by Rock, Judith
“Hold your noise, who could see you in this pitch pot?”
Pernelle recognized the speaker’s voice. He was a small, wiry ex-soldier she’d seen earlier that evening, who apparently slept in the chamber beyond Barbe’s when his wife caught him with another woman and locked him out of their rooms. As Pernelle’s eyes grew used to the dark, she saw that he was dragging a man—or a body.
“Dear God!” she gasped. “Is he dead?”
“Not yet. Shot and bleeding. Can you help me?”
She rose shakily and felt her way to the man’s feet. Staggering under the weight, she helped the ex-soldier carry the wounded man into the next chamber.
“Put him down,” the ex-soldier growled. “Wait here.”
He hurried past her and came back carrying a candle. “Belongs to that painter. He’s wandering in wine dreams and no man needs light for that.”
He felt along the floor, came up holding flint and tinder, and worked till he got the candle lit. Then he stuck it to the floor in a puddle of wax, and by its small wavering light they got the wounded man face down on a straw pallet instead of on the floor. Kneeling between Pernelle and the man, the old soldier tried to tear a strip off the robe the man was wearing.
“Cloth’s too strong. Can you tear a piece off your petticoat, madame?” He shifted his patient half onto his side. “Got to free your hurt, mon ami. But got to get your priest robe off first.”
Pernelle, who was ripping away more of her blue petticoat, looked up in alarm. “He’s a priest?”
“So he said.” He rolled the man back onto his belly. “Bring your cloth, madame.”
She didn’t move. “Is he conscious?”
“Don’t think so.”
Deciding that even if the man was conscious, he’d have no way to know her for a fugitive and was in no condition to do anything about it even if he did, she knelt beside the ex-soldier.
“Put your petticoat piece just here,” he said, and guided her hand to the man’s side.
Keeping her head bent, Pernelle pressed her cloth against the long bloody gash across the back and side of the priest’s lower ribs.
The ex-soldier stood up. “I’m going for wine to pour in the wound. And in him. If he wakes up.” The old soldier sighed. “In me and you, too, we’ve earned it.”
“Hurry, then. I want to go back to sleep.” Pernelle’s sympathy for the wounded man was rapidly fading. What was a priest doing in the beggar’s Louvre in the middle of the night with a gunshot wound in his back? If he was a priest. More likely he was a rogue masquerading for his own purposes. She turned the blood-soaked pad and pressed a drier part against the wound. Well, whoever he was, she couldn’t let him bleed to death. Seeing that he lay utterly still, she risked a more of a look at him. His tangled hair, thick and yellow as gold, caught the light. A young man, then. She could feel hard muscle under her hand where the wound was. His face, turned toward the wall, was in darkness. Suddenly wanting to see him better, she picked up the candle and held it high. And the world turned upside down.
No, she told herself. It couldn’t be. Charles was hundreds of miles away in Carpentras. She leaned over the man to see his face. As though her eyes might be lying, her fingers carefully traced the line of his forehead, his nose, his mouth, the profile of this face she’d known as long as she’d known her own. She put her hand over his heart, felt its beating. “What happened to you?” she whispered. “What are you doing here?” Very carefully, like someone in a dream, she set the candle down. She put her arms around him to keep him warm and rested her head on his bare shoulder. “Don’t die, Charles. Please, God, don’t let him die.”
Chapter 11
Geneva, Switzerland
September 1686
The fire in the bedchamber was nearly out and rain was falling again beyond the window. Lightning lit the room and Lucie stirred and whimpered. Pernelle went quickly to part the curtains and murmur reassurance.
“Only lightning, birdling. God’s lightning. Nothing to fear.”
Lucie cuddled onto her side and sank again into sleep. Shaking her head, Pernelle went to the window. Lightning was another thing over which she and her mother-in-law had clashed. A few days ago, she’d walked in on Mme Bayle telling Lucie that demons made lightning. She’d told the woman roundly not to fill Lucie’s head with such nonsense and had taken her away to the kitchen for a piece of Annette’s pastry.
