Plague of Lies (9781101611739)

by Rock, Judith

  Still looking down, Charles watched the shapely black-stockinged legs and red-heeled shoes pass along the glowing Savonnerie carpet. Then La Chaise shoved at Charles again, and he lifted his head and followed his companions into the royal train behind the king’s almoner. The procession, lengthened every moment by courtiers falling in behind, made its way back through the long chain of rooms to the chapel, where most of the courtiers went down into the sumptuously gilded nave, but the king and his immediate train, including the Jesuits, took their places in the balcony. Louis knelt on his thickly cushioned prie-dieu, set in front of a cushioned armchair, and his attendants stood in a semicircle behind him. Most had kneeling cushions set ready for them on the floor, and out of the corner of his eye, Charles saw that even these were pawns in the game of grandeur. He watched as one shining square-toed shoe inched its owner’s cushion forward, closer to the king, and then a different shoe inched another cushion beyond it. Someone else cleared his throat, and both cushions were inched back to where they started.

  The Mass began, celebrated by a Franciscan priest. The heart-lifting musical setting was gloriously sung by a choir of men and boys accompanied by violins and oboes, but instead of losing himself in the liturgy as he usually did, Charles could not stop drinking in the colors, the music, the rich fabric, and the jewels of the crowd. Not to mention how the sunlight played over all of it, since the chapel’s windows, fittingly for a king who likened himself to the sun, were mostly clear glass, in the new fashion. And there in the midst of it, the Sun King—the man who rode his charger over the dead and dying on the ceiling of the Galerie des Glaces—was praying.

  Which was more than Charles managed to do, and by the time the Mass was ended, he was in a thoroughly bad humor with himself. Feeling as though he’d been caught in a trap of richness, he kept his eyes rigidly on his low-heeled, square-toed black shoes as Louis left the chapel, and kept them there as he waited with his fellow Jesuits for the royal attendants to sweep through the door after the king. Oh, for God’s sake—and I do mean that literally—can’t you just enjoy the beauty? the acid part of Charles’s mind said. I am enjoying it, Charles said even more acidly back, that’s the trouble. Oh, yes? the inner voice said. What a very un-Jesuit position to take. A very Jansenist position, in fact, the voice taunted, Jansenist Catholics being so austere that they rejected beauty entirely, insisting that it distracted the soul from God. The voice went on needling him. Jansenists say they love only what is ugly. Are you going to join them, then? Of course not, Charles returned indignantly.

  “And shut up!” He realized he’d said it out loud only when Jouvancy turned an outraged face on him.

  Fortunately, La Chaise called their attention. “Come, we will get the reliquary, and then go to Madame de Maintenon’s antechamber.”

  The five men hurried to La Chaise’s chamber, where Charles fetched the reliquary while Le Picart and Montville washed the road’s gritty dust from their faces and Jouvancy gave the reliquary’s satin-smooth, carved box a last polishing. He started to hand it back to Charles to carry, stopped, told him to pull his white shirt cuffs another fraction of an inch below his cassock sleeves, barked at him to straighten his bonnet, put the box tenderly down on La Chaise’s bed, hurried to the bowl of water still standing on a table, washed his spotless hands again, dried them, picked up the box, and finally handed it to Charles. With an amused glance at one another over Jouvancy’s head, La Chaise and Le Picart and Montville got him out the door, followed by Charles with the box.

  Madame de Maintenon lived on the south side of what had been Louis XIII’s little royal hunting lodge. The placement of her rooms, nearer than anyone else’s to the king’s, made Charles wonder why there was any gossiping question at all about her status. When the Jesuits reached the guardroom that was the only access to her reception chamber, a large, impassive soldier barred their way. Charles found the Swiss Guard’s ceremonial indoor uniform, in the fashion of his grandfather’s time, slightly comical. Patterned in red, black, and white, it sported a starched white ruff, a padded doublet, and loose breeches gathered and fringed at the knee. But there was nothing comical about the pike in the soldier’s white-gloved fist. It was a menacing weapon, taller than a tall man, with a steel ax head and a long, glittering spear point.

