Plague of Lies (9781101611739)

by Rock, Judith

  Charles turned to stare at him and then began to laugh. “That sort of spring, you mean?” He nodded toward the pigeons.

  “It is no laughing matter.”

  “But I’ve heard the court is greatly changed, mon père, since the king has become more sober and devout.”

  “The king may have become more sober and devout—and not before time, he’s in sight of fifty—but the court is forever full of ill-disciplined young people, and even Madame de Maintenon cannot change young blood into old.”

  Charles considered the rhetoric master with some surprise, wondering at this irritable, moralistic fault finding. He’d never heard Jouvancy in this mood before.

  “And so you are warning me, mon père?” he said carefully.

  “Yes, and you can stop laughing up your sleeve about it. I saw that little flower seller flirting with you on the way out of the city! The court is also full of young, bored, pretty women.”

  Torn between laughter and offense, Charles kept quiet and watched the pigeons. After a moment, he said, “Do you really think me so vulnerable, mon père? So uncertain in my vows?”

  “I don’t doubt the sincerity of your vows, but you are young and male and well featured. As for what uncertainty there may be, time will tell.”

  “Well,” Charles said, trying for lightness, “then it’s to the good that I passed my twenty-ninth birthday on Saint Bobo’s Day, and am rapidly becoming not all that young.”

  “Saint Bobo?” Jouvancy frowned and shook his head. “I have never heard of any Saint Bobo.”

  “He lived a long time ago, in Languedoc. He’s much loved in the south and we call him Bobo, though his Christian name was Beuvron. He fought Saracen pirates to stop them raiding our coast. My father gave me Beuvron as my third name, since I was born on his day.” Charles grinned sheepishly. “But my family likewise calls me Bobo.”

  Charles expected laughter, but Jouvancy only grunted and smiled faintly. Anxiously, Charles studied the priest’s fine-drawn profile, thinking that if the rhetoric master was already tired enough to be so fractious, perhaps they should turn back to Paris now. The priest’s light blue eyes were still shadowed and he was thin, but he had always been small. His slenderness added to his grace, which seemed bred in the bone and not something learned.

  Thinking that Jouvancy might have personal reasons for cautioning him, Charles said, “Were—forgive me, mon père—but were you already a Jesuit when you last visited Versailles?”

  “No.”

  “Then I can imagine that you must have attracted much attention. But I am already a Jesuit under first vows. There must be some respect for clerics at court.”

  Jouvancy snorted. “Have you forgotten Madame de Maintenon’s nickname for Père La Chaise, who holds what many would judge the most eminent clerical position in France?”

  The little priest stood up, slapping the crown of his wide-brimmed black hat farther down over his fine fair hair, and stalked back toward the horses. Hoping that his superior’s current mood was not going to color their whole trip, Charles hastily closed the saddlebag and followed him. He held the older man’s reins and stirrup and helped him mount, strapped the bag on the front of his own saddle, and swung himself up.

  They rode in silence until they reached the southwest side of the village. There, Charles asked a boy with a flock of hissing geese if the road they were on joined the road to Versailles. Told that it did, somewhere beyond the village of Issy, they rode on, still without speaking. The warming air was thick with the smell of earth and Flamme danced and curvetted, shaking his head against the reins. Charles held him back reluctantly. The horse was not the only one who would have loved a gallop through the sloping vineyards green with new leaves, but Jouvancy could not be left to follow in Charles’s dust. They both had to content themselves with drinking in the spring air as though it were the local white wine. But under Charles’s pleasure in the day, he was still uneasy about Jouvancy’s mood and concern for his virtue.

  Charles had indeed had a sharp struggle with his vow of chastity, but that was known only to his confessor. He’d done his penance and remade his vows, choosing chastity finally and with his whole heart. Before entering the Society of Jesus, however, he’d had plenty of experience with women. During his two years as a soldier, he’d bedded several willing and pretty women, whom he remembered with affection. He hoped their memories of him were equally happy. But all that was past.

