The Sun King Conspiracy (26 page)

G
ABRIEL did not spare his horses. Leaving London, the young man headed straight for the coast and succeeded in obtaining a passage to France just as the ship was about to sail. After taking advantage of the crossing to rest and sleep, the Pontbriand heir disembarked at Boulogne and hurried to the first coaching inn to obtain a fresh horse. He chose a sturdy one so that he would be able to gallop all the way to Beauvais without losing any time.

Throughout the journey, Gabriel thought constantly of the events of the past hours. The image of his father’s corpse kept coming back to haunt him. He now had only one aim: to avenge his death, first by catching the fugitives and making them pay and then by confronting their master.
I’ll do whatever it takes to make Colbert pay for this!
the young man told himself over and over again, intoxicated with grief.

Reaching Beauvais at last, Gabriel had to skirt the magnificent, four-hundred-year-old cathedral to reach the coaching inn nearby. There were few people there at that time of day.

‘What can I do for you, Monseigneur?’ Scipion Carion asked as he greeted him, bowing low.

The landlord of the post-house was short and plump, but his cheery face inspired confidence.

‘I’ve arranged to meet some friends,’ said the young man, anxious
not to arouse suspicion. ‘They may be waiting for me already. And I’m hungry and thirsty.’

Scipion Carion took him by the arm and led him to the inn’s dining room, so that the traveller could satisfy his appetite. Gabriel followed him but remained on his guard, discreetly scrutinising the customers seated at their tables.

‘You’ll find the best cook in Beauvais at my inn. Madame Carion herself does all the cooking here,’ the man announced proudly, showing Gabriel to a table next to the window.

Eyeing the other guests, Gabriel suddenly straightened up and reached for his sword.

‘You!’ he cried, lunging at three men who were seated at the back of the room.

The three companions, clearly taken by surprise, then charged at the young man with their swords in their hands. As they began to fight, the innkeeper cried out:

‘For pity’s sake, Messieurs, spare my family! I have only this inn to provide for them! I beg of you, do not break anything!’ the poor man pleaded as weapons clashed and plates flew off the tables.

Once again, young Pontbriand’s agility unsettled his opponents, who were as taken aback by his bravery as they were by his surprise appearance.

But despite his dexterity, Gabriel now felt he was in trouble, and when he received a light wound on his shoulder he decided to run for it. Jumping out of the open window, he found himself once again in the courtyard of the coaching inn. The three men immediately rushed out of the inn in hot pursuit.

‘Careful, he’s dangerous!’ one of them shouted as he set off after the fugitive.

They caught up with their quarry in front of the cathedral and the
fighting recommenced on the steps of the great building.

Backed up against the heavy wooden door, the young man thought he was done for. Then he remembered his father, whom he would never see again, and rage lent strength to his arm. He ran one of the attackers through with his sword, and the bloody corpse toppled down the cathedral steps.
It’s a good thing there’s nobody around,
thought Gabriel, anxious to extricate himself as quickly as possible. He killed the second attacker by piercing him through the eye. Anger gave him the power to finish the job with a thrust through the heart of the third. He too fell to the ground and lay still.

That’s that then,
thought young Pontbriand, wiping his bloody sword on the torn clothes of his last victim.
But there’s no time to lose. I must hurry before these villains are discovered.

As he dashed away from the cathedral, keen to return to Paris as quickly and discreetly as possible, Gabriel felt a kind of intoxication overwhelm him.

This is only the first step,
he told himself, inspecting the wound on his shoulder.
Now it’s between you and me, Colbert!

G
ABRIEL had arrived in Paris three days earlier and taken refuge at the home of his friend Julie. The actress lived alone in a modest attic room, not far from the Palais-Royal theatre. The young woman had greeted the fugitive with surprise and emotion, extremely happy to be reunited with her confidant who had disappeared so suddenly from Molière’s troupe. The young man told her nothing of his adventures, but began his stay by sleeping for almost twenty hours at a stretch. When he awoke, the anger generated by the sight of his father’s corpse had still not left him. He was more determined than ever to assassinate Colbert. So as not to worry Julie, he invented a scenario in which he had played the hero, forcing him to hide in Paris for a few days. She believed him or pretended to, happy that this conjunction of circumstances obliged him to stay with her. She didn’t ask how long he would be staying; in fact she did not ask him anything at all. And on the second evening, on her return from the theatre where she was still playing in
Dom Garcie,
she invited him into her bed. The comely actress no longer made any secret of her feelings, and these had not escaped him. He in turn was not immune to her charms and willingly tasted the pleasures she offered, even if they did not ease his grief.

