Plague of Lies (9781101611739)

by Rock, Judith

  “Need something, mon père?” A sandy-haired groom with freckles across his nose came out of a stall.

  “Yes, thank you. I have two horses here. They’ve been in your keeping since I arrived on Monday.” With a shock, he realized he’d spent only four nights at Versailles. It seemed like a month.

  “What are they called?”

  “Flamme and Agneau. From the college of Louis le Grand.”

  “Follow me.”

  Before they reached Flamme’s stall near the end of the aisle, the gelding put his head over the door and whickered, scenting Charles. Agneau, in the last stall, looked up from her hay rack, saw the saddlebags Charles was carrying, and redoubled her efforts to eat while she could.

  The boy went into Agneau’s stall. “Shall I saddle her for you?”

  “My thanks—what’s your name?”

  “I’m Laurent.”

  Charles smiled at the boy and went to saddle Flamme. But first he stroked the horse’s shining neck and laid his cheek against the warm muzzle, contentedly breathing in the welcome smell of clean horse. As he pulled the saddle and its blanket from their long thick wall peg, Flamme butted him in the back, clearly pleased to be going somewhere.

  “Be sure you check the mare’s girth,” Charles called to the boy. “She’ll blow up like a bladder to keep it loose.”

  The boy laughed. “I know that trick, I always check.”

  They worked in silence for a moment and then the boy said, “Mon père?”

  “Maître,” Charles said absently, letting the stirrups down to fit him.

  “Oh. maître, then. I heard—Jacques Prudhomme said that a young Jesuit prayed over poor Bertin. Was that you?”

  “Bertin?” Charles took the bridle from its peg, trying to think who Jacques Prudhomme and Bertin were. Guilt assailed him as he remembered the dead man beside the lake. “Yes,” he said hastily, “I did. Did you know him?”

  “Jean Prudhomme is my uncle. Bertin Laville was married to his daughter.”

  Charles pushed the bridle between Flamme’s teeth, gave him a pat, and went into the stall where the boy was. “So you knew Bertin, then. Do you have any thought about who killed him?” he asked quietly.

  Laurent shook his head and gave Charles a wary sideways look. “I only wanted to thank you for looking after him.” He stepped away from Agneau and turned his back on her. The mare sighed out a great breath and the boy spun around, grabbed the end of the girth strap, and pulled hard. “Ha-ha!” He grinned at Charles, who was laughing, too.

  “Well done!” Charles patted the displeased mare’s round rump and waited to see if the boy would say more about the dead man.

  Laurent took down Agneau’s bridle from its peg but made no move to put it on her. “My cousin—Bertin’s wife—has just had another child.” He sighed. “She cries all the time. At least she found money he’d hidden in the house. So she has something till she can find another husband.”

  Charles’s ears pricked. Money and murder were so often locked in a deadly embrace. “Gardeners are paid well, then?”

  The boy’s sneer was too adult for his years. “Who’s ever paid well? And Bertin couldn’t hold on to money any more than he could close his fist on water. No, I think it was gambling money. He diced. Mostly he lost, but every man wins sometime. Maybe he called someone a cheat and was killed for the insult.”

  “That could be,” Charles said. Men were often enough killed when gambling quarrels flared. “Do you have any other thoughts about what might have happened?”

  The boy’s face flamed and he turned away to bridle the mare, dealing expertly with her efforts to resist the bit.

  “Your uncle thought Bertin might have been killed over a woman,” Charles said mildly.

  Laurent nodded, still with his back to Charles. “He had a—a woman in the town. And others. I suppose one of them might have killed him.”

  “Could a woman have hit him hard enough?” Charles asked skeptically.

  Laurent turned, with a look that plainly said Charles must be a simpleton. “My mother can butcher a hog. Swinging a shovel is nothing.”

  Charles nodded, thinking that his own mother could probably butcher a hog, too. Though she’d probably talk the poor animal to death instead of using a knife.

  “Anyway, maître, thank you for praying over him. He needed it.”

