by Rock, Judith
The last word was so loud in the lushly padded room that Charles jumped. Drawing himself up, he returned the king’s hard stare. “She said that she had lived in her father’s prisons long enough.”
Not a muscle moved in Louis’s face. But someone unseen moved in the room’s shadows behind Charles, and La Chaise’s eyes flicked toward the sound.
“I thank you,” the king said through stiff lips. “Leave us now.”
Charles inclined his head, started to turn away, and then stopped, unsure whether he was allowed to turn his back to Louis.
The king suddenly lifted a hand and gestured him back to the desk. “I am remiss,” he said. “You saved my life, and I thank you. But I command you never to speak of anything that happened tonight, except to your religious superior. The Society of Jesus will receive a suitable gift. That it is given because of your action will not be said.” He nodded another dismissal, but Charles didn’t go. Both La Chaise and La Reynie looked meaningly at the door, but Charles ignored them.
“Sire, if I may speak?”
The king nodded.
“Henri de Montmorency, who is waiting in your anteroom, has been my student, and I know him. I think that his only crime was to love your daughter too well. I also know that there is—concern about the Prince de Conti. I would stake my life that Monsieur Montmorency has nothing to do with that concern.”
“Very well. I shall see.”
Louis’s aging face seemed grayer and more fallen by the moment with fatigue and sorrow, a sorrow Charles was sure he would never admit and for which he would never ask comfort. Without warning, and even though he believed Louis had brought much of his sorrow on himself, Charles felt a terrible rush of pity for him. Not for the king, but for the man.
“I will pray for you both, Sire, you and Lulu,” he said. And for your unborn grandchild, he added silently. “God is better at forgiving than—than men are.”
A sigh came from somewhere in the shadows, and Charles got himself out the door. In the anteroom, the Duc du Maine and Anne-Marie were both asleep on their footstools, Anne-Marie with her head in Maine’s lap, looking for once like the child she was. The footman called Montmorency’s name, but the boy didn’t move, and the guard had to nudge him to his feet and through the door. Charles, shaking now from his royal encounter, sank onto a footstool. And shot to his feet as Mme de Maintenon emerged from the reception room.
She woke Maine and the sleeping Anne-Marie. “Go to your beds now. Yes, go,” she said, when the little girl started to resist. “Your Louis will be whimpering for you.” She walked them to the door. “Say your prayers for Lulu and then leave her to God.” She stood for a moment, watching after them, and then returned to Charles. “What you said to His Majesty was bold, Maître du Luc.”
Charles swallowed. “I meant no harm, madame.”
“I know you did not. You spoke to the sorrowing man, not to the king. I came to thank you for it.”
She nodded her black-veiled head very slightly and returned to her husband. Swaying on his feet with exhaustion and drained of feeling, Charles sat down again, his legs refusing to hold him any longer. He leaned against the wall and felt himself falling toward sleep. The Silence briefly held him back. You begin to know who you are, It said. Then It let him sleep.
Charles opened his eyes to see La Reynie bending over him. At first, he wasn’t sure where he was. Then a bright yellow wig appeared over La Reynie’s shoulder.
“I knew you were going to be bad luck,” Margot hissed at Charles. “People who can’t enjoy themselves always are.” Her eyes were frightened, and her lined face had shed most of its powder. “Stick to your prayers and stay out of what doesn’t concern you!” She rustled away out of the anteroom.
Charles struggled to sit up and rubbed his face. “What happened in there? Did she confess to helping Conti?”
“No. Conti’s still there. The king called the two of them in while you slept.” La Reynie sat down heavily beside Charles. “They’re going to get away with it. She swears, and her servant swears, that she was only helping Montmorency keep his love letters secret, and that his love letters were the only letters she sent on to Versailles. All out of the goodness of her heart, of course. Conti professes to be bewildered by the whole thing. He’s had no letters from anyone. And, of course, we won’t find any, because he’s far too careful to keep even a scrap of paper. So Conti and Margot will both walk carefully for a while, and it will take us longer to get them. If, in the end, there’s anything tangible enough to get. Dear God, I wish I were home in bed.” The lieutenant-général yawned cavernously.