Each day, when Julie had left for the theatre, Gabriel prowled around outside the Palais-Royal or Colbert’s house, trying to work
out the best way to kill the man he now regarded as a personal enemy. Gabriel’s blood boiled at the sight of the walls and the courtyard glimpsed through the doors as they opened for a moment to allow a carriage – perhaps Colbert’s own carriage? – to pass through. Standing patiently in the cold, hidden in the shadow of the carriage entrance, he noted the times at which the servants entered and left; the guards’ movements; in short, all the details which might feed his hunger for vengeance.

On this sunny morning he was still in bed, with his arms wrapped around Julie, when someone knocked at the door.

‘Open up, Gabriel! I know you’re in there!’ said the voice on the other side of the door.

The young man leapt out of bed and seized his sword.

‘Don’t open the door,’ pleaded Julie, frightened by the sudden awakening and pulling up the coverlet to hide her breasts.

‘Open up!’ the voice persisted. ‘It’s François d’Orbay.’

Reassured, Gabriel opened the door. The architect smiled at the sight of the young man, stark naked, brandishing his sword.

‘Well, my fugitive friend, it’s quite clear you have nothing to hide! Get dressed,’ said d’Orbay, paying no attention to the young girl who had now vanished beneath the bedclothes, ‘then come down and join me in my carriage. I have to talk to you – by order of the Superintendent of Finance!’

Gabriel closed the door again and rushed around to gather up his clothes which were scattered all over the room.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said kindly to Julie, kissing her on the forehead. ‘He’s a friend of Nicolas Fouquet. I’ll come back as soon as I can.’

The young girl looked at him with rather a sad smile.

‘Go,’ she said. And then, more softly: ‘Farewell, mysterious Gabriel.’

A heavy carriage with six horses was waiting in the street. The curtains were drawn, so it was impossible to see inside. The architect was leafing through a newspaper as he waited for Gabriel.

‘I am delighted to see you again, Monsieur de Pontbriand. We were extremely worried when you disappeared from London!’

‘But I left a letter explaining everything to the Superintendent!’ replied Gabriel sitting down opposite d’Orbay. ‘My hasty departure was for pressing, personal reasons which I cannot reveal to you, Monsieur d’Orbay.’

‘I know!’ François d’Orbay cut in grimly, laying a hand upon his arm, ‘and I share your grief. Believe me …’

‘You can’t know!’ the young man interrupted.

Astonished by this harsh reaction, François d’Orbay smiled and went on softly:

‘Listen to me and don’t interrupt, Gabriel. Charles Saint John – or more precisely André de Pontbriand, your father – was one of my friends. I knew him a long time before you were born. His violent death has caused me great pain, particularly since I saw him only a short time ago, in London. I have a general idea of what happened. I asked that you should be watched from a distance and …’

He stopped for a moment and clenched his jaw.

‘Anyway, my men arrived too late to prevent it. They saw you running away, then lost track of you during the Channel crossing. I didn’t realise what had happened next until later, when I heard through my sources about the deaths of three men at Beauvais. It wasn’t very difficult to work out. It was a rather more delicate
task to find you in Paris. But believe me, the only reason I’ve been searching for you since my return is that I feared for your life. I have to say your hiding at the home of that young actress was ideal from my point of view, and from yours, if I’m to believe what I saw just now,’ the architect grinned knowingly. ‘If Isaac Bartet hadn’t spotted you prowling around Colbert’s residence and then followed you here, we would still be wondering if you were alive!’

Gabriel frowned at François d’Orbay. He did not understand exactly what game d’Orbay was playing and decided to give nothing away until he knew exactly how much the Superintendent’s close colleague knew.

‘I don’t know what you’re planning, but I must urge you to be extremely careful,’ went on d’Orbay. ‘Monsieur Colbert doesn’t take kindly to his men being murdered!’

‘I want vengeance – I want to punish that man Colbert for his crimes. If as you say you were a friend of my father, his cowardly murder by Perrault’s henchmen cannot leave you unmoved. For several weeks I have been at the centre of an intrigue over which I have no control, and which I still don’t fully understand, but whatever the dangers, I cannot allow the death of a Pontbriand to go unpunished!’

‘Steady now! Gently, young man. You want to kill Colbert, is that it? Don’t you think that’s a little presumptuous on your part?’

Faced with the boy’s stubborn silence, d’Orbay went on:

‘Your father and I shared a commitment to the service of a cause that is greater than we are. Perhaps he talked to you about it. In fact it is in our struggle and the nature of the documents that fell into your possession that you will find the source of your misfortunes. If you truly wish to be faithful to the memory of André de Pontbriand,
you should talk to Nicolas Fouquet himself before you commit an act of folly for the sake of honour.’

