by Judith Rock
“La Couche,” he barked at the boy, who told the driver, and they were off.
La Reynie crossed his arms on his chest and stared steadfastly out the window. That suited Charles, who settled back on the red cushioned seat, looking eagerly out his own window. He was so rarely in a carriage that the experience was still new. Beyond the window, people, horses, carriages, carts, mules, shops, dogs, courtyard gates flashed past in a flood of color. Watching the wheels throw waves of muddy snow and water against stone walls and swearing pedestrians, Charles realized that the day was steadily warming. Snow dripped from eaves and gargoyles, and people even leaned on the sills of open windows, airing their rooms. On the Petit Pont, a few well-wrapped women sat in west-facing doorways, their faces lifted to shafts of sunlight and long-absent warmth.
On the Île de la Cité, the carriage wound its way to the rue Neuve Notre Dame and stopped in front of the gate to the long, stone-built Couche. La Reynie and Charles got out, still in silence, and La Reynie rang the bell. Charles waited silently behind him. A young, bright-eyed Sister of Charity hurried across the court and let them in.
“Our thanks, ma soeur,” La Reynie said, lifting his hat, as Charles bowed. “We are seeking one of your sisters.” He gestured to Charles to take over the asking.
“She is called Mariana,” Charles said.
“Oh, you are in luck, come with me.” The girl led them across the muddy court. “Soeur Mariana has been ill, but she is better now, and back with us.” She ushered them through the door and into the anteroom. “Will you wait one little moment, please? I will see if she is busy.” With another curtsy, she hurried away.
The dark, rambling old house smelled of babies. Dirty swaddling, sour milk, and strong soap scented air already rank with the closed-in smells of winter, while wailing cries, hurrying feet on stone floors, and sharply urgent commands smote their ears. The young nun returned, as serene as though they were all in a summer garden.
“Soeur Mariana will see you. Come.”
She took them through the anteroom and along a dark, low-beamed passage to a small plaster-walled room where an elderly nun sat singing under her breath as she fed an eagerly sucking newborn with a rag soaked in milk. It was a common way of feeding babies, especially when there were several to feed at once. Wet nurses were sometimes accused of letting babies die, because the ones who got only the rag and not the breast often starved to death. Watching, Charles hoped this child—and the half dozen others in the cradles ranged around the room—would soon go to wet nurses of their own.
“Ma soeur,” La Reynie said, “I have questions to ask you, if you will be so kind.”
The old woman’s reedy singing stopped and she peered at him, blinking shortsightedly. Her aquiline nose was like a blade, and her starched white headdress stood away from her dark face in wide quivering wings.
“And who are you?”
“I am Nicolas de La Reynie, ma soeur, head of the Paris police. And this is Maître Charles du Luc, from the college of Louis le Grand.”
Her black eyes flicked from La Reynie to Charles, and she pulled the rag from the infant’s mouth, dipped it in the basin of milk on the table at her elbow, and wrung it out a little. “What do you want?” She gave the baby the rag tit again and resumed her singing.
La Reynie frowned impatiently. “Soeur Mariana, I beg the favor of your attention.”
“You see me here, speak,” the old woman said, and kept singing.
La Reynie shook his head in exasperation and looked at Charles.
Charles knelt beside her. “Ma soeur, did you have a child in your care, perhaps as many as twenty years ago, a boy called Tito? Also perhaps called Jean?”
“Tito?” She drew in a quick breath and looked up, seeming to see La Reynie and Charles for the first time. “My Tito? Where is he?”
Charles said softly, “When did you last see Tito?”
“Thirteen years ago. Only once. Soon after he went to be a servant, I was sent to see how he did. He was eight years old then.” She sighed. “I missed him sorely. But it was best for him; it was a place and a way into the world.” The nun stared into the distance, her pale lips moving in prayer or memory, Charles couldn’t tell. The child in her lap had sucked the rag dry and began to wail before she sighed and said, “Thirteen years ago he went to Madame Anne Mynette. Such a long time.”