She watched another lightning flash outline the roofs of Geneva. She sighed, telling herself it was time to put memories away and make peace with this place she’d risked everything to reach. She could not return to France. That would be walking into the dragon’s mouth. Even if she were willing to do that, she would never risk it for Lucie.
Well, morning came as early here as it did in Paris, and that meant she must go to sleep.
She closed the shutters, banked what was left of the fire, undressed down to her shift, and climbed shivering into bed beside Lucie. Gathering her daughter’s warm little body close, she prayed for a quiet night and safety from evil dreams, added a prayer for Charles, and slept. But even in her sleep, she was dimly aware of the lightning flickering between the shutters, and perhaps it was the lightning that kept memories flashing in her mind, like momentary dreams.
She saw Charles coming to himself at dawn in the beggars’ Louvre and herself giving him sips of wine to drink and asking what on earth he was doing in Paris. Saw him holding tight to her hand and explaining how he’d been sent north to teach there at the Jesuit school. Saw herself demanding to know why a Jesuit had been out at night getting himself shot, saw him telling her that he’d seen something he shouldn’t have and had been shot at for his trouble. Saw his familiar half grin when she said that was only half an answer. Saw them riding together across Paris, as people stared openmouthed at the young Jesuit with a woman riding behind him. Saw Charles giving her into the care of a baker’s wife at the Jesuit college door, the baker’s wife dressing her as a boy and sending her fleeing into the college when the police came looking for an escaped Huguenot. Saw Charles passing her off as a boy hired to help in the understage during the college’s summer ballet production.
A shutter slammed somewhere in the house and Pernelle sat up in bed, wide awake, her breath coming short. The only sound was the wind outside. She lay down again, turned over, and tried for sleep, but now she was seeing waking pictures in her mind. After the ballet there had been chaos, but Charles had seen how to open the road to Geneva for her. And then there had been the rest of that night. She turned her face into Mme Bayle’s thick goosedown pillow, smothering the beginning of tears, stifling her body’s longing. Refusing to take out the memory of that night and look at it more closely, because things so piercing sweet and full of grief could be borne only if they were kept—and treasured—in the dark of the heart.
Before dawn on that night’s morning, she and Charles had slipped out to the college’s postern door. The cloaked figure waiting there had led her down the rue St. Jacques to the Seine, and onto the Petit Pont. On the bridge, the figure stopped at a tall narrow house with an apothecary’s sign and knocked. The apothecary opened the door, and as they followed him through the house to his workshop, Pernelle saw that he was a dwarf. In his workshop, he moved a clutch of barrels aside and opened the trapdoor under them. Then he held a lantern over a yawning square of river-loud darkness so that she could see the boat waiting beneath. Go with God, the cloaked figure had said softly. The dwarf had nodded, murmuring words she couldn’t understand, and the two of them had lowered her through the trap. A man in the boat caught her, and when she looked up, the trapdoor was already closed. The boatman hid her under a hooped canvas shelter and took the oars. When he had the boat free of the bridge, he caught a rope thrown from the bank and made it fast at the prow. A sturdy white horse on the towpath began towing the boat upstream, east toward Geneva and
the sunrise. Toward Lucie, if God was kind. And toward the loneliness of freedom.
Look for the next adventure from Judith Rock
A PLAGUE OF LIES
A Charles Du Luc Novel
Keep reading for a special excerpt . . .
from Berkley!
Chapter 1
THE FEAST OF ST. CLOTHILDE, TUESDAY, JUNE 3, 1687
The storm-riding demons of the air were gathered over Paris, huring fire and thunder at the city’s cowering mortals. Every bell ringer in the city was hauling on his ropes, and his bells—baptized like good Christians for just this purpose—were wide-mouthed roaring angels fighting off the storm with their own deafening noise. The spring thunderstorm had begun north of the river, but now it raged directly over the rue St. Jacques, sending thunder echoing off walls and stabbing roofs and cobbles with spears of rain. In the Jesuit college of Louis le Grand, teachers and students were praying to aid the clanging bells. But the prayers of the senior rhetoric class dissolved into gasps and cries when lightning struck nearly into the main courtyard. The near miss made assistant rhetoric master Maître Charles du Luc’s skin tingle. And startled him into wondering if the demons of the air, in whom he mostly didn’t believe when the sun was shining, were bent on making this day his last on earth.
