The Rhetoric of Death

by Judith Rock

  “You,” Charles breathed. He wanted to run, but couldn’t move. Moulin’s crow of laughter slapped him back to Père La Chaise’s terrace, where the man who’d tried to slit his throat had laughed exactly the same way.

  “Had you going, didn’t I, feeling so sorry for me! Philippe’s shirt becomes me, don’t you think?” Moulin had darted between Charles and the edge of the stage and was bouncing happily on the balls of his feet, tossing his knife lightly from hand to hand. “That was fun, making you chase me out of the shit-house and over the wall that day!”

  Moving with the infinite caution terror bestows, Charles took a small sideways step, trying for a clear path around Moulin. “You did Guise’s killing for him. You, not Frère Fabre.” If he kept Moulin talking, the brother might not notice what Charles’s feet were doing.

  “Fabre winces when he crushes fleas,” Moulin scoffed. “Guise couldn’t risk the street porter saying he’d been paid to keep quiet about seeing the knife in my hand, could he? And I couldn’t risk it, either, could I!”

  “How did you know I’d found the porter?” Charles slid his feet another few inches aside.

  “You tripped over me on the quay, you clumsy piece of shit! But you’re wrong about Philippe. I did Philippe for me, not Guise. The little cock saw my box of souvenirs and was going to be the lily-white boy and get me thrown out for thieving. Or womanizing, he couldn’t quite make up his mind which. Insufferable little shit, even mealymouthed Fabre scolded him once for the way he talked to me! Pride goeth before a fall, they say, don’t they? His went.”

  “Souvenirs?” Charles gained another half an inch. “The box Antoine and Marie-Ange found in the stable loft?”

  “The same. Mementoes of my dead sister.”

  “But—surely no one would blame you for keeping those!”

  Moulin chortled. “My very dead sister. And much too dear, most people would say. Oh, no, that killing’s still remembered. I couldn’t risk my treasures being seen, so—exit Philippe. Told him that if he’d meet me by the latrine, I’d explain where I got the things in the box and he could do as he thought best.” He shrugged a shoulder. “You could say my past is even more checkered than the pasts of most noble younger sons. And Guise knew where the bodies were buried. Literally, I’m afraid, and held what he knew over my head. That’s why he gave me a new name, sponsored me as a lay brother, and in turn got himself a humble servant for his little projects. In exchange, I got entertainment, money, and a new identity. Speaking of bodies, you never would have found Philippe’s if the shit collectors I paid to take it away and dump it hadn’t gotten cold feet.” Moulin’s voice turned sullen. “Killing Philippe should have made Guise grateful, since he’d planned to do it anyway, but did it? No, I was just the servant, never anything more, no matter if I’d brought the bastard the Holy Grail!”

  “Why should he have been grateful?” As Charles risked a lightning glance at the stage edge, measuring the distance, he thought he saw shadows moving slowly along the right-hand wall of the courtyard. But he couldn’t be sure in the light and dared not take his eyes from Moulin long enough to look again.

  “Don’t you listen? Guise was planning all along to get rid of the Douté brats, and when Philippe turned up missing, Guise took it as a sign from God. Had me go ahead and try for the other one. But the little snot-nose was too fast and I missed him.” Moulin caressed his knife as though to comfort it. “Then Guise had Lisette try, but Doissin ruined that. I told Guise the poison scheme was trouble. When he listened to me, his projects turned out, but when he didn’t—see where it got him?”

  They looked at Guise’s body. The reek of blood from the priest’s throat hung over the stage. Suddenly, out of the corner of his eye, Charles saw a brief flash of torchlight on metal where he thought he’d seen shadows moving.

  “I’ll tell you about one of his projects, knowing how much you’ll hate it.” Moulin’s eyes gleamed in a windy flare of torchlight and he leaned closer, smiling wolfishly. “Dragonnades! Not the silly English plot. The ones Guise and Louvois have been running for our saintly king. I’ve been their messenger to the very well-paid military couriers who pass orders to provincial officials. Want to know where the next one is? Metz.” Moulin lunged playfully at Charles and pricked the end of the knife through his cassock and shirt. “Don’t worry, however—you won’t grieve when it happens, because you’ll be dead.”

