The Whispering of Bones

by Judith Rock

  “Of course justice should be done. And will be done by Lieutenant-Général La Reynie and his police. Not by you.”

  “Because of what Père Donat and Père Le Boeuf and Maître Richaud might do and say,” Charles said flatly.

  “Have you understood nothing? Hold your tongue and listen to me! Out of all of this last year’s reports I sent to the head of our Paris Province about my men at Louis le Grand, the Provincial singled out yours for particular attention and concern. That is not a compliment, should you be so foolish as to think so. He does think, as I do—most of the time—that you have a promising future. He also thinks—as I know to my cost—that I allow you to overstep your bounds. He wants no more special privileges given to you. For the good of the Society’s reputation and your future as a Jesuit. And for the good of mine as rector.”

  “I see,” Charles said, chastened. “May I speak further?”

  “If by ‘speak’ you mean ‘argue,’ the answer is no.” The rector sighed and rubbed his face. “By our rules, you have the right to question an order, if you think obeying it would be an occasion for sin. About that, you may speak.”

  “Forgive me, mon père—and I do not ask your forgiveness as a matter of form. Of course you are not ordering me to sin. But if God has given me some degree of skill at helping to bring about justice, and I do not use that skill, is that not sin?”

  “Perhaps. And so is clever theological argument to get what one wants.”

  “True. But this killer has not only taken a life, he is responsible for what has happened to Père Dainville. And Père Dainville may die.”

  “Père Dainville is old and fragile. What happened to him might well have happened anyway. What you want is vengeance, maître, and that belongs only to God.”

  “I want justice, mon père.”

  The gray gaze darkened. “You want your own will. Is this how you would repay Père Dainville for his efforts to help you grow as a Jesuit? To help you grow in Jesuit obedience? To help you subdue your noble pride?” He smiled bleakly at Charles’s sharp intake of breath. “Oh, don’t look so surprised, maître, it shows itself, believe me. Are you still so arrogant as to think that only you are capable of bringing about justice?”

  Charles bit his tongue and forced his gaze to the floor. “I hope not, mon père.”

  “Then remember what you have chosen. Remember what you hope to be.”

  Charles held himself very still. That was the nearest thing to a threat he’d ever heard from Le Picart, and it was about the priesthood he so deeply wanted. “Yes, mon père,” he said, to give himself time to think.

  “Very well.” Le Picart strode to the office door. “We understand each other,” he said, as he opened it. “And now we have both missed a good part of dinner. Come, we’ll go and beg from the kitchen.”

  Staying in the rector’s presence after what had been said was not what Charles wanted, but he dutifully followed him out to the courtyard. As they turned toward the fathers’ court, Frère Martin hurried breathlessly from the street passage.

  “Mon père! I thought you were at dinner. There’s a message for you!”

  As Le Picart went to meet the porter, Charles waited where he was, but he could still hear what was said.

  “It’s that girl from The Dog,” Martin said. “Marguerite? No. Rose, was it? I can’t—”

  The rector said impatiently, “Do you mean Mademoiselle Rose Ebrard?”

  “That’s it!” Martin sighed with relief. “I knew it was a flower. The girl from the bookshop. She’s at the postern door, asking if you can see her at five o’clock instead of four.”

  “Tell her that will do. Get someone to bring her to my office when she arrives, and ask Père Montville to act as my companion while I see her.”

  “Yes, mon père.” Martin bowed and hurried back toward the postern and the girl with the flower name.

  The rector came back to Charles and said, as they started walking again, “If you want to come with me to the infirmary and see Père Dainville before you go to your afternoon duties, you may.”

  Charles nodded, surprised. “Thank you, mon père.”

  In the fathers’ courtyard, they went past the refectory to the open door of the hot, busy kitchen beside it. Le Picart put his head in.

  “Forgive me, mes frères, but two of us are very late for our dinner. Can you give us something here in the kitchen?”

