The Whispering of Bones (4 page)

Or were you too afraid to do anything?
Charles's inner voice said, as it had said more times than he could count. Wrenching himself away from the memories, he realized that his cousin was talking to him again.

“—so I'm telling you, if you know what's good for you, you're going to help me get Amaury out of your Novice House!”

Charles squinted in bewilderment at his cousin. “What does the Novice House have to do with this?”

“Have you lost your ears as well as your balls? I tell you, Amaury has gone mad enough to think he wants to be a Jesuit. He's in your Paris Novice House!” Charles-François rocked forward onto his toes, his round dark eyes bulging with anger. “And if you don't help me get him out, I will personally see to it that every Jesuit on earth knows what a slinking”—he pushed Charles lightly in the chest—“damned”—he pushed him again, and Charles stumbled backward—“
coward
you are!”

It was as though Charles's life as a Jesuit had never been. He shoved his cousin roughly away and reached for the sword that hadn't been at his side since he walked through the door of the Avignon Novice House eight years ago. The du Lucs were minor nobles, and in the code of nobility, only blood could wipe away Charles-François's insult. Then the moment of rage passed and Charles stood rigid and silent.

But Charles-François read his face all too well. “Shall I lend you a sword so you can invite me into the street? No? You really did leave your manhood at Cassel, didn't you? Too bad it wasn't you the peasant woman killed. Before you tried to make Amaury stop his men from killing the king's enemies.”

“
Enemies?
Those were terrified
peasants
you helped Amaury's men murder. Starving women and children trying to hide from war, for God's sake!”

“Anyone who shoots at the king's soldiers is an enemy and deserves everything he—or she—gets! But Amaury didn't deserve the guilt you left him with. You ruined him. Now you've taken him from his rightful place as a fighting man. Just like you took my arm and half my fighting skill!”

“God calls whom He calls,” Charles said. “And in His own good time.” He suddenly almost pitied his cousin. “However you judge what I did at Cassel, if Amaury has offered himself to the Society, that's the opposite of cowardice. Though I don't expect you to understand that.”

Charles-François shook the stump of his arm at Charles, the pinned sleeve flapping like a small pennant. “What I
understand
is that if you hadn't pulled me in front of you to save yourself from that damned woman's shot, I'd still have two good arms to fight with!”

“If you hadn't urged on Amaury's men and your own to slaughter her and the rest of them, you'd still have two good arms. They were miserable refugees, Charlot, and I pulled you back to stop you trying to kill them—why can't you understand that? God knows I've always been desperately sorry the shot hit you.”

“You
hid
behind me, you were too rabbit-scared to fight
peasants
, even after they killed one of Amaury's soldiers and wounded another. If you'd had the balls to help us like you should have, Amaury wouldn't have slowly rotted inside all these years. He wouldn't be trying to hide in your damned Society now!” Charles-François was shouting and spraying spit. “His men and mine only did their duty! He's guilty of
nothing
but listening to
you
. But you—you're guilty as hell itself!”

Charles folded his hands so tightly that he felt the small bones being pulled out of place. A door opened at the end of the
salon
and Père Montville, the Prefect of Studies in charge of day students, put his head out of his office. His round, normally pleasant face was dark with displeasure and he frowned from Charles to his cousin. “What is the meaning of this uproar,
maître
?”

Charles tried to keep his voice neutral. “
Mon père
, please forgive the disturbance.”

“Please remind your guest that this is a religious house.”

“Yes,
mon père
.”

Montville withdrew into his office and shut the door.

Grinning, knowing that Charles would bite his tongue off now rather than react, Charles-François flicked a finger against Charles's chest. “Yes,
mon père
. No,
mon père
. Just a handsome little automaton carrying out orders, aren't you? And that's what your Society will make of Amaury.” The grin vanished and the man's mouth twisted with hatred. “You make me sick! I meant what I said; I'll see that every Jesuit on earth knows what you are and what you did. Your Society's a military order, what use do they have for cowards?”

Charles shook his head wearily. “No, we aren't a military order.”