  “Why go on killing?” Slowly, Charles bent his knees to leap for the edge of the stage. “You could still confess and do penance, instead of damning your soul—”

  “You think God cares about any of this? If he did, would the world be such a shithole? No theologian’s ever explained that one and some of them are almost as smart as I am. Sorry. But I am leaving Paris.” Moulin jerked his head toward Guise’s body. “Tidying up before I go. Too bad you saw my pretty shirt.”

  He sprang with part of the sentence still in his mouth. As he knocked Charles to the floor, flipped him onto his belly, and straddled him, gunfire echoed off the courtyard walls.

  Chapter 36

  Charles lay rigid, not knowing who had fired the shot or which of them had been its target.

  “Charles, oh, dear God, Charles, don’t be dead!” Pernelle fell to her knees beside him. And jumped up with a smothered sob as someone vaulted onto the stage.

  The light from a swinging lantern made Charles blink. Shoes crossed his line of vision and Moulin’s weight was rolled off his back. A large hand framed in lace reached down.

  “Are you hurt?” Lieutenant-Général La Reynie pulled Charles up and holstered a pistol with his other hand.

  Feeling at his wound to see if it was bleeding again, Charles shook his head. Pernelle had withdrawn to the edge of a wing, a hand pressed to her mouth, her eyes enormous in her white face.

  A man with a bloodied bandage around his arm held the lantern over Moulin’s body.

  “That’s him.” The words were full of grim satisfaction.

  La Reynie nodded. “Go back to the Châtelet, let them see to you,” he said to the man.

  Charles stared at what had been Moulin, trying to pray for the man’s twisted, violently dispatched soul and failing utterly. He looked up. “I owe you my life, M. La Reynie.”

  “It was one of my men who shot him.”

  “How did you know to come here?”

  “When Guise left the Hôtel de Guise, two of my men followed him. This Moulin must have been watching the Guise house, too, because he followed my men. One of my officers realized he was there and doubled back to question him. Moulin killed him for his trouble and wounded the one who just left, but that one got word back to me at the Châtelet. I guessed Guise would come here and thank God I guessed right.” La Reynie gave Charles an appreciative nod. “You did well to keep Moulin talking. Did you know we were in the courtyard?”

  “I knew someone was. You heard what Moulin said?”

  “Most of it. Enough.”

  Hurrying footsteps made them turn.

  “Maître! Thank God!” Père Le Picart rested trembling hands on Charles’s shoulders. “You are not hurt?”

  Charles shook his head. “It’s finished, mon père,” he said gently. “It’s over.” He nodded toward the bodies. “Frère Moulin was behind it all, not Frère Fabre. But he was working for Père Guise, as was Mme Douté.”

  Briefly, Charles and La Reynie told the rector what had happened and what they’d learned.

  “It is not finished,” Le Picart said into the quiet that fell then. “Not for their souls.” He looked from Moulin’s splayed body to Guise’s, lying in a glistening pool of blood. “I failed them. I was their superior, I stood as their father in religion. I should have known, I should have seen . . .”

  “They made their own evil, mon père,” La Reynie said brusquely.

  “As do we all.” The rector knelt between the bodies and began to pray for his lost “sons.”

  Lieutenant-Général La Reynie went down into the courtyard to talk
to his men and Charles went to find Pernelle. She was sitting in the dark corner of a wing with her face in her hands.

  “Are you all right?” He touched her shoulder. “I’m sorry you had to see this.”

  A sob caught in her throat. “I thought you were dead.”

  “So did I for a moment.” Charles held on to a side flat, thinking that he might still die from sheer exhaustion. “Can you stay hidden a little while more? La Reynie seems to have forgotten you and I want to keep it that way. I’ll get us away as soon as I can.”

  A sudden beam of light sent Charles’s heart into his throat.

  “Emotional, isn’t he, your young friend?” La Reynie stood behind Charles, holding the lantern high and looking at Pernelle. “As emotional as a girl. From the south, too, I hear in his voice. An unusual coincidence.”

