Plague of Lies (9781101611739)

by Rock, Judith

  “No, Your Serene Highness. What machine is that?”

  “The Machine de Marly. It’s by the river at the king’s chateau of Marly. It’s immense!” The white lace ruffles fluttered at her elbows as she stretched her short arms as wide as they would go. “And it makes a terrible noise. No one can sleep near it. It pumps water up the hill to Marly’s fountains and then here to Versailles.”

  “Yes, even the water has to obey my father,” Lulu said bitterly. She went to a small stone bench at the lake’s edge, but turned back. “It’s wet.”

  “I’ll dry it for us.” Charles pulled a large handkerchief from his sleeve and wiped the bench with it.

  The girls sat close together and Charles remained standing, but Lulu reached up and pulled him down beside her.

  He let a few moments go by and then said carefully, “Is no one trying to help you through this time, Your Highness? Not your mother? Nor Madame de Maintenon?”

  “My mother doesn’t want me to go, but what can she do? The king cares nothing for what she wants, not anymore. And Madame de Maintenon only really cares about my brother; he was always her favorite.” Lulu twitched a dismissive shoulder. “Though she did put her new relic temporarily in the chapel, so I can go there every day and pray to Saint Ursula for help in doing my duty.”

  Charles winced at the chill of that. But the Duc du Maine had said that Mme de Maintenon did not care much for the troublesome Lulu. “So you have no one to help you.” Or love you, he thought sadly.

  “Except Saint Ursula,” Anne-Marie whispered. “And me.” But Lulu didn’t seem to hear her.

  Charles did, but he paid no attention. He was remembering himself at sixteen, remembering how the love of God and the saints and everyone else had paled beside the love he’d really wanted then, from Pernelle.

  Forcing himself to go on, he said, “Your Highness, may I—”

  She laughed bitterly and waved him quiet. “If you’re going to suggest a convent, I think I’d rather go to Poland.”

  “It’s good that you can think of something worse than Poland. But no, I can’t imagine you in a convent. I was going to say that what helps is giving over your own wants to God. I know from experience that it’s very hard to do that. But if you manage it, then God will give you more than you can possibly imagine.”

  He expected anger, but she turned on the bench and studied him. A small frown gathered between her eyes. “You believe that, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  Suddenly the wary hope in her died, and she hugged herself as though something hurt. “No. I can’t. You don’t understand, you’re a man—” White-faced, she jumped up from the bench. “I must go. Come, Anne-Marie.”

  She pulled the little girl up by the hand and walked away, stumbling on her petticoats in her haste. Dragged in her wake, Anne-Marie gave Charles a look so formidably displeased that he glimpsed her grandfather, the legendary Great Condé, in the tiny, twelve-year-old princess. The dog, Louis, followed them, barking and wagging. Charles watched the trio out of sight and then went on sitting, gazing at the dark, dead waters that obeyed the king and knowing he’d failed utterly.

  Chapter 11

  That evening, Charles stood in the doorway of one of the large salons, watching the famed Versailles gambling. This salon was for cards, and in the one beyond, a lottery was in progress. Candles in tall lampstands were set along the tables, bathing the piles of coins in gold and silver aureoles. As the gamblers’ stakes changed hands, shouts of triumph and disappointment rose to the ceiling, which was painted, appropriately enough, with scenes of Fortune and her wheel. The king himself was there, strolling sedately through the room, his gentlemen following at a distance as he spoke amiably to the gamblers. La Chaise had said that the gambling tables were the only place where anyone and everyone could sit in the presence of the king, and indeed, as Louis passed through the room, no one rose. Some of the players barely noticed him, avid as they were for their games. Besides the usual lotteries, there were card games: lansquenet, reversis, and bassette. There was even a hoca board at a corner table, though the notorious game had been banned from Paris years ago, after it ruined too many citizens.

  “Have you come to pray for us, maître?” The young Duc du Maine paused beside Charles in the wide doorway. “I could use your prayers against the Prince de Conti.”

