Plague of Lies (9781101611739)

by Rock, Judith

  “Him?” Charles felt some of the tension go out of his body. “I was afraid it was Mademoiselle de Rouen who was dead. The king’s daughter.”

  “Why, in God’s name?”

  “Because she’s—I think she’s in great trouble. I’ve been afraid she might try to kill herself.”

  “Again—why?”

  “I’ll tell you. But first tell me who the dead man is.”

  “A palace footman called Bouchel. He was poisoned. They found him dead in his room in the palace.”

  Charles felt as though he’d been kicked in the belly. “Bouchel?” Bouchel poisoning old Fleury, or pushing him down the stairs—that he could imagine, indeed, had already imagined. But who would poison Bouchel? “But Monsieur La Reynie, he may have been simply ill. People at court have had the same sickness we’ve had here.”

  La Reynie shrugged. “There was an autopsy. The doctors think he was given inheritance powder, judging from how sick he’d been. You know what that is?”

  “Arsenic?”

  “Mixed with aconite, belladonna, and opium. They think the Comte de Fleury, who died when you were there, had been given the same thing.”

  “I know. But Bouchel—it doesn’t make sense!” Unless, Charles thought suddenly, one of Bertin Laville’s relatives suspected that Bouchel had killed Bertin. But poison seemed an unlikely, and expensive, weapon for a gardener’s family. Charles tried to ignore the taunts from his acid inner voice—trying not to think of the most obvious person, aren’t you? Lulu could afford a little poison.

  “Another man died while we there,” Charles said slowly. “As you no doubt know. A gardener, Bertin Laville.”

  “And?”

  “I think Bouchel may have killed him. To protect Mademoiselle de Rouen. Bertin Laville’s family might try for vengeance.”

  La Reynie looked at Charles as though he’d gone mad. “Why would a footman kill a gardener to protect Mademoiselle de Rouen?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “Make it a short one. I have little time.”

  Charles told him what had happened at court, what he’d read in Fleury’s mémoire, and what he’d made of it. “So if the Comte de Fleury was telling the truth about seeing Bouchel and Lulu come out of the grotto, and if the gardener who also saw them was Bertin Laville, then Bouchel had plenty of reason to kill Laville.”

  “And Fleury.”

  “I thought of that. But Bouchel might not have known then that Fleury had also seen them. And it’s possible Fleury’s fall was an accident. There really was water running over the floor from a ceiling leak. I looked.”

  “That’s not conclusive.”

  “No. But even if Bouchel killed both Fleury and Laville, he’s dead now himself. His killer is not.”

  La Reynie looked as though he might not mind if someone poisoned Charles. “So you are telling me that the king’s daughter is probably illicitly pregnant.” His voice was dangerously level and full of reason. “By a footman. A footman at whom she was presumably very angry, and who has since been poisoned. Which means, if you are right in your ungodly number of assumptions, that the king’s daughter has quite likely committed murder.”

  “Possibly. Though I still think she’s more likely to kill herself. What are you going to do?”

  La Reynie hurled his silver-headed stick at the ground and turned the color of a ripe strawberry. “Nothing! Are you mad? Bouchel was probably a murderer. The girl is the king’s daughter. And she is on the point of leaving for Poland. Where she will be the Polish court’s problem. The marriage negotiations are finished and there is a grand ball celebrating their completion tomorrow night at the palace of Marly. Do you know it? Very near Versailles, but smaller. The king likes to celebrate family occasions there. On Tuesday morning, she marries her prince there by proxy—the senior ambassador is the stand-in—and sets out for Poland. Thank God and every saint there is.”

  “But if she’s with child,” Charles said doggedly, “what will happen to her? And the child? The Poles might quietly kill her for dishonoring them.”

  “That’s ridiculous. The Polish queen is French!”

  “The Polish king is Polish. Who knows what their customs are? If Lulu murdered Bouchel and dies unconfessed and unabsolved—whenever she dies—she’s damned. And if she takes her life before she goes, she’s doubly damned. If we do nothing, her death will be on your head as well as mine. Do you want that?”

  La Reynie glared balefully at Charles. “So now you’re my confessor? I cannot go to the king with this tale about his daughter and a footman. We don’t even know if it’s true.”

