Plague of Lies (9781101611739)

by Rock, Judith

  “He is not, he is behind you. Maître, please—”

  “I’ll be just a moment,” Charles said to the brother.

  “A moment only? Then that will be a miracle,” the brother murmured with a grin, and stepped aside.

  Mme LeClerc was already launched on her news. “—so don’t let them burn, I told Marie-Ange when I saw you from the shop just now and ran out. We are still baking, the fire went out this morning. If it’s not one thing, it’s one hundred! But I’m taking a moment to tell you, maître, but don’t think he goes there all the time—a man must have his pleasures, all of them, and who knows that better than a wife?” Her round brown eyes dropped meaningfully to her middle.

  Charles rubbed his shoulder and tried to wait patiently for the point. Mme LeClerc looked up and rolled her eyes in exasperation.

  “Tch! Do you need a little story about storks? Of course you don’t, you are a man, we know that.” She thumped her belly impatiently. “A baby! On top of everything else, my Roger has given me a baby and then what does he do, he goes off to the tavern every night with that brother who thinks he’s God’s own baker and refuses to believe that our good Seine water is better than the Gonesse water he’s always talking about, and you can take it from me it is not water those two drink at the tavern! Well, I suppose it is in a way, they call it eau de vie, but it makes me doubt even more whether he saw what he says he saw, though the truth of that the bon Dieu only knows.”

  Charles caught at what sounded like a point. “What did Monsieur LeClerc see?”

  “Hmmmph. The cobblestones in front of his nose, that’s the pig’s share of what he saw, because he fell down in the street on his way up from the river, and getting Paris mud off breeches, do you know what that takes? I am sick enough every morning without the smell of that!” She stepped closer to Charles and dropped her voice to a whisper. “He saw your Henri de Montmorency riding onto the Petit Pont and it was after ten o’clock and black dark, the tavern was closing, and what was your student doing out at such an hour?”

  She had Charles’s full attention now. “What night?” he said brusquely.

  “Thursday night, maître. And then, as you know, on Friday morning he tried to run away again and nearly ran inside my shop, but they caught him just here on the pavement. I was in the back room and we were all shouting, Roger and his brother and me, but we still heard the noise outside, the dead in their tombs in St. Étienne up the street must have heard the noise, and we went to look and saw it was this Montmorency. But my turnip-brained Roger never told me till today he’d also seen the boy on Thursday night.”

  “He’s sure it was Montmorency?” Charles said dubiously.

  “He says he is. This morning I told him I was going to the apothecary on the Petit Pont to get his specific against this sickness that’s all over Paris and—”

  “Has your household been ill?”

  “No, not yet, thanks to the apothecary’s medicine, don’t ask me what it is, it looks like mud. So when I told him I was going to get it, Roger said oh, I never told you I saw that young devil of a Montmorency riding onto the Petit Pont late Thursday night. I said of course you didn’t, you were too drunk and what would he be doing on horseback that time of night? But Paul—that’s Roger’s brother—said Roger wasn’t all that drunk and only tripped over a cobblestone when he fell on his face and there was a young man riding and Roger had told him it was Montmorency.”

  “May I speak to Monsieur LeClerc and his brother?”

  “Certainly, maître, but not today. Roger’s gone with Paul back to Gonesse, or more likely to every tavern between here and Gonesse, and left me and the apprentice and Marie-Ange to do all the work.” She crossed her arms on the little mound of her belly and looked at Charles with what he thought was probably the look Eve had given Adam when he swore that eating the apple had been all her fault.

  “Please tell him as soon as he returns that I need to speak with him, madame. My thanks for telling me what Monsieur LeClerc saw.” Charles was skeptical, though, about whether the brothers had seen Montmorency. He glanced down at Mme LeClerc’s belly and smiled. “I will pray daily for you and your new little one.”

  That brought a sharp, anxious nod. “I thank you. There have been others, besides Marie-Ange, I mean. But—” Her voice softened. “They died. Always, there are too many little bodies in the churchyards.” She cradled her belly. Then she dimpled, looking exactly like Marie-Ange. “Roger is hoping for a son. So am I. But Marie-Ange wants it to be a little horse.”

