A Plague of Lies (7 page)

“With our rousing August ballet. It’s called
La France Victorieuse sous Louis le Grand
. I chose it to proclaim the strength of our
realm and our Most Christian King in the face of our enemies. Our students performed it several years ago, but Maître du Luc is revising it to make it more current, so that it fits with what is happening now.”

Charles bit his tongue.

“
France Victorious under Louis the Great
,” La Chaise said meditatively. “Yes, that’s good. Perhaps I can contrive to mention that tomorrow morning.” He peered at Jouvancy. “I must let you go and rest, but first, let me briefly explain what will happen tomorrow after the king’s Mass. From the chapel, we will go to Madame de Maintenon’s antechamber and wait there until we are called into her reception room. Some of the royal children will be there, and an assortment of courtiers. We will go over the ceremonial procedure in detail tomorrow, but the crux of it is that you, Père Jouvancy, should present the reliquary directly into Madame de Maintenon’s hands—unless it is too large or heavy?”

“No, no,” Jouvancy said, “it is only about the height of two spread hands.”

“Good. After she takes it from you, she will thank you and the Society of Jesus, and everyone will admire the gift. Then she will give the signal for the three of us to retire. And then it will be dinnertime. What I went to confirm just now is where we will eat. I am happy to tell you that we are invited to the Duc de La Rochefoucauld’s table. A very good table indeed. He is a friend of Madame de Maintenon’s and pleased by your gift.” La Chaise smiled at Jouvancy and stood up. “For now, let us get you settled in your own chamber for a little more rest. Besides the door from this chamber, there is also a door into the gallery. You will find a latrine in the corner of the gallery to your left.”

Jouvancy began to struggle out of his chair, and Charles went quickly to help him.

“Oof! I feel as stiff as a new boot,” he said, holding to Charles’s arm as he slowly straightened. “Will you get our saddlebags,
maître
?”

La Chaise took his place at Jouvancy’s arm, and Charles went to the anteroom for the saddlebags. As he hefted them over his shoulder, what sounded like thunder crashed and echoed out in the gallery, and women began to scream.

Chapter 3

C
harles left the saddlebags and ran out into the gallery. A huddle of courtiers blocked the way, crowding around the staircase he and Jouvancy had come up. Some were trying to get closer and some were already retreating, staring at one another, hands pressed to their mouths. Two young women turned hastily and hurried in Charles’s direction, the linen and ribbons of their fontange headdresses quivering as they leaned close and whispered avidly to each other.

“…old Fleury,” he heard, as they came closer.

He stopped where he was. The Comte de Fleury? Surely not. Surely not the same Comte de Fleury he’d known as a soldier.

“Well, no one will miss
him
,” the other woman said, half laughing. “None of the young serving maids, anyway. Dear God, the man was a lecher!”

“Such an undignified way to die, though.” The first woman’s mouth puckered in a moue of distaste, quickly smoothed away as she saw Charles. “But may God receive his soul,” she said loudly. Both women crossed themselves and disappeared, giggling, around the corner.

Charles pushed his way to the front of the crowd and looked down at the man sprawled at the foot of the marble stairs. It
was
the same Fleury, and from the way he lay, it was clear that he’d broken his neck in his thunderous plunge down the stairs. Charles stared down at the man’s dead, empty eyes, remembering… It had been ten years ago, in April 1677, outside the defeated city of Cassel in the Spanish Netherlands. He’d pleaded with the Comte de Fleury for the lives of three terrified common soldiers. The oldest was eighteen. It had been their first battle, and they’d fled in terror through the broken bodies of friends and enemies. Caught and brought back to face their commanding officer, they’d cowered, weeping, beneath the hanging ropes already strung in a tree. Charles had begged the Comte de Fleury to give them a second chance, but he was a hard and arrogant commander and had hanged them then and there. He’d nearly hanged Charles, too, for interfering.

A courtier bent over Fleury, searching uselessly for signs of life, straightened, and took off his white-plumed hat. “He’s gone.”

The young footman Bouchel, standing white-faced at the foot of the stairs, slowly crossed himself. The men in the crowd of courtiers removed their hats with a decent show of respect. But one laughed and said, “Well, our poor dear Conti will never collect
those
gambling debts, anyway! And at least Fleury’s nephew can stop shaking in his boots, now that the old man won’t be after his money anymore.” That got muffled laughter and knowing looks, but the courtier standing beside the body shook his head reprovingly.

“Trying to reach the latrine, I think, poor soul,” he said, and Charles realized that Fleury was without coat and hat and that his brown breeches were partly undone. The smell of bowels was thickening the air, and vomit streaked the front of the dead man’s linen shirt.

Bouchel swallowed and nodded. “I was up there putting a pot under a ceiling leak. I saw the old—I saw him run out of his room toward the stairs.”

“Ah, yes, he lived up above,” someone said, jerking his head at the ceiling, “and the latrine up there is closed. They’re making it into a lodging.”

Someone else groaned. “That one, too? So we’ll have even more—nuisances—left in the gallery alcoves.”

A hand gripped Charles’s shoulder and Père La Chaise said, “Go to Père Jouvancy. He’s lying down and should stay in his bed, he doesn’t need to come and see this.”

Charles pulled himself together and stepped back, and La Chaise took his place at the front of the crowd. As Charles started back to the chamber, someone said, with the carrying diction of an actor, “I wonder, though, why the poor old thing didn’t just use his
chaise de commodité
?”

Charles spun on his heel and saw a young man in a gold-trimmed coat and a frothy wig nearly as golden as the trim smiling brightly into La Chaise’s face.

