Plague of Lies (9781101611739)

by Rock, Judith

  The door opened again to admit La Chaise, who walked heavily to the fire, shaking his head. “A terrible thing to happen. But marble stairs are slippery at the best of times, and if the floor upstairs was wet… And it clearly was not the best of times for the Comte de Fleury.” He shrugged as though to shrug off his thoughts. “Is Père Jouvancy resting?”

  “He’s asleep, mon père. May I help you with the supper?”

  “Yes, thank you.” La Chaise glanced down at the simmering water, then out the window at the densely clouded sky visible above the roofs across the courtyard. “Light the candle on the table, if you will. Rain brings the dark sooner, even in June.” He took a long wooden splinter from a box beside the hearth, lit it, and handed it to Charles, who used it to light a short, stubby candle.

  “Wax?” Charles said. “That’s pleasant, instead of tallow.”

  “Yes, Bouchel saves me from the evil smell of tallow. He gathers wax candle ends from courtiers’ servants and keeps them aside for when I have to stay the night. A good servant, and a pleasant one. And he knows everything about the town, he was born in the village here.”

  “Village? Most of the buildings I saw riding in look as new as the palace.”

  “They are. But yes, there was a village. Small, but it had been here time out of mind. The king demolished it when he decided to turn his father’s old hunting lodge into this palace.”

  Charles shook his head. “And how did the villagers take that?”

  “Not well. But the king employed them in the building, so they got something out of it. If I remember correctly, Bouchel said once that his father was one of the masons.”

  “Oh? And now Bouchel works in the palace his father helped to build. Do you know what happened to his voice?”

  “No, but I do know that while the palace was being built, there was an enormous camp for the workers. During the work, the whole place, including the old village, became very wet and unhealthy because of massive digging and rerouting of water. I suppose anyone who lived here—villagers as well as incoming workmen—risked chest and throat sickness.” La Chaise went to the cupboard and brought out a tall pitcher covered with a white linen cloth. Crouching down, he removed the cloth and poured the contents of the pitcher into the simmering water. “The remains of last night’s bouillon,” he said, straightening and taking a long spoon out of the cupboard. The savory smell of onions and leeks in beef broth filled the room. Charles’s stomach began trying to climb up his backbone to get to the food.

  “And I am going to add a little more beef and another bone, though my mother would be scandalized at my short way of making bouillon.” La Chaise reached into the cupboard and brought out a bloody paper packet, unwrapped it, and dumped its contents into the pot. “Now we have only to wait.”

  Charles swallowed hard. “How long will it need to cook?”

  “Not long, the meat is chopped somewhat fine.” La Chaise smiled suddenly. “When I was a scholastic, I was hungry all the time. If you’re hungry now, break some bread from the loaf there. And let us have a little wine while we wait for the soup to become soup and for Père Jouvancy to wake.” His face fell as he looked at the pot of wine Bouchel had brought. “Oh, dear. A little wine is the apt word, unfortunately. Oh, well, we can water it. Or not water it and drink water with our supper. Anyway, wine now!”

  Charles looked for a knife to cut the loaf, that being the polite modern custom, but La Chaise only said, “No, no, break it. If Louis can use his fingers to eat, so can we.”

  Gratefully, Charles broke a piece off the brown loaf and La Chaise refilled the cone-shaped glasses they’d used earlier, but only to the scant side of half full.

  “To your health, maître,” he said, handing a glass to Charles and raising his own.

  Charles returned the compliment and they drank.

  “Sit. No, have the chair.” La Chaise gestured Charles to the thinly cushioned chair fringed with red silk where Jouvancy had sat, and settled himself in the other. “Aaah.” He drank again and closed his eyes briefly. Seeming to open them again with an effort, he said, “Have you had much sickness in the college?”

  “Yes, these last weeks. Our infirmarian thinks it’s some unbalance of humors caused by the weather going from cold to warmer after such a bad winter. He says the change makes the stomach and bowels grip, and then the blood boils trying to get through them, which raises a fever. Though hardly anyone dies of it, he says.”

  La Chaise grunted. “Unless they fall downstairs trying to reach the privy. Does this illness come on suddenly?”

  “Oh, yes. Père Jouvancy was well one afternoon at the beginning of the rhetoric class, and deathly ill and spewing before it ended. I could hardly get him to the infirmary.”

  “Have you, too, been ill?”

