Plague of Lies cdl-3 Page 10

  He finished writing out directions for the comic entrées of Scaramouches and Harlequins in Part two of La France Victorieuse sous Louis le Grand, turned the page to Part three, and began to read Jouvancy’s most recent editing, done in the college infirmary. Charles had known there would be changes, since this third Part was called La France Victorieuse de ses Ennemis par les Armes, and his own version of the French military victories had emphasized celebrations of peace. But Jouvancy had the livret’s French Heroes trampling their foes in a manner worthy of Versailles’s painted ceilings, conquering first Spaniards, then Germans, and finally the Dutch. He stared unseeingly at the livret in his lap, trying not to remember his own experience of war. He’d seen too much death and, in the end, had found the death he’d seen-and caused-pointless. And this ballet’s drum-beating for the illusory glory of battle left him feeling as though he were mourning for the not yet dead.

  Charles let his quill rest and watched the fountain playing in front of him. The sound of the rising and falling water eased him somewhat, but his sense of calm vanished as he looked more closely at the fountain’s sculptures. On a stone island in the fountain’s center, the goddess Latona was turning angry peasants into frogs to protect her children Apollo and Diana from their wrath. The intended allegory hit Charles between the eyes. The matronly Latona would be Anne of Austria. Which made Apollo into Louis, and Diana, well, it wasn’t hard to understand Diana as Louis’s rouged and beribboned brother Philippe. And that meant the frogs were the eternal poor, always angry-usually with good cause-and perpetually baffled and defeated. So much for “blessed are the poor,” Charles thought sourly, closing his eyes.

  Someone laughed, a hot tongue licked his hand, and his eyes flew open. A small black dog was standing in front of him, wagging its ragged plume of a tail. A young woman and a little girl stood between the dog and the fountain. Charles recognized Mademoiselle de Rouen-Lulu-the king’s legitimized daughter about to be sent away to Poland, and the girl he’d seen playing ball, one of the Condé’s tiny daughters, a Doll of the Blood.

  The chestnut-haired little girl drew the dog away by its red ribbon collar. But Lulu came closer and bent toward him. The smell of tobacco and the sight of an impressive décolletage assailed him, but it was her blazing vitality that made him blink. She glittered with it and a warning instinct that he ought to get out of its path brought him to his feet.

  “Were you dreaming?” Her smile widened and she looked him up and down. “Of me? You saw me yesterday, you know.”

  Charles put the livret aside on the step, made his face a social blank, went down the two steps to her level, and removed his bonnet.

  “Your Highness,” he said tonelessly, inclining his head.

  Her blue-gray Bourbon eyes mocked him. “Or perhaps you weren’t dreaming. Only praying. Oh, dear, did I disturb your devotions?”

  “And if I said yes?”

  Slowly as a stalking cat, she closed the distance between them. The green jewels hanging from her ears and her cream and sea-green satin skirts shimmered in the sunlight. “Then I would say that perhaps you could find something more entertaining to do.” The music of her laughter vied with the fountain’s music, and the ruche of pale pink lace that edged her décolletage rose and fell. The Bourbon eyes were full of challenge. And something else that he might have called desperation if he hadn’t been too angry at her rude familiarity to care.

  “If you will excuse me, Your Highness?” He replaced his hat. “I have work I must do.” He looked beyond her for her attendants. But except for the child and the dog, she was alone, which no young woman of quality, and especially no king’s daughter, should be. He looked again at the child and saw that she was watching him gravely, her small oval face oddly knowing and resigned.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “You may go. I will stay with her. And I am not a child, I am nearly twelve, though I don’t look it.”

  “Mademoiselle,” he began, but she stopped him.

  “I am Anne-Marie de Bourbon. You must call me Your Serene Highness.”

  “I beg your pardon, Your Serene Highness.”

  Her dignity dissolved into a smile. “Well, I have to say that, don’t I? If I don’t, everyone will treat me like a child, even if I live to be a hundred years old, since I probably won’t grow any more.”

