Chapter 15

FRIDAY NIGHT INTO THE FEAST OF ST. ELISÉE,
SATURDAY, JUNE 14, 1687

THE FEAST OF ST. VITUS, SUNDAY, JUNE 15, 1687

Dumbfounded, Charles turned the roughly stitched pages. Except for the flourished name, the script was cramped and hard to decipher. Charles stood at the window trying to read it until the light failed. He lit his candle and kept on reading until the wick was consumed and the flame guttered out. Then he lay awake, wondering who had put the mémoire in his bag. His first guess was the Duc du Maine. Maine had taken Lulu’s silver tobacco box from Fleury’s room and could easily have taken the journal. The journal might even have been the true object of Maine’s search on Lulu’s behalf, the night Charles had talked to him in the gallery corridor. But the boy seemed to Charles like someone who would mostly shut his eyes to trouble. So if Maine had not gone to La Chaise’s rooms while the Jesuits were out and put Fleury’s book in the saddlebag, who had?

The first part of the mémoire was a conventional, self-aggrandizing account of the Comte’s public and military life, and the name-dropping included only other men, most far better known than Fleury. But the second part was another matter. It began innocuously enough, with comments on court happenings. But it soon degenerated into Fleury’s highly colored and self-congratulatory record of lecherous escapades with maidservants. There was also an account of his violent pursuit of a female courtier whom he called simply Venus, including a tale of buying a magical powder guaranteed to make Venus throw herself into his arms. Then came page after malicious page recounting his fellow courtiers’ alleged peccadillos, none of which the said courtiers would want known—or even suggested.

Lulu and her misdeeds figured largely in it. Fleury wrote salaciously of catching her wading bare-legged, skirts to her knees, in the Latona fountain, of seeing her in the arms of the Prince of Conti in a gallery arcade, of watching her climb onto the roof of the palace and sit singing at the top of her voice, until the king sent two of his gentlemen out onto the roof to bring her in. He wrote indignantly that she’d cursed and thrown her silver tobacco box at him when he scolded her for smoking her little clay pipe. He gloated over keeping the box. To punish her, he said, but from a few entries about expenses and furious envy of a rich nephew, Charles suspected that Fleury had meant to sell the little box.

But the worst was that one day late in April, so Fleury claimed, he’d been walking in the gardens, near the Grotto of Persephone, an imitation classical temple with an underground chamber pretending to be the door to the spring goddess’s underworld. He’d stopped to talk to a gardener trimming a yew hedge. They’d both seen the handsome young footman Bouchel come out of the little temple, but Bouchel hadn’t seen them. Then Fleury and the gardener were “rewarded,” as Fleury put it, by “the sight of lovely Persephone herself, Mademoiselle de Rouen, coming languidly from the temple, rosy and smiling.”

When Charles finally shut the book and went to bed, he lay sleepless, going over and over what he’d read. The night was warm, and he threw back his blanket and pushed up the sleeves of his long linen shirt. Considering the source of the story, it might not even be true. But if it were true, and if the unnamed gardener had been Bertin Laville, it could explain the gardener’s death and the money his wife had found in the house after he died. If the gardener had seen Bouchel and Lulu come out of the grotto, he might have tried to blackmail the footman. Charles found it hard to think of Bouchel as a killer, but he could imagine him killing to protect Lulu.

Charles turned over and punched his pillow into a better shape. But if Bertin Laville saw Bouchel and Lulu come out of the grotto in April, why wait till June to blackmail Bouchel?

The college clock chimed midnight. Charles went over what the little Condé girl had told him about the argument overheard between Bouchel and Lulu. Anne-Marie had said that Lulu told the footman that he had to help her. And that Bouchel had pleaded—near tears, the child had said—that he’d already done what he could and that he had no money. And that Lulu had run weeping into the corridor, threatening to kill herself. With a sinking heart, Charles stared up into the darkness, seeing Lulu’s pale face and darkly shadowed eyes, and thinking about her frenetic and changeable moods. He sat up in bed. Women shout more at men when they’re expecting babies, Marie-Ange had confided just hours ago, when she told him her mother was pregnant. And Anne-Marie had told him not to make Lulu run, because Lulu had been feeling ill. Charles got out of bed and went to the open window.

Two and half months since Lulu and Bouchel were seen leaving the grotto. And Bertin Laville would know the signs of pregnancy, Charles realized suddenly. The stable boy at Versailles had said that Laville’s wife had just had a child. A gardener might easily see a girl hiding in the garden to be sick without witnesses. Seeing unmistakable signs of a princess’s secret pregnancy was a blackmailer’s dream. And if Lulu were pregnant, she had every reason to feel desperate over going to Poland. She could not possibly attribute a baby to a ten-year-old husband.

