by Judith Rock
“Ma soeur,” he said, sighing, “I have urgent need of information. About a foundling who came to you as much as twenty years ago. All I know of him is that he was called Tito.”
Her wimple and veil, so white and starched that light bounced off them, made it hard to tell her age. Charles guessed that she might be forty.
“I was not here that long ago.” She smiled sadly. “I entered the order after my husband died.” She paused, thinking. “But yes, there is a sister who was here then. Soeur Mariana, a Spanish woman.”
“Please,” Charles said eagerly, “may I speak with her?”
“No, mon père. She is old and has been ill.”
His heart sank. “Is she expected to recover?”
“I think so. We are praying for her.”
“If—when—she feels well enough, will you ask her about this boy Tito?”
“This is important?”
“Life and death may depend on it, ma soeur.”
“If she is well enough, I will ask her. Come back in a few days. I am Soeur Madeleine.”
She inclined her head to Charles, who bowed and withdrew. The sky was cloudless now and Charles had to squint against the snow glare as he plodded across the court, trying to pray that Soeur Mariana would recover for her sake, not his.
Chapter 23
The lay brother in the clothing room was not pleased. Charles stood before the clothing counter in his cassock, watching the brother inspect the holes in his cloak. “Another cloak gone.” The brother glared at Charles, demanded his hat, and turned it slowly in his hands. Charles realized that he was counting the singed places, perhaps to charge each one to Charles’s purgatory account as so many extra years of penance. Charles unobtrusively clasped his hands behind his back to hide the tiny cinder burns in his cassock sleeves. As he moved, the brother sniffed the air.
“You smell like a peasant’s fire. That cassock will probably have to be washed. Wool is never the same after washing, you know that. Let me see your shoes.”
Charles held out one cold sodden foot and then the other.
The brother rolled his eyes and sighed. “Take them off. The cassock, too. Behind the curtain there.”
Muttering and shaking his head, he left Charles shivering in shirt and stockings while he searched his stores for replacements. When he came back, he was still muttering.
“Frenchmen are short. Except, of course, you. At least your feet are smallish. Here.”
He thrust a cassock, cloak, and shoes around the curtain. “The cassock hasn’t been worn for I don’t know how long. The smell will air out. Your hat you’ll just have to keep for now,” he added with satisfaction. “I don’t have another one.”
“Thank you, mon frère.” Charles put on the ancient cassock and cincture, which smelled of moth remedies and looked as though they’d been in the clothing store since one of St. Ignatius’s original companions turned them in. The shoes, for a miracle, came close to fitting him. And the cloak was heavier than the one he’d lost at the fire. Clothed again, he walked around the curtain and bowed to the clothing master. “Again, my apologies, mon frère, and my thanks.”
“I trust your confessor will hear how much of my stores you have destroyed.”
“He will, mon frère.”
Charles bowed again and escaped. The bright sunshine was at its early January zenith, striking rainbows from ice crystals and glittering on the snow, but it had no more warmth than a painting of sunshine. Père Le Picart had received Charles’s report before dinner with some alarm at the firefighting story, and disappointment that what Charles had discovered was not enough to confirm Brion’s claims of innocence. Le Picart had also given Charles permission to return to the Couche when need be. For now, though, Charles had his usual duties to perform. He turned his steps toward the grand salon for the student confraternity’s almsgiving, trying to ignore how little his wet stockings were doing for the comfort of the new shoes. He’d gone to the Capuchins wearing both his pairs of stockings for warmth and had not had the courage to ask anything more of the clothing brother.
Arriving early in the grand salon, he sat down in one of the armchairs to wait for the students. His eyes closed almost immediately and he slept till the jarring of his head falling forward woke him. He stared sleepily at the framed paintings of Jesuits on the grand salon’s walls, and the other paintings and engravings scattered among them. The nonportrait drawings were changed from time to time, and Charles got up to look more closely at one he hadn’t seen before. It was an engraving of a heart—not the familiar symbol of Christ’s Sacred Heart, but a liverish-red anatomical rendering that might have been drawn at an autopsy. It was pierced with a myriad of tiny black swords. Sins, the caption explained, damaging and deforming the heart of the sinner. Which should have made him consider the state of his own sinful heart, but instead made him wonder what the Condé’s heart might look like under its silk wrappings.
