The Whispering of Bones (9 page)

“Oh.” She blushed and looked down. “I've recently come to live with my aunt, Madame Cheyne, just up the street. She owns the bookshop called The Saint's Dog. Though everyone seems to call it The Dog. I am Mademoiselle Rose Ebrard.”

Charles bowed again, remembering the door porter's message to the rector on the way to the refectory.

“Forgive me,” he said, “I have not introduced myself. I am Maître Charles du Luc.” He was puzzled at her startled look—a look of recognition, he would have thought, except that he was certain they'd never met before.

She busied herself for a moment with adjusting her scarf. “I've just been meeting with your rector, my new spiritual advisor.” Her lips quivered and she pressed them together. “I had been meeting with poor Père Dainville. My father died shortly before I came to Paris,” she said softly, “and Père Dainville was a great comfort. I will miss him sorely. I only saw him four or five times, but I grew so quickly to feel real affection for him. Though perhaps one is not supposed to feel that for a priest. He was so wise. And he welcomed me. Priests don't always welcome women, you know.”

“I know. I hope that will change. But Père Dainville welcomed everyone,” Charles said. “He was my confessor, too.”

The sound of a smothered sneeze made them both look toward the postern. To Charles's surprise, Maître Richaud stood in the doorway of the porter's tiny room, rubbing his nose with his sleeve as his eyes darted between Charles and Mlle Ebrard. His short loud sniffs managed to convey extreme disapproval.

Charles sighed, suddenly sure that Richaud had been furtively watching and listening to Charles's talk with the woman. With deceptive mildness, he said, “What are you doing in the porter's room,
maître
?”

“I am helping a lay brother,” Richaud said righteously. “Frère Martin had to deliver a package. I was just coming in and offered to watch the door for him.”

Which was probably true, Charles thought. And as luck would have it, that righteous offer had also provided him with the treat of catching Charles in a prolonged and unchaperoned talk with a woman. Foregoing things he wanted to say to Richaud, Charles turned to Rose Ebrard, “I must leave you,
mademoiselle
,” he said loudly, for Richaud's benefit. “I am expected in the chapel.”

“Is Père Dainville's body there yet?”

“It should be. I'm taking the first watch.”

She hesitated and glanced at Richaud, who still lurked in the doorway. “May I follow you, Maître du Luc? I would like to go and pray for him.”

“Of course,” Charles said, feeling Richaud's eyes boring into him. “Come.”

“He looks like a bad-tempered turtle,” the young woman murmured as she followed behind him, and they smothered matching snorts of laughter.

Classes were over for the day. The only sounds as they crossed the big court, walking side by side now, were their feet on the gravel and the dry skittering of fallen leaves from the trees along the wall. Charles was uncomfortably aware that Mlle Ebrard was studying him covertly as they went. He found himself hoping that Richaud's suspicions were not going to be proved true for once. But her repeated glances at him were not in the least flirtatious. Charles knew flirting when he met it.

When they reached the chapel, two lay brothers had just finished setting up trestles at the front of the nave. Charles and Mlle Ebrard crossed themselves as more brothers carried in Père Dainville's coffined body and placed it on the trestles. She went to kneel behind the first row of benches. Charles waited where he was while the brothers lit tall candles at the coffin's head and foot, bowed to the altar, and withdrew. Maître Henry Wing, the English scholastic, burst into the chapel from the courtyard and stumbled over the threshold.

“Oops! I'm to keep the first part of the vigil with you,” he said eagerly to Charles, who hushed him and showed him where to kneel before the coffin.