Charles’s mind stopped short and backed up. If this was all true, then what about Fleury’s death? Bouchel had been there when the old man fell downstairs. Had Bouchel pushed him, then, in the hope of being rid of the other witness at the grotto? Bouchel had said that Fleury slipped in water, and Charles had seen the wet patch on the floor when he went up to find Fleury’s room. And Lulu hadn’t had Fleury’s journal till later that night. So when the Comte fell, Bouchel might not even have known that he and Lulu had been seen leaving the grotto back in April.

Marching feet echoed along the rue St. Jacques and Charles saw that the night watch was returning from the river, a formidable phalanx of striding men, their swinging lantern striking flares of silver and gold from the stars and fleur de lys on the shoulder straps that held their swords. They passed by and went on up the hill, leaving the city drowned again in quiet and nearly invisible in the dark. In summer, the street lanterns stayed unlit, but even if they’d been lit, their candles would be nearly burned out by now. A breeze came up from the Seine and cooled Charles’s face. He looked up at the sky and its thickly burning stars. Was Lulu really desperate enough to kill herself? The thought made Charles half sick. If he did nothing with what he suspected, and if she committed suicide, part of the guilt would be his. For her death and the child’s. If there was a child.

He could tell the rector what he’d read and Le Picart could send word to La Chaise. Or he could tell La Reynie. But would they agree with his deductions? If they did, how long would it take them to move from talking to acting? It took only a moment to die. Charles suddenly wanted to ride to Versailles and take Lulu somewhere safe, out of the king’s reach. Someplace where she would have a chance to simply live. He lost himself in a moment’s fantasy of taking her to Languedoc, to his mother, where she could be just a girl and wade in the Gard River as she’d waded in the palace fountain, and harvest olives. A girl with a new name. And perhaps a baby. But free…

A pretty fable, the coldly logical part of him said. It rivals the fables of Monsieur de La Fontaine. Lulu harvesting olives? She would cling to her royal living like a leech. Shrugging off the probable truth of that, Charles said back, I’m afraid for her life. And you’re heartless; shut up. The voice didn’t. Besides, it said, who is free?

Charles leaned on the windowsill. “What am I to do?” he whispered.

The stars shifted a little, the breeze from the Seine died, and the darkness wrapped itself around him like black velvet. The air itself seemed to tense and quiver. He waited, every sense quivering. Slowly, breath by breath, the quiet deepened into the Silence that sometimes visited him. He didn’t dare to name it. But it spoke to him from the deepest place in his love of God. Charles, it said, and it was the first time it had called him by name. Who are you? And that was all.

Charles finally slept, but when he woke, the Silence’s question still echoed in him like soft thunder. After the early morning Mass, he went looking for Père Le Picart, only to learn that the rector had gone to the Jesuit house at Gentilly, along with the rectors of the Novice House and the Professed House, to meet with the Paris Provincial, the Society’s chief official in the Île de France, and would not return until Monday morning. Père Montville, the college’s second in command, had gone with him, leaving only Père Donat, the third-ranking administrator. Donat disliked and distrusted Charles and was unlikely to listen to anything he had to say, let alone act on it. He would probably order him to do nothing, which would make whatever Charles ended up doing worse disobedience than it was already likely to be.

All Saturday morning as he assisted in his assigned grammar class and then helped oversee dinner in the senior student refectory, he tried to make up his mind. He was hoping to ask advice from his friend Père Damiot, but Damiot wasn’t at dinner. The meal ended, Charles made sure that Henri de Montmorency’s tutor took his charge back to their chamber, and then he went to Damiot’s room, across the passage from his own. But Damiot wasn’t there, either. Charles went down to the postern to ask the porter if Damiot had gone out. Frère Martin, an elderly lay brother settled comfortably on a stool beside the door, nodded portentously.

“He did, maître. His father’s ill again and Madame Damiot sent for him early this morning. To the Pont Notre Dame, that’s where they live. No knowing when he’ll be back.”

“Is it this sickness everyone’s been having?”

“No, and better if it were, poor man. Pains in the heart, Père Damiot said.” Martin clapped a meaty hand over his own chest and held up his rosary. “So I’m saying my beads and calling on the Sacred Heart for him.”

Charles sighed. “I will pray for Monsieur Damiot, too.”

