by Judith Rock
“Mon père, of course I want to do what you ask. But—just to take one doubt I have of my ability to do this—I know nothing about commerce or finance. And this silver scheme likely has a bearing on Henri Brion’s death, at least.”
“Père Damiot will help you there.”
“And if I fail? To find either killer?”
“The Society of Jesus is being publicly accused of murder for wealth. That calumny has been painted on our doors. You—and we, and Lieutenant-Général La Reynie—have no choice but to make our best effort to find the real killers. If we fail, we fail, and God will have a reason for it. Will you do this?”
“I will, mon père.” Charles returned Le Picart’s level gaze. “For the dead as much as for the Society.”
“And that is the most important reason why I ask you and not another to do this. Your heart is in it. So,” Le Picart said briskly, “I will tell my own superior what I have set you to do. If he tells me I am wrong, then I will call you back. If any . . . difficulty arises from your task, I will take it wholly on myself. You are acting on my orders and you are acting as Ignatius said a Jesuit should: as the strong stick supporting your feeble superior.”
“Feeble?” Charles snorted with unapologetic laughter.
Le Picart smiled slightly. “Our founder’s words, not mine.”
“Mon père, am I to tell the lieutenant-général what you have asked me to do?”
“Yes. As I said before, I have told Père Pallu that you will not, after all, be assisting in his morning classes for now. Also, I caution you again not to neglect your duties to Père Jouvancy and the February performance, unless—God and His saints forbid—a dire emergency arises. Furthermore, hear me well—you will use violence to no one.”
“No, mon père. Unless—”
“No ‘unless.’ You have taken first vows—which you have renewed—and you are a Jesuit, if only a scholastic. But you have also been a soldier. And what you did and saw and learned as a soldier are not far under your skin. That is very clear to me and is another reason you are suited for what I have asked you to do. But you belong to the Society of Jesus now, you are one of ours, not the army’s. Use what you know, but use violence to no one.”
“And if it is a question of life or death? Mine or someone’s whom I must protect?”
“Our Savior told us to turn the other cheek.”
“My own cheek is my own to turn. Allowing someone else to die seems to me another thing altogether.”
Le Picart looked long at Charles, who felt as though the man were seeing through his flesh and bone to his soul.
“That will have to be between you and God,” Le Picart said.
Chapter 14
Gilles Brion sat hugging himself at his cell’s battered table. He wore a black cloak over the same brownish-black coat and breeches Charles had seen him in before, and his elegant linen was still crisp and white. A single candle lit the small chamber and a tall brazier had been brought in for heat, but it did little to dispel the cold of the ancient stone walls. Still, it showed that M. Callot had laid out more than a little money to the jailor. Brion had started up when the thick-planked, iron-bound door opened, but slumped again into his chair when he saw Charles.
“What do you want?” he said listlessly.
“To know whether you’ve killed anyone.”
“Don’t mock me.”
“I am not, I assure you. Did you kill Mademoiselle Mynette? Did you kill your father?”
“What does it matter? I am a dead man, anyway.”
Charles turned abruptly and pounded on the cell door. “Jailor, I am through here,” he shouted through the open grille.
Behind him, the chair scraped on the stones and Brion cried, “No, wait, please!”
Praying for patience, Charles turned around.
“Wait for what?” If harshness was the only thing that could penetrate this idiot’s posturing, then harshness he would have.
“I didn’t kill either of them. I own I wanted sometimes to kill my father. But I didn’t. And I would never have killed Mademoiselle Mynette. I swear by all the saints, by my hope of heaven!”
“But you went to her house before dawn on Friday morning. The morning she died.”
Gilles gasped and clutched the back of the chair. “Isabel betrayed me! Dear God, women are of the devil! Their tongues forge the chains of hell, they—”
Charles turned back to the door and raised a fist to pound on it.
“Don’t go!” Gilles clutched Charles’s arm. “Women are weak, I know that, Isabel surely didn’t mean—forgive me—”
Charles shook off Brion’s hand. The young man was swaying where he stood, his face was colorless.
