by Judith Rock
He raised his head. The bells had long since stopped and the rue St. Jacques was quieter than it was in the daylight. The lanterns hanging from the sides of buildings had been lit and cast small pools of light on the cobbles. A little way up the hill, an upper window opened in a house on the other side of the street and a woman leaned on the sill, her white coif gleaming in the lantern light. She was singing, though too quietly for Charles to hear the words. But he recognized the melody, because he’d heard it in the streets. He remembered its words, too, about the pleasure of seeing a lover, and about love’s danger. He leaned his elbows on the windowsill, thinking about his own youthful love, Pernelle. He’d chosen God above all else. And she had also made her own choices. But a deep place in his heart would always belong to her. They had let each other go for many reasons, good reasons, but love songs still wrung his heart. How long are you going to stand here spinning yourself another drama? Don’t you have work to do? his critical inner voice said. Charles sighed and swung the small-paned window shut. Then he picked up the malodorous tallow candle from the stool beside his bed, nodded as though in greeting toward the small painting of Mary and her Child that hung nearly invisible in the shadows, and went into the tiny study that opened from his sleeping chamber. He shut the door behind him, as though that would keep his needling inner voice out.
The study was like his sleeping chamber, with whitewashed plaster walls, beamed ceiling, bare floor, no fireplace, and little furniture. He put his copper candlestick beside a thick book on the table that served him as a desk, sat down beneath the painted crucifix over the chair, and eyed the book with distaste. He liked studying. Or he used to like studying, he thought sadly, shifting on the hard chair’s thin red cushion, trying to get comfortable. Half seriously, he wondered if it was too late to just be a lay brother. Lay brothers didn’t have to read St. Augustine. And if he were a lay brother, he could work in the stable, take care of the horses. One of the things he missed most about his father’s—now his brother’s—house and fields and vineyards far away in the south, in Languedoc, was being around horses.
But he knew he couldn’t be a lay brother, not even to be around horses, because during the summer he’d come to know even more deeply—beneath complaining and fears and even beneath his terrible secret—that he wanted to be a priest more than he’d ever wanted anything. Anything? the needling inner voice replied, having apparently wormed its way under the door. More than Pernelle? Yes, he told it. More than I wanted Pernelle. So shut up.
That silenced the voice, and Charles opened the book. But instead of reading, he leaned back in the chair, trying to let the day’s shocks and fears recede. The study’s closed window did little to muffle the occasional sound of carriage wheels echoing off the buildings that lined St. Jacques. In a space of quiet, he heard someone shout, someone else shout back, and running feet pounding downhill toward the Seine. Then a loud group—University students, judging by their garbled Latin drinking song—came out of the little rue des Poirées across from Louis le Grand and turned toward the taverns in nearby Place Maubert. When quiet settled again in the room, he watched a mouse come out of its hole beneath the window. She—Charles felt sure it was a she—watched him warily, whiskers twitching, and edged cautiously toward his feet. Irrationally glad to see another creature, he leaned over to see what she might be after and saw that she was stalking crumbs from the cakelike sable Marie-Ange had given him yesterday when he passed the bakery. He’d eaten it at his desk last night, in an effort to sweeten reading St. Augustine. The mouse snatched a tiny piece from the floor and sat up, turning it in her paws and watching him, bright-eyed and unafraid. Charles, too, sat up, opened his book and tried to find as much contentment in St. Augustine’s Confessions.
But the clamor in his mind returned, growing louder than the bells had been, and soon blinded him to what was on the pages. Finally, he took his candle and went to the prie-dieu in his sleeping chamber. He put the candle in the sconce beside the prayer desk and knelt. The little painting of Mary and her Child on the wall in front of him glowed in the candlelight. He gazed at Mary, who sat on a bench in a small room, with the Child on her lap and an open window at her back. She was smiling down at her son, and Charles thought again about the murdered boy in the well chamber. You know what will happen to your son, he told her. How do you bear it? She went on smiling at the laughing baby as though darkness would never fall over the green hills beyond the window, or over the Child, or in her heart. Will Père Dainville live? Charles asked her. She was so quiet that he seemed to hear the fire in her grate crackling and murmuring. For the first time since he’d come to the college, he felt that she didn’t hear him, felt shut out of the room in the painting. He put his head down on the ledge of the prie-dieu, exhausted and forsaken.
