The Whispering of Bones (23 page)

“No.” She stared at him, mystified. “She hardly ever offers to have books delivered. And the only person from the Novice House I've ever spoken to—besides Amaury just now—is the servant boy, and I certainly never gave him a book. I doubt he can read.”

“I imagine he can, he gets teaching in return for his work. Well, that's one question answered. Here's another. Is your aunt selling
Le Cabinet jesuitique
upstairs at The Dog?”

A flush crept up the girl's throat and she kept her gaze determinedly on the street in front of them. “I know what's upstairs. Is this
Cabinet
one of those Dutch books?”

“Have you seen a book with that title among the Dutch books?” Charles countered.

“I don't remember a title like that. But I don't—I try not to look at them. My aunt doesn't make me sell them. But she says that if The Dog doesn't have them, someone else will make the profit. She's trying to make a living for us both, and the shop hasn't done so well since her husband—my mother's brother—died.”

They moved aside to let a string of porters go by, bent under carrying frames loaded with bales of cloth.

“Mademoiselle Ebrard, do you swear by the Virgin that you are not helping your aunt distribute
Le Cabinet jesuitique
?”

Impatience flared in her deep blue eyes. “Yes! How many ways do I have to say it? Why does it matter so much?”

“Because
Le Cabinet
is an illegal and poisonous book full of clever lies about the Society of Jesus, and someone in Paris is selling it. I was sure it was your aunt.” Charles's tone grew lightly ironic. “And if she were, what a stroke of luck that would be for you.
Le Cabinet
might well persuade a Jesuit novice that he'd made a bad decision.”

Her eyes were as cold as a Paris winter. “I mean to win Amaury back, but not with lies.”

She put a pleading hand on Charles's arm. “
Maître
, if I know that Amaury has no business in your Novice House, surely God must know it!” She tried to laugh. “I wish I could send God a note! Because I need a miracle. I'm so outnumbered—there are so many of you—so many Jesuits—standing between me and Amaury.”

“He's taken no vows. He can leave if he wants to. We don't keep anyone in the Society who doesn't want to be there.”

“But so long as he tells himself he has a vocation, and is surrounded by men with vocations, he will want to be there. And I know that your Society always wants nobles.”

They were nearing the rue St. Jacques. Behind his calm face and carefully lowered eyes, Charles was in turmoil. He doubted Amaury de Corbet's vocation as much as the girl beside him did. He'd seen the way the two looked at each other, and he knew what it was to look at a woman like that and lose her. He also thought that Amaury needed time and refuge for enough penance to help him leave the Battle of Cassel behind. But a man could have those things without having a religious vocation. On the other hand, Charles told himself, who was he to pronounce for certain on another man's vocation? And who was this girl to pronounce on the vocation of a man she wanted for herself?

What am I to do?
he flung at God. And waited, hoping against hope that the Silence would come to him now, there in the street. Instead, he heard something crack like a musket shot. It came again, and terror flooded Charles. The world around him was suddenly a battlefield and he smelled death. He grabbed Rose and shoved her against a building wall, covering her with his body to shield her. His heart pounded and sweat poured from him as he heard gunfire and screaming. His closed eyes showed him a flood of stumbling, bleeding men. The blood smell and his own acrid fear were sharp in his nostrils as something hit his shoulder. He tasted salt and knew that he was weeping, not for pain, but for life gone, for failure, for death . . .

“Let go! Let
go
of me!”

Something went on thudding against Charles's shoulders and he heard a growl of angry voices. He opened his eyes. The guns had stopped. Rose Ebrard stopped pounding at him with her fists and pulled hysterically away as his hold slackened. A workman built like a barrel, with sweat-soaked black hair plastered across his forehead, grabbed Charles by the throat and bounced his head off the wall.

“You false rotten cleric, that's the last girl you try to take!”

“Move away! Me, I'll teach him,” a bigger and broader workman said, planting his feet and flexing hands the size of skillets. A rumble of approval rose from the half dozen bystanders.

“No, leave him,” someone else said in disgust. “He's not worth what you'll bring on yourself! He's a Jesuit, can't you see his cassock? He belongs down the street there. Take him there and they'll see to him, never fear.” The first man started dragging Charles toward the college.

