The Whispering of Bones

by Judith Rock

  “Maître! Maître du Luc!” She ran to the chair’s window, her thick curling brown hair tumbling from her white coif, and dropped her empty bread basket unceremoniously on the cobbles. Marie-Ange LeClerc was just turned ten, the daughter of bakers who rented one of Louis le Grand’s few remaining shop fronts. “What are you doing in a chair, maître?” She gripped the window’s edge to peer inside. “Your ‘mule’ stepped in a hole and twisted his ankle and—” She broke off, suddenly seeing Dainville. “Oh, no, what happened? Poor Père Dainville, is he dead?”

  “No, but he’s very ill.” Charles looked again at the two carriers arguing beside the road. “Marie-Ange, are you finished delivering bread?”

  She tilted her head at the gate of the Dominican monastery behind her. “The monks were the last.”

  “I need your help. I want you to sit here where I’m sitting and keep Père Dainville from falling sideways—you can do it, he’s very light. Then I can help carry the chair and we can get him home.”

  She nodded eagerly and Charles eased himself out of the chair, keeping one hand under Dainville’s head. Then he helped Marie-Ange inside, and resettled the old man against her knees.

  “Hold his shoulders as tight as you can.” He started to close the door.

  “Wait, my basket, Maman will kill me if I leave it!”

  “I’ll get it.” He shut the door, grabbed the basket, and went to the back of the chair. “Let’s go,” he called to the gardener, as he hung the basket over one of the rear poles. “I’m your new ‘mule.’”

  The gardener stood openmouthed for a moment, then shrugged and went to the front poles. “Lift when I say ‘up,’ then. Ready? Up!”

  The rue St. Jacques quickly began sloping down to the river, which made carrying the rear of the chair somewhat easier, but the old war wound in Charles’s left shoulder was soon throbbing from the weight. It took all his agility to keep step as the gardener dodged the usual array of dung, spoiled and discarded market produce, a small flock of stubborn milk goats, and a weaving passenger chair on wheels pulled by a man and pushed by a woman from behind. A passing carriage driver’s whip nearly knocked Charles’s hat off, and a baying dog chased a cat between his feet.

  “Hold up,” he shouted, as they finally reached Louis le Grand’s postern door. Sighing with relief as the chair came to rest on its supports, he hurried to its door and helped Marie-Ange out. As he stooped to gather Dainville into his arms, something smacked against his back and raucous laughter came from across the street. Leaving Dainville in the chair, Charles whirled furiously, blocking the door from whatever was being thrown.

  Two students in short black University gowns stood jeering at him across the street. “So Jesuits are taking chairmen’s money now,” one of them called. “Your piles of gold aren’t enough for you?”

  “You gutless sons of gelded pigs!” Marie-Ange picked up the rotten fish they’d thrown at Charles and hurled it back with deadly aim. As it hit one of the students—with a satisfying splat square in the chest—the college postern opened and a portly, elderly lay brother in the brothers’ short black cassock and canvas apron surged into the street. Heedless of traffic, he put himself between Marie-Ange and the students, who had started toward her.

  “You leave her alone, you hear me?” Frère Martin shook his big fists at them. “Bothering a little maid, shame on you, you milk-livered whelps!”

  The students, who seemed to recognize Martin, backed up. The brother nodded with satisfaction and advanced on them. Charles caught him by his cassock.

  “Let them go, Frère Martin, I need your help here!”

  “Oh, it’s you, maître, I didn’t really see you. I heard Marie-Ange and came to see that she was all right.” He smiled at the little girl. “I take it you threw the fish, ma petite—and a very nice aim you have!” He swept a puzzled glance over the sedan chair and the waiting gardener. “But Père Dainville went out with you, maître, where is he?”

  “Here.” Charles turned back to the chair and gathered Dainville in his arms, then straightened.

  “Oh, blessed Mary! Ah, his poor face—struck!” Martin exclaimed, using the old word for apoplexy.

  “Yes, I’m taking him to the infirmary.” Charles nodded toward the Carmelites’ gardener. “Will you please give this man something for carrying the chair and find someone to help him take it back to Notre Dame des Champs?”

