The Eloquence of Blood

by Judith Rock

  Isabel led her into the salon and sat her down in one of the high-backed chairs beside the fire. Murmuring comfort, she untied the girl’s cloak, a heavy black manteau, and pushed it gently back to reveal a front-laced, stiffened bodice and skirt of fine black wool, trimmed with lace like black spiderweb. Callot hurried to his bottle and half filled the glass beside it. Morel came hesitantly forward and bowed to the newcomer.

  “Bonjour, Monsieur Morel!” The girl’s voice was high and sweet. She wiped her tears with a matching spiderweb handkerchief and glanced from the young man to her friend. “I am so happy to see you here, monsieur,” she said, smiling a little.

  Callot returned and went awkwardly down on one creaking knee beside the chair. “This will do you good, ma petite.” He put the glass into her hand.

  Charles was trying not to stare. From her little low-heeled, bronze leather mourning shoes to her black taffeta coif, the girl was breathtaking. Her bright hazel eyes were enormous, her lashes thick and dark. Her brows slanted like little wings. Her skin was milky, and the sun coming through the salon windows made a golden aureole around the ringlets showing under the coif. But even with such beauty, Charles knew that she was right to be afraid for herself if she was without family or finances. Beauty without money was rarely enough, marriage being nearly always made for social or financial advancement, and preferably both. For most people, building up the family fortune was the eleventh commandment.

  The girl handed the glass back to Callot. “You are very kind, monsieur.”

  “Ah, ma belle Martine, if I were forty years younger, I would be kinder still.” He opened his eyes wide at her, and she laughed in spite of herself.

  “Even if—” She looked down and bit her lip. “—if I have no money?”

  Callot smote himself on the chest. “On my honor, I would be your faithful knight until the bon Dieu’s stars fall from the sky!”

  They both laughed and she touched him playfully on his withered cheek. Mlle Brion, who had perched on the arm of the chair, shook her head impatiently and leaned closer to her friend.

  “But, Martine, if you would only marry Gilles, as my father so earnestly wishes you to, you would be safe forever. And we would be sisters!”

  Callot snorted. “Gilles. Much use that one would be as a husband.”

  Martine turned her head away. “You know that my mother did not wish me to marry your brother, Isabel,” she said softly. “I would be your sister with all my heart, but my mother saw that—well, that Gilles and I would not suit each other.”

  “Oh, I know Gilles is not exciting,” the other girl cajoled. “But—” She shrugged expressively. “How many husbands are exciting?”

  The dismay on the dancing master’s face made Charles clear his throat in an effort not to laugh. Callot laughed heartily.

  Isabel blushed and stood up, seeming suddenly to remember her manners. “Maître du Luc, forgive me for my discourtesy. This is my dearest friend, Mademoiselle Martine Mynette. The bon Dieu is testing her sorely. As you see, she is in mourning. Her mother, whom we all loved, had been ill for many months, and she died just over a week ago. Martine has no other family, and my father is now her guardian. The trouble is that the paper that assured Martine’s inheritance—drawn up many years ago by my father, who is a notary—is lost. He is trying every day to find it. But so far, he has not and we are very worried.”

  Charles frowned in confusion. “But surely children must always inherit something of the family fortune?”

  Martine Mynette glanced at her friend and drew herself up in her chair.

  Isabel Brion said quickly, “Children of the blood always inherit, yes.” The two friends exchanged another glance. “But Mademoiselle Mynette is an adopted daughter, maître.”

  Charles looked from one to the other, even more confused. “I thought adoption was not legal here in the north. In the south it is, where we still follow Roman law, but—”

  Sudden fire flashed in Martine Mynette’s eyes. “Some of our judges say adoption is not legal, but they are stupid, because people do it all the time. You have only to go to a notary like Monsieur Brion and promise to raise and care for the adopted child as though it were your own. And if the notary draws up for you what is called a donation entre vifs, you can give the child whatever you wish. Even if there are blood relatives, they cannot take away what the donation gives you. But the donation Monsieur Brion helped my mother make cannot be found.” Her lips quivered and she put a hand to her mouth.