  “No, thank Saint Roch and Saint Stephen,” Charles answered fervently, naming two saints known for protecting against contagion. “If I may ask, mon père, are you thinking that the Comte de Fleury was ill in the same way?”

  “Possibly. You may have heard the woman in the corridor say he seemed well enough at dinner today.” La Chaise rose and stirred the soup, whose scent was so enticing now that Charles felt like biting at the air to see if it tasted like it smelled. To distract himself, he said, “I saw three young people playing in the court below the window soon after we arrived and recognized two of them as the king’s children, who did us the honor of coming to our college performance in February, the Duc du Maine and Mademoiselle de Rouen.”

  “Two of our legitimées de France. You know, of course, that he had his children by Madame de Montespan declared legally legitimate.”

  “The other was a small girl. But very quick at the game they were playing.”

  “Very little? Bright brown hair?” When Charles nodded, La Chaise said, “That was Anne-Marie de Bourbon, Princess of the Blood, a daughter of the new Prince of Condé.”

  “Ah.” Charles nodded. The Condés were Bourbons, as royal blooded as the king and in line for the throne. The present Prince of Condé had come into his title only in December, when his father died.

  “In case you have to speak to the princess,” La Chaise said, “she’s styled Her Serene Highness and her title is Mademoiselle d’Enghien. She looks six, but she’s eleven or twelve, I think. The new Condé’s daughters are all tiny, like their grandmother Claire Clemence. People call them ‘Dolls of the Blood.’” Watching the fire brighten as the light faded, La Chaise said reflectively, “Have you ever thought how oddly things are passed on in families? Take those two children of the king you saw. Maine is dark like his father. But Lulu, as Mademoiselle de Rouen is called, is nearly blond, like her mother, Madame de Montespan. And her character could not be more different from her brother’s if she came from the other side of the world. Maine’s a quiet boy, doesn’t seem to like public life much. He’d rather be in the woods with his huntsman and the dogs, so I hear. Though his limp doesn’t help his riding. I will tell you—in confidence—that he’s the king’s favorite child. Though they say he’s not living up to his promise. He was a brilliant little boy, but now he has—well—faded, somehow. In my opinion, Madame de Maintenon has kept him too close, too tied to her, probably because of his limp. She tried very hard to cure him, you know. But limp or not, it’s high time the king sent Maine to the army. The boy is seventeen. Far too old to be mooning around here at court playing children’s games.”

  “And what of Lulu, as you called her? How old is she?”

  La Chaise sighed. “Yes. Lulu. She’s—let me see—almost sixteen. Her Highness’s real name is Louise Marguerite. Louise after her father, of course, and Marguerite after his mother’s mother, Marguerite of Austria.”

  “So she’s nearly marriageable.”

  “In fact, nearly married. And furious about it. She’s tried to change the king’s mind. But he pays no attention and she’s causing a world of trouble. I live for the day she’s finally dispatched to her husband, I assure you.”

&nb
sp; “Who is he?”

  “A Polish prince, the younger son of King Jan Sobieski. We need to strengthen ties with Poland, since Sobieski has too often aligned himself with France’s enemies. Particularly the Hapsburgs and the Holy Roman Empire. Of course, Sobieski had no choice but to fight on the Hapsburg side against the Turks at Vienna and Buda, the Turks being such a danger to Poland. But Louis hopes to make Sobieski our ally with this marriage.”

  “However the girl herself feels about it?”

  La Chaise looked at Charles as though he’d begun speaking Chinese. “She’s known all her life that she would be married for royal reasons. Why she’s making so much trouble about it, I can’t imagine.” He shook his head and sipped from his glass. “Poland is an odd place. Did you know that Polish nobles elect their king? They usually choose the old king’s son, but not always. It seems to me an affront to God to show so little trust in the royal lineage.”

  Charles was silent, wondering how different things might be in France if the French king were elected.

  “With his daughter married to Sobieski’s son, Louis will have more influence on the next vote, whenever that should come. So Lulu’s marriage—” La Chaise stopped short and turned in his chair as the connecting door between the chambers opened.

  Jouvancy stood in the doorway, blinking in the firelight and yawning. “Bonsoir, mon père, maître,” he said indistinctly, turning politely aside to cover another wide yawn. “I see I have slept into the evening. I thank you for letting me rest so long. I am a new man.” He sniffed the air. “Supper?” he said hopefully.