“A good question,” La Chaise answered evenly. “Though from the smell of him—if, of course, it’s him I smell—I’d say his
chaise de commodité
might well be full.”

“Oh, well said, Père—ah—La Chaise.” A small man in russet satin grinned, lynx-eyed, over his shoulder at the crowd and raised a ripple of stifled laughter.

Ignoring the insults, La Chaise turned to Bouchel. “Did you see him fall?”

“No,
mon père
.” Bouchel jerked his head at the stairs. “But as I said, I saw him come out of his room, and he was groaning as if he might die. And I know there was water on the floor—from the leak, you understand. He must have slipped as he started down the stairs.”

La Chaise nodded and looked again at the body. “We have to get this body out of the palace. And quickly.” By tradition, a king of France could not stay in a building with a corpse.

Bouchel nodded. “Shall I go for the Guard?”

“Yes. And then for Monsieur Neuville. When the Guard has Fleury in the mortuary, the physicians will have to look at him to confirm how he died.” La Chaise’s dark gaze swept across the courtiers. “Did any of you see the Comte de Fleury earlier?”

“I saw him at dinner today, at the Duc de La Rochefoucauld’s table,” an older woman in burgundy velvet said hesitantly, flicking a lace-edged painted fan in front of her nose to disperse the smell. Her eyes were troubled and she frowned at La Chaise. “He seemed quite well then. I know he was old… but to be so suddenly ill… one could be forgiven for wondering…” She shivered and crossed herself.

“One could,” La Chaise said grimly, and also crossed himself. “While we wait,” he said firmly, “we will say the prayers for the dead.”

A chastened hush descended. Charles left the Comte de Fleury’s soul to La Chaise—or more likely, he thought uncharitably, to the devil—and turned back to the bedchamber and Jouvancy. He went in through La Chaise’s anteroom, picked up the saddlebags, and made his way to the adjoining chamber. In spite of all the noise in the gallery, Jouvancy had fallen fast asleep on the wide, green-curtained bed, curled into himself like a snail in its shell.
Good
, Charles thought, and untied the bed curtains and closed them. He tiptoed to the second, smaller bed and pulled off his riding boots to make his moving about the room quieter. The second bed was tucked into a tiny alcove between this second chamber and its antechamber, where the door into the corridor was. Narrow and plain, obviously meant for a servant, it was still softer than any Jesuit bed he’d ever slept
in. Charles opened the larger saddlebag and began taking out his and Jouvancy’s fresh linen. His head came up as a sudden tramping of feet passed in the corridor.
The Guard coming for the Comte de Fleury’s body
, he thought, and found himself utterly unable to pray for the man, unable to be anything but glad he was dead, hoping even that he’d suffered at least a taste of terror at the end, like the men he’d hanged. But those were sinful thoughts, because vengeance belonged to God. Though it was easy enough to see Fleury’s end as appropriate divine vengeance.

As he put tomorrow’s clean shirts away in a tall cupboard of polished dark wood, the door opened and closed in La Chaise’s chamber. Charles went through the connecting door, expecting to see the king’s confessor returned, but instead found the footman Bouchel on one knee at the hearth, beside a basket of wood. Hearing Charles, he looked up, smiling, and shook his thick brown hair back from his face.

“Making a fire,
mon père
,” he said in his rasping voice. “Dark soon. And Père La Chaise will likely want to cook.”

“I’m only
maître
as yet,
monsieur
.” Then Charles said, startled, “Did you say ‘cook’?”

“Yes, he boils up his
bouillon
most nights.”

Charles’s heart sank into his empty belly as the visions he’d entertained of a laden supper table disappeared. La Chaise probably felt it was unfitting for Jesuits to feast openly, or at least too often, he thought with a sigh, admonishing himself for gluttony.

The footman got to his feet as a blaze rose from the neatly built new fire. “The courtiers all do it—well, more do than don’t, anyway.”

“They all cook?” Jesuits supping frugally on a
bouillon
made over their own fire was one thing. But courtiers? “Why?”

Bouchel laughed and rubbed his thumb and forefinger
together. “No money. Plenty of pretty clothes and mortgaged jewels, but half of them haven’t got the price of a radish in their purses. Sometimes they eat in the Grand Commons refectory—that’s across the street from the south wing. But that costs them, too. Sometimes they eat at the Tables of Honor, but one can’t always be invited, so the courtiers get cooking pots—or their servants get them—and man or master cooks the
bouillon
. Usually they send someone like me out into the town for bread and cheese and a little pot of wine. And—
voilà
—
le souper
!”

Bouchel took a copper pot from the cupboard, carried it into La Chaise’s antechamber, brought it back half filled with water, and set it on a solid iron trivet at the edge of the fire. Then he pulled the square table out from the wall and brought over a round loaf of bread, a little cloth-wrapped cheese, and a sadly small pottery pitcher of wine, which he set on the table next to the silver pitcher that was already there.

“There,” he said, adding a candle in a brass holder to the table array. “Père La Chaise will take over from here when he comes back.”

Bouchel made as if to go, but Charles said, “I thought I heard the Guard go by.”

“You did. They took the Comte de Fleury’s body away, but we’ve not heard the end of it, you can be sure as rain of that.”

“Why do you say so?”

Bouchel’s harsh, damaged laughter filled the darkening room. “This is Versailles,
maître
. Drop dead from anything, including a broken neck, and before Mass tomorrow, the whole palace will be saying it was poison.” He shrugged, bowed, and became again the well-trained royal footman. “With your permission,
maître
. I wish you a good night.”