Charles knelt beside him. Grief assailed him and he bit his lip as tears came. The tears were as much for himself as for Dainville, but that was the way of grief. Dainville, after all, was gone to God. Or very shortly to God, Charles thought, since after a life like his, how long could it take to clean away his youthful sins? Surely the penitential time in Purgatory would be short for such a man. Charles knew that he was grieving over the empty place his confessor's death left in his own life and in the college. What other Louis le Grand confessor saw so deeply into hearts? Who at the college would know Charles as Dainville had? Who would companion his recurrent struggles with obedience? Who would repeatedly bring him to laugh at himself? Who would welcome his occasional hesitant account of the terrifying and longed-for Silence that sometimes visited him, and the heart-stopping sense of God's nearness it brought? He hid his wet face in his hands.
Oh, my father!
his heart cried. It was a cry of pure need, and he wasn't sure whether he was calling out to Dainville or God or his own father.

He straightened and drew a shaking breath, pulled out his handkerchief, and wiped his face. Then he folded his hands and began again the church's prayers for the dead. But he'd barely started when the bell rang for dinner and he felt his companion stir beside him. He glanced up and saw that Wing was looking anxiously at him, his pale blue eyes full of some question.

Wing leaned closer. “I'm hungry.”

“We're here until Compline. After that, they'll give us something.”

“Oh. That's a long time.”

Charles gave Maître Wing a look that sent him back to at least the semblance of prayer and began his own prayers yet again. This time they took him beyond himself and into the quiet where his own needs and self fell away. Most of his own needs, anyway. Slowly, he grew aware that his body was clamoring urgently for the latrine. He tried to quiet the clamor, but it was no good. Ignoring his companion's hastily smothered startled yelp as he stood up, Charles bowed to the altar and made speed to the little courtyard off the Cour d'honneur.

When he emerged from the long, low wooden latrine building, Lieutenant-Général La Reynie was standing beside its screen of leggy rose bushes, his nose buried in a late yellow bloom.

C
HAPTER
8

L
a Reynie looked up and snapped the yellow rose from its stem. “I was in the street passage, on my way out, when I saw you come out of the chapel. I need to speak with you.” He patiently released the lace of his cuff from a thorn and put the rose in a buttonhole of his coat.

Charles glanced warily in the direction of the rector's office, though it wasn't even visible from the small court. “Did you find out who the dead man is?”

“Yes, I've just told Père Le Picart. Who is obviously not going to tell you. But I want you to know. The dead man is indeed Paul Lunel, the seventeen-year-old who never arrived at your Novice House.”

Charles crossed himself. “God receive his soul.” Then he remembered what Le Picart had said. “Where do you suppose he was those three weeks? Before he was killed.”

“That is the next thing I have to find out. There are only servants at the Lunel house. They say they don't know where he's been. But I've learned a little more about him. As I told you, Père Guymond had no reply to his message that Paul Lunel hadn't arrived at the Novice House. The only family are Lunel's mother and an older brother, who were at the Lunel country house beyond Chaillot. The mother stays there most of the time, now that she's widowed. The servants say they sent the message there. Why there was no response, I don't know.

“Madame Lunel was known to be opposed to her son's vocation—she's something of a Gallican and fiercely anti-Jesuit. It was Paul Lunel's father, a judge who died last spring, who encouraged him. Père Guymond says that when the father knew he was dying, he was afraid his wife would try to keep the boy from becoming a Jesuit. The father sent Père Guymond a letter giving permission for his son to enter the Novice House and instructing him to pay no heed to Madame Lunel's objections. Why the boy waited until this autumn to present himself, Père Guymond doesn't know. Perhaps he was trying to reconcile his mother to his choice.” La Reynie shrugged. “In any case, I am now obliged to ask questions at the Novice House, and also of any Jesuit I can find who knew Paul Lunel. I tell you frankly,
maître
, I need your help. You could ask many of those questions—and get an honest answer—much more easily than I.”

Charles was shaking his head. “You've no reason to think that Jesuits will lie to you when you're trying to find the killer of a boy who was almost one of us. Besides that, though I tell you frankly that I
want
to help you, I can't. The rector has forbidden it. I cannot disobey him.”

La Reynie stabbed his silver-headed stick so hard into the ground that the rose in his buttonhole dropped a petal. “You've disobeyed him before.”