  “Of course!” Calling to the gardener to wait, Martin, whose usual job was watching the postern door, hurried back through it toward the main college courtyard.

  Marie-Ange picked up her basket and ran to open the postern wider for Charles and Dainville. “Will you come and tell me how he does, maître?” Her round face was furrowed with worry. “I’ll pray for him.”

  “Please do. Thank you for your help, Marie-Ange. I’ll come when I can.” She pushed the door closed after him, and he lengthened his stride through the street passage. He was half running by the time he reached the main courtyard.

  The last classes of the afternoon were in session and the vast main court, the Cour d’honneur, was mostly empty. A bored courtyard proctor taking his ease on a stone bench looked up when he heard Charles crunching across the gravel and then leaped to his feet in dismay.

  “What’s happened, maître? Is it Père Dainville?”

  “He’s ill, mon frère. Please find the rector and ask him to come to the infirmary.”

  The proctor ran toward the main building, and Charles strode through the archway on his left. The infirmary stood beyond the student court, in the midst of a small physic garden. The year’s last sweet and pungent scents rose as his cassock skirts swept past fading herbs and flowers to the infirmary door. He carried Dainville into the small vestibule and shouldered open the door into the Jesuits’ infirmary. The long room with its two rows of beds was full of late-afternoon quiet but empty of patients.

  “Frère Brunet!” Charles made for a bed at the far end of the row, near the tiny chapel and the infirmarian’s chamber. “Are you here?”

  He put Dainville down on the bed and was untying the old man’s sash with shaking hands when Brunet hurried in from the vestibule.

  “I was upstairs in the student infirmary. Who’s ill, maître?” He bustled down the room to the bed. “Oh, dear.” Shaking his head at Dainville’s twisted face, Brunet pushed Charles gently aside. “See to his shoes.”

  With deft fingers, the infirmarian finished untying the sash, set it aside with its long wooden rosary, and peeled Dainville’s cassock off him, leaving him in his long white linen shirt. Charles unbuckled the priest’s worn black shoes and dropped them on the floor’s rush matting.

  “Now, mon père,” Brunet murmured, lifting Dainville’s knees so he could pull the blankets up, “we’ll just get you under the covers and nicely warm, that will be better, won’t it? There you are.” He pulled the blankets up to Dainville’s chin, put his forehead to Dainville’s to check for fever, and laid his fingers against the old man’s neck. “His blood’s not beating as strong as I’d like. Tell me exactly what happened.”

  He listened wide-eyed to Charles’s account, exclaiming in horror at the murder. “Whoever killed that boy bears the guilt for this as well, and I hope he hangs!” He stared down at the old man. “Père Dainville would have been—maybe still will be—eighty on Saint Martin’s Day. But that’s a month away.”

  Charles swallowed hard. “May I watch with him?”

  Brunet eyed him. “Don’t you have a class to teach? Or somewhere you should be?”

  “No class,” Charles said, ignoring the rest of the question. “I’ve started my theology study.”

  “Have you?” The infirmarian’s face was as sympathetic as if Charles had said he had gout. “Well, I know you have to, going toward your priesthood as you are. Yes, stay with him while I make a tisane. I might be able to get it into him with a spoon.” He we
nt to a tall cupboard beyond the bed. “Theology,” he muttered, shaking his head as he reached in. “Always something there to fight about. Me, I’m glad to be just a lay brother. But Jesuits are supposed to find God in all things, even in theology, I suppose . . .” His words trailed off and he leaned deeper into the cupboard. “Ah. Got it.” He turned with a pottery cup and a small, stoppered clay pot in his hands. “I’ll be back as quick as I can, maître.”

  Charles pulled a stool to Dainville’s bedside and sat holding the old man’s hand, for his own comfort as much as for Dainville’s. Worry choked his prayers and seemed to be squeezing his heart. He turned his confessor’s dry, thin hand over and found himself thinking that the tangle of lines in the palm was like a map. A map of all Dainville had done, of the twisting path that had led to faithfulness. Hoping that his own life would be as faithful, he watched the shallow rise and fall of the thin chest and willed it to go on.

