The Rhetoric of Death

by Judith Rock

“When I got there, Antoine was lying on his back. Is that how he fell?”

  “Yes, backward. I tell you, maître, my heart warns me that we have not seen the last of that man. If only Antoine were going home—anyone would think his parents would want him there at such a time!”

  “His stepmother feels that he will be better off here at school than moping at home.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Stepmother, is she? Ah. I see. Poor little cabbage. So how do you mean to find that man, maître?”

  But before Charles could decide what to say, peals of laughter came from the street passage.

  “Ah, mon Dieu, what is she doing now?” Mme LeClerc picked up her skirts and hurried ahead of him.

  Marie-Ange was standing beside the postern door and Frère Martin, the porter, was rocking with laughter on his stool. When he saw Mme LeClerc, he heaved himself up, greeted her as an old friend, and nodded to Charles.

  “Do you know what this child said, maître? I asked her if she knew her catechism, and she said she could tell me about Adam and Eve and the garden. So I said, ‘Yes, do, ma petite.’ And she said, ‘Well, who is in the garden, mon frère?’ ” The brother shook with laughter. “ ‘ In the garden,’ she said, ‘are un pomme, deux poires, et beaucoup des pepins!’ One apple, two pears, and a lot of seeds! Seeds of sin, maître, get it? A doctor of the church, this one!”

  Charles smiled politely at the old joke. Poire meant pear, but it also meant fool. Mme LeClerc had gone peony red. Marie-Ange was grinning at her own cleverness and avoiding her mother’s eyes.

  “I will kill Roger for telling her that,” Mme LeClerc muttered as she took her daughter none too gently by the hand. “Au revoir, maître. Mon frère.”

  Still laughing, the brother opened the postern, and Mme LeClerc hurried Marie-Ange away. Charles went back to the Cour d’honneur, squinting in the harsh light and wondering how long the funeral feast would last. A musical peal of laughter made him catch his breath and look up. In a corner beyond the senior refectory, the usually dour lay brother Frère Fabre stood talking with a woman in plain mourning. Her back was to Charles and her head and shoulders were draped in a voluminous black scarf, but her laugh was as bright and full of life as the sunshine. So like Pernelle’s laughter that he had to stop himself running across the gravel to see her face. Please God, he prayed, forcing himself to keep his measured pace, let Pernelle have a good life now, a life with laughter in it.

  Without letting himself look more closely at the woman, he went into the refectory and scanned the crowd to be sure his students were still there and still gowned. When he saw them, he lifted a hand in greeting and went to the dais, where the food and drink were laid out. To his surprise, Fabre was already there as well.

  “I didn’t expect to see you back inside so soon,” Charles said, as Fabre filled his plate and poured the watered wine. “I saw you in the court just now.”

  The young brother flushed so red that his freckles seemed to melt together. “It was nothing,” he said hurriedly. “Only talk. I was hardly gone at all.”

  “Softly, mon frère, I am not accusing you of anything.”

  The boy turned away to refill the pitcher. “She’s my sister.”

  Watching him curiously, Charles set his plate on the edge of the table and sipped his wine. He liked this boy, in spite of his prickliness. Or maybe even because of it. “How did you become a lay brother, mon frère? I am always interested in how men come to the Society.”

  Fabre gave him a wary glance. “My father is a tanner out by the Bièvre River.” He shuddered. “A horrible, stinking trade. I begged our parish priest for schooling.” Fabre rubbed at the water beaded on the pitcher. “He taught me to read a little and got me in here as a scholarship student. With a scholarship, you get to live in the college with the pensionnaires. Crowded together in a dortoir, but it’s a higher place than being just a day boy.” His face clouded. “But my reading never got better.”

  “But why? You obviously have more than enough wit for it.”

  Fabre ducked his head and smiled fleetingly at the compliment. Then he shrugged. “The letters won’t stay still for me. They get backward on the page and I can’t make out the words. Père Dainville thought I was possessed. He exorcised me, but I still couldn’t read much. They said I had to leave, but Père Guise made them keep me as a lay brother.”

  “Père Guise?” Charles was too startled to cover his surprise.