“Have they fed you?”
“I don’t want anything.”
Charles sighed. “At least sit down before you fall.” He pushed Gilles into the chair and picked up the cloak, which had fallen to the floor. “You were seen,” he said, draping the cloak back around Brion’s shoulders. “You were seen leaving the side gate to the Mynette’s garden Friday morning. Why did you go there, Monsieur Brion? And why so early?”
Gilles froze as booted feet walked past the door. As the sound faded, he groaned and shook his head hopelessly. “I went to ask her to help us both out of the coil my father had made. I knew she would be awake. She always woke early to dress and say the early prayers.” Haltingly, he told Charles the same story Isabel Brion had already given him.
“And when Mademoiselle Mynette refused to help you, what did you do?”
“I left. I went back to the Capuchins for Prime and Mass.”
“They can confirm that you were there?”
“Yes.”
Sitting now with his back turned to Charles, Gilles took something from his pocket. It caught the candlelight in a small red flash, and in one stride, Charles was at the table and wrenching open Brion’s hand. But the thing was a rosary with reddish beads, not a red enamel heart.
“Forgive me,” Charles said, laying it carefully on the table. “I thought this was something else. I was mistaken.”
Brion, cowering away from him, snatched up the rosary and began to pray.
“Monsieur Brion, you most certainly need God’s help. But you also need mine. Please listen to me. Your sister says you stayed at the Capuchin monastery on Thursday night. Is that true?”
“Yes,” Brion said resentfully, opening his eyes. He glanced at Charles and ducked his head over the rosary again. “In a—a guest cell. I often stay there.”
Charles watched him thoughtfully for a moment. “So you stayed the night in the monastery. Praying. Solitary. Celibate. Just as a future monk should be. Admirable. And regrettable, since there is no one who can swear you never left your guest chamber on Thursday night and the early hours of Friday morning. No one can swear for you that you were at the Capuchins during the hours when your father must have died.”
Brion, clutching the rosary so tightly that his knuckles were bone white, seemed to stop breathing.
Charles decided to risk everything on one throw. “It is not unknown,” he said, as though to himself, “for young men to decide to enter religious life together. Two heartfast friends sometimes vow to enter the same monastery, to live there chaste, but in each other’s company.”
Brion stared at him as though ensorcelled, his eyes like black pits in his white face.
“Do you have such a friend, Monsieur Brion?”
A silent sob convulsed the young man’s body. He shook his head.
“I think you do, mon ami,” Charles said gently.
Brion leaned his head on his folded arms and wept. “Don’t tell them, I beg you, don’t tell them. We’ve done no wrong. We are chaste, maître, I swear it!” Then, to Charles’s surprise, he made an effort to pull himself together and took a square of linen from his pocket. He mopped his face and pushed back his lank brown hair. “It is not just for him that I want to be a monk,” he said softly, running his fingers over a roughly f
ormed rose some prisoner before him had carved into the table’s surface. “But I want to spend my life serving and praying where he is. Is that wrong?”
Charles hesitated. The church, the law, and the world harshly condemned that kind of love between men, even when it was chaste. Sodomites were rarely burned alive now, but they could be—even though the king’s brother and more than a few courtiers were notorious for “the Italian vice,” as it was called. A century ago Henri III, who had piously inscribed and laid the cornerstone for Louis le Grand’s chapel, had confounded his ministers by appearing at state functions in jeweled gowns, with purple powder in his hair and beard.
Charles knew that he, too, should condemn this kind of love, especially now, when Brion was frightened and maybe vulnerable enough to renounce his friend. But Charles also knew what it was like to be torn, albeit by the more usual kind of love, and had no taste for condemning.
“I don’t think love itself is wrong,” he said, walking away from the table to the brazier.
Brion twisted in his chair and stared in astonishment.