He fell asleep there and woke sometime in the dead of night to stumble to his bed.
When the college’s five o’clock rising bell pealed, he greeted God’s new day with a groan. He mumbled his waking prayer and crossed himself, straightened his bed covers, found his cassock in the dark and pulled it on over his knee-length linen shirt, and was kneeling at the prie-dieu before he was more than half awake. Mary and the Child were remote and silent. He prayed, lit his candle from the passage sconce, washed his face with water from his copper pitcher, and cleaned his teeth with a linen rag and the thick paste his mother regularly sent him. Then he shouldered the small satchel he would need for his classes and started through the dark maze of uneven passageways to the back stairs that led to the chapel and Mass. Père Thomas Damiot, the young priest who lived just across the passage and was one of Charles’s closest friends at the school, was already on the stairs. They smiled a greeting at each other but didn’t speak, breaking the night’s silence before Mass being frowned upon. Charles, yawning, stumbled off the bottom step. Damiot grabbed his arm to keep him upright and gave him a questioning sideways look that Charles pretended not to see.
On most mornings, when Charles went into Louis le Grand’s chapel, the sight of the rosy, open-armed angels reaching down from the painted ceiling of the chapel’s false dome lifted his spirits, no matter what else was happening. But this morning, he kept his eyes on the floor as he followed Damiot to a bench toward the back of the nave. As Jesuits, students, and people from the neighborhood gathered for the first Mass of the day, Charles knelt on the stone tiles and prayed for Père Dainville. When that prayer was finished, he stayed on his knees, not praying, but thinking about going to the Novice House later and trying to see Amaury de Corbet. And about what they would or wouldn’t talk about. Then the priest celebrating the Mass came in, everyone stood, and Charles tried to give himself up to the mystery of God coming to meet him in the bread and wine.
When the Mass ended and the neighborhood people were going out the west door into the rue St. Jacques, a loud woman’s voice made Charles and Damiot turn to see who was being so heedless of reverence and courtesy. Two women were halted just inside the door. The better-dressed one was shaking a finger in the other’s face.
“Of course you may not! You spend enough time in church. And you have work to do! Why else are you living in my house, I’d like to know?”
The scolded woman, whose face was half hidden by a scarf draped around her throat and head, turned sharply and disappeared into the street. The other woman, suddenly aware that everyone was watching her, drew her long cloak of silky gray wool closer and stalked after her companion.
Charles and Damiot went with the rest of the Jesuits and students out the chapel’s always-open north door, into the Cour d’honneur. The sun had still not reached the rooftops, and the college’s age-blackened walls were crusted with frost. Charles pulled his cloak collar tightly around his neck as they crunched across the gravel toward the fathers’ refectory.
“Have you heard what happened to Père Dainville?” he asked Damiot.
The priest nodded. “On the way to supper last night, Père Montville t
old us he’d been taken ill. Apoplexy, he said. And that you were with him.”
“He’d asked me to go with him to the Carmelites’ crypt chapel—he’s grown very frail, you know, and needs help now. But he wasn’t only taken ill,” Charles said grimly. He told Damiot about the murdered man. “I think seeing him is what brought on the apoplexy.”
Damiot crossed himself and gave Charles a long look. “I’ve known men who seem to attract mosquitoes and fleas, but until you, I’ve never known a man who attracted dead bodies. Though it’s a talent that seems very useful to the head of our Paris police,” he added dryly. “Lieutenant-Général La Reynie has had more than a little reason to be very glad of you.” He raised an ironic eyebrow. “Though that cannot be said for some of our Jesuit superiors.”
