Charles hesitated, wanting no more of her company. But his orders were not to leave her. Soft footed, he followed, keeping her just in sight. The farther they went, the more deserted the gallery was. The wall sconces grew farther apart, but even in the dimming candlelight, the yellow wig led him like a beacon. And the beacon’s progress was straight as an arrow. Margot’s drunken wavering was gone and her heels tapped purposefully along the marble. Which made Charles follow with greater interest and think, as she turned corner after corner, that surely she must have passed a privy by now. But she never slowed. She vanished suddenly and he heard her pattering rapidly down a staircase. He ran lightly to its opening and felt his way down. At the bottom, he heard her steps fading away on his right. Knowing that if he lost the duchess he’d never find her in this maze, he put on a burst of speed. And cannoned into a massive figure who stepped suddenly into his way without seeing him.
The man swore, lumbered backward, and stood against a door, glaring at Charles.
“Did a woman in a yellow wig and a green gown pass just now?” Charles said.
The man-a footman, Charles supposed-set his back more solidly against the closed door.
“If she didn’t pass you, she must have gone through that door you’re guarding so well.”
The footman ignored him and Charles drifted a little aside, as though giving up the effort to communicate. He hit the wood-paneled wall as hard as he could with the flat of his hand, and the footman jumped and swore again.
“So you’re not deaf,” Charles said pleasantly. “Which means you’re probably not mute, either. “Did a woman go into the rooms you’re guarding?”
“What’s that to you?” the man growled.
His stare was beginning to remind Charles of an implacably belligerent dog deciding where to bite, and he stepped a little farther away. “Whose rooms are these? Come on, mon brave, you may as well tell me; I can easily find out from someone else.”
“Then go find out.”
Charles withdrew. When he reached the staircase, he stepped into the dark stairwell and settled himself against the wall, veiled in shadows, and watched the door. Unless Margot decided to stay the night, she would eventually emerge into the gallery. With luck, she would then simply find her carriage and leave. And he could go to bed. After, of course, reporting to Père La Chaise. He wondered why Margot had feigned drunkenness. Simply to be rid of the “silly young prude”? But she was royal; she had no need to be subtle when she tired of someone’s company. Had she been making sure he wouldn’t follow her? And what had she truly been doing in the salon alcove with Mademoiselle de Rouen and Montmorency? Charles shook his head. Were La Chaise’s suspicions of the women-both Margot and Lulu-justified, or did they only mean that he’d been too long in this hothouse of rumor and suspicion?
Charles sighed with weariness and began to recite one of Cicero’s speeches to himself to pass the time. When he was done with that and there was still no sign of Margot, he tried to pray, but closing his eyes took him to the edge of sleep. Last night’s sickness, he supposed, had left him more tired than he’d realized. He tried planning the next section of the college ballet, but the ballet made him think about the king’s wrongdoings and his own helplessness against them. From there, his thoughts jumped to courtiers and then to the Comte de Fleury lying dead at the foot of the gallery stairs, and then to the dead gardener beside the lake. He heard the Prince of Conti’s lazy, ironic voice in his head. So now you’ve found a drowned rat. For no reason he could fully explain, Charles was still certain that Conti had followed him from the fountain. But why?
Torchlight flared from the stairs, and Charles withdrew farther into the darkness. A servant with a small wax torch came from the stairs and led a chattering group of men and women along the gallery. Returning from the ball, Charles guessed, from the glitter of their clothes in the torchlight. They passed by the footman and twinkled and glimmered into the distance. As Charles settled against the wall again, the footman moved suddenly and the door opened. The Grand Duchess of Tuscany emerged, cloaked and hooded. She walked briskly in Charles’s direction, and the footman fell in behind her.
Following after her stolid watchdog, Charles breathed a prayer of thanks when she made for the forecourt where Charles and Jouvancy had dismounted on their arrival at the palace. Which seemed weeks ago now, Charles thought dismally, though this was only their third night there. From a gallery window, he watched with relief as the footman handed Margot into a waiting carriage and climbed up behind. The coachman turned the pair of horses and the carriage began to roll toward the palace gates.
But Charles would have been more relieved if Margot’s drunkenness had not disappeared so abruptly when she’d left him.
Suddenly needing to breathe fresh air, Charles went outside. The evening was mild. There was a small breeze, and the stars were half veiled in rags of cloud. The courtyard wasn’t busy; only a few carriages waited for nobles, and members of the Guard stood at their posts or patrolled their appointed territory. Charles wandered across the gravel toward the south wing, breathing in the breeze-blown sweetness of grass and trees, glad even for the pungence of horse smells and burning torches, glad for anything that wasn’t the smell of sweated cloth, dirty wigs, and bodies less clean than their snowy linen. At least, he thought, he was spared breathing air drenched in clashing perfumes, since the king had grown to dislike them.
Dogs barked in the town and dogs in the royal kennels answered them. The swift gray flight of an owl brushed Charles’s cheek. And something-the dogs, the kiss of the owl’s wing-made him nearly cry out with longing for home, for the hot dry smell of Languedoc, the call of nightjars from dark trees, the spare coolness of his mother’s old stone house. Grapes swelling in the vineyards, fatter in the morning than they’d been the night before, the sight of Pernelle at fifteen in the firelit doorway, all fine bones and a cloud of black hair, calling him to come in. Himself, seventeen and blind with love for her. He closed the memory gently, the way he closed old books, and prayed for her.
His prayer finished, Charles looked up at the windows of the palace’s south wing, most with shutters still open on candlelit rooms. Tired, but not wanting to shut himself back inside yet, he walked slowly to the end of the wing and turned toward the garden side, thinking to go in by a back door. Sounds of the forecourt fell away as he turned the building’s corner and went slowly toward the dark gardens. But when he turned along the torchlit side of the wing, he stopped short. Half a dozen chattering men in court dress came out of a door onto the gravel.
“You do me too much honor, monsieur,” a light, ironic voice said.
Charles retreated from the torchlight. The last thing he wanted at the end of this day was another meeting with the Prince of Conti. But as he watched the men stroll toward the gardens, he recognized the largest among them as Henri de Montmorency. Whom La Chaise should have had on his way back to Paris by now. Hoping that the Lulu-besotted Montmorency had not left the king’s confessor somewhere with a broken head, Charles stayed out of the light and considered what he ought to do. Montmorency was following Conti like an overgrown puppy, all but treading on his heels. That the boy would want to curry favor with a Prince of the Blood was no surprise. The surprise was that Conti was tolerating him, and it seemed politic to find out why. Not least for Montmorency’s sake.
Charles set himself to follow the courtiers. Unexpectedly, Conti turned suddenly aside, through the gate of one of the walled gardens. Charles had thought the men would stroll the paths, chattering and vying for Conti’s attention, and had intended to come upon them as if by chance and draw Montmorency away. But now, full of misgiving, he stepped off the gravel onto soft turf and slipped into the garden. At first, he heard nothing. Then he caught a low urgent voice away on his left, and as he moved toward it, he realized it was Conti’s.