Charles frowned suddenly as a memory came back to him. “I think I saw Lulu pass Conti a letter,” he said.
“What? Where?”
“At a gambling night at Versailles. She sat down next to him, and I thought they were holding hands under the table. But she could have been putting something small into his hand. Which he could have put in his coat pocket without anyone seeing.”
“Ah.” La Reynie’s eyes closed again. “I wondered about that while I listened in there. Margot helps the lovelorn young man, puts the spy’s letters inside the love letters, sends or takes them to Lulu, and Lulu gives the spy’s letter to Conti. With whom she was half in love, so I hear, so who would suspect anything she gave him to be more than a billet-doux? Because what besides a love note could a closely watched sixteen-year-old girl possibly give him?”
“And now you’ll never prove it.”
“No. But if it was done that way, Lulu knew what she was doing. It would have been one more way to ingratiate herself with Conti and also get back at her father. You know, I think one reason the king disliked the girl was because they were too much alike.”
“I think so, too.” Charles sighed heavily. “From all I’ve heard about his youth—and his dancing—she clearly had his physical grace. And the vitality he’s said to have had when he was young. If she’d lived—” Charles closed his eyes, trying not to see the desperate satin bird falling into darkness.
“Well, she certainly had his ruthlessness. And his ability to scheme for what she wanted and keep her own counsel,” La Reynie said. “I agree with you now that she killed Bouchel, though I do think it was an accident. The one thing Conti said that I believed was that he knows nothing about the footman’s death. My spy overreached himself there.”
“What happened when the king questioned Montmorency?”
“Louis exiled him.”
Charles said in dismay, “From France?”
“No. He’s banished permanently from the court and from Paris. But no worse than that. He sleeps here tonight, under guard, and leaves tomorrow for his mother’s house.”
For Montmorency’s future, that was bad enough, Charles thought. But at least he had his life. “That’s something, then. It hardly matters, but I keep wondering how he got out of the college. Did he say?”
“He passed as part of a group of foreign tourists visiting your library. He was hatted and cloaked, remember.”
“Then that’s proof the tutor was in it with him. Montmorency would never have thought of that.” Charles sat silently for a moment. “You heard the king tell me that all this is never to be talked about. But what about the Poles? Won’t they talk when they return to Poland?”
“The king will probably bribe them to silence and seal it with threats. I imagine their public story will be that the bride suddenly and unfortunately died. Privately, they’ll tell their king what happened. The little bridegroom probably won’t care what happened, since he’s escaped being married off for now. And since the queen is French, I think the king will keep faith with Louis.”
“So after all of this, all we know for certain,” Charles said bleakly, “is that Lulu killed Bouchel by accident and tried to kill the king. And now she’s dead.” His voice was rising angrily. “And since Frère Brunet says he’s been told that drink can make a liver look as black as poison can, Fleury may simply have slipped and fallen. We think
Bouchel killed the gardener, but we’ll never know for sure. And none of it gained anyone anything.”
La Reynie sighed. “So let that count for justice.”
“It will have to.”
Chapter 24
THE FEAST OF ST. RODOLPHE, MONDAY, JUNE 23
A soft summer rain was falling in the Cour d’honneur, accompanying Walter Connor’s clear tenor and the music of Pierre Beauchamps’s violin winding together in a sung sarabande for the Spirit of France. The rehearsal was going well enough, with Charles Lennox, recovered from the contagion, once more dancing the Spirit’s role. Beauchamps had been complaining all week that the boy’s calm gravity made him seem like the Spirit of England, not France. But today Charles found him as soothing to watch as the rain was to hear. At the side of the room, Armand Beauclaire and two other boys were trying on the expressionless masks they would wear as Charles’s trio of Fates, hovering on a cloud over the ballet’s prologue. Charles wondered why he’d thought that the presence of the Fates would make anyone question the king’s lust for war. Now, after all that had happened, their inhuman impassivity seemed only a sadly true comment on life.