But Charlot wasn't listening. “I'll go to your Superior General in Rome, if I have to. You've only taken first vows. They'll throw you out fast enough. You won't be able to hide your gutlessness any longer in your safe Jesuit nest, where you obey and don't have to think.”

Charles lifted his gaze and looked at his cousin. “Most men carry out someone's orders. I decided not to carry out any more orders to kill. As Amaury apparently has also decided. God go with you, Charles-François.”

Charles walked out the rear door of the
salon
, ignoring his cousin's shouted demand to come back, and walked straight into Père Le Picart.

“Forgive me,
mon père
—”

The rector was looking beyond him into the
salon
. “Who is shouting?”

“My cousin. He's angry.”

“So I gather. Angry at you?”

Before Charles could answer, Charles-François was at his heels, pushing him aside.

“You don't know what a coward my dear cousin Charles is, do you?” he challenged the rector. “You have a
coward
in the pope's army. That's what you Jesuits are, aren't you?”

“No,” Le Picart said quietly. “Not his army.”

Momentarily silenced, Charles-François gaped at him. Charles said nothing. He was more than willing to let the rector face his cousin down, and he didn't care whether that was obedience or cowardice. Whichever it was, he wanted his cousin to go and take his fury with him.

“We were established to help souls,
monsieur
,” Le Picart said with deceptive mildness. “To teach and counsel, to help the poor, and work in the world in all its variety. How can we help you?”

“You can give up Amaury de Corbet, who's in your Novice House! Because my cowardly cousin enticed him there. He—”

Le Picart took a step toward Charles-François and held up a sinewy hand. To Charles's surprise, his cousin's mouth snapped shut.

“Enticed him?” The rector looked questioningly at Charles.

“I haven't seen Amaury de Corbet since I left the army,
mon père
.”

“Monsieur de Vintimille du Luc, I have nothing to do with the Novice House. But you may certainly go there and speak with its rector. I wish you a blessed evening and a peaceful night. You may go out the way you came in.”

The rector and Charles-François stared at each other until, incandescent with fury, Charles-François strode back into the
salon
. Charles and Le Picart stayed where they were until they heard the street passage door open and slam shut.

“Well.” The rector looked thoughtfully at Charles. “Why do I have a feeling he'll be back?”

Charles sighed. “Because he will, when he doesn't get what he wants at the Novice House.”

“Come and tell me what all that was about. I think I should be armed with the facts when he returns.”

Suddenly so tired he was weaving as he walked, Charles followed the rector to his office. “How is Père Dainville?” he asked, as Le Picart lit a small tallow candle and waved away its pungent smoke.

“There's no change yet.” Le Picart settled himself behind his desk. “Frère Brunet thinks God may be about to take him. It will be very hard to let him go.” He gazed sadly at the candle's small yellow flame. “Père Dainville has been a Jesuit as long as I've been alive. And a member of this house most of those years. I've rarely known a man so able to see into the souls of others. I doubt there's a better confessor in the Society.”

Charles nodded, wondering whether Le Picart knew about Dainville's turbulent youth. “I'm grateful that he's been my confessor.”

The rector nodded. “Now tell me about your cousin and his accusations.”

Something close to panic swept through Charles. He couldn't tell the whole truth. He'd never told even Père Dainville about that terrible noon outside Cassel.

Le Picart was watching Charles in alarm. “Sit down,
maître
.
You've gone as white as your shirt.”

Charles put an involuntary hand to the edge of white linen showing above his cassock collar, as though the touch of something so ordinary might help him, and sank into the chair in front of the desk. “My cousin and I have disliked each other since we were children,” he said carefully. “Some part of his anger means no more than that.”

Le Picart waited.

“As you saw,” Charles went on reluctantly, “he has lost an arm. We were both wounded in the Spanish Netherlands. He at Cassel, and I at Saint Omer a few days later. He's always blamed me for the loss of his arm.”

“Why?”

Charles folded his hands together and fixed his eyes on the small, plain crucifix on the wall beyond Le Picart. “There was musket fire from some ruined cottages near the Cassel wall. A soldier was killed and another wounded. Their comrades ignored their very young captain's order to stand off—the captain was the man my cousin was talking about, Amaury de Corbet. The soldiers attacked the cottages. A peasant woman had fired the shots. A little group of peasants, refugees from some village, had found a musket somewhere and hidden in the cottages. I tried to help de Corbet stop his men, but my cousin and his own men joined the attack. I was trying to hold my cousin back when another shot from the cottages hit his arm. He thinks I tried to hide behind him and that's why he was wounded.” Charles fell silent.

