The Rhetoric of Death

by Judith Rock

  “He is here. On important business.” The disciple glanced over his shoulder and beckoned the circle closer. “Business that will bring glory to Holy Church.” He put a hand on his chest, as though to still his bounding heart. “I must go now, messieurs, to play my own small role.” He bowed and withdrew.

  Into the silence he left behind, someone said thoughtfully, “His grandfather was a butcher in Rouen.”

  “Ah, yes,” someone else purred. “He is a little like Madame of the Moment, then.”

  Everyone laughed. Mme de Maintenon, the king’s new wife, had also risen from the lower orders. Because her surname sounded like “maintenant” or “right this minute,” her enemies never tired of calling her Madame of the Moment and hoping that her pious influence at court would last no longer than that. Charles laughed with them, but his eyes followed his goat. As the circle’s talk wound itself somehow from Mme de Maintenon to England and what James II’s open Catholicism meant for English religion, the goat stopped beside the man who had been standing with La Chaise when Charles arrived. The two of them moved purposefully across the room, and Charles bowed to the circle and followed them.

  At the salon’s far wall, the goat looked around furtively, failed to see Charles watching him, and hurried his companion through a door. Charles drifted toward the wall. With his back to the door, he set his glass on a side table and benignly surveyed the company as he felt behind him for the latch. When, as far as he could tell, no one was noticing him, he lifted the latch and stepped backward.

  Chapter 21

  All Charles could tell at first was that he had walked into near darkness. He stretched out his arms and his fingers touched plaster on both sides. A passage, then. As his eyes adjusted, he saw that light leaked thinly under the door he’d just closed and that a line of light showed under another door on his left. He moved closer. Someone was talking, but the voice was too muffled for him to make out words. He put his ear to the door. The voice came more clearly; not a French voice, though its French was passable.

  “You already know something of my purpose,” the voice said. “But now that M. Lysarde here has made us known to each other, I will put my plea before you in my own heartfelt words. I truly believe that God led M. Lysarde to visit King James’s court. We met at Mass, as he has told you, and later I had the pleasure of presenting him to His Majesty. I met M. Lysarde often after that to talk of our devotion to Holy Church. As you know from Père La Chaise, I am one of King James’s Catholic advisors. Unofficial—he will deny knowledge of me, if necessary—but close to him. It is in that capacity that I have accompanied our young friend here to France. To ask your help on King James’s behalf in ridding England of heresy, as you have so efficiently rid your own realm of it.”

  Charles went rigid against the door.

  “Our king desires to emulate your great Louis and wipe away England’s Protestant stain,” the man went on in his accented French. “The moment is ripe, if only you will help us seize it.”

  “Eloquent, mon cher Monsieur Winters,” Charles’s goat said fervently.

  “You are too kind, Monsieur Lysarde,” the voice murmured.

  “Exactly what do you mean, Monsieur Winters?” The unpleasantly familiar voice was that of Michel Louvois, the war minister.

  “Why, I mean dragoons, Monsieur Louvois. The dragoons that you deploy so successfully here, to teach our English troops the methods of conversion you have perfected.”

  Charles bit blood from his tongue to keep his silence and told himself that it would be suicide to burst into the room.

  “Then your errand is in vain,” Louvois replied stiffly. “Do you not know in England that King Louis has officially forbidden dragonnades?”

  “Of course. And like everyone else, we know that he was only placating our too tender-hearted pope. Rulers so often cannot afford to let their right hand know what their left hand does. Let me congratulate you, monsieur. As minister of war, you have been a most effective left hand.”

  The room was suddenly full of a silence whose discomfort Charles felt even through the door.

  “Monsieur Louvois? How shall I interpret this silence?” Winters hesitated. “You are his left hand, are you not? Or—dear God, dare I say it—has someone continued these dragonnades without your king’s knowledge? But who values his life so little as to poach on King Louis’s vaunted authority? No, no, that is beyond belief.”

  “You continue to puzzle me.” Louvois’s words were silky with danger. “Your King James seems bent on toleration for all—Anglicans, Anabaptists, Quakers. Even Jews, I hear. Just last spring, he released twelve hundred Quakers from your jails. Why would he suddenly want dragoons?”

