A Plague of Lies (17 page)

The Polish ambassadors sat on the king’s left. On his right was his son the Dauphin, also named Louis. The Dauphin was said to be the image of his mother, the dead Queen Maria Teresa. Like her, he was blond, plump, and pink-faced. And unfortunately, none too intelligent.

“Where is the Dauphin’s wife?” Charles whispered, speaking
Latin to keep his questions even more private. All educated men learned Latin, but only the scholarly kept it up. Courtiers used it little.

“Pregnant again, or so I understand. Even when she’s not, the Dauphine rarely goes anywhere.”

Beyond the Dauphin was a smallish man in a beautifully curled dark brown wig, moving restlessly, gesturing with slender, heavily ringed hands at the crowd. As he turned his head, Charles saw that his cheeks were brightly rouged. Beside him, a large woman in gray satin and red jewels sat immovable as a mountain.

Seeing where Charles was looking, La Chaise mouthed, “Monsieur and Madame.”

Styled simply Monsieur, Philippe d’Orleans was the king’s younger brother. The gray satin mountain was Philippe’s second wife, the formidable German princess called Liselotte.

“Where is Madame de Maintenon?” Charles said softly in La Chaise’s ear. “I thought she would be here.”

La Chaise shook his head. “She makes few and brief appearances at occasions like this. Since her position is not acknowledged, you understand.”

“And Madame de Montespan, Mademoiselle de Rouen’s mother? Or is she no longer at court?”

“Of course she is,” La Chaise murmured, keeping an eye on the white plume. He smiled without mirth. “I doubt she will give up trying to retake the king’s affections while there is breath in her body. But she’s too indolent to bother much about her children.”

The king suddenly stood, and everyone sitting stood with him. He gave the signal for the proceedings to begin, and everyone sat down. A dozen men in the first row of the Ring rose again and bowed to a dozen women. As always, the ball would
open with a
branle
. All the pairs came onto the floor, made their honors of bows and curtsies to the king and each other, and linked hands in order of rank to form a long line. Music began beyond the open double doors of an adjoining room, and the line began to wind its way around the dance floor. Each of these couples would dance a paired dance before the evening was over.

Though Charles had been a good dancer, and part of his work at the Jesuit college was creating and producing the student ballets, he couldn’t, of course, dance in public now. But he loved watching people dance. He did wish, though, that someone would open a window to cool the thick air. He scrutinized the dancers performing the
branle
. The
branle
was a simple dance, an occasion to show off rank and finery, and because the occasion was in honor of the king’s daughter and the Polish nobles who had come to negotiate her marriage contract with their prince, the finery was very fine indeed. At the head of the
branle
was the Prince of Conti, devastatingly handsome in a suit of what Charles at first thought was black satin. But as Conti moved, the bright candlelight struck gleams of dark red and blue from his coat and breeches, and Charles saw that the suit was of a costly weave called, appropriately enough, “Prince.” The cloth reminded Charles of the man—changeable, neither one thing nor the other, beautiful. Conti moved with the grace of Apollo himself, the blue and silver plumes of his broad beaver hat waving as he danced. He was such a magnificent dancer that Charles almost forgot his dislike of the man in the pleasure of watching his entrancing skill.

His partner, of course, was the bride-to-be. Her rose satin gown, covered with a delicate web of snow-white lace, was so obviously meant for a maiden’s blush that the effect was nearly comic. Her curling dark blond hair shone under an old-fashioned net of pearls, and ropes of pearls were wrapped around her bare
shoulders, hugged her long neck, and swung from her ears. As the dance went on and the room grew hotter, Charles found himself wondering how much the girl’s finery weighed.

When the
branle
ended, the dancers separated, men standing in one row, women in the other, and faced the king. They made their honors to him and then to each other, and the men escorted the women back to their seats. But the Prince of Conti, instead of resuming his seat, returned to the floor. He faced the king, standing gracefully in dance’s fourth position, one foot advanced before the other, and bowed deeply. As he replaced his hat, the sound of a foot beating grave triple time was heard, and the traditional second dance of a ball, the noble
courante
, began.

“King Louis used to dance this himself,” La Chaise murmured, nodding slightly down at the white plume waving above the high-backed royal chair.

