Plague of Lies (9781101611739)

by Rock, Judith

  “No larger role in the fourth Part?” Charles said in surprise.

  “He must also learn to be one of an ensemble. And the Furies’ jumping and turning will suit his abilities.” Beauchamps handed back the livret. “Shall I take him aside and tell him?”

  “Yes, do.”

  With something uncomfortably near wistfulness, Charles watched Beauchamps call Bertamelli from the waiting group and walk him to the other side of the makeshift stage. One hand rested protectively on the boy’s shoulder, and Bertamelli looked up at him with worship in his huge black eyes. Well, Charles thought, he himself had had some dancing. And in a way, he still had it. But there’d been a time when he’d wanted what Bertamelli was going to have.

  Putting the past back where it belonged, Charles went to work, paging quickly through the livret and casting the rest of the students. Finally, only the younger Polish boy and Montmorency were left. Alexandre Sapieha was the brother of Michel with the broken nose, who was still in the infirmary. Fifteen to Michel’s seventeen, Alexandre was already as big as his brother. As he stood waiting in front of Charles, he cast dark looks at Montmorency. Montmorency glared back with his good eye, his other being still swollen shut from his fight with Michel. So, Charles thought, Montmorency and the two Sapiehas had better be in different troops of soldiers in the ballet’s third Part, France Victorious over Her Enemies by Arms. Charles hoped that solution wouldn’t lend too much spirit to the fighting between the troops.

  “Very well. Monsieur Sapieha,” he said, “in the ballet’s third Part, you will be in the first troop of French Heroes. Then you will be a German soldier and then a Dutch one.” He made quick notes in the livret and when he looked up again, Sapieha was scowling at Montmorency. “Monsieur Sapieha?”

  The boy turned stolidly. “I wait, maître.”

  “You are looking at Monsieur Montmorency as though you want a broken nose to match your brother’s.”

  Sapieha’s white-blond brows drew together as he tried to unravel that. Latin was the required language for speaking in the college, and students were supposed to know some Latin before they came to Louis le Grand. But the Sapiehas’ Latin was shaky and, to French ears, practically indistinguishable from Polish.

  “I would not have the broken nose, maître.”

  “If you keep fighting, you and your brother will be sent home to Poland in disgrace. Is that what you want?”

  Sapieha chewed his lip and then grinned. “My father will kill us.”

  “No doubt. And is this quarrel worth such a fate?”

  “Is matter of Polish honor,” the boy said grimly.

  “I see.” Charles wondered if he’d been this obsessed with honor at fifteen.

  “Montmorency insulted our Prince Alexandre! He called him a mewling child. He said he hoped Alexandre would die! Alexandre does not want your old French princess, he is desolate about this marriage. It is she who should die!”

  “No one should die, Monsieur Sapieha, and you are not to wish it or say it. The French princess is only a year older than you, and she is very beautiful. She does not want the marriage any more than your Prince Alexandre does,” Charles said, more hotly than he meant to.

  “No?”

  “No. Think about that. Monsieur Montmorency is only feeling for the French princess what you feel for your prince,” Charles said, wishing that were true. “Back to our business now. In the fourth Part of the ballet, you will be a gardener. And a Fury. Furies are very angry, and you can put some of your wish to fight into your role.”

  Sapieha brightened. “I hit Montmorency while I dance?”

  “No,” Charles said very slowly, articulating with his whole mouth. “No fighting. None.”

  “Oh. But I will still like being Fury. Being furious. I thank you. It is—” Sapieha frowned, biting his lip. “—beautiful!” he finished triumphantly.

  “We shall hope so, monsieur,” Charles said wearily. “Go and wait with the others.”

  Sapieha joined the group on the makeshift stage, where Charles had set Walter Connor to sort the dancers into their entrées for Part one. Charles gestured Montmorency to come, ignoring the rainbow spectacle of the boy’s bruised face.

  “In Part two’s entrée of the sculptors and the statue, Monsieur Montmorency, I want you to be the statue, the statue of the king. Then, in the—”

  “No.”

  Charles breathed slowly in and out. “I beg your pardon?”

  “I cannot be the king. I am no longer the king’s man.”