  “This ‘tolerance’ is but a mask, the face James shows to England in order to secure the throne and forestall rebellion.”

  “Of course it is,” a new voice said reprovingly.

  Guise. Charles pressed his ear closer to the door and held his breath.

  “Since the hell-bound Henry destroyed the true Church in England, its throne has been a precarious seat for a Catholic monarch,” Guise declaimed. “As you well know, Monsieur Louvois.”

  Louvois ignored him. “Why do you not carry some token from King James, Monsieur Winters?”

  “Is it not enough that I am here, in this sacred Jesuit house, vouched for by your king’s confessor? And by M. Lysarde, of course. Safety lies in anonymity.” Winters’s voice grew hard. “I am, of course, wholly dispensable, but King James cannot risk his plans becoming known. I will tell you, though, that even now he has fourteen thousand soldiers gathered at Hounslow. Soldiers led by Catholic officers, who hear Mass in a chapel the king has built for them.”

  “These soldiers,” Guise said eagerly, “are they ready to move?”

  “They wait only for your dragoons.”

  “Then they will wait until hell freezes, monsieur,” Louvois said flatly. “There will be no dragoons.”

  “I—I am shocked, Monsieur Louvois,” Winters said over Guise’s recriminations. “My king is guided by his Jesuit confessor, Père Edward Petre, as your king is guided by our noble host. Père Petre and Père La Chaise have prayed—and more—for years to restore the true Church in England. Are you prepared to take the eternal consequences of flying in the face of such holy hopes? King James looks to the king of France as to a father, he pleads with him for aid. The moment he knows that you will send soldiers, the restoration of Holy Church will begin in our long-suffering island.”

  “You move me inexpressibly, Monsieur Winters.” Guise’s voice vibrated with fervor. “God and His saints are truly calling us to this. We will lay this request before King Louis at the first opportunity. As soon as—”

  “You forget yourself, Père Guise.” Louvois sounded like he was choking on swallowed fury. “Dragonnades are forbidden. And your Anglicans and Quakers and such are not swarming across the Channel to attack us, Monsieur Winters, but the Holy Roman Emperor and this new Augsburg alliance are very likely to do so. French troops will go east and north and nowhere else.”

  “All our troops need not be sent there,” Guise snapped.

  “I am minister of war and I say they will be. Even setting aside other objections, who would pay for dragoons in England? The English king indeed relies on King Louis as a father when it comes to money.”

  “Money? Is that what really concerns you? Why, Monsieur Louvois”—Winters laughed—“you sound more like a Dutch merchant than France’s war minister and a true son of Holy Church.”

  “I will pay, messieurs!” Lysarde, the goat, cried. “With my last sou, if necessary!”

  In spite of his horror, Charles wanted to laugh. Lysarde sounded like a student actor playing doomed Roland refusing to surrender.

  “Dutch?” Louvois said, ignoring the would-be hero. The war minister’s voice was heavy with irony. “A Dutch merchant? A very interesting choice of comparisons, Monsieur Winters.”

  “A common enough turn of phrase, I believe,” Winters
said lightly. “But forgive my jest, if it offends you. Well, messieurs. I can see that you need time to consider what I have put before you. I beg you to think—and pray—long and well about King James’s request. Discuss it, of course, with those you most trust. And when you put it to your king, lose no time in letting me know his answer. Sadly, the English court swarms with heretic spies who have deep pockets for bribing royal couriers. It will be safest to send letters through the two men whose names are written here.” There was a rustle of paper. “They are both known to King James and will protect our correspondence with their lives. Now, I thank you from my heart for this audience and bid you adieu, in the hope of hearing very soon that the great King Louis will aid us in the service of Holy Church.”

  Charles reached the deeper darkness at the passage’s far end just in time. Light spilled across the floor. As Winters and Lysarde hurried down the passage and slipped back into the salon, Charles realized that Winters was the man he’d seen standing with Père La Chaise when he arrived. Someone inside the room the men had left pulled its door shut and Charles crept back to his listening post.