  “Someone was worried enough about it to put the mémoire in my bag. And someone killed Bouchel.”

  La Reynie looked as though he might weep. “Where would the king’s daughter get poison? I heard she’s been watched every minute at Versailles ever since her betrothal.”

  “Well, the court seems to assume that everyone has poison at their fingertips. I also know that when you had the great poison affair here in Paris some years back, you discovered that Lulu’s mother, La Montespan, had poison to hand.”

  La Reynie looked away. “I thought you liked Mademoiselle de Rouen.”

  “I do like her,” Charles said sadly.

  Chapter 16

  THE FEAST OF ST. AURELIAN, MONDAY, JUNE 16

  On Monday morning, Charles and Père Damiot were walking toward Holy Innocents for the funeral of their confraternity member. “Is your father better, mon père?” Charles thought Damiot looked as though he hadn’t slept much.

  “We think so. But I’m worried about him. The physician is being grave. But they always are, aren’t they? Since the more they do, they more they’re paid.”

  “True. Well, I hope this one will earn little from your father. Who has my prayers, such as they are.”

  “My thanks.” Damiot smiled a little and stifled a yawn.

  “And my thanks to you,” Charles said, “for interceding with Père Donat.” Extracting permission from the acting rector for Charles to go to Holy Innocents had been a near thing. “He makes me feel that he’d like to see me sent in chains to Rome and thrown into the arena,” he added, as they turned off the rue St. Denis.

  “I don’t think there’s an arena anymore. And you did bring it on yourself.” He glanced at Charles. “Never wear boots if you’re going on foot to somewhere you’re not supposed to go. No one just goes for a stroll wearing boots.”

  “Do I hear the voice of experience?”

  Damiot smiled complacently.

  “I see. Well. I am indeed fortunate, mon père, to have such a pious example before me. You also handled Père Donat as though you’d done it before.”

  Damiot rolled his eyes. “There’s very little that doesn’t offend His Holiness. I imagine he’s offended every morning that the sun doesn’t ask his leave before rising.”

  “His Holiness?” Charles wasn’t feeling in much mood to laugh, but he laughed at that. Only the pope was called His Holiness.

  “Some of us call him that. But only behind very thick locked doors.”

  The narrow cobbled street, sun-soaked in strong morning light and bordered by high stone walls that held the heat, almost made Charles feel that he was walking on a street in Nîmes, the town near his family’s vineyards. Here the street ran between the beginnings of Les Halles market on the left and Holy Innocents cemetery on the right. Though Charles was basking in the warmth like a lizard as he walked, he was still nearly as worried as he’d been yesterday. La Reynie had agreed to send a message ordering one of his female court spies to watch Lulu, but Charles was uncomforted. His heart was sore over Bouchel’s death, and over Lulu’s possible guilt. And over what she and Anne-Marie and the Duc du Maine must be feeling on this last day before the proxy marriage. And beyond his worry over all of them, too much was unexplained. Or perhaps he himself was only unconvinced. He felt like someone crouching in the dark after thunder, waiting for lightning. Whenever he closed his eye
s, he saw Versailles’s new lake. Saw the gardener’s body lying beside it, soaked and pathetic. And saw Bouchel in his imagination, saw him dying miserable and terrified and alone in his dark little room. Charles told himself sternly to stop dramatizing his sorrow and fear. But still, just beyond the edge of hearing—some hearing of his spirit or mind—there was thunder.

  “I’m sweating!” Père Damiot wiped a sleeve across his forehead and squinted at the sky. “This much sun is unnatural.”

  “Unnatural?! So you think Eden was gray and cold and wet, like Paris usually is?”

  “I have no information on the weather in Eden. Let’s hope there’s shade to stand in during this burial.”

  Charles looked up at the stone wall on his right. “I don’t see any trees, at least none tall enough to show.”

  “There aren’t any trees. Every morsel of space is used for bodies. I meant shade in the charnel house arcade. Monsieur Delarme’s family has done well in trade and has a tomb in an arcade. It’s the baser people who—”

  Something flew over the wall above their heads, bounced, and rolled to a stop nearly at Damiot’s feet, where a pair of thin dogs fell on it, barking happily.