As Charles watched Conti stepping and balancing and turning his way through the dance’s sinuous floor pattern, he caught sight of the Duc du Maine sitting near the king’s end of the Ring. Absorbed and wistful, the boy’s shoulders twitched as he watched, his breath visibly catching in his throat as the excitement of the dance reached out to his lame body. Watching him, Charles thought sadly that but for his lameness, Maine might have shown his father’s talent reborn. He clearly had the passion. Conti ended his dance and made his bow. Then he returned to Lulu and, with another fluid bow, invited her back onto the floor.

The two took their places and made their honors. As the girl rose from her curtsy, she raised her eyes to her father, and the fury in them took Charles’s breath away. Then the upbeat of the
gavotte
sounded and her face became as smooth and expressionless as a mask. Her dancing burned with life; as she turned, jumped, balanced, and posed through the lively
gavotte
, her feet
might almost have set fire to the floor where she stepped. Charles felt her every move in his own body and wished he could dance with her. The
gavotte
was also a proud dance, and the blue-black and rose pattern of royal order and balance she and Conti wove together coaxed sighs of pleasure from the watchers. When the pattern was complete and they made a final
reverence
to the king and to each other, Conti took his seat again in the Ring.

With another brief glance at the king that Charles thought must have struck him like lightning, Lulu advanced on the younger of the Poles. Charles felt almost sorry for the hapless ambassador as she gave him her hand—and a look colder than the Polish winter. The Pole, wearing French coat and breeches now, was competent enough at French dances, though his carnation-colored suit clashed badly with Lulu’s rose silk. He was also sweating heavily, and Charles saw the girl flinch as sweat flew from his moustache during a jumped turn. When the dance ended, the Pole returned Lulu, who had steadfastly refused to look at him, to her chair. His face was as red as his carnation coat—with embarrassment as well as exertion, Charles thought—and his coat’s back was dark with sweat. The man’s sigh of relief was audible as he regained his seat, and a woman in a bright yellow wig, in the Ring’s second row, laughed loudly. A ripple of laughter spread through the
salon
.

But near the door, the laughter turned to protest, and Charles looked to see what was happening. He stared in disbelief as one of his students from Louis le Grand, eighteen-year-old Henri de Montmorency, pushed through the standing watchers, apparently headed for the dance floor. Montmorency’s pride and high nobility had not saved him from being painfully bewildered in the classroom or from being the only student Charles had ever had who was incapable of even the simplest dancing. Charles watched him narrowly. Surely Montmorency did not
mean to dance here. Surely even he knew that all the dancing pairs and their dances had been chosen before the ball began. But Charles had learned that with Montmorency, it was best not to make assumptions. He began trying to edge through the crowd toward the boy, but La Chaise pulled him back.

“What are you doing?” he rumbled in Charles’s ear. “No one can leave yet.”

“One of my students just arrived.” Charles nodded toward the boy, as wedged in now by the crowd as Charles was and obviously seething with frustration. “I need to find out what he’s doing here.”

La Chaise frowned. “You think he’s here without permission from the college?”

“He may be,” Charles said. It was as good a reason as any to get to Montmorency, and it might well be true. The closer some boys got to leaving the school, the less they cared about offending the rules they’d lived by for so long.

“No matter,” La Chaise said, “you’ll have to wait till the ball ends. The king brooks no interruptions to these ceremonies.”

And, indeed, as though to underscore the words, King Louis slowly turned his head and looked up at the whispering Jesuits, who whipped off their
bonnets
.

“Forgive us, Sire,” La Chaise murmured, and they bowed their heads.

The annoyed king turned back to the dancing, and La Chaise’s grip on Charles’s cassock forbade him to move so much as a toe.

To Charles’s relief, Montmorency stayed where he was, even as the final dance of the evening began. Charles was interested to see that it was one of the new English
contredanses
, in which all the evening’s couples danced facing each other in two lines. He’d heard of this style’s recent import to France but had never
seen it, and he was fascinated by the simple but lively meeting and parting of the dancers and the bright swirl of color as pairs changed places up and down the line.

