A Plague of Lies (41 page)

La Reynie burst through the door. “Maître, I told you to stay near me; what are you—” He broke off, staring at the leaf on Charles’s palm. “What’s that?”

Charles nodded toward Anne-Marie, cautiously letting go of her. La Reynie bowed hastily.

“This leaf fell earlier from Her Serene Highness’s hair,” Charles said. “Like the ones we saw when she was dancing. She admits that she helped Lulu escape. I think the leaves came from the hiding place she prepared for Lulu.”

Frowning, La Reynie took the leaf from Charles and held it up to the light. “It’s hornbeam. Have you hidden her in the
berceau
, Your Serene Highness?” But he sounded more puzzled than triumphant. “What good will that do her?”

“She is not there,” Anne-Marie said disdainfully.

“The
berceau
?” Charles said in confusion. “Cradle? How could she hide in a cradle?”

“The
berceau de charmille
,” La Reynie said impatiently. “It’s a
hornbeam arbor—more like a tunnel—that follows the Marly wall. She couldn’t hide there, not for long. But we’ll have to go and—”

“Wait,” Charles said. “Your Serene Highness, you say that Lulu isn’t in the
berceau de charmille
. But you went there. Someone is or was there. Who?”

She stared back at him like a statue. Until a dog began to bark in the distance and she turned toward the sound, her small face creasing with anxiety.

“That’s your Louis barking, isn’t it?” Charles listened for a moment, to be sure of his direction. “Monsieur La Reynie, does the hornbeam hedge circle the whole property?” He pointed northeast, toward the barking. “There, too?”

Catching Charles’s thought, La Reynie said, “It does.”

Charles ran down the steps. La Reynie, shouting for guards to follow them, was on his heels.

The wind drove thin clouds across the sky, but a half moon gave fitful light. The two men pounded across gravel, along paths, and straight across the planted
parterres
when there weren’t paths. The barking stopped, then grew louder, and Charles nearly fell over Anne-Marie’s little black dog. The dog ran around him and La Reynie in joyous circles and then back the way it had come, ears streaming in the wind. Charles raced after it, a trio of guards close behind, leaving La Reynie bent over and catching his breath. A flood of hurrying clouds quenched the moon, and Charles nearly ran facefirst into the hornbeam hedge. One of the guards held up his torch to show a manicured archway cut in the hedge a little way to their right. The guard cautiously stuck the torch through, low to the ground.

“Can’t see anyone,” he said. “But I hear the dog in there. I can’t take my torch in, the whole tunnel might burn.”

Charles went in. He could hear the dog off to his left, but
he could see nothing beyond the reach of the torchlight at the entrance. Then, as the dog came running out of the green-smelling darkness, the torch flared a little in the wind and something small and bright caught Charles’s eye down where the dog had been. He went toward it, brushing his hand along the hornbeam at the level where he’d seen the thing.

Behind him, the shrubbery rustled and La Reynie caught up with him, struggling for breath. “It’s like God’s pocket in here.”

Charles suddenly felt broken branches and then empty space. “We’ve found it; she got out here, the hedge is broken. Is the wall beyond?”

“Yes.”

Charles’s fingers closed suddenly on what felt like a ribbon. From the brief torchlight glimpse he’d had of it, it was the pink-gold color of Lulu’s gown. “I’m sure she went out here. Her ribbon’s caught on the edge of the hole.”

“Anne-Marie couldn’t have made a hole this size,” La Reynie said. “I doubt even both girls could have done it together—they’d scratch themselves too badly to go unnoticed.” He told the guard who’d come in behind him to have men comb the outside of that part of the wall and quarter the ground beyond. The man ran back through the hornbeam tunnel, and Charles and La Reynie squeezed through the broken place. Gritting his teeth against the ache in his shoulder as he pulled himself up, Charles gained the top of the six-foot wall and helped La Reynie up.

Grunting and swearing, the
lieutenant-général
jumped heavily down into dew-wet grass on the other side. “I want to think she couldn’t get over this by herself, not in skirts. Even at her age. But that may be only my damaged dignity speaking.”

“No.” Trying to ignore what hauling La Reynie up the wall had done to his own aching shoulder, Charles was looking intently
across the fields and forest sloping away before them. “She didn’t. Montmorency is here, I’m sure of it.”