  Feeling increasingly at sea, Charles said, “I have never known a lone woman to adopt a child.”

  Both young women looked at him disapprovingly.

  “Of course a woman can adopt a child on her own,” Isabel Brion said. “Spinsters and widows without children have done it for ages. Even married women, though they must have their husband’s permission. My father often draws up such papers, though he does say women seem to do it less often now. But it is still perfectly possible. The trouble is that Martine’s mother’s copy of the donation is gone from their house, and my father found that mice had nested in his ledger for that month. And the stupid Châtelet clerks cannot find the original.”

  “I see.” Charles offered an arm to M. Callot, who was struggling up from his chivalric pose beside the chair.

  “Oof! I thank you, maître. The knight would suffer all for his lady, though his knees greatly object.” Either the effects of the eau de vie had somewhat worn off or Callot was covering them for Martine Mynette’s benefit. He gazed sorrowfully at the girl. “I will bet anything you like, maître, on any game you like, that my lazy, useless nephew never even took that original donation to the Châtelet!”

  Isabel shook her head angrily. “Of course he did, Uncle Callot, that’s only your eau de vie talking. Some clerk has put the paper in the wrong place, that’s all. The point is, what are we going to do? Shall I come and help you search again, Martine?”

  “I have looked and looked in the house,” the girl said, shaking her head hopelessly. “I’ve done little else since the morning my mother died.” She looked at Charles. “As Isabel said, she died on St. Gatien’s Day, exactly a week before Christmas. The donation was not where she’d always kept it, but I was sure I would find it when Monsieur Brion had the inventory done just a few days later. You know how the inventory clerks go through everything. But it has disappeared.”

  “Where did you expect to find it, mademoiselle?” Charles asked, and then felt himself blushing at his naked curiosity. “Forgive me, I have no reason to—”

  “I am glad to tell you. My mother hid her copy for safety behind a painting of Saint Elizabeth in her oratory, a little alcove in her chamber. She fixed it to the back of the painting with glue—you can still see a spot of glue where it was attached. But one night, a few days before she died, she told me to go and get it for her, she wanted to hold it in her hands and know that I would be safe when she was gone. I went to get it, but it wasn’t there. I thought she must have moved it and forgotten. I never doubted I would be able to find it. But—” She shook her head and gazed sadly into the fire. “My mother had terrible pain in her breast, and the poppy syrup they gave her made her confused.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I sat with her every night toward the end. By then, even the syrup didn’t help. I could do nothing for her.”

  No one spoke, and the only sound was the crackling fire.

  “Come,” Isabel Brion said briskly. She pulled her friend to her feet. “Let me get my cloak and we will go and search one more time. Two are always better than one.” She smiled at the dancing master. “And perhaps Monsieur Morel will be so kind as to escort us to your house? It is barely a step, Monsieur Morel, just to the Place Maubert, at the Sign of the Rose.”

  “I am entirely at your service, mesdemoiselles!” Morel grabbed his hat from the chest and stowed the little violin in a deep pocket inside his wide-skirted coat.

  Charles said he would walk as far as the Place with them, and Callot made as if to c
ome, too, but his great-niece firmly refused him and he wandered sadly back to his bottle.

  The little party went out into the thin sunshine, the two girls walking arm in arm and talking earnestly. Once, Martine Mynette laughed and looked archly at Morel, and Isabel Brion blushed crimson. Morel walked beside Isabel, studiously seeing and hearing nothing. Charles was silent, admiring the Mynette girl’s teasing attention to her friend’s romance, even as she herself faced disaster. His heart ached for the grieving girl, and he hoped that she had proof that she was the orphan of legitimately married and respectable parents, which she surely was, since Mademoiselle Anne Mynette had adopted her as her heir. And since Henri Brion wanted her as a wife for his son. People made an inflexible distinction between the orphans of respectable married parents and those nameless foundlings left on the street. The children were received in different institutions and faced vastly different fates. The best a foundling could hope for was to be taken in and raised as a servant, or sometimes as a future apprentice. Without the donation, and if she couldn’t prove her parentage to strangers, Martine would have very little chance of a good marriage. Her future could well be bleak indeed, if she went on resisting her guardian and his unexciting son.