  Charles smiled back. “Very well thought, Your Serene Highness. One must keep one’s dignity at all costs. But now I certainly cannot leave, because there are two young ladies to guard.”

  “No,” Lulu said sweetly, “you cannot. So you must stay and talk with us. Besides, I know you’re not a priest, you could still decide to be-” She looked up at him through her dark eyelashes. “-a man. So why should you work so hard? You see that I know all about you, Maître du Luc. Don’t you want to know how?” Her eyes sparkled invitingly.

  “On the whole, no, Your Highness.” Charles bent to ruffle the dog’s ears.

  “Oooh!” Lulu laid a small white hand on his cassock sleeve. “I think you are afraid of me!” Her nails scratched like a cat’s as her fingers moved on his woolen sleeve.

  “Lulu!” someone called from behind her, and the dog bounded away, barking joyously. Her Serene Highness Anne-Marie picked up her blue skirts and ran after the dog.

  Lulu swore and looked over her shoulder.

  “What are you doing hiding away with Maître du Luc?” The Prince of Conti, the young man who had mocked the Jesuits’ gift in Madame de Maintenon’s antechamber, strolled lazily around the fountain toward them. “Everyone’s searching for you, my sweet Lulu. You’ll be late for dining with your handsome Poles.” He waggled his fingers at the dog, which was jumping and barking in greeting, and reached out to pull one of Anne-Marie’s brown curls. She slapped hard enough at his hand that he snatched it back and muttered something under his breath.

  Lulu’s brightness died like a doused flame, and she looked as though she might cry. “No. I won’t eat with them today. Soon enough, I’ll have no one else.” She whirled and picked up her skirts as if to run. “Come, let’s go to a traiteur in town for our dinner.”

  Anne-Marie de Bourbon shook her head in alarm. “No, Lulu, you mustn’t!” The little girl turned to Conti. “Don’t let her go.”

  Conti ignored them both and gazed limpidly at Charles.

  “So sorry to interrupt your pleasures, maître.”

  “Not pleasure, Your Serene Highness, work.” Charles doffed his bonnet to Conti with an inward sigh and every outward appearance of respect. Conti’s arrival was a chance to try to learn something for Lieutenant-Général La Reynie. Charles admitted to himself that the more he saw of Conti, the less he minded causing trouble for this arrogant young Bourbon. “I had the pleasure of seeing you yesterday in Madame de Maintenon’s antechamber, mon prince.”

  “Yes. I am surprised to see you still here. But court life always does agree with Jesuits, I believe.”

  “Does it?” Charles showed his teeth in what the prince might possibly mistake for a smile. “And does it always agree with you, Your Serene Highness?”

  Conti’s eyebrows lifted, and he seemed to really see Charles for the first time. “How could it not, when I am near my kinsman the king?”

  “How not, indeed? Royal kinsmen, of course, feel nothing but brotherly love for one another.”

  At that, Lulu burst into laughter so deep and loud that Charles thought it would have doubled her over, had her bodice not been so boned and laced. Anne-Marie only looked gravely from one speaker to the next, like someone watching a game of jeu de paume.

  But this conversational game felt to Charles more like a skirmish on the edge of battle. “You disagree?” he asked Lulu.

  Still burbling with mirth, she waved a beringed hand at Conti. “My royal father hates this dear Bourbon prince! And this dear prince is only waiting-”

  “Shut up, Lulu.” It was Conti’s turn to bare his teeth in a dangerous smile. He caught her hand. “You are shocking our good cleric. No one hate
s anyone here.”

  The girl winced and pulled her hand away, and to Charles’s surprise, her lip trembled. “You hate me,” she said.

  Conti shrugged at Charles. “Sometimes I think I will become a monk of some sort. To get away from women. They’re utterly incomprehensible. My darling Lulu, what does hating or not hating matter? You are going to Poland. I am desolate, but what can I do about it?”

  “Much, if you only would!” She gathered her skirts and fled, like some rare silvery green bird taking flight, and disappeared beyond the fountain.

