The Whispering of Bones (15 page)

C
HAPTER
13

THE FEAST OF ALL SOULS, SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 1687

C
harles spent all of the next day, Saturday, waiting for a summons from La Reynie in the gaps between the festival Mass for the Feast of All Saints, the additional special Mass offered for Maître Louis Richaud that he might yet be found safe and unharmed, and trying to read St. Thomas in his chamber. But no word came from La Reynie and Charles ended the day feeling edgy and deflated.

On Sunday, as he shivered in the thin sunshine on a bench in the deserted Cour d'honneur, an unread book in his lap, the back of his neck prickled coldly—the sign that someone was too close behind him. He jumped to his feet and turned, arms up to defend himself. Lieutenant-Général La Reynie stood there, his mouth open in surprise and his silver-headed stick half-raised to fend Charles off.

“I've told you, don't come up behind me like that!” Charles said. “Ever since the army, people coming too close make me want to strike first and question later.”

“If you were armed, I'd take that very seriously.”

“Bear in mind that an ex-soldier doesn't need a weapon to do you serious harm,” Charles shot back. La Reynie blinked in surprise. “Sometimes,” Charles muttered, picking up the book he'd dropped, “I fear I really will strike out at someone before I realize there's no threat.”

“I'll bear that in mind. Meanwhile, I hear you've been ordered to help me, after all.”

“You
hear
?” Charles said wryly. “I think you heard that news at Fontainebleu.”

A slow smile spread over the
lieutenant-général
's face. “I had good ‘hunting' there this autumn.”

“And I was the quarry.”

“Quite a nice ‘bag,' if I may say so.”

Charles gave up and smiled back. “Why do I always lose these sparring contests?”

“Because they're with me.” La Reynie jerked his head toward the street. “Come. My carriage is waiting.”

“My orders don't include simply roaming over Paris with you.”

“They do include helping me with questions where Jesuits are concerned. So come.”

Charles followed him out to the rue St. Jacques. “What Jesuits?” he said, as La Reynie climbed into the low, red-wheeled carriage.

“I'm stretching the category a little. I want you with me while I talk to Maître Louis Richaud's family. Your presence may encourage them to talk. Or—as I rather suspect—may anger them enough to make them even more indiscreet than they've already been. I sent their neighborhood police
commissaire
to do it, but
la famille
Richaud threw him out.”

The lackey shut the carriage door and climbed up onto his rear perch, and the carriage moved off down the hill.

“The
commissaire
, being a promising young man,” La Reynie continued, “came to me and suggested I use that little judgment lapse on their part to my benefit. They are going to discover that they'd rather talk to me than visit the Châtelet.”

Charles grinned. “Your
commissaire
does sound promising.” He looked out the window and saw that they were turning off St. Jacques by the little church of St. Yves and heading for the Place Maubert. “Where do the Richauds live?”

“Near Saint Victor's abbey. There's only a sister and a brother, it seems. The brother works in the woodyard by the river.”

Charles turned from the window. “They're poor people?”

“Very, my man says.”

Charles was silent, staring at the rich coverings of the carriage seats and thinking about Maître Louis Richaud. It had never occurred to him that the scholastic came from poverty. It had been obvious that Richaud came from a modest background, but Charles had imagined him from some careful family of competent artisans, comfortable enough in a small way. Not that he'd ever thought much about it, because Richaud had been only a sour and vindictive minor presence in his life and best avoided. The carriage had turned and turned again, and was moving east along the river now, toward the turreted stretch of the old wall and the St. Bernard gate. The river was white-capped, and the gulls trying to fly against the wind looked as though they were hovering in midair.

“We'll go to the house,” La Reynie said, as they passed the gate. “The Richaud brother won't be at the woodyard on All Saints.”

The carriage rattled over the rough road along the wall, and Charles gazed across the spreading woodyards at the tower of St. Victor's church showing above the abbey walls. He wondered if Richaud, growing up here in the abbey's shadow, had thought of becoming a monk there. Or had he wanted only to get as far from these poor beginnings as he could?

La Reynie peered from the window beside his seat. “We're nearly there.” He put his head out, started to call to his driver, and got a mouthful of wig in the river wind. “Stop!” he yelled, spitting out strands of hair. “We'll get out here.”

The road was uncrowded on this holiday, and the driver stopped the carriage without the usual outcry from other carriage drivers and pedestrians. La Reynie and Charles descended and stood looking at the narrow shabby houses along both sides of the road. A few people sat on their front steps, in spite of the chill, and a flute was playing somewhere. A worn and stained chemise and a pair of men's breeches flapped loose from the small leafless tree where someone had put them to dry, and a shrieking little girl raced barefoot after them, her uncoifed brown hair flying behind her.

“Which house is the Richauds'?” La Reynie called to the girl.

“There.” She pointed beyond where the laundry had come to rest and leaped to catch the chemise by its tail out of a bush. Then she pulled the breeches from a small thicket—of thorns Charles thought, from the ripping sound the garment made—and trudged back across the road. “He's drunk,” she said warningly as she passed them.