The rector sighed and crossed himself. Charles was afraid that if he moved, his control would shatter. He had never told this story to anyone. And he'd still kept back the worst part.

“Is there more?” the rector said gently.

“A few days later, I was shot at the battle of Saint Omer and de Corbet saved my life. But I didn't see him again after that.” He finally allowed himself to look at Le Picart. “Do you think I might be able to see him in the Novice House? When I go there to study with Père Quellier?”

The rector's cool gray eyes searched Charles's face. “Given that Monsieur de Corbet saved your life, I imagine that Père Guymond—the Novice House rector—would allow you to see him briefly. Are you going to tell Monsieur de Corbet that your cousin is searching for him?”

“No. And if my cousin comes here again, I won't tell him I've seen Amaury.”

Le Picart nodded. “Good. If Monsieur de Vintimille du Luc goes to the Novice House as angry as he left us, it's certain that he'll be turned away in short order. Even if he masters himself, it's unlikely that de Corbet will be allowed to see a layman this early in his novitiate. So don't worry about him.” The rector's eyes were still on Charles, and full of concern. “This has been an afternoon of shocks for you and I know that you missed supper. Go to the kitchen and get something before you return to your chamber.”

“Thank you,
mon père
.” Charles stood up. “But Père Dainville—will you—”

“I will let you know if there is a change.” The rector stood, too, and came around the desk to put a hand on Charles's sleeve. “I'm going back to sit with him. I think that whatever happens, he will be at peace. It is your own peace that should concern you now.”

Nearly undone by the compassion on his superior's face, Charles made his escape, his secret coiled like a little snake in his heart.

C
HAPTER
4

TUESDAY EVENING INTO THE FEAST OF ST. HILARION,

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 22, 1687

C
harles forced down the bread and warmed-over mutton stew the kitchen brothers gave him and went to his chamber. The city's bells were ringing Compline, the last of the day's hours of prayer, and when he opened his chamber window, the bells' clamor beat in his body as though the sound struck his ribs as well as his ears. The wind had died, leaving the city chilled, but he stayed at the window and shut his eyes, murmuring the first few Compline prayers.

“God, come to my assistance . . . make speed to save me . . .” But Père Dainville's stroke-twisted face and the smooth young face of the murdered man in the Carmelites' well chamber kept coming between him and the words. He prayed for his confessor's recovery, for the murdered man's soul, and that the killer would be found. But it seemed to him that his prayers refused to “rise.” Not that he really thought God was “up,” but often when he prayed, he felt that what he offered or asked broke free of himself and went—somewhere.
Help me
, he begged silently. And then,
forgive me
.

But those prayers, too, went nowhere. The image of Dainville and the murdered young man were pushed out by older memories. Cassel's walls rose again in his mind, and he heard the peasants' shots, saw Amaury de Corbet's soldiers fall, saw their enraged comrades charging the war-ruined cottages. He saw the woman with the musket, wide-eyed with fury and terror in the first cottage's doorway, felt his cousin fall against him as her shot hit home. He saw himself finally reach the cottage door where Amaury stood, ashen and sick. The woman who'd wounded Charles-François, all the children but one, and an old man lay dead in their blood. The earthen floor was slick with it. Charles shouted at the soldier who had his musket trained on the little boy, but the soldier fired. The jubilant men moved on to the next house. Sick with horror, Charles leveled his musket at their backs. And then let the barrel drop. The men were his fellow soldiers. If he shot them, he would die. Either there and then, or soon after by hanging. So he stood still, listening helplessly to women screaming in the second cottage. He hadn't hidden behind Charles-François, or caused his cousin the loss of his arm. But Charles-François's assessment was right—he was a coward.

