“Because you’ll listen more acutely if you’re not trying to hear what you think I want you to hear. Send me word when you return to Paris, and I will come to the college to hear what you have to tell me.”
Charles hesitated, his interest piqued and his conscience protesting. On the Friday just past, his confessor had reminded him-yet again-that he must learn to live quietly within the bounds of his lowly place in the Society. On the other hand, his logical self said, isn’t Père Le Picart sending you to Versailles for the good of the king?
“Very well. If I hear anything, I will certainly tell you-though you know that I will have to tell Père Le Picart first. And I will not be free to come and go on my own at court.”
La Reynie laughed. “I don’t recall that that has ever stopped you, maître.”
The shot went home, and Charles winced. “Anyway, I cannot imagine that a lowly Jesuit scholastic like myself will hear or see much of use to you.”
“Oh, come, surely you know that it is in the presence of those who don’t count that people are careless.”
“You flatter me,” Charles said, straight-faced, and they both laughed.
La Reynie’s eyes went to the bookshop again, and Charles, watching him, thought about how much his opinion of the man had changed. Something he would have sworn would never happen when they were first thrown together. The early sun was strong on the lieutenant-général’s face, and Charles saw how deep its lines were growing. Well, the man was sixty-one, more than twice Charles’s own twenty-nine. Sixty-one was a full age for working day and night, as La Reynie did. He turned back to Charles, reaching to steady a radish seller who stumbled beside him. The woman glanced up at him, mumbled her thanks, and walked on a few paces. Then she stared, round-eyed, over her shoulder as she realized who had helped her. La Reynie’s courtesy to the lowly street vendor made Charles respect him all the more.
“When you return,” La Reynie repeated, “send for me.”
“I will. Monsieur La Reynie-please-how is it with Reine?” Reine was a beggarwoman whose mysterious past was intertwined somehow with La Reynie’s own, though he refused to say much about how and why.
La Reynie’s chin came up and his eyes turned wary.
Having good reason to know that this man’s secrets were inviolable, Charles said quickly, “It’s only that I think of her sometimes and hope she’s well.”
The wariness softened and the older man smiled fleetingly. “She’s well. Growing older. Like me. But well. She’s asked about you, too.”
Charles smiled, inordinately pleased by that. “She’s in my prayers.”
“As, I hope, am I. I wish you a good ride. And that you will go about your court business looking as lowly as possible and letting your ears flap.” He looked toward Jouvancy. “I wish you both a good journey.”
Charles called Jouvancy’s attention, the priest signed a blessing toward La Reynie, and the two Jesuits rode on. Telling himself that whatever trouble came of what he’d just been asked to do, it would be La Reynie’s trouble and not his, Charles nudged Flamme into the lead. They passed the Convent of St. Michel and the line of the old walls, and the road angled southwest, past the Prince of Condé’s townhouse and toward the village of Vaugirard. Beyond Vaugirard they would join the royal Versailles road, which left Paris on the Right Bank and crossed the Seine at the village of Sevres. The ride from Paris to Versailles was a short one for a man in a hurry, but Charles had strict orders to take the journey slowly for Jouvancy’s sake, stopping often, and they did not expect to arrive until the afternoon.
“How far is it to Versailles, exactly?” Jouvancy asked, craning his neck to look up at the dome of the Luxembourg palace as they passed it. “I’ve been there, but not for many years, and then not from Paris.”
“It’s five miles,” Charles said, filling his lungs with the scent of flowering trees from the Luxembourg Gardens. Then he looked sharply at Jouvancy. “Are you tiring, mon père?”
“No, no, we’ve just set out, I am very well. Five French miles, I suppose you mean.”
“I could give you the distance in some other country’s reckoning, if that would please you better.”
“Pride is a great fault in a lowly scholastic, maître,” Jouvancy said with mock gravity. “But go on, show off your knowledge.”
Twisting in his saddle, Charles answered with a grin and a small mock bow. “Know, then, mon père, that we have fifteen English miles to ride, or, if you prefer, twenty Russian miles. In Spanish miles, the figure is less tiring-something under four and a half miles. And the German distance is easier yet, only a soupçon more than three miles.” He frowned and then shook his head. “I used to know Italian miles, but I’ve forgotten them.”
“I, also. Well, then, I shall ride in German miles and arrive fresh as the world’s first morning. Or at least,” the rhetoric master said wryly, “still able to stand up after I dismount.”
As the road bent south, the houses and convents thinned and gave way to fields and vineyards. They rode companionably, without speaking, listening to the country sounds of birdsong, cows and sheep, and field laborers calling to each other. Then there were more vineyards than fields, and the houses of the wine-growing village of Vaugirard began to line the road. They rode past the old church, with its carvings of vines and grapes, and stopped in the little arcaded marketplace to let Jouvancy rest for a time.
They tethered their horses to an iron ring in the stone arcade and Charles loosed the saddlebag with Madame de Maintenon’s gift in it and tucked it under his arm. As they walked slowly across the cobbled square to drink from the fountain in its center, Charles saw several curious faces watching them from upper windows, but it wasn’t a market day so the square itself was mostly empty. Jouvancy sat down on a tree-shaded bench, and Charles sat beside him. The church bells rang nine o’clock and the office of Terce, and Jouvancy took out his breviary. As a priest, he was required to say the offices, though in the solitary Jesuit manner, unlike the Benedictines. As merely a scholastic, Charles was not yet bound to say them, but he knew many of the prayers by heart and joined Jouvancy silently.
At the prayers’ end, they sat quietly. Then Jouvancy put his breviary away in his pocket. Charles opened the saddlebag, brought out two winter-withered but still sweet apples, and offered Jouvancy one. They munched in companionable quiet and watched the little there was to see: maidservants with pitchers and buckets coming and going from the fountain, and a few old men walking under the arcade, their sticks tapping the stone. Pigeons drank from the puddled gravel near the fountain, the males strutting and chasing the softly cooing females.
“Spring,” Jouvancy snorted, watching them. He looked sideways at Charles. “You will do well to remember that it is always ‘spring’ at Versailles, Maître du Luc.”
Charles turned to stare at him and then began to laugh. “That sort of spring, you mean?” He nodded toward the pigeons.
“It is no laughing matter.”
“But I’ve heard the court is greatly changed, mon père, since the king has become more sober and devout.”
“The king may have become more sober and devout-and not before time, he’s in sight of fifty-but the court is forever full of ill-disciplined young people, and even Madame de Maintenon cannot change young blood into old.”
Charles considered the rhetoric master with some surprise, wondering at this irritable, moralistic fault finding. He’d never heard Jouvancy in this mood before.
“And so you are warning me, mon père?” he said carefully.
“Yes, and you can stop laughing up your sleeve about it. I saw that little flower seller flirting with you on the way out of the city! The court is also full of young, bored, pretty women.”