  A brother looked up from a bubbling cauldron at the hearth and wiped sweat from his eyes. “Of course we’ll feed you, mon père.” He hurried across the stone floor, mopping at his face with his cassock sleeve. “No need to eat in here, go and sit, we’ll bring your dinner.”

  In the crowded refectory, the midday meal was ending with small tarts that smelled of apples and cinnamon, and a middle-aged Jesuit was standing at the small lectern, reading from the life of St. Geneviève as the others listened silently. The rector’s appearance brought everyone to their feet and silenced the reader, but Le Picart shook his head.

  “I beg you, go on as you were. Business has made me very late.”

  He sat down in his usual place and gestured Charles to the table where the other theology scholastics were sitting. Charles had always been glad that worldly, family rank had no importance in a Jesuit house. However, as he went now to his table, he was glad that rank within the Society mattered enough to save him from eating in tense silence beside the rector, after the talk they’d just had. He sat down, nodding to the other scholastics. Most of them smiled vaguely and went on with their dessert, but the oldest of the group, Maître Placide Du Pont, looked at Richaud’s empty chair and then questioningly at Charles. Du Pont, from Paris, was firm, unfailingly gentle, older than the others—older even than Charles—and had taken on the mild authority of the senior scholastic. In answer to the silent question about Richaud, Charles put his hands together as though praying. Du Pont shrugged slightly and took another tart from the dish. A kitchen brother brought leek soup, and Charles said a short silent grace and ate as quickly as he decently could, only half listening to St. Geneviève. As he ate, he considered what had happened in the rector’s office. He’d seen a side of Le Picart he’d rarely met before. Not that the rector had been unfair. His concern for Charles’s future was as real as his concern for his own position, that was clear. But Charles recognized immovable decision from which there was no appeal. He knew that if he went on protesting, or acted against the order he’d been given, he would in sober fact seriously endanger his Jesuit future. He sighed and nearly choked himself on his soup. As his coughing stopped, the scholastic beside him sighed, too, and looked sadly at his glass of watered wine.

  The round-faced young man leaned toward Charles and whispered, “Isn’t there ever any beer?”

  “Shhh.” Charles shook his head and tried not to laugh. The speaker was Maître Henry Wing, an Englishman and a late arrival from the Jesuit college of St. Omer on the Atlantic coast. St. Omer was small and poor and often sent its scholastics to Paris for their theology study. Since it was just across the channel from England, which allowed no Jesuit schools, many of its scholastics were English. This latest arrival—pudgy, pink, and fair, with peculiarly accented Latin—was very English.

  The kitchen brother returned, snatched the soup dish, and put roast chicken with apples in front of Charles. The reader droned on about St. Geneviève saving Paris from the Vikings. The six other scholastics watched Charles like a circle of waiting vultures, silently willing him to eat quickly. No one could leave the table until the final grace was said, which would not happen until everyone in the room had finished. Charles kept his eyes on his plate and worked his way through his dinner. Finally, the reader finished, Le Picart and everyone else stood, and the rector said the final grace.

  When the scholastics were outside, they made their way without consultation to their common room in the main building, where their living
chambers were, for the midday hour of quiet recreation. The Englishman started to take the chessboard from the cupboard, but Du Pont smiled and shook his head.

  “No,” he said, “not chess just now. I have been thinking that we should finish the talk we were having yesterday at recreation. About women.”

  The scholastics settled themselves willingly enough on the room’s hard chairs.

  Maître Henry Wing spoke first, in his accented Latin. “Well, the last thing I said yesterday was that surely God made women, too.”

  Maître Owen Rhys, a red-haired Welshman also from St. Omer, whose Latin was even odder than the Englishman’s, said, “Ye-e-es. He did. But only as an afterthought. Adam was first. So women are less important than men.”

  “And so the Mother of God is less important than you are? Because you have the—um—dangly parts?” Maître Jean Montrose, from the part of France called Auvergne, was built like a cart horse and argued like St. Thomas.

  The Welshman bristled, but Du Pont intervened. “Aren’t we getting away from the question? The question that began our talk yesterday was how much time we should give to women penitents when we are priests.”

