The Whispering of Bones

by Judith Rock

  “I won’t go behind his back. And I’m unlikely to have much further conversation with Monsieur de Corbet. Novices are allowed few visitors.” But in his mind, Charles was seeing the smooth curve of Paul Lunel’s young dead face, seeing Père Dainville lying disfigured and helpless in the infirmary, both lives cut off by someone’s malignant rage. “If I learn something—at the Novice House or here,” he said, “I will tell Père Le Picart. He will tell you. He is not unwilling to help the king’s justice find a killer; he is only unwilling for me to be involved. But that is all I can do.” Charles nodded to La Reynie and started to walk away.

  Behind him, the lieutenant-général said, “Too bad you are not your own man.”

  Charles stopped. Without turning around, he said, “I am the Society’s man. Just as you are the king’s.”

  “So we are two of a kind? Is that what you mean?”

  Finding no answer to that, Charles went back through the thickening dark to the almost equally dark chapel. Maître Henry Wing flinched sideways and squeaked in surprise as Charles knelt beside him. Occasional whispers, the sounds of people walking clumsily as they tried to keep heels from clacking on the floor, and the rustle of cloth marked the coming and going of neighborhood people in the nave. Trying to take comfort from their presence and love for Dainville, Charles bowed his head.

  But what La Reynie had told him refused to be pushed aside. Where had Paul Lunel been for three weeks? Had wherever he’d been and whatever he’d been doing gotten him killed? Charles doubted he’d hear much about Lunel at the Novice House. Gossip was not looked upon kindly in Jesuit houses. Not that that stopped it, but during the novice years, rules were unbending and their observance was scrupulously watched. Rules were certainly not lax later, but in small things, at least, some breadth of interpretation came with time and maturity. Unable to make his mental questions stop, Charles gathered his body to stillness, kept saying the words of the prayers, and waited for his mind to hush. Very slowly, the silence deepened around him, the sounds in the nave fell away, and even his grief was quiet, like a tired animal finally able to sleep. Charles, the Silence said. Nothing is lost. The voice that was not a voice poured through him like balm.

  Then the supper bell rang from the courtyard, someone’s sneeze echoed through the chapel like thunder, a bench scraped on the floor, and the street door began opening and closing repeatedly. People going home to their own supper, Charles realized, shifting his knees on the hard floor. He raised his eyes to the coffin. Nothing is lost, the Silence had said. What, then, of the emptiness death left? What was he to do with that? Unless the emptiness was a fullness he couldn’t see? He let that thought wait in his mind, hoping against hope that there would be an answer. But there was not.

  The thought changed shape like a cloud, and he found himself wondering what Père Dainville would have made of La Reynie saying that he and Charles were “two of a kind.” Charles wasn’t sure what to make of it. He knew that they shared a relentless need to find truth. Both of them had quick tempers, whose sparks quickly died, and neither suffered fools gladly. La Reynie had even offered once to take Charles into the police if he quit the Society of Jesus. But if they were two of a kind, what kind? Whatever the answer to that might be, it changed nothing. Including the fact that this watch beside his beloved confessor’s body would not end until Compline rang, and his knees were already screaming at him.

  Charles bent to bunch his cassock into thicker folds under his knees. As he straightened, a light, high-pitched giggle echoed startlingly around the chapel. Beside Charles, the English scholastic was staring up at the chapel’s second-story-level gallery. Charles narrowed his eyes, trying to see in the dim light. He heard furtive footsteps and then the giggle came again. Something small fell from the gallery’s balustrade and bounced on the stone floor. As Charles got angrily to his feet, the lay brother watching the chapel door hurried up the aisle toward him.

  Others had noticed the sounds, as well, and scattered whispers came from the few people, mostly women, still kneeling in the nave.

  “I can’t leave the door, maître,” the brother said softly when he reached Charles. “Can you go up there? Sounds to me like it’s boys again. They tossed down a prayer book.”

  “I’ll go,” Charles said grimly. “If the little wretches run down the south stairs from the gallery, catch them and hold on to them. I thought we’d put a stop to this nonsense.”

  A month earlier, on the second night of the school term, five twelve-year-olds had decided to prove their bravery by spending the night pretending to be spirits haunting the chapel. Their giggling and running around the gallery had given them away to a Jesuit praying late, and they’d been caught. Four were seriously disciplined, and the fifth, whose idea it had been, had been expelled.