  “Le bouillon, mon père.” La Chaise got up and set his wineglass on the table. “And to start, let me pour wine for you.”

  The firelight made a twisting red rope of the wine as he added what was left in the small pot of wine to the silver pitcher. He filled a glass for Jouvancy, who took it with a satisfied sigh and sank into the chair Charles offered him.

  “You feel better, then?” Charles said, watching Jouvancy narrowly.

  “Much better, I was only tired.” Jouvancy settled stiffly on the seat’s thin cushion and smiled up at Charles. “Don’t fuss over me—go and help our host.”

  La Chaise straightened from stirring the pot. “No need, we have a few minutes yet to wait. What you can do, though, is show me the gift we’re giving to Madame de Maintenon tomorrow. I would like to see it.”

  “With pleasure, mon père.”

  Charles brought the well-wrapped reliquary from the connecting chamber and held it out to Jouvancy.

  “No, please—you unwrap it, maître.”

  When the heavy canvas and the soft silk wrappings beneath were peeled away, the cross stood glowing among the supper preparations, the bread and the wine, so that for a moment, Charles saw the table as an altar.

  “Very beautiful,” La Chaise said, coming closer to examine the shining gold and the deep blue inlay of the stone called lapis lazuli.

  “Show him the relic,” Jouvancy said.

  Charles picked up the cross, turned it facedown across his hand, and pressed a tiny flange in its back. The cross’s back opened like a door to reveal a little compartment an inch wide and three inches long that held a thin bundle of tightly wrapped and yellowing old silk.

  “Saint Ursula’s finger bone,” Charles said.

  “Her little finger,” Jouvancy added. “The silk has always seemed too fragile to unwrap.”

  “Very nice. A well-thought gift, indeed. And perfect for Saint Cyr, as Saint Ursula is also a patron of students.” La Chaise nodded at Charles to reclose the reliquary and went to peer again into the soup pot. He laughed softly. “We must hope, though, that Madame de Maintenon does not know how uncertain Saint Ursula’s legend is.”

  Jouvancy bridled, frowning. “What do you mean, ‘uncertain’?”

  An unholy glee showed briefly in La Chaise’s dark eyes. “As uncertain, you might say, as Madame de Maintenon’s ‘legend’ is in our own time—her ‘uncertain’ marriage to the king, I mean.”

  “Oh, dear Blessed Virgin!” Dismay furrowed Jouvancy’s pale face. “The lady won’t think—she can’t think—but that isn’t at all what we mean by it. I’ve never believed that Saint Ursula’s story was other than truth!”

  Charles bit his tongue for courtesy’s sake and hoped that Madame de Maintenon was as credulous as Jouvancy. He supposed that St. Ursula and her martyrdom might be real enough. But many people—including him—found her eleven thousand martyred virgin companions a bit much to swallow.

  “Of course,” La Chaise said soothingly. “I’m sure nothing of the kind will occur to her. And even if it did, she wouldn’t think of any connection to her marriage. Her mind doesn’t work like that, especially about holy things.” With a disconcerting glance at Charles, he added, “But you must admit, it’s amusing, if your mind does work like that.”

  Charles’s mind definitely worked like that. Trying and failing to keep the laughter out of his voice, he said, “There’s something else we didn’t think of. Or I didn’t, anyway. When Ursula was martyred by the Huns, eleven thousand other virgins were martyred with her. So it’s said, at least. That’s a lot of virgin bones.”

  “This isn’t just one of those other virgins, it’s Ursula herself—her own finger!” Jouvancy was sitting militantly upright now. “My grandfather brought it back from Cologne when he visited the Basilica of Saint Ursula. It cost him a fabulous sum.”

  “Yes, mon père, I’m sure it must have,” Charles murmured, not daring to look at La Chaise.

  “Beyond price, surely,” the king’s confessor said gravely. “And you can be sure that Madame de Maintenon will value the gift accordingly.”

  Jouvancy sat back in relief. La Chaise gave a final stir to the bouillon, pronounced it ready, and armed himself with a ladle.

