His height letting him see over the crowd, Charles watched a long line of gilded, red-wheeled carriages passing the first of Versailles’s gates and rolling toward the palace.
“Quickly, so we can get a place.” La Chaise pulled Charles away and they hurried along the route they’d traveled yesterday until they reached a small dark flight of stairs. “We’ll have to find a place at the foot of the Ambassadors’ Staircase,” La Chaise said, starting down. “We’re not grand enough to stand at the top near the throne.”
“Not even you?”
La Chaise shook his head. “Not unless there’s a religious statement to be made. When the king receives an envoy from a foreign prince who is not Christian, he might ask me to be there. But Poland is a Catholic country.”
In the sumptuous entrance hall, where the wide marble staircase rose beneath a painted and gilded coffered ceiling, a large crowd had gathered, talking and laughing excitedly and jockeying for space. The hall bristled with the pikes of the Hundred Swiss, spear points catching and scattering light as the guards stood lined up on each side of the path to the stairs, watching the crowd and the doors. Some made a fence of their pikes to keep back tourists, others stood around the antechamber walls, and more were outside the doors, the clusters of white plumes in their cocked-brim black hats making Charles think of menacing long-legged birds.
“I’ve heard that Louis is the best-guarded monarch in Europe,” he said, watching them. “It seems true.”
“Of course it’s true.” La Chaise began worming his way through the crowd, and Charles did his best to stay close behind. La Chaise elbowed ruthlessly until he had them close enough to the first step and the front rank of watchers to see and be seen. Craning his neck to see around La Chaise, Charles counted twelve steps of colored marble leading to a landing where classical figures of gilded bronze reclined beside the sculpture of a fountain. Above the figures, courtiers stood immobile, leaning on balustrades covered with cloth of gold and waiting for the envoys. Charles wondered why such stillness-before the ceremony even began-and then realized with a start that they were only painted. To their right and left, the staircase branched, each side rising to the level of the royal apartments, where the king would receive the Poles in the royal bedchamber.
La Chaise sighed and righted his bonnet. “I hope this doesn’t take long. I still feel like I could fall on my face.”
“Don’t,” Charles said gravely, glancing significantly up the stairs. “Fall on your back-isn’t that the protocol? Don’t show royalty your back?”
That raised the ghost of a laugh. “A timely reminder.”
Charles hesitated. “Mon père, do you truly believe that we were poisoned yesterday?”
“I don’t know what to think. But I can easily believe it about Fleury. He was a grasping, arrogant man who liked no one.” La Chaise leaned close to Charles’s ear and said, under the noise of the crowd, “And he was known to be writing a mémoire of the court.”
“Ah.” Charles nodded thoughtfully. An acid-tongued mémoire of the court could well give someone enough reason to poison Fleury. He thought about his nighttime encounters with Neuville and the Duc du Maine. People had certainly been taking an interest in Fleury’s room. How many souls in this hive of gossip and hard-won position might fear that Fleury had vented his pen on them?
A blare of trumpets sounded, and every head turned toward the doors. The Swiss soldiers stood at rigid attention, the trumpets settled to a stately march, and the head of the Polish procession appeared. First came the Introducer of ambassadors and the grand master of ceremonies, gravely resplendent in shining black-satin suits. Behind them was a small tight formation of Polish soldiers, fair haired and impressively moustached. Then came the pair of envoys sent by King Jan Sobieski to negotiate his son’s marriage: a stocky elder and a taller, darker man perhaps in his thirties. The watching crowd stared eagerly at their quilted robes of heavy calf-length silk-one robe scarlet and the other blue-with rows of gold tassels across the front. Both men were sweating under small fur-trimmed hats, and their moustaches were even longer and thicker than their soldiers’ luxuriant growths.
The crowd made its bows and curtsies as the men passed, watched them climb the stairs and take the left-hand branch toward the king’s apartements, and then began murmuring and making ready to move on to somewhere else. La Chaise turned to Charles.
“There are a few things I must do, maître. Go back and see how Père Jouvancy does. I will return as soon as I can. Do you feel you’ll be able to eat?”
“Yes, something, at least.”
“Me, I am not altogether there yet.” La Chaise raised an eyebrow. “I imagine that you do not wish to return to the Duc de La Rochefoucauld’s table.”
“On the whole, no,” Charles said, somewhat shamefaced. In spite of his reluctance to believe that a poisoner was at work-even after what Monsieur Neuville had said about Fleury’s blackened liver-he kept remembering the doctor’s whisper that he’d seen the duke and Madame de Maintenon in close conference. “But if there is bread and cheese in your chamber, mon père, that will do for me. When you return, if you have no objection, may I leave Père Jouvancy with you and go out into the gardens for a little air? While I work on our ballet livret?”
“Very well. I will return as quickly as I can.”
They parted and Charles went slowly back to his and Jouvancy’s room. But before he reached the black-and-white tiled gallery, a clamor of ominously low-pitched barking pulled him up short. He looked around, expecting to see large dogs running toward him, but there were only a few courtiers in sight, and none seemed to notice the noise. Perhaps they were used to it, Charles thought, wondering why someone kept large dogs inside. The noise and crowding of Louis le Grand were beginning to seem positively pastoral by comparison with this place, and he had an overwhelming urge to bundle Jouvancy into a carriage and go home.
When he reached La Chaise’s chamber, Bouchel told him that the rhetoric master hadn’t stirred. Charles went to Jouvancy’s bed and parted the curtains. The little priest’s flushed face and hot forehead put paid to Charles’s thoughts of leaving. He wrung out a cloth in cold water and sponged the priest’s face, smiling reassuringly and murmuring, “Go on sleeping, all’s well,” when Jouvancy briefly opened his eyes. Then he closed the curtains, glad for the west-facing windows that left the room still dim and cool, and left the chamber.
Bouchel turned from staring out the courtyard window. “Do you need me anymore, maître?” His eyes were shadowed, and his face was pinched and gray.
“Are you well?” Charles said, peering at him in concern.
The footman tensed and darted a sideways glance at Charles. “Well enough, thank you. Are you better?” He jerked his head at the door into the other chamber. “Is he?”
“We’re all better, thank you.”
“I was thinking-I don’t mean to step out of my place, maître, but whatever happened to old Fleury, I doubt you three were poisoned.”
“Why not?” Charles went to the cupboard and opened it, looked for bread and cheese.
“Well, Père La Chaise set the leftover bouillon back in the cupboard after your breakfast yesterday.” He wrinkled his nose. “I didn’t find it till this morning, and it was high and ripe. Enough that it had to be already going that way yesterday. So it could have been what made you sick.”
Charles nodded slowly. The bouillon! Of course. An unpleasant but ordinary explanation. What could be simpler? “Thank you, I’ll tell Père La Chaise. But you look as though you may be getting Père Jouvancy’s sickness. You should take care of yourself.”