“Messieurs, I beg you, calm yourselves,” he shouted, over the noise, to his students huddled together on the classroom benches. “All storms pass. The bells are winning, as they always do, because we baptize them to make them stronger than the demons of the air. Listen! The demons are fleeing toward the south now.” By force of will and voice, he called the boys back to their unfinished praying.
When he looked up after the “amen,” one of the students, Armand Beauclaire, was frowning thoughtfully at the oak-beamed ceiling. Beauclaire, a round-faced sixteen-year-old with a thick straight thatch of brown hair, put up a hand and shifted his gaze to the teacher’s dais at the front of the room.
“Yes, Monsieur Beauclaire?” Charles called, over the storm’s receding noise, girding his mental loins. Beauclaire’s questions were always interesting and never easy to answer.
“Is it really demons, maître? If the demons of the air cause thunderstorms, why do the storms always end? Why don’t the demons win sometimes?”
“Win? You want that demons win?” The outraged speaker was the elder of a pair of brothers from Poland.
“No, Monsieur Sapieha, he doesn’t want them to win.” Charles hoped he was responding to what Sapieha had actually said. It was often hard to tell, Latin being the language of the college, but the Sapieha brothers’ Latin was heavily accented and mixed with Polish. “Monsieur Beauclaire only wants to know why they don’t win, which is a very different question and an excellent one.” But it was not a question Charles was going to discuss there and then. When not dodging lightning, he personally doubted the demon theory, though many people—including most of his fellow teachers at Louis le Grand—did not. And he had to get the class through a lot more pages of Greek before the afternoon ended.
Charles was in the scholastic phase of his long Jesuit formation, with ordination and final vows still some years away. Teaching was part of Jesuit training, and Charles was a teacher of rhetoric, the art of communication in both Latin and Greek.
He raised his eyebrows at Beauclaire. “Perhaps the demons always lose because good is stronger than evil,” he said. And hoped that his belief in the second half of his sentence was enough to justify his evasion. “But now, back to our book!”
As the storm receded outside and he tried to find his place in the book open on the oak lectern in front of him, Charles wondered if he looked as unconfident as he felt. The senior rhetoric master, Père Joseph Jouvancy, was in the infirmary recovering from sickness. And the second senior master, Père Martin Pallu, had just fallen ill with the same unpleasant malady. Which left Charles in sole charge of the thirty senior rhetoric students. But, no help for it, there were still two hours of class before the afternoon ended. He smoothed the book’s pages open, pushed his black skullcap down on his curling, straw-blond hair, and twitched at his cassock sleeves. The long linen shirt under the cassock showed correctly as narrow bands of white at wrists and high-collared neck, and the cassock hung sleekly on his six feet and more of wide-shouldered height. With a deep breath and a prayer to St. John Chrysostom, the only Greek saint he could think of at the moment, Charles tackled the Greek rules of rhetoric, sometimes reading from the book, sometimes explaining what he read.
But under the reading and explaining, he felt more than a little overwhelmed by his responsibilities. Behind the teacher’s dais where he stood was a tapestry showing the unfortunate philosopher Socrates drinking his fatal cup of hemlock. Its graphic rendering of an unpopular academic’s fate made for an uncomfortable teaching backdrop, he’d always thought.
He paused, giving the class time to write down what he’d said, and let his eyes wander over the benches. The boys were bent over small boards braced on their laps, their feathered quills scratching across their paper, and all he could see of them were the tops of their heads above their black scholar’s gowns. Louis le Grand’s students ranged in age from about ten to eighteen. The youngest in this class was thirteen, a little Milanese named Michele Bertamelli, whose mass of curls was as black as his hat. Most of the bent heads were French and every shade of brown, apparently God’s favorite color for hair. But there were also boys from England, Ireland, Poland, and the Netherlands—one with hair flaming like copper, some as blond as Charles himself was, thanks to his Norman mother’s Viking forbears. Today, though, there were fewer boys than there should have been, because three of them were in the student infirmary with the same contagion Jouvancy and Pallu had.