  A passing rider guffawed. “Looks like someone wants your prayers, mes pères,” the rider called. “Maybe it’s even hotter than this where he’s ended up!”

  Damiot kicked halfheartedly at the dogs and picked up the human skull. “Really!” he exclaimed. “This happens nearly every time I walk along here. You’d think the diggers would learn. I’d swear they do it on purpose. I’ve seen skulls land among parties of women, and the shrieks are enough to open all the graves in the city.”

  “Ah, you’ve got her!” A lined brown face under a dirt-colored, bag-shaped cap was looking over the wall. “Would you mind throwing the lady back, mon père? They’re heavy as lead when I put ’em in, and light as feathers when I pull ’em out. Just a little flick of my old spade sends them flying. Trying for heaven, no doubt, only a little late!”

  Laughing in spite of himself, Damiot lobbed the skull back into the cemetery, and the digger grinned his thanks, let go of the wall, and dropped out of sight.

  They walked on, Charles keeping a wary eye on the top of the wall. “Before the—um—lady—dropped into our midst, you were saying something, mon père?”

  “Oh. Yes, it’s the baser sort—little merchants and unsuccessful notaries and so on—who are buried in Holy Innocents ground. The poor get mass graves. It’s said of Holy Innocents dirt that it cleans bones faster than any other dirt on earth. So the trenches aren’t as crowded as the Hôtel Dieu’s trenches for the destitute out at Clamart. At Holy Innocents, it’s magistrates and lawyers, and wealthy bourgeois like the Delarmes—and my family—who have tombs in the arcades along the charnel houses.”

  They turned right at the rue aux Fers and when they came to a gate in the wall, just short of the church, Damiot said, “We’ve a little time still. I’ll show you the cemetery so you’re not gawking during the burial.”

  Meekly, Charles followed him through the gate. And stopped short, staring at the scene spread in front of him, at first glance more like a fair than a burial ground. A group of strolling men had stopped to listen to a lute player and female singer. An old woman with a tray of small cakes hung on a strap around her neck strolled toward the men and the musicians. Dogs slept on the shady side of several spirelike monuments topped with crosses, or lolled in the sun, scratching and gnawing—Charles realized he didn’t want to know on what. Half a dozen beggars lay in the sun like the dogs. Another beggar, nearly naked, stood in an open grave, gesticulating and haranguing passersby like a preacher, and Charles wondered if the others were waiting their turn, in a cooperative effort to gather coins. A swath of color caught his eye and he watched two heavily painted women, their dirty red and yellow satin skirts trailing on the ground, stop beside the group listening to the lute player. All but one of the men quickly abandoned the music, and what looked like bargaining began.

  Damiot pointed to the low buildings around three sides of the churchyard, whose wide cloisterlike arches had been filled in with wood. “Those are the charnel houses. The one with the Delarme tomb is there on the east side.”

  Charles saw a few small doors in the closed-in arches and wondered what it smelled like beyond the doors. He’d heard that the cemetery itself, with its full and shallow graves, sometimes smelled like death itself. It didn’t today, but it smelled like the memory of death, which was somehow worse.

  Damiot turned toward the church. “I have to robe for the Mass,” he said. “And we have to find you a server’s surplice.”

  The nave of Holy Innocents Church was a pool of deep, cool shadow. They walked up a pillared side aisle toward the altar, which was draped in black for the funeral, and Charles thought how much he liked churches like this, churches in the old style. Not that he disliked the new style’s streaming light and open space, and he loved the airy elegance of the nearby Jesuit church of St. Louis. In St. Louis, light was the symbol of faith; people could see the altar and the Mass and feel themselves part of what the priest did. But Holy Innocents was very old and full of soaring, echoing darkness, full of mystery, and something in Charles answered back that yes, God was like that.

  They went into the tiny, low-vaulted sacristy, and found the Holy Innocents priest already robing.

  “Père Lambert, this is Maître Charles du Luc, one of our scholastics, who helps me with the Congregation of the Holy Virgin. He will serve with us today and needs a surplice.”