  Anne-Marie and the dog followed her, and Conti rolled his eyes at Charles and strolled after the three of them. Charles replaced his hat; picked up his livret, ink, and quill; and went quickly up the steps in the other direction, with an irrational feeling-half irritation and half fear-that more Bourbons would appear in his path, no matter what direction he chose. He turned aside along a dark green hornbeam hedge, wanting to be out of sight of the fountain, and kept walking. Turning repeatedly and at random among hedges and rosy brick walls surrounding a myriad of small gardens, he kept walking until dizziness reminded him that he was still recovering from last night’s sickness. He slowed as he turned yet another corner and saw an enormous expanse of water ahead of him. It was half surrounded by piles of dirt, and two workmen were doing something at the water’s near edge. As Charles’s footsteps crunched along the gravel walk, one of them straightened and waved his arms.

  “Mon père! Come quickly-he’s dead, poor sod, and you’re needed!”

  Chapter 7

  The workman met Charles halfway, squelching water from his shoes, wiping his hands dry on his stained brown-linen coat, and still talking. “Your prayers will be worth more than mine, that’s sure!” He dropped his voice. “He looks like he drowned, but he didn’t. You’ll see what I mean. Will you stay with him, so me and my boy can go for the Guard?”

  “You’re sure the man is dead?” Charles was reluctant to encounter a second man, in just three days, dead practically at his own feet. “Who is he?”

  “Bertin. Bertin Laville.” He shook his head sadly. “My daughter’s husband. He works-worked-in the kitchen garden. Over there.” He gestured vaguely toward the palace.

  They reached the edge of the lake, where a white-faced teenage boy knelt beside a man’s prone body. The boy got up awkwardly and bowed to Charles. Charles squatted on his heels and put a hand on Bertin Laville’s sodden chest, though it was plain enough that the breath had long gone from this man. Squinting in the glare of the sun off the white gravel, he ran his eye carefully over the body and then gently turned Laville’s head to one side. Charles took off his bonnet, held it to block some of the sun’s glare, and parted the man’s dripping dark hair at the crown.

  “So. You see,” the elder workman said.

  Charles winced as his fingers found the jagged-edged circle of bone and felt lightly at the sickening hollow inside the circle. Dropping his hat beside the body, he cupped the ruined skull in his hands as though he could still protect it and said a quick silent prayer. When he crossed himself and stood up, the workmen hastily crossed themselves, too.

  “Shall we go for the Guard now, mon père?” the older one said.

  “In a moment. When did you last see your son-in-law?”

  “Me? Not since yesterday. Sometimes he helped in this part of the gardens, but I didn’t see him today.” The speaker jerked his head at the boy. “Nor did my son.”

  “May I know your names?” Charles said. “I am Maître Charles du Luc.”

  “Me, I’m Jean Prudhomme. Gardener. My boy is Jacques.”

  “Who might have wanted to kill your son-in-law, Monsieur Prudhomme?”

  The father gave his son a warning look, and they both shrugged.

  Charles opened his mouth to say he would pray for the dead man. Instead, he heard himself say, “Was there any talk about Bertin? Did he dice? Run after women?”

  The boy looked up, but his father’s heavy hand descended on his shoulder and he looked down again.

  Prudhomme eyed Charles. “Why are you asking? He’s the Guard’s business now.”

  “Not that they’ll do much,” the boy muttered at the ground.

  Why do I want to know? Charles asked himself wearily. The obvious answer was that he was religious and the man had a soul about which he had to care. And did care. In truth, though, he would rather not care about this unknown peasant beyond a few prayers. He wanted no more barriers in the way of his going home. Though if this turned out to be no more than a peasants’ quarrel over money or women, the Guard would do less than if a man of quality had been found dead in the royal precincts.