Charles tried to wrench himself free. “I wasn't trying to harm her. I was trying to protect her. I heard—” He looked in bewilderment at the ordinary Paris street. “I thought I heard shots and screams and—I thought we were about to die.”

“That's likely, in broad daylight. You come, too,
mademoiselle
, and tell the priests what this scum in a skirt tried to do.”

But Mlle Ebrard was watching Charles and shaking her head doubtfully. “I think he's speaking the truth. He frightened me, but there
was
a loud, sharp sound. I heard it, too. But I didn't think it was a shot.”

“Oh. I know what that was.” The youngest and smallest man grinned at her and hefted an enormous mallet. “It was me,
ma
belle
, splitting cobblestones with my mallet. It makes a crack like the coming of doom, maybe that's what he heard.”

“Yes. Yes, that was it.” Charles looked at Mlle Ebrard. “Forgive me. I meant no disrespect. I was afraid for you. Sometimes—I—” His face was hot with embarrassment. “Since the army, if there's a loud sound or someone comes too close behind me, I”—he glanced at the workmen and shrugged—“sometimes I think there's danger when there's not.”

The workmen looked at each other and then at Charles, but now there was a kind of understanding in their eyes. They moved away, muttering among themselves. Charles looked up at the gray sky, feeling both relieved and shamed. A breath of wind chilled his face, and he realized it was wet with tears. So those, at least, had been real. He stumbled with sudden weariness and braced a hand on the building wall. God knew this grief that haunted him was real—grief for that day at Cassel, for failed courage and deaths wasted. Grief without end, it seemed. How could he be so arrogant as to think that he knew what Amaury de Corbet should do with his own grief?

The silent question hung in the cold air, without complaint, without hope, and the Silence came. Between one breath and another, it was there and gone again.
Charles. Nothing is wasted, not even death
. The words splintered into blinding clarity in Charles's heart.

When he could see again, he felt so light that he looked down at his feet to see if they were on the cobbles. The clarity seemed to lie over everything. The gray wall under his hand glinted with small points of silver. A swirling cloud of crows blackened the sky and left it seeming almost white. A fold of Rose Ebrard's tawny skirt blew against his cassock, burning like sunset.

“Are you all right?” she said hesitantly.

He wasn't sure whether moments or years passed before he straightened and turned to her. “I think finally I am.”

Her eyes narrowed. “What happened just now?”

“Listen,” he said, leaving her question unanswered. “When I talked with Amaury, I, too, doubted his vocation. I will find a way to talk to him again. But only he himself—and his superiors—can finally judge. That will take time. Are you willing to wait? For whatever his decision finally is?”

Hope made her eyes shine. “I can wait.”

C
HAPTER
19

C
harles went back to the college and across the Cour d'honneur to the chapel. He signed himself with holy water from the font and went to St. Ignatius's altar on the side wall. He sank to his knees and covered his face with his hands.
Nothing is wasted, not even death.
He said the words to himself over and over. Not yet asking what they meant, but drawing them around him like a cloak. He knew from experience now that the gift in the words would push him further than he wanted to go. But not yet. So he let himself just rest there beneath the painting of St. Ignatius. Until a different voice—not the Silence, though perhaps the saint—reminded him of what he'd promised Rose Ebrard. That promise pitted the Jesuit rules he tried to live by against the new clarity in his heart. That flat contradiction made him look up uneasily at Ignatius, whose austere face gave so little away. But perhaps there were no contradictions.
Nothing is wasted
, the Silence had said.
Not even death.

“I don't believe in Amaury de Corbet's vocation,” he said silently to Ignatius. “But I
do
believe in my own. Amaury gave me the chance for my vocation, my right life, when he saved my life at Saint Omer. How can I not do what I can to give him back his right life?”

How arrogant
, Charles's acid inner voice said.
So you've already forgotten the story about Père Dainville. Will you never learn to leave things to God and your superiors? Who are you to say Amaury doesn't have the life that's rightfully his?

Charles ignored the voice and held out open hands, pleading for the saint's understanding.
We're linked, Amaury and I. That day at Cassel, we became more than brother soldiers.
Ignatius would understand that, Charles thought; the saint knew all there was to know about soldiers.
Don't you see? Amaury and I became like those unfortunate children born with their bodies grown together
, Charles said.
Only we're joined by death, not birth, by the deaths we were too afraid to prevent. And by the guilt that's grown in us since. If a surgeon tries to cut apart two children born monstrously together, they always die. It's like that for Amaury and me. The suffering for what we failed to do at Cassel can only end for both of us or for neither.