  “Do not repeat that. I will do us both the favor of pretending I didn’t hear it.”

  Montmorency repeated it.

  Feeling a twinge of near hysteria, Charles said, “You only have to pretend to be a statue. Pretend. It doesn’t matter how you feel about whom the statue represents.”

  Montmorency peered owlishly out of his good eye. “No.”

  Charles’s patience evaporated along with his scruples. “Have you forgotten our interesting conversation about unpracticed headsmen, Monsieur Montmorency?”

  “They won’t behead me for refusing to be a statue!”

  “They beheaded your illustrious ancestor for refusing to be loyal to the king.”

  The boy drew himself up to his full six feet. His brown eyes were bleak with misery. “I cannot—”

  “Think of it as suffering for chivalry’s vows.” Charles said desperately. And added coaxingly, though he knew he shouldn’t, “After all, knights used to go through terrible trials. Think of Tristan and all he suffered for the love of Iseult.” He waited, hardly daring to breathe, while Montmorency laboriously thought about Tristan and Iseult.

  “Oh. Yes. Then I will be the statue.”

  “Good. Now in the third Part,” Charles rushed on, before the boy could reconsider, “you will be in the second troop of French Heroes. The second, remember that. And in the ballet’s fourth Part, a sea god. The chief sea god, who stands on a shell.” Whenever he could, he stood Montmorency on something and kept him still, since he was incapable of all but the simplest dance steps. He sent Montmorency to join the others. Whatever it takes, he told himself. Whatever it takes to get him quietly finished with school and gone. Then it will be up to his mother to keep him from catastrophe.

  For a little while, the rehearsal went forward with reasonable progress and no crises. Beauchamps finished teaching the steps for the Harlequins’ dance, which included nearly the whole cast, and went to get his violin. Charles, who had been helping him place the dancers, took the chance to sketch the placement in the livret.

  Most dancing masters carried their little violon du poche, the small instrument used for teaching, in a long pocket on the inner side of their coat skirts. But Beauchamps disliked anything that deranged the fit of his suits, and he had his instrument carried in the box by his servant. The man flipped his greasy gray pigtail out of the way and handed Beauchamps the violin. Beauchamps went back to the silently waiting dancers and positioned the violin under his chin. Then he glanced up and erupted into fury. He tossed the violin at the servant, who leaped to catch it, and stalked through the frozen scatter of boys.

  “So you became a choreographer in the last three minutes, Monsieur Bertamelli, and have changed my dance?” He glared down at the little Italian, who had left his place in the front and was standing beside Montmorency in the stage left back corner of the ensemble where Beauchamps had tried to hide his gracelessness. “This is not where I placed you.”

  “He forgot his steps, maître,” Bertamelli whispered piercingly to Beauchamps. “I saw him trying to remember and didn’t want him to be yelled at so soon.” He patted the scowling Montmorency on the arm.

  “Do not presume on your talent, Monsieur Bertamelli. You are neither a choreographer nor a dancing master. Go back to your place.”

  With a warning glance at Montmorency, Bertamelli scurried to the front of the ensemble, leaving Charles wondering what was going on between the two. Whatever Bertamelli might do elsewhere, Charle
s had never known him to come even close to disobeying during a rehearsal. Unless—surely this new piece of unlikely behavior had nothing to do with Bertamelli’s visit to the tower? But Montmorency knew Margot, and Bertamelli had gone to meet Margot’s servant…

  Charles dragged his attention back to the rehearsal. The cast made its first stumbling attempt at the Harlequins’ dance and then moved on to the soldiers’ dances. With the help of Beauchamps’s servant, Charles brought the chest full of wooden swords from the top of the stairway down to the cave where scenery and props were kept. Eyeing Montmorency and Sapieha, he issued a stern warning about using them for anything but rehearsing the dances, and then handed them out. He took one for himself and gave one to Beauchamps, and they began teaching the two troops of French Heroes how to use them while they danced.

  Charles hated war, but he liked sword dances—the sweep and swing of the arm, the majestic thrusting and turning of the dancer/swordsman. Most of the students had been taught to use real swords, and Charles saw with surprise that even Montmorency wasn’t doing badly. In fact, it looked as though the boy might be quite a decent swordsman. They were all sweating and happy when Jouvancy called the first break, a few minutes for rest and water between the first and second rehearsal hours.

