“Come this moment. Your father is having a fit, asking where you are!”
“My father is always having a fit.” Anne-Marie turned back to Charles. “It’s my nurse. She never pays any attention to me unless my father asks where I am. Please, we must talk. Tomorrow?”
Before Charles could answer, the stout, dark-gowned woman, visible only in outline against the candlelight beyond the chapel, reached the side altar and gasped when she realized he was there.
“Who are you? What do you mean, being here alone with this child?” She took the little girl by the hand and pulled her away as though Charles had the plague. Scolding her without pause, she walked Anne-Marie out of the chapel.
Torn between fears for Lulu, worry over what Anne-Marie wanted to tell him, and his own fervent desire to be gone at first light and leave them both to others, Charles went slowly back to the evening’s festivities.
He found the buffet salon in an uproar. It was crowded with exclaiming, pushing courtiers, and someone had apparently been shoved into a table, because a bright flood of fruit was being crushed underfoot. Charles kicked a plum aside and tried to get nearer the confusion’s center to see what had happened. A woman’s wail rose above the noise.
“Dear Blessed Virgin, it’s just like the Comte de Fleury! Oh, Saint Benoit, protect him!”
St. Benedict? Benedict was the patron invoked against poison. Charles elbowed his way ruthlessly through a swath of outraged courtiers. Then someone shouted a command and the crowd parted to make way for the physician Neuville and Père La Chaise, supporting the king between them. Louis was hatless, his face white and sheened with sweat, and he walked slightly bent over, one hand pressed tightly to his stomach. He looked as though it was taking all his will to hold his mouth clamped shut. On the other side of La Chaise, the tearful Dauphin clutched his father’s black-and-white hat to his chest, and the Prince of Conti leaned at the Dauphin’s ear, murmuring solicitously. The covey of noblemen who attended the king came crowding behind them.
“Make way, for the love of God!” the doctor shouted again, and Charles leaped to clear a knot of stupefied courtiers out of the royally urgent path to the door.
As he passed, La Chaise said to Charles, “Go back to my chamber and wait.”
“Yes, mon père.” But instead of leaving immediately, Charles turned to the woman standing beside him. “What happened? I only just arrived.”
Two men drew near to listen to her answer. Her diamond earrings danced in the candlelight as she shook her head. “I hardly know. I was playing reversis and the king was standing beside our table. He suddenly turned away and-well-doubled over-and was sick.” She put a hand to her heavily powdered throat and stared at Charles in bewilderment, as though she’d just seen the sun rise in the west. “No one has ever seen him sick in public. We know he is ill from time to time. But he never lets us see it. Even when he had his operation in the winter, he was giving audiences and orders from his bed later that same day! One knew he had to be in pain, but he gave no sign at all. But this-he could not control himself at all, and-dear Blessed Virgin, what if he dies?”
“Madame,” Charles said, “I think you are jumping too far ahead. Who can control himself when the urge to spew comes on him?”
“I know. But-” Her small black eyes were full of fear. “-he’s not like us. He is the king!”
And Jupiter never vomits, Charles thought, mentally casting his eyes up. He turned away with a small nod, but the older of the two listening men, perhaps fifty or so, put out a hand to detain him. Charles knew he should know who the man was but couldn’t name him. The man glanced in the direction the king had gone and then back to Charles.
“Like the Comte de Fleury,” the man said quietly.
“Only, thank God, there were no stairs here,” his companion put in. He was the lynx-eyed man who’d baited La Chaise in the gallery after Fleury fell.
“You mistake me,” the older man replied impatiently. He looked at Charles. “Perhaps I should have said, exactly like Fleury. Because, may God help us, it looks to me as though someone has poisoned the king.” His words had the heavy finality of a tolling bell.
“Oh, dear. Then all we can do now is pray,” the other said, but his words were light as air. He excused himself and went quickly toward the doors.
“Poisoned how?” Charles said brusquely. “Where?”
The older man gestured gracefully toward the tables.
“That can’t be!” Charles said. “Unless you think it was random and any victim would have done? Anyone and everyone might have been poisoned, if it was in something on the tables.”
“Don’t be absurd, of course I don’t mean that.”
“Then what do you mean?”
The man inclined his head very slightly in the direction the younger man had gone.
Charles shook his head. “I don’t understand you.”
The nameless man looked casually over both shoulders and scanned the knot of gesticulating, hysterically whispering courtiers beyond Charles. “Come.” Without seeming to be going anywhere in particular, he drew Charles after him into a corner. They stood sideways against the wall, watching over each other’s shoulders and speaking so that their words would not carry out into the room. The man murmured, “It would not be so hard to do. The king loves sweets. And the best of the sweets are always offered first to him. Do you think he serves himself at the buffet? Of course he doesn’t. He points and nods and someone fills a plate for him. And until he has eaten from the buffet, no one else can take anything.”
Charles thought about that. He’d seen the king standing with La Chaise near the tables early in the evening. Neither had been eating then, but they might have eaten from the buffet before he saw them.
As though reading his thoughts, his companion said, “The king always goes immediately to the tables and has something, so that we aren’t kept from refreshing ourselves.” He raised an eyebrow. “I believe that tonight it was your Père La Chaise who served him.”
Charles gaped at the man. “Are you accusing Père La Chaise? That’s absurd!” Giving up the effort to identify the man and preserve the courtesies, he said bluntly, “Who are you?”
His companion seemed equally uninterested in the courtesies. “I am not accusing him at all. I am simply saying it would have been possible. Someone else may well have brought the king more to eat a little later. I was only briefly in this room before I went to the gambling.” He smiled slightly at Charles. “I am the Duc de La Rochefoucauld. And you are Maître Charles du Luc. You and Père Jouvancy and your companions ate at my table the day Père Jouvancy became so ill. You may just as well say that I poisoned him. Though I didn’t.” He made Charles a small ironic bow. “Nor did I poison the Comte de Fleury, who ate at my table the day he died. Though I am well aware of what is being said.”
“I am glad to hear it.” Charles folded his hands at his waist. “Forgive me, monsieur, but it seems to me that everyone at court is obsessed with poison. We have had a very bad stomach sickness and fever going the rounds in Paris. Père Jouvancy had been ill with it before we came, and I feel sure he has only had a relapse. So why not assume that the illness has reached Versailles? And that the Comte de Fleury had it, and now so has the king.”
“Logical, I grant you. And if some kind, innocuous man had broken his neck on the way to the privy, I might think as you do. But the Comte de Fleury was not innocuous, as I think you know. I was there in the gallery when he fell. I saw you recognize him. Oh, yes, it showed.”
“I was a soldier under his command.”
“Ah. Then you do know how well hated he was. Half the court would trade its palace lodgings for a look at Fleury’s reputed journal, to be sure they are not included. But the thing seems to have disappeared.”