Shouts made them look back along the wall. Guards with torches were running toward them.

“A horse,” the nearest one called breathlessly. “A horse was tethered a little way along there.” He jerked a thumb behind him. “Left its droppings.”

Charles and La Reynie looked at each other.

“Can you tell which way it went?” La Reynie called back.

“Toward the river, looks like.” The guard arrived, panting, his fellows at his back. “Started that way, at least.”

The guards’ faces showed avid in the torchlight, and Charles thought that this was likely more excitement than any of them had ever seen. Not only an attempt on the king, but an attempt by a royal daughter, a
legitimée
of France.

“Get horses,” La Reynie said curtly. “Go both ways around the Machine, down to the water.”

“Are there boats?” Charles said. “Could they find a boat there?”

“They could,” another guard said. “There’s a boat or two for inspecting the Machine. They couldn’t go downstream, there’s a dam, but they could get across to the other bank.”

“The machine that brings water from the river?” Charles said.

“That’s right. Huge thing,” the guard said, “fourteen paddle wheels pushing water up the Louveciennes hill to the aqueduct. For the fountains here at Marly, and at Versailles, too, it’s so close.”

Charles was running before the man finished talking. The moon came and went, usually going just as he needed it. The ground began to slope downhill as he entered a belt of trees and
velvet darkness. He smelled the horse before he saw it and swerved at the last minute, frightening both of them.

“Lulu? Montmorency?” There was no sound but the horse’s blowing and snorting. Charles bent close and saw that it stood with its off foreleg lifted. He tried to lead it a few steps, and it nearly fell. Lamed and abandoned. Which meant that the fugitives were on foot now, too. He started running again, trying to stay upright as he slithered down an even steeper slope. Away on his right, he heard hooves and saw torches, as the mounted guards approached the river.

Charles could hear rushing water now and ran toward the sound, caroming from tree to tree in renewed moonlight, using the trunks as handholds to keep himself from plunging headlong. A great roar smote his ears as he came abruptly out of the trees and saw gleaming water ahead of him. The noise was heart-stopping. The Machine, he realized, and started downhill beside a long wooden construction higher than his head. The horsemen and torches were at the bottom of the slope on a wider pathway beside the water.

Someone reined in his horse and pointed, shouting, “There, look, there they go!”

Holding their torches high, the guards looked out at the dark mass of platforms and throbbing machinery that thrust itself like a square peninsula into the water. Charles reached the bottom of the hill and pelted across the riverside path, past the dismounting guards, who were tethering their horses and looking for a way onto the vast, multileveled Machine.

He plunged through a small door and came out on wooden planking. From its live throbbing, he guessed that it was built over churning gears and wheels. To his left, what sounded like the groaning rumble of all the mill wheels in France smote his
ears. Other feet were pounding behind him now and he redoubled his speed, feeling as though his heart were about to burst out of his chest. Below him, on his right, was a long, lower level of flooring and at its end, the river, racing westward under the moon like a fat silver snake. He could see them clearly now. Montmorency jumped down to the lower wooden level, held up his arms, and caught Lulu as she jumped. They ran hand in hand along the boards toward the river end of the Machine.

“Lulu! Montmorency! Stop!” Charles’s feet pounded over the planking, which narrowed suddenly to nothing in front of him. The first of the guards was closing on him and he turned furiously. “No,” he roared, “stay back! Let me bring them in.”

It was his old battlefield voice, and it worked. The last-come guards skidded into their fellows, and they all stopped where they were. Knowing he had only moments before they followed him, Charles gathered his cassock and jumped to the lower level. Ahead of him, Lulu and Montmorency clambered over a low wooden barrier and ran to a rail where the Machine thrust farthest into the river. They stopped beside an opening that led lower still and looked over the rail. Lulu shook her head at Montmorency and darted to her right and out of Charles’s sight.

“Wait!” Charles bellowed, leaping the barrier.

Montmorency was still leaning over the rail, looking up and down the river and wailing, “There’s no boat, Lulu, you said there was a boat!” He turned, saw Charles nearly on him, and flung himself to the right, blocking the way Lulu had gone. His sword was out and leveled at Charles. “Stay back,” he shouted over the Machine’s roar. “Let us go.”

