A Plague of Lies (30 page)

“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.

Chapter 16

T
HE
F
EAST OF
S
T
. A
URELIAN
, M
ONDAY
, J
UNE
16

O
n Monday morning, Charles and Père Damiot were walking toward Holy Innocents for the funeral of their confraternity member. “Is your father better,
mon p
è
re
?” Charles thought Damiot looked as though he hadn’t slept much.

“We think so. But I’m worried about him. The physician is being grave. But they always are, aren’t they? Since the more they do, they more they’re paid.”

“True. Well, I hope this one will earn little from your father. Who has my prayers, such as they are.”

“My thanks.” Damiot smiled a little and stifled a yawn.

“And my thanks to you,” Charles said, “for interceding with Père Donat.” Extracting permission from the acting rector for Charles to go to Holy Innocents had been a near thing. “He makes me feel that he’d like to see me sent in chains to Rome and thrown into the arena,” he added, as they turned off the rue St. Denis.

“I don’t think there’s an arena anymore. And you did bring it on yourself.” He glanced at Charles. “Never wear boots if you’re going on foot to somewhere you’re not supposed to go. No one just goes for a stroll wearing boots.”

“Do I hear the voice of experience?”

Damiot smiled complacently.

“I see. Well. I am indeed fortunate,
mon père
, to have such a pious example before me. You also handled Père Donat as though you’d done it before.”

Damiot rolled his eyes. “There’s very little that doesn’t offend His Holiness. I imagine he’s offended every morning that the sun doesn’t ask his leave before rising.”

“His Holiness?” Charles wasn’t feeling in much mood to laugh, but he laughed at that. Only the pope was called His Holiness.

“Some of us call him that. But only behind very thick locked doors.”

The narrow cobbled street, sun-soaked in strong morning light and bordered by high stone walls that held the heat, almost made Charles feel that he was walking on a street in Nîmes, the town near his family’s vineyards. Here the street ran between the beginnings of Les Halles market on the left and Holy Innocents cemetery on the right. Though Charles was basking in the warmth like a lizard as he walked, he was still nearly as worried as he’d been yesterday. La Reynie had agreed to send a message ordering one of his female court spies to watch Lulu, but Charles was uncomforted. His heart was sore over Bouchel’s death, and over Lulu’s possible guilt. And over what she and Anne-Marie and the Duc du Maine must be feeling on this last day before the proxy marriage. And beyond his worry over all of them, too much was unexplained. Or perhaps he himself was only unconvinced. He felt like someone crouching in the dark after thunder, waiting for lightning. Whenever he closed his eyes, he saw Versailles’s new lake. Saw the gardener’s body lying beside it, soaked and pathetic. And saw Bouchel in his imagination, saw him dying miserable and terrified and
alone in his dark little room. Charles told himself sternly to stop dramatizing his sorrow and fear. But still, just beyond the edge of hearing—some hearing of his spirit or mind—there was thunder.