When it was over, he checked to be sure Montmorency was still there. He wasn’t. Which made Charles uneasy, but at least now the dancing was over and Montmorency couldn’t disgrace himself—and Louis le Grand—by trying to dance.

Charles turned to La Chaise, hoping that they could go, and saw that La Chaise was leaning over the back of the king’s chair, listening as Louis talked. Wondering irreverently which royal body was speaking—God’s mystically anointed king or the natural man who begat children—Charles watched the white plume wave above a royal nod.

La Chaise straightened and nodded in turn to Charles. “We must go to the buffet
salon
for a time, not to our chambers yet.”

They joined the crowd’s slow drift toward the door and into the adjoining
salon
, where courtiers gathered around tables covered with platters of cold meat, plates of heaped pastries, and elaborately constructed pyramids of hothouse strawberries, plums, and peaches. Wine pitchers and ranks of short-stemmed glasses reflected the chandeliers’ flickering light.

“They’ll be pillaging the tables for a while,” La Chaise said, under the pitch of the crowd’s loud talk. “It does look inviting, doesn’t it?”

“You must be feeling better,
mon père
. Are we allowed to pillage, as well?”

“If we do it without making an unclerical spectacle of ourselves. And you’re right, I am better.” After filling plates and glasses, La Chaise led the way toward a dark alcove where they could eat unobserved. But when they got closer, they saw a man’s back and the rose-colored edge of a woman’s skirt framed in the alcove’s arch.

La Chaise muttered in exasperation and looked around for somewhere else. But Charles put his plate and glass down on a side table and strode to the alcove. The rose-colored skirt was overlaid with delicate white lace and the coat was the same black brocade as Henri Montmorency’s.

“
Bonsoir
, Monsieur Montmorency,” Charles said, loudly and brusquely.

Montmorency twitched a shoulder without looking to see who spoke. “Leave us. You intrude.”

“Turn around,
monsieur
.”

The flat order made the boy turn so fast and angrily that his sword smacked against Lulu’s skirt and she exclaimed impatiently. To Charles’s surprise, Montmorency seemed not at all alarmed when he saw who was talking to him. And seemed not to see La Chaise, standing a little aside, at all. Instead of giving Charles the courteous greeting and bow he owed a professor, Montmorency glowered. “What do you want?”

“To know what you are doing here.” Charles glanced into the shadows where the king’s daughter stood. “‘Here’ in all senses of the word, Monsieur Montmorency.”

That produced a giggle from Lulu and a darker scowl from Montmorency.

“I am here with the rector’s permission,” the boy said stiffly.

“I am relieved to hear it,” Charles returned. “Why are you here?”

Montmorency shifted his feet and groped for words, which never came quickly to him. “The ball. Why should I not be here?” He lifted his square chin and fell back on the central tenet of his universe. “I am a Montmorency.”

“And so the king invited you? But you were rudely late.”

The whites of Montmorency’s eyes showed as he glanced into the shadows. “Yes! I mean, no, but—”

“Oh, have done!” Lulu surged out of the alcove, twitching her fan like an angry bird flicking its tail. “I invited him,
maître
.” Her eyes traveled caressingly over Charles, who removed his
bonnet
and willed himself not to blush. She tapped him on the arm with the fan. “I sent him a note. So of course he came. Isn’t he fortunate? Wouldn’t you like to have a note from me?” Charles’s distantly polite expression didn’t alter and her voice chilled. “You, I see, only came to celebrate my being sold to Poland.” Her lips trembled and she bit them to stillness.

“No, Lulu,” Montmorency cried, “you know I will never let—”

“Shut up,
mon cher
!” Her false brilliant smile was back, and she kept it trained on Charles. “Your pupil has the Montmorency love of lost causes,
maître
. But who knows? Perhaps when I get to Poland, I shall at least enjoy the wolf hunting.”

“You will never go there.” Montmorency tried to take her hands. “I will—”

“You will nothing,” she said, pulling her hands out of reach. As she moved, something clattered to the floor. Montmorency bent to retrieve it, but she was before him. Charles saw that it was a ring, old and heavy, with a deep blue stone capping an elaborate raised setting.

“A lovely jewel, Your Highness,” he said.