Plague of Lies cdl-3

by Judith Rock

  “Of course, monsieur,” Maine said, becoming his usual politely anxious self. “Don’t trouble.”

  “Was it you who took the Comte de Fleury’s mémoire from his rooms?”

  “Yes. My sister-Lulu-” he swallowed hard. “She wanted to know what was in it about her. And I took her silver box. But Fleury’s book is gone.”

  “Yes, we know where the book is. Don’t worry about that.”

  At the mention of the box, Anne-Marie had raised her tear-drenched face and was looking warily at La Reynie.

  Charles watched her thoughtfully. “What I am wondering,” he said, to no one in particular, “is where Lulu got the poison. Which I assume she’d had for several days, at least. Because I also assume she used it on the footman Bouchel. For refusing to help her out of the trouble that was partly his doing.”

  Anne-Marie and Maine froze, but La Reynie’s head snapped around. Charles said nothing and waited.

  “The poison was in her silver box when I brought it back from Fleury’s room,” Maine said dully.

  “But she thought it was only a love philtre, I swear it! We all did, maître.” Anne-Marie got up from her chair and came across the room to Charles. “Everyone knew that old Fleury used love charms. He even wrote about it in his mémoire.” Sudden color came and went in her face. “He said he had a love philtre to make some court woman give in to him. We thought that was what the little packet in the box was-his love philtre. Lulu wanted to keep it, but she was afraid someone would find it in her room. So she put it-” She looked quickly at Charles and away. “Where she could get it when she wanted it.”

  Suddenly, Charles understood. “And then she started praying in front of Madame de Maintenon’s reliquary,” he said softly.

  Anne-Marie said nothing. Charles was silent, too, remembering the night Lulu had quarreled with Bouchel and run to the dark chapel. He’d stood in the chapel doorway and heard a small metallic sound. He’d found Lulu bent over the altar where the reliquary stood, and she’d shown him a supposedly dropped earring to explain the sound he hadn’t asked about. The sound that must have been the reliquary chamber in the cross snapping shut.

  “What do you mean?” La Reynie said brusquely.

  “I think she hid the little packet there,” Charles said. “In the reliquary. And when Bouchel said he’d done all he could to help her, she went to get her ‘love philtre.’”

  Anne-Marie nodded. Her hazel-gold eyes were wide and pleading. “She thought it would make Bouchel do more to help her.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “She cared about him. She never meant to kill him.”

  The Duc de Maine sighed. “When she realized what she’d done, something changed in her.” He bit his lip, trying to find the words he wanted. “I think she felt already damned because Bouchel died-so it didn’t matter anymore what she did.”

  La Reynie’s face was noncommittal as he watched Maine. “Why would Fleury have put poison in the silver box?”

  “Lulu and I read some of the mémoire together. Fleury hated his rich nephew. He thought the nephew’s money should by right have come to him. He wrote that the omens told him it would very soon be his. And poison is called inheritance powder, isn’t it? Fleury was always horribly in debt.”

  “So when Bouchel died,” La Reynie said, “she knew what she had and decided to use it on her father.”

  And I thought I was helping her, Charles thought bitterly, helping her accept her marriage. I encouraged her so earnestly to trust that God would not abandon her, even if her father had. She saw the use of the role I offered and played it, seeming to be what I wanted her to be. And I was eager to be deceived.

  The door to the king’s reception room opened and La Reynie was summoned.

  “He’ll want to see you in a moment,” La Reynie said hurriedly to Charles. “Say as little as you can. Answer his questions. Nothing more.”

  He disappeared into the inner apartment, leaving Charles with the grieving children. Anne-Marie sat down on the floor beside Montmorency, and the Duc du Maine kept a wary eye on them both. The guard, who had tried to keep the little girl away from his captive, caught Charles’s eye and shrugged. Coping with Anne-Marie de Bourbon, Charles thought, was going to be beyond most men.

  Seeing that there was an untasted glass of wine beside Montmorency, Charles got up and put it into his hand. “Drink, monsieur.”

  The young man obediently swallowed the wine. “If you hadn’t come after us, she wouldn’t have died.”

  “Others also came after you. You had no hope of getting away.” Charles pulled Anne-Marie to her feet. “Your Serene Highness,” he said gently, “please leave us for a little.” She studied him for a moment and went to sit on a footstool beside Maine. Charles turned his gaze on the guard. “If you will be so good as to stand in the doorway?”

  The guard hesitated and then withdrew to the passage door. Charles knelt on the blue-and-gold carpet beside Montmorency. “Listen,” he said softly and urgently. “There’s not much time. The king is going to call us in, and before I have to face him, I must know whether you’ve been helping the Prince of Conti get letters from the eastern border.”

  “Letters?” Montmorency looked at him blankly. “I wrote letters to Lulu. The Duchess of Tuscany gave them to her.”

  “No other letters passed through your hands?”

  “No. Why should there be other letters?”

  “Did you know that Lulu had the poison?”

  “What poison?”

  Charles realized with a shock that Montmorency had not been in the salon. “Haven’t you heard what we’ve been saying here?”

  Montmorency shook his head, staring again at the floor.

  Charles shook him by the arm. “Listen to me. Lulu tried to poison the king before she ran tonight. That’s why you were followed so quickly. Did you know she was going to do that?”

  Horror washed the grief from Montmorency’s eyes. “Poisoned the king?”

  “Tried to. She failed.”

  “No! I didn’t-I would never-no, she wouldn’t! He’s her father.” He looked at Charles incredulously. “He’s the king!”

  Charles sighed with relief. This poor dull knight seemed to have forgotten his own loud denunciations of Louis. His only treason had been to fall in love with the king’s daughter and try to rescue her from the king’s will. Stupid. Beyond stupid. But Charles hoped the king would not require Montmorency’s death for it.

  “When you speak with the king,” Charles said, “answer his questions truthfully. Don’t defend yourself. Don’t accuse him of anything. Do you understand?”

  “I didn’t know about the poison.” Montmorency’s eyes filled again with tears. “I loved her.”

  “I know you did.”

  The door to the royal reception room opened. “Maître du Luc.”

  Charles’s heart missed a beat. He stood up and followed the expressionless footman into the king’s reception room, whose damask walls and hangings were of an even deeper red than the anteroom’s. In the candles’ dim glow, they made Charles think uncomfortably of blood. The king sat behind a small desk. La Chaise stood beside him and La Reynie stood in front of him. Charles stopped short of the desk and bowed. La Reynie stepped slightly aside and nodded at Charles to take his place.

  The king’s eyes were hooded, as though what he wanted to say were written on the ebony inlaid surface of his desk. “I am told that my daughter took her own life.”

  Unsure of what to say, Charles was slow to respond. Louis looked up, and Charles saw that the blue-gray Bourbon eyes were looking into deep darkness, the darkness of his daughter’s hatred and self-murder and damnation.

  “She jumped into the river, Sire, but she may have meant to swim; she may not have known how strong the current was.”

  “She knew. She saw the Machine built. She knew how the current ran.”

  Charles bowed his head. There was nothing to say to that.

  “Did she speak to you before she jumped?”
r />   “Yes, Sire.”

  “Tell me what she said.”

  Charles felt as though he, too, were about to jump fatally. “She said that she did not want to live in-in a prison.”

  The king frowned. “Prison? She thought I would imprison her?”

  Charles hesitated. “Yes, Sire.”

  “What else? You are not telling me everything. Speak!”

  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-”