“Stop, Monsieur Montmorency. You have felled your enemy. Stop.”
The boy seemed to look through him and kept coming. Knowing that he was breaking the college rules, knowing how sore his shoulder already was, knowing he probably didn’t remember enough to do this right, Charles tackled him. His shoulder screamed louder than Sapieha had been, but he got Montmorency facedown on the floor. The boy lay still as a corpse, and except for Sapieha’s moaning, the watchers fell silent.
“Get the proctors,” Charles said through his teeth, from where he lay across Montmorency’s back.
“I’ll go,” Jouvancy said. He nodded toward Sapieha. “I’ll bring lay brothers to take him to the infirmary.”
As Jouvancy left, Charles said to the students, “Carry Monsieur Sapieha outside. No need for more people than necessary to come in.”
Murmuring comfort, four boys gathered up the crying Pole and carried him out of the room, to the building’s courtyard door. Beauchamps drew to one side, his hand on Bertamelli’s shoulder. Charles sat up cautiously, keeping a hand on Montmorency’s neck.
“No more, monsieur,” Charles said. “Do you hear me?”
Montmorency nodded and Charles removed his hand, poised to move quickly if he had to, but thinking he wouldn’t. Montmorency sat up.
“What began this, monsieur?”
Montmorency looked at him blankly and shook his head. He was rubbing one hand over the other, and Charles saw that he was caressing the ring with Lulu’s hair in it.
“The fight was about this marriage?”
Montmorency cradled the hand with the ring against his chest, his brown eyes pools of misery. His broad, smooth face showed several of the inflamed pustules young people often had. And something about that-the ugly spots, his misery, his awkwardly budding manhood-made Charles’s heart contract. Suddenly and to his shame, he knew why this furious grieving boy irritated him so, why he mostly just wanted him gone from Louis le Grand. It was himself Charles saw looking out of Montmorency’s eyes, himself at Montmorency’s age, himself when he’d known beyond hope that his beloved Pernelle would be married to someone else. His raw grief had opened hell itself. Literally opened hell, in fact, because it was what had sent him fleeing into the army.
“Monsieur-” Charles reached impulsively for the boy’s hand and searched for words, something to keep Montmorency from making a hell of his grief. But before he found anything to say, Jouvancy came in with three large proctors.
Charles got to his feet. “No need for force,” he told them. “He’ll go with you to his chamber. Do we have your word that you will do that, Monsieur Montmorency?”
“Yes.”
Without taking his eyes from the boy, Charles spoke quietly in Jouvancy’s ear. “Even if his tutor is there, I think it would be wise for a proctor to stay outside the chamber door. If you’ll allow it, mon père.”
Jouvancy nodded and gave the order to the proctors. Montmorency got to his feet like a shambling bear and the proctors closed in on him, one on each side and one behind. Jouvancy saw them out. He came back to Charles, shaking his head, and Charles braced himself for admonishment for physically tackling a student.
But Jouvancy said fervently, “Thank you. The boy seems-almost possessed. At least out of his wits.” Louder, to Beauchamps and the students, he said, “We will all pray privately for Monsieur Sapieha and Monsieur Montmorency. That they will both amend. And that Monsieur Sapieha will mend. But for now, this rehearsal will continue.”
The rhetoric master kept them at it until the clock chimed four, then oversaw the replacement of the benches, gathered them for an extra prayer for the two miscreants, and dismissed them. Bertamelli lingered as long as he could, looking pleadingly at Charles. But when Charles started across the room to speak with him, Jouvancy called him back sharply to the argument over how to alter the ballet with two fewer dancers. Sapieha would be unable to walk for a while, and Montmorency would not be allowed back. He would probably be dismissed from the college.
“Well,” Beauchamps said finally, “I only hope no one else decides to air their differences during rehearsals. I don’t have enough professionals free to replace them. And you couldn’t afford them, even if I did.”
He and Jouvancy gave each other the slightest of bows, and Beauchamps stalked from the room. His long-faced servant shouldered the violin box as though it were a small coffin and trailed after him.
Jouvancy made a wry face and lifted his hands helplessly. “Now I must go to Père Donat and tell him what has happened. I’d best get it over. Will you clean up in here?”
He left, muttering disconsolately to himself, and Charles sighed and picked up the broken sword to see if it could be mended. He saw that it couldn’t, put it aside, and put the rest of the swords back in the chest. Then he checked to be sure all the old hats were back on their hooks and picked up the ballet livret. In the time before supper, he wanted to find out from Alexandre Sapieha what he’d said to Montmorency. And he wanted to find Bertamelli. He thought the little Italian might tell him now what he’d been doing at the tower. He reached to close an open window and stopped, listening to a dove cooing mournfully in the mellowing light. Tomorrow morning, Charles thought, Mademoiselle de Rouen would go to Poland, in spite of whatever secrets she carried with her. With a sigh, he latched the window and started across the Cour d’honneur to the student court.
But his steps dragged and his shoulder hurt, and he sat down on a bench beside the courtyard wall. Montmorency’s door was guarded by a proctor, and Bertamelli was in the charge of the anxiously watchful cubiculaire. A few minutes’ rest would not hurt. Charles leaned back against the warm stones. The mid-June sun was still above the city roofs, and he was glad for the shade of the lime tree that grew beside the bench. Birds came and went in the branches, and he thought he glimpsed a nest high above his head. His eyes followed a songbird’s flight and came to rest on the king’s profile, above him on top of the wall. The sculptor had caught the long, slightly curved Bourbon nose perfectly, and it seemed to test the outer air as Louis le Grand gazed over the college that bore his name. Charles’s brief encounters with the king went through his mind. Louis majestic at the head of the daily procession to Mass; a distant glimpse of Louis walking in the gardens with his gentlemen; the plume of Louis’s hat waving above his massive armchair at the ball; Louis’s assessing blue-gray gaze as he silently acknowledged Charles’s attention to Lulu. Louis had seemed always quiet, always merely passing, or in the distance, or seen from behind. He’d spoken to Charles only once, in few words and hardly pausing. But his presence beat down on Versailles like the sun on the earth. Except that, for those at court, the sun never set and there was little shade.
The door to the main building banged shut, startling Charles from his reverie. Lieutenant-Général La Reynie was coming toward him across the courtyard, followed by a red-faced Père Donat. Jouvancy hurried behind them.
“Maître du Luc, stay where you are,” Donat called imperiously, as though Charles were about to run.
Wondering what had happened now, Charles stood up and the trio halted in front of him.
In a hissing whisper, as though the whole college were trying to listen, Donat said, “Monsieur La Reynie has asked to speak with you. I have given my permission. The matter concerns Monsieur Montmorency.”