“Not love that wants the beloved’s good more than it wants fulfillment of its own desires. Though what we choose to do about love is often enough wrong, God knows. And in your case, you would do well to remember the punishment the law can exact for the act of love between men.”
Brion laughed harshly. “As though I could ever forget.”
“Monsieur Brion, there is already strong evidence against you in the Mynette murder. Mademoiselle Mynette was killed early on Friday morning. And it seems that your father was killed very shortly after that. If you cannot—or will not—provide proof of where you were on Thursday night and Friday morning, before you went to the Mynette house, no one will be able to save you from the other charge.”
“What does it matter? I will hang for the girl’s murder, anyway. And I will not put . . . anyone else . . . in peril.”
Charles shut his ears to his conscience and used the weapons he had. “It is you who are in peril! How hard do you want your death to be? The penalty for parricide is worse than the penalty for homicide. Too many people know that your father was trying to force you into marriage. And that his death clears your way to the monastery.”
“But it doesn’t! Great-Uncle Callot will still stop me if he can. He wants me to marry and be a notary. And the Capuchin novice master says they prefer the consent of families when they take a novice.”
Charles wondered if perhaps the Capuchins were looking for a graceful way out of coping with Gilles Brion. “Your great-uncle cares more for your happiness than you imagine, Monsieur Brion. Why do you think you were not flung into the filth and danger of the common cell?”
Gilles frowned and glanced around the chamber. “He did this?”
“He did.” Charles let that sink in. Then he said, “Monsieur Brion, did you know of your father’s scheme to smuggle silver in barrels of chocolate seeds?”
A surprised smile appeared fleetingly on Brion’s thin face. “No, I didn’t. My poor father; his schemes for making money never worked. Did one of his angry investors kill him, then? I’ve always thought that was how he would end.”
They both started as someone shot the door’s outer bolt and Lieutenant-Général La Reynie came in.
“Bonjour, messieurs.” He inclined his head to Charles. Then, leaning on his silver-headed stick, he gazed for a long moment at Gilles Brion. “I came to give you a little more to think about, Monsieur Brion. In spite of the fears you have confided to Maître du Luc—yes, I have been listening at the grille—we have determined that your father was not killed by the investors he was last seen with. Which leaves us once again with you as our man for that murder.”
With more dignity than Charles had yet seen in him, Brion rose from his chair and faced La Reynie. “There must be other investors.”
“Perhaps. But I usually find that men are quicker to kill their loved ones than their debtors and creditors. Especially since murderers so often face breaking on the rack instead of merely hanging. And occasionally, of course, there’s burning. If other circumstances demand it.”
Charles and Brion both flinched. La Reynie smiled genially at them.
“If I may have a moment of your time, maître?” he said to Charles. He gestured toward the door and they went out, leaving Brion crouched over his rosary.
“Will you at least see that he is fed?” Charles said, as they walked away from the cell.
“A little fasting will loosen his tongue.”
Charles regarded the lieutenant-général with distaste. “He did not kill his father. I am certain of it. And I don’t think he killed the girl.”
“Oh? Who had a better motive than he to kill both of them?”
“I wish I knew.” Charles stopped in the small light of a lantern beside the worn stone stairs. “Brion truly wants to be a monk.” And when, Charles’s mind said cynically, did you decide his vocation is real? Just now in that cell, he told it. So please shut up. “Monsieur La Reynie, no one with a real religious vocation would kill to get it.”
“I agree that the sin of murder to gain monastic life would twist that life out of all rightness. But this Gilles Brion does not strike me as a humbly judging intellect. He strikes me as a weak young man floundering in tempests of emotion.”
Lips pressed together to keep what he wanted to say behind his teeth, Charles hitched his cassock skirts impatiently out of the way and started down the stairs.
“That was well done to remind him of the penalty for sodomy,” La Reynie said behind him.
“You cannot prosecute him for sodomy,” Charles said curtly. “You have no evidence.”
“No. I haven’t. But threats about one thing have been known to elicit what I want to know about other things.”