  The cast obediently put their swords down on the stage and went to the side table where pitchers and pottery cups stood. Charles had water, too, and then watched Jouvancy talking earnestly to Beauchamps, his earlier resentment apparently forgotten. Since his return from Versailles, Charles had been nursing an idea for an addition to the ballet livret. Now, when the rhetoric master was pleased at being well and back to work, seemed a good time to suggest it. It was a daring idea. But if he presented it as he’d planned, there was a chance that Jouvancy and Beauchamps would see only its surface, leaving the deeper meaning for the audience to see. With a sense of girding his loins, Charles walked down the room.

  “This Queen of Acre,” Jouvancy was saying. “I am still not altogether happy about female roles. But the story calls for them, so what can I do?”

  Beauchamps pursed his lips. “Was there a real Queen of Acre called Erixane? I’ve never seen a Jesuit play about crusaders.”

  “Nor have I. I don’t know of any others. I suppose playing female roles is good practice for the boys. Knowing how to play a woman does make a court actor or dancer more versatile. And Queen Erixane hardly appears. Her daughter, though, has a large role—she even dresses up like a boy and fights for her mother’s honor.”

  “Well,” Beauchamps said, laughing, “she is a boy. Here, anyway.”

  Charles, who had been standing quietly, listening, laughed with him.

  “True,” Jouvancy said reluctantly. “And I suppose they have to learn about girls sometime.”

  “Some of them have already learned,” Charles said dryly, thinking of Montmorency.

  “Oh, do you think so?” Jouvancy’s blue eyes rounded with worry.

  Beauchamps snorted with laughter, and Charles intervened before Jouvancy could retaliate. “Mon père, maître, may I offer a thought for a small addition to our ballet’s livret?”

  “What is it?” Jouvancy looked wary.

  But Beauchamps looked interested, and Charles plunged ahead. “The ballet’s third Part concerns war and the hope for triumph in war. But being mortals, we cannot know what will happen. Which makes the courage of our soldiers all the more admirable.” He smiled guilelessly. “I propose that, during the third Part’s musical prologue, we show the three Fates seated on a cloud above the stage where the soldiers will fight. As the prologue is played, we see the Fates spinning the thread of man’s life, measuring the length of the thread that determines the length of his life, and cutting the thread at his death. Seeing that would remind our audience of our classical roots. But more, it would remind them that humanity never knows its future. And that we are always dependent on God. Whom, of course, we cannot show onstage.”

  The rhetoric master and the ballet master looked at each other, brows raised consideringly. Jouvancy looked up, as though looking into the overstage where the cloud would be hung. Or possibly to consult heaven.

  “That might be an admirable addition,” he said judiciously. “How large would the cloud be? And in what colors would we paint it? Grays might be suitable.”

  “Yes,” Beauchamps said. “And the somber grays could be carried through in the Fates’ costumes. That would be interesting.” He frowned at the floor. “And they should be masked, I think. The Fates. Not grotesquely, but very simply and serenely. The impassive face of Fortune, as it were.”

  Charles hardly knew whether to laugh or cry at this easy reception of his wickedly subversive comment on the king’s wars. Before he could respond at all, pandemonium broke out at the far end of the room.

  Chapter 19

  Charles reached the shouting ballet cast first. Alexandre Sapieha was swiping at Montmorency with a wooden sword and roaring in Polish so furious that its meaning was clear. Montmorency stood like a rock, staring at the Pole and seeming not to feel the blows. Bertamelli leaped forward and hung on Sapieha’s sword arm, but Sapieha shook him off. The other boys backed away, a few cheering for one hero or the other.

  “Stop it! Both of you! Now!” Charles was bellowing the way he had on the battlefield, but he might as well have been talking to the wall as far as the two principals were concerned. Jouvancy and Beauchamps were also shouting outraged orders, and Montmorency finally moved. He swung his long arm back and scythed Sapieha down at the knees with his wooden sword. Bone cracked, the sword broke, and Sapieha fell, yelling in pain. Montmorency dropped what was left of his weapon and made for the door. Charles got in front of him.

