Chapter 22

Chaos broke out and the music stopped. Cries of outrage filled the salon. Lèse-majesté! He assaulted the king’s majesty! Take him, hold him! It’s a Jesuit plot, a Huguenot plot, it’s the English! It’s the poisoner, I saw the cup! I saw a knife in his hand! Take him!

Charles lay utterly still, not daring even to speak lest the sword points pressing through his cassock and drawing warm trickles of blood under his shirt should press even harder. He had fallen with his head turned toward Lulu, and he looked through the forest of shoes and stockings for her pink-gold skirts. Then rough hands pulled him to his feet.

Guards from the vestibules held him and a hedge of sword points surrounded him, reflected candlelight running like fire along the blades. Pike-wielding guards and horrified gentlemen with drawn swords flanked the king, who was staring at the fallen cup and the wine splashed like blood across the floor. La Chaise was bent over the spilled wine, watching a fluffy white dog with red ribbons on its ears lapping eagerly at the puddle. Slowly, Louis turned his head to look at Charles.

“Regicide!” Michel Louvois, the war minister, raised his court sword from the hedging circle to Charles’s throat. “Now we know you for what you are!” His chins quivered with satisfaction. “You see, Sire! I was right about him. A Huguenot sympathizer, spreading his damnable creed at Louis le Grand, plotting—”

A deep, furious voice growled, “Don’t be a fool,” and a lace-cuffed hand shoved Louvois’s sword point away from Charles’s throat. La Reynie pushed past the war minister to the king. With a quick glance at La Chaise, he went down on one knee. “Sire, there was an attempt on your life, but not by Maître du Luc. Without him, you would be dying now. Look.”

He pointed, and a gasp went up from the royal family and others close enough to see. The fluffy white dog stood with its head down, heaving miserably. Suddenly it crumpled onto its side, shuddered, and lay still. A woman began to wail, but the others who had seen fell abruptly silent, and the frozen horror of their silence spread through the salon.

“Sweet wine, Sire,” La Reynie said softly. “Everyone close to you knows you like it. Sweet wine to cover a bitter taste.”

Only the king’s eyes moved as he looked from the dog to La Reynie to Charles. “Let the Jesuit go.” The guards took their hands away and stood at attention as Charles got slowly to his feet.

Louvois, protesting, made to secure him again, but Charles wrenched himself away.

“Sire,” Louvois pleaded, “you are not yourself; you have had a terrible shock! You cannot let this man go—everyone knows La Reynie protects him, and you might do well to discover why!”

“Not myself? I am entirely myself, Monsieur Louvois. But you forget yourself.” The royal words were full of warning. Louvois blanched and bowed.

“Find her,” the king said to La Reynie. “My men are at your service.” He raked the gathered courtiers with his eyes and left the salon, taking the speechless Polish ambassadors and the rest of his shocked entourage with him. When he was gone and everyone rose from their bows and curtsies, the courtiers edged toward the doors in their turn, chattering and staring at La Reynie and Charles as they went. La Chaise came to La Reynie. His face was the color of spoiled dough.

“What do you want me to do?” he said.

“Set whomever you can trust to watch the doors. If Montmorency shows himself, they must take him and hold him until I return.”

Nodding, La Chaise looked at Charles. “We are deeply indebted to you, Maître du Luc.”

Charles shook his head. “I was nearly too late. I failed her, I didn’t see her clearly enough. I wish—” He shrugged, out of words.

“My failure is greater than yours. At least you saw her desperation.”

He turned abruptly and went out the way the king had gone.

As he moved, Charles saw that Anne-Marie de Bourbon was standing near the wall, watching and listening. Before he could go to her, La Reynie said in his ear, “Stay near me,” and called the guard captain, who had been waiting with his men for orders.

La Reynie swiftly assigned half of them to search the chateau and its surrounding buildings for Lulu, and the other half to quarter the grounds. “I was in the balcony,” he told them. “I saw her leave by the north door. She can’t have gone far, on foot and dressed as she is. When you find her, bring her to me.”

Anne-Marie whirled and ran for the north door. Ignoring La Reynie’s order to stay close, Charles went after her. He caught her arm as she started down the terrace stairs, toward the streaming torches that marked where guards were already searching.

Charles shook the child slightly. “Where is Lulu, Your Serene Highness? We both know she left by this door.” He held out the leaf he’d picked up on the terrace earlier. “This dropped from your hair, I think, when we were talking before. I think it came from the place you found for Lulu to hide in. Did you know she planned to poison the king?”

