by Rock, Judith
“Quickly, so we can get a place.” La Chaise pulled Charles away and they hurried along the route they’d traveled yesterday until they reached a small dark flight of stairs. “We’ll have to find a place at the foot of the Ambassadors’ Staircase,” La Chaise said, starting down. “We’re not grand enough to stand at the top near the throne.”
“Not even you?”
La Chaise shook his head. “Not unless there’s a religious statement to be made. When the king receives an envoy from a foreign prince who is not Christian, he might ask me to be there. But Poland is a Catholic country.”
In the sumptuous entrance hall, where the wide marble staircase rose beneath a painted and gilded coffered ceiling, a large crowd had gathered, talking and laughing excitedly and jockeying for space. The hall bristled with the pikes of the Hundred Swiss, spear points catching and scattering light as the guards stood lined up on each side of the path to the stairs, watching the crowd and the doors. Some made a fence of their pikes to keep back tourists, others stood around the antechamber walls, and more were outside the doors, the clusters of white plumes in their cocked-brim black hats making Charles think of menacing long-legged birds.
“I’ve heard that Louis is the best-guarded monarch in Europe,” he said, watching them. “It seems true.”
“Of course it’s true.” La Chaise began worming his way through the crowd, and Charles did his best to stay close behind. La Chaise elbowed ruthlessly until he had them close enough to the first step and the front rank of watchers to see and be seen. Craning his neck to see around La Chaise, Charles counted twelve steps of colored marble leading to a landing where classical figures of gilded bronze reclined beside the sculpture of a fountain. Above the figures, courtiers stood immobile, leaning on balustrades covered with cloth of gold and waiting for the envoys. Charles wondered why such stillness—before the ceremony even began—and then realized with a start that they were only painted. To their right and left, the staircase branched, each side rising to the level of the royal apartments, where the king would receive the Poles in the royal bedchamber.
La Chaise sighed and righted his bonnet. “I hope this doesn’t take long. I still feel like I could fall on my face.”
“Don’t,” Charles said gravely, glancing significantly up the stairs. “Fall on your back—isn’t that the protocol? Don’t show royalty your back?”
That raised the ghost of a laugh. “A timely reminder.”
Charles hesitated. “Mon père, do you truly believe that we were poisoned yesterday?”
“I don’t know what to think. But I can easily believe it about Fleury. He was a grasping, arrogant man who liked no one.” La Chaise leaned close to Charles’s ear and said, under the noise of the crowd, “And he was known to be writing a mémoire of the court.”
“Ah.” Charles nodded thoughtfully. An acid-tongued mémoire of the court could well give someone enough reason to poison Fleury. He thought about his nighttime encounters with Neuville and the Duc du Maine. People had certainly been taking an interest in Fleury’s room. How many souls in this hive of gossip and hard-won position might fear that Fleury had vented his pen on them?
A blare of trumpets sounded, and every head turned toward the doors. The Swiss soldiers stood at rigid attention, the trumpets settled to a stately march, and the head of the Polish procession appeared. First came the Introducer of ambassadors and the grand master of ceremonies, gravely resplendent in shining black-satin suits. Behind them was a small tight formation of Polish soldiers, fair haired and impressively moustached. Then came the pair of envoys sent by King Jan Sobieski to negotiate his son’s marriage: a stocky elder and a taller, darker man perhaps in his thirties. The watching crowd stared eagerly at their quilted robes of heavy calf-length silk—one robe scarlet and the other blue—with rows of gold tassels across the front. Both men were sweating under small fur-trimmed hats, and their moustaches were even longer and thicker than their soldiers’ luxuriant growths.
The crowd made its bows and curtsies as the men passed, watched them climb the stairs and take the left-hand branch toward the king’s apartements, and then began murmuring and making ready to move on to somewhere else. La Chaise turned to Charles.
“There are a few things I must do, maître. Go back and see how Père Jouvancy does. I will return as soon as I can. Do you feel you’ll be able to eat?”
“Yes, something, at least.”
“Me, I am not altogether there yet.” La Chaise raised an eyebrow. “I imagine that you do not wish to return to the Duc de La Rochefoucauld’s table.”