  Fabre turned away and busied himself rearranging a plate of tarts. “He said I would be a good servant.”

  “And are you content?”

  “I am not a tanner.” Fabre glanced at Charles, his eyes hard, and started filling plates for the group of boys approaching the table.

  Charles joined his students. When a brother came to say that the feast was ending, they drained their glasses, trudged back into the sweltering courtyard, and positioned themselves on the temple steps. After another interminable wait, the guests appeared, walking in slow procession. M. and Mme Douté came first, escorted by Père Le Picart and Père Jouvancy. Mme Douté, a head shorter than her none-too-tall husband, walked slowly, her wide black brocade skirts swaying and her coming child apparent even under her long mourning veil. Behind them, red-eyed and tear-streaked, Antoine and his cousin Jacques Douté walked hand in hand. Père Guise came next with a veiled woman Charles had heard was Mme Douté’s sister. Père Montville and a thin, gray-haired man representing the Prince of Condé’s household followed. To Charles’s surprise, the police chief Lieutenant-Général Nicolas de La Reynie, whom he had seen leaving the rector’s office the day he found Philippe’s body, was also in the line, companioned by a short round man Charles didn’t know. The rest of the company, twenty or so relatives and friends, both clerics and lay, stretched behind them.

  When the Doutés reached the Temple of Rhetoric, Le Picart and Jouvancy bowed and stepped back to allow them to enter the temple first. Moving at Mme Douté’s slow pace, Charles ushered the bereaved couple up the steps. As he guided them through the temple, gently pointing out the compliments paid to Philippe, M. Douté wept openly. With barely a glance at each exhibit, his wife pulled on his arm to hurry him. Halfway through, she stopped and pushed her veil back. She had large brown eyes and fair hair, and would have been pretty had she not looked so fretful.

  “I am hot, husband,” she said. “And my back hurts me.”

  “Where is your maid?” M. Douté took a wet handkerchief from his sleeve and wiped his eyes. “Do not grudge me this last glimpse of my son, Lisette.”

  She reddened and her small pouting mouth opened, but the fat man who had walked with La Reynie appeared at the bottom of the steps that surrounded the open-sided temple, looking like a dark moon in his funeral black.

  “Allow me, my dear Mme Douté,” he purred. “Leave your poor husband to mourn.” He mounted the steps, bowed to M. Douté, and with a severe look at Charles, as though Mme Douté’s discomfort were his fault, led her out of the temple.

  When M. Douté had thoroughly wrung Charles’s heart by weeping over each tribute to Philippe, Charles murmured condolences and turned him over to the rector. For the next half hour or so, Charles kept watch over the student guides and answered questions about the exhibits, especially about the large drawing of Philippe as a fallen Hercules, shown lying gracefully on his cloak in a cypress grove, costumed as he would have been in the ballet. Achilles, Ulysses, Virgil, Homer, Hannibal, Julius Caesar, Apollo, Terpsichore, and Minerva stood weeping over him and a cohort of winged cherubs grasped the corners of his cloak, ready to carry him to heaven, where the Virgin Mary held out her arms to him from a cloud.

  When everyone had made their way through the allegories, Charles rounded up his students, thanked them, and dismissed them to their chambers and the comfort of shedding their gowns. He longed to go to his own chamber and do likewise, but too many noble mourners still lingered in slices of shade along the western wall of the courtyard, murmuring and sipping from small glasses of swee
t wine that the lay brothers were offering. M. and Mme Douté had already left on the sad journey back to Chantilly with Philippe’s coffin.

  Charles circulated briefly and then paused in the shade with a glass, watching men reach surreptitiously under their hats to lift their wigs and cool their sweating heads. The few women present stood whispering together, their black fans beating the air like the wings of funereal hummingbirds. Two of them drew apart and the shift of their stiff skirts and tall headdresses revealed Guise, deep in talk with the police chief and the fat man who had escorted Mme Douté from the temple. As though he felt Charles’s eyes on him, Guise glanced up. He said something to his companions, who both looked at Charles. Not wanting an encounter with any of them, Charles moved toward a group of departing guests to say his formal farewell. But the police chief and the fat man cut off his escape.