“Madame Anne Mynette?” Charles said mildly.
“So she called herself four years before, when she came looking for her own child. I doubted then she had a right to the title,” the nun said acidly. “Women who come here to retrieve their babies—not that many ever come—hardly ever have a right to it.”
La Reynie raised an eyebrow at Charles. “It seems a long time for you to remember the woman’s name,” he said skeptically, watching her soak the rag again and quiet the baby.
“Oh, no, when she came in search of a little servant, I remembered her. Why would I not, when I’d already given her one of our babies?”
Charles frowned in confusion. “But you just said that when she came earlier, it was to get her own child.”
“Her own child had died.”
“Died? But—”
Soeur Mariana bridled. “I remember quite well how it was. A wet nurse left the child, because her own children had fallen ill, and she feared the infant would too. The infant she brought to us did sicken, and when ‘Madame’ Mynette came, it had just died. But I saw a chance for another child.” She made a derisive little sound. “Babies look much the same when they’re very young. And ‘Madame’ Mynette had told me that she hadn’t seen her child for some weeks. So I found a baby girl about the same age and with the same color eyes, though lighter hair. I wrapped her in a clean blanket, but then I was afraid the Mynette woman would see the difference and I would be in grave trouble. But God used little Tito to show me what to do. Tito was with me that day—I often kept him with me, though he lived in the older children’s house by then. Well, that day he was playing with the little trinket he had, a heart on an old ribbon. He’d always had it. It was around his neck when he was found in Notre Dame.” The nun’s face softened and she shook her head sadly. “His mother no doubt put it on him when she left him in the stone cradle that’s been there time out of mind for leaving babies in. So I—”
“Wait, ma soeur! Tito’s mother? But Martine Mynette told her friend that Mademoiselle Anne Mynette had put it on her when she was a baby!”
“Nothing of the kind.” Soeur Mariana gave Charles a shrewd look. “The Mynette woman was desperate with guilt when she came searching for her infant. Guilt for leaving her with the wet nurse, I suppose. Well, she deserved guilt, if a woman has a child, she should feed it with the breasts God gave her. If she told the girl that she’d given her the heart, it was no doubt to make herself seem a better mother.”
Charles’s head was spinning. “Tito’s mother,” he murmured, trying to make sense out of what he was hearing. “So the baby Mademoiselle Anne Mynette took home was a foundling like Tito himself.”
“Yes. Left on the Pont Neuf, if I remember rightly. Du Pont—from the bridge—we would have given her for a surname.”
Charles’s heart contracted as he tried to imagine young, desperate mothers, newborn children in their arms, watching to see that they were unobserved, putting their babies down somewhere that seemed safe. And walking away.
“The mothers often leave some trinket,” the nun said. “They think they’ll come and claim the baby, but they don’t. They’re whores, most of them.”
“So you are saying, ma soeur, that you took Tito’s necklace and put it on the baby who became Martine Mynette.”
“I thought the Mynette woman would be more likely to accept the child as hers, if I said I’d put the little heart on her baby when the wet nurse left her, to be sure she wasn’t mixed with the others and lost.” Soeur Mariana smiled complacently. “‘Madame’ Mynette made us a very large gift for that.” She rose and laid the sucking child in one of th
e beds, ignoring its cries when she pulled the rag from its mouth. Then she went to a different bed and busied herself with another infant.
Charles looked at La Reynie. The lieutenant-général looked like he was holding himself in the chair and in the room by main force.
Charles said, “What did Tito do, ma soeur? When you took his necklace?”
“Do?” Soeur Mariana sat down with the new child and soaked the rag again. “Oh, he cried. He even tried to kick me, but I beat him and he said he was sorry. It’s the only way with them.” She frowned, sucking her yellowed teeth. “I thought he would forget, as children do, but when I went to check on him after he was in the Mynette household, ‘Madame’ Mynette said she was going to send him back if he didn’t stop trying to steal her adopted daughter’s necklace. So I talked sharply to him and told him that if he didn’t stop, she would throw him out in the street and no one would take care of him. Tito was bright enough, he took to heart what I said, and she kept him.”
