When he woke again she was sleeping soundly. Her head was on his chest and he breathed in the sweet scent of her hair. He hoped he hadn’t been repulsive, still wearing his day’s sweat. But she hadn’t seemed repulsed. His smile was broad enough to light the dark. But dawn was coming. His arm tightened around her. Before dawn, she would go. He tensed against grief’s assault, but it didn’t come. But I love her with all my heart, he said to the Silence, appalled at his lack of feeling.
Yes, Something said very distinctly in the dark. Charles froze, feeling like Adam discovered with Eve after they’d shared the apple, and everything else. Pernelle sighed in her sleep and put a warm hand over his heart. Light too bright to look at seemed to come from nowhere and flood everything, every smallest piece of him. And he finally understood, though he also didn’t understand at all. She would go and he would love her. And he would love many other things, though not any other woman. Yes, the Silence said.
Darkness still held Paris in its arms when Charles and Pernelle went hand in hand to the street passage. The college was sleeping and the porter hadn’t yet come to his post. Pernelle was in her boy’s clothes, wearing her cloak and with the last of the rector’s pouch of coins in her pocket. Before they reached the postern, the bell rang beside it. They stopped and turned to each other. Charles put down his lantern.
“Go with God, beloved heart,” he whispered, and kissed her. “Always.”
Her dark eyes were silvery with tears. “Always.”
Charles unbarred the postern door and Lieutenant-General La Reynie, booted and cloaked, stepped out of the darkness.
“Quickly,” he whispered.
Pernelle’s hand rested briefly against Charles’s heart. Then she turned to La Reynie and Charles closed and rebarred the door. He listened to the two pairs of feet walk toward the river and when he could no longer hear them, he went to the chapel. He meant to go to the Virgin’s altar, but he found himself instead standing in front of the statue of Jeanne d’Arc, the Maid of Orleans. He knelt where he and Pernelle had knelt just a few days before, and waited for the blow of her leaving to hit him. Instead, an emptiness grew inside him. Not a grieving emptiness. A waiting emptiness, he thought, gazing uneasily up at the Maid. She stared over his head, as though she were waiting, too, waiting for the English army and knowing, against all the odds, that she would prevail.
“But they killed you,” Charles said out loud. The statue calmly studied the horizon. “They burned you,” he said. But only after she had saved France. His breath began to come short. “I have no power,” he protested, “no power at all!” But neither had she, only belief in her truth. They could take her mortal life-and they had-but God had held her soul’s life. So she had clung to nothing but God; her enemies had had nothing she wanted. She’d had no price. That was her power. Charles stood up. Or something pulled him upright.
Chapter 38
The servant who opened the Hotel de Louvois’s gate was as brusque as the war minister himself. He waved Charles across the cobbles to the house door and disappeared into one of the ground-floor outbuildings. Charles picked up the iron fist that served as a knocker and let it fall.
“I am Maitre Charles Matthieu Beuvron du Luc,” he said to the surly footman who answered, putting several generations of Provencal noblemen into his voice. “Please tell M. Louvois that I must speak with him. About last night’s events at the college of Louis le Grand.”
“Wait here.”
He waited in an antechamber done in rich red, listening to the early-morning stirrings of the household. The footman returned as quickly as Charles thought he would and led him upstairs to a large room whose glowing parquet was an expanse of eight-pointed golden stars. Across the room, in front of long windows, Louvois sat writing behind a massive black desk. Ebony, Charles thought. The room was so padded and plump with luxury that Louvois’s plum brocade house robe and turbanlike head wrapping made him seem like just one more piece of costly decor.
“Monsieur.” Charles nodded to him slightly.
Louvois glanced up. “What do you want? It is barely day.”
“You will have heard, I think, in spite of the hour, of last night’s deaths at the college.”
“Of course,” Louvois said, still writing. “It is all over Paris. Pere Guise was my confessor,” he added accusingly, as though Charles were disturbing his mourning.
“Before Pere Guise and Frere Moulin died, they talked.”
Louvois’s hands stilled. “I did not know this Moulin.”
“On the contrary, Monsieur Louvois. Last night Frere Moulin talked much about his usefulness to you. As your errand boy for the dragonnades you and Pere Guise have run these last years. I know the king knows about them. I know he wants them to go on. I also know that if they are forced publicly on his notice, you will be the scapegoat. He will accuse you of usurping his authority and you will likely die a very public traitor’s death to save his face.”
“The man who forces such knowledge on Louis will also die,” Louvois said, purple with fury. “He will see to that, make no mistake.”
“Nevertheless, I am here to give you notice, monsieur, that if the dragonnades continue, I will force all that on the king. The next dragonnade is planned for Metz, I understand.”
Louvois’s eyes bulged. “You are insane. You are a rogue Jesuit. Do you expect me to believe that Jesuit policy toward heretics has changed?”
“I expect you to believe that I will do what I have said.”
Louvois surged to his feet and bellowed for his servants. Charles ran. Halfway down the stairs, he straight- armed a man over the banister and into the path of more men coming behind him. Charles gained the front door, covered the courtyard in a few long strides, and was through the gate, just opened for a carriage coming in. He took a twisting path away from the rue de Richelieu and when he passed the open door of a tiny church, he ducked inside.
Hidden in a corner’s shadows, he gasped for breath, sweating with fear and holding on to the wall because his legs threatened to collapse under him. What in God’s name had he just done? Had he truly gone insane? A priest came out of the sacristy and started toward him, and Charles went back outside, wary and watchful, but no one paid him any attention. He walked toward the river, gulping rain-washed air, still asking himself what he’d done. As he crossed the Petit Pont, the utterly simple answer came: He had done what he could.
He had also guaranteed that he would be looking over his shoulder for as long as he lived. As long as Louvois lived, anyway. Rogue Jesuit, Louvois had called Charles. In a way, he supposed he was. Yesterday he had helped Louis le Grand to a public triumph. But this morning he had kissed his lover good-bye. Just now, he had struck a blow against what many Jesuits applauded. And before any of that, he’d already had penance coming. For the lies that had bought him time to solve the murders, for acting as La Reynie’s spy, for breaking his vow of chastity. But not for loving. Never for loving. If that made him a rogue, then rogue he was.
Dodging the rivulets of mud sliding down the rue St. Jacques, he climbed toward the college. When he reached it, he stopped in the street and looked up at the words carved over the double doors. Collegium Magni Ludo. The College of Louis the Great, the king’s college. But not only the king’s. It was also Le Picart’s, Jouvancy’s, Dainville’s, Fabre’s, God’s…
“God’s thorn bonnet, mon pere!” A cart driver pulled his horse nearly onto its haunches to keep from hitting Charles. “Are you going in or out? Make up your mind!”
“In,” Charles said. “I’m going in.”
Epilogue
The last dragonnade in France took place in August 1686 in Metz.
In 1688, when the Catholic King James II fled England, rumors that French dragoons were poised to invade and dragonnade the Anglicans helped to bring about his fall. The English throne went to his Protestant daughter