  When the little party reached the Mynette house at the Sign of the Rose, a substantial stone house with gates in a stone arch protecting its cobbled court, Charles made his polite farewells. But he was frowning as he started back across the Place to the chandler’s shop. How could a notary—and a guardian—lose track of such an important document?

  Chapter 3

  The early darkness had fallen. The long chamber in Louis le Grand above the older pensionnaires’ refectory, called the salle des actes, was full of laughing professors and lay brothers crowded shoulder to shoulder on benches. On the small stage at the chamber’s east end, A Farce of Monks, this year’s strictly in-house comedy, was galloping to its conclusion. These private, Jesuits-only farces were a Christmas tradition in the Society of Jesus, a wise chance to poke fun at each other, puncture overblown solemnities, and generally let off steam. From the stage, Charles saw that even the college rector was smiling, something he’d rarely done in recent months. Maître Richaud, on the other hand, sitting farther back in the crowd, looked as though devils with pitchforks were prodding him from every side.

  Charles, playing Brother Infirmarian, was waving a clyster—an outsize enema syringe—at a bug-eyed patient.

  “But mon père,” Charles caroled, “it is for your own good!”

  “No, no, I beg you!” The patient keeping his back to the wall and his eyes on the clyster was the college’s real infirmarian, the lay brother Frère Brunet. “I tell you I am well,” he gabbled at Charles, “it is a miracle, there is no need for your medicines.”

  “They are often like this when they see my clyster,” Charles said cheerfully over his shoulder to the audience. “But, never fear, this will clear his head as well as his bowels!”

  The audience roared and wiped its streaming eyes on sleeves and cassock skirts so as not to miss anything onstage. Charles pounced on his patient. Brunet yelped, picked up the skirts of his brown monk’s habit, and fled through a doorway in the scenery. Charles followed, and the shouts and pleas from offstage convulsed the audience anew. He came back dancing an intricate little gigue of triumph and tossed the empty clyster aside. Brunet popped out of the exit and lumbered downstage to address the audience.

  “Mes frères, I have a grudge to state, a bone to pick! This gigue-hopping brother is a mere scholastic, is he not?”

  Knowing what was coming, the audience called back, “The merest of scholastics, yes!”

  Brunet nodded soberly. “And the end of a scholastic is . . . ?”

  “To be kicked!” the audience roared, and Brunet proceeded to follow their instructions.

  Charles picked himself up from an elaborate fall and bowed deeply to Brunet while rubbing his posterior and grimacing at the audience. Then the two of them opened the door of a large cupboard standing onstage, revealing a tall wooden barrel.

  “How do you fare, Brother Cellarer?” Charles shouted, addressing himself to the pair of square-toed black shoes sticking up from the barrel. He turned to the audience. “What do you think, mes pères et mes frères? If Brother Cellarer promises never to water our wine again, shall we pull him out?”

  Shouts of “Yes!” and “No!” drowned each other.

  “Come and help me, then!”

  That was the cue for a half dozen Jesuits to leap onto the stage. They pulled the red-faced and realistically dripping mathematics professor playing Brother Cellarer out of the barrel and set him on his feet. He swore by Bacchus, classical god of the grape, never to so much as mention water in the same breath with wine, and everyone onstage joined in what began as a gigue and ended as a hilarious rout. Père Montville, former assistant rector and now the newly appointed college principal, provided the accompaniment, sawing joyously on a squawking violin.

  Then Père Damiot, the farce’s beaming author, walked downstage to speak the verse epilogue. His rich voice filled the chamber and the audience quieted to listen.

  Now, Fathers and Brothers, a mirror we’ve held

  to the high and the low, what was hidden’s revealed.

  Now nothing’s concealed. Let’s give thanks for the season,

  for laughter and reason, for our house and each other,

  both Fathers and Brothers!

  There was long applause and more laughter, and then lay brothers began clearing away the benches and setting out jugs of wine and trays of refreshments along one side of the chamber. The cast and Damiot left by the door through which Charles had chased Frère Brunet and shed the brown monks’ robes they’d worn over their Jesuit cassocks.