  Tears stung his eyes. He thought of the young man lying dead in the deep crypt at Notre Dame des Champs and wondered who would weep for him when the terrible news came. And he thought of the man at the foot of the crypt stairs, so blackly outlined against the single candle flame, and wondered if he’d just come from praying—or killing.

  CHAPTER 3

  The door from the vestibule opened and Louis le Grand’s rector came in. Charles let go of Père Dainville’s hand and stood up as Père Jacques Le Picart hurried down the row of beds.

  “How is he, maître?” The rector was wiry and gray-haired, and peasant Normandy still sounded in his speech.

  Charles shook his head, trying to pick through his scattered thoughts for an answer, but Frère Brunet emerged from his chamber with a steaming cup and a spoon and forestalled him.

  “He’s none too good, mon père,” Brunet said. “Apoplexy, they call it now. Struck, I call it.” He sat down on Charles’s stool, stirring the tisane, and the soft fragrance of chamomile rose from the cup. “Struck by a murderer, so Maître du Luc says.”

  “What?” Le Picart rounded on Charles, his sea-gray eyes horrified. “He was attacked?”

  “No, not by the murderer’s hand,” Charles said. “We went to Notre Dame des Champs to pray in the crypt. While I was still praying, Père Dainville went into the well chamber across from the chapel. I found him there, fallen onto a pile of rags. The dead man had been mostly hidden under the rags, but his hand and arm were visible. I think Père Dainville saw that and the shock brought on this apoplexy.” Seeing Le Picart’s next question on his face, Charles said, “The body wasn’t yet cold.”

  Le Picart stared at him. “Are you telling me that the man was killed while you two were in the chapel? But surely you would have heard a quarrel or a fight. Did you see anyone?”

  Charles told him about the man silhouetted at the bottom of the stairs, and what Mère Vinoy had said about having oiled the chamber door hinges in preparation for the upcoming work in the chamber.

  “So you told the abbess.”

  “I told her what I knew and she said she would send for the police. She also loaned a sedan chair for bringing Père Dainville home.”

  Le Picart smiled briefly. “She’s a good woman. And an impressive administrator. She makes me wish we had nuns in the Society of Jesus. Though one could wish she’d been less impressive and had left the door hinges alone.” His smile faded as he watched Brunet spooning sips of the tisane into Dainville’s mouth and gently wiping away what spilled. “Do you want to bleed him, mon frère? Or send for a physician?”

  “Neither.” Brunet scowled at Le Picart as though the rector were holding out the bleeding basin and the lancet. “You know I don’t believe in bleeding. The poor man is already so frail and you want to take his lifeblood from him?”

  The rector held up his hands in submission. “No, truly I don’t! I only wondered.”

  “Hmph. As for a physician . . .” Brunet eyed his patient. “We’ll see.” His suspicion of University-trained physicians and their harsh remedies—and high fees—was well known at Louis le Grand and, most of the Jesuits felt, had probably saved not only the budget but lives.

  “Use your judgment,” Le Picart said. “I’ll sit with him awhile.”

  To take his confession, if he regained consciousness, Charles thought sadly. Or to give him last rites, if he continued to sink.

  Brunet nodded and got up from the stool. “He’s not going to drink any more now. Sit here, mon père. I must go to check on a boy upstairs, and then I’ll be back.”

  “You, too, must go, maître,” the rector said to Charles. “In the midst of all this unhappy news, I’ve neglected to tell you that you have a visitor waiting in the grand salon. A cousin of yours, he says.”

  “A cousin?” Charles said in surprise. He had many cousins, but none—so far as he knew—visiting Paris. All his family lived in the south. “Did he give his name, mon père?”

  “He is Monsieur Charles-François de Vintimille du Luc. You must not keep him waiting longer.”

  Charles groaned inwardly. This cousin had never been a friend, and there were few people he wanted less to see.

  The rector’s nose twitched and he frowned. “I keep thinking I smell fish. Fish gone bad.”