“On the whole, no,” Charles said, somewhat shamefaced. In spite of his reluctance to believe that a poisoner was at work—even after what Monsieur Neuville had said about Fleury’s blackened liver—he kept remembering the doctor’s whisper that he’d seen the duke and Madame de Maintenon in close conference. “But if there is bread and cheese in your chamber, mon père, that will do for me. When you return, if you have no objection, may I leave Père Jouvancy with you and go out into the gardens for a little air? While I work on our ballet livret?”
“Very well. I will return as quickly as I can.”
They parted and Charles went slowly back to his and Jouvancy’s room. But before he reached the black-and-white tiled gallery, a clamor of ominously low-pitched barking pulled him up short. He looked around, expecting to see large dogs running toward him, but there were only a few courtiers in sight, and none seemed to notice the noise. Perhaps they were used to it, Charles thought, wondering why someone kept large dogs inside. The noise and crowding of Louis le Grand were beginning to seem positively pastoral by comparison with this place, and he had an overwhelming urge to bundle Jouvancy into a carriage and go home.
When he reached La Chaise’s chamber, Bouchel told him that the rhetoric master hadn’t stirred. Charles went to Jouvancy’s bed and parted the curtains. The little priest’s flushed face and hot forehead put paid to Charles’s thoughts of leaving. He wrung out a cloth in cold water and sponged the priest’s face, smiling reassuringly and murmuring, “Go on sleeping, all’s well,” when Jouvancy briefly opened his eyes. Then he closed the curtains, glad for the west-facing windows that left the room still dim and cool, and left the chamber.
Bouchel turned from staring out the courtyard window. “Do you need me anymore, maître?” His eyes were shadowed, and his face was pinched and gray.
“Are you well?” Charles said, peering at him in concern.
The footman tensed and darted a sideways glance at Charles. “Well enough, thank you. Are you better?” He jerked his head at the door into the other chamber. “Is he?”
“We’re all better, thank you.”
“I was thinking—I don’t mean to step out of my place, maître, but whatever happened to old Fleury, I doubt you three were poisoned.”
“Why not?” Charles went to the cupboard and opened it, looked for bread and cheese.
“Well, Père La Chaise set the leftover bouillon back in the cupboard after your breakfast yesterday.” He wrinkled his nose. “I didn’t find it till this morning, and it was high and ripe. Enough that it had to be already going that way yesterday. So it could have been what made you sick.”
Charles nodded slowly. The bouillon! Of course. An unpleasant but ordinary explanation. What could be simpler? “Thank you, I’ll tell Père La Chaise. But you look as though you may be getting Père Jouvancy’s sickness. You should take care of yourself.”
Bouchel grunted his thanks and left. But when he was gone, the simplicity of spoiled soup began tangling itself into unwelcome subtlety. The soup had not smelled off when they’d had it for breakfast yesterday, but putting poison in bouillon would be easy enough…
Stop it, he ordered his mind. There is no poisoner. It wasn’t poison. It was spoiled soup. And I’ve heard our infirmarian say that too much drink can blacken a man’s liver. Maybe that’s why Fleury’s liver was black. God knows the man drank enough in the army. Wobbly with tiredness—and
some measure of relief—Charles stood up and stretched. Impatient to get out of the palace’s fog of rumor and suspicion and into plain sunshine and air, he hoped La Chaise wouldn’t be long about his errands.
He wasn’t, and as soon as he returned, Charles told him what Bouchel had said.
“Oh. I suppose that could explain it. I should have thrown away what was left after dinner. But, do you know, I always find that hard to do, perhaps because my mother would never let the servants throw soup away…” La Chaise smothered a yawn. “For now, I am not going to think about soup or poison or anything else. I am going to sit here in my chair and doze.”