Except for the partial account he'd given Le Picart, he'd never told anyone about that day at Cassel, not even his confessors. His mother knew, but only because she'd pieced together things he'd said during the fever that came after his wound. She'd reassured him over and over that he hadn't fired his musket because the men were the king's soldiers and he was loyal. But she was wrong. He hadn't fired his musket because he'd been afraid. When he began to recover, he'd prayed constantly for forgiveness. Just before he'd entered the Jesuit Novice House in Avignon, his mother had told him flatly that he'd never hear God's forgiveness until he stopped shouting accusations at himself.

He raised his head. The bells had long since stopped and the rue St. Jacques was quieter than it was in the daylight. The lanterns hanging from the sides of buildings had been lit and cast small pools of light on the cobbles. A little way up the hill, an upper window opened in a house on the other side of the street and a woman leaned on the sill, her white coif gleaming in the lantern light. She was singing, though too quietly for Charles to hear the words. But he recognized the melody, because he'd heard it in the streets. He remembered its words, too, about the pleasure of seeing a lover, and about love's danger. He leaned his elbows on the windowsill, thinking about his own youthful love, Pernelle. He'd chosen God above all else. And she had also made her own choices. But a deep place in his heart would always belong to her. They had let each other go for many reasons, good reasons, but love songs still wrung his heart.
How long are you going to stand here spinning yourself another drama? Don't you have work to do?
his critical inner voice said. Charles sighed and swung the small-paned window shut. Then he picked up the malodorous tallow candle from the stool beside his bed, nodded as though in greeting toward the small painting of Mary and her Child that hung nearly invisible in the shadows, and went into the tiny study that opened from his sleeping chamber. He shut the door behind him, as though that would keep his needling inner voice out.

The study was like his sleeping chamber, with whitewashed plaster walls, beamed ceiling, bare floor, no fireplace, and little furniture. He put his copper candlestick beside a thick book on the table that served him as a desk, sat down beneath the painted crucifix over the chair, and eyed the book with distaste. He liked studying. Or he
used
to like studying, he thought sadly, shifting on the hard chair's thin red cushion, trying to get comfortable. Half seriously, he wondered if it was too late to just be a lay brother. Lay brothers didn't have to read St. Augustine. And if he were a lay brother, he could work in the stable, take care of the horses. One of the things he missed most about his father's—now his brother's—house and fields and vineyards far away in the south, in Languedoc, was being around horses.

But he knew he couldn't be a lay brother, not even to be around horses, because during the summer he'd come to know even more deeply—beneath complaining and fears and even beneath his terrible secret—that he wanted to be a priest more than he'd ever wanted anything.
Anything?
the needling inner voice replied, having apparently wormed its way under the door.
More than Pernelle? Yes
, he told it.
More than I wanted Pernelle. So shut up.

That silenced the voice, and Charles opened the book. But instead of reading, he leaned back in the chair, trying to let the day's shocks and fears recede. The study's closed window did little to muffle the occasional sound of carriage wheels echoing off the buildings that lined St. Jacques. In a space of quiet, he heard someone shout, someone else shout back, and running feet pounding downhill toward the Seine. Then a loud group—University students, judging by their garbled Latin drinking song—came out of the little rue des Poirées across from Louis le Grand and turned toward the taverns in nearby Place Maubert. When quiet settled again in the room, he watched a mouse come out of its hole beneath the window. She—Charles felt sure it was a she—watched him warily, whiskers twitching, and edged cautiously toward his feet. Irrationally glad to see another creature, he leaned over to see what she might be after and saw that she was stalking crumbs from the cakelike
sable
Marie-Ange had given him yesterday when he passed the bakery. He'd eaten it at his desk last night, in an effort to sweeten reading St. Augustine. The mouse snatched a tiny piece from the floor and sat up, turning it in her paws and watching him, bright-eyed and unafraid. Charles, too, sat up, opened his book and tried to find as much contentment in St. Augustine's
Confessions
.

