"Has this horse dealer's widow a taste for the bottle, or for something a little more genteel-say, opium?" La Reynie asked smoothly. He was rewarded with an irritated glance from the marquise. Her fan snapped shut. La Reynie's eyes glinted with secret pleasure: at last he had broken through that d.a.m.ned woman's iron self-control.

"If she is like the rest of her type, she probably drinks like a fish." The marquise bristled.

"That is all, Madame de Morville. I am afraid we will have to ask you to remain in my reception hall with the sergeant here for the rest of the day. But perhaps I can find another volume of edifying sermons to help you pa.s.s the time."

"Monsieur de La Reynie, you are always so graciously hospitable," replied the marquise.

"And as usual, you may speak to no one about this," La Reynie responded.

"You know I can't. Not if I wish to stay in business," the marquise snapped. La Reynie's smile was strangely sensual, his eyes caressing.

As the marquise was shown through the door, Desgrez said in a low voice to his chief, "Yes, monsieur, immediately. I'll have Lebrun send his wife to her." Madame de Morville paused in the hall, then continued as if she had heard nothing. That afternoon, as the marquise stared out of a back window in the Hotel La Reynie in utter boredom, Marie Bosse sold a vial of white a.r.s.enic to a policeman's wife who had come to complain of her husband's brutality.

"You say they were all in bed when you arrested them? How convenient for you, Desgrez." La Reynie looked up from his desk, where he had just put his signature on his weekly report to the King. Desgrez was standing, holding his hat.

"In the same bed, Monsieur. La Bosse, her grown son, the whole lot of them. It proves-"

"That the race of sorcerers is perpetuated by incest? Desgrez, I do not care in the least about sorcerers; it is poisoners I am seeking. I wish to get to the root of this conspiracy."

"You will find a good beginning in the contents of these women's cupboards. There is hardly a poison they don't possess. That does not even count the black candles, wax figurines, a medallion of the King-"

"The King?" Even La Reynie was taken aback. In this setting, an image of the King could be used for only one purpose. A sorcery to encompa.s.s his death.

"Desgrez," he said quietly, "I believe we have found them."

CHAPTER FIFTY

It was not until late afternoon that I was able to send for my carriage and escape my afternoon of unwanted hospitality. I was not much concerned about La Bosse or La Vigoreux, who surely were intelligent enough to recognize a policeman's wife, but La Reynie's insult rankled and festered for hours. Once free, I went straight to La Trianon's little laboratory in the rue Forez. I was fired with fury and resolve. In the street, a group of giddy girls in ap.r.o.ns and wooden clogs had just left the shop, giggling to each other and hiding something. A love potion, no doubt.

The little black reception room in front was more magnificently decorated than ever. The ladies were clearly prospering. On the mantel, a candle on a cat's skull stood before a complex drawing of the circles of heaven and h.e.l.l, and the consultation table held several mysterious bottles, as well as the coffer with the tarot cards and a book on the science of physiognomy. In the alcove, the curtain was discreetly drawn over the portrait of the Devil, and Uncle was getting a nice patina where he hung, suspended from a wire. There is something impersonal about a skeleton; I had found in the course of many visits here that I could view him without any feelings whatsoever, except, perhaps, a vague sense of contentment.

"Ah," said La Trianon, summoned by the shop bell from her laboratory, "it's the little marquise! My dear, to what do we owe the honor? Surely, you are not out of nerve medicine yet?"

"It's about the cordial I needed to see you. I need to give it up."

"Oh, you've said that before. What's happened now? Another physician says you'll die of it? We told you as much ourselves, you know. You take more of it than any living being I've seen."

"It's a weakness. It makes me vulnerable. Times are dangerous. I don't want to be vulnerable."

La Trianon's eyes narrowed. "You know," she said. Know what? I thought. This must be something quite bad. "Has she told you?" asked La Trianon in a whisper. "I should have known it couldn't be hidden from you-not while you read the oracle gla.s.s." I acted smooth. If I asked questions, I might reveal my ignorance.

"I don't pry," I answered, "but I can't help knowing something. Still, I'm here for other business. I want you to dilute the opium in my cordial, but make the solution taste just as strong. I'll pay you the same, but each week you reduce the opium by a quarter. That way I can deceive myself as I cut down." La Dodee, having come to fetch some papers from the front room, smiled in greeting as she saw me seated with her friend before the fire. She had obviously overheard my proposal.

"Just so you don't end up vomiting blood, like last time. Madame will think we've poisoned you," she broke in cheerfully. I noticed that La Trianon became very quiet in the presence of the younger woman. So, she hasn't even told her partner about this. La Voisin must be up to something very serious indeed. As La Dodee left, La Trianon stood and put one hand on the mantel, motioning me close with the other.