Gabriel said nothing. He did not know what to do or how to react, and at the same time had the disagreeable impression that d’Orbay knew much more than he was giving away.

Understanding his unease, François took a letter from his glove and handed it to Gabriel.

Gabriel paled as he read this posthumous message.

‘Very well, Monsieur, I believe that you knew my father, but this note doesn’t free me from the need to avenge him. As you know the details of what happened you should also be aware that I found a document on the body of the man I killed in London that directly implicated Colbert. Colbert is the one who directed the assassins.’

He was now almost shouting.

‘I am going to kill Colbert. I want to avenge my father!’

D’Orbay’s tone turned icy.

‘And we shall avenge him, believe me. But not now. And not in this way. Do you think Colbert is so naïve that he neglects to be constantly on his guard? He has you watched, you disappear, and his men are murdered. Would he then continue to act as if nothing had
happened? I am sure that his guard has already been strengthened, even if the link has not yet been established between you and those men’s deaths. Though in all likelihood it has. If Bartet found you, do you think it would be impossible for others to do so, too?’

Gabriel was silent, shaken by d’Orbay’s arguments.

‘Throwing yourself straight into the lion’s mouth, alone, would not serve your vengeance and would compromise our plans. For pity’s sake, go to Vaux and see Fouquet. I promise you that Colbert will still receive his just desserts.’

Gabriel nodded.

‘Very well, I shall follow your advice and go to see the Superintendent, but do me the kindness of telling me everything you know about my father, and about the mystery surrounding his life which seems, alas, to have also been the cause of his death!’

Relieved, d’Orbay sighed and laid his hand once more upon the pale youth’s arm.

‘It’s a long story,’ he said, giving the signal for the carriage to set off. ‘A long story. But Nicolas Fouquet should be the one to tell it. He alone has the right. He was chosen,’ he added enigmatically.

G
ABRIEL watched the white pebble skim over the surface of the lake, then sink straight down beneath its dazzling surface. The afternoon sun cast patches of golden light across the nearly completed gardens, emphasising the brightness of the chateau’s pale stone façades. The scaffolding had disappeared, flowers and shrubs were gradually covering the bare earth, bringing the flowerbeds to life, and Vaux was slowly taking shape, little by little revealing its full majesty.

But all this was far from the young man’s thoughts. All he could think about, obsessively, was the distance that separated Vaux from Paris, in other words from his father’s murderer. Two days had elapsed since he had agreed to take d’Orbay’s advice and follow him to Vaux. Two days, during which his appetite for revenge had continued to conflict with his belief that to mount a lone attack on the man who dared to have a snake for his emblem was a recipe for failure and suicide.

‘Gabriel.’

The soft voice made the young man turn round. Dropping his handful of pebbles, he leapt to his feet to face the man who had called to him.

‘Monsieur Superintendent?’

With his eyes lowered and his hat obscuring his face, Fouquet
silently removed his dusty gloves and took off the travelling cloak he wore to protect his dark green doublet.

‘I’ve just arrived from Paris,’ he said.

Looking up, his eyes met Gabriel’s.

‘I must talk to you, my dear Pontbriand,’ he went on. At that very moment, the sun struck the chateau’s front windows and dazzled Gabriel. He blinked and took a step back, temporarily blinded. In this moment of bedazzlement, he heard Fouquet’s voice again:

‘It’s about your father.’

Gabriel’s expression hardened.

‘François told me about your conversation,’ went on Fouquet.

He came closer.

‘I can imagine your impatience, your rage, your pain. François shares them, as do we all.’

He had placed deliberate emphasis on the word ‘we’.

‘And we shall avenge your father.’

Taking him by the elbow, Fouquet led him slowly away.

‘I met him only once a long time ago, and very briefly. To me he was Charles Saint John, not André de Pontbriand … And yet in that one meeting he talked to me in barely disguised terms about you and about what he called his “other dream”, to distinguish it from the quest pursued by our Brotherhood. Despite his ardent desire to spare you the sufferings he had known, that dream was to make you his heir. I confess I did not immediately understand what he meant. He realised this and repeated the word “heir”. He meant his heir to our project, and not only in the sense that you were his son.’

Fouquet paused to look Gabriel square in the face.

‘That is a very special kind of inheritance, Monsieur de Pontbriand.’

The young man clenched his teeth and tears shone in his eyes.