The sense of urgency snapping at his heels drove him to the alcove in the grand salon, where paper, ink, and quills were kept. No scholastic was authorized to send notes on his own, but Charles wrote to La Chaise at the Professed House and went in search of a lay brother to carry what he’d written. If trouble came of it, he would make sure it fell only on himself. He gave the note to a brother who was too new to question him and saw him off, praying that La Chaise was in fact back at the Professed House. He wouldn’t be, if the king was still ill, but sending a lay brother all the way to Versailles was out of the question.

Feeling that he’d at least done something, Charles went back to his rooms to finish the ballet livret, writing with half his mind and one ear cocked toward the door. When the knock came, the brother who’d taken the message told him that La Chaise was still at Versailles. But the Professed House rector, Père Pinette, had agreed to send the note on the next time he sent something to Versailles. Charles thanked the brother, shut the door, and felt his sense of urgency becoming panic. It took so little time to let the life out of a body. He’d been a soldier, a scout, a spy in enemy camps, he knew exactly how little. One moment a man was breathing. The next moment he was not.

He went to his desk and wrote a note to Lieutenant-Général La Reynie at the Châtelet. He still needed to make his report to La Reynie about the little he’d learned of the Prince of Conti, though that did not make sending the note any more permissible. He gave it to the brother who’d taken the other note, then doggedly returned to work on the livret. This time, when the knock came on his door, the brother told him that La Reynie, too, was in Versailles. No one knew when he would be back. They’d kept the note, though, to give him as soon as he returned.

Charles tried to feel relieved that La Reynie was at Versailles. But La Reynie was probably there because of the Prince of Conti. He had no reason to pay attention to Lulu. But what else can I do? Charles asked the air. He couldn’t walk out of the college and go to Versailles himself. Even Père Le Picart would not save him if he did that. It would be the end of him as a Jesuit. But suicide would be damnation for Lulu.

Charles put on his boots. And discovered, when he got to the stables, what he should have realized—the college had only two horses now, Flamme and Agneau, and the rector and Montville had taken them both to Gentilly. Agreeing completely with the part of himself shouting in his head that he was being an idiot, that he was ruining his life, he walked purposefully out of the stable gate. He had nearly reached the end of the lane and the street that came up from the rue St. Jacques when he came face to face with Père Donat.

Donat, walking with another Jesuit Charles didn’t know, folded his big hands across his paunch like a man contemplating a long-awaited dinner. “Where are you going, Maître du Luc?”

The other man, small and wiry and bright-eyed, was gazing at Charles’s feet.

“Forgive me, mon père.” Charles held Donat’s gaze and prayed to St. Homobonus, the patron of tailors, to miraculously lengthen his cassock and hide his boots. Or at least to keep the other Jesuit from mentioning them. “I was restless and came to walk in the lane,” Charles said. Which was true, as far as it went.

Donat’s smile widened. “In boots, for such a short walk?”

“Yes, mon père.”

“Go back to your chamber.”

“Yes, mon père.”

Charles went back through the gate, feeling their eyes on him and hearing their hissing whispers behind him. In his room, he flung himself down at his prie-dieu. He prayed for Lulu’s safety and the grace to know what he should do—or not do. When he ran out of words and pleas and bargains, he stayed there, his face in his hands, as the evening light filled his room and drained away.

The next morning, after Sunday’s High Mass, Charles sat under a lime tree in the Cour d’honneur, where a group of older boys was gathering for a walk to Montmartre, to the chapel where St. Ignatius and his friends had vowed their service to God and companionship to one another. While the group waited for its accompanying professors, two of Charles’s rhetoric students were telling him about a game of jeu de paume they’d played. Walter Connor had been one of the tennis players, and Armand Beauclaire, just out of the infirmary, had watched and kept score. As Charles listened, he watched a falcon fly from its perch on the pointed roof of a tower and wished he could come and go as easily and as unseen. No wonder your little talks with Lulu about acceptance of her marriage had so little effect, his ruthless inner voice commented. You still can’t accept your vow of obedience after—what is it now, eight years since you entered the Society?

Charles dredged up a smile for the two boys, who had reached the high point of their tennis story.

“Excellent, I’m glad to hear it! Where did you play?”

“In a court near the Pré aux Clercs,” Connor said. Jesuit students were sometimes taken for recreation to the Scholars’ Meadow, west of Louis le Grand, on the riverbank, where Latin Quarter students had held games for time out of mind.

“Saint Ignatius went there for recreation when he studied in Paris,” Charles said.

Connor laughed. “Can you imagine Saint Ignatius with his scholar’s gown off, wrestling in the grass? Or running after a football?”