Charles glanced out at the courtyard and saw that the rain had nearly stopped. The storm was south of the city now, and the bell ringers of Paris were letting their ropes go slack. Relieved at no longer having to shout over the noise, he went back to feeding his fledgling scholars Aristotle’s rules for rhetoric. But even as he tried to make his dry morsels of knowledge tempting, his thoughts kept circling around all that he should have finished and hadn’t.
His biggest worry was the summer ballet and tragedy performance, only two months from now, on August sixth. In Jesuit schools, both voice and body were trained for eloquence, and part of his job was directing the ballet that went with the school’s grand tragedy performance every summer. This year, under Jouvancy’s watchful eye, Charles was working on the ballet’s livret—the plan of its four Parts—and would be directing the ballet itself. Happily, this year’s ballet was an updated version of the 1680 college ballet, so he was only rewriting instead of coming up with something new from scratch. Full rehearsals were about to start, but because of Jouvancy’s illness and this extra teaching, Charles was seriously behind. And what if Jouvancy’s illness returned and worsened, as illness so often did? If that happened, Charles knew that he might end up directing the tragedy and the ballet.
He finished his lecture and told the class’s three decurions—class leaders named for Roman army officers commanding ten men each—to collect the afternoon’s written work and bring it to the dais. Then he set them to hear each of their “men” recite the assigned memory passage. Today it was from St. Basil’s writings. Greek recitation was never popular, and when the decurions delivered the bad news, thirteen-year-old Bertamelli sprang from his seat and flung his arms wide.
“But, maître,” the Italian boy wailed, “I cannot speak Greek, it hurts my tongue!”
Snorts of laughter erupted along the benches, and Charles bit his lip to keep from laughing himself. Henri de Montmorency, the eighteen-year-old dull-witted scion of a noble house, turned on his bench and gaped at Bertamelli.
“You’re mad. Words can’t hurt anything!”
Charles called the class back to order, fixed Bertamelli with his eye, and schooled
his face to stern disapproval. The boy’s scholar’s gown had slipped off one shoulder to reveal his crumpled and grayed linen shirt, and his huge black eyes were tragic with pleading. He was one of the most gifted and passionate dancers Charles had ever seen, but he was also proving nearly impossible to contain within Louis le Grand’s rules—and probably its walls, though Charles preferred not to think about that. He suspected that the little Italian would not be with them long, though who would crack first, Bertamelli or the Jesuits, he wouldn’t have cared to predict.
“To put Monsieur Montmorency’s puzzlement more politely,” Charles said, with a sideways frown at Montmorency, “how does Greek hurt your tongue, Monsieur Bertamelli?”
“That language has hard edges, sharp edges, cruel edges. It bites me! My tongue is a tender Italian tongue!” To be sure Charles understood, he stuck the sensitive member in question out as far as it would go.
“No need for scientific demonstration, Monsieur Bertamelli, and please pull your gown closed over your shirt. And if at all possible, compose yourself.”
Bertamelli yanked his gown onto his shoulder, pulled it straight, and clasped his thin brown hands together under his chin. His eyes grew even larger. “My tongue—”
“Let your tongue rest, monsieur, and make your ears work. Hear three things that I am going to tell you.” Charles held up his thumb. “Number one: Learning Greek will strengthen the sinews of your tender Italian tongue.” His first finger joined his thumb. “Two: Every educated man must learn Greek. We speak Latin here in the college because Latin is the international language of scholarship, but what the Romans wrote in Latin is rooted in what the Greeks wrote.” Charles’s third digit uncurled and his eyes swept the classroom and came to rest on Montmorency. “Three: And this is for each of you. You will observe the rules of classroom behavior. If you want to speak, put up your hand—as you all know very well. Now, Monsieur Bertamelli, sit down and prepare yourself for your Greek recitation.”