Plague of Lies (9781101611739)
Page 1
PRAISE FOR
The Eloquence of Blood
“Rock’s second novel featuring Charles du Luc is every bit the equal of her impressive historical thriller debut, The Rhetoric of Death… Readers will hope this energetic and engrossing sequel will be the first of many.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Rock’s historical accuracy resonates here, transporting you to 1686 Paris. Her intriguing plot and protagonists with whom readers are becoming good friends make this a necessary read for all who enjoy historical mysteries, especially those by Ariana Franklin.”
—Library Journal (starred review)
“Thrilling… engaging.”
—Sarasota Magazine
“Rock provides meticulous details of everyday life across various social classes with an engaging style… touches of humor and insight… In du Luc, Rock has created a highly likeable scholar-detective. I hope that his adventures will play out for many books to come.”
—Historical Novels Review
“Rock nails everything about characters, dialogue, setting, historical research, pacing and story development… fascinating… all of this detail is woven so seamlessly into the story that the reader never falters… Rock has the start to an excellent historical detective series.”
—Bookgasm
“Not only satisfies the taste of historical mystery lovers but anyone who likes complex plots, twists, and elaborate mysteries… Judith Rock’s research is as impeccable as her writing style… a great read.”
—Mystery Tribune
PRAISE FOR
The Rhetoric of Death
2011 BARRY AWARD NOMINEE FOR BEST PAPERBACK ORIGINAL
ONE OF DEADLY PLEASURES MAGAZINE’S BEST BOOKS OF 2010
“Amazing… Ms. Rock takes you back to fascinating and dangerous seventeenth-century Paris so well that I suspect her of being a time-traveler who’s been there.”
—Ariana Franklin, national bestselling author of A Murderous Procession
“Rich with telling detail and a deep feeling for time and place.”
—Margaret Frazer, national bestselling author of The Apostate’s Tale
“Rock skillfully builds her suspense plot, all the while incorporating splendid detail of seventeenth-century Parisian monastic and street life and the relationship between church and Crown… She proves herself a promising new talent by creating this powerful, absorbing, complex, and thoroughly satisfying novel.”
—Historical Novels Review (editor’s choice)
“[A] superb historical debut… With an experienced writer’s ease, Rock incorporates details of the political issues of the day into a suspenseful story line.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Rock brings firsthand knowledge of dance, choreography, acting, police investigation, and teaching to what is hopefully the beginning of a mystery series… [A] fascinating historical mystery… Plenty of derring-do and boyish mischief sprinkled into the plot make this a fun read, and Charles’s thought-provoking struggles as he questions his vocation lend added depth… sure to satisfy those eager for a great new historical mystery.”
—Booklist (starred review)
“Rich with historical detail… meticulously researched. [Rock] captures a city and time that is lively, dangerous and politically charged, and makes it sing… [Her] fine eye for historic detail and well-drawn characters will continue to engage readers.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Rock is an exciting new discovery. Her plotting holds your interest, her characters are real, and her attention to details of the time period is extraordinary. Highly recommended for fans of historical thrillers and readers who enjoy Ellis Peters, Edward Marston, and Ariana Franklin.”
—Library Journal (starred review)
“Rock balances perfectly the differing claims of detection, romance, suspense, and historical detail. As a mystery, as a kind of coming-of-age novel, or as a docudrama on early Jesuit pedagogy, The Rhetoric of Death works remarkably well… Very entertaining.”
—Commonweal magazine
Berkley titles by Judith Rock
THE RHETORIC OF DEATH
THE ELOQUENCE OF BLOOD
A PLAGUE OF LIES
eSpecials
PERNELLE’S ESCAPE: A RHETORIC OF DEATH NOVELLA
JUDITH ROCK
BERKLEY BOOKS, NEW YORK
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) • Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Copyright © 2012 by Judith Rock.
“Readers Guide” copyright © 2012 by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Cover art: Pink Dress copyright © by Mohamed Itani / Arcangel Images, Chapel Royal, Versailles copyright © Art Resource. Grand Appartement De La Reine, Versailles, France, copyright © JNS/Gamma-Rapho / Getty Images, Torremocha del Jarama, Madrid, Spain. Landscape with clouds at sunset copyright © Carlos Muina / Getty Images.
Cover design by Danielle Abbiate.
Interior text design by Tiffany Estreicher.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
BERKLEY® is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
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PUBLISHING HISTORY
Berkley trade paperback edition / October 2012
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rock, Judith.