  Her laughter mingled with Charles’s and followed him back through the postern. Wondering over her story, he made his belated way to the senior student refectory, where he helped to oversee meals. As he went into the enormous high-ceilinged hall, he saw Bertamelli sitting with his dormitory mates at one of the long tables and that a harried-looking cubiculaire had taken the tutor’s place. Charles went up onto the dais, where old Père Dainville, his confessor, was presiding at the professors’ table.

  “I was assisting Père Damiot at a confraternity member’s funeral Mass, mon père. Please forgive my coming late.”

  Casting an ironic glance down the table at Damiot, already in his place, Dainville nodded mildly enough at Charles, who slipped into his own place at the table’s end.

  Damiot interrupted his talk with the Jesuit on his other side long enough to raise a questioning eyebrow at Charles.

  Charles shrugged and shook his head. “It was nothing. She only wanted to talk about seeing Montmorency apprehended outside the bakery on Friday afternoon,” he said, knowing that the rector wanted to keep Montmorency’s sins as quiet as possible. He nodded toward the table where Bertamelli sat. “Did you tell the cubiculaire to keep our Italian friend under his eye until he delivers him to the rhetoric class?”

  “I did. The poor cubiculaire is feeling very unsure of himself, so I’ll come for Bertamelli when your class is over.” Damiot raised his eyes to the faded gold stars painted on the refectory ceiling. “I pray to all the saints,” he said under his breath, “that keeping so much from His—from Père Donat doesn’t get us dismissed along with Bertamelli.”

  He went back to his talk with his other neighbor. Charles scanned the room for Henri Montmorency and was relieved to see him where he should be, sitting with his tutor. Charles ate in silence, hardly tasting the thick mutton soup with its lump of bread soaking at the bottom of the bowl, hardly hearing the buzz of voices that made the refectory sound like a giant beehive. He finished the soup and drank the last of his watered wine, looking up at the faded stars painted on the ceiling long ago. He loved the sense they gave him of sitting under God’s sky. He’d been told the stars had been there since the refectory was part of the Hôtel de Langres, the private townhouse the Jesuits had bought more than a hundred years ago, and he kept hoping the college would repaint them, but there was never enough money.

  But even the stars couldn’t stop his thoughts circling each other. His thoughts about what the Holy Innocents priest had said to him. The unlikely puzzle of Montmorency on horseback on the Petit Pont at ten o’clock at night. The oddly familiar look of the man who had barreled down the tower stairs, pushed him down on his face, and disappeared through the tangled garden. Identifying him would tell something about what Bertamelli had been doing there, but Charles could not call to mind anyone who seemed to fit.

  His shoulder’s ache hadn’t much lessened after dinner, and he asked Père Dainville’s permission to go to the infirmary for some of Frère Brunet’s ointment, saying he’d slipped and fallen on his shoulder. Brunet was not in the fathers’ infirmary on the ground floor, so Charles went upstairs to the student infirmary and came almost nose to nose with the infirmarian at the door. Brunet was standing motionless, staring straight ahead and frowning.

  “What is it, mon frère?” Charles said in surprise.

  “Hmm? Oh. I’ve forgotten where I was going! It happens more and more often. And Saint Anthony refuses to do a single thing about it,
though I pray daily. Tch! Oh, well. Do you need something? Come in.” He turned and went back inside.

  Leaving Charles openmouthed with revelation as the short, broad-backed lay brother plodded ahead of him between the rows of beds. From the back, Brunet looked exactly like the Grand Duchess of Tuscany’s short, stocky servant. It was Margot’s servant who had attacked him at the tower. But why?