Angry shouting pulled Charles rudely back to the outer world. It was coming from somewhere beyond the chapel's always-open north door. The noise grew louder and he got to his feet, crossed himself, and went hastily out into the courtyard. But the shouting was coming from a small Mary chapel built against the big chapel's east end, the meeting place of the day students' Congregations of the Holy Virgin. Two courtyard proctors running toward the Mary chapel converged with Charles at its door.

Inside, they stopped short, trying to make sense of a chaos that Charles had never expected to see in a consecrated place. At the front of the Mary chapel, a quartet of boys stood faced off against two furious Jesuits. Most of the other fifty or so boys—all aged seventeen or eighteen, by the look of them—were still kneeling on the stone floor, but some had drawn away and stood by the walls, their faces white with shock. Others, though, grinned broadly as they watched.

“But King Philip is
Pater Noster
to you,” the best-dressed boy, obvious leader of the troublemakers, jeered at the pair of Jesuits facing him. The proctors started toward him.

“Wait,” Charles said softly. “We need to hear more.” The day he'd taken the shortcut through the day students' court, he'd seen this boy in the center of the huddle of students, holding whatever the others had been looking at.

Apparently oblivious of Charles and the proctors standing by the chapel door, the ringleader said tauntingly, “You always teach us that we must speak the truth. So we'll pray to your Jesuit
Pater
again!” He threw back his head like a crowing cock and his supporters joined in.

“Philippe, you're king of everyone,

we won't be mute, we won't be dumb.

We'll confess to all just who we are,

We're your dear sons, to us you are: Our Father!”

The
Monita Secreta
, Charles thought, with a tired sigh. The blasphemous
Pater Noster
had been printed at the back of the copy he'd read in the library. He nodded grimly to the proctors, and the three of them strode up the single center aisle. The priest who'd been faced off with the boys saw them coming and grabbed for the ringleader's arm. But the boy twisted easily away and skipped backward a few paces, now singing the blasphemous prayer to a street tune while his
confrères
laughed and shoved the priest and his assistant away. The gleeful singer didn't know anyone was behind him until Charles's hand closed on his arm and twisted it behind his back.

“Out,” Charles said through his teeth. “And shut up.” The boy yelped and struggled, but Charles gripped his shoulder and sank his fingers hard into the young muscle. “Another word, any more struggle, and who knows? Frère Brunet may be working on your dislocated shoulder.”

“You can't,” the captive snarled. “It's against the rules. You're not—”

“You are deficient in grammar,” Charles said sweetly. “I
shouldn't
. But I
can
. What's your name?” The boy didn't answer, and Charles's fingers dug deeper. “Your name!”

“Ow! Louis Poquelin.”

The proctors and the priest's young assistant—whom Charles recognized now as a teaching scholastic—had subdued the ringleader's three lieutenants and were marching them out of the chapel. Charles recognized the student with red hair—red hair was unusual in the college—as another of the day boys he'd seen when he'd crossed the day students' court. Keeping a grip on his own captive, Charles scanned the faces of the remaining boys in the Mary chapel, his gaze lingering on those who were still grinning and had obviously enjoyed the rebellion.

“
Mon père
,” he said loudly and distinctly to the priest, who was dusting his hands after delivering the last of the three conspirators to the proctors. “Please keep your Congregation here. Don't let anyone get rid of anything. They're all going to be searched. Someone will come to help you.”

The disheveled priest nodded and turned to his now-silent flock.

As Charles, the proctors, and their captives crossed the Cour d'honneur, Charles saw the rector's face briefly at his office window. When the little cavalcade reached the
grand salon
, Père Le Picart was there waiting for them.

“I heard the noise,” he said. “What has happened?” His gaze went from student to student.

The proctors looked at Charles. “Blasphemy, for one thing,
mon père
,” he said. “In the Mary chapel where these boys' Congregation of the Virgin was meeting.” He turned his captured student over to the proctor who had only one boy in his charge. “
Mon père
, will you send proctors to search the other Congregation members? They're all still in the chapel.” He lowered his voice. “I think that these we've brought—and probably others, too—have been reading
Le Cabinet
.”

