The Whispering of Bones (16 page)

Charles sighed. “Because I do.” He told La Reynie how and where he'd found the fragment of cover.

“Of course it
would
be you who'd find the thing. Oh, well, at least it's not another murdered man.”

The carriage pulled up at Louis le Grand's postern and the lackey sprang down and opened the door for Charles.

“When you talk to the women at The Dog,” Charles said, “please remember that whatever the owner may be doing, the young one has nothing to do with anything illegal. She's only just come to live there and, well—”

La Reynie laughed. “And she's young and pretty. Yes, I'll bear it in mind. Out with you, now, I'm going home for once. I doubt I'll need you tomorrow. Besides other things—including an argument I've been avoiding about the cost of candles for the street lanterns—I'm going to see the abbess at Notre Dame des Champs. I want to ask more questions there, and look again at that well chamber before her workmen go in there on Thursday. So I won't need you tomorrow. Soon after, though.”

Charles got out of the carriage and watched it roll away up the hill. All the saints were witness that he needed to study, after his time in the infirmary and the time he'd just spent with La Reynie. But the saints also knew that he'd hoped that the
lieutenant-général
would turn out to need him tomorrow, after all.
So
, he asked himself with a sigh, as he rang the postern bell,
does that mean you're insincere about wanting to be a priest? Should you accept La Reynie's old offer to join the police?
With that uncomfortable thought, he went into the college and slowly climbed the stairs to his books.

C
HAPTER
14

THE FEAST OF ST. CHARLES BORROMEO,

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 1687

T
o Charles's disappointment, Lieutenant-Général La Reynie didn't come looking for him on Monday. On Tuesday, during the recreation hour after dinner, Charles was in the library, in the small room reserved for consulting books considered dangerous or rare. He'd asked for the library's copy of
Le Cabinet jesuitique
, and was standing with it at the little reading room's tall, small-paned window to have better light. When Frère Brunet had released him back to his own chamber on Saturday, it had been with strict orders to come straight back if the wound opened, or his fever came back, or a long list of other unhappy developments. None of those had so far happened, but the more he read of
Le Cabinet
, the sicker he felt. He was reading the “fourth directive” of the forged Secret Instructions for Jesuits. In it, the vengeful author purported to tell Jesuit confessors how to gain political power for the Society.

“In order that ours undertake well the direction of princes and aristocrats, they should thus steer matters so that it appears that the direction tends to the good that the princes believe in. But little by little . . . the directions should aim at political governance.”

Charles stared helplessly at the page. How would anyone unacquainted with the Society's real rules know that this was false? Even the language sounded like the language of Jesuit documents, using the customary
ours
to refer to Jesuits. But the content would be even more confusing to outsiders. Most Catholic princes, including Louis XIV, had Jesuit confessors, and anyone with easy access to a ruler was regarded with uneasy suspicion. Charles knew how hard King Louis's confessor, Père La Chaise, worked to influence his royal charge for good—or to at least lessen some of the harm the king could do. But Charles had also seen how easily enemies twisted La Chaise's fallible efforts into a Jesuit quest for political power at court.

“Hah! I told him!”

Charles jumped and turned around, nearly dropping
Le
Cabinet
. An elderly Jesuit sitting behind him with an enormous book was grinning broadly. He slapped a hand down on the table.

“
That
settles the Manicheans!” the old man crowed. “I knew I was right.” He shut the book with a bang, earning himself more reproving looks from the other readers and the librarian, and shuffled out.

Trying to remember which heretics the Manicheans had been, Charles turned back to the window and found his place again in the
Cabinet
. Disconsolately, he turned the page. This book was libel, not heresy. But its effects were as destructive and even harder to counter, since so many people over the years had taken it for Gospel truth. He started reading the next “directive,” about how the Society should creep into the affections—and purses—of rich widows, but it was so disheartening that he quit reading and stared out at the garden in front of the library.

The college's ancient grapevine hugged the stone wall as though it might be shivering in the chilly sunlight. The vine made him think of Père Dainville, who'd loved unearthing the school's history. Dainville had told him that the Cour d'honneur had once been an enormous garden with vineyards stretching to each side, a remnant of the vineyards that had covered the Left Bank for centuries. Thinking about that made Charles recall the illuminated manuscript page he'd stopped to look at downstairs. The brightly colored old drawing showed King Louis IX—later St. Louis—riding along a Paris street as someone emptied a chamber pot over his head. Charles wondered what had happened to the figure at the window upending the pot—and how long it had taken to get the smell out of the king's thick fur-trimmed robes. Now, after reading
Le Cabinet
, he wondered if the stink of lies this little book had poured over the Society of Jesus could ever be washed away.

From the Cour d'honneur, the bell clanged for the end of recreation. For Charles, it was the signal to go to the street passage to meet students from the older boarders' Congregation of the Holy Virgin who were this week's almsgivers. The Congregation was a social and spiritual organization, active in all Jesuit schools and in many parishes, and one of its functions was regular charity. He picked up his outdoor hat and his cloak and took his book to the librarian, who would lock it away again in a sturdy cupboard. Then he went down the library's new grand staircase and out into the mercifully windless day. Instead of going through the fathers' garden, he went the quicker way through the day students' court. Though there were nearly three times as many day students as boarding students, Charles had little contact with them, since they didn't live in the college or eat there. Now, as they flooded into the court after dinner at home or in lodgings, Charles watched them curiously. Their courtyard, like the others, had its proctors to enforce discipline, but strict discipline was harder here because of the day boys' sheer numbers. The proctors called for silence as the boys lined up at classroom doors but sensibly settled for a muted murmur of talk.