  When the guard was satisfied that the Jesuits had reason to be there, he allowed them into Mme de Maintenon’s antechamber. Bright with sun from its big south-facing window, the room was full of men and women, talking and shifting from one little group to another. Charles was startled to hear the word poison slipping in and out of their talk like a sibilant snake. He saw that Le Picart heard it, too, and watched him whisper a question to La Chaise.

  Not everyone was gossiping, though. A few courtiers watched the door to the inner chamber like dogs watching a man with a leg of lamb, and more than a few looked merely bored, fanning themselves, fingering their jewelry, examining their lace or fingernails. Tapestries and gilt-framed religious paintings hung on the walls, and Charles could see himself in the shine of the parquet. It was as slick as a mirror, too, and when Charles sidestepped to avoid a glowering man striding out of the audience chamber, he skated into Jouvancy and nearly dropped the reliquary. Jouvancy yelped and grabbed it from him, holding the box to his chest as though it were a lady’s frightened lapdog. Montville patted Jouvancy’s arm, and Le Picart looked sternly at Charles.

  “A man who dances as well as you do cannot keep his balance on two feet?”

  “Not here, it seems, mon père,” Charles murmured.

  La Chaise drew them all to the side of the room, out of the path between the antechamber doors, and gave them a brief education in court ceremony.

  “To my surprise, the king expressed a desire to be here,” he began. “But early this morning he told me that he cannot leave his council meeting after all, since he returned from inspecting the fortifications at Luxembourg only on Saturday and there is much business to be done.” La Chaise gave them a moment to murmur their disappointment and then took them through the steps of the ceremony, finishing with, “You, Père Jouvancy, will be flanked by Père Le Picart and Père Montville. I will stand to one side, and Maître du Luc will stand behind you with the box. When you finish your presentation speech, he will hand it to you. You will open its lid and hold it toward Madame de Maintenon, so that she can see the reliquary. When she has admired it and thanked you, someone, probably the Duc du Maine, will step forward and take the box from you. Then all of us will step back, make our reverence to her, turn, and leave the chamber. Not backward, remember, for the same reason that we do not remove our bonnets to her: she is not royalty.”

  The audience chamber’s door opened and the crowd turned as one. A liveried footman nodded at Père La Chaise. Charles took the reliquary box from Jouvancy, who, with Le Picart and Montville, crossed the antechamber close behind La Chaise. Suddenly dry-mouthed and feeling his heart thud like any provincial’s, Charles brought up the rear. With a mental shrug, he silenced the acid-tongued part of himself before it could comment and gave himself up to the experience. The footman spoke their names as they entered a large chamber that Charles registered only as a brief blur of color before La Chaise stopped halfway down the room and led them in their révérence to the woman who waited for them in a chair upholstered in yellow brocade. She wore a ribbon-edged, rose-embroidered black satin gown that covered her shoulders, with a filmy black scarf partly covering her abundant dark hair. Behind her, a dozen young courtiers and two brown-robed Franciscans stood in a rough semicircle, their eyes flicking from her to the Jesuits. Among them, Charles recognized the three young people he’d seen playing ball last evening in the courtyard: the king’s eldest legitimized son, the Duc du Maine, his sister, Mademoiselle de Rouen, and the Condé child. Mademoiselle de Rouen’s eyes swept dismissively over the Jesuits until they reached Charles. Then they widened, and she smiled and whispered something in the Duc du Maine’s ear. Maine shook his head and hushed her, but she sh
rugged a round white shoulder at him and kept watching Charles.

  Madame de Maintenon nodded to La Chaise, who stepped to the side, and Jouvancy led the other three in their approach to her. Clutching the box and walking carefully on the polished floor, Charles tried not to stare. He hadn’t expected the king’s secret wife to seem so youthful. She was more than fifty, but her round cheeks had natural-seeming color and her eyes were as large and dark as an Italian madonna’s. They were also full of a cool, assessing intelligence as she watched the Jesuits.