"I need to talk to you-confidentially," she whispered. "I cannot get La Voisin to understand me, and she has always had a weak spot for you. Maybe she will listen to a warning, if I say it comes from you."

"Tell me everything. I swear secrecy."

"Last week she came to me for a poison that could penetrate material. She wished to poison a footstool so that whoever rested his feet on it would die. I told her it was impossible. 'Don't sell it in Paris, if you want to keep your reputation. Sell it to someone who is leaving the country,' I advised her, 'so if it fails, you won't have an infuriated customer returning for revenge.' 'I need it for here,' she said, 'I mustn't fail.' She sounded remote, strange-almost mad." La Trianon's voice was soft, hurried.

"This could only be for La Montespan," I whispered.

"I cast the cards yesterday. The Queen of Wands was crossed by the King of Swords. I cast death, and the shattered tower. I am sure it is Montespan. She wants revenge."

"I know that; I've heard it from her own lips."

"But what you may not know is that since the King has withdrawn his favor from Madame de Montespan, La Voisin has put Romani on the trail of Mademoiselle de Fontanges, the new mistress." La Trianon's voice was low. Suddenly, I could see the whole pattern of the plot. La Voisin's greatest conspiracy. There must be money in it, too. Immense sums from foreign treasuries, more than just La Montespan's money. It was clear to me at that very instant that it was not only a woman that the sorceress intended to pursue to the death.

"But the King, though he no longer eats or drinks with Madame de Montespan, still pays her a brief formal visit each week, surrounded by his courtiers. In her apartments, he sits in the big armchair she keeps for him, and puts his feet on the special footstool that is reserved only for him," I said to La Trianon.

"Exactly," she whispered, "and the cards say that if La Voisin continues on the path she has chosen, she will die, and bring everything down with her. The only question in my mind is whether the shattered tower is our own 'society' or the entire kingdom."

"I suppose you want a water reading."

"Yes-your best. Absolute truth." Motioning me to wait, she went into the laboratory and returned with a clear gla.s.s vessel of water.

"I don't really need all the other things," I said. "That was just for effect."

"I know," said La Trianon, sitting down at her card-reading table where she had set the water vase. "She taught you well. It's a pity, you know. Even if you had never read again, you could have been queen, the greatest queen of all. But you've wasted yourself on the wrong things: men, for example."

The dizzy, weak feeling that accompanied the rising image swept over me. But the image that came glittering up from the bottom of the water was the old familiar one: the girl with the gray eyes, whom I now recognized as myself, looking out to sea. But the cloak she clutched around her shoulders was entirely different. A heavy cloak in blue trimmed with gold braid, with a crimson lining that flashed brightly as the wind tugged at it. I knew that cloak well. I watched for it in crowds, from out of my upstairs window, from the carriage window as the driver coaxed the horses through the crowded streets. The image, for many years the same, had changed! Behind the girl, another figure was forming. The wind tore at the plumes of his hat, and he put a hand on it to keep it in place. The other arm he put around the girl who was wearing his cloak. She looked up at him, and they smiled.

"My G.o.d," I whispered. "Causality. Free will. We are all fools, we fortune-tellers. Fate and creation. But how, when did this happen?"

"What are you talking about? What do you see?" La Trianon whispered anxiously.

"We shape our own fate, but...I can't understand how..."

La Trianon sighed. "At last I see what she meant. Too many books. What a gift to be squandered on a pedant. And a female pedant at that. Who ever heard of such a thing? Just tell me the image."

"It's just the ocean. I get the same image every so often when I'm looking for something else. I'll try again." My knees felt watery, and my essence seemed drained. I dipped my finger into the water to shatter the image and looked again.

"I see Madame in full court dress-her dark green silk. She is wearing a great emerald ring...and holding a little vial, one of yours, I believe. She is scratching at a double door...white wood paneling with the carving picked out in gilt...at the end of a marble-floored corridor. Ah, I recognize it now-it is the entrance to Madame de Montespan's rooms at Saint-Germain. The door opens halfway. Mademoiselle des Oeillets stands there, gesturing silence. La Voisin gives her the bottle, and Mademoiselle des Oeillets closes the door quickly."

La Trianon suddenly looked shriveled, as if she had aged a hundred years. "I saw it when I cast the cards," she said. "This is death. I will go and beg her to give it up. What prideful demon leads her to this madness?"

"You know that it is Montespan," I answered.

"If she were not of a mind to, even La Montespan could not move her to this. It is suicide, and they both know it."