The Rhetoric of Death

by Judith Rock

  A splash of glowing red on a grocer’s stall stopped him in front of a basket of tomatoes. Tomatoes were common at home, but less so here, it seemed. None had appeared so far on the college table. Charles found himself smiling as he drank in their glowing color, remembering that some people still shunned them as the fruit Eve had given Adam, and what Pernelle had had to say about that. “Well, he didn’t have to eat it, did he?” she would say, her black eyes snapping. “But, of course, women are always blamed when things go wrong for a man.”

  “Oh, look, let’s get some,” the same rich alto voice went on. Charles froze. Could coffee make him hear voices that weren’t there?

  “Never, child!” an older voice hissed. “They’re love apples, they’re poisonous, everyone knows that. It’s a sin to sell them!”

  Very slowly, Charles turned his head. The girl with Pernelle’s voice was pretty. But her hair was only brown, not a cloud of midnight. And when she felt Charles’s stare and turned to smile at him from under her little cherry ribboned parasol, he saw that her eyes were only brown instead of sparkling onyx.

  “Bonjour, mon père,” she said demurely, dimpling at his admiration.

  He sketched a hasty blessing on the air and moved away to gaze fixedly at a length of badly dyed tawny wool on the next stall. Laughing, the girl called a bold good-bye as her chaperone hurried her away. Blind to the wool’s garish color and deaf to the seller’s praise for its quality, Charles was seized with longing for news of Pernelle, if she was well, if she liked Geneva, if David’s family was kind to her. He closed his eyes, prayed for her, and then walked on, earning a muttered curse from the disappointed cloth merchant. And another curse when he reversed direction and passed by the stall again without stopping. He’d been so unnerved by the girl, he’d hardly registered the snowy sugar sparkling on a stall beyond the love apples.

  He chose two large cone-shaped loaves and paid for them with Jouvancy’s coins. As the grocer wrapped them, the tower clock chimed from the old Conciergerie palace. If he kept his mind on business, he still had enough time to look for the street porter with the broken nose. He stowed the sugar in Jouvancy’s leather bag and started down the quay that bordered the market, heading west toward the tip of the island. He soon found the sort of scene he wanted. Heavily wrapped bolts of cloth, rounds of cheese, and boxes smelling of cinnamon were being unloaded from a barge and a small boat, and a dozen or so porters were securing bundles to the tall carrying frames they wore on their backs. Charles walked slowly among them, but none had the nose he was looking for. He reached the quay’s end without finding the man and retraced his steps toward the Petit Pont, still looking, but with no success. As he came to the bridge, the tower clock struck the quarter before ten, sending him at a trot across the river, where he went down the slope and along the left bank, seeing plenty of porters, but never the one he sought. He was below the Quay des Augustins, passing small fishing boats with planks laid so that customers could come from the bank and buy, when he collided with a woman stepping off a plank bridge with a basket of eels. The eels went flying and the woman rained abuse on him as he helped her gather their tangled slipperiness back into the basket. He straightened and nearly upended the basket again as he came face-to-face with the man who was trying to step around him.

  “Monsieur, thank God!” He pulled the startled and protesting porter to the side of the quay. “Please, monsieur, I must talk with you. About the accident you saw on the rue des Poirées, the little boy—”

  “No!” Breathing heavily through his mouth, the porter wrenched his arm away. “Leave me alone!” His long bony face had gone the color of a fish belly. “I told the other one. You’ve no call to hound me!”

  His fingers twisted in the old sign to ward off evil and he tore himself out of Charles’s grip and ran, the empty frame bouncing on his long back. Charles started after him, but someone jerked him back by his cassock and spun him around.

  “Leave him alone, priest!” His captor had a voice like gravel caught in a sieve, and the face that went with the voice was as expressionless as a wall. He was big in every direction and his four confrères were built like the squat, sturdy pillars in a Norman church. The five men closed around Charles.

  “I swear by the Virgin, messieurs, I mean him no harm,” Charles said. “I only want—”

  “Are you deaf?” Gravel Voice said, shaking him. “I said leave off. If we cut away the flapping part of your ears, maybe you’d hear better. But there’s no sport with your kind. No fight.”