“In smaller things. But this time he's made it clear that my future as a Jesuit depends on obeying him to the letter.”

“After what you did for the king in the summer, Père Le Picart should be nothing but glad for you to go on bringing the Society of Jesus to the royal notice by serving the king's justice!”

“Monsieur La Reynie, the Society is not the king's court. I am not a courtier. I do not earn favor and trade on past success.” He held La Reynie's angry gaze. “I
want
my Jesuit future.”

“Do you? Or is it that you have suddenly grown more comfortable and less brave?”

Less brave. Cowardly. There it was again. A flare of anger—or was it fear?—burned through Charles. But he said nothing. They stood like two rams that had locked horns in a battle and couldn't get clear of each other. Finally, La Reynie's lips curved in a half smile, and he made Charles a mock bow.

“I used to be able to intimidate you. Or at least prod you into yelling at me.”

Charles smiled a little, too, and the standoff eased. “I used to be terrified of you. When one is frightened of a large dog, one does tend to yell at him.” Charles's smile widened as La Reynie's graying brows drew together. “And I haven't always been sure how much I cared about my Jesuit future. I'm sure now.”

“So you've decided that your Society of Jesus is blameless and pure?”

“In exactly the same measure that you've decided the king you work for is blameless and pure.”

“Touché.”
La Reynie's brief laughter echoed around the little courtyard, and it was Charles's turn to make a mock bow. “Nonetheless,” the
lieutenant-général
said, “this murder is a Jesuit matter and I need you.”

Charles shook his head and made to turn away. “I've told you that I want to help you. But I cannot.”

La Reynie's iron grip closed on Charles's arm and held him where he was. “Don't you care that this killer helped your Père Dainville to his death?” he said roughly.

Charles's self-control vanished. “Of course I care! I can hardly pray for Père Dainville because all I can think of is finding the man and hanging him with my own hands!”

“Then please, listen to me! If your rector hears that we've talked, I'll swear I kept you here by force.”

Charles looked down at the hand on his sleeve, and La Reynie let him go.

“Say it, then,” Charles told him. “But be quick.”

“Your Novice House rector is telling me that I can talk to him but cannot question anyone else in his house. He is trying to claim that the novitiate is one of the old Liberties where the king's justice cannot enter.”

“But he can't keep you out! The king's law runs everywhere in Paris now. Or so I've been told.”

La Reynie cast his eyes up at the darkening sky in exasperation. “That's certainly supposed to be true. But I fight this kind of obstruction all the time. I think the abbot of Saint Germain would see every one of his monks murdered before he'd willingly let me in. The Novice House rector says my coming and going will deeply upset the running of his house and the formation of his novices and if I persist, he will instruct everyone there to tell me nothing and most of them will obey him. Which brings me back to you. The rector told me earlier today—before you joined us in his office—that you will be at the Novice House twice each week for your studies. And you know this new novice you mentioned, de Corbet. The dead man was supposed to live in de Corbet's chamber. No doubt there will be talk and speculation about the dead boy. I've already told you servants there are talking about him! If you keep your eyes and ears open, if you turn conversations to Lunel and learn something, how can Père Le Picart object? And if you tell me outside the college what you learn, how would he even know? I can easily make ways to see you on your way back from the Novice House.”

“I won't go behind his back. And I'm unlikely to have much further conversation with Monsieur de Corbet. Novices are allowed few visitors.” But in his mind, Charles was seeing the smooth curve of Paul Lunel's young dead face, seeing Père Dainville lying disfigured and helpless in the infirmary, both lives cut off by someone's malignant rage. “If I learn something—at the Novice House or here,” he said, “I will tell Père Le Picart. He will tell you. He is not unwilling to help the king's justice find a killer; he is only unwilling for me to be involved. But that is all I can do.” Charles nodded to La Reynie and started to walk away.

Behind him, the
lieutenant-général
said, “Too bad you are not your own man.”

Charles stopped. Without turning around, he said, “I am the Society's man. Just as you are the king's.”

