A Plague of Lies (44 page)

Surprised and pleased, Charles thanked him. “So long as the upper stage construction will be able to hold the cloud. It will have to be a good bit bigger than that one is.”

“What do you want them to wear, your Fates?”

Charles suddenly remembered Conti dancing in the ballet at Versailles. “There is a color that is somehow all colors. I saw it recently. But I’ve forgotten its name.”

“Ah.
Prince
, I think you mean. Dark, but when it shimmers it shows different colors? Very expensive. But yes, that would be interesting.” Beauchamps hesitated, watching the swordplay. “
Maître
,” he said quietly, “I have heard that our Montmorency is banished from court. Is that true?”

Charles frowned. “Where did you hear that?”

Beauchamps merely smiled. When Charles said nothing, he lifted a shoulder. “Well. However that may be, Montmorency was the worst dancer I have ever seen. But I am sorry for him. His downfall was inevitable.”

“Why inevitable?”

“Because he hasn’t the wit to see shadows. He sees only black and white. One who is blind to shadows cannot keep his footing.”

The courtyard clock struck the end of rehearsal, Jouvancy offered the closing prayer, and the boys filed out. Except for Bertamelli, who detoured to Charles to ask after his sore shoulder, made a little obeisance to his god Beauchamps, and then ran after the others, executing a perfect full turn in the air on the way. Outside the rain had stopped, and Jouvancy and Beauchamps went into the courtyard to discuss whether red smoke should accompany the Furies of Heresy as they fled back into
hell at the end of the ballet. Charles put away the wooden swords and the Fates’ masks, lugged the pink cloud out of the way against the wall, shook the two squashed hats back into shape and hung them on their hooks, shut the windows, and picked up his ballet
livret
. He went out to the Cour d’honneur and in again at the always open door to the college chapel. Greeting the lay brother on duty at the street door, he went out into the rue St. Jacques. He lifted a hand to Mme LeClerc, inside the bakery with a customer; crossed the side street that ran from St. Jacques to the lane behind the college; and climbed the deeply worn steps to the little church of St. Étienne des Grès.

Scholastics had been given permission to pray in St. Étienne, and since returning from Marly, Charles had gone there nearly every day. It was an old church, one of the oldest in Paris, and its enfolding darkness welcomed Charles, even though he knew he came there more like an animal homing on its bolt-hole than a Jesuit seeking prayer. He groped his way through the candle-pointed shadows to
Notre Dame de bonne délivrance
. She and her Child were carved from black wood, and were kept from melting into the surrounding gloom only by the painted gold of her hair, the stars on her red gown, her crown, and the golden ball in the Child’s hand.

Charles had known other black Madonnas, and their blackness always made them seem to him both more remote and more human. He knelt, feeling pushed to his knees by the weight of grief and anger he’d brought back from Marly and had to keep hidden. He was grieving over Lulu and her desperate choices, and full of guilt for failing to prevent her death. He was also angry—and sad—at her duplicity. He was sad about the murders. He was angry at the king, who had set so much in motion.

And what was he to make, in his heart of hearts, of having
saved the king’s life? He’d slapped the cup away simply to prevent a man’s murder and would do it again. But he’d saved not only Louis the man, he’d preserved a king he chafed under, a king who sacrificed his own flesh and blood and France itself to feed his lust for
gloire
.

Charles and La Reynie had spent hours with Père Le Picart, explaining what had happened and why. The rector, who had also heard Père La Chaise’s account of events, had praised Charles for what he’d done. And was, of course, pleased at the king’s gratitude and what it would bring. But when La Reynie was gone, Le Picart had talked gravely to Charles.

“You’ve been at Louis le Grand not quite a year,” he’d said, “and you’ve been involved with things far beyond the usual scope of a scholastic. There have been good reasons, and I have allowed your involvement. Lieutenant-Général La Reynie is very grateful, to you and to the Society of Jesus, and so is Père La Chaise. But you must remember that the Society does not look kindly on scholastics who call too much attention to themselves. You have not meant to do that, I know. But there are those in the college who disagree.”

“Père Donat?” Charles had said.

“I know how much weight to give Père Donat’s reports.” Le Picart had shaken his head. “Not only him, there are others. I tell you this because I do not want your future marked with questions. The small-minded can make outsized difficulties, and I do not want those for you, Maître du Luc.”

Well, Charles thought now, kneeling before
Notre Dame
, he didn’t want more difficulties, either, and he was more than willing to be quiet. But he couldn’t stop thinking. Especially about the tangle of man and king, justice and grief, desiring and destroying, a tangle no man seemed able to unknot. A tangle even God mostly held his hand from teasing apart, or so it seemed to
Charles. But if there was no unknotting in this world, then how did any temporal good come to mortals? Was the world hopeless? Was he wasting his time trying to be a Jesuit?

In desperation, he leaned his elbows on the rail and his forehead on his clasped hands and prayed for light. For the light of healing on the souls who’d come through these last weeks with him. For the light of mercy on those who’d died. Then his silent praying fell away and he seemed to see a great throng of men and women making their way through shifting light and shadow, as though they walked in a forest whose branches moved in the wind. The dappled light was always changing. The men and women sometimes saw clearly and sometimes groped in near darkness. They helped one another up and stumbled over the fallen. And all the time a deep sighing went with them, whether the sound of the trees in the wind or the sighing of the wanderers, he couldn’t tell…

“Maître?”
A hand tapped his shoulder.