In the light of the torch mounted on the chateau wall, Anne-Marie’s face was as white and pinched as the king’s had been. “No.” She made no effort to free herself from his grip.

“But you helped her escape.”

“Yes.” The rising wind blew her ribbons around her face as she stared unflinchingly back at him, and he realized once more that she was as determined as her grandfather, the Great Condé, had been. But unlike the Condé, she would keep her word, once given, no matter what. And she would scorn a lie.

La Reynie burst through the door. “Maître, I told you to stay near me; what are you—” He broke off, staring at the leaf on Charles’s palm. “What’s that?”

Charles nodded toward Anne-Marie, cautiously letting go of her. La Reynie bowed hastily.

“This leaf fell earlier from Her Serene Highness’s hair,” Charles said. “Like the ones we saw when she was dancing. She admits that she helped Lulu escape. I think the leaves came from the hiding place she prepared for Lulu.”

Frowning, La Reynie took the leaf from Charles and held it up to the light. “It’s hornbeam. Have you hidden her in the berceau, Your Serene Highness?” But he sounded more puzzled than triumphant. “What good will that do her?”

“She is not there,” Anne-Marie said disdainfully.

“The berceau?” Charles said in confusion. “Cradle? How could she hide in a cradle?”

“The berceau de charmille,” La Reynie said impatiently. “It’s a hornbeam arbor—more like a tunnel—that follows the Marly wall. She couldn’t hide there, not for long. But we’ll have to go and—”

“Wait,” Charles said. “Your Serene Highness, you say that Lulu isn’t in the berceau de charmille. But you went there. Someone is or was there. Who?”

She stared back at him like a statue. Until a dog began to bark in the distance and she turned toward the sound, her small face creasing with anxiety.

“That’s your Louis barking, isn’t it?” Charles listened for a moment, to be sure of his direction. “Monsieur La Reynie, does the hornbeam hedge circle the whole property?” He pointed northeast, toward the barking. “There, too?”

Catching Charles’s thought, La Reynie said, “It does.”

Charles ran down the steps. La Reynie, shouting for guards to follow them, was on his heels.

The wind drove thin clouds across the sky, but a half moon gave fitful light. The two men pounded across gravel, along paths, and straight across the planted parterres when there weren’t paths. The barking stopped, then grew louder, and Charles nearly fell over Anne-Marie’s little black dog. The dog ran around him and La Reynie in joyous circles and then back the way it had come, ears streaming in the wind. Charles raced after it, a trio of guards close behind, leaving La Reynie bent over and catching his breath. A flood of hurrying clouds quenched the moon, and Charles nearly ran facefirst into the hornbeam hedge. One of the guards held up his torch to show a manicured archway cut in the hedge a little way to their right. The guard cautiously stuck the torch through, low to the ground.

“Can’t see anyone,” he said. “But I hear the dog in there. I can’t take my torch in, the whole tunnel might burn.”

Charles went in. He could hear the dog off to his left, but he could see nothing beyond the reach of the torchlight at the entrance. Then, as the dog came running out of the green-smelling darkness, the torch flared a little in the wind and something small and bright caught Charles’s eye down where the dog had been. He went toward it, brushing his hand along the hornbeam at the level where he’d seen the thing.

Behind him, the shrubbery rustled and La Reynie caught up with him, struggling for breath. “It’s like God’s pocket in here.”

Charles suddenly felt broken branches and then empty space. “We’ve found it; she got out here, the hedge is broken. Is the wall beyond?”

“Yes.”

Charles’s fingers closed suddenly on what felt like a ribbon. From the brief torchlight glimpse he’d had of it, it was the pink-gold color of Lulu’s gown. “I’m sure she went out here. Her ribbon’s caught on the edge of the hole.”

“Anne-Marie couldn’t have made a hole this size,” La Reynie said. “I doubt even both girls could have done it together—they’d scratch themselves too badly to go unnoticed.” He told the guard who’d come in behind him to have men comb the outside of that part of the wall and quarter the ground beyond. The man ran back through the hornbeam tunnel, and Charles and La Reynie squeezed through the broken place. Gritting his teeth against the ache in his shoulder as he pulled himself up, Charles gained the top of the six-foot wall and helped La Reynie up.