“So we are two of a kind? Is that what you mean?”

Finding no answer to that, Charles went back through the thickening dark to the almost equally dark chapel. Maître Henry Wing flinched sideways and squeaked in surprise as Charles knelt beside him. Occasional whispers, the sounds of people walking clumsily as they tried to keep heels from clacking on the floor, and the rustle of cloth marked the coming and going of neighborhood people in the nave. Trying to take comfort from their presence and love for Dainville, Charles bowed his head.

But what La Reynie had told him refused to be pushed aside. Where had Paul Lunel been for three weeks? Had wherever he'd been and whatever he'd been doing gotten him killed? Charles doubted he'd hear much about Lunel at the Novice House. Gossip was not looked upon kindly in Jesuit houses. Not that that stopped it, but during the novice years, rules were unbending and their observance was scrupulously watched. Rules were certainly not lax later, but in small things, at least, some breadth of interpretation came with time and maturity. Unable to make his mental questions stop, Charles gathered his body to stillness, kept saying the words of the prayers, and waited for his mind to hush. Very slowly, the silence deepened around him, the sounds in the nave fell away, and even his grief was quiet, like a tired animal finally able to sleep.
Charles
, the Silence said.
Nothing is lost.
The voice that was not a voice poured through him like balm.

Then the supper bell rang from the courtyard, someone's sneeze echoed through the chapel like thunder, a bench scraped on the floor, and the street door began opening and closing repeatedly. People going home to their own supper, Charles realized, shifting his knees on the hard floor. He raised his eyes to the coffin.
Nothing is lost
, the Silence had said. What, then, of the emptiness death left? What was he to do with that? Unless the emptiness was a fullness he couldn't see? He let that thought wait in his mind, hoping against hope that there would be an answer. But there was not.

The thought changed shape like a cloud, and he found himself wondering what Père Dainville would have made of La Reynie saying that he and Charles were “two of a kind.” Charles wasn't sure what to make of it. He knew that they shared a relentless need to find truth. Both of them had quick tempers, whose sparks quickly died, and neither suffered fools gladly. La Reynie had even offered once to take Charles into the police if he quit the Society of Jesus. But if they
were
two of a kind, what kind? Whatever the answer to that might be, it changed nothing. Including the fact that this watch beside his beloved confessor's body would not end until Compline rang, and his knees were already screaming at him.

Charles bent to bunch his cassock into thicker folds under his knees. As he straightened, a light, high-pitched giggle echoed startlingly around the chapel. Beside Charles, the English scholastic was staring up at the chapel's second-story-level gallery. Charles narrowed his eyes, trying to see in the dim light. He heard furtive footsteps and then the giggle came again. Something small fell from the gallery's balustrade and bounced on the stone floor. As Charles got angrily to his feet, the lay brother watching the chapel door hurried up the aisle toward him.

Others had noticed the sounds, as well, and scattered whispers came from the few people, mostly women, still kneeling in the nave.

“I can't leave the door,
maître
,” the brother said softly when he reached Charles. “Can you go up there? Sounds to me like it's boys again. They tossed down a prayer book.”

“I'll go,” Charles said grimly. “If the little wretches run down the south stairs from the gallery, catch them and hold on to them. I thought we'd put a stop to this nonsense.”

A month earlier, on the second night of the school term, five twelve-year-olds had decided to prove their bravery by spending the night pretending to be spirits haunting the chapel. Their giggling and running around the gallery had given them away to a Jesuit praying late, and they'd been caught. Four were seriously disciplined, and the fifth, whose idea it had been, had been expelled.

Now, wearily climbing the south stairs that led up from the nave, Charles wondered who was responsible for this new outbreak. From the pitch of the giggles, these were even younger boys.

“Come down!” he called as he reached the stairhead. “Have you forgotten that Père Dainville's body lies here?” Absolute silence fell in the gallery. Then there was a scuffle of feet toward the east end of the gallery over the chancel. “Enough!” Charles strode angrily toward the sound.