“Will you also block the old stairway? That would-”
“Pere Guise has given me his key to the stairway doors. Both doors are now locked. Enough, Maitre du Luc. We must not keep the lieutenant-general waiting longer. Remember, tell him only that robbers attacked you.”
“Bonjour, Pere Le Picart, Maitre du Luc.”
They turned sharply. Lieutenant-General La Reynie was in the doorway, straightening from a bow.
His bright dark eyes went from one startled face to the other. “Forgive me, if I have come in too soon. But the door was a little open and I heard you talking.” He smiled broadly. “So I took it on myself to join you.”
“Please do, Monsieur La Reynie,” the rector said, his tone delicately tinged with irony. “As you see, Maitre du Luc is better. Allow us just to finish some college business and then you may talk with him. No, no, stay. We have no secrets.” He turned his back and grimaced at Charles. “You remember, I trust, Maitre du Luc,” he said, pitching his voice so that La Reynie heard him clearly, “that although it is Sunday, you have a rehearsal this afternoon. Since the performance is only four days away.”
Sighing inwardly, Charles nodded. He hadn’t remembered. And he wanted to go and see how Pernelle was faring. But Wednesday and the performance were nearly upon them.
“Pere Jouvancy wants you there, even if you only sit and watch. I have said you are injured because your horse threw you. No need for more hysterical gossip.” He turned to La Reynie. “I will leave you in private. I beg you not to tire Maitre du Luc, as he must work this afternoon.”
La Reynie bowed the rector out the door. He waited a few moments in silence, opened the door quickly, checked the passageway, then closed it again and walked back to Charles. “If you were injured in my service, maitre, please accept my regrets.” He lifted his dark blue coat skirts out of the way and sat down on a bed.
“In Pere Le Picart’s service as well as yours, monsieur,” Charles said curtly, sinking carefully onto the bed he’d occupied.
La Reynie rested his crossed hands on the silver head of his walking stick. “So you are ordered to tell me robbers attacked you. Now why would robbers risk drawing the watch’s attention by shooting, Maitre du Luc?”
“And where was the watch, anyway?” Charles said irritably. “They’re never there when you need them.”
“So I often hear. Who attacked you?”
“I never saw the man who shot at me.”
“You had been at Pere La Chaise’s soiree?”
“You know that because one of your flies was also there?”
La Reynie smiled wolfishly. “Of course-you were there.”
“Pere Le Picart sent me to deliver messages and pay my respects.”
“And did you meet the visiting Englishman? Or Dutchman, as I’m told some thought him?”
“I saw a visitor who was said to be English,” Charles said, thinking that there really had been another fly at Pere La Chaise’s soiree. “We were not introduced.”
“A pity.” La Reynie scratched with a fingernail at a patch of tarnish on his walking stick’s silver. “How did you end up in the beggars’ Louvre?”
Hoping that La Reynie had learned that from the rector, Charles said, “When the attacker shot at me the second time, my horse bolted and fetched up near the unfinished colonnade.” Charles shrugged and grimaced with pain. “I fell off and a Good Samaritan found me and dragged me inside.”
“And who is the woman who tended you there and spoke your southern language with you?”
A cold hand closed on Charles’s gut. He shook his head as though baffled. “There was a woman, one of the beggars. She had a thick accent, but-” He shrugged. “She was very kind and I gave her some coins. I never thought to get her name. I hardly remember even being there, monsieur, let alone any delirious nonsense I uttered. I had bled a great deal.” He closed his eyes and tried to look pathetic.
“Why did your attacker not pursue you there and finish you?”
Charles opened his eyes. This he could answer truthfully. “I think his horse went down and he lost me. We were going at demon speed through streets hardly wide enough for a man on foot to pass.”
“I hear that a young Huguenot woman escaped from the New Converts convent last week. Did she end up at the Louvre, Maitre du Luc?”
“Possibly,” Charles said indifferently. “Since she would have no coreligionists to go to.”
