boar, or the chill taste of snow; nothing but deep unconsciousness. Godfrey, if he is a presence, is at too deep a level to touch her conscious soul.

When sleep finally let her go, she rolled over in a tangle of warm linen shirt, blankets, and furs; and the slanting light from one slit-window put sunset’s red gold across her face.

“The doc – the
Duchess
sent word,” Rickard said, as soon as he saw she was awake. “She wants you at the chapel.”

She arrived in the bathhouse of the palace’s Mithraic chapel as Floria del Guiz stepped up out of the wooden tub, and servants swathed her in pure white linen. Water dampened the cloth. The steam that filled the air began to dissipate quickly in the chill.

“This is what you call immediate, is it?” Florian called.

Ash handed her cloak and hat to her page, and turned back to find the surgeon-Duchess temporarily wrapped in a vast fur-trimmed blue velvet robe. Ash walked across the flagstones towards her.

“I had stuff to do. I needed to talk with Jonvelle and Jussey and the rest of Olivier’s
centeniers.
” Ash yawned, stifling it with her fist. She looked at Florian, eyes bright, as the woman waved her attendants away. “
And
the refugee French and German knights, and their men. Very nice, everyone’s being. We’ll see what happens when it comes to me giving them orders…”

“Next time, get here when I ask.”

Floria spoke harshly. Ash opened her mouth to snap back. The woman added, “I’m
supposed
to be a Duchess. You’re showing me up in front of these people. If I do have any authority – I don’t need it undermined.”

“Uh.” Ash stared at her. Finally she shrugged, put her hand through her cropped silver hair, and said, “Yeah. Okay. Fair enough.”

They stared at each other for a few seconds.

“I understand,” Ash protested.

“Boss’s vanity is hurt.”

“You’re—” Ash stopped: rephrased
you’re not really a Duchess!
“You know, whatever it is you do with the Wild Machines – you’re not a Duchess to me or the company.”

A little wistful, the older woman said, “I’m glad to hear it.”

“But I still don’t have time to waste on this. If it is a waste. Have you spoken to that bishop yet?”

“He won’t say anything until I go through this vigil.”

“Ah, fuck it. Let’s do it, then. Who needs sleep anyway!”

The Duchess’s attendants emerged again from behind the long hessian curtains that separated each of the great baths; one with wine, and two others with towels and fresh clothing. Ash stood absent-mindedly watching as they unwrapped and dried the gold-haired woman, her mind running through roster-lists.

Floria turned her head, opened her mouth as if to say something, flushed, and turned away. Pinkness flooded the skin of her throat and bare breasts. Ash
-
expecting a caustic remark, rather than embarrassment – abruptly felt herself colour, and turned her back on the group of women.

Does she feel like I used to feel when Fernando watched
me?

It is five months since she touched him, in bed; her fingers still remember the smooth silk heat of his cock, the velvet electricity of his skin; the flex and thrust of his bare buttocks under her hands as he pushes inside her. Fernando: who may be dead, now, in the Carthage earthquake – or, if he isn’t, has likely divorced her by now. Too dangerous for a renegade German now in a Visigoth household to have a Frankish wife…

And to be the brother of a Burgundian Duchess?
Ash suddenly thought. Hmm. I wonder if he’s in even more trouble, if he’s still alive?

“Let’s get going.” Florian appeared at her shoulder. She eyed Ash’s start with curiosity, but did not say anything. A faint pinkness remained to her skin, but it might have come from the rough towelling, and nothing more.

“How long is this going to take?”

“Until Prime tomorrow.”

“All night? Fuck…”

They had dressed Florian in a plain white linen over-gown, and under it a gown of white lambswool, also with no decoration. A linen coif covered her short gold hair. As the women withdrew, she looked over her shoulder, snapped her fingers, and beckoned; and the youngest girl came back with the fur-lined blue velvet robe.

Ash watched Florian struggling into the voluminous garment. Turning to signal her own page to bring back her hat and campaigning cloak – the stone walls’ chill soaking the air already, even so soon after nightfall – she smiled, mildly. “Who needs a vigil? You ain’t having any trouble taking to behaving like a Duchess…”

Florian stopped pushing her arm through the slit of a hanging sleeve, and stared back over her shoulder at the departing attendants. “That’s not fair!”