“Here they are, maître,” a tutor said from the street passage door.
The boys distributing the week’s alms for the older pensionnaires’ Congregation of the Ste. Vierge came in. Two carried a hip-high basket of loaves between them, and three others were nearly hidden behind the piles of garments in their arms. The remaining pair of boys brought the walnut table from the grand salon to the antechamber and placed it in front of the double doors.
Charles thanked and dismissed the tutors, helped the boys arrange the loaves and clothing, and gathered them for prayer. Then Armand Beauclaire and Walter Connor pushed open the great doors, the snow in front of them having been cleared aside by lay brothers. To Charles’s surprise, Marin was already standing there. The old man hobbled forward.
“Have you medicine, maître?” He seemed much more himself than when he’d fled from Charles outside the church of St. Louis.
“Not here. Are you ill, Marin?”
“Not me. My boy Jean. He’s coughing up his guts. Has been for a while, but it’s worse now.”
Charles grimaced in sympathy, remembering the young man’s thinness and harsh cough. “I can ask our infirmarian for something to help him.” Charles called Beauclaire to him. “Monsieur Beauclaire, go to Frère Brunet and ask for the remedy he uses for coughs. As many lozenges as he will give you. Quickly.”
Beauclaire bowed, happily important at being trusted with the errand, and sped away. One of the other boys handed Marin a loaf, and the old man tore off a piece and moved aside, eating while he waited.
People were crowded around the doors now, narrow-eyed against the light. Charles stood back as the students distributed bread and clothes. Filthy hands reached for the round loaves, and pinched faces lightened at their solid weight. Charles smiled with satisfaction at the intensity of the boys’ concentration, the effort they made to be courteous, in spite of the running noses, the breath stench, and the sores. In spite of wariness, and sometimes a little fear, they listened courteously to the grumbling, most of it merely sullen, some of it outright crazed.
The icicles hanging from the stonework above the doors were beginning to drip, lifting Charles’s spirits somewhat to see that the thin sunshine had that much warmth. A man leaning against one of the open doors and trying on a pair of shoes cried out and leaped backward as a foot-long icicle fell to the snow beside him.
“Trying to kill you for your coins, are they?” a University of Paris student called merrily from the other side of the street. “Be on your guard!”
“Animals!” Old Marin began wading furiously through the snow toward the student, swinging his stick. “I don’t see your kind giving anything, you pigs!”
The boy and his laughing fellow students hurled snowballs at him and darted down the rue des Poirees, which led off the rue St. Jacques deeper into the University’s territory. Cursing them and their fathers back to Adam, Marin brushed snow off his face and coat. Most of those receiving alms had prudently ignored the University students, but a few women cast frightened eyes at Charles, who sighed and stepped far
ther back into the antechamber’s shadows. The almsgiving wore on. The last of several pairs of gloves (all worn and denuded of their trimming but still a rarity in the alms box) were given out, the man who’d dodged the icicles went away with his new shoes, and a student handed the last loaf to an old woman. Marin came back to the doors and looked anxiously into the antechamber, his face lighting with relief as Armand Beauclaire ran breathlessly in from the street passage.
“Here they are, maître, he just finished making them, that’s what took me so long.”
Thanking him, Charles took the little package wrapped in paper, told the boys to clear away the table, and went to Marin.
“These should help your Jean,” Charles said. “I will pray for him.”
Marin turned the little package over with his swollen, knotted fingers and glanced worriedly up at Charles. “Angels can’t die, can they, maître?”
“Angels cannot, no.”
“My Claire sent Jean to me.” The old beggar’s faded eyes shone with unshed tears. “I know, because he told me just how she looked. She won’t let him die.” Marin frowned suddenly. “Will Jean have to die for my sins?”