  “I’ll see him home shortly.” Charles started back through the narrow passage between the wings and La Reynie had to retreat in front of him. Charles stopped close to the wings, so as not to disturb Le Picart, who was still praying. As a distraction from Pernelle, but also because he wanted to know, Charles asked, “Is it true, Monsieur La Reynie, about the child and Mme Douté? Are they dead?”

  “I’ve sent someone to find out for certain.”

  Charles looked at the rector, bent low as though the deaths Guise had caused hung on his own soul, and thought about the other deaths, Huguenot deaths, that Guise had helped to cause. “Monsieur La Reynie,” he said abruptly, “you told me that you protect the Huguenots still in Paris.”

  “What of it?” La Reynie said warily.

  “You heard what Moulin said about the dragonnades? French dragonnades, I mean.”

  “I heard.”

  “You can use what you heard to stop them.”

  Le Reynie looked pityingly at him. “I cannot.”

  “Why not? Do you want more of this?” Charles gestured angrily at the bodies, the priest, the blood.

  La Reynie did not respond.

  “Oh, I see.” Helplessness rose in Charles’s throat like bile. “I beg your pardon. I should have known. After all, I first saw you talking to Guise and Louvois. An unholy trinity, I thought you were then. I had come to think differently, but you are telling me I was right the first time. Death does not trouble you.”

  La Reynie’s eyes blazed red in the torchlight and he struck Charles a blow on the cheek that sent him crashing into a wing. Two of La Reynie’s men, stooping to lift Guise’s body onto a board, started toward Charles, but La Reynie shook his head and they held where they were. For a long perilous moment, he and Charles faced each other, both their faces dark with anger.

  Then the lieutenant-général shut his eyes and turned his head away. “I watched my first wife die.” His shaking voice was a thread of sound for only Charles to hear. “And three of my children.” He opened his eyes and stepped close to Charles. “You are a celibate, you will never know the pain of any of that! You may be very sure that death bothers me. I see death most days. And of course I have a part in the dragonnades. So do you and every other faithful Catholic, if you choose to look deeply enough. You blind innocent, I will spell it out for you. And if you talk, you may well find yourself dead. Our war minister Louvois has become too powerful for the comfort of many highly placed men. Many of whom not only hate him, they fear him. And his ambition.” La Reynie’s softly furious words sounded like grease spitting in a hot pan. “Everyone knows that Louvois keeps the dragonnades going for Louis. But few know that Guise was Louvois’s confessor. Which means that Guise knew Louvois’s secrets like no one else, and Louvois’s secrets are not only legion, but potentially perilous to Louvois. When I learned that he was Guise’s penitent, I began to wonder if I might get some hold over Guise and trade with him for some threat I could use to curb Louvois’s power. Then someone—and I was sure it was someone in your college—started killing. And I recruited you. Now, thanks in great part to you and your rector, I have this English plot to hold over Louvois’s head.”

  “What about Lysarde’s murder and the Dutchman’s—or whoever he was? When you told me those two were dead, I had the strong feeling that you assumed Louvois was responsible.”

  “No doubt. But there will be no proving it.”

  “What about the dragonnades, then? You can prove those, you can stop them!”

  “How can they be stopped when officially they do not occur? The man who makes Louis admit they go on at all is finished.”

  Charles shook his head in disgust. Louvois had said exactly that to Guise. “And so we are back where we were,” he flung at La Reynie. “You will not risk your comfortable position.”

  “Oh, very comfortable,” La Reynie said wearily. “If you could hear anything other than your own emotion, you might be in better case, Maître du Luc. I have used my power to draw a fragile circle of peace around Paris. And Versailles. I have done what I can do.”

  A soft rustle of cloth made Charles realize that Pernelle had crept closer and was listening just out of sight. “Why did you have men watching the LeClercs’s bakery?” he said.

  The lieutenant-général watched his men carry away Moulin’s body. Softly, more to himself than to Charles, he said, “To keep Louvois’s men away from her. He has flies in the Louvre, too.”