Glad to get out of the palace, Charles made his way down to the ground-floor corridor and started around it to the south wing’s garden front. He hoped he wouldn’t have to walk too far before he found a shady secluded place to sit and work on the ballet livret he’d retrieved from the saddlebag. But when he was finally outside, he found himself in a wide desert of hot gravel, only to discover that the greenery beyond was an inhospitably formal checkerboard of walkways, plots of grass and shrubs dotted with classical statues, spiral paths to nowhere among carefully placed and manicured trees, and stretches of high hornbeam hedges as impassable as walls. There was solitude enough, but the grass seemed the only place to sit. He walked on, toward a jet of water playing above a balustrade topped with urns, and found two sets of steps leading down to the fountain, the bottom flight shaded by a wall. Surprised at how tired he was by the walk from the palace, Charles settled himself on a lower step, turned so that he could lean against the wall, and opened the ballet livret. The next thing he knew, a flight of cawing crows was passing overhead and the livret was at the bottom of the steps, where it had tumbled from his lap. Blinking, he stretched and went to the fountain’s basin to splash water on his face and wake up. He dried his face with his cassock skirt, picked up the livret, unstoppered his bottle of ink, and got to work.
He finished writing out directions for the comic entrées of Scaramouches and Harlequins in Part two of La France Victorieuse sous Louis le Grand, turned the page to Part three, and began to read Jouvancy’s most recent editing, done in the college infirmary. Charles had known there would be changes, since this third Part was called La France Victorieuse de ses Ennemis par les Armes, and his own version of the French military victories had emphasized celebrations of peace. But Jouvancy had the livret’s French Heroes trampling their foes in a manner worthy of Versailles’s painted ceilings, conquering first Spaniards, then Germans, and finally the Dutch. He stared unseeingly at the livret in his lap, trying not to remember his own experience of war. He’d seen too much death and, in the end, had found the death he’d seen—and caused—pointless. And this ballet’s drum-beating for the illusory glory of battle left him feeling as though he were mourning for the not yet dead.
Charles let his quill rest and watched the fountain playing in front of him. The sound of the rising and falling water eased him somewhat, but his sense of calm vanished as he looked more closely at the fountain’s sculptures. On a stone island in the fountain’s center, the goddess Latona was turning angry peasants into frogs to protect her children Apollo and Diana from their wrath. The intended allegory hit Charles between the eyes. The matronly Latona would be Anne of Austria. Which made Apollo into Louis, and Diana, well, it wasn’t hard to understand Diana as Louis’s rouged and beribboned brother Philippe. And that meant the frogs were the eternal poor, always angry—usually with good cause—and perpetually baffled and defeated. So much for “blessed are the poor,” Charles thought sourly, closing his eyes.
Someone laughed, a hot tongue licked his hand, and his eyes flew open. A small black dog was standing in front of him, wagging its ragged plume of a tail. A young woman and a little girl stood between the dog and the fountain. Charles recognized Mademoiselle de Rouen—Lulu—the king’s legitimized daughter about to be sent away to Poland, and the girl he’d seen playing ball, one of the Condé’s tiny daughters, a Doll of the Blood.
The chestnut-haired little girl drew the dog away by its red ribbon collar. But Lulu came closer and bent toward him. The smell of tobacco and the sight of an impressive décolletage assailed him, but it was her blazing vitality that made him blink. She glittered with it and a warning instinct that he ought to get out of its path brought him to his feet.
“Were you dreaming?” Her smile widened and she looked him up and down. “Of me? You saw me yesterday, you know.”
Charles put the livret aside on the step, made his face a social blank, went down the two steps to her level, and removed his bonnet.
“Your Highness,” he said tonelessly, inclining his head.
Her blue-gray Bourbon eyes mocked him. “Or perhaps you weren’t dreaming. Only praying. Oh, dear, did I disturb your devotions?”
“And if I said yes?”
Slowly as a stalking cat, she closed the distance between them. The green jewels hanging from her ears and her cream and sea-green satin skirts shimmered in the sunlight. “Then I would say that perhaps you could find something more entertaining to do.” The music of her laughter vied with the fountain’s music, and the ruche of pale pink lace that edged her décolletage rose and fell. The Bourbon eyes were full of challenge. And something else that he might have called desperation if he hadn’t been too angry at her rude familiarity to care.