Charles was in no mood for Damiot’s humor. “If Père Dainville dies, whoever killed the man in the crypt will have two deaths to pay for. And I would gladly help La Reynie scour Paris for him! Though you’re right about the superiors. I’m not likely to have the chance to help La Reynie this time.”
“I wouldn’t mind helping him, either,” Damiot said, earning a startled glance from Charles. “Though what help I’d be is open to question.” That drew a bark of laughter from Charles, who could not imagine the fastidious Damiot in tandem with the blunt police chief.
“So you’ve been told in so many words that you won’t have the chance to help La Reynie again?”
“It’s unlikely I’d get permission, now that I’ve started theology study,” Charles said lightly, sidestepping the question.
They went through the archway into the fathers’ court, where the fathers’ refectory and most of the Jesuit living quarters were.
“Why am I sure there’s more to it than that?” Damiot said quietly.
Charles sighed. “Because at heart you’re the village witch.” He’d rarely been able to deflect Damiot from anything he wanted to know. Or already, somehow, did know.
“The college is much like a village,” Damiot said, smiling. “And you must know that it’s bad luck to keep things from the village witch.”
“If I tell you, will you put a spell on my Saint Thomas book so it won’t open? All right, the rector told me last summer that there’s been too much gossip in the college about things I’ve done. He cautioned me to call no more attention to myself. You’re not the only one who knows something about what I’ve done with La Reynie, and the rector wants no more talk about that.”
The ironic eyebrow went up again. “For his own sake, I would imagine, as well as yours. Which is administratively understandable. But unfortunate, because from what I’ve heard—and seen—you’re quite good at finding killers.”
“However,” Charles responded, “that talent is not in demand in the Society of Jesus. And, it seems, neither are scholastics who make themselves conspicuous. So La Reynie is on his own. And he’d better catch the man,” he added darkly.
They had reached the refectory, where cloaked Jesuits were going to and from the frugal college breakfast of bread, cheese, and watered wine, taken standing and in silence. But near the bottom of the stairs to the door, a small group of Jesuits was talking quietly. Père Joseph Jouvancy, the rhetoric professor whom Charles had worked with last year, stood with three college administrators: Père Montville, Père Donat, the rector’s third in command, and Père Le Boeuf, the dour college provisioner. Maître Louis Richaud, an unpopular, sour-faced scholastic at the same stage of training as Charles, hovered nearby, trying to listen without seeming to.
Père Jouvancy’s face lit with welcome when he saw Charles. As he gestured to him, Montville turned also. “Ah, maître,” Montville began, but Jouvancy was already in full spate.
“My dear Maître du Luc!” the little rhetoric professor cried, beaming at Charles. “We do miss you sorely in the rhetoric class. The boys as much as I.”
“Not more than I miss being there, mon père. The saintly church fathers are not nearly such good company.”
“As my saintly self, you mean?” Jouvancy grinned at Charles. “I’m already planning next summer’s ballet and I am so thankful that you’ll be working with me! I’m calling it The Ballet of Seasons! And with the leaves so lovely just now, I’ve been thinking that Autumn should wear—”
“Mon père!” Donat, a dull-witted stickler for every slightest rule and formality, glared at Jouvancy. “Remember, I beg you, what we are discussing here!”
“Hmmm?” Jouvancy glanced at him. “Yes, we’re discussing the ballet. Now, maître, as I was saying—”
Damiot, who had drifted unobtrusively in Charles’s wake and was listening, choked with stifled laughter. Montville rolled his eyes and stepped closer to Charles.
“Bonjour, maître,” Montville greeted him loudly, drowning Jouvancy’s words. Red-faced, portly, and usually in high good humor, Montville was uncharacteristically sober and impatient. Lowering his voice, he said to Charles, “The rector asked me to tell you that he and I have already been to the infirmary, and Père Dainville is much the same.” He looked warningly at Donat, who had edged around his bulk and was staring malevolently at Charles, whom he seemed to dislike this morning even more than usual. “The rector also reminds you,” Montville said in Charles’s ear, “to speak as little as possible of what happened yesterday. The less gossip here about the poor murdered man, the better.” He tilted his head very slightly toward Donat and the stiffly silent Le Boeuf, who was regarding Charles as though he were a column of kitchen expenses that refused to add up correctly. “As the presence of two of our companions here should remind you,” Montville went on, “the less gossip about your involvement with yet another death, the better.”