  “We should give women as much time as we give men,” Charles said. “Or more, if more women ask our assistance. It would depend on one’s assignment, would it not?”

  “More time for women?” Richaud said from the doorway. “More?”

  “You are late joining us, maître,” Du Pont said mildly.

  Ignoring that, Richaud sat down in the empty chair and drew his skirts close around him. His nostrils were pinched as though he smelled a woman at the table. “But you would want more time for women, wouldn’t you, Maître du Luc? You like women. Perhaps too well. We’re celibates—aren’t we?” The question’s questioning cadence hung in the air, and Richaud folded his hands in his lap with an air of satisfaction.

  Charles gazed with distaste at Richaud’s dirty fingernails, wondering why no one ever made him clean them. “Isn’t hearing confessions and directing penitents part of the duty of a priest?” he said. “Both men and women confess and are penitents. When a Jesuit priest hears a woman’s confession, there is always another Jesuit nearby, watching without hearing what’s said. Where’s the difficulty?”

  Richaud licked his thin lips. “There should be another Jesuit nearby when one speaks at all with a woman. But there isn’t always. Is there, Maître du Luc?”

  “Life,” Charles said lightly, “sometimes overtakes rules. Even our Lord told his disciples to harvest grain on the sabbath if they were hungry. Think on this, Maître Richaud. Are we supposed to hate half of God’s human souls because we’re celibate? Are we supposed to hate our Lord’s mother?”

  Wing slipped a fragment of tart crust, purloined from the refectory table, into his mouth and nodded enthusiastically. “Well argued, Maître du Luc!” he cried, spraying crumbs.

  Du Pont sighed. “You are not to take anything from the refectory, Maître Wing. You are a scholastic, not a novice. You should know that.”

  Wing’s pink face flamed. “Oh. Yes. I should. I mean—I do. But I’m always hungry,” he said plaintively. “Because there’s never any beer. Beer is very filling.”

  The others exchanged hopeless glances.

  Montrose, the Auvergnat, brushed Wing’s crumbs from his sleeve and said, “Returning to the point, I agree with Maître du Luc. The Society of Jesus exists to help souls. Not male souls. Souls.”

  Charles smiled at him. “So souls are male and female?”

  “While they companion our earthly bodies, one might say so.”

  “But—to start a different question—that makes them sound as distinct from the body as my body is from my cassock,” Charles said. “Saint Thomas said that the soul is what makes the body alive. Which means that if the soul becomes separate from the body, the result is death.”

  Maître Du Pont said, “But what about—” He turned sharply as the common room door flew open and banged against the wall. All of them stared at the young lay brother who stood there trying to catch his breath.

  “Maître du Luc?” The brother looked uncertainly around the circle of scholastics.

  Charles stood up. “What is it?”

  “Frère Brunet says you are to come immediately.”

  Charles’s heart contracted. “Père Dainville?”

  “Yes, maître.”

  The lay brother barely had time to jump back from the threshold before Charles was in the passageway and running for the stairs.

  CHAPTER 7

  Charles reached the infirmary just behind Père Le Picart. Père Montville was at the foot of Père Dainville’s bed, wearing his stole and laying out what he needed to give the last rites. Frère Brunet rushed down the row of beds to meet the rector.

  “I thought he was better, mon père, truly I did! He was awake and knew me this morning, he even ate a little. So I sent the father sitting with him to eat something, and then I was busy upstairs in the students’ infirmary and then in my room making a new tisane—”

  “There’s no blame to you, you were only doing what was necessary. Tell me what happened to him.”

  Brunet pulled himself together. “He went on much the same, but then I went upstairs again to see that dinner had come for my two patients up there. And when I came down, Père Dainville’s poor face was twisted like a knot and I couldn’t wake him. His breathing went on sinking and”—he held out both meaty hands in a gesture of defeat—“I sent for Père Montville and you.”