A plague of lies / Judith Rock.—Berkley trade paperback ed.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-101-61173-9
1. Maintenon, Madame de, 1635–1719—Fiction.
2. France—History—Louis XIV, 1643–1715—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3618.O3543P57 2012
813’.6—dc23
2012011227
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
ALWAYS LEARNING
PEARSON
For Damaris Rowland, agent extraordinaire,
whose patient and brilliant teaching and encouragement
resulted in these books.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Once again, hea
rtfelt thanks are due to my incomparable team of expert advisors: John Padberg, S.J.; Patricia Ranum; and Catherine Turocy. All three take me beyond my own research, telling me things I didn’t know—and correcting what I mistakenly thought I did know! Thanks, as always, to the enthusiastic and sharp-eyed early reading team, and to all the people at Berkley who turn what I give them into a book—especially my editor, Shannon Jamieson-Vazquez, and the artists who create such beautiful covers.
A NOTE TO THE READER
In this story, I have given Louis XIV an imaginary daughter: Louise Marguerite de Bourbon, titled Mademoiselle de Rouen, nicknamed “Lulu,” daughter of the king and his mistress Madame de Montespan. From 1670 to 1674, Madame de Montespan had a child every year—except in 1671. So my fictional Lulu’s birthday is May 30, 1671.
All other characters related to the king in this story are real people.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Author’s Note
Discussion Questions
Chapter 1
THE FEAST OF ST. CLOTHILDE, TUESDAY, JUNE 3, 1687
The storm-riding demons of the air were gathered over Paris, hurling fire and thunder at the city’s cowering mortals. Every bell ringer in the city was hauling on his ropes, and his bells—baptized like good Christians for just this purpose—were wide-mouthed roaring angels fighting off the storm with their own deafening noise. The spring thunderstorm had begun north of the river, but now it raged directly over the rue St. Jacques, sending thunder echoing off walls and stabbing roofs and cobbles with spears of rain. In the Jesuit college of Louis le Grand, teachers and students were praying to aid the clanging bells. But the prayers of the senior rhetoric class dissolved into gasps and cries when lightning struck nearly into the main courtyard. The near miss made assistant rhetoric master Maître Charles du Luc’s skin tingle. And startled him into wondering if the demons of the air, in whom he mostly didn’t believe when the sun was shining, were bent on making this day his last on earth.
“Messieurs, I beg you, calm yourselves,” he shouted, over the noise, to his students huddled together on the classroom benches. “All storms pass. The bells are winning, as they always do, because we baptize them to make them stronger than the demons of the air. Listen! The demons are fleeing toward the south now.” By force of will and voice, he called the boys back to their unfinished praying.
When he looked up after the “amen,” one of the students, Armand Beauclaire, was frowning thoughtfully at the oak-beamed ceiling. Beauclaire, a round-faced sixteen-year-old with a thick straight thatch of brown hair, put up a hand and shifted his gaze to the teacher’s dais at the front of the room.
“Yes, Monsieur Beauclaire?” Charles called, over the storm’s receding noise, girding his mental loins. Beauclaire’s questions were always interesting and never easy to answer.
“Is it really demons, maître? If the demons of the air cause thunderstorms, why do the storms always end? Why don’t the demons win sometimes?”
“Win? You want that demons win?” The outraged speaker was the elder of a pair of brothers from Poland.
“No, Monsieur Sapieha, he doesn’t want them to win.” Charles hoped he was responding to what Sapieha had actually said. It was often hard to tell, Latin being the language of the college, but the Sapieha brothers’ Latin was heavily accented and mixed with Polish. “Monsieur Beauclaire only wants to know why they don’t win, which is a very different question and an excellent one.” But it was not a question Charles was going to discuss there and then. When not dodging lightning, he personally doubted the demon theory, though many people—including most of his fellow teachers at Louis le Grand—did not. And he had to get the class through a lot more pages of Greek before the afternoon ended.
Charles was in the scholastic phase of his long Jesuit formation, with ordination and final vows still some years away. Teaching was part of Jesuit training, and Charles was a teacher of rhetoric, the art of communication in both Latin and Greek.
He raised his eyebrows at Beauclaire. “Perhaps the demons always lose because good is stronger than evil,” he said. And hoped that his belief in the second half of his sentence was enough to justify his evasion. “But now, back to our book!”