Charles swallowed hard. “Yes, she kept him.”
“Is he there still, maître?”
“No. Anne Mynette is dead,” Charles said. “And so is the little girl you gave her.”
Soeur Mariana put the rag tit into the new baby’s mouth and stared beyond Charles and La Reynie, as though into the past, still saying nothing. Finally, with a faint sigh, she said, “Tito is dead, too, isn’t he?”
Charles hesitated. “Yes,” he said, and left it at that, because it seemed the kindest thing to do. “I am sorry.”
“Before I joined the Sisters of Charity, I was a wife,” the nun said, murmuring so that Charles had to lean closer to hear her. “We left Spain and came here. I had two children. They died, and my husband, also. So I became a nun. Little Tito came back to us from his wet nurse, and I had the charge of him at the house for the older children. But sometimes when I came here to work for a day, I brought him with me. He was like my son who died. Very like.” Her voice trailed into silence.
“Was your son’s name Tito?”
She shook her head. “They called my little foundling Jean Baptiste, because he was found on St. Jean Baptiste’s day. In Spanish that is Juan Bautisto, and I called him that. But he couldn’t say it, he could only say Tito, so that became what everyone called him.”
Charles nodded, wondering if Tito had called himself Jean after he left the Mynette house because he wanted to be a man, called by a man’s name, and not just little foundling Tito.
The nun was looking down at the child in her lap. “I only wanted to give another child a chance at life. So many die before we can even find them wet nurses.”
“The baby you put Tito’s necklace on had time to grow up, ma soeur. With a mother who loved her as her natural daughter.”
She gave Charles a bleak smile. “That is something, then.”
A sound from La Reynie made Charles turn to see him emptying his purse onto the table beside the basin of milk. “For the children,” he said through stiff lips, and left the room.
Hurriedly, Charles thanked the nun and gave her the last of the coins from Le Picart’s purse, made the sign of the cross over the babies, and caught up with La Reynie in the courtyard. When they reached the carriage, La Reynie dismissed it.
“Walk with me,” he said.
Instead of turning toward the Right Bank and the Châtelet, the lieutenant-général walked toward the towers of Notre Dame at the tip of the island. Charles kept pace with him, watching him covertly and thinking about what the nun had told them. In the open square below the cathedral’s west face, La Reynie stopped and looked up, past rank upon rank of stone saints wet with snowmelt, past the climbing towers, up at the brilliant blue sky.
“Sometimes,” he said, staring at the soaring stones, “when I cannot face this city or myself any longer, I come here. I tell myself that no matter what happens, no matter the evil and suffering, day and night into day and night, the saints still stand there. So God must still be there, too. Still somewhere.”
Too astonished to speak, Charles stood as motionless as the carvings, until the lieutenant-général began to walk again. They went around the side of the cathedral, along its line of buttresses.
“You want to know about Reine,” La Reynie said abruptly. “Because you saved her life, I will tell you. She was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. But her face and her body were the least of her beauty. Oh, not that I didn’t appreciate them, I did, and fully.” He glanced sideways at Charles. “You have known women, you will understand that. Though perhaps not the rest of it. I—I met Reine soon after coming to Paris and this impossible job. I think you know what she was then. A gloriously beautiful, royally expensive courtesan. I spent more and more time with her, time I didn’t have, money I didn’t have, but she kept me from losing my sanity. I would have married her, even with all I knew about her. But, of course, I could not, I was already married to my second wife. And Reine would not have had me, anyway. And why?” He laughed sadly. “Because she loved Marin. The beggar. Then, a few years later, when I was seeing her rarely, she was in great danger. I cannot tell you more than that, only that I was able to help her. And she has often helped me. For more than twenty years now, my heart has been more than half in her keeping.”
They had reached the eastern tip of the île and turned to look at the cathedral again.
“And what of your own love?” La Reynie said roughly. “So far away in Geneva.”
