The Eloquence of Blood

by Judith Rock

Smiling with satisfaction that Montmorency had met his match, Charles went to the other dancers. Most were going silently through their steps, though without the full execution the steps would have in performance. Marking the steps, dancers called it. Michele Bertamelli, though, was doing what he’d learned of his canarie as though the world were watching. Canaries were full of springing steps, and as Charles watched, Bertamelli nearly propelled himself through one of the south-facing windows.

  “Doucement, Monsieur Bertamelli,” Charles cried, running across the floor and pulling the boy to a halt. “You are a magnificent jumper, but that is not all you must be to perform this dance!”

  “But, Maître du Luc, it only jumps, it jumps everywhere, what else does it do?” Bertamelli’s shoulders were around his ears. “So what else can I do?”

  “For your jumps to be as beautiful as they can be, you must also know how to go slow, Monsieur Bertamelli. Remember, dancing is not the same as doing tricks.”

  The little Italian stared at Charles in frank bewilderment.

  “And jumping is like pulling a rabbit out of a hole,” Charles improvised, miming his words. “If I only reach down a little way and pull out my rabbit, well, it’s nice to see a rabbit, but it’s not all that exciting. But if I pull my rabbit out of a very deep hole, it is another thing entirely.” Charles extracted his imaginary rabbit.

  Bertamelli’s eyes widened. “I see, I see!” He clapped his hands. Then his face fell. “If my jumps are the rabbit, maître, where is the hole?”

  “The hole is only a verbal figure, the kind you learn in the rhetoric classroom. You make your jumps more astonishing by being able to go slow as well as fast. So I am giving you a very very difficult exercise, mon brave,” Charles said gravely. If Bertamelli thought the exercise was so difficult that doing it well enhanced his honor, he would give his life’s blood to it.

  “Watch now.” Charles walked across the salle and faced the boy. He drew himself up and began to walk. With utter concentration, so slowly, so intentionally, that every smallest movement, every lightest touch of a part of his foot on the floor was a physical revelation. Hardly breathing, Bertamelli watched, his wide black eyes seeming to take up most of his face. Before Charles reached him, Bertamelli’s body was moving as Charles was moving.

  “You see, then,” Charles said.

  “Oh, I do, maître.” The boy wiped his sweating face. “It is very hard indeed. How can that be?”

  “Keep on doing it and you will understand. After you practice like that, you will understand much more where your jumps come from. You will pull astonishing and beautiful rabbits out of the very deepest holes, mon brave.”

  Thinking that this child’s “rabbits” were going to be very astonishing and very beautiful indeed, Charles left him to it and called the shy Charles Lennox aside. They went to work on the majestic, but short, measured, and relatively simple entrée grave he’d persuaded Monsieur Charpentier to include for Lennox’s St. Ambrose.

  When the bell rang for three o’clock, Charles was sure it could not be so late. Lennox had turned out to be surprisingly good at making himself into a grave old man and putting the dignity of age into his steps.

  “Well done, indeed, Monsieur Lennox,” he said, as the boy made him a reverence.

  “Thank you. I like dancing, Maître du Luc.” Lennox’s barely audible voice was presently wandering painfully up and down the scale. “I wish I could dance all the time. Or play cricket.”

  “Cricket? What is that?”

  “It’s just a game, maître. But I like it.” Lennox’s blue eyes lit with a rare smile and he bowed to Charles, picked up his hat, and moved with the other boys to the door.

  Holding Montmorency’s flaking gold baton and shaking it as he talked, Morel escorted the hapless noble soldier to join them. Jouvancy chivied his actors down the room, still talking intently to poor St. Nazarius, whose eyes looked as glazed as sugared figs. When Jouvancy saw Charles, he paused and Nazarius escaped.

  “Ah, Maître du Luc, you are with us, good, good, it is all going very well. I think we must make these French operas a yearly thing, they are very good practice for the boys. Very beautiful. And you, Monsieur Morel, are heaven sent. Perhaps I will write to our usual dancing master—Maître Beauchamps, you know—that he may stay in Italy and buy pictures, for all we care! On, now, go on,” he called to the students, “quickly, I am following. The ancients await us!”

  With a bow to Charles, Morel moved toward the door also.