  “How dare you, Monsieur Louvois? I am ashamed of you.” Guise was spluttering with fury. “You will feel it in penance. If I had not heard you with my own ears, I would not believe it! After your education at Louis le Grand, after all my own guidance, to see you spit on God’s chosen time and the true faith as you have just done breaks my heart.”

  So Louis le Grand had not only educated the war minister, Guise was his confessor. Charles remembered Le Picart’s warning that the college, the court, and the government hung in the same web.

  “Mon père, when you first mentioned this meeting to me in M. Douté’s garden during the birthday fête, I feared that Winters was a fraud,” Louvois said. “I said so, but no, you were bent on receiving him. And now that I have seen him, I am certain he is a fraud. I will take my oath that he lied from start to finish. That was a direct threat, his wondering so innocently if someone has usurped the king’s authority to run dragonnades. And why come to us? Why not go straight to Versailles, if he really comes from James? Official or unofficial, Louis would have received him.” “You heard him, James must do this as quietly as possible so that no rumor leaks out and lets the enemy prepare!” “I heard him. And if we don’t take Winters’s heart-rending “plea” to Louis, the cur will make good on his threat.” “Threat?! It is certainly not—” “Threat, Père Guise! If we don’t do what Winters asks, he will send a storm of rumor and gossip about our dragonnades straight at Louis’s head. Half of the court will pretend to be unbearably surprised that dragonnades go on and will whisper that Louis’s absolute authority is no longer absolute. It will be as though we’ve cuckolded him! He would probably mind less if we had truly cuckolded him. Meanwhile, the other half of the court will titter that of course we haven’t cuckolded the king’s authority, because everyone knows he never meant the dragonnades to stop. And Louis will then be very publicly caught. Because he swore to the pope he’d stopped the dragonnades. I tell you, Louis will be caught, but he will see that the vise closes on us!”

  Charles tried to take in what he was hearing. His eyes widened. Dragons. Dragons in England. Antoine had told him and he’d thought the child was just being a child. From his perch in the tree, Antoine had heard Louvois and Guise talking not just about dragonnades in France, as Charles had thought, but, God forbid, about these proposed dragonnades in England. No wonder that when Antoine asked to hear more about “dragons in England,” he had been sent to bed. His questions would have told Guise that he and Louvois had been overheard, which was a much more believable reason for murder than witnessing an illicit kiss. Antoine had told Philippe about that kiss. Had he also told him about the “dragons?” Had Philippe died because he’d understood what that meant?

  “I warn you,” Guise hissed. “If you reject this chance to restore the Church in England, you will walk to Rome on your knees.”

  “We are caught, I tell you! Do you really want to go to Louis and make him talk about dragonnades? Not dragonnades in Huguenot rat holes so far away that he and the pope can fail to notice, but blazingly public dragonnades across the Channel that would scandalize all Europe! Including Rome and the Protestant Augsburg states!”

  “Holy Church—”

  “I tell you, we are caught! If we go to the king and the slightest whisper leaks out of the audience chamber—as you know it will, the court’s very air gossips—it will start a fire trail of rumor that will flash from Versailles to London to Rome. ‘Have you heard? King Louis is about to unleash French dragonnades on Anglicans.’ ‘What?’ the pope will say. ‘The same King Louis who solemnly forbade dragonnades five years ago?’ His Holiness will seize this new excuse to grow even more adamant in his quarrel with Louis over church revenue and bishops. And the Augsburg alliance will grow even more determined to contain French power! And in England, James will have revolution on his hands and we will lose our Catholic ally there. Which is exactly what this Dutch Winters wants! Dutch, Père Guise! Could you not hear the accent under his appalling French? The man doesn’t want dragonnades, he wants destabilizing rumors to help his master William of Orange to the English throne!”

  “Calm yourself, mon fils, he is not—”

  “If we do this, King Louis will have only two choices! To admit that he lied to the pope about stopping the dragonnades—which he will never admit—or to take the only other way out. To quickly “discover” that you and I have, as Winters so elegantly put it, poached the king’s authority. Louis will cover himself by accusing us of usurping his sovereignty. He will swear that anything to do with dragonnades is against his will and without his knowledge, and he will charge us with treason. Us.” Louvois spit the word out like a piece of bad meat. “Even your name will not save you, Père Guise.”

