A sob caught in her throat. “I thought you were dead.”
“So did I for a moment.” Charles held on to a side flat, thinking that he might still die from sheer exhaustion. “Can you stay hidden a little while more? La Reynie seems to have forgotten you and I want to keep it that way. I’ll get us away as soon as I can.”
A sudden beam of light sent Charles’s heart into his throat.
“Emotional, isn’t he, your young friend?” La Reynie stood behind Charles, holding the lantern high and looking at Pernelle. “As emotional as a girl. From the south, too, I hear in his voice. An unusual coincidence.”
“I’ll see him home shortly.” Charles started back through the narrow passage between the wings and La Reynie had to retreat in front of him. Charles stopped close to the wings, so as not to disturb Le Picart, who was still praying. As a distraction from Pernelle, but also because he wanted to know, Charles asked, “Is it true, Monsieur La Reynie, about the child and Mme Douté? Are they dead?”
“I’ve sent someone to find out for certain.”
Charles looked at the rector, bent low as though the deaths Guise had caused hung on his own soul, and thought about the other deaths, Huguenot deaths, that Guise had helped to cause. “Monsieur La Reynie,” he said abruptly, “you told me that you protect the Huguenots still in Paris.”
“What of it?” La Reynie said warily.
“You heard what Moulin said about the dragonnades? French dragonnades, I mean.”
“I heard.”
“You can use what you heard to stop them.”
Le Reynie looked pityingly at him. “I cannot.”
“Why not? Do you want more of this?” Charles gestured angrily at the bodies, the priest, the blood.
La Reynie did not respond.
“Oh, I see.” Helplessness rose in Charles’s throat like bile. “I beg your pardon. I should have known. After all, I first saw you talking to Guise and Louvois. An unholy trinity, I thought you were then. I had come to think differently, but you are telling me I was right the first time. Death does not trouble you.”
La Reynie’s eyes blazed red in the torchlight and he struck Charles a blow on the cheek that sent him crashing into a wing. Two of La Reynie’s men, stooping to lift Guise’s body onto a board, started toward Charles, but La Reynie shook his head and they held where they were. For a long perilous moment, he and Charles faced each other, both their faces dark with anger.
Then the lieutenant-général shut his eyes and turned his head away. “I watched my first wife die.” His shaking voice was a thread of sound for only Charles to hear. “And three of my children.” He opened his eyes and stepped close to Charles. “You are a celibate, you will never know the pain of any of that! You may be very sure that death bothers me. I see death most days. And of course I have a part in the dragonnades. So do you and every other faithful Catholic, if you choose to look deeply enough. You blind innocent, I will spell it out for you. And if you talk, you may well find yourself dead. Our war minister Louvois has become too powerful for the comfort of many highly placed men. Many of whom not only hate him, they fear him. And his ambition.” La Reynie’s softly furious words sounded like grease spitting in a hot pan. “Everyone knows that Louvois keeps the dragonnades going for Louis. But few know that Guise was Louvois’s confessor. Which means that Guise knew Louvois’s secrets like no one else, and Louvois’s secrets are not only legion, but potentially perilous to Louvois. When I learned that he was Guise’s penitent, I began to wonder if I might get some hold over Guise and trade with him for some threat I could use to curb Louvois’s power. Then someone—and I was sure it was someone in your college—started killing. And I recruited you. Now, thanks in great part to you and your rector, I have this English plot to hold over Louvois’s head.”
“What about Lysarde’s murder and the Dutchman’s—or whoever he was? When you told me those two were dead, I had the strong feeling that you assumed Louvois was responsible.”
“No doubt. But there will be no proving it.”
“What about the dragonnades, then? You can prove those, you can stop them!”
“How can they be stopped when officially they do not occur? The man who makes Louis admit they go on at all is finished.”
Charles shook his head in disgust. Louvois had said exactly that to Guise. “And so we are back where we were,” he flung at La Reynie. “You will not risk your comfortable position.”
“Oh, very comfortable,” La Reynie said wearily. “If you could hear anything other than your own emotion, you might be in better case, Maître du Luc. I have used my power to draw a fragile circle of peace around Paris. And Versailles. I have done what I can do.”
A soft rustle of cloth made Charles realize that Pernelle had crept closer and was listening just out of sight. “Why did you have men watching the LeClercs’s bakery?” he said.
The lieutenant-général watched his men carry away Moulin’s body. Softly, more to himself than to Charles, he said, “To keep Louvois’s men away from her. He has flies in the Louvre, too.”
“To keep Louvois’s men away?” Charles said, to be sure he’d heard right. That couldn’t mean what it seemed to mean. But if it did . . . As he stared at La Reynie, an insane thought—or a fragile hope—reared itself in Charles’s mind. When La Reynie’s men were gone, the thought and the hope were still there. Charles began cautiously feeling his way. “Forgive me for insulting you, Monsieur La Reynie.”
La Reynie nodded slightly without looking at him.
“You have said that you are indebted to me, monsieur,” Charles said.
Another nod.
“I think you are a man who pays his debts. Even to self-righteous innocents.”
Now La Reynie was looking at him. “I pay my debts.”
Praying that his hunch was right, Charles nodded toward the wings. “My young friend needs to go to Geneva.” He heard Pernelle stifle a gasp. “Will you pay your debt, Lieutenant-Général La Reynie, by helping him on his way?”
It seemed to Charles that all three of them stopped breathing for longer than should have been possible. La Reynie looked into the darkness where Pernelle stood.
“Come here,” the lieutenant-général said.
Pernelle stepped into the lantern’s light.
“Take your hat off, boy,” La Reynie said gruffly.
She looked at Charles. He nodded and she slowly removed her hat.
A soft sound escaped La Reynie. “I thought so.” His voice caught in his throat and he swallowed. “When I saw you in the bakery, you ran to the back so quickly, but I thought so. You could almost be my Marguerite’s—” He smiled at Pernelle “—brother, shall we say?” To Charles’s astonishment, he drew himself up, swept his hat off, and bowed low to her. When he straightened, he was Lieutenant-Général of Paris again. “Be at the college postern before first light, boy. Accept my apology for striking you,” he said stiffly to Charles. Then he went to deal with the dead and the fragment of peace their dying had restored to his city.
Chapter 37
As Lieutenant-Général La Reynie reached the edge of the stage, the man he’d sent to the Hôtel de Guise came running back across the courtyard, spurs clanking. Charles went closer to hear the man’s report. He’d seen the female spy working at the house, the officer told La Reynie, and it was true that a woman had given birth there a few hours ago. In the Guise chapel, he added, with avid relish. Neither the woman nor the child had lived. Gossip in the house had it that the child was full-term.
Charles crossed himself and said quietly, “Her child was due in October, I heard.”