Grunting and swearing, the lieutenant-général jumped heavily down into dew-wet grass on the other side. “I want to think she couldn’t get over this by herself, not in skirts. Even at her age. But that may be only my damaged dignity speaking.”

“No.” Trying to ignore what hauling La Reynie up the wall had done to his own aching shoulder, Charles was looking intently across the fields and forest sloping away before them. “She didn’t. Montmorency is here, I’m sure of it.”

Shouts made them look back along the wall. Guards with torches were running toward them.

“A horse,” the nearest one called breathlessly. “A horse was tethered a little way along there.” He jerked a thumb behind him. “Left its droppings.”

Charles and La Reynie looked at each other.

“Can you tell which way it went?” La Reynie called back.

“Toward the river, looks like.” The guard arrived, panting, his fellows at his back. “Started that way, at least.”

The guards’ faces showed avid in the torchlight, and Charles thought that this was likely more excitement than any of them had ever seen. Not only an attempt on the king, but an attempt by a royal daughter, a legitimée of France.

“Get horses,” La Reynie said curtly. “Go both ways around the Machine, down to the water.”

“Are there boats?” Charles said. “Could they find a boat there?”

“They could,” another guard said. “There’s a boat or two for inspecting the Machine. They couldn’t go downstream, there’s a dam, but they could get across to the other bank.”

“The machine that brings water from the river?” Charles said.

“That’s right. Huge thing,” the guard said, “fourteen paddle wheels pushing water up the Louveciennes hill to the aqueduct. For the fountains here at Marly, and at Versailles, too, it’s so close.”

Charles was running before the man finished talking. The moon came and went, usually going just as he needed it. The ground began to slope downhill as he entered a belt of trees and velvet darkness. He smelled the horse before he saw it and swerved at the last minute, frightening both of them.

“Lulu? Montmorency?” There was no sound but the horse’s blowing and snorting. Charles bent close and saw that it stood with its off foreleg lifted. He tried to lead it a few steps, and it nearly fell. Lamed and abandoned. Which meant that the fugitives were on foot now, too. He started running again, trying to stay upright as he slithered down an even steeper slope. Away on his right, he heard hooves and saw torches, as the mounted guards approached the river.

Charles could hear rushing water now and ran toward the sound, caroming from tree to tree in renewed moonlight, using the trunks as handholds to keep himself from plunging headlong. A great roar smote his ears as he came abruptly out of the trees and saw gleaming water ahead of him. The noise was heart-stopping. The Machine, he realized, and started downhill beside a long wooden construction higher than his head. The horsemen and torches were at the bottom of the slope on a wider pathway beside the water.

Someone reined in his horse and pointed, shouting, “There, look, there they go!”

Holding their torches high, the guards looked out at the dark mass of platforms and throbbing machinery that thrust itself like a square peninsula into the water. Charles reached the bottom of the hill and pelted across the riverside path, past the dismounting guards, who were tethering their horses and looking for a way onto the vast, multileveled Machine.

He plunged through a small door and came out on wooden planking. From its live throbbing, he guessed that it was built over churning gears and wheels. To his left, what sounded like the groaning rumble of all the mill wheels in France smote his ears. Other feet were pounding behind him now and he redoubled his speed, feeling as though his heart were about to burst out of his chest. Below him, on his right, was a long, lower level of flooring and at its end, the river, racing westward under the moon like a fat silver snake. He could see them clearly now. Montmorency jumped down to the lower wooden level, held up his arms, and caught Lulu as she jumped. They ran hand in hand along the boards toward the river end of the Machine.

“Lulu! Montmorency! Stop!” Charles’s feet pounded over the planking, which narrowed suddenly to nothing in front of him. The first of the guards was closing on him and he turned furiously. “No,” he roared, “stay back! Let me bring them in.”

It was his old battlefield voice, and it worked. The last-come guards skidded into their fellows, and they all stopped where they were. Knowing he had only moments before they followed him, Charles gathered his cassock and jumped to the lower level. Ahead of him, Lulu and Montmorency clambered over a low wooden barrier and ran to a rail where the Machine thrust farthest into the river. They stopped beside an opening that led lower still and looked over the rail. Lulu shook her head at Montmorency and darted to her right and out of Charles’s sight.

“Wait!” Charles bellowed, leaping the barrier.

Montmorency was still leaning over the rail, looking up and down the river and wailing, “There’s no boat, Lulu, you said there was a boat!” He turned, saw Charles nearly on him, and flung himself to the right, blocking the way Lulu had gone. His sword was out and leveled at Charles. “Stay back,” he shouted over the Machine’s roar. “Let us go.”

