But for the young baronne de Vaudreuil, the real cause for worry lay elsewhere. She suspected La Fargue knew some of Cecile’s secrets. Secrets that he had not shared with anyone.
This was both abnormal and disturbing. It was completely unlike the captain, who, with his frankness and absolute loyalty, had always shown himself worthy of the blind faith invested in him by his Blades. Where had this mistrust come from? Had the years changed him to such an extent? No, time alone did not cause well-tempered souls to bend. But the betrayal of a friend, perhaps…
Since Saint-Lucq was also in the game, the Cardinal’s Blades were now, arguably, complete. Complete except for two, that is. Those two would never return. One of them, Bretteville, was dead. The other, Louveciennes, had betrayed them. He had been La Fargue’s companion-in-arms, his oldest and his best friend, with whom he had founded the Blades and recruited all the others. As brutal as it was unexpected, his treason had first led to the death of Bretteville during the siege of La Rochelle and then brought about the infamous disbanding of the Blades as a whole. La Fargue had witnessed the shattering of his life’s work at the hands of a man he had considered as a brother and who, rich from the fortune that this crime had earned him, had found refuge-it was said-in Spain.
The wound was deep. It had probably never healed and no doubt explained why La Fargue distrusted everyone, including the men under his command. Agnes understood this to a certain degree, but her resentment of it remained sincere and profound. The Blades were a citadel in which La Fargue was the central keep. Without the certainty of being able to find refuge there in case of need, Agnes could not imagine herself fighting for long upon the ramparts.
Having almost reached the end of its journey, the coach slowed as it climbed a winding and stony track.
Then it pulled to a halt.
Savelda descended first and, holding the door open, signalled for Agnes to follow him. Beneath a sun which, after the darkness inside the cabin, dazzled her for a moment, she found herself surrounded by the partially crumbled ruins and ramparts of a fortified castle whose imposing keep dominated a courtyard which had long been invaded by weeds and shrubs. Isolated on top of a rocky and wooded height overlooking the Chevreuse valley, the place was a scene of bustling activity at odds with its ancient sleeping stones. Men and dracs were busy planting torches, building woodpiles for bonfires, and erecting three tiers of benches on either side of an open-air stage. Wagons loaded with materials were entering the site. Riders came and went. Overseers gave orders and assigned tasks, hurried by a sense of urgency. A wyvern and its rider circled in the sky. A second, saddled, waited in the shelter of a covered enclosure.
Savelda seized Agnes by the elbow and led her into a small building of which only the exterior walls remained standing, its interior being overgrown with brush. He made her descend a stairway carved into the rock, at the bottom of which a hired swordsman was already posted. Upon seeing them he opened a door and Agnes entered an underground chamber filled with dusty debris. There was an old oven for baking bread in one corner. Daylight entered through a small semicircular window which looked out on the courtyard.
A fat woman rose from her seat, abandoning her knitting.
“Keep an eye on her,” Savelda ordered.
Then, turning to the prisoner, he warned her: “Don’t try anything. If you obey us, no harm will be done to you.”
Agnes nodded and the one-eyed man departed, closing the door behind him and leaving her alone with her female guardian. After a moment, as the fat woman did not seem to be overly concerned about her, she went toward the window, whose bars she gripped with both hands in order to raise herself on tiptoe and, while verifying the solidity of the iron, gazed outside.
Something important was about to happen here and, despite the risks she was taking, Agnes knew she had been right to let herself be brought here.
15
Because it was designed to take in plague victims, the Saint-Louis hospital had not only been built outside Paris but also resembled a fortress. Its first stone had been laid in 1607, after the serious epidemics which the Hotel-Dieu, the only big hospital the capital possessed at the time, had been unable to cope with. Its four main buildings, each formed of a single storey above a ground floor with taller structures at their centre and extremities, surrounded a square courtyard. Two rings of walls separated it from the rest of the world. Between them, symmetrically distributed, were the dwellings of the employees, nurses, and nuns who worked there. The pantries, kitchens, storerooms, and bakeries were built against the outer wall. Around them spread the gardens, fields, and pastures bordering the faubourg Saint-Denis.
Having shown his pass several times, Marciac received directions to the immense ward where, among the moans and murmurs of the other patients, he found Castilla lying on one of the beds aligned in rows. Cecile was sitting near him. Pale, her eyes red, she caressed his forehead with a light touch. The wounded man was clean and bandaged, but his face was swollen and horribly deformed. He was breathing but showed no reaction to his surroundings.
“Leave me be,” said the young woman on seeing Marciac. “Leave us both.”
“Cecile…”
“That’s not my name.”
“It’s of little importance.”
“Oh, but it is…! If I wasn’t who I am, if he who claims to be my father wasn’t who he is, none of this would have happened. And this man here, he would live.”
“He isn’t dead.”
“The sisters say he won’t live through the night.”
“They don’t know anything. I’ve seen many men survive wounds that were believed to be fatal.”
The young woman did not reply, seeming to forget the Gascon and, leaning over Castilla, continued to caress his brow.
“What should I call you?” asked Marciac after a while.
“Ana-Lucia… I believe.”
“You want this man to live, don’t you, Ana-Lucia?”
She glared at him with damp eyes, as if this question were the worst possible insult.
“Then you should leave here,” Marciac continued in a gentle voice. “The men who tried to abduct you are no doubt still after you. And if they find you here, they’ll also find him…”
She stared at him and a new worry caused her drawn features to look even more distraught.
“You… you really think so?”
“I know so, Ana-Lucia. Please come. You will need to be brave. I promise you that we’ll return tomorrow.”
Back in Paris an hour later, the beautiful Gabrielle, mistress of a brothel located in rue de la Grenouillere, heard knocking at her door. As no one in the house answered and the knocking continued, she wondered why she bothered paying her porter and, more resigned than angry, leaned from her window.
Outside, Marciac lifted a grave-looking face toward her, which worried her because the Gascon tended to be one who smiled in the face of adversity.
“I need you, Gabrielle,” he said.
He was holding a tearful young woman’s hand.
16
The coach picked Rochefort up at Place de la Croix-du-Trahoir and, after a short conversation with the comte de Pontevedra, it left him in front of the scaffolding covering the facade of the Palais-Cardinal. The ambassador extraordinary of Spain had demanded this discreet meeting urgently. He had promised that he had important news and he had not been lying.