A Plague of Lies (8 page)

“And God give you a good night, also,” Charles said absently, his thoughts gone to poison. Poison was often suspected when
a death came suddenly, and not just at court. But Fleury’s death seemed so obvious—sickness, a rush to the privy, a wet floor, a headlong fall down marble stairs. He eyed the unpromising pot of water on the hearth. On the other hand, perhaps it was just as well to cook over one’s own fire here.

The door opened again to admit La Chaise, who walked heavily to the fire, shaking his head. “A terrible thing to happen. But marble stairs are slippery at the best of times, and if the floor upstairs was wet… And it clearly was not the best of times for the Comte de Fleury.” He shrugged as though to shrug off his thoughts. “Is Père Jouvancy resting?”

“He’s asleep,
mon père
. May I help you with the supper?”

“Yes, thank you.” La Chaise glanced down at the simmering water, then out the window at the densely clouded sky visible above the roofs across the courtyard. “Light the candle on the table, if you will. Rain brings the dark sooner, even in June.” He took a long wooden splinter from a box beside the hearth, lit it, and handed it to Charles, who used it to light a short, stubby candle.

“Wax?” Charles said. “That’s pleasant, instead of tallow.”

“Yes, Bouchel saves me from the evil smell of tallow. He gathers wax candle ends from courtiers’ servants and keeps them aside for when I have to stay the night. A good servant, and a pleasant one. And he knows everything about the town, he was born in the village here.”

“Village? Most of the buildings I saw riding in look as new as the palace.”

“They are. But yes, there was a village. Small, but it had been here time out of mind. The king demolished it when he decided to turn his father’s old hunting lodge into this palace.”

Charles shook his head. “And how did the villagers take that?”

“Not well. But the king employed them in the building, so they got something out of it. If I remember correctly, Bouchel said once that his father was one of the masons.”

“Oh? And now Bouchel works in the palace his father helped to build. Do you know what happened to his voice?”

“No, but I do know that while the palace was being built, there was an enormous camp for the workers. During the work, the whole place, including the old village, became very wet and unhealthy because of massive digging and rerouting of water. I suppose anyone who lived here—villagers as well as incoming workmen—risked chest and throat sickness.” La Chaise went to the cupboard and brought out a tall pitcher covered with a white linen cloth. Crouching down, he removed the cloth and poured the contents of the pitcher into the simmering water. “The remains of last night’s
bouillon
,” he said, straightening and taking a long spoon out of the cupboard. The savory smell of onions and leeks in beef broth filled the room. Charles’s stomach began trying to climb up his backbone to get to the food.

“And I am going to add a little more beef and another bone, though my mother would be scandalized at my short way of making
bouillon
.” La Chaise reached into the cupboard and brought out a bloody paper packet, unwrapped it, and dumped its contents into the pot. “Now we have only to wait.”

Charles swallowed hard. “How long will it need to cook?”

“Not long, the meat is chopped somewhat fine.” La Chaise smiled suddenly. “When I was a scholastic, I was hungry all the time. If you’re hungry now, break some bread from the loaf there. And let us have a little wine while we wait for the soup to become soup and for Père Jouvancy to wake.” His face fell as he looked at the pot of wine Bouchel had brought. “Oh, dear. A
little
wine is the apt word, unfortunately. Oh, well, we can water
it. Or not water it and drink water with our supper. Anyway, wine now!”

Charles looked for a knife to cut the loaf, that being the polite modern custom, but La Chaise only said, “No, no, break it. If Louis can use his fingers to eat, so can we.”

Gratefully, Charles broke a piece off the brown loaf and La Chaise refilled the cone-shaped glasses they’d used earlier, but only to the scant side of half full.

“To your health,
maître
,” he said, handing a glass to Charles and raising his own.

Charles returned the compliment and they drank.

“Sit. No, have the chair.” La Chaise gestured Charles to the thinly cushioned chair fringed with red silk where Jouvancy had sat, and settled himself in the other. “Aaah.” He drank again and closed his eyes briefly. Seeming to open them again with an effort, he said, “Have you had much sickness in the college?”

“Yes, these last weeks. Our infirmarian thinks it’s some unbalance of humors caused by the weather going from cold to warmer after such a bad winter. He says the change makes the stomach and bowels grip, and then the blood boils trying to get through them, which raises a fever. Though hardly anyone dies of it, he says.”

La Chaise grunted. “Unless they fall downstairs trying to reach the privy. Does this illness come on suddenly?”

“Oh, yes. Père Jouvancy was well one afternoon at the beginning of the rhetoric class, and deathly ill and spewing before it ended. I could hardly get him to the infirmary.”

“Have you, too, been ill?”