  “I’ll go on praying for him.” I imagine he still needs it, Charles thought. He looked into the stable aisle to be sure they weren’t being overheard. “Is the Guard still trying to find his killer?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. But probably not. He was—well—only Bertin.” Laurent turned Agneau and led her out of the stall.

  That was true and nothing Charles could change. He followed Laurent into the aisle, put both saddlebags on Agneau, and secured them to the saddle. “Can you lend me a leading rein?”

  Laurent ran to the end of the aisle, vanished into an adjoining room, and came back with a long sturdy rein that he buckled to the mare’s bridle.

  “My thanks. I’ll send it back. If you’ll take her out to the forecourt, I’ll follow with the gelding and we’ll be gone.”

  Charles led Flamme after the mare, mounted, and took the leading rein from the boy. “Thank you, mon brave.” He realized that Laurent was waiting for a coin, and at the same moment realized that Jouvancy had the small purse the rector had given them. “My apologies. My companion has gone on in a carriage with our small store of coins.”

  The boy’s face fell, but he shrugged philosophically. “Oh, well, you can pay me with prayers for Bertin. A good ride to you.” He lifted a hand and loped back to his work.

  Charles rode under the sculptured arch and turned the horses toward Paris. Before he’d gone more than a few yards, a gleaming, red-wheeled carriage hurtled toward him and he drew rein. But Agneau, on her leading rein, plodded into Flamme from behind and the gelding curvetted into the middle of the road. The coachman swerved, shouting angrily at Charles, who was too busy fighting Flamme to a standstill to heed him. Charles quickly got the gelding under control and started to call an apology to the driver, but the carriage’s occupant put his head out a side window, and the sight of him struck Charles mute.

  He hadn’t seen Michel Louvois, the king’s minister of war, for nearly a year. And had hoped never to see him again. Louvois, perhaps the second most powerful man in the realm after the king, was not a man to cross. Let alone threaten. And last summer, Charles had threatened him, because he’d seen no other way to try for at least a measure of justice. For months, he’d lived looking over his shoulder, waiting for Louvois’s retaliation, but it hadn’t come. Charles had decided he was too small an enemy to merit the attention of a man with so many enemies. Now, though the malice on Louvois’s heavy-jowled face sent fear rippling through him, he made himself hold the war minister’s gaze until Louvois drew his head back inside the coach and left Charles choking in its dust. Charles pressed Flamme into a trot and put a quick mile between himself and Louvois. And between himself and the palace, and La Chaise, and Lulu, and all the rest. He could hardly remember wanting so much to be gone from a place, wanting so much to be home. As he rode, though, he prayed for Lulu and that good would come to her. He also prayed for the grave and lonely little Condé princess, Anne-Marie de Bourbon.

  As he left Versailles behind, his body let go its watchfulness, and he began to look around him at the June day. The cold spring had made the birds’ nesting late, but now harried parent birds flew from tree to grass to bush, searching for insects and worms. When lulls came in the road’s carriage traffic, he could hear the small shrill cries of nestlings demanding to be fed. But thinking about nestlings made him think of the boy Laurent and his cousin’s new baby, and soon his mind was once more circling around the problem of the dead workman Bertin.

  Charles didn’t believe in the theory of a furious, shovel-wielding woman. What the boy had said about Bertin’s hidden money seemed a much more likely piece of the puzzle. Laurent
hadn’t thought much of Bertin’s gambling skill. But as he’d said, every man won sometime. But if it hadn’t been won, could it have anything to do with Bertin’s murder? Perhaps he’d sold something. But what would he have to sell? Charles greeted a walking group of men and women, singing and passing around a leather bottle. Small craftsmen on holiday, he guessed from their dress and manner, as they shouted greetings back at him, on their way to marvel at Versailles from their lowly place on the social ladder. Bertin’s status had been still lower. Perhaps someone had owed him money. Or a relative might have died and left him a little something. Though that was unlikely, since Laurent was kin and would probably have known about it. Or perhaps Bertin had stolen the money. That could end in murder, if the theft was discovered.

