A Plague of Lies (22 page)

“Yes.”

Suddenly the wary hope in her died, and she hugged herself as though something hurt. “No. I can’t. You don’t understand, you’re a man—” White-faced, she jumped up from the bench. “I must go. Come, Anne-Marie.”

She pulled the little girl up by the hand and walked away, stumbling on her petticoats in her haste. Dragged in her wake, Anne-Marie gave Charles a look so formidably displeased that he glimpsed her grandfather, the legendary Great Condé, in the tiny, twelve-year-old princess. The dog, Louis, followed them, barking and wagging. Charles watched the trio out of sight and then went on sitting, gazing at the dark, dead waters that obeyed the king and knowing he’d failed utterly.

Chapter 11

T
hat evening, Charles stood in the doorway of one of the large
salons
, watching the famed Versailles gambling. This
salon
was for cards, and in the one beyond, a lottery was in progress. Candles in tall lampstands were set along the tables, bathing the piles of coins in gold and silver aureoles. As the gamblers’ stakes changed hands, shouts of triumph and disappointment rose to the ceiling, which was painted, appropriately enough, with scenes of Fortune and her wheel. The king himself was there, strolling sedately through the room, his gentlemen following at a distance as he spoke amiably to the gamblers. La Chaise had said that the gambling tables were the only place where anyone and everyone could sit in the presence of the king, and indeed, as Louis passed through the room, no one rose. Some of the players barely noticed him, avid as they were for their games. Besides the usual lotteries, there were card games:
lansquenet
,
reversis
, and
bassette
. There was even a
hoca
board at a corner table, though the notorious game had been banned from Paris years ago, after it ruined too many citizens.

“Have you come to pray for us,
maître
?” The young Duc du Maine paused beside Charles in the wide doorway. “I could use your prayers against the Prince de Conti.”

Maine nodded toward a table farther down the room, and
Charles saw Conti lounging in a chair, gazing expressionlessly at the cards in his hands. The Grand Duchess of Tuscany sat on his left, her yellow wig clashing with her crimson bodice and slipping a little sideways as she tried shamelessly to see what he held. Across the table from them, rings flashed on the fingers of three men hunched over their cards, murmuring to each other and glancing unhappily at Conti from time to time.

“How the Prince of Conti plays so well I can never understand.” Maine smiled ruefully. “I keep thinking that I’ve watched him and learned, but I always lose. It makes Madame de Maintenon furious, but she never comes to the gambling, so I’m safe till someone tells her. Or till I have to borrow money from her to pay him back!”

Fascinated by this glimpse of royal life, Charles couldn’t help asking, “Does she lend it?”

“Usually. But with very high interest—I have to listen to long and severe lectures on my morals and my duty as a prince.” The boy’s smile was irresistibly sweet. “But if you pray for me tonight… is there a patron saint of gambling, I wonder?”

“I’ve never thought to wonder that,” Charles said, laughing. Then, wickedly, “Shall we ask Père La Chaise?” He inclined his head toward the adjoining
salon
. “He’s just there in the buffet room.”

Maine grinned. “Yes, let’s!” But then he looked suddenly down the room. “The king is coming this way,” he said urgently, and his hand went to his hat.

Louis was making straight for them—or for the door, Charles hoped. Charles stepped aside and snatched off his
bonnet
. Maine made his bow and Louis paused, his eyes resting warmly on his son. Then the king turned his gaze, so like Maine’s, on Charles, who clutched his
bonnet
as though it were a lifeline and hoped he didn’t look as hunted as he felt. There was a deep, watching
quiet about Louis that Charles found oddly disconcerting. This was not a man easily fooled.

“Père La Chaise informs me that you are persuading Our unhappy daughter to a more seemly acceptance of her duty,” the king said. “You have Our thanks.” He added, “She is at the lottery table in the next room. There is no other door from that
salon
except the one you see from here.”

Louis walked serenely on. Charles let his held breath go and looked down at his half-crushed
bonnet
. He felt as though Louis had hung Lulu around his neck.

“I esteem him above all men on earth,” Maine said, his eyes following the royal back. “But—” He sighed.

“But it is not easy being his son,” Charles hazarded.

The boy nodded feelingly. “You can have no idea. He is kindness itself to me. But still, how can one ever please a—a—well, a god, almost? A hero, at the least!”

Charles thought of all the Jesuit college ballets he’d seen in which the king was depicted as Hercules. Or Apollo or Jupiter. No, it couldn’t be easy to be Louis’s son. Or daughter. It was difficult enough being one of Louis’s anonymous subjects—and it seemed to Charles now that he was no longer anonymous.

Maine drew closer. “But do you know who I feel most sorry for? His real son, Louis. The Dauphin, I mean—he’s the one who matters, because he is legitimate and will rule after him. And our father is so constantly disappointed in him, because the poor Dauphin isn’t—well—very quick. And that disappointment has made the Dauphin terrified of most everything.”

“That’s very unfortunate,” Charles said thoughtfully, remembering what he’d heard from Conti and his coterie in the garden. A terrified king would be a gold mine of opportunity to that little coven.

“Well, I must go now and lose my pretty shirt,” Maine said,
shrugging off the realm’s future. “Unless you can discover which saint to pray to!” He smiled at Charles and went eagerly to where the Prince of Conti sat, raking a pile of gold coins called
louis
toward him.

