Judith Rock - Plague of Lies

She woke Maine and the sleeping Anne-Marie. “Go to your beds now. Yes, go,” she said, when the little girl started to resist. “Your Louis will be whimpering for you.” She walked them to the door. “Say your prayers for Lulu and then leave her to God.” She stood for a moment, watching after them, and then returned to Charles. “What you said to His Majesty was bold, Maître du Luc.”

Charles swallowed. “I meant no harm, madame .”

“I know you did not. You spoke to the sorrowing man, not to the king. I came to thank you for it.”

She nodded her black-veiled head very slightly and returned to her husband. Swaying on his feet with exhaustion and drained of feeling, Charles sat down again, his legs refusing to hold him any longer. He leaned against the wall and felt himself falling toward sleep. The Silence briefly held him back. You begin to know who you are , It said. Then It let him sleep.

Charles opened his eyes to see La Reynie bending over him. At first, he wasn’t sure where he was. Then a bright yellow wig appeared over La Reynie’s shoulder.

“I knew you were going to be bad luck,” Margot hissed at Charles. “People who can’t enjoy themselves always are.” Her eyes were frightened, and her lined face had shed most of its powder. “Stick to your prayers and stay out of what doesn’t concern you!” She rustled away out of the anteroom.

Charles struggled to sit up and rubbed his face. “What happened in there? Did she confess to helping Conti?”

“No. Conti’s still there. The king called the two of them in while you slept.” La Reynie sat down heavily beside Charles. “They’re going to get away with it. She swears, and her servant swears, that she was only helping Montmorency keep his love letters secret, and that his love letters were the only letters she sent on to Versailles. All out of the goodness of her heart, of course. Conti professes to be bewildered by the whole thing. He’s had no letters from anyone. And, of course, we won’t find any, because he’s far too careful to keep even a scrap of paper. So Conti and Margot will both walk carefully for a while, and it will take us longer to get them. If, in the end, there’s anything tangible enough to get. Dear God, I wish I were home in bed.” The lieutenant-général yawned cavernously.

Charles frowned suddenly as a memory came back to him. “I think I saw Lulu pass Conti a letter,” he said.

“What? Where?”

“At a gambling night at Versailles. She sat down next to him, and I thought they were holding hands under the table. But she could have been putting something small into his hand. Which he could have put in his coat pocket without anyone seeing.”

“Ah.” La Reynie’s eyes closed again. “I wondered about that while I listened in there. Margot helps the lovelorn young man, puts the spy’s letters inside the love letters, sends or takes them to Lulu, and Lulu gives the spy’s letter to Conti. With whom she was half in love, so I hear, so who would suspect anything she gave him to be more than a billet-doux ? Because what besides a love note could a closely watched sixteen-year-old girl possibly give him?”

“And now you’ll never prove it.”

“No. But if it was done that way, Lulu knew what she was doing. It would have been one more way to ingratiate herself with Conti and also get back at her father. You know, I think one reason the king disliked the girl was because they were too much alike.”

“I think so, too.” Charles sighed heavily. “From all I’ve heard about his youth-and his dancing-she clearly had his physical grace. And the vitality he’s said to have had when he was young. If she’d lived-” Charles closed his eyes, trying not to see the desperate satin bird falling into darkness.

“Well, she certainly had his ruthlessness. And his ability to scheme for what she wanted and keep her own counsel,” La Reynie said. “I agree with you now that she killed Bouchel, though I do think it was an accident. The one thing Conti said that I believed was that he knows nothing about the footman’s death. My spy overreached himself there.”

“What happened when the king questioned Montmorency?”

“Louis exiled him.”

Charles said in dismay, “From France?”

“No. He’s banished permanently from the court and from Paris. But no worse than that. He sleeps here tonight, under guard, and leaves tomorrow for his mother’s house.”

For Montmorency’s future, that was bad enough, Charles thought. But at least he had his life. “That’s something, then. It hardly matters, but I keep wondering how he got out of the college. Did he say?”

“He passed as part of a group of foreign tourists visiting your library. He was hatted and cloaked, remember.”

“Then that’s proof the tutor was in it with him. Montmorency would never have thought of that.” Charles sat silently for a moment. “You heard the king tell me that all this is never to be talked about. But what about the Poles? Won’t they talk when they return to Poland?”

“The king will probably bribe them to silence and seal it with threats. I imagine their public story will be that the bride suddenly and unfortunately died. Privately, they’ll tell their king what happened. The little bridegroom probably won’t care what happened, since he’s escaped being married off for now. And since the queen is French, I think the king will keep faith with Louis.”

“So after all of this, all we know for certain,” Charles said bleakly, “is that Lulu killed Bouchel by accident and tried to kill the king. And now she’s dead.” His voice was rising angrily. “And since Frère Brunet says he’s been told that drink can make a liver look as black as poison can, Fleury may simply have slipped and fallen. We think Bouchel killed the gardener, but we’ll never know for sure. And none of it gained anyone anything.”

La Reynie sighed. “So let that count for justice.”

“It will have to.”

THE FEAST OF ST. RODOLPHE, MONDAY, JUNE 23

A soft summer rain was falling in the Cour d’honneur, accompanying Walter Connor’s clear tenor and the music of Pierre Beauchamps’s violin winding together in a sung sarabande for the Spirit of France. The rehearsal was going well enough, with Charles Lennox, recovered from the contagion, once more dancing the Spirit’s role. Beauchamps had been complaining all week that the boy’s calm gravity made him seem like the Spirit of England, not France. But today Charles found him as soothing to watch as the rain was to hear. At the side of the room, Armand Beauclaire and two other boys were trying on the expressionless masks they would wear as Charles’s trio of Fates, hovering on a cloud over the ballet’s prologue. Charles wondered why he’d thought that the presence of the Fates would make anyone question the king’s lust for war. Now, after all that had happened, their inhuman impassivity seemed only a sadly true comment on life.

The sarabande ended and Beauchamps complimented Connor on his singing. Then he called Lennox to him.

“Monsieur Lennox, could your Spirit of France be-possibly, only just possibly-the slightest morsel less-less- English ?” he said plaintively.

Charles hovered, hoping that Beauchamps was not going to flay the shy English boy with his tongue. But Lennox seemed only puzzled.

“But I am French,” he said earnestly. “My mother is French. My father’s mother was French. And before them-”

“Never mind before them. It depends on what part of you is French now.” Beauchamps cast his eyes up. “And whatever part that may be, it is not your feet.”

He plunged into his corrections, which Lennox accepted stolidly, and Charles gave out the wooden swords to the second troop of French Heroes. They took their places on the marked-out stage, and Charles helped them work out the confusion resulting from the redistributing of roles since Montmorency was gone. And the rector, recovered now and returned from Gentilly, had withdrawn some of Bertamelli’s ballet roles as discipline for sneaking out of the college. Bertamelli’s only function now in the third Part was to beat a military drum as the French Heroes entered the stage. But he did it with such panache that he seemed to have gained rather than lost by the substitution. That, Charles thought, would always be Bertamelli’s way, and it would always help him land on his feet after setbacks. The rector had written to Signora Bertamelli asking her to let her son leave Louis le Grand and begin with Beauchamps at the Opera, and Charles was praying fervently that she would say yes.