by Rock, Judith
“Yes, she went that way.”
The chapel lay in that direction. Charles hoped against hope that Lulu had taken her lonely misery to St. Ursula, that other beleaguered virgin. Or had at least taken refuge there until she had herself in hand again.
“Maybe she’s gone to the chapel,” he said.
“She might go there. I’m coming with you.”
As Charles pulled the door open, the dog darted into the passage, and the door across the way began to open. Charles ducked out of the room, pulled the door shut behind him, and was leaning against it when Bouchel ducked through his own doorway into the passage.
“Ah, bonsoir, Bouchel,” Charles said, wiping his forehead as though he’d been running.
“What—what are you doing here?”
“Chasing Mademoiselle d’Enghien’s little dog,” Charles said, with a tolerant smile. “And now I’ll have to chase him farther, he’s gone that way.” He nodded toward the far end of the corridor.
“Oh. Yes. He’ll have gone down the stairs there.” Bouchel wiped his hands over his face and through his hair.
He looked, Charles thought, like a man who’d just taken a heavy blow. “I thought earlier that you seemed unwell. You look as though you’re feeling worse.”
“Oh. No. No, not at all!” The whites of Bouchel’s dark brown eyes flared in the dim light. “I just came up to—to see to something. They’ll be after me, I must go back now.”
As Bouchel ran unceremoniously down the near stairs, Charles stood staring after him and wondering why in God’s name Lulu had gone to the footman.
Behind him, Anne-Marie pushed her way into the passage. “See? I told you. We have to find her!”
Together they returned to the ground floor and found Louis happily wolfing down cake someone had dropped. Anne-Marie picked him up and started toward the chapel. The salons here were nearly deserted, since most everyone made a point of being seen at the gambling. He is a man I never see was the worst thing King Louis could say of anyone entitled to be at court.
When they reached the Salon of Abundance at the east end of the chain, out of which the chapel opened, Charles stopped in the doorway. “Wait,” he said softly to Anne-Marie.
At this hour the chapel was lit only by the salon’s few candles shining behind them and by the small lamp on the high altar. He heard clothing rustle and gripped Anne-Marie’s shoulder to keep her from rushing into the dark. Then he heard a metallic sound and what sounded like the whispering of skirts.
“Stay here.” He walked toward the sound.
He could just make out Lulu crouching at the foot of the side altar where the reliquary was. “Your Highness?”
She straightened.“There was no need to come hunting me.” Her voice was chilly and remote.
“Anne—I mean Mademoiselle d’Enghien—was worried about you. She heard you in Bouchel’s room.”
“In—? No, she is lying.”
Flying feet came down the chapel aisle and Anne-Marie flung herself at Lulu, holding to her skirts. “I am not lying; you were there, you shouted at him, you said you would kill yourself. I was so frightened!”
Lulu sighed but made no move to comfort her. “Very well. Since you spied on me, yes, I did ask Bouchel’s help. He has always seemed—very kind.” She shrugged disdainfully. “And he’s a peasant. That kind of person always wants money, and I thought I might be able to bribe him to help me run away. He won’t. There. Now you know. And I know what I must do. And there’s an end of it.”
“But you said you would kill yourself! Lulu, you mustn’t even think that, you can’t—”
“Don’t be silly.” She put Anne-Marie gently but firmly aside. “Children are so tiresomely fanciful,” she said to Charles, and swept out of the chapel.
He put out a hand to stop Anne-Marie from following her. “Let her be. She doesn’t want either of us just now.”
“I know that.” The little girl twisted out of his grasp and faced him. He half expected tears, but she said fiercely, “You see? There’s only you and me to care about her. Someone has to help her, but no one will, because they’re afraid of the king. So what are you going to do?”
Charles looked warily at her. This one could probably lead armies. “I don’t know,” he said frankly. “I’m leaving very soon. I can tell Père La Chaise I’m worried about her.”