‘I shall be direct, Gabriel. We need you. The documents you miraculously retrieved at the theatre, then saved once again on the night your father was murdered; these documents which have placed your life in danger are of vital importance. They altered the course of your father’s life, and yours for that matter. Now you have a chance to change that curse. If you entrust me with the documents, you will be carrying out your father’s dearest wish … And you will succeed him.’

‘But what are these accursed secrets which have torn my family apart?’ demanded Gabriel.

‘I shall tell you; you’ve earned that right many times over. But I want it to be your choice. Gabriel, there will be consequences if I tell you the story of this secret: if you hear it, it means that you have already accepted it and agreed to serve it. Once I’ve told you, there can be no going back.’

The Superintendent broke off for a moment and moved a little way away from Gabriel.

‘Rest. And think. For once, time is on our side. We are alone until tomorrow. I am going to check on the construction work, and then we shall have dinner with La Fontaine. You must not let anything slip, I beg you. La Fontaine is a dear friend, but he is not one of us and must not find out what is at stake in this conflict. If you don’t think you can manage that, do not come down for dinner; I will say that you are unwell. In that case I shall wait for you in my office at eleven o’clock tonight. If you join me there, I shall consider that you have accepted your inheritance and the burden of these secrets.’

Without waiting for a reply, the Superintendent of Finance left Gabriel and headed back towards the chateau.

Night had fallen over the Château de Vaux. Standing in his office at the French doors which opened onto the terrace, with his hands clasped behind him, Nicolas Fouquet gazed out at the inky sky dotted with stars. He smiled faintly in the silence as he listened to the sound of light footsteps on the wooden floor in the adjoining salon. The door creaked open softly, and Fouquet turned to see Gabriel standing motionless in the doorway. The light from two torches surrounded him with a luminous halo that emphasised the pallor of his skin. Dressed in a simple white nightshirt, he came forward with a spring in his step, looking Fouquet straight in the eye, and stopped in the centre of the room.

‘I’m listening.’

‘The night is warm,’ answered Fouquet, pointing to the terrace.

‘Shall we walk?’

The lights of the chateau were still twinkling in the distance. Setting off along an avenue lined with young poplars, the two men felt the warm breeze caress their faces as it rustled through the leaves.

‘It’s a very long story, Gabriel. It began more than one thousand six hundred years ago, by the Sea of Galilee in the Holy Land, at the house of a fisherman who hadn’t returned home in years; not since he left to follow a prophet called Jesus. The man was called Simon Peter and his village was Capernaum. And this story began while he was busy re-reading the testimonies written by other companions of the master. There were four of these testimonies, four documents which the world would come to know as the Gospels. Four documents which would not have given rise to this story had Simon Peter not been mad with rage, horrified by what he read. He took a terrible decision, the decision to rewrite part of those texts, to alter
them. In fact it was quite a mundane thing: an act of censorship. Except that it changed the course of history throughout the world. Simon Peter cut the texts. He expurgated them and dictated a new version, the one we know. Then he buried the original texts in an amphora, and for twelve centuries no one knew anything about them. Until the crusades brought our knights to the Holy Land. Until a few of them, on the road to Syria, stopped beside the Sea of Galilee and sought refuge in a cave which had become accessible after twelve hundred years of erosion. Until they found the amphora in that cave. Amongst them was a learned man who knew Aramaic. Months later, in his monastery in Jerusalem, this learned man spent some time deciphering the texts, which were written on papyrus. Despite the terror which filled him as he read them, and after checking thousands of times that his eyes were not deceiving him, this learned man found the courage to reveal his discovery to the chapter of his order. That learned man was also a soldier. His order was that of the Templars. And these writings were then given a name: the Fifth Gospel. That is the Secret which your father bore. Like me, like others, he was guardian of the Fifth Gospel, willing to sacrifice everything so that this Secret should not fall into unworthy hands liable to misuse or destroy it. Its injudicious revelation could provoke a terrifying situation of murderous anarchy. Like others, your father had taken a vow to bear this Secret and to wait until the appropriate circumstances arose. Only then could it be revealed, to a man capable of comprehending its meaning and accepting this inheritance before his people, thus countering Simon Peter’s rewriting.’

Stunned, Gabriel hung on Fouquet’s every word.

‘But where are the documents? Did I carry them?’

Fouquet smiled.