  Now, wearily climbing the south stairs that led up from the nave, Charles wondered who was responsible for this new outbreak. From the pitch of the giggles, these were even younger boys.

  “Come down!” he called as he reached the stairhead. “Have you forgotten that Père Dainville’s body lies here?” Absolute silence fell in the gallery. Then there was a scuffle of feet toward the east end of the gallery over the chancel. “Enough!” Charles strode angrily toward the sound.

  He rounded the gallery’s curve, wishing he’d thought to bring a candle, but sure that he must be nearly on the miscreants. The gallery’s overhang cut off most of the light from the altar candles, but if the boys had escaped to the north aisle stairs, he would have heard them running. As he walked into deeper shadow, his hair prickled on his neck and a tiny whisper of breath sighed behind him. He whirled, but too late. Something hit him like a cast stone, pain ripped through the back of his left shoulder, and he cried out and fell.

  For a few moments, he was aware of nothing but pain and the hot sickening feel of blood running down his back.

  “Maître?” the lay brother called. “Are you all right?”

  Charles’s groan was inarticulate, but it was enough to bring the lay brother pounding up the stairs.

  “What happened?” he cried, bending over Charles. “Bring a candle,” he called over the gallery railing, “Maître du Luc’s hurt! Where are those unblessed boys, maître?”

  “It wasn’t boys,” Charles said faintly.

  Someone came with a candle, and Charles groaned as hands prodded at his back.

  “You’ve been stabbed!” someone said. “You’re bleeding like a pig!”

  The next few minutes were a chaos of questions Charles couldn’t answer. “But did you see the man who stabbed me?” he finally managed to say, looking up.

  Two lay brothers were bending over him now, and a man he recognized as a courtyard proctor was holding a candle. All of them shook their heads.

  Charles breathed deeply against the pain. “The street door,” he said, “who’s watching it?”

  “A proctor’s there,” said the man with the candle.

  “Then the man’s hiding somewhere.” Charles tried to shrug off their hands. “Never mind me, find him!”

  “Maître Wing, come up here and help us search,” one of the brothers called down to the Englishman. “Bring a candle.”

  The brothers heaved Charles to his feet and one of them walked him toward the north stairs, which were on the other side of the altar and nearest to the courtyard door. The other brother called out to Wing to hurry.

  When they reached the foot of the stairs, Charles saw that the women who’d been scattered through the nave praying for Dainville were gathered near the altar, in front of the coffin, and seemed to be arguing with someone.

  “Stop your fussing!” an aggrieved male voice said to them. “I tell you, there’s nothing wrong with him!”

  The voice was Maître Richaud’s, and Charles stopped. “What’s happened there?” he called, but his voice was too weak to carry over the angry voice of a woman still arguing
with Richaud.

  “I’ve told you, I saw no one coming down those stairs,” Maître Louis Richaud’s voice went on. “But I wasn’t looking, was I? I came from the courtyard to put a stop to the unseemly noise in here!” The women parted in haste as he pushed his way through them. When he saw Charles, he stopped, glaring. “I suppose you started this uproar?”

  “No,” Charles said through his teeth, “whoever stabbed me started it. I thought it was boys up there. But—” He caught his breath and leaned heavily against the lay brother.

  Richaud snorted. “If they’re hiding there, they’ll be found.” He frowned. “I heard someone say you’ve been stabbed. Surely you don’t think one of our boys did that.”

  “Enough,” the brother growled at Richaud. “I’m taking Maître du Luc to the infirmary.”

  “There’s another man here who needs help,” the oldest of the women said back. She pointed toward Dainville’s coffin and the women with her moved aside. Beyond their wide skirts, a black shape was huddled on the floor and yet another woman was bent over it.

  Charles’s heart jumped into his throat. “Is it Maître Wing? Did the man stab him, too?”

  “He’s only fainted,” Richaud said derisively. “I found him like that when I got here.”

  “I saw him faint,” the older woman put in. “It was when he”—she nodded at Charles—“cried out—screamed, really—in the gallery.”

  The lay brother started Charles moving again. “Stay with him,” the brother told Richaud. “If he doesn’t come to himself quickly, bring him to the infirmary.”

  “He can come to himself somewhere else,” Richaud snapped. “He can’t stay here in front of the coffin!” With a put-upon sigh, he shooed the women aside, bent over Wing, and shook him impatiently by the shoulder. As the lay brother led Charles out the door, Wing stirred and mumbled behind them.