  “Oh.” Charles reached behind himself, trying to feel the center of his back. “I’m sorry, mon père. I forgot. A University student threw a fish at me outside our postern. I’ll go and clean it off.” He looked down at Dainville. “Will you let me know if—if he’s worse?”

  “Of course. Go now.”

  Charles bowed and took his leave, worry over Dainville vying with dismay at the news that his unbeloved cousin awaited him. As he let himself out of the infirmary and walked through the windy garden, he could hear the voices of Louis le Grand’s day students, exulting over their release for the day as soon as they were beyond the various college gates and postern doors. As he entered the boarding students’ court, a Jesuit scholastic shepherded a group of boys through the archway from the Cour d’honneur. Two of the boys had been among Charles’s favorite students: Walter Connor and Armand Beauclaire, both good in rhetoric and even better at dance—in spite of the havoc Beauclaire’s peculiar inability to tell right from left could create onstage. Now they dropped back from the scholastic and their fellows and stopped to make flourished bows to Charles, grinning from ear to ear. Seeing that their shepherd hadn’t noticed and kept walking, Charles sketched an equally silly bow to the boys and waved them on, smiling with pleasure at seeing them.

  Dusk was falling and Louis le Grand’s uneven roofline was sharp against the sky, bristling with round and square towers that seemed to have been dropped haphazardly on the roofs’ blue-gray slate. In its hundred and twenty-four years, the college had grown from a private townhouse with a grand courtyard to a checkerboard of graveled and turfed courts surrounded by three-, four-, and five-story buildings, the newest of brick and the oldest half timbered. The high walls of blackened stone were honeycombed with archways leading from one court to the next, and Charles’s way led beneath two more arches, one round and one pointed, before he reached the main court and the main building’s back door. He climbed the back staircase to his chamber, removed his cassock, and saw that the fish remains were beyond simple wiping. He put on his clean cassock, consigned the fishy one to the laundry, washed his hands, reknotted his sash, and carefully readjusted his shirt collar to show the correct edge of white above the cassock’s high black collar.

  Hoping your cousin will go away if you make him wait long enough? His chiding inner voice was right as usual. Telling himself that the sooner he saw his cousin, the sooner he’d be rid of him, Charles went resolutely downstairs and to the doorway of the grand salon. The high-ceilinged reception room was the only room at Louis le Grand with any claim to elegance. Its red and gold carpet was worn but not threadbare, and several good paintings in wide, gold-leafed frames hung on the wall. The pair of tall beeswax candl
es on the heavily carved side table were not yet lit and the room was dim. For a moment, Charles thought he’d gotten his wish and his cousin had left. Then he saw him across the room, peering at a small, red chalk drawing of St. Ignatius, one of the school’s treasures.

  Unmoving and unnoticed in the doorway, Charles watched him. Most du Luc men were named Charles, after an illustrious ancestor. And most looked like this cousin, Charles-François de Vintimille du Luc, a former soldier turned galley captain. Short and thick bodied where Charles was more than six feet tall, dark where Charles was Viking fair, he seemed top heavy under the curly black wig cascading over his shoulders. Charles wondered if the wig was meant to draw attention away from his cousin’s empty left coat sleeve—Charles-François had lost his arm at the battle of Cassel in 1677. Charles had come through that same battle unscathed, though he’d taken a musket ball in his shoulder just a few days later at the battle of St. Omer. Ten years was long enough to forget most things, but seeing his cousin’s neatly pinned-up coat sleeve brought memories slamming against Charles’s eyes.

  “Bonsoir, mon cousin,” Charles said, walking away from his memories and into the salon.

  Charles-François turned from the drawing. “I wondered how long it would take you to gather enough courage to walk through that door.”

  “I was admiring your wig,” Charles shot back. And grimaced because, as usual, they were throwing words at each other almost before they’d said hello. He tried to put warmth into his voice. “Have you come to bring family news, Charlot?” Charles-François’s face reddened at the nickname, though Charles had only used it from habit. Five years older but a head shorter, Charles-François had been called Charlot, “Little Charles,” by the family ever since Charles had shot past him in height.