She sighed impatiently. “That won’t help. Lulu doesn’t like him; she won’t listen to him.” Her hazel-gold hawk’s eyes caught light from the altar lamp as she looked up at him. “I see that I must tell you. Listen. After the Comte de Fleury—”
Louis began to bark in the aisle as heavy footsteps pounded into the chapel.
“Your Serene Highness! Come here. At once!”
“Hell’s lecherous devils!” Anne-Marie said startlingly, looking over her shoulder. “I am busy, madame.”
“Come this moment. Your father is having a fit, asking where you are!”
“My father is always having a fit.” Anne-Marie turned back to Charles. “It’s my nurse. She never pays any attention to me unless my father asks where I am. Please, we must talk. Tomorrow?”
Before Charles could answer, the stout, dark-gowned woman, visible only in outline against the candlelight beyond the chapel, reached the side altar and gasped when she realized he was there.
“Who are you? What do you mean, being here alone with this child?” She took the little girl by the hand and pulled her away as though Charles had the plague. Scolding her without pause, she walked Anne-Marie out of the chapel.
Torn between fears for Lulu, worry over what Anne-Marie wanted to tell him, and his own fervent desire to be gone at first light and leave them both to others, Charles went slowly back to the evening’s festivities.
He found the buffet salon in an uproar. It was crowded with exclaiming, pushing courtiers, and someone had apparently been shoved into a table, because a bright flood of fruit was being crushed underfoot. Charles kicked a plum aside and tried to get nearer the confusion’s center to see what had happened. A woman’s wail rose above the noise.
“Dear Blessed Virgin, it’s just like the Comte de Fleury! Oh, Saint Benoit, protect him!”
St. Benedict? Benedict was the patron invoked against poison. Charles elbowed his way ruthlessly through a swath of outraged courtiers. Then someone shouted a command and the crowd parted to make way for the physician Neuville and Père La Chaise, supporting the king between them. Louis was hatless, his face white and sheened with sweat, and he walked slightly bent over, one hand pressed tightly to his stomach. He looked as though it was taking all his will to hold his mouth clamped shut. On the other side of La Chaise, the tearful Dauphin clutched his father’s black-and-white hat to his chest, and the Prince of Conti leaned at the Dauphin’s ear, murmuring solicitously. The covey of noblemen who attended the king came crowding behind them.
“Make way, for the love of God!” the doctor shouted again, and Charles leaped to clear a knot of stupefied courtiers out of the royally urgent path to the door.
As he passed, La Chaise said to Charles, “Go back to my chamber and wait.”
“Yes, mon père.” But instead of leaving immediately, Charles turned to the woman standing beside him. “What happened? I only just arrived.”
Two men drew near to listen to her answer. Her diamond earrings danced in the candlelight as she shook her head. “I hardly know. I was playing reversis and the king was standing beside our table. He suddenly turned away and—well—doubled over—and was sick.” She put a hand to her heavily powdered throat and stared at Charles in bewilderment, as though she’d just seen the sun rise in the west. “No one has ever seen him sick in public. We know he is ill from time to time. But he never lets us see it. Even when he had his operation in the winter, he was giving audiences and orders from his bed later that same day! One knew he had to be in pain, but he gave no sign at all. But this—he could not control himself at all, and—dear Blessed Virgin, what if he dies?”
“Madame,” Charles said, “I think you are jumping too far ahead. Who can control himself when the urge to spew comes on him?”
“I know. But—” Her small black eyes were full of fear. “—he’s not like us. He is the king!”
And Jupiter never vomits, Charles thought, mentally casting his eyes up. He turned away with a small nod, but the older of the two listening men, perhaps fifty or so, put out a hand to detain him. Charles knew he should know who the man was but couldn’t name him. The man glanced in the direction the king had gone and then back to Charles.
“Like the Comte de Fleury,” the man said quietly.
“Only, thank God, there were no stairs here,” his companion put in. He was the lynx-eyed man who’d baited La Chaise in the gallery after Fleury fell.
“You mistake me,” the older man replied impatiently. He looked at Charles. “Perhaps I should have said, exactly like Fleury. Because, may God help us, it looks to me as though someone has poisoned the king.” His words had the heavy finality of a tolling bell.
