A Plague of Lies (23 page)

He went softly around the table and eased the small door open. The candles behind him lit the mouth of a narrow flight of stairs leading upward. He listened, heard nothing, and ventured onto the stairs. It was only a half flight and brought him to a dark corridor, so low-ceilinged he couldn’t stand upright. Deserted, it was lit by a single candle in a sconce at the stairhead and lined with closed doors whose lintels were perhaps five feet
from the floor. Peering at the little doors, he lifted his head and unwarily collided with the ceiling. Glad for the cushioning of the stiff
bonnet
, he rubbed his head. These could only be servants’ rooms, a sort of mezzanine inserted between two ordinary floors. Well, he told himself, many people had less and worse. But why did they have to have so little here at the heart of luxury, where the courtiers sat on silver benches? He pulled himself back to more immediate problems.

Lulu was hardly likely to be in a servant’s room. Bent uncomfortably to one side, he started toward the far end of the passage to see if there were stairs there, thinking that perhaps she’d come this way as a shortcut to somewhere else. He was halfway along the corridor when something grabbed his cassock skirt. He yelped in surprise and jumped away from whatever it was, but a small voice commanded,

“Shhh! In here!”

Anne-Marie de Bourbon pulled him through one of the little doors and shut it. Charles found himself in nearly complete darkness, with something panting and jumping against his legs.

The dog, Louis, he realized, and squatted down to where he thought the child was.

“What are you doing here, Your Serene Highness? Why—”

“Hush!” She clutched his arm, an agony of fear in her voice. “He’ll hear you!”

“Who? What game are you playing?”

“It isn’t a game! Louis got away and I chased him up here. We had to hide because I heard someone coming and I’m not supposed to come here.” He felt her shiver. “So I came in here. At least it’s empty. The servants don’t go to bed till after we do. Then I looked out and—”

“There’s no one out there now, so you and Louis can—”

“No, listen! I opened the door a little crack to see who was coming and it was Lulu. She went into the room across the passage. It’s the footman Bouchel’s and he’s still in there!”

Charles was glad the darkness hid his astonishment. “With Lulu?”

“No, she left. She was crying and very angry. They were shouting at each other.”

“How do you know?”

“I heard them. Some of it, anyway. At first, I could just hear voices, but not what they said. Then she got louder and started crying and told him he had to help her. He tried to hush her, but she wouldn’t be quiet. He was talking louder, too. He said he’d tried to protect her and what else could he do? He sounded like he was almost crying. Then something crashed against the wall and she ran out into the passage.
Maître
, she told him that if he didn’t help her get away, she would kill herself!” Anne-Marie’s small hand was shaking. “I’m so worried! I know she’s unhappy about the marriage—but to go to a servant for help? And to say she’ll commit a mortal sin if she has to go to Poland? Please, she likes you, please talk to her and make her see she cannot do that, even if—”

He heard her catch her breath. “Even if what?”

“Just keep her from doing anything terrible!”

“Your Serene Highness, you saw this morning that I can’t make her do anything.”

But Charles thought suddenly of the lake, and his own fears rose. “Do you have any idea where she’s gone? Are there stairs at the far end of the passage?”

“Yes, she went that way.”

The chapel lay in that direction. Charles hoped against hope that Lulu had taken her lonely misery to St. Ursula, that other
beleaguered virgin. Or had at least taken refuge there until she had herself in hand again.

“Maybe she’s gone to the chapel,” he said.

“She might go there. I’m coming with you.”

As Charles pulled the door open, the dog darted into the passage, and the door across the way began to open. Charles ducked out of the room, pulled the door shut behind him, and was leaning against it when Bouchel ducked through his own doorway into the passage.

“Ah,
bonsoir
, Bouchel,” Charles said, wiping his forehead as though he’d been running.

“What—what are you doing here?”

“Chasing Mademoiselle d’Enghien’s little dog,” Charles said, with a tolerant smile. “And now I’ll have to chase him farther, he’s gone that way.” He nodded toward the far end of the corridor.

“Oh. Yes. He’ll have gone down the stairs there.” Bouchel wiped his hands over his face and through his hair.

He looked, Charles thought, like a man who’d just taken a heavy blow. “I thought earlier that you seemed unwell. You look as though you’re feeling worse.”