“But, mon père,” Charles couldn’t help saying, “I’d never seen the man before. I’m hardly ‘involved’ in his death. And it was almost certainly Père Dainville who found him first.”
“Yes, yes, but there are those who won’t bother with that distinction. So remember the rector’s caution, because—” Suddenly realizing that Charles was looking beyond him and no longer listening, Montville frowned and turned sharply.
The scholastic Richaud, who had crept close to Montville to overhear what he said to Charles, skittered backward. In the last several months, Richaud had taken to reporting Charles to the rector for fancied infractions of the rules. Now Charles watched with unconcealed satisfaction as Montville upbraided the other scholastic. But his satisfaction turned to wariness as Donat and Le Boeuf protested against Montville’s “unjust chastising” and took their martyred favorite up the stairs to breakfast.
“And there you have it, Maître du Luc,” Montville murmured, watching in disgust as the trio disappeared into the refectory. “Those three are the heart of at least half the college gossip. And too many of their rumors are aimed at you.” He eyed Charles. “I’m not the only one in authority here with hopes for your future. So heed the rector’s warning. And mine.” Fetching a sigh from the depths of his formidable belly, he made his ponderous way out of the courtyard.
Charles let his breath go and looked around for Damiot. His appetite for breakfast was gone, but he knew that if he didn’t eat, half an hour of classes on the church fathers would make him wish he had. Damiot was talking to another grammar professor, so Charles started toward the refectory door on his own. But Jouvancy suddenly appeared beside him. Charles expected Jouvancy to say more about the ballet, but he didn’t.
“I saw all that,” he said soberly, glancing toward the refectory door. “Don’t let those three worry you. Père Montville and our rector think very well of you. And you know that I do.”
“That’s kind of you, mon père,” Charles said. “I’m grateful.”
“You may not be, when you’ve heard what else I’m going to say to you.” They reached the top of the stairs and Jouvancy drew Charles aside. “I’ll be as quick as I can. So listen. You have much talent, which leads you to put y
our nose where it needn’t go. Or where others don’t want to find it. Oh—I know, I know, don’t bother saying it. You don’t mean to cause trouble. But you do cause it. And why? Because you are good at too many things. That is more often a curse than a blessing. One who is good at too many things tends to think he knows best.”
“I don’t think that,” Charles said hotly. “I only—”
“You ‘only’ think I’m wrong. And that you are right.”
Charles’s face burned and he held his tongue.
“I’m going to tell you a story about Père Dainville when he first came to the Novice House. No, I wasn’t there, of course. But the story has been told to most of us older men. For our own good. Now it’s your turn. When Père Dainville entered the Society, he was not very amenable at first to obeying his superiors.”
Charles could easily believe that, remembering what Dainville had told him about his life before the Novice House.
“After a somewhat turbulent first year of his novitiate,” Jouvancy said, “our Père Dainville began to see the benefits of obedience. Finally, he said to his novice director, “Well, mon père, it is inexpressibly comforting to understand that I, at least, am not God!”
Charles smiled in spite of himself. “Did you make that up for my edification, mon père?”
“It is true, I promise you! And one day in time to come, if I am not much mistaken, you will tell it to some other young man of ours.”
They went into the silent refectory, whose bare floor, walls of snow-white plaster, and high ceiling made it seem colder than the courtyard. Charles took a glass of watered wine from the side table, cut himself slices of bread and cheese, and began to eat. Richaud, Donat, and Le Boeuf, standing together and eating on the other side of the big table, pretended not to notice him. Charles ate quickly and drained his glass. Then he gave thanks; returned the empty glass to the side table; nodded to Damiot, who had just come in; and escaped outside. But two bent, elderly Jesuits were coming slowly up the stairs, and he went back and held the door open for them.