“Oh, dear. Then all we can do now is pray,” the other said, but his words were light as air. He excused himself and went quickly toward the doors.
“Poisoned how?” Charles said brusquely. “Where?”
The older man gestured gracefully toward the tables.
“That can’t be!” Charles said. “Unless you think it was random and any victim would have done? Anyone and everyone might have been poisoned, if it was in something on the tables.”
“Don’t be absurd, of course I don’t mean that.”
“Then what do you mean?”
The man inclined his head very slightly in the direction the younger man had gone.
Charles shook his head. “I don’t understand you.”
The nameless man looked casually over both shoulders and scanned the knot of gesticulating, hysterically whispering courtiers beyond Charles. “Come.” Without seeming to be going anywhere in particular, he drew Charles after him into a corner. They stood sideways against the wall, watching over each other’s shoulders and speaking so that their words would not carry out into the room. The man murmured, “It would not be so hard to do. The king loves sweets. And the best of the sweets are always offered first to him. Do you think he serves himself at the buffet? Of course he doesn’t. He points and nods and someone fills a plate for him. And until he has eaten from the buffet, no one else can take anything.”
Charles thought about that. He’d seen the king standing with La Chaise near the tables early in the evening. Neither had been eating then, but they might have eaten from the buffet before he saw them.
As though reading his thoughts, his companion said, “The king always goes immediately to the tables and has something, so that we aren’t kept from refreshing ourselves.” He raised an eyebrow. “I believe that tonight it was your Père La Chaise who served him.”
Charles gaped at the man. “Are you accusing Père La Chaise? That’s absurd!” Giving up the effort to identify the man and preserve the courtesies, he said bluntly, “Who are you?”
His companion seemed equally uninterested in the courtesies. “I am not accusing him at all. I am simply saying it would have been possible. Someone else may well have brought the king more to eat a little later. I was only briefly in this room before I went to the gambling.” He smiled slightly at Charles. “I am the Duc de La Rochefoucauld. And you are Maître Charles du Luc. You and Père Jouvancy and your companions ate at my table the day Père Jouvancy became so ill. You may just as well say that I poisoned him. Though I didn’t.” He made Charles a small ironic bow. “Nor did I poison the Comte de Fleury, who ate at my table the day he died. Though I am well aware of what is being said.”
“I am glad to hear it.” Charles folded his hands at his waist. “Forgive me, monsieur, but it seems to me that everyone at court is obsessed with poison. We have had a very bad stomach sickness and fever going the rounds in Paris. Père Jouvancy had been ill with it before we came, and I feel sure he has only had a relapse. So why not assume that the illness has reached Versailles? And that the Comte de Fleury had it, and now so has the king.”
“Logical, I grant you. And if some kind, innocuous man had broken his neck on the way to the privy, I might think as you do. But the Comte de Fleury was not innocuous, as I think you know. I was there in the gallery when he fell. I saw you recognize him. Oh, yes, it showed.”
“I was a soldier under his command.”
“Ah. Then you do know how well hated he was. Half the court would trade its palace lodgings for a look at Fleury’s reputed journal, to be sure they are not included. But the thing seems to have disappeared.”
“So I’ve heard. I grant you that more than a few might have willingly killed Fleury. Are you saying that the king is also well hated?”
“What king is not?” La Rochefoucauld replied.
“Then the question becomes, who hates him most?” Charles stared at the rapidly shifting groups of men and women telling each other that the king had been poisoned, that the king could not possibly have been poisoned, that their aunt had had that same sickness last week in Paris, that they knew for certain who had poisoned the king, that no one would ever know who had poisoned the king.
“And who would your choice be for that position?”
“The Prince of Conti.”
La Rochefoucauld’s eyebrows rose, and he half bowed. “The Society of Jesus’ reputation for quickness of observation continues to be well deserved.”
“Does that mean you agree with me?”
“I am not naive enough to answer that, Maître du Luc. But I have long observed the Prince of Conti gathering a devoted coterie of men around him.”
“Around him or around the Dauphin?”