The sarabande ended and Beauchamps complimented Connor on his singing. Then he called Lennox to him.
“Monsieur Lennox, could your Spirit of France be—possibly, only just possibly—the slightest morsel less—less—English?” he said plaintively.
Charles hovered, hoping that Beauchamps was not going to flay the shy English boy with his tongue. But Lennox seemed only puzzled.
“But I am French,” he said earnestly. “My mother is French. My father’s mother was French. And before them—”
“Never mind before them. It depends on what part of you is French now.” Beauchamps cast his eyes up. “And whatever part that may be, it is not your feet.”
He plunged into his corrections, which Lennox accepted stolidly, and Charles gave out the wooden swords to the second troop of French Heroes. They took their places on the marked-out stage, and Charles helped them work out the confusion resulting from the redistributing of roles since Montmorency was gone. And the rector, recovered now and returned from Gentilly, had withdrawn some of Bertamelli’s ballet roles as discipline for sneaking out of the college. Bertamelli’s only function now in the third Part was to beat a military drum as the French Heroes entered the stage. But he did it with such panache that he seemed to have gained rather than lost by the substitution. That, Charles thought, would always be Bertamelli’s way, and it would always help him land on his feet after setbacks. The rector had written to Signora Bertamelli asking her to let her son leave Louis le Grand and begin with Beauchamps at the Opera, and Charles was praying fervently that she would say yes.
Inspired by the drum, the French Heroes were French enough even for Beauchamps, leaping, thrusting, stamping, feet flickering as they advanced and retreated, swinging their heavy wooden swords in harmlessly menacing patterns. As they finished, the enormous lay brother who’d been sent to the scenery cave to find a practice cloud for the Fates banged his way into the room from the cellar stairs. Charles recognized the cloud he carried. It was from last summer’s ballet The Labors of Hercules, brilliantly pink and hardly large enough for three boys. But for now, it would do. The brother’s broad feet squashed two of the old hats marking the practice stage as he strode to center stage and put down the cloud. With a slow smiling nod at Charles, he meandered out of the classroom through one of the long windows and went back to helping some recently arrived workmen carry lengths of wood through the warm rain. Something must have fallen down, Charles thought. Because there was certainly no money for building anything. Madame de Montmorency’s gift, promised when her son finished his schooling at Louis le Grand, would not be given now. And even though the king had promised a gift, when that might arrive was anyone’s guess.
“No, no, no!”
Startled, Charles and the ballet cast turned and saw Jouvancy waving both arms at one of his actors.
“Fight like a boy, not like a girl!” Jouvancy thundered.
“But I am playing a girl, mon père.”
“You are a boy pretending to be a girl who is pretending to be a boy. So you must fight like a boy!”
“But she’s a girl, and girls cannot fight!”
Grinning at each other, Charles and Beauchamps and the dancers went back to work. Charles set the French Heroes to more practicing offstage and got the three masked Fates crowded onto the cloud. Beauchamps played the ending section of the ballet’s musical prologue. Then an uncertainly baritone sixteen-year-old delivered the spoken prologue, as the Fates in their expressionless masks mimed spinning, measuring, and cutting the threads of men’s lives.
“That is going to work very well, maître,” Beauchamps said. “Better than I thought.” He shrugged a little sheepishly. “It touches the heart, somehow.”
Surprised and pleased, Charles thanked him. “So long as the upper stage construction will be able to hold the cloud. It will have to be a good bit bigger than that one is.”
“What do you want them to wear, your Fates?”
Charles suddenly remembered Conti dancing in the ballet at Versailles. “There is a color that is somehow all colors. I saw it recently. But I’ve forgotten its name.”
“Ah. Prince, I think you mean. Dark, but when it shimmers it shows different colors? Very expensive. But yes, that would be interesting.” Beauchamps hesitated, watching the swordplay. “Maître,” he said quietly, “I have heard that our Montmorency is banished from court. Is that true?”
Charles frowned. “Where did you hear that?”
