Judith Rock - Plague of Lies

“Much better, I was only tired.” Jouvancy settled stiffly on the seat’s thin cushion and smiled up at Charles. “Don’t fuss over me-go and help our host.”

La Chaise straightened from stirring the pot. “No need, we have a few minutes yet to wait. What you can do, though, is show me the gift we’re giving to Madame de Maintenon tomorrow. I would like to see it.”

“With pleasure, mon père .”

Charles brought the well-wrapped reliquary from the connecting chamber and held it out to Jouvancy.

“No, please-you unwrap it, maître .”

When the heavy canvas and the soft silk wrappings beneath were peeled away, the cross stood glowing among the supper preparations, the bread and the wine, so that for a moment, Charles saw the table as an altar.

“Very beautiful,” La Chaise said, coming closer to examine the shining gold and the deep blue inlay of the stone called lapis lazuli.

“Show him the relic,” Jouvancy said.

Charles picked up the cross, turned it facedown across his hand, and pressed a tiny flange in its back. The cross’s back opened like a door to reveal a little compartment an inch wide and three inches long that held a thin bundle of tightly wrapped and yellowing old silk.

“Saint Ursula’s finger bone,” Charles said.

“Her little finger,” Jouvancy added. “The silk has always seemed too fragile to unwrap.”

“Very nice. A well-thought gift, indeed. And perfect for Saint Cyr, as Saint Ursula is also a patron of students.” La Chaise nodded at Charles to reclose the reliquary and went to peer again into the soup pot. He laughed softly. “We must hope, though, that Madame de Maintenon does not know how uncertain Saint Ursula’s legend is.”

Jouvancy bridled, frowning. “What do you mean, ‘uncertain’?”

An unholy glee showed briefly in La Chaise’s dark eyes. “As uncertain, you might say, as Madame de Maintenon’s ‘legend’ is in our own time-her ‘uncertain’ marriage to the king, I mean.”

“Oh, dear Blessed Virgin!” Dismay furrowed Jouvancy’s pale face. “The lady won’t think-she can’t think-but that isn’t at all what we mean by it. I’ve never believed that Saint Ursula’s story was other than truth!”

Charles bit his tongue for courtesy’s sake and hoped that Madame de Maintenon was as credulous as Jouvancy. He supposed that St. Ursula and her martyrdom might be real enough. But many people-including him-found her eleven thousand martyred virgin companions a bit much to swallow.

“Of course,” La Chaise said soothingly. “I’m sure nothing of the kind will occur to her. And even if it did, she wouldn’t think of any connection to her marriage. Her mind doesn’t work like that, especially about holy things.” With a disconcerting glance at Charles, he added, “But you must admit, it’s amusing, if your mind does work like that.”

Charles’s mind definitely worked like that. Trying and failing to keep the laughter out of his voice, he said, “There’s something else we didn’t think of. Or I didn’t, anyway. When Ursula was martyred by the Huns, eleven thousand other virgins were martyred with her. So it’s said, at least. That’s a lot of virgin bones.”

“This isn’t just one of those other virgins, it’s Ursula herself-her own finger!” Jouvancy was sitting militantly upright now. “My grandfather brought it back from Cologne when he visited the Basilica of Saint Ursula. It cost him a fabulous sum.”

“Yes, mon père , I’m sure it must have,” Charles murmured, not daring to look at La Chaise.

“Beyond price, surely,” the king’s confessor said gravely. “And you can be sure that Madame de Maintenon will value the gift accordingly.”

Jouvancy sat back in relief. La Chaise gave a final stir to the bouillon , pronounced it ready, and armed himself with a ladle.

“Bowls and spoons are in the cupboard,” he said to Charles, who got three brown pottery bowls from a shelf and set the small table with the spoons. The king’s confessor placed the fragrantly steaming bowls beside the spoons and brought a knife for the bread and cheese, and the three of them stood with folded hands and bowed heads while he said the grace. Then, tired and momentarily at peace in the darkling room, they sat and ate hungrily, comforting their bodies with bread, wine, cheese, and La Chaise’s hot soup, and comforting their minds with good talk. Charles watched the candlelight gleam on St. Ursula’s reliquary and thought that perhaps their souls were comforted, too, by her presence. For the good of what they had to do here, he hoped she was present, because whatever the reliquary’s gold and lapis had cost Père Jouvancy’s pious grandfather, the little cross seemed smaller and more insignificant by the moment here in the grandeur of Versailles.

THE FEAST OF ST. LANDRY, TUESDAY, JUNE 10, 1687

Before half after nine the next morning, after a late and hasty breakfast of bread and the rest of the bouillon, Charles followed Père La Chaise and Père Jouvancy along the gallery corridor toward the central, royal part of the palace. Their heels echoed sharply on marble and parquet as they passed through a seemingly endless chain of sumptuous chambers opening one into the other. In spite of his determination not to admire the king’s ill-gotten grandeur, Charles caught his breath in wonder when they reached the Galerie des Glaces. Not long completed, the Hall of Mirrors was already one of the wonders of Europe. It was more than two hundred feet long, and the inner side of it was lined with “windows” whose panes were mirrors, reflecting back the sunlight from the outer windowed wall and the colors and jewels of the people moving between. Staring and blinking in the unaccustomed light, Charles realized that the benches and tables, and the enormous pots of orange trees in every window embrasure, were made of what looked like silver. He edged toward the nearest pot to see if it really was silver and walked into Jouvancy, who had stopped and was gazing upward.

“Thank the bon Dieu for so much beauty,” the rhetoric master whispered, and Charles looked up, too.

He had to admit that the ceiling was beautiful. Until he looked closely and saw that it was war spread over his head in sky blue and blood red and every other color in the artist’s palette. Louis XIV, in a billowing wig and a Roman soldier’s scanty armor, ramped over the battlefields of Europe, leading charges and trampling enemies against a background of smoke from burning cities, while a sky full of cheering angels watched and bosomy classical goddesses waited to bestow laurel crowns. Charles turned his attention to trying to catch sight of Père Le Picart and Père Montville among the throng of courtiers waiting for the war god’s appearance. La Chaise had set Bouchel to watch for the other two Jesuits outside and bring them to the gallery the moment they arrived.

The king’s day, La Chaise had explained, rarely varied from its set schedule of private events and royal appearances, and there was little chance that this morning’s appearance would be late. From being waked at half after seven and the succeeding ritual of the royal dressing, to the reverse ritual of undressing and retiring to bed at half after eleven at night, Louis was the center around whom everyone else’s day revolved.

The palace clocks began to chime the quarter before ten. Beside Charles, La Chaise sighed with relief at the sight of a pair of three-cornered formal Jesuit hats called bonnets coming toward them, bobbing behind the footman Bouchel, who was cleaving the gathered courtiers like Moses in the Red Sea. As the footman delivered Le Picart and Montville, a hush fell and every head turned toward the door opening into the middle of the Galerie des Glaces. La Chaise drew his delegation a little forward to stand at the front of the crowd. In spite of himself, Charles felt his heart begin to speed. After all, he was about to see the king of France. He’d never seen a king, and quite apart from any personal feelings, the anointed king was the body of France itself.