  “Bowls and spoons are in the cupboard,” he said to Charles, who got three brown pottery bowls from a shelf and set the small table with the spoons. The king’s confessor placed the fragrantly steaming bowls beside the spoons and brought a knife for the bread and cheese, and the three of them stood with folded hands and bowed heads while he said the grace. Then, tired and momentarily at peace in the darkling room, they sat and ate hungrily, comforting their bodies with bread, wine, cheese, and La Chaise’s hot soup, and comforting their minds with good talk. Charles watched the candlelight gleam on St. Ursula’s reliquary and thought that perhaps their souls were comforted, too, by her presence. For the good of what they had to do here, he hoped she was present, because whatever the reliquary’s gold and lapis had cost Père Jouvancy’s pious grandfather, the little cross seemed smaller and more insignificant by the moment here in the grandeur of Versailles.

  Chapter 4

  THE FEAST OF ST. LANDRY, TUESDAY, JUNE 10, 1687

  Before half after nine the next morning, after a late and hasty breakfast of bread and the rest of the bouillon, Charles followed Père La Chaise and Père Jouvancy along the gallery corridor toward the central, royal part of the palace. Their heels echoed sharply on marble and parquet as they passed through a seemingly endless chain of sumptuous chambers opening one into the other. In spite of his determination not to admire the king’s ill-gotten grandeur, Charles caught his breath in wonder when they reached the Galerie des Glaces. Not long completed, the Hall of Mirrors was already one of the wonders of Europe. It was more than two hundred feet long, and the inner side of it was lined with “windows” whose panes were mirrors, reflecting back the sunlight from the outer windowed wall and the colors and jewels of the people moving between. Staring and blinking in the unaccustomed light, Charles realized that the benches and tables, and the enormous pots of orange trees in every window embrasure, were made of what looked like silver. He edged toward the nearest pot to see if it really was silver and walked into Jouvancy, who had stopped and was gazing upward.

  “Thank the bon Dieu for so much beauty,” the rhetoric master whispered, and Charles looked up, too.

  He had to admit that t
he ceiling was beautiful. Until he looked closely and saw that it was war spread over his head in sky blue and blood red and every other color in the artist’s palette. Louis XIV, in a billowing wig and a Roman soldier’s scanty armor, ramped over the battlefields of Europe, leading charges and trampling enemies against a background of smoke from burning cities, while a sky full of cheering angels watched and bosomy classical goddesses waited to bestow laurel crowns. Charles turned his attention to trying to catch sight of Père Le Picart and Père Montville among the throng of courtiers waiting for the war god’s appearance. La Chaise had set Bouchel to watch for the other two Jesuits outside and bring them to the gallery the moment they arrived.

  The king’s day, La Chaise had explained, rarely varied from its set schedule of private events and royal appearances, and there was little chance that this morning’s appearance would be late. From being waked at half after seven and the succeeding ritual of the royal dressing, to the reverse ritual of undressing and retiring to bed at half after eleven at night, Louis was the center around whom everyone else’s day revolved.

  The palace clocks began to chime the quarter before ten. Beside Charles, La Chaise sighed with relief at the sight of a pair of three-cornered formal Jesuit hats called bonnets coming toward them, bobbing behind the footman Bouchel, who was cleaving the gathered courtiers like Moses in the Red Sea. As the footman delivered Le Picart and Montville, a hush fell and every head turned toward the door opening into the middle of the Galerie des Glaces. La Chaise drew his delegation a little forward to stand at the front of the crowd. In spite of himself, Charles felt his heart begin to speed. After all, he was about to see the king of France. He’d never seen a king, and quite apart from any personal feelings, the anointed king was the body of France itself.

  Suddenly, the darkness stirred beyond the open door. France’s fourteenth Louis let the doorway frame him for the length of a breath, stepped into the light arcing between the windows and the mirrors, and paced along the center of the Galerie. As Louis went, he raised his white-trimmed hat with its fashionably rolled brim to every lady. The mass of courtiers jammed between the royal pathway and the walls dipped like wheat in a wind, making their deepest bows and curtsies as he passed. Men—and a few women—darted forward and spoke quickly to him or placed small folded notes in his hand. Charles stared at the royal face as Louis drew nearer. Its expression of Olympian courtesy never varied. The man was more than merely regal, Charles thought, in unwilling admiration, he was regality’s ideal, its pattern. Light flamed from his diamond shoe buckles and made his brown velvet coat shine like the pelt of a sleek beast. And then the king’s dark blue-gray eyes were looking back at him. La Chaise nudged Charles, who removed his bonnet and deeply inclined his head, the protocol for clerics before their king, showing that they honored and served him, but bent the knee only to God.