  The three in front halted, Charles hovering a step behind Jouvancy’s right shoulder, and they all bowed their heads to her again. As he raised his eyes, Charles realized from her expression—or lack of it—that she was simply waiting for this to be over. Jouvancy made his short, perfectly composed presentation speech, claiming Madame de Maintenon as a fellow educator and praising her school for young noblewomen, flattering the king’s children she’d raised, and reminding her briefly and delicately in the course of it all that they were kin (which brought, if anything, more frost into the atmosphere, Charles thought). Then Charles handed Jouvancy the box, and Jouvancy held it toward Madame de Maintenon, open like a book to show the reliquary. Her face thawed into a slight smile as she gazed at it. She nodded graciously and crossed herself, everyone else doing likewise. Then she made a brief response, praising the beauty and holiness of the gift and commending the young people present to the protection of St. Ursula. Dragging his lame leg, the Duc du Maine stepped forward and courteously took the box from Jouvancy. La Chaise added graceful thanks for the honor the lady had done them in receiving their gift. Madame de Maintenon listened politely and then, at her gesture of dismissal, the Jesuits made their exit.

  “Well,” Jouvancy said, with a shaky sigh, when they were through the door and back in the antechamber. “Thank the Blessed Virgin that’s over!”

  His words raised a ripple of laughter among the waiting courtiers as the Jesuits started toward the guardroom and the stairway. Behind them, the reception chamber’s door opened and closed again and a light voice said, “I beg your pardon, mes pères.” A young man in rich black velvet and a beautifully curled dark wig passed them hurriedly. He looked back, smiling, his smooth face unmistakably Bourbon. “Very prettily done in there, if I may say so.” Sudden mockery flashed from his eyes. “But you’ll need more than a virgin’s little finger to touch that lady’s heart.”

  That brought a louder and harsher ripple of laughter from the courtiers, which made Charles stand solidly on both feet, stifling an urge to trip the man as he swept from the room. The sudden harsh clash of weapons made Jouvancy startle and gasp, but La Chaise said, “It’s only the Swiss; they always present arms to a Prince of the Blood. Come.”

  “And which Prince was that?” Jouvancy said indignantly, when they were on the stairs and out of anyone’s hearing.

  “His Serene Highness, the Prince of Conti,” Le Picart replied noncommittally, exchanging knowing looks with La Chaise and Montville.

  So, Charles thought, running an appreciative hand along the stair’s yellow-veined marble balustrade, that was the man the police chief La Reynie had asked about as Charles rode out of Paris. Charles tried unsuccessfully to place this Prince of the Blood in the Bourbon family. Conti, Condé, too many branches, too many royal sprigs to keep track of.

  “The Contis are a younger branch of the Condés,” Jouvancy said, seeing Charles’s confused frown. “And no better mannered, either, as you saw.” He looked up at La Chaise, walking beside him. “Do you think we will see the king again before we leave?”

  “His first valet de chambre told me earlier that tomorrow morning he receives the envoys from Poland, coming to negotiate Mademoiselle de Rouen’s betrothal agreements. If you are still here, you can be present with the court for that.”

  Jouvancy looked hopefully at Le Picart, who smiled indulgently at him.

  “I think we can stay for that. After all, we have schools in Poland.”

  Montville nodded his pleased agreement and Charles admitted grudgingly to himself that he, too, would like to see such a ceremony.

  “How many valets de chambre does the king have?” Montville asked curiously.

  “Only one sleeps in his room at night,” La Chaise said. “But there are household officers without number, from dukes to little Parisian barbers who have bought some minor post.” The king’s confessor sighed. “I must say, I had the unhappy feeling in the audience chamber that we still rank somewhere below the barbers.”

  The others commiserated ruefully and Jouvancy said, “Our gift isn’t going to help much, is it?”

  “I think,” Le Picart said judicially, “that it will weigh in our favor. The lady is reputed to be more often just than warm. Is that not so, Père La Chaise?”

  “On the whole, yes.”