“Oh. No. No, not at all!” The whites of Bouchel’s dark brown eyes flared in the dim light. “I just came up to—to see to something. They’ll be after me, I must go back now.”

As Bouchel ran unceremoniously down the near stairs, Charles stood staring after him and wondering why in God’s name Lulu had gone to the footman.

Behind him, Anne-Marie pushed her way into the passage. “See? I told you. We have to find her!”

Together they returned to the ground floor and found Louis happily wolfing down cake someone had dropped. Anne-Marie picked him up and started toward the chapel. The
salons
here
were nearly deserted, since most everyone made a point of being seen at the gambling.
He is a man I never see
was the worst thing King Louis could say of anyone entitled to be at court.

When they reached the Salon of Abundance at the east end of the chain, out of which the chapel opened, Charles stopped in the doorway. “Wait,” he said softly to Anne-Marie.

At this hour the chapel was lit only by the
salon
’s few candles shining behind them and by the small lamp on the high altar. He heard clothing rustle and gripped Anne-Marie’s shoulder to keep her from rushing into the dark. Then he heard a metallic sound and what sounded like the whispering of skirts.

“Stay here.” He walked toward the sound.

He could just make out Lulu crouching at the foot of the side altar where the reliquary was. “Your Highness?”

She straightened.“There was no need to come hunting me.” Her voice was chilly and remote.

“Anne—I mean Mademoiselle d’Enghien—was worried about you. She heard you in Bouchel’s room.”

“In—? No, she is lying.”

Flying feet came down the chapel aisle and Anne-Marie flung herself at Lulu, holding to her skirts. “I am
not
lying; you were there, you shouted at him, you said you would kill yourself. I was so frightened!”

Lulu sighed but made no move to comfort her. “Very well. Since you spied on me, yes, I did ask Bouchel’s help. He has always seemed—very kind.” She shrugged disdainfully. “And he’s a peasant. That kind of person always wants money, and I thought I might be able to bribe him to help me run away. He won’t. There. Now you know. And I know what I must do. And there’s an end of it.”

“But you said you would kill yourself! Lulu, you mustn’t even think that, you can’t—”

“Don’t be silly.” She put Anne-Marie gently but firmly aside. “Children are so tiresomely fanciful,” she said to Charles, and swept out of the chapel.

He put out a hand to stop Anne-Marie from following her. “Let her be. She doesn’t want either of us just now.”

“I
know
that.” The little girl twisted out of his grasp and faced him. He half expected tears, but she said fiercely, “You see? There’s only you and me to care about her.
Someone
has to help her, but no one will, because they’re afraid of the king. So what are you going to do?”

Charles looked warily at her. This one could probably lead armies. “I don’t know,” he said frankly. “I’m leaving very soon. I can tell Père La Chaise I’m worried about her.”

She sighed impatiently. “That won’t help. Lulu doesn’t like him; she won’t listen to him.” Her hazel-gold hawk’s eyes caught light from the altar lamp as she looked up at him. “I see that I must tell you. Listen. After the Comte de Fleury—”

Louis began to bark in the aisle as heavy footsteps pounded into the chapel.

“Your Serene Highness! Come here. At once!”

“Hell’s lecherous devils!” Anne-Marie said startlingly, looking over her shoulder. “I am busy,
madame
.”

“Come this moment. Your father is having a fit, asking where you are!”

“My father is always having a fit.” Anne-Marie turned back to Charles. “It’s my nurse. She never pays any attention to me unless my father asks where I am. Please, we must talk. Tomorrow?”

Before Charles could answer, the stout, dark-gowned woman, visible only in outline against the candlelight beyond the chapel, reached the side altar and gasped when she realized he was there.

“Who are you? What do you mean, being here alone with
this child?” She took the little girl by the hand and pulled her away as though Charles had the plague. Scolding her without pause, she walked Anne-Marie out of the chapel.

Torn between fears for Lulu, worry over what Anne-Marie wanted to tell him, and his own fervent desire to be gone at first light and leave them both to others, Charles went slowly back to the evening’s festivities.