  “Monsieur Morel,” Charles said, “before you go, please, how is it with Mademoiselle Brion and Monsieur Callot?”

  Morel shook his head. “Nearly as bad as it could be. She can think of nothing but her brother. Monsieur Callot tried to see him, but Lieutenant-Général La Reynie would not allow it. And he would not tell Monsieur Callot if he is going to charge Gilles with the murders. As for my own affairs, I fear more each day that Mademoiselle Brion will join the Ursulines. I must go back to them now. I try to keep them company in the evening.”

  Charles wanted quiet for thinking. When Morel’s footsteps had faded on the stairs, he went out through the snow-covered courtyards, across the fathers’ garden, and into the main college library. Built only a few years ago, the library was one of the quietest places in the crowded school. He would have liked to settle on a bench under Louis le Grand’s ancient grapevine, said to be a relic from the Romans who had once settled St. Geneviève’s hill, calling it Lutetia. But the vine was only bare sticks now and the library was relatively warm. Inside, he went quickly up to the second floor and along a gallery to the little chamber called the cabinet of natural history.

  He’d often found it deserted and a good place to think. Though small, it had two large windows to throw ample light on the treasures ranged along its shelves and in its cupboards. Charles wandered past heaps of sparkling pink and purple quartz, nuggets of gold, ancient gold and silver coins, bronze and gold brooches for fastening cloaks, huge outlandish seashells, a stone head of Julius Caesar with a badly chipped eye (discovered when the foundations for the college chapel were dug), shelves of brilliant butterflies on boards, a tiny pair of embroidered Chinese shoes, and a grayish, uninviting bezoar stone from a Near Eastern goat’s belly. There was also a waist-high globe, leather-surfaced and brightly painted, for those who wanted to see where all these things had come from.

  Charles stopped at the end of the little room, in front of his favorite thing in the cabinet, and ran his fingers along it. The long, ornately twisted, ivory horn glimmered in a pool of sunlight. The fabulous unicorn’s horn, some insisted, though Charles thought it was more likely the horn from a great fish sailors claimed to see—and sometimes catch—far out of sight of land. In truth, he didn’t much care what it was; he loved it for its beauty. And for the way it drew to itself the human longing for miracles and wonders, for something good and beautiful beyond the everyday world. He rested his hand on the warmly glowing ivory, thinking unhappily about Marin.

  The raving old man saw his lost Claire in every pretty, fairhaired girl. But some girls turned out to be demons, he’d said. They refused him alms, they laughed at him. Marin begged all over the quartier. What if he’d gone to the Mynette house for alms and Martine Mynette had been frightened by him, refused him, even tried to push him away? Marin had matter-of-factly told Charles that he’d tried to kill the Prince of Condé. And Charles had seen him strike down his would-be assassin outside the tavern. Even more disturbingly, Marin had suddenly taken to muttering about the Sacred Heart. Charles, like everyone else, heard it in capitals, Jesus’ Sacred Heart of growing popular devotion. But what if Marin didn’t mean it like that? What if he meant Martine Mynette’s little red enamel heart on its embroidered ribbon? Involuntarily, Charles shook his head. He didn’t want that to be true. But who else was there? So far, there was only the shadowy Tito, as hard to lay hands on as a unicorn. And there was Gilles Brion. Charles and Monsieur Fiennes could be wrong. Brion had had reason to kill both M
artine and his father, better reasons, as sane men reckoned, than either of the others. But Charles simply could not imagine him doing it.

  Loud whispers made Charles turn. A small boy, surely one of the college’s youngest students, had come in with his tutor. Perhaps nine or ten years old, dressed in brown velvet under his scholar’s gown, the boy stared wide-eyed around the cabinet.

  “Where is it, maître?” he whispered hoarsely to his tutor, who smiled at Charles and led the child to the shelf with the horn.

  But the boy was too short to examine what was on the shelf. Charles brought a stool for the child to stand on from the end of another set of shelves, and the tutor thanked him and helped his charge up onto it.

  “Oooh.”The boy touched the horn as though it might dissolve under his hand. “It really is here,” he breathed, turning shining eyes on his tutor and then on Charles. “There really are unicorns, then,” he said, with a great sigh of relief. “I was afraid there wouldn’t be. Not here.”