  The others laughed and Charles breathed onion, garlic, and the stink of sweat. “No, not now,” he said evenly, “I swore off fighting a long time ago.”

  “What would you know of fighting?”

  “Enough, after two years in the king’s army.”

  “Where?” the shortest man said skeptically.

  “The Spanish Netherlands in ’77, for one place. St. Omer.”

  “You, too?” The short man’s eyes lit with interest and he stepped closer and peered up at Charles. “Me, I was there, too, I carried a pike.”

  “I was a mousquetaire,” Charles said.

  Gravel Voice spat close to Charles’s feet. “Why the skirt, then?”

  “I was wounded. I had a lot of time to think and decided I didn’t like killing people.”

  “Me, I was wounded, too.” The ex-soldier pulled up his patched jacket and showed a jagged scar running the length of his forearm. “But I never thought of being a cleric.”

  “That randy woman of yours would beat you into a pâté if you did,” someone laughed.

  “What do you want with Pierre, then, mon père?” the ex-soldier said.

  “I teach at the college of Louis le Grand, and a few days ago, he saw a little boy from our school ridden down on the rue des Poirées. I just want to hear from him what happened. Only that. He was in no way to blame, he is in no trouble. I would be very grateful and will certainly reward him for telling me what he saw.”

  The man’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Why?”

  “The boy’s father is anxious to know all he can about what happened.”

  Most of the men grunted, understanding that.

  “Would you tell your friend Pierre what I say? And tell him, too”—Charles hesitated, unsure how to put it—“tell him I am not a friend of the other priest who talked to him.”

  “Good enough for me,” the ex-soldier said, ignoring Gravel Voice’s protest. “Come back here first thing tomorrow.” He pointed across the Seine at the Louvre palace. “You sound foreign, there’s your landmark, if you need it. If Pierre wants to talk, he’ll be here.”

  “Thank you, mon camarade. Until tomorrow, then.”

  Slowly, the men stepped back and let Charles through. He spoiled his attempt at a dignified exit by tripping over the bare feet of a fisherman who was sitting against a barrel beside his pole, so sound asleep beneath his hat that he never stirred. Charles was too excited at having found his man to mind the porters’ jibes and laughter.

  On the way back to the college, he barely noticed the raucous street life going on around him. If Pierre had seen a knife in the rider’s hand as he reached toward Antoine, then the accident was indeed no accident. And if the man confirmed that Guise had paid him for silence, then Charles had a weapon against Guise and his cronies, and Guise had an unpleasant amount of explaining to do.

  Charles was reaching for the bell rope beside the college postern when furious female voices reached him from beyond the chapel’s west door. Marie-Ange ran out of the bakery with her mother on her heels.

  “You will never go up there again!” Mme LeClerc shouted. “Never, do you hear me? Do you want to get us turned out? Now be off with you. And come back the moment you’ve finished. Not like yesterday. I know how long delivering bread should take, Marie-Ange.”

  “But, Maman! It wasn’t me that—”

  “Go!”

  Marie-Ange hefted her loaded basket and her mother went back into the shop. Whe
n the little girl was past the chapel, she set the basket down and wiped her wet face on her skirt.

  “My lady Jeanne?” Charles squatted down on his heels in front of her. “What has happened, ma petite? Are the English winning again?”

  Marie-Ange hiccupped indignantly. “I was only trying to help. But grown-ups never think of that, do they, the pigs?”

  Charles considered gravely. “No, sometimes we don’t.”

  “Well, it’s not fair!”

  “I agree. How were you trying to help?”

  “We were just—”

  “Marie-Ange, go! Now!”

  Mme LeClerc was coming toward them, brandishing a bread paddle that could have flattened a horse. With an expressive look at Charles, Marie-Ange picked up her basket and went. Her mother raised the bread paddle to heaven.

  “Some days, maître, she makes me wish I’d been a nun!”

  “Celibacy has its rewards, madame,” Charles said dryly. Though lately, he was finding them hard to remember.