“Not into the river, you fool!”

“We’ll find another boat, stay back!” The boy’s face was grim and hard. Not a boy’s face any longer.

The guards were at Charles’s back now, their torches blotting out the moonlight. Someone tried to push him out of the way and he whirled and shoved back savagely, sending the man to the floor and only then realizing it was La Reynie.

“If they try to swim for it, they’ll drown in the currents,” Charles shouted at the lieutenant-général and the rest. “Let me talk to them.”

The guards started past him, but La Reynie yelled, “Hold where you are, give him a chance!”

Montmorency had disappeared now, too, and Charles, hands open and visible, went to the right, the way Lulu had gone, and found the pair standing together on a small piece of decking at the side of the Machine.

“Come back with me,” he pleaded over the noise. “The king will be merciful. Please, come back with me.”

“Merciful?” Lulu’s laughter was as silvery as the moonlight on the heavy ropes of pearls around her shoulders.

Montmorency had an arm around her, his sword still pointed at Charles. “We’ll marry, we’ll go somewhere else. England. Italy. Somewhere. Let us be.”

“Think! You have no boat, no horse. The king’s guards are here behind me. You cannot go anywhere from here. Come back with me and retrieve what you can for yourselves.” Charles was remembering Louis’s gray stunned face. He’d seen shock and disbelief and anger there, but not the rage that drives revenge. There’d been too much pain for that. The rage might come later, but it was a chance worth taking. “I think you won’t get worse than exile. Even you, Lulu. In exile, you’d still be alive.”

Lulu looked out over the racing water and shook her head.

“Lulu,” Charles said, “I know your secret. I’ll help you. I’ll—”

She looked over her shoulder. Her slight smile was piercingly sweet. “I’ve lived in my father’s prisons long enough. And you don’t know all my secrets.”

She stood on tiptoe, one hand resting on Montmorency’s shoulder, and kissed him. Charles took advantage of the moment to step closer. As Montmorency bristled and warned him off with his sword, Lulu pushed herself up onto the rail. Before Charles could cry out, she seemed to spread satin wings in the moonlit air, and the Machine’s roar swallowed the splash of her fall.

“Lulu!” Montmorency flung a leg over the barrier, fumbling to throw off his cloak.

Charles lunged, got both arms around him, and pulled him backward. “No! She’s gone. There’s nothing you can do!”

Montmorency struggled fiercely. “Then I’ll die with her, that’s all I want, let me go!”

They shouted the same words at each other, like responses in a hellish liturgy, until Montmorency finally stopped struggling and they wept together, huddled in the roar of the water wheels.

“Charles.” A hand gripped Charles’s shoulder. “Charles. Get up now. Come, I’ll help you.”

Blinded by tears and wondering dimly at La Reynie’s calling him by his Christian name, Charles let the lieutenant-général help him to his feet. The two of them lifted Montmorency and steadied him, one on either side.

Numbly, Charles wiped his face on his cassock skirt and, half carrying Montmorency, they made their way back to the path along the river, the guards following. Down on the bank, a huddle of men were shaking their heads and gesticulating, and looking out at the place where Lulu had gone into the water.

La Reynie saw Charles looking and said, “Those are the men who run the Machine. Can you manage Montmorency? I’ll go and see what they’re saying.”

Charles walked Montmorency slowly to the riverside path and spoke to one of the torch-carrying guards, who went for horses. La Reynie came back from talking to the Machine operators. He shook his head.

“They say the currents where she went in are too treacherous for any hope of finding her. And too strong. She’s probably been carried downriver, but she went in so close to the Machine that she could be—” He swallowed and sighed. “Come, let’s get Montmorency back to the chateau.”

The guard had brought horses for all of them. They helped Montmorency mount, but he slumped dangerously in the saddle.

“You’ll have to get up behind and steady him,” La Reynie said to Charles. “I don’t think he can ride alone.”

The guard, also mounted, led them up the slope. Charles rode with an arm around Montmorency’s waist, listening to the fading noise of the water wheels moving the river from where God had put it to where the king wanted it. The wind had died and the clouds had passed by. Charles let his head fall back and looked up at the moonlit sky powdered with faint stars, but for once, the stars failed to comfort him. His mind circled around and around a single question: Where had she gotten the poison?