  Charles stretched himself in the saddle and reached to stroke his horse’s neck. “Flamme, mon brave, let’s move! And you, ma chère Agneau, will have to put up with it.” He nudged the gelding to a canter and tugged on the leading rein. Alternately cantering, walking, and trotting, they reached the village of Vaugirard and Charles turned off the royal road to take the smaller road to the Left Bank gate. He was thirsty, and in his haste to be gone from Versailles he hadn’t filled his leather water bottle, so he made for the village fountain and watering trough. He drank and watered the horses, then sat down on the bench where he and Jouvancy had rested on Monday, thinking how much longer this week had seemed than other weeks. Women and a few serving men came and went from the fountain, exchanging news as they filled pitchers and buckets. Customers went in and out of the few shops around the square, and Charles’s thoughts floated and drifted like lazy fish in a stream. A pair of beggars approached him, one missing an arm and the other half a leg. Old soldiers, they said, and Charles thought it was likely true. But he had only his blessing to give them, which they let him know was worth little.

  Feeling guilty, he set himself to prayers. Name by name, he prayed for those he carried in his heart and those he felt a responsibility to remember. As he prayed, he settled into quiet. Until he came to the last name on his list, the dead Comte de Fleury, and his teeth set and his mind refused to pray. But hating the man didn’t excuse him from praying for his soul, and Charles plowed through prayers for the dead until he sidetracked himself with wondering whether prayers he had no desire to pray were worth anything. But if they weren’t, then feelings were more important than intention, which couldn’t be true. The whole self should be given to God, including the feelings, so feelings mattered, but surely not more than will. As much, though? He got up and shook himself, drank again, and untethered the horses. If what he knew of theology was any measure, he’d grow a beard and die, right there on the bench, before his questions were settled.

  But the Comte de Fleury went with him. Charles told himself he’d probably never know the truth of Fleury’s death any more than he’d know the truth of Bertin’s. Had Fleury been simply ill, not poisoned? Had he and Jouvancy and La Chaise fallen sick merely from spoiled soup? Was the king only ill with the contagion so many had had? The court was insane when it came to gossip about poison. When his mind ran out of explanations, Charles was left with the thought that he’d been trying since last night to bury. The thought that surely, no matter how much the Prince de Conti wanted a new, weak king, he wouldn’t dare to lift his hand against King Louis. Would he?

  By the time the stone spires and blue-roofed towers of Paris rose against the limpid sky, and Charles reached the paved length of road that led in past the wall where the old St. Michel gate had stood, his mind was a whirl of argument and suspicion. He rode along the line of the wall and turned down the rue St. Jacques past the Dominican monastery.

  What met his eyes as he approached Louis le Grand did nothing to calm him. Henri de Montmorency stood in the street outside the postern door, surrounded by talking, gesticulating courtyard proctors. The college corrector, the layman who applied the disciplinary stick on the rare occasions Père Le Picart allowed its use (members of the Society being forbidden to use corporal punishment on the students), was also there. Not wanting any part of whatever new crisis had befallen Montmorency, Charles turned quickly up the small street by the church of St. Étienne des Grès toward the lane behind the college. But his effort to escape unnoticed failed.

  Marie-Ange LeClerc, the baker’s daughter from the shop beside the college chapel, came pelting up St. Jacques toward him, skirts flying. Going on ten years old now and as in love with horses as Charles was, she skidded to a halt just around the corner, where Charles had stopped when he caught sight of her. He reached down for her hand and swung her up to sit in front of him.

  “Merci, maître! Did you have a good ride? Did you see the king? And his horses? I’m sure they’re not as pretty as Flamme. Oh, I wish Flamme were mine, but bakers can’t have horses, can they, they can’t afford them. And my father wouldn’t let me keep him in the back room. Did you see what’s happening at the postern?”

  “Bonjour, Marie-Ange,” Charles said gravely. “I trust you are well?”

  “Oh. Yes, and you? But did you see poor Montmorency? They’re going to beat him and he tried to run away!”

  Charles’s heart sank. “Beat him? Why?”

  “I don’t know, but they caught him just outside our shop, I saw them! He’s very handsome, I think.”