Charles was lost once more in Marin’s crazy logic. Before he could answer, the tutors arrived to escort the boys to afternoon classes.
“Wait a little, Marin,” Charles said, and called the boys together.
“Shall we close the doors, maître?” Beauclaire asked, but Charles shook his head.
“I will see to that. We will pray now.”
He led them in giving thanks that they had alms to give, and asked that their giving be a means of grace, to themselves and to the beggars. As the boys left, the afternoon class bell began to ring. The bell also meant rehearsal, but Charles hesitated, feeling somehow reluctant to leave the old man. He went outside and pushed the double doors closed. Marin, standing in the street and murmuring to himself, didn’t seem to notice.
“Marin, shall we go and stand by the postern door? I need to see someone as he comes in.” Charles had decided to give Germain Morel a message for Jouvancy. “And then I will walk with you back to where you stay. And you can tell me about Claire.”
For a moment, the old man’s wandering wits were as clear as Charles’s own. “No, no. You can’t go with me.” He shook his shaggy head until his ancient leather hat fell off. “Foxes have holes,” he said sonorously. “But the Son of Man has no place. No son of man and no daughter of woman.” He picked up his hat. “That’s Scripture.”
Glancing up and down the street for some sign of Morel, Charles led Marin to the postern. But before he could ask again about Claire, the dancing master arrived panting at the postern door.
“Bonjour, Monsieur Morel,” Charles said. “I need to finish some business here and will be somewhat late to the rehearsal. Will you please tell Père Jouvancy I am detained on the rector’s business?”
“Of course, maître.”
Morel bowed, glanced curiously at Marin, and went into the college. Charles turned to Marin, but he was interrupted again.
“Maître du Luc, look!” Marie-Ange LeClerc, in an old red cloak trailing on the snow, burst out of the bakery and stopped breathlessly in front of Charles. “Maman made them!”
She held something wrapped in a white napkin out to Charles.
A strange sweet fragrance spread in the cold air. He bent closer, unwrapped the napkin, and peered at the two small golden cakes it held.
“What is it that smells so good, ma petite? I don’t recognize the scent.”
“Taste one and see if you can guess.” She was almost quivering with excitement.
Charles obediently took a cake. Marie-Ange looked doubtfully at the old beggar, moved a little closer to Charles’s side, and politely held out the napkin to Marin as well.
To Charles’s surprise, Marin made her the ghost of a bow and held up the proffered cake in a kind of toast.
Charles bit into the cake’s rich sweetness and his eyes widened in surprise. “It’s wonderful! A taste I’ve never had before.”
Marin nodded and muttered something around his mouthful.
“It’s the inside of my coconut! Maman chopped it up and sprinkled it on the cakes.”
“Tell her if she makes more, they will be the rage of all Paris! Thank you, mademoiselle, and our thanks to your mother.”
Marie-Ange dimpled and curtsied. “I am going to Martinique, maître,” she confided, “the very first minute I am old enough. I will marry Antoine and we will send Maman all the coconuts she wants and she will be rich from her cakes.” With a confident smile that surprised Charles with a glimpse of the young woman she would be one day, Marie-Ange hauled up the tail of her cloak and went back to the bakery.
Marin, licking his fingers, watched her go. “That one is very pretty, but she is not Claire. I can tell by how brown her hair is. She is very kind. But not Claire. Sometimes I still find Claire.” He frowned suddenly and shook his head. “But sometimes demons steal her golden hair and when I ask for alms, they laugh at me.”
Charles waited, baffled by the way the old man’s mind twisted and turned among its phantasms.
“Fair as the moon. Sad like the moon.” Marin sighed out a miasma of rotten teeth and garlic and clutched at Charles’s cassock. “More fair than you,” he said, looking hard at Charles’s hair. “Do you know what they did to her? Do you?”
“No.” Charles gently released himself from the clutching fingers.