  Charles and Jouvancy heard the royal road to Versailles before they saw it. Galloping hooves, rattling harness, bouncing carriages, and belligerent cries disputing the right of way made them feel they were back in Paris. When the small road they were on unwound its last curve, they reined in, gaping at the stream of fast-moving traffic in both directions. Luxurious private carriages, red and gold and black, and drawn by anything from two to eight horses, sped along the wide and level road surface. Charles caught glimpses of brocaded interiors and richly dressed men and women inside—and once, of a beady-eyed lapdog at a carriage window, its black-and-white ears streaming in the wind. A slow-moving hired coach trundled past, weighed down by fifteen or twenty laughing, singing tourists returning from Versailles to Paris. The road was also thick with agile pedestrians, women as well as men, dodging not only coaches but also riders on horseback. Young men in wind-tangled wigs under plumed hats, dark velvet-trimmed coats, and gleaming riding boots—boots that made Charles catch his breath with forbidden covetousness—rode their lathered horses as recklessly as the king’s hard-bitten mail couriers, going as though their lives depended on arriving before anyone else at Versailles or Paris. Charles and Jouvancy joined the cavalcade, going slowly and steadily like the tortoise in Aesop’s fable, and were quickly covered in everyone else’s dust.

  By late afternoon, the road had climbed gently and the Versailles-bound traffic had thickened even more. A voice behind Charles and Jouvancy bellowed, “Way! Way!” and a four-horse coach passed so closely that Charles nearly brushed knees with the postillion mounted on the right-hand lead horse. Flamme, exasperated at having been held back all day, shied madly sideways, tossing his head, and Jouvancy’s mare bared her teeth and snapped, nearly catching his ear. Just as Charles got Flamme settled, another coach going like devils out of hell hurtled toward them, the postillion blowing long and loud on a brass horn. Flamme reared, pawing the air. It took all of Charles’s horsemanship to get him to the side of the road. The mare, Agneau, having shaken her reins loose from Jouvancy’s grip, was now ignoring everything except the grass she was pulling up. Jouvancy sat motionless in the saddle, squinting straight west into the late afternoon sun.

  “There it is,” he said.

  At the end of the tree-lined avenue, the sun struck gleams of gold from towering, gilded iron gates on the far side of a trapezoidal plaza. Two other tree-lined avenues, one on each side of their own, converged on the plaza, where what looked like half the population of a small town walked, lounged, and loitered, careful to stay out of the way of the busy gate traffic. There were men exercising horses on lead reins, other men walking braces of leashed dogs, and off to one side, Charles thought he saw two men dueling. But it was a good quarter mile from where they sat to the open space, he realized, and he might be wrong.

  “Shall we go on?” Jouvancy said. “I confess I am ready to be done with riding.” His tone was light, but Charles saw with concern that there were gray shadows under his eyes and he was slumping tiredly, which he hadn’t been earlier.

  “By all means, mon père. I, too, am ready to arrive.”

  As the palace grew nearer, Charles felt as though a mounting wave of architecture were about to break over him. Palace, Charles thought, was really the only word for the place. Calling this sprawling pile of buildings a chateau was like calling Louis XIV merely a bureaucrat. As they crossed the plaza, Charles’s eye was caught by what looked like a shop front in the wall to the left of the gates. One horizontal wooden shutter was propped up as a sloping rooflet, the other let down
to make a counter, behind which a concierge was renting out swords and plumed hats, required wear for all laymen entering the palace, to men too low in rank to have their own. Vendors from the new town that had grown up around the palace were selling pastries and lottery tickets and eau de vie. Obvious palace officials attended by retinues of lesser officials walked slowly, deep in talk. Several ladies—by their dress and bold looks, of doubtful virtue—watched the men with practiced eyes, and one of them let her eyes linger on Charles as he passed.

  At the gilded gate, the guards on duty asked their business. While Jouvancy explained, Charles stared balefully at the golden sun as big as a carriage wheel on the gate’s top, feeling already scrutinized by the Sun King’s personal surveillance. The guards let them pass into the wide green expanse that still lay between them and most of the palace buildings. Beyond was a second gilded gate that Charles hadn’t even seen till now. He shook his head, thinking that the scale of the place was so huge that some things were simply too big to be seen.