  Charles left the two in possession of the cabinet. As he went out onto the gallery, he realized that he’d seen the child before, that he was the youngest of the three boys who’d gone to see if the holy water was frozen in the chapel on Christmas Eve. Smiling with pleasure at the boy’s delight in the horn, Charles walked under the grand painted ceiling of the ground floor, past the paintings of St. Ignatius and Francis Xavier, and out into the frozen garden. Under the winter sunset’s intense orange and red, he went slowly toward supper, thinking about the child’s easy trust that the horn was what he wanted it to be. Charles told himself that he could do that; he could simply keep on believing that Marin would not have killed Martine Mynette, no matter what, and keep his mouth shut. But Marin did not just look wistfully at every pretty girl, hoping that she was his beloved Claire. He saw hateful demons when he failed to find her. And I am not nine years old, Charles sighed to himself as the supper bell began to ring.

  Charles, whose table assignments paralleled Père Jouvancy’s, was once again eating his meals in the older pensionnaires’ refectory. The huge room was at least warmer with more students present, now that most classes had begun again. Charles took his place at the end of the faculty table on the dais, looking out over the vast room. Jouvancy sat a few places to his left, toward the center, and Père Damiot was beside Charles. Supper was beans again, but at least there was mutton in the pottage. Even so, Damiot was eyeing his bowl with distaste.

  “Salt it,” Charles recommended. “It’s not bad with more salt.”

  “What’s that?” Damiot lifted up a whitish chunk of something on his spoon. “Blessed Virgin, is that a—a potato? Or whatever they’re called? Those things are cattle feed; surely we’re not that badly off yet!”

  “Whatever possessed a gourmet like you to become a Jesuit? It’s not a potato, it’s mutton fat.” Charles passed Damiot the salt.

  Outside the refectory windows, iron-grilled for protection against balls and flying shuttlecocks during courtyard recreation, dark had come. The refectory was lit with the bare minimum of tallow candles, and Charles supposed that Damiot could be forgiven for thinking that someone had put potatoes in the pottage. The feeble light picked out an occasional gleam of gold on the ceiling, but for once, the ceiling painted with the Virgin’s stars failed to comfort him. He kept imagining Marin helpless in the Châtelet, a useless beggar whom no one cared for, the perfect scapegoat. But if Marin had killed Martine Mynette, there had to be two murderers. There was no reason for him to have killed Henri Brion. At least, no reason Charles could think of.

  “Maître du Luc,” Damiot said loudly, “have you heard anything I’ve said?”

  “What?”

  “Do you want to know what I’ve learned about the smuggling scheme or not?”

  “Certainly,” Charles said, pushing his fears away.

  “Here is what I learned from my father this afternoon,” Damiot said, pitching his voice under the beehive sound of talk in the refectory. “I’ve already told our rector. So far as my father has been able to find out, there were only three other investors in the smuggling scheme besides Monsieur Bizeul the goldsmith and his friend Cantel.”

  “Yes, Monsieur La Reynie already told me as much.”

  “Well, I don’t think he’s told you this! Cantel, according to his furious wife, left Paris—probably with his mistress—just before midnight on that same Thursday when Monsieur Henri Brion was last seen. Madame Cantel says he’s fled his creditors, and my father thinks the same. Madame Cantel also told my father that it was she who found Henri Brion in a courtyard outbuilding, just before light on Friday morning, and let him out. So,” Damiot finished brightly, “there were only five investors in all. Monsieur Brion kept the number small, you see, so that each could make more money out of the scheme. And very sound policy that is, remember that.”

  “Oh, I will,” Charles said gravely. Beyond teasing his friend, he felt grave in truth. Madame Cantel had been much more forthcoming with Monsieur Damiot than with Lieutenant-Général La Reynie. Her evidence—if she was telling the truth—put Cantel out of the running as Henri Brion’s killer. Which would only turn La Reynie’s attention more determinedly to Gilles Brion.

  The rector rose from his chair as the signal for the final grace, and all talk stopped. Then, as the Jesuits at the faculty table were filing out, the rector drew Charles aside.

  “Have you learned anything more today?” Le Picart asked, nodding at Damiot to keep going.

  Charles shook his head. He was not ready to tell anyone of his growing suspicion of Marin. “Nothing, mon père. Père Damiot has just told me what his father learned about the senior Brion’s investors, but he said that he has told you, as well.”