  Charles looked down at the girl’s dark, curly head with its faded green ribbons, thinking that she was fast getting too old for her years. “Stick to horses, Marie-Ange. They’re much more intelligent than Montmorency.”

  “How can I stick to horses if I can’t have one? But I can have a husband someday. Maman says girls have to marry.”

  “Well, don’t marry Montmorency.”

  Marie-Ange giggled. “I can’t. I don’t want to, he gets in too much trouble. Anyway, he’s head over heels in love with someone else.”

  Charles frowned. “How do you know that?”

  “Maman says your postern porter told her Montmorency’s in love with some girl at court, but she’s going to marry someone else and go and be a queen. I’d rather be a queen than marry anyone.”

  She went on chattering happily, and Charles let her ride with him till they were near the back gate that led to the stable.

  “Time to dismount, Your Majesty, so neither of us gets into trouble.”

  “Oh, I won’t get in trouble.” She grinned at him over her shoulder. “Maman won’t miss me; she’s too busy scolding my father and his brother for going to the tavern every night. I like it when Uncle Paul comes—he’s the one who’s a baker at Gonesse—because maman shouts at them so much about the tavern, she doesn’t notice what I do! This time, though, she’s been shouting more than usual. Because she’s going to have a baby. My uncle told me that makes women shout at men more. But at least she’s not sick anymore.”

  “I see,” Charles said, straight-faced. “Well, I’ll pray that she and the baby will be safe. But you must get down now, we’re nearly at the back gate.”

  With a sigh, she swung a leg over Flamme’s neck and slid to the ground. She reached up to pull her small white coif straight and dimpled at him. But it was the horse she thanked. “Merci, Flamme!” She put her arms as far as she could around the gelding’s neck and kissed him soundly, then gave Agneau a smacking kiss on the nose. “So she won’t feel slighted,” she confided to Charles. “I hope you go riding again soon, maître!”

  “So do I,” Charles said, with more feeling than she could know.

  Marie-Ange backed toward the street, waving and throwing kisses to the horses. Charles smiled and raised a hand in farewell, wondering with sudden sadness if Lulu or Anne-Marie had ever been as blithely happy as the baker’s daughter. He rode into the stable courtyard, feeling as though Versailles had followed him home.

  Chapter 14

  The lay brother working in the stable took charge of the horses and Charles went to report his return to the college rector. But when he reached Père Le Picart’s office, on the main building’s ground floo
r, the door was open and the college corrector, a large placid blacksmith, was just going in. Charles halted and turned away. But Le Picart caught sight of him and called out, “Maître du Luc, come in.” Reluctantly, Charles followed the corrector.

  “Shut the door.” Le Picart was seated behind his desk. The head proctor, Henri Montmorency, and Montmorency’s tutor stood in front of him. Montmorency had a very black eye. “I believe you can throw some light on our difficulties, maître,” the rector said to Charles. “Let me state them as they stand. In the scant time since Monsieur Montmorency was sent back from Versailles on Wednesday night, he has twice breached our rules. At three o’clock this morning, he was discovered trying to get back into the college after leaving without permission. He says—” Le Picart gave Montmorency a scathing look. “He says that Père Vionnet”—the tutor got an even more scathing look—“gave him permission to go to the chapel to pray after supper. Monsieur Montmorency tells us he left by the street door while the doorkeeper there was showing our chapel to visitors who came in from the street. He expects us to believe that he merely walked alone around the quartier. For eight hours.” The sarcasm in the rector’s voice was harsh enough to take the paint off the plaster walls.

  “I confined him to his chamber, except for Mass. And this morning after Mass, he attacked Monsieur Michel Sapieha in the Cour d’honneur. It took three proctors to separate the combatants, and Monsieur Sapieha is in the infirmary with a broken nose. In addition to his black eye, Monsieur Montmorency has a broken tooth. They tell me they fought about the coming marriage of the king’s daughter and the Polish prince.”

  Reprehensible though the attack—and its reason—were, Charles couldn’t help looking at Montmorency with new respect for his fighting ability. A broken nose was worse damage than a broken tooth, and Michel Sapieha, the older of the two Polish students, was a young giant who looked capable of besting a squadron of Turks.