“No!” Beauclaire looked scandalized. “Saints don’t—” He fell silent, looking toward the passage through the main building to the postern door.

Charles looked, too, and jumped to his feet with a cry of relief. Lieutenant-Général La Reynie was striding into the court.

“Join your fellows, now,” Charles told the boys. “I have some business to attend to.”

With sideways looks at La Reynie, Beauclaire and Connor withdrew.

“Maître.” La Reynie bowed slightly, his long dark wig swinging a little forward on his shoulders. His face was tired and harassed, his midnight-blue coat and breeches were dusty, and the lace frothing at neck and cuffs had lost its starch. “I asked to see the rector for permission to talk with you, but the porter said he’s not here.” A smile twitched at La Reynie’s mouth. “He said I could see Père Donat, but I had the feeling he wasn’t recommending it.”

With a glance at the main building, where Donat’s office was, Charles shook his head. “No, Frère Martin wouldn’t recommend anyone seeing Père Donat. Who would probably refuse anyone’s request to see me. Let’s—”

“Why? What have you done now?”

“He doesn’t like me. And if he sees you he’ll turn you out. Come, we can—”

The main building’s back door flew open and Père Donat emerged, making narrow-eyed for Charles, like a gundog after a shot bird.

“Hell’s shit!” Charles muttered, and got a shocked look from La Reynie. “It’s Donat. Use your rank. He likes rank.”

“Fat little flies like honey better,” the lieutenant-général murmured. He bowed to Donat, who gave him a curt nod and pointed a triumphant finger at Charles.

“No visitors without permission, Maître du Luc.”

Charles stretched his mouth in what looked like a smile. “This is Lieutenant-Général Nicolas de La Reynie, mon père.”

“And I know that you are Père Donat,” La Reynie said fulsomely. “I was on the point of seeking your permission for a brief talk with your scholastic. Concerning something he happened to see at Versailles. If there is somewhere private I may speak with him? I won’t keep him long, but be assured his help will reflect well on the Society of Jesus. The king will certainly hear of it.”

“Ah. Well.” Donat eyed La Reynie. “I see. Then make him tell whatever he knows.” He looked down his short nose at Charles. “See that you cooperate, maître. Come to me when he finishes with you.”

“If I may beg your indulgence, mon père,” La Reynie said smoothly, “my orders are that he may not speak with anyone about our conversation. It will be better if he does not come to you. So he won’t be tempted.”

Donat took a moment to rearrange that to his advantage. “True, he is known to be vulnerable to temptation. Return to your chamber, maître, when you have told Monsieur La Reynie what he wishes to know. Speak of it to no one else, as he has ordered you.”

“Yes, mon père,” Charles said gravely. “Shall I take him to the library garden? That is likely to be private.”

“Very well.” Donat inclined his head regally to La Reynie and bustled back to his office. “Dear God,” La Reynie murmured, following Charles toward the archway to the neighboring courtyard. “When does Père Le Picart return?”

“Not soon enough.” They passed under the arch, and to keep himself from asking about Lulu before they reached the garden, Charles said, “Did you see the king? Is he better?”

“Much better. Though still a little weak. His doctors say now that it was the illness everyone’s been having, but a mild case of it. I came because I got your message, but I would have come anyway, knowing you had returned. I hope you sent for me to pass on what you learned at Versailles of the Prince of Conti.”

“I doubt I learned much you don’t already know.” As they walked, Charles quickly recounted what he’d seen and heard about Conti, ending with what La Chaise had said about the man.

“So he, too, thinks Conti is working against the king,” La Reynie said. “Well, that’s something.”

They crossed a stretch of turf toward a little garden, walled on two sides and looking toward the new library. When they reached it, they sat down on a stone bench beside the college’s struggling grapevine. Charles turned to face La Reynie.

“Before I tell you the real reason I sent for you, will you tell me why you were at Versailles?”

Le Reynie looked at him in surprise. “I was called there because of a death.”

“A death?” Charles could barely force his voice through his throat.

“One of my spies found the body. But you haven’t said—”

“Oh, no. Blessed Virgin. How did she do it?” Charles pressed his clasped hands to his mouth and steeled himself to hear the answer.

“She?” La Reynie took Charles’s wrist in a grip like a wrestler’s. His dark eyes were cold with anger. “What do you know about this? You know who killed him? Was it a woman?”

“Him?” Charles felt some of the tension go out of his body. “I was afraid it was Mademoiselle de Rouen who was dead. The king’s daughter.”

