Judith Rock - Plague of Lies

Inspired by the drum, the French Heroes were French enough even for Beauchamps, leaping, thrusting, stamping, feet flickering as they advanced and retreated, swinging their heavy wooden swords in harmlessly menacing patterns. As they finished, the enormous lay brother who’d been sent to the scenery cave to find a practice cloud for the Fates banged his way into the room from the cellar stairs. Charles recognized the cloud he carried. It was from last summer’s ballet The Labors of Hercules , brilliantly pink and hardly large enough for three boys. But for now, it would do. The brother’s broad feet squashed two of the old hats marking the practice stage as he strode to center stage and put down the cloud. With a slow smiling nod at Charles, he meandered out of the classroom through one of the long windows and went back to helping some recently arrived workmen carry lengths of wood through the warm rain. Something must have fallen down, Charles thought. Because there was certainly no money for building anything. Madame de Montmorency’s gift, promised when her son finished his schooling at Louis le Grand, would not be given now. And even though the king had promised a gift, when that might arrive was anyone’s guess.

“No, no, no !”

Startled, Charles and the ballet cast turned and saw Jouvancy waving both arms at one of his actors.

“Fight like a boy, not like a girl!” Jouvancy thundered.

“But I am playing a girl, mon père .”

“You are a boy pretending to be a girl who is pretending to be a boy. So you must fight like a boy!”

“But she’s a girl, and girls cannot fight!”

Grinning at each other, Charles and Beauchamps and the dancers went back to work. Charles set the French Heroes to more practicing offstage and got the three masked Fates crowded onto the cloud. Beauchamps played the ending section of the ballet’s musical prologue. Then an uncertainly baritone sixteen-year-old delivered the spoken prologue, as the Fates in their expressionless masks mimed spinning, measuring, and cutting the threads of men’s lives.

“That is going to work very well, maître ,” Beauchamps said. “Better than I thought.” He shrugged a little sheepishly. “It touches the heart, somehow.”

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?