  “Maître Charles du Luc?” The westering sun scattered gold over the black plumes in Lieutenant-Général La Reynie’s hat as he stopped in front of Charles.

  “Yes, monsieur,” Charles said. “May I help you?”

  “I am Nicolas de La Reynie, Lieutenant-Général of Police.” He turned to his companion. “Monsieur de Louvois, may I present Maître Charles du Luc?”

  The little hairs stood up on the back of Charles’s neck and he nearly lost his balance as he bowed. Michel de Louvois was in charge of the king’s dragoons, the most powerful man in the kingdom after the king. And Charles had heard, since his first sighting of La Reynie, that the police chief was probably the third.

  “You are new here, I understand,” La Reynie said conversationally. “Newly come from the south. Nîmes, I believe?”

  “Carpentras, monsieur.” The words came out in a croak and Charles drank quickly to wet his throat, studying La Reynie over the edge of his glass. “You are searching for Philippe’s killer, monsieur?” he said, hoping to turn the talk away from himself.

  La Reynie inclined his head. “A shame that you arrived just in time for this terrible tragedy,” he said, studying Charles in return.

  “I did not know Philippe, monsieur, but I am told he was an honor to the college in every way.”

  “Did not know him,” Louvois said flatly.

  “No, monsieur, I regret that I did not.”

  “But he knew you.” The war minister’s little black eyes glittered with malice.

  “Knew me? No, Monsieur Louvois. We met for the first time the afternoon he disappeared.”

  “Perhaps he knew of you, then,” La Reynie put in helpfully.

  In spite of the heat, a chill was creeping down Charles’s back. “I very much doubt it, messieurs. I have no fame.”

  “Oh, I think you are too modest,” La Reynie murmured.

  Louvois said curtly, “Père Guise says that you were the last to see poor Philippe.”

  “His killer was the last to see him, monsieur. When he disappeared from the classroom, I was sent to find him. I chased someone wearing a yellow shirt, thinking he was Philippe.”

  Louvois’s lip curled. “Though no one else saw this convenient phantom.”

  “He was no phantom, monsieur. And we would only know that no one else saw him if we could question everyone along the route he took. Which is, of course, impossible.”

  Louvois’s eyes narrowed and he stepped closer. La Reynie stepped back, planted his silver-headed walking stick in front of him, and folded his hands over it, watching Charles.

  “Père Guise says you were gone too long when you went to find Philippe.” Louvois was breathing wine up into Charles’s face now. “Far longer than necessary.”

  “I was gone a little more than twenty minutes. Which Père Guise knows. But perhaps he runs faster than I do.”

  “Do you think this is a jesting matter?” Louvois hissed. “We know nothing about you. Except that you come from the south. And hold heretical opinions.”

  A wave of pure fury at Guise broke over Charles. “I beg your pardon, Monsieur Louvois. I am not aware that believing in the love of God is heretical. May I suggest, messieurs, that you take your questions back to Père Guise? Unlike me, he knew Philippe well. Whatever led to the boy’s disappearance and death, Père Guise is more likely to understand it than I.”

  Charles bowed and started to walk away, but Louvois grabbed his arm and jerked him sharply back. Charles winced as pain shot through his old injury, and his glass slipped from his hand and shattered on the gravel. He wrenched himself free and what might have happened next fortunately did not, because Antoine burst from nowhere, shoved Louvois aside, and wrapped his arms around Charles’s waist, sobbing his heart out.

  Chapter 13

  What is it, mon brave?” Astonished, Charles swung Antoine away from the war minister’s attempt to grab him and bent over the boy. “What has happened?”

  Antoine’s eyes darted sideways at Louvois, who was berating him for his intrusion. Charles saw that, in spite of the sobs, the child’s dark eyes were as dry as the gravel.

  “They’ve gone,” Antoine choked, hiding his face on Charles’s cassock and pulling him toward the adjoining courtyard so urgently that Charles nearly lost his footing. “Philippe is gone!”

  “Forgive me, messieurs,” Charles said over his shoulder, “but you see that I must attend to this grieving child.”

  He walked Antoine across the Cour d’honneur toward the north courtyard as fast as the boy’s short legs could go. When they reached the dividing archway, Charles looked back. La Reynie had a hand on Louvois’s arm, obviously restraining him, and Louvois was arguing furiously. But La Reynie was thoughtfully watching Charles.

