A Plague of Lies (29 page)

But the worst was that one day late in April, so Fleury claimed, he’d been walking in the gardens, near the Grotto of Persephone, an imitation classical temple with an underground chamber pretending to be the door to the spring goddess’s underworld. He’d stopped to talk to a gardener trimming a yew hedge. They’d both seen the handsome young footman Bouchel come out of the little temple, but Bouchel hadn’t seen them. Then Fleury and the gardener were “rewarded,” as Fleury put it, by “the sight of lovely Persephone herself, Mademoiselle de Rouen, coming languidly from the temple, rosy and smiling.”

When Charles finally shut the book and went to bed, he lay sleepless, going over and over what he’d read. The night was warm, and he threw back his blanket and pushed up the sleeves of his long linen shirt. Considering the source of the story, it might not even be true. But if it were true, and if the unnamed gardener had been Bertin Laville, it could explain the gardener’s death and the money his wife had found in the house after he died. If the gardener had seen Bouchel and Lulu come out of the grotto, he might have tried to blackmail the footman. Charles found it hard to think of Bouchel as a killer, but he could imagine him killing to protect Lulu.

Charles turned over and punched his pillow into a better shape. But if Bertin Laville saw Bouchel and Lulu come out of the grotto in April, why wait till June to blackmail Bouchel?

The college clock chimed midnight. Charles went over what the little Condé girl had told him about the argument overheard between Bouchel and Lulu. Anne-Marie had said that Lulu told the footman that he had to help her. And that Bouchel had pleaded—near tears, the child had said—that he’d already done what he could and that he had no money. And that Lulu had run weeping into the corridor, threatening to kill herself. With a sinking heart, Charles stared up into the darkness, seeing Lulu’s pale face and darkly shadowed eyes, and thinking about her frenetic and changeable moods. He sat up in bed. Women shout more at men when they’re expecting babies, Marie-Ange had confided just hours ago, when she told him her mother was pregnant. And Anne-Marie had told him not to make Lulu run, because Lulu had been feeling ill. Charles got out of bed and went to the open window.

Two and half months since Lulu and Bouchel were seen leaving the grotto. And Bertin Laville would know the signs of pregnancy, Charles realized suddenly. The stable boy at Versailles
had said that Laville’s wife had just had a child. A gardener might easily see a girl hiding in the garden to be sick without witnesses. Seeing unmistakable signs of a princess’s secret pregnancy was a blackmailer’s dream. And if Lulu were pregnant, she had every reason to feel desperate over going to Poland. She could not possibly attribute a baby to a ten-year-old husband.

Charles’s mind stopped short and backed up. If this was all true, then what about Fleury’s death? Bouchel had been there when the old man fell downstairs. Had Bouchel pushed him, then, in the hope of being rid of the other witness at the grotto? Bouchel had said that Fleury slipped in water, and Charles had seen the wet patch on the floor when he went up to find Fleury’s room. And Lulu hadn’t had Fleury’s journal till later that night. So when the Comte fell, Bouchel might not even have known that he and Lulu had been seen leaving the grotto back in April.

Marching feet echoed along the rue St. Jacques and Charles saw that the night watch was returning from the river, a formidable phalanx of striding men, their swinging lantern striking flares of silver and gold from the stars and
fleur de lys
on the shoulder straps that held their swords. They passed by and went on up the hill, leaving the city drowned again in quiet and nearly invisible in the dark. In summer, the street lanterns stayed unlit, but even if they’d been lit, their candles would be nearly burned out by now. A breeze came up from the Seine and cooled Charles’s face. He looked up at the sky and its thickly burning stars. Was Lulu really desperate enough to kill herself? The thought made Charles half sick. If he did nothing with what he suspected, and if she committed suicide, part of the guilt would be his. For her death and the child’s. If there was a child.