  “Yes, he came to me before supper. So nothing has changed. We have nothing more to use to quiet the rumors. Or the song.” His eyes ranged over the students leaving the refectory in the required silence. “If nothing has changed by Monday, I am going to order a general day of prayer and fasting.” Humor sparkled briefly in his eyes. “Though, given our supper, perhaps that would not be such an unwelcome order. Meanwhile, I must tell you that you have an extra duty tomorrow after the rising bell and prayers. I began this morning having all our entrances guarded as the day students come and go, to prevent any repeat of Thursday morning’s brawl. You will take your turn tomorrow morning at the stable gate, as the younger boys come in by the lane.” The rector sighed and stifled a yawn. “Let us leave this day behind and hope for better tomorrow.”

  Dismissed, Charles crossed the court to the main building’s back door, then went through the salon and up the front staircase to his chambers. He was suddenly so tired he could have sat down on the stairs and slept there. When he reached his sleeping chamber, he felt his way to his candle, took it to the passage lantern and lit it, and carried it back to his room. Hugging his cloak tightly around his body—there was still only canvas in his window frame—he looked at the candlelight dancing on the little black stone Pietà in its wall niche. Though his mother had sent it as his New Year’s present, he would keep it only briefly, and then it would be placed where everyone could see it. At first, he hadn’t much liked the carving’s dark stone. But the longer he lived with it, the more its color moved him, as though the mourning Virgin and her Son’s tortured body were dark with all the world’s death and suffering since Adam.

  Charles set his candle firmly in its holder beside the prie-dieu and knelt. Outside, bells began to ring, from the Carmelites, the Visitandines, the Jacobins, St. Germain des Pres, Port Royal, Cluny, calling the devout to end the day with prayer. When he finished his prayers, he stayed where he was—partly because he was almost too tired to get up, but also because his mind was still on the dark Pietà. In contrast, the little painting of the Virgin and Child hanging in front of his prie-dieu was full of light and soft, clear colors. The Virgin was young and round cheeked; the plump child was squirming and laughing. Well, that’s how beginnings are, Charles thought. That’s how youth is.r />
  He pushed himself to his feet and took the Pietà from its niche. He brought it to the prie-dieu and knelt again, balancing the carving on the wooden ledge. His eyes went from the painting to the little statue, from the statue to the painting. Beginning and ending, the brightness of birth and the darkness of death. But that was hardly profound. Dead children had lain on their weeping mother’s breasts since the Creation. Nonetheless, he found himself staring hungrily at the way the baby in the painting and the dead man of the statue both nestled against Mary’s heart. Then, for an instant, he saw it, saw what was arcing back and forth between the painting and the statue like lightning. Truth, he thought, at first. No, not truth, only love. He shook his head. “Only” love? Whatever he glimpsed was too bright to look at. And when it was gone, he was still unable to find words for what it had been.

  All the weight of his body came suddenly back to him, and he stumbled as he got up from his knees and put the black statue back in its place. His eyes closing with exhaustion, he blew out the candle, clumsily kicked off his shoes, and got into bed, still wearing his cassock for warmth, and was asleep before he got his blankets drawn up.

  He dreamed of a nun. He seemed to be standing in her cell, watching her as she slept. With a sigh, she turned over and was suddenly resting her head on a luminous figure he couldn’t quite see—a man’s figure, he thought uncomfortably. Then, in the way of dreams, her black habit became the black of the little Pietà, and then the nun was gone and the empty bed was glowing like a star. Slowly, inevitably, the light took the form of Pernelle’s naked body, shining through her veil of black hair, and the bed she lay in was his. She opened her arms to him. With a great cry, he sank onto the bed, naked now himself, holding her warmth and fragrance, stroking her silken flesh, resting his head on her breast, listening to the beating of her heart. Then the chamber was full of people. A nun held out the Sacred Heart of Jesus to him, with cherubs fluttering around it like the natural history cabinet’s butterflies restored to life. Martine Mynette took the nun’s place, holding out her wounded heart and weeping. Then Charles, alone in his bed, was holding his own heart in his hands and seeing that it was full of tiny black swords buried to the hilt in his living flesh.