Charles caught his breath. La Reynie knew Pernelle, but this was the first time he had ever called her Charles’s “love.”
“As you say, she is in Geneva. I am here. That will not change.”
“I see. And have you accepted your penance and done it?”
“Yes.” Charles was shaken by how good it was to speak about her. “I did willing penance.” He fell quiet, looking up at Notre Dame’s great rose window. “I renewed my vows,” he said finally. “God helping me, I will keep them.” He caught La Reynie’s glance and held it. “I did not do penance for loving.”
“Is that an overfine Jesuit distinction?”
“I hope not.”
Charles wanted to say something more, something to ease La Reynie’s unhappiness, but before he found anything to say, the lieutenant-général faced him and held out his hand. Surprised, Charles took it. La Reynie nodded slightly, disengaged himself, and walked rapidly away.
Chapter 28
ST. SIMEON THE PILLAR SITTER’S DAY, SUNDAY, JANUARY 5
The early afternoon’s blanket of clouds added to the mourning feeling of the Brion house, whose windows were still covered in black. To Charles’s surprise, the manservant who answered his knock was wearing black, too, new breeches and a coat whose sleeves covered his wrists. The Sunday Mass and dinner—chicken stew today, to everyone’s relief—were over, and Charles was on his way to the church of St. Louis. This stop was unauthorized, but he could not resist the chance to see how the Brions were faring, now that Gilles had been released from the Châtelet.
But when the servant showed him into the dark salon, he found only Monsieur Callot, Mademoiselle Brion, and Monsieur Morel. Callot smiled at Charles as he got to his feet, and so did Morel. But Isabel’s face was unaccountably anxious as she made her reverence.
Charles bowed his greeting. “I came to congratulate you,” he said, “that Monsieur Gilles Brion is with you again—at least, I trust he is?”
“Yes—that is, we’ve seen him.” Isabel’s tired face lit with a brief smile. “I know that it is you we have to thank for his freedom, maître. Though how we can ever thank you enough, I cannot imagine.”
“Yes, you have given us more than you know,” Morel said meaningly, and took Isabel’s hand in his.
“As you see, though,” Monsieur Callot said, “Gilles is not here.” The words were sour as a lemon. “He deigned to give us a few minutes and then he went to his Capuchins. I have given him my permission, as the new head of the family.” The sourness in his voice gave way to regret. “The b
est thing for him, perhaps. Though why a man would want to do it, I cannot fathom. I will say, though, that his narrow escape seems to have stiffened his spine a little. Ah, well, I wish the Capuchins joy of him.” He backed closer to the small fire, whose light flickered over the black drapery at the windows. “And what of the real killer, Maître du Luc?”
“The Mynettes’ former servant Tito—whose real name was Jean Baptiste—admitted that he’d killed them both, for his own tangled reasons. He was very ill and not altogether right in his wits. He died early this morning. Not alone, I was with him.” Charles sighed, remembering the sudden silence when Jean’s tortured breathing finally stilled, remembering Reine’s gentle closing of the boy’s eyes. “There will be no public execution.”
Isabel said softly, “There have been enough deaths. I am glad there will be no public show of his.” They were all quiet for a moment, and then she said, “Maître du Luc, we have something to show you.” Biting her lip, she turned and took folded papers from a small table. “We found these hidden in my father’s bedchamber yesterday. You must read them.”
She held them out. Charles took them and realized immediately what the larger paper must be, with its seals and ribbons. He unfolded it. At the bottom of the page were Mademoiselle Anne Mynette’s signature and Henri Brion’s, as well as the signatures of witnesses, all to make certain that Martine Mynette would one day have the Mynette patrimoine. Slowly, he refolded the donation entre vifs.
“You found this hidden?”
Isabel nodded, red with shame. “Beneath his mattress. Read the letter, maître, and you will know why. It came the day after he died. An Ursuline returning from their New France mission brought it. But I did not have the heart to open it then. I read it yesterday and soon after, we found the donation. And . . .”