“That’s very unfortunate,” Charles said thoughtfully, remembering what he’d heard from Conti and his coterie in the garden. A terrified king would be a gold mine of opportunity to that little coven.
“Well, I must go now and lose my pretty shirt,” Maine said, shrugging off the realm’s future. “Unless you can discover which saint to pray to!” He smiled at Charles and went eagerly to where the Prince of Conti sat, raking a pile of gold coins called louis toward him.
Charles moved a little aside from the door, beyond a potted orange tree, and stood against the wall’s dark silk brocade. From there he could look for Lulu, and also watch Conti and Margot, without being much noticed. A gambling evening was not a usual place for a Jesuit, however, and he felt distinctly uncomfortable. Not because he’d never gambled. Far from it-soldiers endured long hours of boredom when not marching or fighting, and dice and cards helped to pass the time. But that was a long time ago. And the stakes he’d played for then were nothing compared to the fortunes spread out on these tables. As the candlelight from the tables lit the gamblers and their money, it threw dancing shadows into the salon’s corners, where Charles could easily believe that the patient specter of ruin waited for its prey.
His attention sharpened as he saw Lulu, changed now into a gown of tawny gold satin, come slowly from the lottery room and stop at Conti’s table. Her gown shone like the sun, but her face was pinched and shadowed. She leaned down to speak to Maine, her brother, who was sitting on Margot’s left. Then she sat in the empty chair on Conti’s right. Margot was frowning blackly at her cards and ignored the newcomer. Conti glanced sideways and gave Lulu an absent smile, but his real attention was all for the game. One of Lulu’s hands disappeared under the table. After a moment, Conti’s eyebrows lifted and his free hand disappeared likewise. Well, Charles thought, that doesn’t look to me like resignation to Conti’s indifference. Or perhaps Conti was only giving her a little brotherly comfort? But Charles had sisters, and a girl’s face didn’t look like that for a brother. He wondered if the girl was trying again to persuade Conti to help her stay in France. A forlorn hope, from everything he’d seen of the man.
The play at Conti’s table went on. The prince’s hand emerged from under the table and he threw his cards down, laughing uproariously as he raked in everyone else’s coins.
“You devil!” one of the men across the table said wryly. “How do you do it, Your Highness?”
The Duc du Maine was frowning sadly at his cards, as though Madame de Maintenon’s lecture already sounded in his ears. Lulu looked quickly around the room and then flung her arms around Conti and kissed him on the cheek.
“Well done!” she cried. “What a useful stake you are gathering! With my help, of course.”
That got her a quick-and, Charles thought, hunted-look from Conti.
“My thanks, Your Highness, your beauty always brings me luck,” he said loudly and formally, for the table of players more than for her, Charles thought, and turned back to the next game.
Lulu looked as though she’d been slapped. “But you give me nothing in return.”
She stood up, knocking her chair backward onto the polished floor, and Charles glimpsed the fury he’d seen in her eyes when she looked at her father during the ball. She hovered over Conti for a moment, clearly hoping to be drawn down beside him again, but he made no move and she turned blindly away from the table. Charles moved closer to the doorway.
“Bonsoir, Your Highness,” he said quietly, steadying her as she nearly walked into him. She pulled her arm out of his grasp and wiped her tear-blinded eyes with the cream-colored lace of her sleeve, then brushed past him into the adjoining salon, where the buffet tables were set up.
He watched her go, remembering the way she’d walked away from him earlier and hating his uselessness. He hoped she would stay in the salon so he wouldn’t have to follow and hound her. About God or anything else.
He looked into the buffet salon. Most of the courtiers were still hard at their gambling, so there were only a few people around the tables. Lulu stood beside a towering pyramid of summer fruit. La Chaise, standing with the king at the other end of the room, caught Charles’s eye and nodded almost imperceptibly toward her. A wave of revulsion hit Charles, revulsion toward himself and his failure, this place, the king, the careful plans of power. He wanted to walk out of his cassock, out of his own skin, out of Versailles, and back home to Languedoc.
But Lulu was disappearing through the salon doors. Gritting his teeth, Charles hurried after her. Each of these salons opened into the next, a long chain of them. He was starting to feel like he’d spent half his life trudging across the palace galleries’ black-and-white stone floors. He’d even dreamed of their checkerboard pattern the night before, and had seen himself running desperately after something or someone, disappearing always farther into the dark in front of him.
And Lulu was disappearing now, though the salons in this royal center of the palace were all brightly lit. She turned suddenly through a small side door. A pair of women were coming toward Charles, and since he didn’t want to be seen going after Lulu, he stopped in pretended admiration of a painting of Diana and her nymphs, waiting for the women to pass. But they stopped, too.
“Very pretty,” one of them said. Her ivory silk skirts rustled like dead leaves as she pressed close to Charles under the pretense of looking at the painting. “How do you like Versailles, maître? You are not yet a priest, we understand.”
“Not yet, madame.” He edged away and bowed slightly, as though to let them go on their way, but they stayed where they were.
The other woman kept her distance, but looked him up and down as though considering buying him. “How long will you stay at court?”
“Not much longer, madame.”
“Such a change for you from your college.”
“Yes. And now I must take myself to my quarters, mesdames. The hours of the court are too much for a simple Jesuit.”
They shrieked with merriment. “Simple Jesuit? What a wit you are!”
Desperate to be rid of them and afraid he’d already lost Lulu’s trail, he walked firmly away in the direction they’d come from. To his relief, they went on toward the gambling rooms, chattering and laughing. When he glanced back, they were far enough away for him to sprint back to the half-open door Lulu had gone through. The small room beyond, lit by a pair of candles on a table in its center, was empty. A place to leave food and drink till it was needed to replenish the buffet, he guessed from the platters of cheese and pastries on the tables, and the cupboards that lined the walls. At first, he thought Lulu had vanished into the air, but then he saw yet another door in the right-hand wall.
He went softly around the table and eased the small door open. The candles behind him lit the mouth of a narrow flight of stairs leading upward. He listened, heard nothing, and ventured onto the stairs. It was only a half flight and brought him to a dark corridor, so low-ceilinged he couldn’t stand upright. Deserted, it was lit by a single candle in a sconce at the stairhead and lined with closed doors whose lintels were perhaps five feet from the floor. Peering at the little doors, he lifted his head and unwarily collided with the ceiling. Glad for the cushioning of the stiff bonnet, he rubbed his head. These could only be servants’ rooms, a sort of mezzanine inserted between two ordinary floors. Well, he told himself, many people had less and worse. But why did they have to have so little here at the heart of luxury, where the courtiers sat on silver benches? He pulled himself back to more immediate problems.