Charles moved a little aside from the door, beyond a potted orange tree, and stood against the wall’s dark silk brocade. From there he could look for Lulu, and also watch Conti and Margot, without being much noticed. A gambling evening was not a usual place for a Jesuit, however, and he felt distinctly uncomfortable. Not because he’d never gambled. Far from it—soldiers endured long hours of boredom when not marching or fighting, and dice and cards helped to pass the time. But that was a long time ago. And the stakes he’d played for then were nothing compared to the fortunes spread out on these tables. As the candlelight from the tables lit the gamblers and their money, it threw dancing shadows into the
salon
’s corners, where Charles could easily believe that the patient specter of ruin waited for its prey.

His attention sharpened as he saw Lulu, changed now into a gown of tawny gold satin, come slowly from the lottery room and stop at Conti’s table. Her gown shone like the sun, but her face was pinched and shadowed. She leaned down to speak to Maine, her brother, who was sitting on Margot’s left. Then she sat in the empty chair on Conti’s right. Margot was frowning blackly at her cards and ignored the newcomer. Conti glanced sideways and gave Lulu an absent smile, but his real attention was all for the game. One of Lulu’s hands disappeared under the table. After a moment, Conti’s eyebrows lifted and his free hand disappeared likewise.
Well
, Charles thought,
that doesn’t look to me like resignation to Conti’s indifference.
Or perhaps Conti was only giving her a little brotherly comfort? But Charles had sisters, and a girl’s face didn’t look like that for a brother. He wondered
if the girl was trying again to persuade Conti to help her stay in France. A forlorn hope, from everything he’d seen of the man.

The play at Conti’s table went on. The prince’s hand emerged from under the table and he threw his cards down, laughing uproariously as he raked in everyone else’s coins.

“You devil!” one of the men across the table said wryly. “How do you do it, Your Highness?”

The Duc du Maine was frowning sadly at his cards, as though Madame de Maintenon’s lecture already sounded in his ears. Lulu looked quickly around the room and then flung her arms around Conti and kissed him on the cheek.

“Well done!” she cried. “What a useful stake you are gathering! With my help, of course.”

That got her a quick—and, Charles thought, hunted—look from Conti.

“My thanks, Your Highness, your beauty always brings me luck,” he said loudly and formally, for the table of players more than for her, Charles thought, and turned back to the next game.

Lulu looked as though she’d been slapped. “But you give me nothing in return.”

She stood up, knocking her chair backward onto the polished floor, and Charles glimpsed the fury he’d seen in her eyes when she looked at her father during the ball. She hovered over Conti for a moment, clearly hoping to be drawn down beside him again, but he made no move and she turned blindly away from the table. Charles moved closer to the doorway.

“
Bonsoir
, Your Highness,” he said quietly, steadying her as she nearly walked into him. She pulled her arm out of his grasp and wiped her tear-blinded eyes with the cream-colored lace of her sleeve, then brushed past him into the adjoining
salon
, where the buffet tables were set up.

He watched her go, remembering the way she’d walked away from him earlier and hating his uselessness. He hoped she would stay in the
salon
so he wouldn’t have to follow and hound her. About God or anything else.

He looked into the buffet
salon
. Most of the courtiers were still hard at their gambling, so there were only a few people around the tables. Lulu stood beside a towering pyramid of summer fruit. La Chaise, standing with the king at the other end of the room, caught Charles’s eye and nodded almost imperceptibly toward her. A wave of revulsion hit Charles, revulsion toward himself and his failure, this place, the king, the careful plans of power. He wanted to walk out of his cassock, out of his own skin, out of Versailles, and back home to Languedoc.

But Lulu was disappearing through the
salon
doors. Gritting his teeth, Charles hurried after her. Each of these
salons
opened into the next, a long chain of them. He was starting to feel like he’d spent half his life trudging across the palace galleries’ black-and-white stone floors. He’d even dreamed of their checkerboard pattern the night before, and had seen himself running desperately after something or someone, disappearing always farther into the dark in front of him.

And Lulu was disappearing now, though the
salons
in this royal center of the palace were all brightly lit. She turned suddenly through a small side door. A pair of women were coming toward Charles, and since he didn’t want to be seen going after Lulu, he stopped in pretended admiration of a painting of Diana and her nymphs, waiting for the women to pass. But they stopped, too.

“Very pretty,” one of them said. Her ivory silk skirts rustled like dead leaves as she pressed close to Charles under the pretense of looking at the painting. “How do you like Versailles,
maître
? You are not yet a priest, we understand.”

“Not yet,
madame
.” He edged away and bowed slightly, as though to let them go on their way, but they stayed where they were.

The other woman kept her distance, but looked him up and down as though considering buying him. “How long will you stay at court?”

“Not much longer,
madame
.”

“Such a change for you from your college.”

“Yes. And now I must take myself to my quarters,
mesdames
. The hours of the court are too much for a simple Jesuit.”

They shrieked with merriment. “
Simple
Jesuit? What a wit you are!”

Desperate to be rid of them and afraid he’d already lost Lulu’s trail, he walked firmly away in the direction they’d come from. To his relief, they went on toward the gambling rooms, chattering and laughing. When he glanced back, they were far enough away for him to sprint back to the half-open door Lulu had gone through. The small room beyond, lit by a pair of candles on a table in its center, was empty. A place to leave food and drink till it was needed to replenish the buffet, he guessed from the platters of cheese and pastries on the tables, and the cupboards that lined the walls. At first, he thought Lulu had vanished into the air, but then he saw yet another door in the right-hand wall.