  When they were well into the north court, Antoine pulled away. “That showed them!” he said, looking up defiantly.

  “Yes,” Charles said, caught between laughter and bewilderment. “I think it did. My very sincere thanks, M. Douté. But why such a valiant rescue? We’ve hardly even met. Except when you—ah—sleepwalked, of course.”

  “And you knew I wasn’t, but you didn’t tell on me. And I hate old Louvois, he always tells on me and bullies me just like he was bullying you!”

  “How do you know him, mon petit?”

  Antoine scowled. “He comes to our house. And at my stepmother’s birthday fête I asked him and Père Guise something and they said I was being rude and telling lies, and my father made me apologize and sent me to bed. And I missed the cakes!”

  Charles made a sympathetic face and glanced at the group of boys and tutors talking and reading under a tree on the other side of the court. They seemed to be paying no attention to Antoine or to him. Charles said quietly, “Antoine, why were you in Père Guise’s study that night?”

  The boy’s face closed like a shutter. “I can’t tell you. It’s a secret.” Antoine looked around uneasily, his bravado suddenly gone. “Maître—could we speak in my chamber? It’s just there.” He pointed to the tall stone house on the east side of the court, a venerable survivor of one of the older colleges Louis le Grand had swallowed up, Charles guessed. He hesitated, trying to think of some other place to talk, since teachers were not supposed to go to students’ chambers. But this was his chance to ask about the note Frère Brunet had mentioned.

  “Is your tutor in your chamber?” Every well-born student had a private tutor—often a Jesuit scholastic like Charles—who supervised him, communicated his progress, or lack of it, to his parents, and oversaw the boy’s daily life.

  Antoine shrugged. “I don’t know where he is.”

  “All right, then.” It was the perfect excuse, since someone needed to keep an eye on the child until the errant tutor returned.

  Antoine led him inside and up a staircase. The building was surprisingly quiet; classes had been suspended because of the funeral and some students had gone out with their families.

  Though more lowly boarders shared small dormitories, six or eight to a room, Antoine’s large chamber was private, as Philippe’s no doubt had been. Its casement stood open and a tall lime tree reached companionably toward
the stone sill. The bed looked deep and soft under its red wool coverlet, and there was a sturdy oak table, two chairs upholstered and fringed in rich brown, a flat-topped chest with a decorated lock, and a large carved cupboard. A brazier for heat in cold weather stood in a corner, and a small but good painting of the young John the Baptist playing with the infant Jesus hung at the foot of the bed. The tutor’s more austere bed stood in a small alcove between the chamber and a half-open door revealing a study with several desks. Politely gesturing Charles to a chair, Antoine sat down on his bed. Charles turned the chair toward the bed and opened his mouth to ask about the note, but Antoine forestalled him.

  “I wanted to go with them.” The boy smoothed the bed’s thick cover as though comforting an animal. “With my father. With Philippe.” He looked up, his eyes suddenly blazing, and Charles had an uncanny sense of the older brother looking out of Antoine’s black, long-lashed eyes. “My father wanted me to, but she said I couldn’t and Père Guise made my father do what she wanted. Did you know Père Guise is my godfather? I wish he wasn’t. My father argued, but she started crying about her baby and he gave in. He always gives in. I hate her! She said—” His eyes filled with tears, real tears this time. “She said I had to stay here and pray for Philippe, because he’s probably in hell. Is he, maître?”

  Choking on what he wanted to say about Lisette Douté, Charles took a slow, deep breath. “No, Antoine, he is not,” he said flatly.

  “But he didn’t make his confession before he died.”

  “That was not his fault. God still loves him, just as He loves you.”

  The boy looked up from bunching the cover into small red hills. “But Philippe ran away—that was his fault.”

  Charles stopped himself from saying that Philippe probably hadn’t gone farther than the latrine. “Listen, Antoine. People do not go to hell just for being angry. Or scared.”

  “They don’t?”

  “They don’t.”

  “They don’t.”

  “Then, if God still loves Philippe, why did He let him get killed?”