  Maine nodded toward a table farther down the room, and Charles saw Conti lounging in a chair, gazing expressionlessly at the cards in his hands. The Grand Duchess of Tuscany sat on his left, her yellow wig clashing with her crimson bodice and slipping a little sideways as she tried shamelessly to see what he held. Across the table from them, rings flashed on the fingers of three men hunched over their cards, murmuring to each other and glancing unhappily at Conti from time to time.

  “How the Prince of Conti plays so well I can never understand.” Maine smiled ruefully. “I keep thinking that I’ve watched him and learned, but I always lose. It makes Madame de Maintenon furious, but she never comes to the gambling, so I’m safe till someone tells her. Or till I have to borrow money from her to pay him back!”

  Fascinated by this glimpse of royal life, Charles couldn’t help asking, “Does she lend it?”

  “Usually. But with very high interest—I have to listen to long and severe lectures on my morals and my duty as a prince.” The boy’s smile was irresistibly sweet. “But if you pray for me tonight… is there a patron saint of gambling, I wonder?”

  “I’ve never thought to wonder that,” Charles said, laughing. Then, wickedly, “Shall we ask Père La Chaise?” He inclined his head toward the adjoining salon. “He’s just there in the buffet room.”

  Maine grinned. “Yes, let’s!” But then he looked suddenly down the room. “The king is coming this way,” he said urgently, and his hand went to his hat.

  Louis was making straight for them—or for the door, Charles hoped. Charles stepped aside and snatched off his bonnet. Maine made his bow and Louis paused, his eyes resting warmly on his son. Then the king turned his gaze, so like Maine’s, on Charles, who clutched his bonnet as though it were a lifeline and hoped he didn’t look as hunted as he felt. There was a deep, watching quiet about Louis that Charles found oddly disconcerting. This was not a man easily fooled.

  “Père La Chaise informs me that you are persuading Our unhappy daughter to a more seemly acceptance of her duty,” the king said. “You have Our thanks.” He added, “She is at the lottery table in the next room. There is no other door from that salon except the one you see from here.”

  Louis walked serenely on. Charles let his held breath go and looked down at his half-crushed bonnet. He felt as though Louis had hung Lulu around his neck.

  “I esteem him above all men on earth,” Maine said, his eyes following the royal back. “But—” He sighed.

  “But it is not easy being his son,” Charles hazarded.

  The boy nodded feelingly. “You can have no idea. He is kindness itself to me. But still, how can one ever please a—a—well, a god, almost? A hero, at the least!”

  Charles thought of all the Jesuit college ballets he’d seen in which the king was depicted as Hercules. Or Apollo or Jupiter. No, it couldn’t be easy to be Louis’s son. Or daughter. It was difficult enough being one of Louis’s anonymous subjects—and it seemed to Charles now that he was no longer anonymous.

  Maine drew closer. “But do you know who I feel most sorry for? His real son, Louis. The Dauphin, I mean—he’s the one who matters, because he is legitimate and will rule after him. And our father is so constantly disappointed in him, because the poor Dauphin isn’t—well—very quick. And that disappointment has made the Dauphin terrified of most everything.”

  “That’s very unfortunate,” Charles said thoughtfully, remembering what he’d heard from Conti and his coterie in the garden. A terrified king would be a gold mine of opportunity to that little coven.

  “Well, I must go now and lose my pretty shirt,” Maine said, shrugging off the real
m’s future. “Unless you can discover which saint to pray to!” He smiled at Charles and went eagerly to where the Prince of Conti sat, raking a pile of gold coins called louis toward him.

  Charles moved a little aside from the door, beyond a potted orange tree, and stood against the wall’s dark silk brocade. From there he could look for Lulu, and also watch Conti and Margot, without being much noticed. A gambling evening was not a usual place for a Jesuit, however, and he felt distinctly uncomfortable. Not because he’d never gambled. Far from it—soldiers endured long hours of boredom when not marching or fighting, and dice and cards helped to pass the time. But that was a long time ago. And the stakes he’d played for then were nothing compared to the fortunes spread out on these tables. As the candlelight from the tables lit the gamblers and their money, it threw dancing shadows into the salon’s corners, where Charles could easily believe that the patient specter of ruin waited for its prey.