As the storm receded outside and he tried to find his place in the book open on the oak lectern in front of him, Charles wondered if he looked as unconfident as he felt. The senior rhetoric master, Père Joseph Jouvancy, was in the infirmary recovering from sickness. And the second senior master, Père Martin Pallu, had just fallen ill with the same unpleasant malady. Which left Charles in sole charge of the thirty senior rhetoric students. But, no help for it, there were still two hours of class before the afternoon ended. He smoothed the book’s pages open, pushed his black skullcap down on his curling, straw-blond hair, and twitched at his cassock sleeves. The long linen shirt under the cassock showed correctly as narrow bands of white at wrists and high-collared neck, and the cassock hung sleekly on his six feet and more of wide-shouldered height. With a deep breath and a prayer to St. John Chrysostom, the only Greek saint he could think of at the moment, Charles tackled the Greek rules of rhetoric, sometimes reading from the book, sometimes explaining what he read.
But under the reading and explaining, he felt more than a little overwhelmed by his responsibilities. Behind the teacher’s dais where he stood was a tapestry showing the unfortunate philosopher Socrates drinking his fatal cup of hemlock. Its graphic rendering of an unpopular academic’s fate made for an uncomfortable teaching backdrop, he’d always thought.
He paused, giving the class time to write down what he’d said, and let his eyes wander over the benches. The boys were bent over small boards braced on their laps, their feathered quills scratching across their paper, and all he could see of them were the tops of their heads above their black scholar’s gowns. Louis le Grand’s students ranged in age from about ten to eighteen. The youngest in this class was thirteen, a little Milanese named Michele Bertamelli, whose mass of curls was as black as his hat. Most of the bent heads were French and every shade of brown, apparently God’s favorite color for hair. But there were also boys from England, Ireland, Poland, and the Netherlands—one with hair flaming like copper, some as blond as Charles himself was, thanks to his Norman mother’s Viking forbears. Today, though, there were fewer boys than there should have been, because three of them were in the student infirmary with the same contagion Jouvancy and Pallu had.
Charles glanced out at the courtyard and saw that the rain had nearly stopped. The storm was south of the city now, and the bell ringers of Paris were letting their ropes go slack. Relieved at no longer having to shout over the noise, he went back to feeding his fledgling scholars Aristotle’s rules for rhetoric. But even as he tried to make his dry morsels of knowledge tempting, his thoughts kept circling around all that he should have finished and hadn’t.
His biggest worry was the summer ballet and tragedy performance, only two months from now, on August sixth. In Jesuit schools, both voice and body were trained for eloquence, and part of his job was directing the ballet that went with the school’s grand tragedy performance every summer. This year, under Jouvancy’s watchful eye, Charles was working on the ballet’s livret—the plan of its four Parts—and would be directing the ballet itself. Happily, this year’s ballet was an updated version of the 1680 college ballet, so he was only rewritin
g instead of coming up with something new from scratch. Full rehearsals were about to start, but because of Jouvancy’s illness and this extra teaching, Charles was seriously behind. And what if Jouvancy’s illness returned and worsened, as illness so often did? If that happened, Charles knew that he might end up directing the tragedy and the ballet.
He finished his lecture and told the class’s three decurions—class leaders named for Roman army officers commanding ten men each—to collect the afternoon’s written work and bring it to the dais. Then he set them to hear each of their “men” recite the assigned memory passage. Today it was from St. Basil’s writings. Greek recitation was never popular, and when the decurions delivered the bad news, thirteen-year-old Bertamelli sprang from his seat and flung his arms wide.
“But, maître,” the Italian boy wailed, “I cannot speak Greek, it hurts my tongue!”
Snorts of laughter erupted along the benches, and Charles bit his lip to keep from laughing himself. Henri de Montmorency, the eighteen-year-old dull-witted scion of a noble house, turned on his bench and gaped at Bertamelli.
“You’re mad. Words can’t hurt anything!”
Charles called the class back to order, fixed Bertamelli with his eye, and schooled his face to stern disapproval. The boy’s scholar’s gown had slipped off one shoulder to reveal his crumpled and grayed linen shirt, and his huge black eyes were tragic with pleading. He was one of the most gifted and passionate dancers Charles had ever seen, but he was also proving nearly impossible to contain within Louis le Grand’s rules—and probably its walls, though Charles preferred not to think about that. He suspected that the little Italian would not be with them long, though who would crack first, Bertamelli or the Jesuits, he wouldn’t have cared to predict.
“To put Monsieur Montmorency’s puzzlement more politely,” Charles said, with a sideways frown at Montmorency, “how does Greek hurt your tongue, Monsieur Bertamelli?”
“That language has hard edges, sharp edges, cruel edges. It bites me! My tongue is a tender Italian tongue!” To be sure Charles understood, he stuck the sensitive member in question out as far as it would go.