Charles came back from wherever he’d been and opened his eyes.

The baker’s daughter, Marie-Ange, made a
révérence
to the Madonna. “We saw you go by the bakery,
maître
. The college bell was ringing for your supper and I didn’t want you to miss it.
Maman
says you’re too thin.”

Charles was on his feet now, blinking in the candlelight, which seemed now almost too bright to look at. “Thank you,
ma petite
. That was kind.” He hesitated as she knelt in his place. “Are you staying?”

“To pray for
maman
.” She looked up at him and her brown eyes were full of fear. “That she’ll have a safe delivery when her time comes. So many mothers and babies die.” She turned back to
Notre Dame
.

Charles looked down at the little girl’s brown curls and
frayed red ribbons, remembering a time when his own mother had nearly lost her life in childbirth. “I’m praying for her, too, Marie-Ange. And I’ll tell you a secret. So is the rector.”

Marie-Ange looked over her shoulder, her face suddenly bright with hope. “He is? Oh,
Notre Dame
will surely listen to him!”

Treasuring that up to tell Père Le Picart, Charles left her in
Notre Dame
’s care and went back to the college. When he reached the refectory, he halted on the threshold in surprise. Tables had been moved out of the vast room’s center and crowded close together around the walls. The workmen were gone, but they had begun building scaffolding in the middle of the room. Remembering his lateness, he hurried onto the dais and stood behind his chair at the far end of the long table. Le Picart said the grace and everyone sat. Charles ate with real appetite for the first time since coming back to Louis le Grand, but as he made short work of the stewed beef and mushrooms, and the lettuce salad, he kept wondering about the scaffolding.

When Père Damiot, sitting beside him, paused in talking to the man on his other side, Charles called his attention.

“Why the scaffolding,
mon père
? Is the ceiling falling down?” The old ceiling painted with gold stars was Charles’s favorite thing in the college.

“No, not at all! They’re going to repaint our stars.”

“Using what for money?”

“Old Père Dainville’s niece has given the money. You know Père Dainville’s sight is weakening. Well, it seems he told her how much he loves the stars, and she wants him to see them clearly while he still can.”

Hardly daring to believe his ears, Charles looked up at the faded little stars. Some had already disappeared, leaving only the faintest of gold smudges.

“That’s wonderful news!” he said to Damiot, but Damiot had turned back to arguing points of grammar with the other Jesuit.

Starlight
, Charles thought, savoring the word as he looked at the ceiling. He laughed for sheer, sudden happiness. Even a man benighted in a forest could glimpse the stars. Even painted starlight was sometimes enough to steer by.

Author’s Note

As I said in the beginning note, this book’s Lulu is a fictional member of Louis XIV’s family, the Bourbons. I needed a “might have been” place to put her birth, and found it in the only gap in the birth order of the first five children born to Louis and Mme de Montespan. No actual child was born in 1671, so that became the year of Lulu’s birth. And because she exists only for the space of this story, loose fictional ends are not left dangling in real history.

Researching Louis XIV’s palaces of Versailles and Marly, which were within a few miles of each other southeast of Paris, was a fascinating part of writing
A Plague of Lies.
Versailles was constantly changing, so even if we’ve seen it as it is now, we haven’t seen it as it was then. Tony Spawforth’s recent book
Versailles: A Biography of a Palace
was immensely helpful, and is a great read for anyone who wants to know more.

I was so astonished by the Marly Machine that I had to use it. Built on the Seine near the palace of Marly, the Machine had fourteen huge water wheels, each twelve meters in diameter and operated by pistons. It pumped water up a long steep hill to a holding pond and aqueduct, and then to the gardens of Marly and Versailles. It extended far out into the river, like a rectangular peninsula, and was enclosed in a vast wooden casing with
many levels and walkways. The Machine operated mostly unchanged until 1817, and then in various updated configurations until 1968.

The seventeenth century was a better time for watering your garden than for getting sick. In 1687, French doctors had been arguing about the medicinal use of antimony for a hundred years. Originally called
stibium
, antimony was a metallic substance that could be used in the making of medicinal cups. These cups were then filled with white wine, which broke down and absorbed some of the metal. When the wine was drunk, it irritated the digestive system and caused vomiting, which was thought to rid the body of illness. The medical faculty at the University of Paris supported its use, but other doctors (notably Guy Patin, who died in 1672) were violently opposed to it, insisting that it killed more patients than it helped.

As for other parts of this book that are real, the flogging the king gave Bouchel’s fictional grandmother is real—a woman whose son was killed during Versailles’ construction was flogged for confronting and loudly blaming the king on one of his inspection tours. The belief that “demons of the air” caused thunderstorms and were fought off by ringing baptized church bells is also true. In a letter about the baptism of a Paris bell, the king’s sister-in-law Liselotte remarked that the bell, garlanded with flowers, looked exactly like a hefty court lady of her acquaintance wearing a new and overdecorated gown. And “the most Christian king” Louis XIV really did covertly support the Moslem Turks in their attack on eastern Europe, because they were keeping his European enemies occupied and out of his hair—or wig, since he was probably bald by that time.