Le Picart looked as near cursing as Charles had ever seen him. “How? Students aren't allowed it in the library.”

“But day students are free to go where they wish and buy what they can out of school hours. They were taunting the priest with the King of Spain
Pater Noster
from the back of the book. And several days ago, I saw at least two of them—the one there with red hair and Monsieur Louis Poquelin beside him—showing something to an avid huddle of boys.”

The rector's face was rigid with anger as he turned to the proctors. “
Mes frères
, you may leave these malefactors with us. Please find a third brother and go back to the Mary chapel. See that every boy takes off his scholar's gown and turns out the pockets of his coat. And any other hiding place there may be in his clothing. Any books you find, bring to me. Along with their owners.”

“Yes,
mon père
.”

The older proctor raised his eyebrows at Charles, who nodded and took charge of three of the captives. The other scholastic took charge of Poquelin, who seemed to be the rebellion's ringleader. The proctors went to carry out the rector's order, and the rector knocked sharply on the office door of Père Montville, who was in charge of day students. Le Picart was about to knock again when the door opened. The skullcap Montville wore for warmth had slipped sideways, and he was blinking and stifling a yawn. His good-natured round face was apologetic. He bowed to Le Picart.

“Forgive me,
mon père
. I confess I had fallen asleep. Last night I fear I played my poor violin somewhat late. At the Professed House, you know, because—well, I'm sure you didn't come to hear about my struggles with music. Come in, come in.” Belatedly, he saw the little crowd behind Le Picart, and his sleepy blue eyes opened wider. “Oh. Oh, dear. Come in, everyone.”

The rector, who had patiently waited out the flood of talk, went into the cramped office without explanation. Charles and the other scholastic herded the four boys in and lined them up in the shallow alcove across from Montville's desk, there being nowhere else to put them. Montville placed a chair, facing the alcove, for the rector. Then, pushing his skullcap straight, he sat down behind his desk and waited for Le Picart to tell him why his office was full of people. Le Picart told Montville what he knew and then nodded at the scholastic from the chapel. The pale scholastic, obviously holding himself rigidly in check, bowed to the rector.

“The older
externes
' Congregation of the Holy Virgin was meeting in the small chapel,” he said. “I am, as you know,
mes pères
, assigned to help with that congregation. We were all reverently kneeling, beginning the meeting with prayer. But as we began the
Pater Noster
, these four students started bellowing blasphemy and taunting us. The devil never sleeps!”

The young man's clasped hands were shaking and his knuckles were white. He was scared, Charles realized, perhaps even more frightened than angry at what he'd seen and heard. The four boys kept their faces carefully blank, but their eyes gleamed with satisfaction.

“And what exactly was this blasphemy?” Montville said.

The scholastic flinched and swallowed. “I hardly like to say,
mon père
.”

“I don't suppose you do. But you must.”

“It was a blasphemous rendering of the Our Father.” The young Jesuit was almost whispering. “It was addressed to Philippe, the Spanish king. These—creatures—were laughing at us, they said that this blasphemy is the secret Jesuit
Pater Noster
.”

The rector looked at Charles. “And where,” he demanded of the shaken scholastic, “did they find this so-called
Pater Noster
?”

“I don't know,
mon père
. Perhaps they made it up themselves. Though I hate to think their depravity goes so deep.” The scholastic turned suddenly to Charles. “You also heard it,
maître
.”

“I did. They didn't make it up.” Charles looked inquiringly at the rector, who slightly shook his head. Not naming
Le Cabinet
, Charles went on, “They got it from a book.”

“Search them,” the rector said.

Charles started with Poquelin. He made him take off his scholar's gown, which had no pockets, and then his new-looking coat of rich brown wool. Charles went through the two pockets on the coat's front and found only a few coins and a broken quill.

“Pull up your shirt,” Charles said.

It was Poquelin's turn to look shocked. Charles thought he was going to resist, but then he shrugged, tugged his shirt free from his breeches, and pulled a small book out of his waistband.

Charles took it, saw that it was indeed
Le Cabinet jesuitique
, and handed it to the rector. Montville leaned to see its cover and his mouth fell open.