A wave of anger and disgust rose in Charles. Especially since he’d just done virtually the same thing in his talk with Gilles. “How you can bear your job, I cannot fathom.” He turned abruptly toward where he thought the street door might be, suddenly unwilling to ask the way, or anything else, of La Reynie.
“Oh, I think you can fathom it.” The ancient stone vaulting enlarged La Reynie’s voice so that it seemed to come from everywhere at once. “There is little to choose between us. You and your brother Jesuits are accused every day of twisting questionable means to reach admirable ends. Come to my office. I have other things to tell you.”
“No, thank you.” Charles kept walking.
“Going back on your vow of obedience, are you?”
Charles stopped, but didn’t turn around. “What does that mean?”
“Your rector told you to keep track of my inquiry into these deaths. So come to my office and keep track. Or are you simply another weak young man floundering in tempests of emotion?”
Speechless with fury, Charles turned slowly. He fixed the lieutenant-général with an unblinking stare, and then his eyes dropped to the sword at La Reynie’s side.
“I could take it off, you know,” the lieutenant-général said earnestly. “Then it would be just hand-to-hand combat. Will that do for a young man floundering—”
Charles’s swelling anger deflated as suddenly as a punctured bladder in a boys’ ball game. “. . . floundering in a tempest of emotion,” he finished, with a snort of rueful laughter. “No, it won’t do. Shall we go to your office?”
La Reynie made him a mock bow. “I am relieved that we’re not dueling, because I have quite a lot to do today. And also because you are younger and would probably win.”
“I would most certainly win.”
Smiling, La Reynie led him into an office that proclaimed his exalted place in the realm. Wool hangings of the weaving called moquette, patterned in red and blue and yellow, softened the stone walls. A portrait of the king hung behind the wide walnut desk. A fire burned in a wide, stone-hooded fireplace, and a dark blue-and-yellow carpet with medallions representing Fame and Fortitude lay in front of it. The armchairs on either side of the fireplace were u
pholstered in garnet leather tacked with gilt nails and fringed in gold. La Reynie gestured Charles to one of the armchairs, spread his coat’s thick skirts, and seated himself in the other one. He poured wine from a pewter pitcher standing on the table and held out a glass to Charles.
“I have first to thank you for the information about the silver smuggling. There was a report about it here when I returned, but it was useful to have it sooner. Monsieur Bizeul and a jeweler called Robert Cantel walked Brion out of the coffeehouse. Bizeul denies any part in either Brion’s smuggling or death. I have not yet talked to Cantel for the good reason that I cannot find him.”
“He’s fled? Then there’s your man! You can—”
“I know only that the man has disappeared. For all I know, he, too, is dead. Never fear, I am searching diligently for him. And looking closely into the financial affairs of both Bizeul and Cantel. I am nearly sure that Bizeul is involved in the smuggling. Which means that Cantel probably is, too. About Monsieur Brion, Bizeul says that he left Procope’s with him and Cantel on Thursday night, all friends together, and stopped in a tavern. Then they apparently went on to Bizeul’s house, because an oublieur finishing his rounds saw Brion and Cantel—who lives only a few streets from Bizeul—leave Bizeul’s house together.” Oublieurs were evening street vendors who sold their delicate pastry wafers, called oublies, for after-dinner treats at houses hosting parties. “The oublieur said they were arguing, but he couldn’t say whether Brion went with Cantel willingly or not. Interestingly, I found a little room off Cantel’s courtyard in which there was a pile of straw, blankets, half a loaf of bread, a pewter cup, and a length of rope, cut through. Madame Cantel says that she had a drunk, unruly servant put there overnight. I think that Monsieur Cantel put an unruly notary there. And meant to leave him there until Brion covered his and Bizeul’s losses. I think a servant took a bribe and let him escape, probably shortly before he was killed. When we undressed him here at the Châtelet, there was straw under his cloak, on his coat. I think he was on his way home—your Monsieur Morel said that those streets were a back way to the Brion house.”