“If you will excuse me, Your Highness?” He replaced his hat. “I have work I must do.” He looked beyond her for her attendants. But except for the child and the dog, she was alone, which no young woman of quality, and especially no king’s daughter, should be. He looked again at the child and saw that she was watching him gravely, her small oval face oddly knowing and resigned.
“It’s all right,” she said. “You may go. I will stay with her. And I am not a child, I am nearly twelve, though I don’t look it.”
“Mademoiselle,” he began, but she stopped him.
“I am Anne-Marie de Bourbon. You must call me Your Serene Highness.”
“I beg your pardon, Your Serene Highness.”
Her dignity dissolved into a smile. “Well, I have to say that, don’t I? If I don’t, everyone will treat me like a child, even if I live to be a hundred years old, since I probably won’t grow any more.”
Charles smiled back. “Very well thought, Your Serene Highness. One must keep one’s dignity at all costs. But now I certainly cannot leave, because there are two young ladies to guard.”
“No,” Lulu said sweetly, “you cannot. So you must stay and talk with us. Besides, I know you’re not a priest, you could still decide to be—” She looked up at him through her dark eyelashes. “—a man. So why should you work so hard? You see that I know all about you, Maître du Luc. Don’t you want to know how?” Her eyes sparkled invitingly.
“On the whole, no, Your Highness.” Charles bent to ruffle the dog’s ears.
“Oooh!” Lulu laid a small white hand on his cassock sleeve. “I think you are afraid of me!” Her nails scratched like a cat’s as her fingers moved on his woolen sleeve.
“Lulu!” someone called from behind her, and the dog bounded away, barking joyously. Her Serene Highness Anne-Marie picked up her blue skirts and ran after the dog.
Lulu swore and looked over her shoulder.
“What are you doing hiding away with Maître du Luc?” The Prince of Conti, the young man who had mocked the Jesuits’ gift in Madame de Maintenon’s antechamber, strolled lazily around the fountain toward them. “Everyone’s searching for you, my sweet Lulu. You’ll be late for dining with your handsome Poles.” He waggled his fingers at the dog, which was jumping and barking in greeting, and reached out to pull one of Anne-Marie’s brown curls. She slapped hard enough at his hand that he snatched it back and muttered something under his breath.
Lulu’s brightness died like a doused flame, and she looked as though she might cry. “No. I won’t eat with them today. Soon enough, I’ll have no one else.” She whirled and picked up her skirts as if to run. �
��Come, let’s go to a traiteur in town for our dinner.”
Anne-Marie de Bourbon shook her head in alarm. “No, Lulu, you mustn’t!” The little girl turned to Conti. “Don’t let her go.”
Conti ignored them both and gazed limpidly at Charles.
“So sorry to interrupt your pleasures, maître.”
“Not pleasure, Your Serene Highness, work.” Charles doffed his bonnet to Conti with an inward sigh and every outward appearance of respect. Conti’s arrival was a chance to try to learn something for Lieutenant-Général La Reynie. Charles admitted to himself that the more he saw of Conti, the less he minded causing trouble for this arrogant young Bourbon. “I had the pleasure of seeing you yesterday in Madame de Maintenon’s antechamber, mon prince.”
“Yes. I am surprised to see you still here. But court life always does agree with Jesuits, I believe.”
“Does it?” Charles showed his teeth in what the prince might possibly mistake for a smile. “And does it always agree with you, Your Serene Highness?”
Conti’s eyebrows lifted, and he seemed to really see Charles for the first time. “How could it not, when I am near my kinsman the king?”
“How not, indeed? Royal kinsmen, of course, feel nothing but brotherly love for one another.”
At that, Lulu burst into laughter so deep and loud that Charles thought it would have doubled her over, had her bodice not been so boned and laced. Anne-Marie only looked gravely from one speaker to the next, like someone watching a game of jeu de paume.
But this conversational game felt to Charles more like a skirmish on the edge of battle. “You disagree?” he asked Lulu.
Still burbling with mirth, she waved a beringed hand at Conti. “My royal father hates this dear Bourbon prince! And this dear prince is only waiting—”
“Shut up, Lulu.” It was Conti’s turn to bare his teeth in a dangerous smile. He caught her hand. “You are shocking our good cleric. No one hates anyone here.”