  His attention sharpened as he saw Lulu, changed now into a gown of tawny gold satin, come slowly from the lottery room and stop at Conti’s table. Her gown shone like the sun, but her face was pinched and shadowed. She leaned down to speak to Maine, her brother, who was sitting on Margot’s left. Then she sat in the empty chair on Conti’s right. Margot was frowning blackly at her cards and ignored the newcomer. Conti glanced sideways and gave Lulu an absent smile, but his real attention was all for the game. One of Lulu’s hands disappeared under the table. After a moment, Conti’s eyebrows lifted and his free hand disappeared likewise. Well, Charles thought, that doesn’t look to me like resignation to Conti’s indifference. Or perhaps Conti was only giving her a little brotherly comfort? But Charles had sisters, and a girl’s face didn’t look like that for a brother. He wondered if the girl was trying again to persuade Conti to help her stay in France. A forlorn hope, from everything he’d seen of the man.

  The play at Conti’s table went on. The prince’s hand emerged from under the table and he threw his cards down, laughing uproariously as he raked in everyone else’s coins.

  “You devil!” one of the men across the table said wryly. “How do you do it, Your Highness?”

  The Duc du Maine was frowning sadly at his cards, as though Madame de Maintenon’s lecture already sounded in his ears. Lulu looked quickly around the room and then flung her arms around Conti and kissed him on the cheek.

  “Well done!” she cried. “What a useful stake you are gathering! With my help, of course.”

  That got her a quick—and, Charles thought, hunted—look from Conti.

  “My thanks, Your Highness, your beauty always brings me luck,” he said loudly and formally, for the table of players more than for her, Charles thought, and turned back to the next game.

  Lulu looked as though she’d been slapped. “But you give me nothing in return.”

  She stood up, knocking her chair backward onto the polished floor, and Charles glimpsed the fury he’d seen in her eyes when she looked at her father during the ball. She hovered over Conti for a moment, clearly hoping to be drawn down beside him again, but he made no move and she turned blindly away from the table. Charles moved closer to the doorway.

  “Bonsoir, Your Highness,” he said quietly, steadying her as she nearly walked into him. She pulled her arm out of his grasp and wiped her tear-blinded eyes with the cream-colored lace of her sleeve, then brushed past him into the adjoining salon, where the buffet tables were set up.

  He watched her go, remembering the way she’d walked away from him earlier and hating his uselessness. He hoped she would stay in the salon so he wouldn’t have to follow and hound her. About God or anything else.

  He looked into the buffet salon. Most of the courtiers were still hard at their gambling, so there were only a few people around the tables. Lulu stood beside a towering pyramid of summer fruit. La Chaise, standing with the king at the other end of the room, caught Charles’s eye and nodded almost imperceptibly toward her. A wave of revulsion hit Charles, revulsion toward himself and his failure, this place, the king, the careful plans of power. He wanted to walk out of his cassock, out of his own skin, out of Versailles, and back home to Languedoc.

  But Lulu was disappearing through the salon doors. Gritting his teeth, Charles hurried after her. Each of these salons opened into the next, a long chain of them. He was starting to feel like he’d spent half his life trudging across the palace galleries’ black-and-white stone floors. He’d even dreamed of their checkerboard pattern the night before, and had seen himself running desperately after something or someone, disappearing always farther into the dark in front of him.

  And Lulu was disappearing now, though the salons in this royal center of the palace were all brightly lit. She turned suddenly through a small side door. A pair of women were coming toward Charles, and since he didn’t want to be seen going after Lulu, he stopped in pretended admiration of a painting of Diana and her nymphs, waiting for the women to pass. But they stopped, too.

  “Very pretty,” one of them said. Her ivory silk skirts rustled like dead leaves as she pressed close to Charles under the pretense of looking at the painting. “How do you like Versailles, maître? You are not yet a priest, we understand.”

  “Not yet, madame.” He edged away and bowed slightly, as though to let them go on their way, but they stayed where they were.