Beauchamps merely smiled. When Charles said nothing, he lifted a shoulder. “Well. However that may be, Montmorency was the worst dancer I have ever seen. But I am sorry for him. His downfall was inevitable.”
“Why inevitable?”
“Because he hasn’t the wit to see shadows. He sees only black and white. One who is blind to shadows cannot keep his footing.”
The courtyard clock struck the end of rehearsal, Jouvancy offered the closing prayer, and the boys filed out. Except for Bertamelli, who detoured to Charles to ask after his sore shoulder, made a little obeisance to his god Beauchamps, and then ran after the others, executing a perfect full turn in the air on the way. Outside the rain had stopped, and Jouvancy and Beauchamps went into the courtyard to discuss whether red smoke should accompany the Furies of Heresy as they fled back into hell at the end of the ballet. Charles put away the wooden swords and the Fates’ masks, lugged the pink cloud out of the way against the wall, shook the two squashed hats back into shape and hung them on their hooks, shut the windows, and picked up his ballet livret. He went out to the Cour d’honneur and in again at the always open door to the college chapel. Greeting the lay brother on duty at the street door, he went out into the rue St. Jacques. He lifted a hand to Mme LeClerc, inside the bakery with a customer; crossed the side street that ran from St. Jacques to the lane behind the college; and climbed the deeply worn steps to the little church of St. Étienne des Grès.
Scholastics had been given permission to pray in St. Étienne, and since returning from Marly, Charles had gone there nearly every day. It was an old church, one of the oldest in Paris, and its enfolding darkness welcomed Charles, even though he knew he came there more like an animal homing on its bolt-hole than a Jesuit seeking prayer. He groped his way through the candle-pointed shadows to Notre Dame de bonne délivrance. She and her Child were carved from black wood, and were kept from melting into the surrounding gloom only by the painted gold of her hair, the stars on her red gown, her crown, and the golden ball in the Child’s hand.
Charles had known other black Madonnas, and their blackness always made them seem to him both more remote and more human. He knelt, feeling pushed to his knees by the weight of grief and anger he’d brought back from Marly and had to keep hidden. He was grieving over Lulu and her desperate choices, and full of guilt for failing to prevent her death. He was also angry—and sad
—at her duplicity. He was sad about the murders. He was angry at the king, who had set so much in motion.
And what was he to make, in his heart of hearts, of having saved the king’s life? He’d slapped the cup away simply to prevent a man’s murder and would do it again. But he’d saved not only Louis the man, he’d preserved a king he chafed under, a king who sacrificed his own flesh and blood and France itself to feed his lust for gloire.
Charles and La Reynie had spent hours with Père Le Picart, explaining what had happened and why. The rector, who had also heard Père La Chaise’s account of events, had praised Charles for what he’d done. And was, of course, pleased at the king’s gratitude and what it would bring. But when La Reynie was gone, Le Picart had talked gravely to Charles.
“You’ve been at Louis le Grand not quite a year,” he’d said, “and you’ve been involved with things far beyond the usual scope of a scholastic. There have been good reasons, and I have allowed your involvement. Lieutenant-Général La Reynie is very grateful, to you and to the Society of Jesus, and so is Père La Chaise. But you must remember that the Society does not look kindly on scholastics who call too much attention to themselves. You have not meant to do that, I know. But there are those in the college who disagree.”
“Père Donat?” Charles had said.
“I know how much weight to give Père Donat’s reports.” Le Picart had shaken his head. “Not only him, there are others. I tell you this because I do not want your future marked with questions. The small-minded can make outsized difficulties, and I do not want those for you, Maître du Luc.”
Well, Charles thought now, kneeling before Notre Dame, he didn’t want more difficulties, either, and he was more than willing to be quiet. But he couldn’t stop thinking. Especially about the tangle of man and king, justice and grief, desiring and destroying, a tangle no man seemed able to unknot. A tangle even God mostly held his hand from teasing apart, or so it seemed to Charles. But if there was no unknotting in this world, then how did any temporal good come to mortals? Was the world hopeless? Was he wasting his time trying to be a Jesuit?