  At the second set of gates, another guard questioned them and directed them to their right, across the smaller—but still enormous—court toward the palace’s south wing. Here there were no carriages, just strolling courtiers and clutches of pointing, gawking sightseers. When they finally reached the door, Charles dismounted and helped Jouvancy down from the saddle. Two grooms appeared seemingly from nowhere, one taking the horses’ bridles and the other removing the saddlebags. A young royal footman in a blue serge coat with red velvet cuffs and pockets hurried through the door, spoke sharply to the man with the saddlebags, bowed to the two Jesuits, and scanned the court beyond them.

  “I’ve been watching for you, mes pères,” he said, in a voice that rasped like an old file and consorted oddly with his comely face and warm brown eyes. “But I was told there’d be four of you.”

  “Père Le Picart and Père Montville were detained in Paris,” Jouvancy replied. “They will be here tomorrow morning.”

  “Then if you please, I will conduct you to Père La Chaise. He’s waiting in his chamber.”

  Jouvancy gently removed himself from Charles’s supporting arm and drew himself up, wavering a little as he found his feet again after the ride. “We thank you,” he said, with a relieved sigh, and they followed the footman into the palace, trailed in turn by the lower servant with the saddlebags.

  The footman led his little procession along a corridor, up a flight of marble stairs to the next floor, and to the left along another corridor. This one was so crowded with people coming and going that its black-and-white-patterned marble floor was hardly visible beneath the rustling, swinging skirts and cloaks. Stopping at a door at the courtyard end of the building, the footman scratched at the door with his little finger. A tall, solidly built Jesuit in his late middle years opened it. Charles, who had met him before, recognized him as Père La Chaise and inclined his head. Jouvancy did the same.

  La Chaise returned the gesture. “Welcome, Père Jouvancy. Entrez, I beg you. But where are the others?”

  Jouvancy again explained. La Chaise nodded slightly at Charles, stood aside for them to pass into a small anteroom, and turned to the footman.

  “Thank you, Bouchel, see that your man leaves the bags there.” He pointed to a table standing beside a copper water reservoir.

  The footman pointed imperiously in his turn and stood over the other servant as he deposited the bags.

  Waving his guests through the anteroom into the larger chamber, La Chaise said to Jouvancy, “Please, sit. I know that you have been ill, mon père.” He pulled an upholstered, fringed chair forward and turned to a small polished table that held a silver pitcher and five delicate cone-shaped, short-stemmed glasses. Jouvancy loosed his cloak, handed it to Charles, and sat, groaning audibly as his hindquarters met the chair seat.

  “It is a long while since I’ve ridden,” he said ruefully.

  La Chaise laughed and handed him a glass of rich red wine. “This should help ease the pain—and build up your blood, too. Always necessary after illness, I find.” Returning to the table, he said to Charles, “Put the cloaks on my bed and bring the stool from beside the hearth.”

  Charles folded the cloaks and laid them on the thickly blanketed and well-pillowed bed, whose red curtains were looped back and tied to its carved posts. When he had moved the small, cushioned stool nearer to Jouvancy, La Chaise held out a glass to him.

  “It is a pleasure to meet you again, mon père,” Charles said, bowing once more before he took the wine.

  La Chaise again nodded slightly in return and gestured Charles to the low stool. Charles sat obediently. La Chaise poured his own glass of wine and seated himself in the other chair. Seen close up, the king’s confessor looked to be sixty or so. His fleshy face was lined, his dark eyes resigned and knowing. He had the air of someone long past being surprised by anything—only to be expected, Charles thought, from a man who had spent more than a decade as the confessor of Europe’s most absolute monarch. But Charles could see in him none of the bitter cynicism such a king’s confessor might have had. La Chaise’s eyes were knowing, but they were also warm.