“Why, in God’s name?”

“Because she’s—I think she’s in great trouble. I’ve been afraid she might try to kill herself.”

“Again—why?”

“I’ll tell you. But first tell me who the dead man is.”

“A palace footman called Bouchel. He was poisoned. They found him dead in his room in the palace.”

Charles felt as though he’d been kicked in the belly. “Bouchel?” Bouchel poisoning old Fleury, or pushing him down the stairs—that he could imagine, indeed, had already imagined. But who would poison Bouchel? “But Monsieur La Reynie, he may have been simply ill. People at court have had the same sickness we’ve had here.”

La Reynie shrugged. “There was an autopsy. The doctors think he was given inheritance powder, judging from how sick he’d been. You know what that is?”

“Arsenic?”

“Mixed with aconite, belladonna, and opium. They think the Comte de Fleury, who died when you were there, had been given the same thing.”

“I know. But Bouchel—it doesn’t make sense!” Unless, Charles thought suddenly, one of Bertin Laville’s relatives suspected that Bouchel had killed Bertin. But poison seemed an unlikely, and expensive, weapon for a gardener’s family. Charles tried to ignore the taunts from his acid inner voice—trying not to think of the most obvious person, aren’t you? Lulu could afford a little poison.

“Another man died while we there,” Charles said slowly. “As you no doubt know. A gardener, Bertin Laville.”

“And?”

“I think Bouchel may have killed him. To protect Mademoiselle de Rouen. Bertin Laville’s family might try for vengeance.”

La Reynie looked at Charles as though he’d gone mad. “Why would a footman kill a gardener to protect Mademoiselle de Rouen?”

“It’s a long story.”

“Make it a short one. I have little time.”

Charles told him what had happened at court, what he’d read in Fleury’s mémoire, and what he’d made of it. “So if the Comte de Fleury was telling the truth about seeing Bouchel and Lulu come out of the grotto, and if the gardener who also saw them was Bertin Laville, then Bouchel had plenty of reason to kill Laville.”

“And Fleury.”

“I thought of that. But Bouchel might not have known then that Fleury had also seen them. And it’s possible Fleury’s fall was an accident. There really was water running over the floor from a ceiling leak. I looked.”

“That’s not conclusive.”

“No. But even if Bouchel killed both Fleury and Laville, he’s dead now himself. His killer is not.”

La Reynie looked as though he might not mind if someone poisoned Charles. “So you are telling me that the king’s daughter is probably illicitly pregnant.” His voice was dangerously level and full of reason. “By a footman. A footman at whom she was presumably very angry, and who has since been poisoned. Which means, if you are right in your ungodly number of assumptions, that the king’s daughter has quite likely committed murder.”

“Possibly. Though I still think she’s more likely to kill herself. What are you going to do?”

La Reynie hurled his silver-headed stick at the ground and turned the color of a ripe strawberry. “Nothing! Are you mad? Bouchel was probably a murderer. The girl is the king’s daughter. And she is on the point of leaving for Poland. Where she will be the Polish court’s problem. The marriage negotiations are finished and there is a grand ball celebrating their completion tomorrow night at the palace of Marly. Do you know it? Very near Versailles, but smaller. The king likes to celebrate family occasions there. On Tuesday morning, she marries her prince there by proxy—the senior ambassador is the stand-in—and sets out for Poland. Thank God and every saint there is.”

“But if she’s with child,” Charles said doggedly, “what will happen to her? And the child? The Poles might quietly kill her for dishonoring them.”

“That’s ridiculous. The Polish queen is French!”

“The Polish king is Polish. Who knows what their customs are? If Lulu murdered Bouchel and dies unconfessed and unabsolved—whenever she dies—she’s damned. And if she takes her life before she goes, she’s doubly damned. If we do nothing, her death will be on your head as well as mine. Do you want that?”

La Reynie glared balefully at Charles. “So now you’re my confessor? I cannot go to the king with this tale about his daughter and a footman. We don’t even know if it’s true.”

“Someone was worried enough about it to put the mémoire in my bag. And someone killed Bouchel.”

La Reynie looked as though he might weep. “Where would the king’s daughter get poison? I heard she’s been watched every minute at Versailles ever since her betrothal.”

“Well, the court seems to assume that everyone has poison at their fingertips. I also know that when you had the great poison affair here in Paris some years back, you discovered that Lulu’s mother, La Montespan, had poison to hand.”

La Reynie looked away. “I thought you liked Mademoiselle de Rouen.”

“I do like her,” Charles said sadly.