He could tell the rector what he’d read and Le Picart could send word to La Chaise. Or he could tell La Reynie. But would
they agree with his deductions? If they did, how long would it take them to move from talking to acting? It took only a moment to die. Charles suddenly wanted to ride to Versailles and take Lulu somewhere safe, out of the king’s reach. Someplace where she would have a chance to simply live. He lost himself in a moment’s fantasy of taking her to Languedoc, to his mother, where she could be just a girl and wade in the Gard River as she’d waded in the palace fountain, and harvest olives. A girl with a new name. And perhaps a baby. But free…

A pretty fable
, the coldly logical part of him said.
It rivals the fables of Monsieur de La Fontaine. Lulu harvesting olives? She would cling to her royal living like a leech.
Shrugging off the probable truth of that, Charles said back,
I’m afraid for her life. And you’re heartless; shut up.
The voice didn’t.
Besides
, it said,
who is free?

Charles leaned on the windowsill. “What am I to do?” he whispered.

The stars shifted a little, the breeze from the Seine died, and the darkness wrapped itself around him like black velvet. The air itself seemed to tense and quiver. He waited, every sense quivering. Slowly, breath by breath, the quiet deepened into the Silence that sometimes visited him. He didn’t dare to name it. But it spoke to him from the deepest place in his love of God.
Charles
, it said, and it was the first time it had called him by name.
Who are you?
And that was all.

Charles finally slept, but when he woke, the Silence’s question still echoed in him like soft thunder. After the early morning Mass, he went looking for Père Le Picart, only to learn that the rector had gone to the Jesuit house at Gentilly, along with the rectors of the Novice House and the Professed House, to meet with the Paris Provincial, the Society’s chief official in the Île de France, and would not return until Monday morning. Père Montville, the college’s second in command, had gone with him,
leaving only Père Donat, the third-ranking administrator. Donat disliked and distrusted Charles and was unlikely to listen to anything he had to say, let alone act on it. He would probably order him to do nothing, which would make whatever Charles ended up doing worse disobedience than it was already likely to be.

All Saturday morning as he assisted in his assigned grammar class and then helped oversee dinner in the senior student refectory, he tried to make up his mind. He was hoping to ask advice from his friend Père Damiot, but Damiot wasn’t at dinner. The meal ended, Charles made sure that Henri de Montmorency’s tutor took his charge back to their chamber, and then he went to Damiot’s room, across the passage from his own. But Damiot wasn’t there, either. Charles went down to the postern to ask the porter if Damiot had gone out. Frère Martin, an elderly lay brother settled comfortably on a stool beside the door, nodded portentously.

“He did,
maître
. His father’s ill again and Madame Damiot sent for him early this morning. To the Pont Notre Dame, that’s where they live. No knowing when he’ll be back.”

“Is it this sickness everyone’s been having?”

“No, and better if it were, poor man. Pains in the heart, Père Damiot said.” Martin clapped a meaty hand over his own chest and held up his rosary. “So I’m saying my beads and calling on the Sacred Heart for him.”

Charles sighed. “I will pray for Monsieur Damiot, too.”

The sense of urgency snapping at his heels drove him to the alcove in the grand
salon
, where paper, ink, and quills were kept. No scholastic was authorized to send notes on his own, but Charles wrote to La Chaise at the Professed House and went in search of a lay brother to carry what he’d written. If trouble came of it, he would make sure it fell only on himself. He gave the note to a brother who was too new to question him and saw
him off, praying that La Chaise was in fact back at the Professed House. He wouldn’t be, if the king was still ill, but sending a lay brother all the way to Versailles was out of the question.

Feeling that he’d at least done something, Charles went back to his rooms to finish the ballet
livret
, writing with half his mind and one ear cocked toward the door. When the knock came, the brother who’d taken the message told him that La Chaise was still at Versailles. But the Professed House rector, Père Pinette, had agreed to send the note on the next time he sent something to Versailles. Charles thanked the brother, shut the door, and felt his sense of urgency becoming panic. It took so little time to let the life out of a body. He’d been a soldier, a scout, a spy in enemy camps, he knew exactly how little. One moment a man was breathing. The next moment he was not.

He went to his desk and wrote a note to Lieutenant-Général La Reynie at the Châtelet. He still needed to make his report to La Reynie about the little he’d learned of the Prince of Conti, though that did not make sending the note any more permissible. He gave it to the brother who’d taken the other note, then doggedly returned to work on the
livret
. This time, when the knock came on his door, the brother told him that La Reynie, too, was in Versailles. No one knew when he would be back. They’d kept the note, though, to give him as soon as he returned.