“Not into the river, you fool!”

“We’ll find another boat, stay back!” The boy’s face was grim and hard. Not a boy’s face any longer.

The guards were at Charles’s back now, their torches blotting out the moonlight. Someone tried to push him out of the way and he whirled and shoved back savagely, sending the man to the floor and only then realizing it was La Reynie.

“If they try to swim for it, they’ll drown in the currents,” Charles shouted at the
lieutenant-général
and the rest. “Let me talk to them.”

The guards started past him, but La Reynie yelled, “Hold where you are, give him a chance!”

Montmorency had disappeared now, too, and Charles, hands open and visible, went to the right, the way Lulu had gone, and found the pair standing together on a small piece of decking at the side of the Machine.

“Come back with me,” he pleaded over the noise. “The king will be merciful. Please, come back with me.”

“Merciful?” Lulu’s laughter was as silvery as the moonlight on the heavy ropes of pearls around her shoulders.

Montmorency had an arm around her, his sword still pointed at Charles. “We’ll marry, we’ll go somewhere else. England. Italy. Somewhere. Let us be.”

“Think! You have no boat, no horse. The king’s guards are here behind me. You cannot go anywhere from here. Come back with me and retrieve what you can for yourselves.” Charles was remembering Louis’s gray stunned face. He’d seen shock and disbelief and anger there, but not the rage that drives revenge. There’d been too much pain for that. The rage might come later, but it was a chance worth taking. “I think you won’t get worse than exile. Even you, Lulu. In exile, you’d still be alive.”

Lulu looked out over the racing water and shook her head.

“Lulu,” Charles said, “I know your secret. I’ll help you. I’ll—”

She looked over her shoulder. Her slight smile was piercingly sweet. “I’ve lived in my father’s prisons long enough. And you don’t know all my secrets.”

She stood on tiptoe, one hand resting on Montmorency’s shoulder, and kissed him. Charles took advantage of the moment to step closer. As Montmorency bristled and warned him off with his sword, Lulu pushed herself up onto the rail. Before Charles could cry out, she seemed to spread satin wings in the moonlit air, and the Machine’s roar swallowed the splash of her fall.

“Lulu!” Montmorency flung a leg over the barrier, fumbling to throw off his cloak.

Charles lunged, got both arms around him, and pulled him backward. “No! She’s gone. There’s nothing you can do!”

Montmorency struggled fiercely. “Then I’ll die with her, that’s all I want, let me go!”

They shouted the same words at each other, like responses in a hellish liturgy, until Montmorency finally stopped struggling and they wept together, huddled in the roar of the water wheels.

“Charles.” A hand gripped Charles’s shoulder. “Charles. Get up now. Come, I’ll help you.”

Blinded by tears and wondering dimly at La Reynie’s calling him by his Christian name, Charles let the
lieutenant-général
help him to his feet. The two of them lifted Montmorency and steadied him, one on either side.

Numbly, Charles wiped his face on his cassock skirt and, half carrying Montmorency, they made their way back to the path along the river, the guards following. Down on the bank, a huddle of men were shaking their heads and gesticulating, and looking out at the place where Lulu had gone into the water.

La Reynie saw Charles looking and said, “Those are the
men who run the Machine. Can you manage Montmorency? I’ll go and see what they’re saying.”

Charles walked Montmorency slowly to the riverside path and spoke to one of the torch-carrying guards, who went for horses. La Reynie came back from talking to the Machine operators. He shook his head.

“They say the currents where she went in are too treacherous for any hope of finding her. And too strong. She’s probably been carried downriver, but she went in so close to the Machine that she could be—” He swallowed and sighed. “Come, let’s get Montmorency back to the chateau.”

The guard had brought horses for all of them. They helped Montmorency mount, but he slumped dangerously in the saddle.

“You’ll have to get up behind and steady him,” La Reynie said to Charles. “I don’t think he can ride alone.”

The guard, also mounted, led them up the slope. Charles rode with an arm around Montmorency’s waist, listening to the fading noise of the water wheels moving the river from where God had put it to where the king wanted it. The wind had died and the clouds had passed by. Charles let his head fall back and looked up at the moonlit sky powdered with faint stars, but for once, the stars failed to comfort him. His mind circled around and around a single question: Where had she gotten the poison?