“Oh, there are Huguenots in Paris,” La Reynie said softly, watching him. “Not many, but some. Most are artisans. But a few are men of wealth, whom the king needs. Do you not realize that one reason the dragonnades are always far from Paris is because the Huguenots here are more or less protected?”
“By whom?” Charles said, startled out of his verbal fencing.
“By me. And, in his way, by Monsieur Louvois.”
“But he runs the-” Charles pressed his lips together, cursing himself.
“Of course he runs the dragonnades,” La Reynie sighed. “He is the war minister. Mort de ma vie, are you really so innocent? Everyone knows he runs the dragonnades, there’s no trouble in that. So long as you don’t say so to the king. I repeat, the king needs some few Huguenots. In case it has escaped you, France is struggling and money is scarce. The countryside is poor, the king is poor, I am poor, even the Jesuits may be poor, for all I know, though I doubt it. Only the New World and the Huguenots are rich. Sometimes the king needs their money more than he needs their conversion.”
“I cannot believe that Louvois protects Huguenots, however rich.”
“Mon cher maitre, Louvois is responsible not only for war, but for some part of the realm’s finance. And as I told you in the Louvre, he loves order the way other men love mistresses. Especially order in Paris. The absence of order usually means the absence of money. In the interests of the king’s treasury, he helps me protect some few Huguenots here for the sake of civic peace.”
“And what is your own reason for protecting them?”
“The king tells me to, Maitre du Luc, why else? Just as he sometimes tells me to help convert them-oh, not by torture. I am to do them favors. And have little-theological conversations.”
Charles stared. “Theological conversations?”
La Reynie nodded and rolled his eyes, looking almost sheepish. It was Charles’s first clear glimpse of the man behind the public role.
“You can believe me, maitre, when I say that I do not care whether your Huguenot cousin is in Paris. My interest is in you. I forced you into spying for me because I need your help. I watched you carefully when Louvois accosted you after Philippe’s funeral. You are, like many of your Jesuit brothers, intelligent beyond the ordinary. I knew beyond doubt that you were looking for answers to the attack on the child and to his brother’s murder when I found you standing over the dead porter. Now someone has tried to murder you on your way home from Pere La Chaise’s soiree. I heard your rector order you not to tell me something. And, indeed, you are telling me nothing. In spite of the threats I still hold over you. Was I wrong about you? Are you going to help your rector shield your Society instead of the Doute child? Make no mistake, Maitre du Luc, this tangle has Jesuit intrigue written all over it but I am going to untangle it and you are going to help me. Unless you prefer the alternatives.”
Mislead him, Le Picart had said of La Reynie. Charles thought that men who had misled the lieutenant-general must be few and far between.
“Who attacked you?” La Reynie’s voice cracked like a whip and Charles jumped.
“I don’t know.”
“I think you do. It was a Jesuit and you are shielding him.”
“I assure you, I like my life too much to shield anyone who wants to kill me.” Charles stirred uncomfortably on the bed. His attacker had certainly not been Guise, because Guise had still been inside the room arguing with Louvois. And Charles doubted that Guise would deign to take the role of common assassin. But most Louis le Grand Jesuits had grown up learning how to ride and use weapons. Even the poorest lay brother knew how to use a knife. “I do know what was used to kill Philippe and the porter,” Charles said, partly to redirect La Reynie’s attention.
La Reynie’s gaze sharpened and he leaned forward. “What?”
“Someone in the Louvre saw the porter’s murder,” Charles said. “This witness never saw the killer’s face, but did see the man take something from his pocket and strangle Pierre with it, then sit on the floor and do something to one of his boots. I think the killer strangled the porter with a spur garter and put it back on his boot. As he did with Philippe. A long, partially braided leather garter would fit the marks on both bodies.”
“Well done,” La Reynie said, in surprised approval.
“A woman who saw Antoine’s accident said the man who rode him down wore burnt sugar-colored jackboots.