  “You dare threaten me?” Guise thundered.

  “For the good God’s sake, I am trying—”

  Wood grated over stone. Charles reacted a heartbeat too late as a hand was clamped over his mouth, an arm tightened around his throat, and someone dragged him backward.

  Chapter 22

  Charles fought as though his last battle had been yesterday. But his assailant, with two good shoulders, surprise on his side, and no cassock skirts, had him through the open door and belly down on the terrace in the space of a few breaths. Straddling him, the man pulled Charles’s head up sharply to expose his throat. A dagger gleamed in front of Charles’s eyes and the man laughed. Charles twisted, threw the man onto his dagger hand, and rolled free. He got his feet under him, but the man was up and rushing him, thrusting for his heart. Charles threw himself sideways and backward over the terrace balustrade. The man kept coming and landed half on top of him. Charles grabbed his assailant’s dagger wrist, brought his other elbow up under the man’s chin, and hurled him aside.

  Then he was on his feet and running. As he ran, some detached part of him wondered what had seemed wrong about his pursuer’s face. He needed to see the man in the light, but without dying for the privilege. The man fell behind as Charles’s long legs ate up the ground. Charles was running now through a formal garden, jumping low hedges and flower borders in fitful moonlight. The garden was long and narrow, bounded by stone balustrades like those around the terrace, but beyond them on his left, trees showed against the night sky. Leaping over a gravel path and its betraying crunch, he vaulted the railing. And fell farther than he’d wanted to, onto tree roots. Swallowing a grunt of pain, Charles kilted his entangling skirts with his cincture and made his way deeper into the trees, thankful for soft, tended turf underfoot instead of last year’s crackling leaves.

  He stopped and listened. Running feet slowed and he saw his pursuer outlined against the sky, standing halfway down the garden and slowly turning his head as he searched for his quarry. Feeling his way among the trees, Charles followed the line of the balustrade toward the far end of the garden, where a massive chestnut tree filled the angle of the balustrade
’s turn across the garden’s end. With the chestnut’s trunk between himself and the man, Charles climbed silently back into the garden and stood invisible in the tree’s inky shadows.

  A little more moonlight filtered through the clouds and showed him his pursuer walking toward the tree. The man was middling tall and hatless, and his head was curiously smooth. Bald, perhaps, or shaven, Charles thought. Then moonlight poured through a rip in the clouds and he saw what had seemed wrong about the face. Its upper half was masked, not with an ordinary half mask, but with a mask that covered the top and back of the head, almost like the mask executioners wore. Which was fitting enough, Charles thought grimly. The silvery light shone on the knife in the man’s hand, splashed into the high folded tops of his boots, and then dimmed before Charles could tell the color. But Charles would have bet his life—maybe was about to bet his life—that the boots were the color of burnt sugar. And that under a hat pulled low, the mask would look like the half mask Mme LeClerc had insisted Antoine’s attacker had worn.

  The man was nearly at the tree. Charles crouched and gathered himself, waiting for his moment. A night bird called, a gust of wind flurried the branches, and he used the sounds for cover as he launched himself low at his quarry and knocked him off his feet. He brought his fist down like a hammer on the man’s knife wrist, and the numbed fingers relaxed and dropped the knife. Charles meant to gag the man, tie him, take him to La Reynie. But certainty that this was not only his own would-be killer, but Philippe’s and the porter’s, certainty that this was Antoine’s attacker, boiled into rage. His hands reached for the man’s throat, trying to find skin under the padded doublet’s high collar.

  The moon hid its face. The two men thrashed together like desperate lovers, rolling over and over in the grass. Through the bloodlust singing in him, Charles felt his enemy’s life going. Then the heavens intervened. Laughing, talking men surged out of the house, and their noise and the light of their approaching lanterns cut through Charles’s rage. His grip loosened and his victim rolled away retching, staggered up, and was gone. Charles struggled to his feet. The oblivious newcomers at the garden’s entrance were pointing upward, too engrossed in the sky and their chattering to notice him, a black shadow among shadows. Muffling his panting breath, he slipped over the balustrade again.