The two men picked their way across the badly paved road and around unpleasant puddles. The plaster-and-timber house the little girl had pointed at leaned tiredly against the old house on its left. La Reynie swept a glance up its front wall and tapped at the door with his stick. An indefinable roar came from somewhere above them. He squinted up at the windows again and tapped harder.

A window opened on the top floor and a man who might have been Richaud's twin nearly fell out of it. “What?” He hung over the ledge, gazing at them through half-closed eyes until someone pulled him back into the room and slammed the window shut. Heavy shoes clattered down bare stairs and a haggard woman who looked at least forty wrenched open the door.

“What do you want?” she demanded.

“I am looking for Maître Louis Richaud,” La Reynie said genially. “Are you perhaps Mademoiselle Richaud? His sister?”

Her frown turned wary and she stared at them without speaking. Behind her, the man who'd opened the window lurched down the stairs and pushed her aside to glare at La Reynie and Charles.

“You, I suspect, are Louis Richaud's brother,” La Reynie said less genially. “The one who pitched my
commissaire
out the door.”

The man opened his eyes wider and crouched a little, looking from one of them to the other, like an animal uncertain from which direction an attack might come. The woman stepped in front of him and folded her arms across her filthy apron bodice.

“What's it to you who we are?” she said belligerently.

“I am the head of the Paris police,” La Reynie said, smiling widely. “The two of you threw my
commissaire
out of your rooms. If you don't want to go to the Châtelet for that, you will answer my questions.”

At that, the drunk rushed him, swinging thin arms with muscles like ropes. La Reynie and Charles sidestepped, and La Reynie grabbed the man by the front of his shirt and shook him. “Where is your brother?” he shouted.

The man shrugged and breathed brandy fumes into La Reynie's face. The woman pulled her brother free.

“You want to know where's Louis?” she shouted back at La Reynie. “Ask
him
,” she pointed sullenly at Charles. “Louis went to the Jesuits. Why come here to ask about him?”

Charles said mildly, “Has he been to visit you?”

She spat at his feet. “Louis? Come here? Jesus himself is about as likely to visit.”

She reached up and shoved stringy dark hair under her coif with hands stained a muddy blue color. The same color was deep under her fingernails. Charles turned to look at the man, who had slid down the house wall and was sitting on the ground, apparently going to sleep. His hands were in his lap, stained like his sister's, and his nails harbored the same color. With a wave of guilt, Charles realized that the dark color under Maître Richaud's fingernails, which had always disgusted him, wasn't dirt, but dye.

“
Mademoiselle
, how did Louis go from being a dyer to being a Jesuit?”

“We all worked with our father in the dye works. It was down by the river. But Louis—by God's long cock, Louis was hopeless. All thumbs, couldn't hold a stirring stick the right way up, couldn't tell green from red! My father beat him till he screamed. For that and for running away, but it was no use. You'd think the brat could have done something to earn his keep and pay me back for raising him. I raised him, me. I was ten years old when he was born. My mother, oh, she was too good for a poor dyer's wife. Hardly out of childbed after having Louis, and ran off with a bargeman.” She cast a bitter look toward the river. “Died not long after that, we heard, and served her right.”

Charles grimaced. “And Louis tried to run away?” He was suddenly full of pity for all three of the dyer's children.

“How far can you go at six? He'd sneak away from work. The priest kept finding him in the church trying to steal the Gospel book. Worth something, those books, but Louis couldn't even manage that much. The stupid old priest thought Louis kept taking the book because he wanted to read, so he taught him how. Lot of good that did the rest of us. All it did was make Louis brag even more about being better than us and everyone else on God's earth.”

So that had been the beginning, Charles thought. Reading had been the small opening that let Louis Richaud out into a different world. That world must have come as a godsend to Richaud, as both boy and man. Why then, he wondered, had the man always seemed so joyless, gone to such lengths to dislike everyone and everything? La Reynie's voice startled Charles out of his musings.

“I want the truth, woman! Has Louis been here? Have you seen him anywhere? He's missing and no one knows where he is.”

The woman paled under the dirt on her face. “You wouldn't bother with people like us just for ‘missing.'”

“All right. Your brother may be dead. We don't know. We're trying to find out.”

“Dead?” Her mouth trembled and Charles thought for a moment that some hidden well of feeling had been touched in her. But she only hugged herself, as if she'd suddenly felt the cold wind that was blowing, and went back into the house.

The thin mournful sound of the flute they'd heard earlier followed La Reynie and Charles at they returned to the waiting carriage.

“Did you believe her?” La Reynie asked Charles, as the carriage turned.

“About not having seen him? Yes. And if you should find a body and wonder if it's his, look at the fingernails. He has dye under his just like those two.”

“A good observation. I only wish we had a likely body. Then we could be done with at least that question.” He frowned at Charles. “I think that I'm about to have a worse coil to solve. When I leave you at the college, I'm going to your Provincial's office.”

Charles returned La Reynie's resigned gaze with a sinking heart. “Why?”

“Your Provincial's note said they think that the
Monita Secreta
is being circulated in Paris again.” La Reynie's gaze sharpened. “Why do I suddenly think you know more about this than I do?”