  Chapter 18

  Trying to make sense out of his revelation, Charles went to his chamber for the ballet livret and then made his way through the last of the after-dinner hour’s quiet recreation in the Cour d’honneur to the rhetoric classroom. He went to the professor’s dais at the front of the long, white-walled room and put the livret on the seat of a high-backed oak chair. Experimentally moving his shoulder, which hurt less after Frère Brunet’s salve and rubbing, he walked between the rows of benches, straightening the ones pushed out of line and casting an eye along them to be sure the morning class had left nothing behind. When the college clock began to chime, he went to the classroom door, where a line of boys, watched by tutors and cubiculaires, was forming. Henri de Montmorency’s tutor was there, Montmorency was safely in the line, and Bertamelli was last, just behind him. So far, so good, Charles thought, and then saw that Montmorency was looking over his shoulder as Bertamelli whispered urgently to him. Charles and the little Italian’s cubiculaire hushed them—Montmorency’s tutor looking indolently on—and as the students came into the classroom, Bertamelli walked to his place as though tiptoeing over meringue. Jouvancy, arriving hard on Bertamelli’s heels, walked to the dais with Charles.

  ‘Welcome back to the classroom, mon père,” Charles said warmly. “You look very well.”

  “Yes, thank you, I am. And you continue to escape our plague?”

  “So far, thank all the saints. But Frère Brunet has told me that poor Charles Lennox is in the infirmary now.”

  “Terrible timing to lose him now from rehearsals! But better now than later, I suppose. If our students keep dropping like flies, how can we rehearse? We must pray none of the rest get it.” Shaking his head, the rhetoric master took his place at the lectern, Charles standing behind and a little to one side. Jouvancy swept the class with his eyes. “Rise, messieurs.”

  Everyone stood and took off their hats, and Jouvancy prayed. He gave thanks for the life of St. Aurelian, whose day it was; commended the class’s speaking, acting, and dancing to God; gave thanks for the king’s recovery and his own; prayed for the recovery of the ill, especially their classmate Charles Lennox; and nodded at everyone to sit.

  “Today we begin working harder on our August sixth tragedy and ballet performance.” Jouvancy ducked his chin, swept the room with a wholly spurious glare from under his eyebrows, and gave the class his usual dire warning about the shortness of time. “I beg you to remember that the sixth of August is less than two months away. You will have to work like Trojans to be ready! Like soldiers building fortifications! Beginning on July the seventh, all three hours of our afternoon session will be given to rehearsing. Until then, we have only the second two hours, and this first hour for classroom work. Let us begin now with whatever you have prepared for the class hour.” He turned questioningly to Charles.

  “Cicero, mon père. Recitations.” Which should hardly have needed saying, Charles thought with a mental sigh. It was nearly always Cicero.

  “Excellent.” Jouvancy smiled happily at them. “We will see now how you do.”

  The faces looking back at him registered every feeling from complacence to panic. Jouvancy divided the class in half, and he and Charles took fifteen boys each. Charles settled his group on the back benches, sat down facing them, and steeled himself to listen to them recite in turn the thirty-two parts of Cicero’s speech in defense of the poet Aulus Licinius Archias. In fact, the recitations, from memory, were not bad, Charles only correcting pronunciation here and there or supplying forgotten words. Each boy spoke twice, and then the first two spoke again, to make up the thirty-two parts. The only trouble was that Montmorency, already scarlet with embarrassment at needing Charles to supply nearly all his words, was one of those who had to speak a third time. But as he stood up, the hour bell rang and a very quiet sigh of relief whispered through the rest of the group like a breeze. With his own inner sigh of thankfulness, Charles told the students to move the benches to the side of the room and get the old costume hats they used for rehearsal. Then he went to consult with Jouvancy, who stood on the dais while his own group moved benches.

  Shining with the excitement he always brought to the beginning of rehearsals, despite his dire prognostications of chaos and disaster, Jouvancy took the tragedy script from the lectern. “I will take the Erixane cast at this end of the room, and you and Maître Beauchamps will form your usual ballet ‘stage’ at that end. What do you hope to accomplish today?”

  “I’ll complete the casting,” Charles said, taking the ballet livret from the chair where he’d left it. “And see what Monsieur Beauchamps has done while we were—”

  Charles broke off as heels rapped over the floor and Maître Pierre Beauchamps swept into the room as though onto a stage. His morose skinny servant slouched behind him, carrying the wooden case that held Beauchamps’s violin. Jouvancy and Charles went to greet Beauchamps, who made them a perfect bow.