Charles tried to feel relieved that La Reynie was at Versailles. But La Reynie was probably there because of the Prince of Conti. He had no reason to pay attention to Lulu.
But what else can I do?
Charles asked the air. He couldn’t walk out of the college and go to Versailles himself. Even Père Le Picart would not save him if he did that. It would be the end of him as a Jesuit. But suicide would be damnation for Lulu.

Charles put on his boots. And discovered, when he got to the stables, what he should have realized—the college had only
two horses now, Flamme and Agneau, and the rector and Montville had taken them both to Gentilly. Agreeing completely with the part of himself shouting in his head that he was being an idiot, that he was ruining his life, he walked purposefully out of the stable gate. He had nearly reached the end of the lane and the street that came up from the rue St. Jacques when he came face to face with Père Donat.

Donat, walking with another Jesuit Charles didn’t know, folded his big hands across his paunch like a man contemplating a long-awaited dinner. “Where are you going, Maître du Luc?”

The other man, small and wiry and bright-eyed, was gazing at Charles’s feet.

“Forgive me,
mon père
.” Charles held Donat’s gaze and prayed to St. Homobonus, the patron of tailors, to miraculously lengthen his cassock and hide his boots. Or at least to keep the other Jesuit from mentioning them. “I was restless and came to walk in the lane,” Charles said. Which was true, as far as it went.

Donat’s smile widened. “In boots, for such a short walk?”

“Yes,
mon père
.”

“Go back to your chamber.”

“Yes,
mon père
.”

Charles went back through the gate, feeling their eyes on him and hearing their hissing whispers behind him. In his room, he flung himself down at his prie-dieu. He prayed for Lulu’s safety and the grace to know what he should do—or not do. When he ran out of words and pleas and bargains, he stayed there, his face in his hands, as the evening light filled his room and drained away.

The next morning, after Sunday’s High Mass, Charles sat under a lime tree in the Cour d’honneur, where a group of older boys was gathering for a walk to Montmartre, to the chapel
where St. Ignatius and his friends had vowed their service to God and companionship to one another. While the group waited for its accompanying professors, two of Charles’s rhetoric students were telling him about a game of
jeu de paume
they’d played. Walter Connor had been one of the tennis players, and Armand Beauclaire, just out of the infirmary, had watched and kept score. As Charles listened, he watched a falcon fly from its perch on the pointed roof of a tower and wished he could come and go as easily and as unseen.
No wonder your little talks with Lulu about acceptance of her marriage had so little effect
, his ruthless inner voice commented.
You still can’t accept your vow of obedience after—what is it now, eight years since you entered the Society?

Charles dredged up a smile for the two boys, who had reached the high point of their tennis story.

“Excellent, I’m glad to hear it! Where did you play?”

“In a court near the Pré aux Clercs,” Connor said. Jesuit students were sometimes taken for recreation to the Scholars’ Meadow, west of Louis le Grand, on the riverbank, where Latin Quarter students had held games for time out of mind.

“Saint Ignatius went there for recreation when he studied in Paris,” Charles said.

Connor laughed. “Can you imagine Saint Ignatius with his scholar’s gown off, wrestling in the grass? Or running after a football?”

“No!” Beauclaire looked scandalized. “Saints don’t—” He fell silent, looking toward the passage through the main building to the postern door.

Charles looked, too, and jumped to his feet with a cry of relief. Lieutenant-Général La Reynie was striding into the court.

“Join your fellows, now,” Charles told the boys. “I have some business to attend to.”

With sideways looks at La Reynie, Beauclaire and Connor withdrew.

“Maître.”
La Reynie bowed slightly, his long dark wig swinging a little forward on his shoulders. His face was tired and harassed, his midnight-blue coat and breeches were dusty, and the lace frothing at neck and cuffs had lost its starch. “I asked to see the rector for permission to talk with you, but the porter said he’s not here.” A smile twitched at La Reynie’s mouth. “He said I could see Père Donat, but I had the feeling he wasn’t recommending it.”

With a glance at the main building, where Donat’s office was, Charles shook his head. “No, Frère Martin wouldn’t recommend anyone seeing Père Donat. Who would probably refuse anyone’s request to see me. Let’s—”