“Twelve years old.” Marin had turned half away and seemed to be watching the blue shadows creep across the snow in the street. “She was little, like a doll. Dwarf, some called her, but she wasn’t; she was made as prettily as any girl. Her hair was like curled moonlight and they dressed her in jewels and satin for her betrothal. To that pig Condé. He was embarrassed because she was so little. He made them put heels on her like stilts. She could hardly walk. When all the show was over and it was time for her to dance with him, the actors wheeled a little bridge up to where she sat, raised up in a wooden stand with the rest of the nobility. She had to manage her skirts and walk across it to meet her bastard bridegroom. She did, and they started to dance, with everyone watching. My Claire did the best she could, but those devil’s heels pitched her onto her face. Everyone laughed at her. The Condé was seventeen, he was nearly a man, but did he feel any pity, did he help her up? Not he; he turned red as a dog’s behind and refused to look at her.” Marin’s eyes came back to Charles. “I tried to kill him,” he said matter-of-factly.
“You—how?” And how are you still alive if you tried, Charles didn’t say.
“I was a Condé page. They dressed us up and gave us boys’ swords and placed us around the dancing floor. The swords were sharp, and when she fell and he didn’t help her, I ran at him, trying to draw, but my sword stuck in its scabbard. They only thought I was running to Claire’s rescue. So they sent me to her household. So golden, so pretty . . .” His lucidity vanished in a long-drawn wail. “Claire, forgive me, Sacred Heart, forgive me . . .”
He lunged away from Charles and flailed his way through the tumbled snow up St. Geneviève’s hill. With a sick sense of pity for the little princess and the boy the old man had been, Charles watched him go. Then, thinking uneasily about Marin’s demons and the sword story, and remembering that Marin had struck down and probably killed the man who had tried to stab him in the tavern fight, Charles rang the postern bell.
Chapter 24
In the salle des actes, the familiar lunacy of rehearsal came as a relief. Germain Morel was shouting at Henri Montmorency, who was mounted on his golden plinth and pointing his baton at his two-soldier brigade with utter disregard for music, choreography, or the dancing master’s exasperation. At the other end of the room, Jouvancy stalked back and forth in front of the stage like a displeased crow, listening to a scene from the Latin tragedy.
“No!” Jouvancy jumped onto the stage and grabbed the fledgling St. Nazarius by the back of his coat. “You are a saint! Have you nev
er heard of humility? Dear God, are you trying to look like a fat merchant addressing his guild?” With both hands, he pushed the boy’s shoulders forward, shoved his head lower, and stepped back. “Better.”
St. Nazarius, looking now like a wild-eyed hunchback, quavered. “Yes, mon père. Shall I go on?”
“Yes. No! You’re still not right.”
“But, mon père,” St. Nazarius ventured from his crouch, “the saints seem proud to be saints. At least, their statues do. I mean, not like this—”
“They’re not proud till they’re dead.” Jouvancy glowered at his actor as though offering him that opportunity, then seemed to think better of it. “Watch.” In a silken transformation, the rhetoric master softened his spine, bent his neck just enough, opened his hands, and became the perfect humble saint. “Like this, do you see?”
The other actors, recognizing the start of a long ordeal for the unfortunate Nazarius, faded silently into the background. Keeping his face carefully straight, Charles moved so that Jouvancy would see that he’d arrived. The rhetoric master gave him a vague glance, as though he’d forgotten quite who Charles was, and turned his attention back to his saint.
At the dance end of the room, Morel was now standing on Montmorency’s plinth, directing the two soldiers through the steps of their Air Animé with authoritative grace and singing the music.
“Do I have to sing?” Montmorency asked in horror when he finished.
“No, Monsieur Montmorency,” Charles cut in smoothly, to keep Morel from saying what he was all too obviously about to say. “No one is asking you to sing. Monsieur Morel, shall I work with the other dancers?”
“If you would be so kind, maître,” Morel said through his teeth. “Now, Monsieur Montmorency, let me see you direct your soldiers.” With the light of battle in his eye, he took up his small violin from a bench against the wall.