  Le Picart smiled and shrugged. “Let us trust, then, to her sense of fair play and believe that our little occasion went off well enough.”

  “And we did have a goodly gathering of witnesses,” La Chaise said. “So let us leave it in God’s hands and turn to happier things. Such as dinner at the Duc de La Rochefoucauld’s Table of Honor.”

  His companions’ faces brightened, and they followed him gladly through more of the palace corridors. When at last they reached the north wing’s garden front, the opposite side of the building from La Chaise’s modest chamber, they found the gallery thronged with richly dressed men and women making their way into La Rochefoucauld’s rooms. Charles tried not to stare at the women. Tall headdresses, confections of ribbon, lace, and starched linen, waved above discreetly padded puffs of hair and curls like bunches of grapes, and scarves like woven air fluttered on their bare shoulders. The men’s gold-embroidered waistcoats glittered beneath open black coats, their sticks tapped, and their dark velvet and wool coat skirts hung nearly to their knees. Precedence—the prescribed order of entrance by rank—was taken, given, and rearranged with narrowed eyes and coldly honeyed words.

  The Jesuits’ turn finally came to greet their host. Francois VII, Duc de La Rochefoucauld and grand master of the king’s wardrobe, was an urbane, tired-looking man who passed the Jesuits on to a footman, who seated them at the large horseshoe-shaped table draped in white linen. When all twenty or so guests were seated, La Rochefoucauld took his place at the table’s center and invited La Chaise to return thanks, and the meal began. After a pigeon bisque so delicious that Charles wanted to find the kitchen and sing an aria to the cook, they began on roast chicken with olive sauce, served on silver plates. Charles was savoring the sauce, which reminded him of his home in the south, when his neighbor on the left said into his ear, “You saw him fall, I believe?”

  “I beg your pardon, monsieur,” Charles said in surprise. “Saw whom?”

  “Fleury. Last evening.” The small spare man in tobacco-brown velvet eyed Charles sardonically from under his double-peaked wig. “How many men have you seen fall downstairs since you arrived?”

  “Only the one,” Charles admitted with a smile. “I have not the pleasure of your acquaintance, monsieur.”

  “Forgive me, everyone here knows everyone. I did not mean to be rude. I am the Comte de Vannes. I guessed who you were, Maître du Luc, the moment I heard your name. And your Languedoc accent. My father met yours long ago, when the court was at the Louvre. My unhappy father was in love with your mother, and you look very like his description of her. I think he still mourns that your father won her away from him. She was wondrously blond, he said, with conversation that sparkled like a diamond.”

  “She’s no longer blond,” Charles said, storing up the compliment to tell his mother, “but her conversation sparkles still.”

  “I will tell my father. Or perhaps I won’t, poor man.” He lifted an eyebrow at Charles. “So, tell me. Did you see old Fleury fall?”

  “No, monsieur. I only heard him. By the time I reached him in the corridor, I saw only that his neck was broken.”

  “A nice diversion f
rom the fact that someone gave him his bouillon.”

  “I—what? I don’t understand. You mean he didn’t make his own?”

  The Comte de Vannes bayed with laughter. “Forgive me—you are from the south and perhaps you don’t have this saying there. ‘Giving someone his bouillon’ is what we say to mean someone’s been poisoned.”

  Remembering the whispers about poison in Madame de Maintenon’s antechamber, Charles studied Vannes’s face to see if he was serious and decided he was. “But why should people think Fleury was poisoned? He was sick, certainly. But there is a sickness in Paris now that takes people just that way. Half the staff at Louis le Grand have been struck down by it. Isn’t it more likely that the man was simply ill?”

  “It might have been, had the Comte de Fleury not annoyed so many people.” Vannes applied himself to his chicken for a moment. “I understand that they’re doing an autopsy tonight, so perhaps that will settle the question. The king, of course, wants the rumors of poison stopped.” He smiled. “Or confirmed.” With a courteous nod signaling the conversation’s end, Vannes turned to the woman on his other side.