  The other woman kept her distance, but looked him up and down as though considering buying him. “How long will you stay at court?”

  “Not much longer, madame.”

  “Such a change for you from your college.”

  “Yes. And now I must take myself to my quarters, mesdames. The hours of the court are too much for a simple Jesuit.”

  They shrieked with merriment. “Simple Jesuit? What a wit you are!”

  Desperate to be rid of them and afraid he’d already lost Lulu’s trail, he walked firmly away in the direction they’d come from. To his relief, they went on toward the gambling rooms, chattering and laughing. When he glanced back, they were far enough away for him to sprint back to the half-open door Lulu had gone through. The small room beyond, lit by a pair of candles on a table in its center, was empty. A place to leave food and drink till it was needed to replenish the buffet, he guessed from the platters of cheese and pastries on the tables, and the cupboards that lined the walls. At first, he thought Lulu had vanished into the air, but then he saw yet another door in the right-hand wall.

  He went softly around the table and eased the small door open. The candles behind him lit the mouth of a narrow flight of stairs leading upward. He listened, heard nothing, and ventured onto the stairs. It was only a half flight and brought him to a dark corridor, so low-ceilinged he couldn’t stand upright. Deserted, it was lit by a single candle in a sconce at the stairhead and lined with closed doors whose lintels were perhaps five feet from the floor. Peering at the little doors, he lifted his head and unwarily collided with the ceiling. Glad for the cushioning of the stiff bonnet, he rubbed his head. These could only be servants’ rooms, a sort of mezzanine inserted between two ordinary floors. Well, he told himself, many people had less and worse. But why did they have to have so little here at the heart of luxury, where the courtiers sat on silver benches? He pulled himself back to more immediate problems.

  Lulu was hardly likely to be in a servant’s room. Bent uncomfortably to one side, he started toward the far end of the passage to see if there were stairs there, thinking that perhaps she’d come this way as a shortcut to somewhere else. He was halfway along the corridor when something grabbed his cassock skirt. He yelped in surprise and jumped away from whatever it was, but a small voice commanded,

  “Shhh! In here!”

  Anne-Marie de Bourbon pulled him through one of the little doors and shut it. Charles found himself in nearly complete darkness, with something panting and jumping against his legs.

  The dog, Louis, he realized, and squatted down to where he thought the child was.

  “What are you doing here, Your Serene Highness? Why�
��”

  “Hush!” She clutched his arm, an agony of fear in her voice. “He’ll hear you!”

  “Who? What game are you playing?”

  “It isn’t a game! Louis got away and I chased him up here. We had to hide because I heard someone coming and I’m not supposed to come here.” He felt her shiver. “So I came in here. At least it’s empty. The servants don’t go to bed till after we do. Then I looked out and—”

  “There’s no one out there now, so you and Louis can—”

  “No, listen! I opened the door a little crack to see who was coming and it was Lulu. She went into the room across the passage. It’s the footman Bouchel’s and he’s still in there!”

  Charles was glad the darkness hid his astonishment. “With Lulu?”

  “No, she left. She was crying and very angry. They were shouting at each other.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I heard them. Some of it, anyway. At first, I could just hear voices, but not what they said. Then she got louder and started crying and told him he had to help her. He tried to hush her, but she wouldn’t be quiet. He was talking louder, too. He said he’d tried to protect her and what else could he do? He sounded like he was almost crying. Then something crashed against the wall and she ran out into the passage. Maître, she told him that if he didn’t help her get away, she would kill herself!” Anne-Marie’s small hand was shaking. “I’m so worried! I know she’s unhappy about the marriage—but to go to a servant for help? And to say she’ll commit a mortal sin if she has to go to Poland? Please, she likes you, please talk to her and make her see she cannot do that, even if—”

  He heard her catch her breath. “Even if what?”

  “Just keep her from doing anything terrible!”

  “Your Serene Highness, you saw this morning that I can’t make her do anything.”

  But Charles thought suddenly of the lake, and his own fears rose. “Do you have any idea where she’s gone? Are there stairs at the far end of the passage?”