  “Come in here for a little moment, maître, if you please.”

  She retreated into the shop and Charles followed her. The scent of baking wafted from the ovens and he took a deep, hungry breath.

  “Your shop smells so good, madame, a man could eat the air.”

  “A man may have to, if Roger lets that omelette brain of an apprentice burn my brioches.” She bit her lip and her rosy face grew pinched with apology. “Maître, this morning Marie-Ange went up your stairs. I am so sorry! I would never have allowed it, but what could I do, I didn’t know!”

  “What stairs, madame?”

  “There.” She pointed to a low, arched door in the shop’s side wall. “They lead to two rooms above us. In Roger’s father’s day, the family lived up there. But when Roger inherited the bakery, the college took back the rooms. Since then, we live down here and that door has always been locked. I have not seen the key in an eternity. Now Marie-Ange swears she found it open. Mon Dieu, I only hope no one saw her up there!”

  “Calm yourself, madame, if someone had seen her, believe me, you would know by now.”

  “You really think so? Well, that is a relief, but—”

  “Beatrice,” a male voice boomed from the back of the shop. “I need you!”

  Someone else yelped and the voice rumbled angrily. The air was suddenly tinged with the smell of burning.

  “Roger! Ah, Sainte Vierge, Roger, use your nose if you can’t use your ears! He is deaf as a baguette, maître. And I wish I were, the way he snores! I tell you, sometimes—Guy, you cabbage head, save the brioches!” Brandishing the bread paddle, Mme LeClerc clattered away, her wooden sabots loud on the stone floor. “Roger, I have told you and told you—”

  Hoping that Guy and Roger were fast on their feet, Charles went quickly to the little door and opened it. Narrow, deeply worn stone stairs rose into darkness. He hesitated, then pulled the door shut behind him, abruptly cutting off both light and sound, and began to climb. He felt his way up two switch-back flights, to the level of his own rooms as far as he could tell, and found himself facing another low-arched door. No light showed around its edge. He pinned an ear to the door’s planks, heard nothing, and with infinite caution lifted the latch. The door opened soundlessly and then balked, and an eddy of dust made him clap a hand over his nose to stop a sneeze. A length of thick wool hung over the inside of the door. Charles edged it aside enough to see into the room beyond it. He stared at a sliver of a book-littered desk. If he was right about the floor he’d reached, this could well be Guise’s study. And he had found Antoine standing in front of a tapestry. He remembered the boy’s words: “I tried to go and find him, but you found me, instead.” If these stairs led to Guise’s rooms, then Antoine’s words made sense. He must have been trying to use the stairs to get out of the college and look for Philippe.

  Charles quietly retraced his steps. When he reached the bottom of the stairs, he could hear Mme LeClerc’s and Roger’s voices, but when he peered around the door, he saw that the shop was empty and the voices were coming from the bakery workroom. He realized that this door, like the door at the other end of the stairs, made no sound. He ran a finger over the heavy iron hinges and it came away coated with thick grease. He went quickly through the shop to the street door. Its hinges, too, were newly greased. He had no key to try in the lock, but he would bet that it, too, worked silently. He slipped out of the shop unseen, his mind racing. The stairs changed everything.

  Chapter 16

  Thick fog blanketed the city, and though it was the first day of August, summer seemed to have fled in the night. Hunched against the chill, Charles slid on patches of slippery grass as he made his way to the water level on the downriver side of the Petit Pont. The weather was no doubt punishment for the lie that had gotten him out of the college, he thought wryly. But at least he had permission to go alone. A twinge in his jaw made him wonder if his excuse of needing a tooth-drawer was becoming reality and part of the list of penances he was earning. He’d come to the river, that much was true. And he was meeting the porter down toward the Pont Neuf, where Frère Fabre had said there were tooth-drawers’ booths.