  They went to Pere Dainville’s bedside, and Montville waited for the three of them to kneel. The rough gray blanket hardly rose and fell on Dainville’s chest, and his face was pulled so far to the right that Charles hoped he was gone beyond feeling pain. Then Montville began the sacrament that would send the old priest anointed and shriven to the God he had served so well and so long. Charles joined in the prayers and responses, tasting his tears and wishing there were some sacrament for those who were losing Dainville and would have to go on without him.

  The prayers ended and silence fell in the long room. A bar of afternoon sun had reached Dainville’s bed and lay across his pale, ruined face. Charles put a hand on the blanket, as though touching it could give the old man strength for the work of dying, and also give himself some last comfort. The blanket’s rise and fall grew smaller, the stillness after each breath grew longer, and when the stripe of sunlight had moved beyond the old face, there was only stillness.

  Charles felt Le Picart stand up beside him and forced himself to his feet.

  “Maître.” Le Picart waited until Charles had wiped his face with his sleeve. “When the lay brothers have made Père Dainville ready, I would like you to take the first watch beside his body in the chapel.”

  “Yes, mon père,” Charles said, surprised and grateful. “Thank you.” He breathed deeply to steady himself. “What will happen now? Where will he be buried?”

  “Not here. We’ve never had much room for a graveyard. He’ll be buried in our church of Saint Louis. Do you have a theology class this afternoon?”

  Charles shook his head.

  “If you wish, you may go to the chapel for a while now. Your watch will begin at Vespers.”

  Charles bowed his thanks and looked for the last time at Dainville, whose twisted face seemed already relaxing into peace. Charles forced himself down the infirmary aisle and out into the garden. He looked blankly at the few autumn flowers and dying herbs, the familiar roofline and walls, and felt as though he’d never seen any of it before. But that’s what happens, he told himself. He remembered going outside at home the night his father died. He’d looked at the stone house where he was born, the barn where the wine press stood, the vineyard spreading up the hill, the deep starlit sky, and for the first time in his life, none of it had welcomed him. Because the small, bald, irascible and earnest man who’d begotten him w
as gone from the earth. He hadn’t expected Dainville’s death to leave him as lost. Though Dainville knew more about him than his father had, much more about his wrestling in the dark depths of himself.

  Perhaps cousin Charles-François is right, said the familiar, often acid voice that lived in his head. You’re a Jesuit because you can’t get over needing fathers. Someone to tell you what to do . . .

  Shut up, damn you! Charles strode out of the infirmary court toward the chapel. As he crossed the Cour d’honneur, the college bell began to toll seventy-nine slow strokes, for the years of Père Dainville’s life. Afternoon classes had just started, and the main court was mostly empty, but the proctors and a few others stopped as the bell tolled, praying briefly and crossing themselves. Père Joseph Jouvancy, the rhetoric professor whose assistant Charles had been, appeared in one of the rhetoric classroom’s long windows and called out to him.

  “Is it Père Dainville, maître?”

  Charles nodded, and Jouvancy crossed himself and turned to tell his students. Wishing he could turn back the year and be there helping in the rhetoric classroom, with Dainville alive and at work somewhere in the college on an ordinary afternoon, Charles went into the chapel and knelt at the side altar dedicated to the Virgin Mary. The rue St. Jacques door opened and closed, quiet footsteps crossed the floor, and cloth rustled. Looking over his shoulder, Charles saw that neighborhood people were already coming in response to the bell. Prayers for Dainville had been asked at Mass, and now those who had known him were coming to honor his life and pray for his soul.

  But Charles found it almost impossible to pray. He was grieving, but he was also shaking with anger. He was certain that Dainville had died because of how he’d come across the murdered young man—had been as good as murdered himself. That murderer had so far gone free, and it was clear that Le Picart was not going to let him do anything to find the man. He gripped the rail in front of him and looked up at the carved and painted Mary. Regal as a queen, she held her baby in the curve of her arm while the baby held a golden ball, symbol of the world, in the hollow of his plump hand. Charles told himself that if there was room for all the world in that small hand, there was room in his prayers for anger as well as grief. But try as he would, he could not form the anger into prayer. It stayed in his gut, burning like a torch.