“No, thank Saint Roch and Saint Stephen,” Charles answered fervently, naming two saints known for protecting against contagion. “If I may ask,
mon père
, are you thinking that the Comte de Fleury was ill in the same way?”

“Possibly. You may have heard the woman in the corridor say he seemed well enough at dinner today.” La Chaise rose and stirred the soup, whose scent was so enticing now that Charles felt like biting at the air to see if it tasted like it smelled. To distract himself, he said, “I saw three young people playing in the court below the window soon after we arrived and recognized two of them as the king’s children, who did us the honor of coming to our college performance in February, the Duc du Maine and Mademoiselle de Rouen.”

“Two of our
legitimées de France
. You know, of course, that he had his children by Madame de Montespan declared legally legitimate.”

“The other was a small girl. But very quick at the game they were playing.”

“Very little? Bright brown hair?” When Charles nodded, La Chaise said, “That was Anne-Marie de Bourbon, Princess of the Blood, a daughter of the new Prince of Condé.”

“Ah.” Charles nodded. The Condés were Bourbons, as royal blooded as the king and in line for the throne. The present Prince of Condé had come into his title only in December, when his father died.

“In case you have to speak to the princess,” La Chaise said, “she’s styled Her Serene Highness and her title is Mademoiselle d’Enghien. She looks six, but she’s eleven or twelve, I think. The new Condé’s daughters are all tiny, like their grandmother Claire Clemence. People call them ‘Dolls of the Blood.’” Watching the fire brighten as the light faded, La Chaise said reflectively, “Have you ever thought how oddly things are passed on in families? Take those two children of the king you saw. Maine is dark like his father. But Lulu, as Mademoiselle de Rouen is called, is nearly blond, like her mother, Madame de Montespan. And her character could not be more different from her brother’s
if she came from the other side of the world. Maine’s a quiet boy, doesn’t seem to like public life much. He’d rather be in the woods with his huntsman and the dogs, so I hear. Though his limp doesn’t help his riding. I will tell you—in confidence—that he’s the king’s favorite child. Though they say he’s not living up to his promise. He was a brilliant little boy, but now he has—well—faded, somehow. In my opinion, Madame de Maintenon has kept him too close, too tied to her, probably because of his limp. She tried very hard to cure him, you know. But limp or not, it’s high time the king sent Maine to the army. The boy is seventeen. Far too old to be mooning around here at court playing children’s games.”

“And what of Lulu, as you called her? How old is she?”

La Chaise sighed. “Yes. Lulu. She’s—let me see—almost sixteen. Her Highness’s real name is Louise Marguerite. Louise after her father, of course, and Marguerite after his mother’s mother, Marguerite of Austria.”

“So she’s nearly marriageable.”

“In fact, nearly married. And furious about it. She’s tried to change the king’s mind. But he pays no attention and she’s causing a world of trouble. I live for the day she’s finally dispatched to her husband, I assure you.”

“Who is he?”

“A Polish prince, the younger son of King Jan Sobieski. We need to strengthen ties with Poland, since Sobieski has too often aligned himself with France’s enemies. Particularly the Hapsburgs and the Holy Roman Empire. Of course, Sobieski had no choice but to fight on the Hapsburg side against the Turks at Vienna and Buda, the Turks being such a danger to Poland. But Louis hopes to make Sobieski our ally with this marriage.”

“However the girl herself feels about it?”

La Chaise looked at Charles as though he’d begun speaking
Chinese. “She’s known all her life that she would be married for royal reasons. Why she’s making so much trouble about it, I can’t imagine.” He shook his head and sipped from his glass. “Poland is an odd place. Did you know that Polish nobles elect their king? They usually choose the old king’s son, but not always. It seems to me an affront to God to show so little trust in the royal lineage.”

Charles was silent, wondering how different things might be in France if the French king were elected.

“With his daughter married to Sobieski’s son, Louis will have more influence on the next vote, whenever that should come. So Lulu’s marriage—” La Chaise stopped short and turned in his chair as the connecting door between the chambers opened.

Jouvancy stood in the doorway, blinking in the firelight and yawning. “
Bonsoir, mon père, maître
,” he said indistinctly, turning politely aside to cover another wide yawn. “I see I have slept into the evening. I thank you for letting me rest so long. I am a new man.” He sniffed the air. “Supper?” he said hopefully.

“Le bouillon, mon père.”
La Chaise got up and set his wineglass on the table. “And to start, let me pour wine for you.”

The firelight made a twisting red rope of the wine as he added what was left in the small pot of wine to the silver pitcher. He filled a glass for Jouvancy, who took it with a satisfied sigh and sank into the chair Charles offered him.

“You feel better, then?” Charles said, watching Jouvancy narrowly.

“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.”