  “To keep Louvois’s men away?” Charles said, to be sure he’d heard right. That couldn’t mean what it seemed to mean. But if it did . . . As he stared at La Reynie, an insane thought—or a fragile hope—reared itself in Charles’s mind. When La Reynie’s men were gone, the thought and the hope were still there. Charles began cautiously feeling his way. “Forgive me for insulting you, Monsieur La Reynie.”

  La Reynie nodded slightly without looking at him.

  “You have said that you are indebted to me, monsieur,” Charles said.

  Another nod.

  “I think you are a man who pays his debts. Even to self-righteous innocents.”

  Now La Reynie was looking at him. “I pay my debts.”

  Praying that his hunch was right, Charles nodded toward the wings. “My young friend needs to go to Geneva.” He heard Pernelle stifle a gasp. “Will you pay your debt, Lieutenant-Général La Reynie, by helping him on his way?”

  It seemed to Charles that all three of them stopped breathing for longer than should have been possible. La Reynie looked into the darkness where Pernelle stood.

  “Come here,” the lieutenant-général said.

  Pernelle stepped into the lantern’s light.

  “Take your hat off, boy,” La Reynie said gruffly.

  She looked at Charles. He nodded and she slowly removed her hat.

  A soft sound escaped La Reynie. “I thought so.” His voice caught in his throat and he swallowed. “When I saw you in the bakery, you ran to the back so quickly, but I thought so. You could almost be my Marguerite’s—” He smiled at Pernelle “—brother, shall we say?” To Charles’s astonishment, he drew himself up, swept his hat off, and bowed low to her. When he straightened, he was Lieutenant-Général of Paris again. “Be at the college postern before first light, boy. Accept my apology for striking you,” he said stiffly to Charles. Then he went to deal with the dead and the fragment of peace their dying had restored to his city.

  Chapter 37

  As Lieutenant-Général La Reynie reached the edge of the stage, the man he’d sent to the Hôtel de Guise came running back across the courtyard, spurs clanking. Charles went closer to hear the man’s report. He’d seen the female spy working at the house, the officer told La Reynie, and it was true that a woman had given birth there a few hours ago. In the Guise chapel, he added, with avid relish. Neither the woman nor the child had lived. Gossip in the house had it that the child was full-term.

  Charles crossed himself and said quietly, “Her child was due in October, I heard.”

  “So M. Douté no doubt believed,” La Reynie returned. “I suppose she would have prepared him to welcome a surprisingly large and healthy early-born babe.”

 
; Behind them, the rector groaned. They turned around as he crossed himself and got to his feet. “May God forgive her,” Le Picart said sadly. “May God forgive us all. Monsieur La Reynie, I must call brothers to take charge of the bodies and prepare them for their graves. Will you wait in my office? We can finish saying what needs to be said there. And you, Maître du Luc, go to your bed. You and I will talk tomorrow. You have done more than enough for us today.”

  “Thank you, mon père. Will you release Frère Fabre now? Tonight?”

  “Immediately. And you will see that boy of Mme LeClerc’s home?”

  When Le Picart and La Reynie were gone, Charles went to get Pernelle, who had withdrawn again into the stage wings. He wanted to have her gone before the lay brothers came for the bodies.

  “Is it really true?” she whispered, grasping his hands. In the torchlight, her face was white with shock. “I thought you had gone deranged. Am I really going, and so easily? Can we trust him?”

  “Yes.” Charles wasn’t sure he liked La Reynie, but he had misjudged him badly. “We can trust him.”

  “I can never thank you for what you’ve done, Charles.”

  “Seeing me through the show was thanks enough.” His effort at lightness was a failure. His insane gamble had succeeded and she was going. He cleared his throat and dropped her hands. “Go back to Mme LeClerc tonight, Pernelle. It’s safe. I’ll meet you outside the postern before first light.”

  She looked almost as though he’d struck her. “Is that what you want?”

  “You’ll be more—” He couldn’t force the lie through his tightening throat. “Please.”

  She studied him for a moment. Then she drew his face down and kissed him, spun quickly away, and ran across the stage and jumped to the ground. When Charles heard the porter open and close the postern, he sighed out what started as relief and ended as desolation.