  Straight-faced, Charles said to Damiot, “Think they liked it at all?”

  “No. They were only laughing at your left-footed dancing.”

  They grinned at each other and went back to the noisy chamber in search of wine and food. Carrying cone-shaped glasses and small sweet cakes shaped like the animals at the Christmas manger, they made their way through a barrage of teasing and compliments to a relatively quiet corner.

  “To your immortal prose,” Charles said, raising his glass to Damiot.

  “To your two left feet,” Damiot replied.

  They drank and looked sadly at the pale reddish wine in their glasses.

  “Watered,” Charles said.

  “Very. But I suppose we’re lucky it’s not straight river water.”

  Charles drank again. The stuff was, at least, discernibly wine. “Why do you suppose our finances are suddenly so bad?”

  “Cash is scarce.” Damiot tended to know these things, because his father was a wealthy merchant goldsmith. “All those fleeing Huguenots have drained us of so much money and skill. I continually ask myself how heretics can be such good businessmen.” He shrugged. “Even gold itself is scarce. Silver, too.”

  “Surely that is not the Huguenots’ fault.” Charles knew more than a little about the French Protestants called Huguenots, some of his own family in the south being counted among them.

  Damiot drank and scowled at his glass. “In any case, the New World mines aren’t producing like they used to. Or Spain is keeping it all, who knows? What anyone with two thoughts to rub together does know is that war against the Augsburg Alliance countries is inevitable, and war always means new taxes. And what will a new war do to trade? Prices will no doubt go up. And if the next few grain harvests are not good—” He shrugged. “I imagine that those who have something put aside are keeping it.”

  “Too bad our king is more concerned with war and glory than with the well-being of his own realm and people,” Charles said grimly.

  Damiot’s eyes widened, and he glanced around to see who might be close by. “That’s fascinatingly close to treason. I don’t think I heard that.”

  “But I said it,” Charles muttered. “And it’s not treason, it’s reason.”


  “Here.” Damiot shoved an ox-shaped cake into his friend’s hand. “You can’t talk with your mouth full.” They gave their attention to eating and drinking. In the rumble of talk around them, Charles caught the words of two priests.

  “. . . but I heard,” the older one said eagerly, “that a demon nearly carried away the reliquary!”

  “No, no, just some deranged old beggar, probably an old soldier with a grudge against the Condé. Trying to steal the box and sell it, I imagine.”

  “But Père Pinette would have had a mere mortal—beggar, soldier, what have you—arrested! Explain that!”

  A burst of laughter from somewhere covered his companion’s response. Charles shook his head and swallowed the last of his cakes.

  “I suppose,” he said to Damiot, “that our rector looks so happy tonight because of this rumored bequest.”

  “The prospect of no more bean pottage in the refectory is enough to make anyone look happy.”

  Charles sighed in mock despair. “And there was I, hoping that Père Le Picart was smiling because he liked my performance.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. It was my script he was liking!”

  “In fact, it was all of those,” a light dry voice said behind them.

  They turned and bowed to Père Jacques Le Picart, rector of Louis le Grand. The lean and wiry son of a Norman farmer, Le Picart ruled his college with shrewd justice and a warm heart. His cool gray gaze often saw more than a man wanted seen, as Charles had learned last summer when his vocation had hung in the balance.

  Le Picart smiled at Damiot. “I greatly enjoyed your play, mon père. And your performance,” he said, turning to Charles. “In fact, I was marveling that you joined us and not the Opera,” he added with gentle mockery.

  Charles bowed his thanks, wondering if Le Picart realized how seriously he’d once thought of choosing the stage—in spite of what that choice would have cost him in parental fury. But then the musket ball tore through his shoulder at the battle of St. Omer, leaving permanent damage and changing everything. The loss of his stage dream had been his gain, in the end, because it had shown him what he really wanted. Though he rarely said it aloud, his deepest wish was to come as close to God as a man could. But he wanted to do it in God’s good world, not behind cloister walls. That desire had led him to the Society of Jesus and the teaching of Latin rhetoric. Which had, in God’s odd economy, restored dance to him.