  Since Jesuits created the ballets but didn’t teach the dances, every Jesuit college hired a dancing master from outside to prepare students for performances. Beauchamps, though, was more than a dancing master. He was probably the best dancing master in Europe and certainly the best dancing master in France, director of the Royal Academy of Dancing, dance director of the Royal Academy of Music, and Creator of the King’s Ballets. At Louis le Grand, he not only taught each ballet’s dances but often wrote and directed the ballet music. Having him as the college dancing master was like having St. Peter for the parish curé.

  “Welcome back,” the dancing master said. “I rejoice to see you in better health, Père Jouvancy.”

  “I thank you,” Jouvancy said austerely. “I trust you are well, also.”

  “Always, always.” Smiling broadly, Beauchamps turned to Charles. “I trust you enjoyed Versailles, maître?”

  Knowing that Beauchamps had spent years at court as both the king’s dancing master and fellow performer, Charles chose his words carefully. “It was certainly another world.”

  Beauchamps’s mouth quirked at one corner. “What a very politic summing up.” He stepped to the center of the room.

  “Bonjour, messieurs.” The dancing master bowed to the students.

  “Bonjour, Maître Beauchamps,” the class said in unison, and bowed in return. Then, at a nod from Jouvancy, the boys took off their scholar’s gowns and hung them on the hooks provided, since rehearsing in only their jackets, shirts, and breeches made it easier to move and easier for directors to see and correct mistakes.

  As the ballet cast marked the edges of their “stage” with old costume hats, Jouvancy reclaimed Beauchamps’s attention. “Maître du Luc will observe what you have done in our absence and approve it.” He paused fractionally. “Or not.”

  Beauchamps breathed in slowly through his nose and twitched at the ivory lace cascading from his blue coat cuffs. Jouvancy was making it more than clear that he had not forgiven Beauchamps for going to Italy in January and absenting himself from preparations for the February show that had ushered in Lent.

  “I’m sure all will go well,” Charles said quickly, restraining himself from stepping physically between the two. “Shall we begin, mon père?” With a brilliant smile at Jouvancy and without waiting for an answer, he ushered Beauchamps toward the other end of the room.

  “What a diplomat you have become,” Beauchamps murmured. “Do we owe this to your experience as a courtier?”

  “I hope not.”

  Charles called the ballet cast to order and told the boys who had already been assigned roles and were learning their dances to go over their steps in silence. Those
not yet cast, he called together at the side of the dancing space, and he and Beauchamps looked them over. Or rather, Charles looked them over. Beauchamps looked only at Bertamelli. The little Italian, guilt apparently forgotten, stood at the front of the group quivering with hope for good roles. Which he would certainly have, being the best student dancer. Like most of the others, Bertamelli would have several parts, since La France Victorieuse had no single star role but many small entrées in each Part. Unless, Charles thought wryly, the rector took Bertamelli’s roles all away when he found out about Bertamelli’s trip to the tower. No reason, though, to tell Beauchamps that, not yet.

  Seeing that Beauchamps would be no help until Bertamelli was dealt with, Charles said, “What roles do you want to give him, maître?”

  “Hmm? A pity this ballet has no star part. Though he’s too small yet to play heroes. And may always be. But, blessed Terpsichore, the talent in that small body is blinding. I’ve worked with him a great deal while you’ve been gone.” The dancing master’s eyes glowed, all his usual irony vanished. “I’ve rarely seen such a gift.” His face sobered and he sighed. “You’ll have to let him go, you know. He can’t waste himself here.”

  “I know. God made him for the stage. We’ve talked about it.” Charles had once been a very good dancer himself, and he knew what he was seeing when he watched the little Italian. “I only want him to stay with us until he’s a little older and better able to manage himself in the world.”

  Beauchamps grunted. “A little while. But not long.” He held out his hand for the ballet livret. “I had thought to give him Deceit in the first Part, Mercury and one of the Harlequins in the second, Eole, master of the winds, in the third, and one of the Furies in the fourth.”