“This is Monsieur Neuville, one of the king’s physicians,” La Chaise said, and drew back. The doctor nodded slightly at Charles and went to the bedside. The rhetoric master let go of Charles and reached for the doctor, who drew himself back and out of reach.
“Urine, mon père?” he said abruptly to Jouvancy.
Jouvancy eyed him sourly. “I doubt there’s anything left in me to make water with, monsieur.”
The doctor grunted and held out his hand to the assistant with the basin. The man handed him the cord, Charles brought a chair from La Chaise’s chamber, and the doctor sat down beside the bed.
“Have you been bled this spring?” Neuville asked, tying the stout cord tightly around Jouvancy’s upper arm. When the rhetoric master shook his head, the doctor said, “Then we’ll hope that’s your trouble.” He picked up the lancet. “Though I doubt it.”
“He’s been very ill, monsieur,” Charles put in, “with the sickness we’ve had in Paris these last weeks. I think the effort of riding from town brought on a relapse.”
Neuville ignored that, and Charles turned away as the rhetoric master’s blood spurted from an incision near his elbow into the basin the servant held. Charles wondered if he had caught Jouvancy’s sickness. He was usually unfazed by blood, but now his stomach was climbing toward his throat. Muttering his excuses, he fled toward the privy.
As he returned, weak but eased, the footman passed him in the antechamber with the basin full of Jouvancy’s blood. Charles held the door for him and then stopped to wipe his face with a wet towel lying on the water reservoir. Neuville and La Chaise were talking in the chamber.
“I doubt this will be enough,” he heard the doctor say.
Charles threw down the towel and hurried into the chamber. “Why not, monsieur?”
Both men frowned at his interruption.
“Because this isn’t sickness,” Neuville said. He looked over his shoulder and lowered his voice. “I saw them,” he hissed. “Saw her-deep in talk with the Duc de La Rochefoucauld. That was the day before yesterday. Yesterday Monsieur Fleury ate at La Rochefoucauld’s table. And died. Today you Jesuits ate at his table. And at least two of you are ill.”
“Not two,” Charles said, “only Père-”
“No? You just returned from spewing in the privy.”
La Chaise looked at Charles in surprise. “Did you?”
“Yes, mon père, but I am not ill. Only a little unsettled. And I learned from the footman Bouchel that the floor outside Fleury’s room was wet from a ceiling leak. Which is probably why he fell.”
“And which has nothing to do with why he was ill to begin with. You should both be bled,” Neuville said grimly. “Now. Before the poison takes more hold. And the other two as well. Where are they?”
“I am not in the least ill, and neither are our other companions,” La Chaise snapped. “You overreach yourself, monsieur.”
“Then why did you come for me? You know it is poison, and you know you will be ill.” Charles heard more than a little satisfaction in the doctor’s tone. “And then perhaps you’ll come to your senses and let me bleed you before it’s too late.” Neuville’s scarlet embroidery rippled and glowed in the afternoon sunlight as he bowed to La Chaise. “Because she really does hate you.”
Neuville withdrew, the assistant marching behind him, and left La Chaise and Charles staring in horror at each other.
“He’s obsessed with poison. Like everyone else here,” La Chaise said, seeming to have forgotten his own earlier fears.
“But you thought it might be poison, too, mon père.”
La Chaise sighed gustily. “I did. It’s the normal thing to fear here. But fear clouds reason, and aside from where we ate, there’s no connection at all between us and the Comte de Fleury. Why poison any of us?” But La Chaise’s worried face belied his words. “I am going to pray that the man was only ill with this stomach sickness Jouvancy and so many have had, and that he met with an unfortunate-unrelated-accident.” La Chaise crossed his arms and stared at Charles as though daring him to contradict. “But until we know what the truth is, we’ll eat only what the footman brings and what we cook at my fire.”
Moans from the curtained bed put an urgent end to their talk. The hours that followed had the evil tinge of nightmare, as the doctor’s predictions that the bleeding wasn’t enough began coming all too true. La Chaise sent for extra chamber pots, and for Le Picart and Montville, who helped lift and sponge Jouvancy. By the time the rhetoric master slept again, it was nearly dark. La Chaise’s face had gone from pale to green-tinged, but he insisted that he and Charles could manage and sent Le Picart and Montville to supper in one of the Grand Commons refectories across the road. Almost as soon as they left, La Chaise clapped his hand over his mouth and vanished into the gallery.
By midnight, La Chaise had been sick half a dozen times, as had Charles, who was vying with him for the privy’s use. Between sprints down the gallery, Charles asked if they should send for Neuville again.
“He’d probably give us the antimony cup, and our purging is already hellishly efficient. At least mine is. And he’d bleed us. Is your stomach up to watching your own blood run? Mine is most certainly not.” He pushed hastily past Charles to the chamber’s outer door.
“At least there would be a basin handy,” Charles muttered, and tottered to the other chamber to collapse on his bed in the narrow alcove.
He woke, feeling better, what seemed like hours later. A single candle flickered somewhere in the room. Holding his breath, he listened, but there was no sound from Jouvancy or from La Chaise next door. A candle was burning on the table near Jouvancy’s bed, and the bed curtains were drawn. Charles got weakly to his feet and parted the bed curtains, holding the candle so he could see the rhetoric master’s face. Jouvancy was deeply asleep, pale, but no more so than he had been. With a relieved prayer of thanks, Charles let the curtains fall closed. His nose wrinkled at the stench of sickness hanging in the air and he longed to open the window, but everyone knew that night air was dangerous for the sick. Carrying the candle, he padded to the outer door and was pushing it open to let a little air in, when a light flared to his left and startled him. The corridor’s only permanent light was a single sconce beside the privy, but this light was growing brighter as someone came down the stairs, too bright for a candle.
Charles saw the unsteady flame of a small wax torch, then the hand that held it and the arm, and then the Duc du Maine came quietly onto the staircase landing from the floor above, his limp making the torch jump and waver in his hand. Charles slid back out of sight but kept the door open a crack, wondering why the king’s son was creeping around the palace, and apparently alone, in the dead of night. And what he’d been doing upstairs, where the dead Comte de Fleury’s chamber was. As Maine passed him, Charles saw that he had something in his free hand that gleamed when the torchlight caught it. Charles stretched his neck to see what it was, tipped his candle, and grunted in pain as hot wax splashed onto his hand. The Duc du Maine spun toward him.
“Who’s there?” the boy demanded harshly. But his face showed fright, not anger, in the wavering torchlight, and he put the hand holding the gleaming thing behind his back.
Charles stepped forward into the gallery. “I beg your pardon, Your Highness. I was opening the door for a little air. Forgive me for startling you.”
Maine peered uncertainly at him. “Oh. It’s you-you carried the reliquary today. Or yesterday, now, I suppose.”
“Yes, I am Maître Charles du Luc, from the College of Louis le Grand. You did us the honor of coming to our performance back in the winter.”
Maine’s smile transformed his thin, tense face, but his carefully rigid stance didn’t soften. “It was very good. I liked the singing and the dancing more than the Latin tragedy. But don’t tell Madame de Maintenon! And your little Italian boy is an astonishing dancer. I wish we had him here and could have ballets like the king had when he was young.”