‘No. By an incredible stroke of fortune, you carried the key which provides access to them. The knights hid it in order to protect the Secret. After translating the text, they copied it between the lines on each of the leaves of papyrus used by Simon Peter. Then they soaked the pages of this codex in a bath of special ink which rendered them unreadable. They had learned this art from an Arab scholar. All the pages of the codex are turned black on both sides. And only their immersion in a decoction of plants, prepared according to an extremely precise formula, can cause the ink to vanish and reveal the true text in Aramaic and in Latin. What is more, this operation has to take place at a particular time on a particular date, which only occurs once a year. The formula for this decoction is on the document your father encoded, and its history is almost as extraordinary as that of the codex itself. It was lost during the sacking of the Templar’s commandery by Philippe le Bel. No one knew what had become of it. As for the codex, unreadable as it was, it was carefully hidden in Rome. We were merely the guardians of a memory whose existence we passed on from generation to generation, ready to act if we picked up the trail of the formula. This we did at the height of the Fronde, a little less than fifteen years ago. The formula reappeared in the hands of a Genoese merchant. How it ended up there, nobody knows exactly. All we know is that during the pillaging of the commandery, one of our Brothers – on the point of being caught and murdered, and unable to communicate in any way with our Brotherhood – in an act of despair entrusted the formula to a servant who did not even know what he possessed. He ordered him to flee to Italy and to make contact with one of our people there. He failed to do this. Instead the wretch sought to turn what he possessed into money, without success; he died in poverty around 1350. It is probable that the formula lay for three centuries in
a loft before the chance transactions of buying and selling caused it to be brought in a trunk to Genoa. The formula had been stored with other documents belonging to the Templars. Letters mainly, any objects of value having been destroyed. The Genoese merchant had known your father twenty years earlier, when they fought together in the French armies against the Habsburgs. They had remained in contact by letter and this merchant knew of your father’s interest in the history of the Order of the Temple. He therefore offered to send him the documents, not imagining for an instant what they were. As for your father, he realised immediately. We had almost reached our goal. An extraordinary meeting of the fourteen members of our Brotherhood was hastily arranged, in Rome. Alas, when he arrived in Rome, your father revealed to his travelling companion, another of our Brothers, the subject of the meeting. Only your father’s passion for the art of cryptography saved us then. In fact he only had time to encrypt the text in a code known solely to us. The very next day and one day prior to our meeting, the traitor denounced him and handed him over to Mazarin’s agents in Italy. Although abducted and taken back to France, where he was imprisoned and tortured, your father said nothing. In the end he escaped, but he left behind the coded formula which was lost for fifteen years until Providence placed you in its path.’

‘But what about the original of the formula?’ Gabriel asked.

‘He destroyed it when he realised he had been betrayed.’

The Superintendent looked away.

‘This story is the curious result of man’s desire to put everything in writing. Why did Simon Peter not destroy the papyri? I have never been able to explain to myself what held him back. If he had done so, nobody would ever have known anything …’

He sighed before continuing, an edge of tension perceptible in his voice.

‘For four centuries we have waited and patiently prepared for our chance. Fortified by the possession of the codex, even though we could not make it readable to many people, we made preparations to reveal its existence in several countries, in the hope that we would eventually recover the formula. I was chosen by my Brothers to prepare for the occasion in France. In the meantime, the revolution in England almost presented us with our opportunity. Cromwell was our man: had he not been killed by the grain of sand in his kidneys, the face of the world and our destiny would have been different. But …’

Gabriel opened his mouth but Fouquet spoke first.

‘Don’t ask me to tell you the contents of the codex now. You will have to trust me for the moment, just as I am demonstrating my trust in you by revealing to you the very existence of our secret. The plants needed for the decoction are growing in the orangery and will be ready for the transmutation process in a few weeks’ time; the location is ready too,’ he said, indicating the chateau. ‘Everything is now possible … if you place your trust in me.’

He approached Gabriel. Once again, there was a smile on his face.

‘There, Monsieur de Pontbriand; you now know half of your inheritance. You know what gave meaning to André de Pontbriand’s life. Do you want to know the other half? It will tell you how to become his son a second time.’

Gabriel smiled back at him. The men faced each other, two shapes surrounded by darkness.

‘Speak, Monsieur. You cannot reveal the nature of the Secret to me, I accept that. So tell me, what can be at stake that is important enough to persuade a son to put off avenging his father?’

‘Open your eyes, Gabriel: it is all around you. The stake is symbolised by these walls,’ he added, making a sweeping gesture towards the rooftops of Vaux as they glistened in the moonlight.

Gabriel shuddered.

‘It is almost time. Follow me.’

In silence, they left the poplar-lined avenue and walked up the hill through the trees.

‘This mound was created using the earth removed to create the chateau’s foundations,’ said Fouquet, as they emerged at the top of the hillock. ‘Look to your left, and you will understand.’

Fouquet watched him, smiling.

‘Surprising, is it not? No one but d’Orbay and I have gazed upon what you see here. This is the true vista of the Château de Vaux.’