  Charles greeted the bent, elderly priest, who paused in pulling a wide, flowing chasuble, black for the funeral Mass, over his head and nodded toward a wall cupboard. “In there. I hope there’s one long enough to cover you,” he said, smiling as his eyes measured Charles’s considerable length. “And I’ve laid out your vestments on the table there, mon père.”

  Damiot and Charles laid aside their hats, and Damiot went to the table. In the cupboard, Charles found a white, smocklike linen surplice that more or less reached his knees, drew it on over his cassock, and shook the wide sleeves to hang freely. Damiot was putting on a black silk-and-wool chasuble, the usual outer garment worn to celebrate Mass, that matched the other priest’s.

  “I’ll wait in the nave, mes pères.” Charles said. He went out and stood at the foot of the altar steps. As the quiet closed around him, he felt the unquiet he was carrying inside himself. And would go on carrying until—when? He looked up at what he could see of the delicately arched stone ceiling, as though the answer were up there somewhere, under the prayer-soaked roof. Until Lulu was safe in Poland? Until it was clear there was no baby? Until Montmorency was gone from Louis le Grand? Until the Prince of Conti tripped up and was exposed? Until Louis XIV was dead and the burden of his search for gloire was lifted from France and his ineffectual son ruled in his stead? Until sin was unwound and humankind was back in Eden, whatever the weather there might be?

  Charles told himself sternly that, for the next hour, all that mattered was the Mass, which he would be more intimately part of than he usually had the chance to be. Serving at Mass was part of a scholastic’s learning, toward the time when he would be ordained priest. But Louis le Grand had many scholastics, and the chance didn’t often come Charles’s way. He closed his eyes where he stood, began a prayer for his serving, felt its self-importance, and let it go. Finally he just stood there letting the quiet hold him.

  The sacristy door opened, the two priests came out, and Damiot handed Charles a smoking censer, whose bittersweet scent floated around them as they went to the street doors. When they had the door standing wide, they saw the funeral procession coming down the rue St. Denis, taking up nearly its whole width. The black-draped coffin was carried on the shoulders of Monsieur Delarme’s fellow members of the Congregation of the Holy Virgin. Behind the coffin came the men of the bourgeois Congregation of the Holy Virgin, friends, and family. Behind them a mass of hired mourners shuffled, beggars who’d been
given coins and black hooded robes and candles to follow the coffin. People in the street made way for the procession, men doffed hats, and everyone crossed themselves as it passed. One day, they would each want the same courtesy.

  The priests led the procession into the church, Charles swinging his censer in the lead. As the familiar and majestic Latin floated through the nave with the clouds of smoke as Mass began, Charles carried the Gospel book and the Mass book from one side of the chancel to the other, and brought water and a towel for Damiot’s ritual hand washing. When Damiot spoke the words of consecration that made the bread and the wine into Christ’s sacrifice for lost humanity, each word sank into Charles’s flesh. When he rang the little silver bell as his friend’s long sinewy fingers held up the Host like a small rising sun, Charles knew with almost physical pain that he wanted more than anything on earth to do what Damiot was doing, knew it in spite of his struggles with obedience, in spite of his arguments with God.

  Then the Mass was over and the procession carried Monsieur Delarme out to his tomb, Charles stumbling and blinking in the light like Lazarus, still swinging his censer. Only the priests and the close family went with the coffin into the small stone room under the arcade where the tomb was. Charles stood just outside the door, slowly coming back to the ordinary world as he waited with the hired mourners and the confraternity members. He turned slightly so that he could see part of the cemetery. The bedraggled women and the group of men were gone, and the musicians were leaning against the shady side of what looked like an outdoor pulpit, sharing a loaf of bread and a leather bottle of something. A neatly coiffed woman came in through the rue aux Fers door with several young children, who broke from her shepherding and raced, shrieking with delight, across the cemetery, the two little boys leaping joyously across the empty open grave. The door in the wall opened again and an older boy, wiry and slight, wearing a big plumed hat, came a few steps inside and gazed at the burial ground and the church. Then he backed out of the doorway, but his grace and sureness told Charles his name. What was thirteen-year-old Michele Bertamelli, Charles’s student and wildly talented dancer, doing out of the college alone and at Holy Innocents?