Like the boarding students, the day students wore long black scholar's gowns, many green with age and some—on the youngest boys of nine or ten—nearly trailing on the ground. Unlike the boarders, these were mostly the sons of the middle and lower bourgeoisie. There were some scholarship boys from poor families, but most of these boys' fathers were respected guild members, middling merchants, or legal men on the lower rungs of the law's hierarchy.

When Charles reached the covered passage between the day court and the Cour d'honneur, he found a huddle of day students standing with their heads together, their black hats and gowns making them look like some exotic tree. They were talking eagerly and looking at something in their midst. They didn't hear him at first, but when they did, they gasped audibly, turned like duellers at bay, and then bowed and made speed into their own court. Charles judged their ages at seventeen or eighteen, just the age when the college's hold was thinning to the breaking point. He wondered what they'd been looking at, considered stopping them to find out, and then didn't. He well remembered being a seventeen-year-old schoolboy, more than ready to cut the strings holding him to his teachers and their endless discipline.

When Charles reached the street passage, the half dozen boarders who'd gathered there to help distribute alms greeted him eagerly. Several were the same age as the day boys, and he wondered whether they, too, were chafing under school discipline. The
cubiculaire
waiting with them nodded at the baskets on the passage floor. “The clothes are there,
maître
. Père Damiot entrusted Monsieur Connor with the alms purse. A good walk and a blessed afternoon to you.”

As Charles thanked and dismissed him, laughter rose beside the postern, where some of the boys were listening to Frère Martin.

“So maybe you can choose yourselves brides this afternoon,” Charles heard Martin say, his bass voice shaking with laughter.

“But they're orphans,” a spotty-faced boy from Normandy said, indignant and offended. “My father would never let me marry a girl without a name.”

“They have names,” Walter Connor retorted. “Their parents are not unknown, just dead. The girls at the Miséricorde live there because they no longer have any family to take care of them.”

“So you'll be glad to marry one of them, I suppose?” The Norman boy, Jacques Honfleur, shrugged disdainfully at Connor. “Not surprising from an Irishman.”

Anger turned Connor even paler than he normally was, and Charles put a hand on his shoulder.

“Enough, Monsieur Honfleur,” he said, eyeing the Norman. “It's unwise and unkind to be disdainful of bereavement. As these alms we're giving should remind you.” He pointed at the biggest basket. “You may carry that to help you remember. Monsieur Beauclaire, you may carry the small one.”

Redly furious, Honfleur picked up his basket.

Beauclaire hefted his and said, “What's in them,
maître
?”

“Clothing. The twin daughters of a man from one of our men's Congregations of the Holy Virgin died of a fever a few weeks ago. Their father has given their clothes for the orphans at the Miséricorde, so we're taking them along with the purse your student Congregation has filled.”

Connor looked at Charles. “Does the father have other children?”

“No, he doesn't.”

“Ah, the poor man!” Connor crossed himself and moved toward the postern. The others, chastened, made way for him to go first.

Frère Martin opened the door, looking ruefully at Charles. “Sorry,
maître
. I made too much of a joke about them going to a house of girls.”

Charles nodded his agreement, but leavened it with a friendly clap on Martin's shoulder. He chivied his flock into the street and took his place at the front of the group.

“Remember now,” he said, “we are to go quietly through the streets. Little talking, and no shouting or gawking or making a spectacle of ourselves.
Habes?
”

“Yes,
maître
, we have it.” The chorus of adolescent voices sounded a little like an unmusical choir, some treble, some wandering up and down the scale, and one—an Austrian boy's voice—that was nearly as deep as Frère Martin's and seemed to startle its owner every time he opened his mouth.

They set off southward, climbing the slope of the rue St. Jacques toward the city wall, As they passed The Dog, Charles looked for Rose Ebrard and wondered if La Reynie had been to the shop yet. And how long he would have to wait before La Reynie next wanted his help. As he led his group through the St. Jacques gate market, he wondered anew, as he passed the needle seller's booth, what Mlle Ebrard had really been doing on Friday outside the Novice House.

Beyond the old gate, they turned to their left on a footpath that followed the outside of the lichened wall. Connor, walking beside Charles, reached up and plucked a yellow flower growing out of the gray stones. Sensing Charles's eyes on him, he looked up.

“I like yellow,
maître
. Do you? It was my sister Mary's favorite color. My older sister. She and my younger sister died two years ago. Mary was always my favorite—people said we were like twins.” He put the flower in the buttonhole of his coat, beneath his black gown.

Charles asked Connor more about his sister, letting the other boys draw ahead. Then Connor fell silent, the path turned south, and he and Charles caught up with the rest. Beauclaire was arguing with Honfleur, rebutting Honfleur's argument that Normans were superior to other Frenchmen. Since they were being reasonably quiet and not warring with anything but words, Charles left them to it. He was half Norman himself, but he had no desire to weigh in on the unpleasant Honfleur's side.

Beauclaire suddenly stopped arguing and looked at the narrow lane they were passing. “
Maître
, may we go down this way? I know it doesn't look like it goes in the right direction, but it turns.”

Charles peered into the unprepossessing lane, little more than a dirt-and-grass path and lined with small badly kept houses, ragged gardens, and crumbling garden walls. “Why do you want to go this way, Monsieur Beauclaire?”

“Because I like its name.” Beauclaire's eyes were dancing with a glee Charles had learned to distrust in the year he'd taught him. “Do you know what it's called?”

Everyone, including Charles, shook their heads.

“It's called Talking Flea Street! So may we,
maître
?”

“How do you know that? And how do you know it turns in the right direction?” the skeptical Connor said.

“Maître Richaud told me.”

Charles was glad to see that the mention of Richaud's name provoked no reaction from any of the boys. So far, then, the scholastic's increasingly ominous disappearance had been kept from the students. He fixed Beauclaire with a warning eye. “Do you swear it goes in the right direction?”