  “Stop, Monsieur Montmorency. You have felled your enemy. Stop.”

  The boy seemed to look through him and kept coming. Knowing that he was breaking the college rules, knowing how sore his shoulder already was, knowing he probably didn’t remember enough to do this right, Charles tackled him. His shoulder screamed louder than Sapieha had been, but he got Montmorency facedown on the floor. The boy lay still as a corpse, and except for Sapieha’s moaning, the watchers fell silent.

  “Get the proctors,” Charles said through his teeth, from where he lay across Montmorency’s back.

  “I’ll go,” Jouvancy said. He nodded toward Sapieha. “I’ll bring lay brothers to take him to the infirmary.”

  As Jouvancy left, Charles said to the students, “Carry Monsieur Sapieha outside. No need for more people than necessary to come in.”

  Murmuring comfort, four boys gathered up the crying Pole and carried him out of the room, to the building’s courtyard door. Beauchamps drew to one side, his hand on Bertamelli’s shoulder. Charles sat up cautiously, keeping a hand on Montmorency’s neck.

  “No more, monsieur,” Charles said. “Do you hear me?”

  Montmorency nodded and Charles removed his hand, poised to move quickly if he had to, but thinking he wouldn’t. Montmorency sat up.

  “What began this, monsieur?”

  Montmorency looked at him blankly and shook his head. He was rubbing one hand over the other, and Charles saw that he was caressing the ring with Lulu’s hair in it.

  “The fight was about this marriage?”

  Montmorency cradled the hand with the ring against his chest, his brown eyes pools of misery. His broad, smooth face showed several of the inflamed pustules young people often had. And something about that—the ugly spots, his misery, his awkwardly budding manhood—made Charles’s heart contract. Suddenly and to his shame, he knew why this furious grieving boy irritated him so, why he mostly just wanted him gone from Louis le Grand. It was himself Charles saw looking out of Montmorency’s eyes, himself at Montmorency’s age, himself when he’d known beyond hope that his beloved Pernelle would be married to someone else. His raw grief had opened hell itself. Literally opened hell, in fact, because it was what had sent him fleeing into the army.

  “Monsieur—” Charles reached im
pulsively for the boy’s hand and searched for words, something to keep Montmorency from making a hell of his grief. But before he found anything to say, Jouvancy came in with three large proctors.

  Charles got to his feet. “No need for force,” he told them. “He’ll go with you to his chamber. Do we have your word that you will do that, Monsieur Montmorency?”

  “Yes.”

  Without taking his eyes from the boy, Charles spoke quietly in Jouvancy’s ear. “Even if his tutor is there, I think it would be wise for a proctor to stay outside the chamber door. If you’ll allow it, mon père.”

  Jouvancy nodded and gave the order to the proctors. Montmorency got to his feet like a shambling bear and the proctors closed in on him, one on each side and one behind. Jouvancy saw them out. He came back to Charles, shaking his head, and Charles braced himself for admonishment for physically tackling a student.

  But Jouvancy said fervently, “Thank you. The boy seems—almost possessed. At least out of his wits.” Louder, to Beauchamps and the students, he said, “We will all pray privately for Monsieur Sapieha and Monsieur Montmorency. That they will both amend. And that Monsieur Sapieha will mend. But for now, this rehearsal will continue.”

  The rhetoric master kept them at it until the clock chimed four, then oversaw the replacement of the benches, gathered them for an extra prayer for the two miscreants, and dismissed them. Bertamelli lingered as long as he could, looking pleadingly at Charles. But when Charles started across the room to speak with him, Jouvancy called him back sharply to the argument over how to alter the ballet with two fewer dancers. Sapieha would be unable to walk for a while, and Montmorency would not be allowed back. He would probably be dismissed from the college.

  “Well,” Beauchamps said finally, “I only hope no one else decides to air their differences during rehearsals. I don’t have enough professionals free to replace them. And you couldn’t afford them, even if I did.”

  He and Jouvancy gave each other the slightest of bows, and Beauchamps stalked from the room. His long-faced servant shouldered the violin box as though it were a small coffin and trailed after him.