  Charles said, “Your son-in-law was a man, and he’s dead. Without chance to be shriven. And with the rest of his life stolen from him. And from his wife. So if you know something…”

  The gardener’s seamed, sunburned face went still and watchful. His deep-set black eyes were as opaque as a raven’s, and Charles had the feeling that this man could wait as enduringly as a tree in the garden, if he had to. Young Jacques opened his mouth, but his father’s look made him shut it again. The shadows at their feet had shifted a hair’s breadth or two before Prudhomme finally said, “There were women, yes.”

  “Other men’s women?”

  “Maybe.” The gardener sighed. “My daughter just gave birth. You know-or maybe you don’t-what men do when their wives are breeding.”

  “Whose woman did he poach?”

  That got only another long raven’s stare.

  “Well, if you will go for the Guard, I will stay with the body.”

  Taking his son with him, Prudhomme trudged toward the palace. Charles knelt beside the body again and studied the battered skull. The wound seemed too rounded to have been made by a shovel. A large stone, perhaps, though the grounds were too manicured for stray stones large enough to be lying ready for use. He rose to his feet and scanned the nearest brick wall around one of the small formal gardens. The wall was intact, and a brick wasn’t rounded enough, anyway.

  Exasperated with himself for going after answers like a dog after the scent of deer, Charles turned his back determinedly on the wall and the dead man. He was never going to know what-or who-had killed Bertin Laville, because he and Jouvancy were leaving. Tomorrow, please God. He watched occasional chattering tourists cross the opening of the path he’d come down, until he realized that he was also watching for a sea-green gown and the king’s alarming daughter. And that if he saw her, he was going to flee in the opposite direction and leave the dead man to take his chances. Coward, he told himself, and knelt again, shut his eyes, and prayed determinedly for Bertin Laville’s violently ejected soul.

  “So now you’ve found a drowned rat.”

  Charles’s eyes flew open, and what the Prince of Conti saw in them made him compose his grinning face a little.

  “So sorry to interrupt your prayers. I returned our dear Lulu to her ladies and decided to follow your admirable example and take a healthful stroll.” He smiled down at Charles. “By all means, go on praying.” He widened his eyes facetiously. “Why not pray for a miracle? I’ve always wanted to see one. Especially a resurrection. Even a peasant’s would be remarkable. Oh, make no mistake-my desire to see a miracle is not from any special holiness of mine, I assure you. As Père La Chaise would also assure you. But you Jesuits exist to help souls, do you not? Here am I at your disposal, a soul greatly in need of the convincing help of a miracle!” Conti threw his arms wide, displaying his coat’s deep braided cuffs and sparkling buttons.

  Charles had picked up his hat-unpleasantly wet now from the water around the body-had put it on, and was standing between Conti and the dead man, instinctively blocking Conti’s view of the broken skull. He was also badly wanting to smack the face of this Prince of the Blood for making light of death.

  “Your Serene Highness, the dead man’s soul is in far more need of help than yours. And though a Jesuit, I am not a priest. Of your courtesy, will you go
for a priest?”

  Conti’s mirth vanished. “Find a servant.” He looked coldly at Charles. “Or, better yet-and perhaps suiting your quality-run your own errands.”

  Charles produced a smile as charming as Conti’s had been and even more insincere. “Ah, how could I be so naive as to think that death takes precedence over precedence itself?” He swept off his wet hat, snapping his wrist to make sure the hat sprayed water on the fine fall of lace down the front of Conti’s coat.

  There was a tense silence. Then, to Charles’s surprise, Conti laughed uproariously.

  “Well. You are surprising. Touché.” He eyed Charles with new and disconcerting interest.

  His dark eyes wandered appreciatively over Charles’s face and then shifted beyond Charles to what he could see of the dead man. “No point in hiding him from me, you know. Everyone will know everything about him by supper. A workman, by his clothes. They died like flies when the place was being built. I suppose this one took a glass too much at the tavern and fell into Louis’s nice new lake?” He walked around Charles. “Oh, oh.” He prodded the corpse’s head with his stick. “Not drowned, then. Yes, you do need the Guard. Though that may not be all you need.” His dark eyes lingered on Charles’s face for a moment, and then he strolled away.