But the clamor in his mind returned, growing louder than the bells had been, and soon blinded him to what was on the pages. Finally, he took his candle and went to the prie-dieu in his sleeping chamber. He put the candle in the sconce beside the prayer desk and knelt. The little painting of Mary and her Child on the wall in front of him glowed in the candlelight. He gazed at Mary, who sat on a bench in a small room, with the Child on her lap and an open window at her back. She was smiling down at her son, and Charles thought again about the murdered boy in the well chamber.
You know what will happen to your son
, he told her.
How do you bear it?
She went on smiling at the laughing baby as though darkness would never fall over the green hills beyond the window, or over the Child, or in her heart.
Will Père Dainville live?
Charles asked her. She was so quiet that he seemed to hear the fire in her grate crackling and murmuring. For the first time since he'd come to the college, he felt that she didn't hear him, felt shut out of the room in the painting. He put his head down on the ledge of the prie-dieu, exhausted and forsaken.

He fell asleep there and woke sometime in the dead of night to stumble to his bed.

When the college's five o'clock rising bell pealed, he greeted God's new day with a groan. He mumbled his waking prayer and crossed himself, straightened his bed covers, found his cassock in the dark and pulled it on over his knee-length linen shirt, and was kneeling at the prie-dieu before he was more than half awake. Mary and the Child were remote and silent. He prayed, lit his candle from the passage sconce, washed his face with water from his copper pitcher, and cleaned his teeth with a linen rag and the thick paste his mother regularly sent him. Then he shouldered the small satchel he would need for his classes and started through the dark maze of uneven passageways to the back stairs that led to the chapel and Mass. Père Thomas Damiot, the young priest who lived just across the passage and was one of Charles's closest friends at the school, was already on the stairs. They smiled a greeting at each other but didn't speak, breaking the night's silence before Mass being frowned upon. Charles, yawning, stumbled off the bottom step. Damiot grabbed his arm to keep him upright and gave him a questioning sideways look that Charles pretended not to see.

On most mornings, when Charles went into Louis le Grand's chapel, the sight of the rosy, open-armed angels reaching down from the painted ceiling of the chapel's false dome lifted his spirits, no matter what else was happening. But this morning, he kept his eyes on the floor as he followed Damiot to a bench toward the back of the nave. As Jesuits, students, and people from the neighborhood gathered for the first Mass of the day, Charles knelt on the stone tiles and prayed for Père Dainville. When that prayer was finished, he stayed on his knees, not praying, but thinking about going to the Novice House later and trying to see Amaury de Corbet. And about what they would or wouldn't talk about. Then the priest celebrating the Mass came in, everyone stood, and Charles tried to give himself up to the mystery of God coming to meet him in the bread and wine.

When the Mass ended and the neighborhood people were going out the west door into the rue St. Jacques, a loud woman's voice made Charles and Damiot turn to see who was being so heedless of reverence and courtesy. Two women were halted just inside the door. The better-dressed one was shaking a finger in the other's face.

“Of course you may not! You spend enough time in church. And you have work to do! Why else are you living in my house, I'd like to know?”

The scolded woman, whose face was half hidden by a scarf draped around her throat and head, turned sharply and disappeared into the street. The other woman, suddenly aware that everyone was watching her, drew her long cloak of silky gray wool closer and stalked after her companion.

Charles and Damiot went with the rest of the Jesuits and students out the chapel's always-open north door, into the Cour d'honneur. The sun had still not reached the rooftops, and the college's age-blackened walls were crusted with frost. Charles pulled his cloak collar tightly around his neck as they crunched across the gravel toward the fathers' refectory.

“Have you heard what happened to Père Dainville?” he asked Damiot.

The priest nodded. “On the way to supper last night, Père Montville told us he'd been taken ill. Apoplexy, he said. And that you were with him.”

“He'd asked me to go with him to the Carmelites' crypt chapel—he's grown very frail, you know, and needs help now. But he wasn't only taken ill,” Charles said grimly. He told Damiot about the murdered man. “I think seeing him is what brought on the apoplexy.”

Damiot crossed himself and gave Charles a long look. “I've known men who seem to attract mosquitoes and fleas, but until you, I've never known a man who attracted dead bodies. Though it's a talent that seems very useful to the head of our Paris police,” he added dryly. “Lieutenant-Général La Reynie has had more than a little reason to be very glad of you.” He raised an ironic eyebrow. “Though that cannot be said for some of our Jesuit superiors.”