  Charles drank gratefully, realizing as the wine went down how hungry he was and wondering when something might be done about it. Jouvancy was giving La Chaise an account of his illness, and Charles let his eyes wander over the room, the first palace room he’d seen. Its small size was a relief from the massive scale of the exterior. The chamber’s ceiling was undecorated; its walls were plain wood paneling below and plaster above; and the two armchairs, the stool, the table, a tall cupboard beside the fireplace, a prie-dieu, and the bed were all its furnishings. The large window opposite the door had small wood-framed panes of clear, faintly bluish glass. Its interior shutters stood open and the late afternoon sun, coming and going now among gathering clouds, fell obliquely, lighting a patch of bare, dusty parquet floor.

  Charles realized that he’d expected something more, something grander, even though La Chaise used this room only when events compelled his overnight presence at Versailles. Otherwise, the king’s confessor lived in Paris, in the Jesuit Professed House beside the Church of St. Louis. La Chaise was not outwardly a courtier; he wore the same plain black cassock, with a rosary hanging from its belt, that every other Jesuit wore, and rode horseback or hired a carriage when the king sent for him.

  As though he’d been reading Charles’s mind, La Chaise said, smiling, “I see you wondering at my accommodations, maître. I fought hard to get the brocade taken off the walls and to keep the gaggle of palace artists from painting overfed angels on my ceiling. Which gained me a reputation with a few people for ascetic sanctity, and with a great many more for pretended sanctity and secret luxury, and for myself, one space at least in this palace where I can breathe.” He nodded toward a door beyond Jouvancy. “Your chamber is just there, through that door. It, too, is plain.”

  Jouvancy gave him a tired smile. “We thank you.” Then he sighed and said, “Mon père, I think I must go and rest soon, but before I do, may we know what the arrangements are for giving our gift tomorrow?”

  “Of course, yes. You are certain that Père Le Picart and Père Montville will be here in good time?”

  “That is their intention. They will take a coach after the first Mass.”

  “Good. Then that leaves only…” La Chaise pursed his lips and tapped a foot, staring at Charles without seeming to see him. Then he nodded, as though agreeing with himself, and stood up. “There is one last detail still to settle. Pray excuse me and I will see to it—it will be faster than sending someone. I will return as quickly as may be.”

  He strode from the room, leaving Charles and Jouvancy looking at each other. Jouvancy was pale and the shadows beneath his eyes had darkened.

  “Perhaps you could sleep a little in your chair while he’s gone,” Charles said.

  “Yes. Yes, perhaps I could. Forgive me, I am absurdly tired.”

  Jouvancy’s eyes closed and the wineglass tilted i
n his hand. Charles saved it from falling and set it on the table. Then he went into the adjoining chamber, took a blanket from the larger bed standing there, and put it over Jouvancy’s knees. The rhetoric master did not so much as stir when Charles tucked it in around him. Picking up his own wineglass, Charles went to the window and saw that it looked down into an interior courtyard, where a boy, two girls, and a small black dog were playing some game with a ball. Charles watched with pleasure as they darted after the ball and threw it, laughing and calling to one another, indifferent to the small sprinkling of rain that had started. The dark-haired boy was slower than the two girls, visibly limping as he chased the ball over low bushes bordering the court’s checkerboard of flower beds. He and the older girl, whose tall headdress of red ribbons and lace had fallen off, leaving her curling fair hair to fly in every direction, were in their teens. The other girl was much younger and very small, and Charles was thinking that it was kind of the older two to play with her, when he belatedly recognized the limping boy as the young Duc du Maine, the king’s eldest bastard son, who had come to the Louis le Grand pre-Lenten performance back in February. And the older girl was his sister, Mademoiselle de Rouen, who had come with him. The little girl Charles did not know.

  Charles was turning away from the window when a shout from the courtyard drew him back. A man in coat and breeches of rich brown was crossing the courtyard toward the three, one hand on his belly, shaking a fist at the older girl. She stood with hands on her hips, bust thrust out, shouting back at him like a market woman. The cocked front brim of the man’s black hat showed only part of his face, but something about his walk seemed familiar to Charles. The Duc du Maine hobbled toward the man, but the little girl was backing away. To Charles’s astonishment, Mademoiselle de Rouen bent down, scooped up a handful of courtyard gravel, and flung it at the man’s face. His howl of anger was loud enough to make Jouvancy sit up, and Charles went to see how he did, leaving the scene below to play itself out.