  Shouts and grunts were loud in the wet air and the smell of wood was sharp in Charles’s nose as he threaded his way through men unloading logs from a barge tied up at the quay. The ghostly outlines of bales, baskets, crates, boats covered with hooped canvas like wagons, boats with masts, flat-bottomed boats poled from their sterns, appeared and disappeared as he walked. Hoping he’d recognize the place where he’d seen Pierre and the other porters the day before, he peered through the fog’s shifting veils and caught a glimpse of the Louvre’s east end across the river. This must be more or less the right place. He started whistling a marching song he’d learned at the siege of St. Omer. After a few repetitions, a wheezy voice came back out of the fog, singing the melody’s bawdy words.

  “Do they know you know that one?” the ex-soldier said, materializing in front of Charles. “Your abbot and such, I mean.”

  “We don’t have abbots.” Charles laughed. “But you’re right, I don’t sing that song much. I realize I don’t know your name, monsieur,” he added politely.

  “And I’ve forgotten yours, if I ever knew it. Better that way. Come on, I’m taking you to where Pierre lives, he doesn’t want to be seen talking to you.”

  “Where?” Charles didn’t move.

  “Nothing to worry about, I wouldn’t do a fellow soldier wrong. Pierre’s jumpy, is all.”

  They moved off into the fog, which seemed to thicken. Charles matched his stride to the man’s short legs, but looked warily back over his shoulder, wishing he could see more than a foot or two in any direction.

  “Someone after you, too?” His guide cocked an assessing eye up at him. “About this ‘accident?’ ”

  “Why?” Charles noted the way the man said accident. “Is someone after Pierre?”

  “He says so. Following him, he says. But he’s drinking a lot, mind you, so it might all be out of his cup.”

  Charles hoped it was too early in the day for Pierre to be in his cups. They started across the Pont Neuf, turning a little more of Charles’s lie into truth. Unlike the city’s other bridges, this one bore no houses, just small open shop booths built into its half-round niches, with a raised walkway along them. The booths and the vendors’ stalls set up wherever there was room were all doing a brisk business. Fabre had said that on the bridge you could have your dog barbered, hire an umbrella, join the army, buy a mackerel for supper, or a glass eye or wooden leg if a battle or duel turned out badly. Street criers carrying their wares were thick as the fog and Charles glimpsed a wild-eyed man in a tattered scholar’s gown standing on a stool and proclaiming the virtues of ancient Greek comedy to a cluster of laughing students. Fog-blinded carriages hurtled across the bridge, making Charles grateful for the raised walkways. The ex-soldier led him off the bridge, past the clanging Samaritaine water pump that drew drinking water out of the Seine, and t
urned to the left.

  “That’s it,” the ex-soldier said. He pointed at the Louvre’s bulk looming fitfully through the fog and quickened his pace. “Where Pierre lives.”

  Charles stopped abruptly, with an unpleasant vision of yesterday’s Gravel Voice and minions waiting for him to walk into a nicely set trap.

  “What are you playing at?” he said harshly. “The Louvre’s a palace.”

  The man looked over his shoulder with a puzzled expression. “Of course it is. And Pierre lives there. Him and a few hundred more. They won’t eat you. Probably won’t even rob you, not with me there. Come on.” He vanished around a pile of broken stone and wood, thickly grown with weeds. “Watch yourself,” he called back. “The ground’s full of holes.”

  Following the often misunderstood Jesuit teaching that ends must be considered and means appropriately chosen, Charles pulled a long stave of weathered oak from the pile and followed the porter. He found himself in what could have been stage décor for hell. A freshening wind was thinning the fog, revealing pitted and broken ground. His guide led him across hard puddles of spilled mortar, past scattered rotten lumber. The remains of a flat-bottomed cargo boat lay like a skeleton amid the debris. As they neared the long colonnade ahead of them, Charles saw small fires flickering among the rubble and the smells of doubtful cooking assailed his nose. Grimy faces peered sullenly at them through the fog.

  “What is all this?” Charles asked, keeping his voice low.

  “What, never been here? Oh, well, I guess you wouldn’t, would you? See that long part we’re coming to?”

  He pointed to the three-story colonnade that was revealing its full length as the fog blew away. Half of it looked more or less finished, though roofless. The unfinished half was covered with the remains of wooden scaffolding. Neither end of it seemed to be connected to anything.