He found the buffet
salon
in an uproar. It was crowded with exclaiming, pushing courtiers, and someone had apparently been shoved into a table, because a bright flood of fruit was being crushed underfoot. Charles kicked a plum aside and tried to get nearer the confusion’s center to see what had happened. A woman’s wail rose above the noise.

“Dear Blessed Virgin, it’s just like the Comte de Fleury! Oh, Saint Benoit, protect him!”

St. Benedict? Benedict was the patron invoked against poison. Charles elbowed his way ruthlessly through a swath of outraged courtiers. Then someone shouted a command and the crowd parted to make way for the physician Neuville and Père La Chaise, supporting the king between them. Louis was hatless, his face white and sheened with sweat, and he walked slightly bent over, one hand pressed tightly to his stomach. He looked as though it was taking all his will to hold his mouth clamped shut. On the other side of La Chaise, the tearful Dauphin clutched his father’s black-and-white hat to his chest, and the Prince of Conti leaned at the Dauphin’s ear, murmuring solicitously. The covey of noblemen who attended the king came crowding behind them.

“Make way, for the love of God!” the doctor shouted again, and Charles leaped to clear a knot of stupefied courtiers out of the royally urgent path to the door.

As he passed, La Chaise said to Charles, “Go back to my chamber and wait.”

“Yes,
mon père
.” But instead of leaving immediately, Charles turned to the woman standing beside him. “What happened? I only just arrived.”

Two men drew near to listen to her answer. Her diamond earrings danced in the candlelight as she shook her head. “I hardly know. I was playing
reversis
and the king was standing beside our table. He suddenly turned away and—well—doubled over—and was sick.” She put a hand to her heavily powdered throat and stared at Charles in bewilderment, as though she’d just seen the sun rise in the west. “No one has ever seen him sick in public. We know he is ill from time to time. But he never lets us see it. Even when he had his operation in the winter, he was giving audiences and orders from his bed later that same day! One knew he had to be in pain, but he gave no sign at all. But this—he could not control himself at all, and—dear Blessed Virgin, what if he dies?”

“
Madame
,” Charles said, “I think you are jumping too far ahead. Who can control himself when the urge to spew comes on him?”

“I know. But—” Her small black eyes were full of fear. “—he’s not like us. He is the king!”

And Jupiter never vomits
, Charles thought, mentally casting his eyes up. He turned away with a small nod, but the older of the two listening men, perhaps fifty or so, put out a hand to detain him. Charles knew he should know who the man was but couldn’t name him. The man glanced in the direction the king had gone and then back to Charles.

“Like the Comte de Fleury,” the man said quietly.

“Only, thank God, there were no stairs here,” his companion
put in. He was the lynx-eyed man who’d baited La Chaise in the gallery after Fleury fell.

“You mistake me,” the older man replied impatiently. He looked at Charles. “Perhaps I should have said,
exactly
like Fleury. Because, may God help us, it looks to me as though someone has poisoned the king.” His words had the heavy finality of a tolling bell.

“Oh, dear. Then all we can do now is pray,” the other said, but his words were light as air. He excused himself and went quickly toward the doors.

“Poisoned how?” Charles said brusquely. “Where?”

The older man gestured gracefully toward the tables.

“That can’t be!” Charles said. “Unless you think it was random and any victim would have done? Anyone and everyone might have been poisoned, if it was in something on the tables.”

“Don’t be absurd, of course I don’t mean that.”

“Then what do you mean?”

The man inclined his head very slightly in the direction the younger man had gone.

Charles shook his head. “I don’t understand you.”

The nameless man looked casually over both shoulders and scanned the knot of gesticulating, hysterically whispering courtiers beyond Charles. “Come.” Without seeming to be going anywhere in particular, he drew Charles after him into a corner. They stood sideways against the wall, watching over each other’s shoulders and speaking so that their words would not carry out into the room. The man murmured, “It would not be so hard to do. The king loves sweets. And the best of the sweets are always offered first to him. Do you think he serves himself at the buffet? Of course he doesn’t. He points and nods and someone fills a plate for him. And until he has eaten from the buffet, no one else can take anything.”

Charles thought about that. He’d seen the king standing with La Chaise near the tables early in the evening. Neither had been eating then, but they might have eaten from the buffet before he saw them.