“Conti pretends that they have gathered around the Dauphin. The king would give a great deal to be rid of Conti, but it is not easy to be rid of a Prince of the Blood.”
“Louis the Thirteenth rid himself of his brother Gaston.”
“After extreme provocation. Conti is, so far, too wise to offer provocation quite so extreme.”
“Poisoning would seem about as extreme as provocation gets.”
“You can be sure that if the king was poisoned tonight, it was not by Conti’s own hand, whatever his mind had to do with it. If the king were to die, the Dauphin would be king. And Conti would be safe, because I doubt the poor Dauphin has the guts to rid himself of a mouse in his chamber. So where’s the risk?”
“Assuming the king dies.”
“Assuming that. Bonne nuit, maître.”
Chapter 12
THE FEAST OF ST. ANTOINE, FRIDAY, JUNE 13, 1687
The sun was barely up and, though Jouvancy had announced that he was well enough to travel, the day was already not going well. La Chaise had returned from the night’s vigil by the king’s bed. He was hardly through the door before he asked Charles where Lulu had gone from the gambling the night before. On hearing she’d gone to Bouchel’s room, he’d poured himself watered wine in a grim silence.
When his glass was empty, he said, “Well, it could be worse. Thank God she chose Bouchel. He’s good-hearted and absolutely trustworthy. He would never do anything to anger the king, no matter how much the girl offered him. But now that we know she’s done that, she must be watched every moment so that she doesn’t try it again—with him or anyone else. You will have to stay, Maître du Luc, and finish what you’ve begun.”
And that had landed La Chaise in a furiously polite argument with Père Jouvancy. Charles, the prize in the argument, stood at the window eating bread and cheese, and praying hard that the battle would not make Jouvancy relapse again, at least not before he won.
“I cannot return without him, mon père.” Jouvancy’s words were courteous, but his face was red with anger. “If you need a Jesuit to help you, you must send to the Professed House.”
La Chaise, whose eyes were hollow with exhaustion after a night at the king’s bedside, looked as though he’
d like to make Jouvancy walk on his knees to Jerusalem. “But mon père, Maître du Luc knows the situation, and he has won the girl’s trust.” Ignoring Charles’s protest at that, he went on: “What’s more, she seems to like him. Could you not leave him here until Sunday afternoon?”
“I strongly object. You need an older man for this. You told me yourself how this girl behaves. And Maître du Luc is not only young and well favored, he is a mere scholastic. He should not be tangled in these matters.”
Charles chewed his bread and tried to look as mere as possible.
“He’s helped me all the while you’ve been ill,” La Chaise said, obviously clinging to his patience, “and has come to no harm. On the contrary, I imagine he has learned quite a bit that will one day be useful to him. I need him, I tell you. It is essential to prevent the girl doing anything to upset the Polish ambassadors and the marriage negotiations. The fear that the king has been poisoned already has them talking of withdrawing. I can see in their faces that they’re wondering if Poland wants a princess from a court that would poison its own king! Louis needs the marriage agreement to be quickly concluded and the marriage made.”
Jouvancy softened a little. “Is he very ill?”
“Very ill, during the night. He is a little better this morning.”
“And his doctors truly think he’s been poisoned?”
“Yes.” La Chaise leaned both hands on the table, which brought him eye to eye with the little priest. “Everyone who was anywhere near the buffet last evening has spent the night being interrogated. Even I was questioned, because I served him from the buffet table before anyone else ate. I tell you again, we simply cannot afford more scandal here.”
“You were questioned?” Jouvancy’s smooth forehead creased with worry, and he glanced at Charles. “I did not realize—then perhaps—”
“But, mon père—” Ignoring his better judgment’s warnings, Charles swallowed the last mouthful of bread and waded into the fray. “If one so much as turns pale here, everyone cries poison. Last night the king looked precisely as you did weeks ago when you were taken ill in the rhetoric classroom, and his symptoms were exactly like yours. You know that no one poisoned you at Louis le Grand. Why should we not think that Louis was merely ill with this contagion so many have had?”