  CHAPTER 9

  THE FEAST OF ST. SEVERIN OF COLOGNE,

  THURSDAY, OCTOBER 23, 1687

  “There were no students up in the chapel gallery,” Père Le Picart said from his stool beside Charles’s infirmary bed. “All the boarding students were where they should have been. And aside from the fact that I simply cannot believe a student would attack you, no one in the college—either student or Jesuit—has any weapon, you know that. The man who stabbed you surely lured you up there by moving from place to place and giggling and whispering like boys having a prank.”

  Charles, lying on his side to save pressure on his wound, looked up at the rector as best he could. “So the man just wanted to stab whoever came to find the students?” he said skeptically.

  “Maître Wing thinks so,” said Le Picart. “He thinks it’s the same man who killed Paul Lunel and that he’s going about, trying to kill Jesuits. He says that he heard someone running very lightly along the east end of the gallery, above the altar, almost straight above him. He thought the man was making for the north stairs and coming to kill him. That’s why he fainted.”

  “But no one attacked him.”

  “No.” Le Picart was quiet for a moment. “I’ve been told there were only a few people in the chapel, all women. And that you and Maître Wing and the lay brother watching the street door were the only Jesuits in the chapel. Correct?”

  Charles grunted affirmatively.

  “Anyone would know that the man charged with watching the door would be unlikely to leave it to round up a few students. So it would almost certainly be either you or Maître Wing who came upstairs to see to the supposed boys.”

  “But where in God’s name did this man go?” Charles said. “How did he get away unseen? There must be somewhere that wasn’t searched!”

  “We searched everywhere. There was no one in the gallery; no one saw the man in the church. My guess is that he slipped out the north door to the back court and went over the wall by the stables.” The rector smiled slightly. “Unless, of course, he was a demon.”

  “What?”

  “Maître Richaud has been disciplined for putting it about that you were stabbed by a demon. For your sins, he says. Which is illogical of him, since a demon would no doubt be delighted by your sins.”

  Charles, outraged, tried to push himself up on his elbow.

  “I was stabbed by a real man, with a very real knife. What if Maître Wing is right and this attack has to do with our dead almost-novice?”

  “But why would it? Though you found him, you don’t know who killed him. You can’t accuse anyone.”

  “But the man at the foot of the crypt stairs—I saw him. If he was the killer, he may fear I can recognize him. That’s at least possible.”

  “But he was only outlined against the light, you said. You couldn’t see his features. And you said that he stood quietly and made no attempt to avoid you and Père Dainville.”

  Charles started to protest, but Le Picart frowned and put a hand on Charles’s forehead. “Hush now, lie quiet. Mon frère,” he called, “Maître du Luc is somewhat fevered.”

  “I thought he would be.” Frère Brunet put his head around the doorway to his room beyond the infirmary altar. “I’ve been making him a tisane. I’m coming.”

  The rector sat quietly. Charles lay listening to Frère Brunet humming as he finished his mixing, the soothing sounds reminding Charles of his mother brewing medicine when someone in the household fell ill.

  His eyes were closing when another thought jolted him awake.

  “You’ll have to reconsecrate the chapel,” he said anxiously. “Since blood was spilled there. I’m sorry—”

  “Shhh, maître, that’s hardly your fault. You didn’t spill your own blood. Yes, it will have to be blessed again. Meanwhile, we’re using one of the small chapels. It’s crowded, but it will have to do for a short time. Père Dainville’s body has been moved there.”

  Charles sighed and shifted restlessly on the pillow. “Has Frère Brunet told you how long I must stay here?”

  “No, he hasn’t,” Brunet rumbled, coming in from his room with a glass and a thick pottery bowl. “You’re not going anywhere today or tomorrow, that’s certain. The wound isn’t so much—a slice, but not a deep one. The man’s knife was sharp enough, but he didn’t know much about using it.” He put the bowl down on the table. Slipping an arm under Charles’s shoulders, he turned him so that he could drink and held the glass to his lips. “Drink it all, it’s eau de melisse, same as I gave you last night. Good for shock. Other things, too.”

  The sweet lemony taste was comforting and went down easily. “That’s better than some of the things you’ve poured into me, mon frère.”

  “Don’t complain. You’ll drink what I give you and be glad!” He laid Charles down on his side again, put the glass down, and stirred the contents of the bowl. “Turn onto your belly,” he growled. “This is going to hurt.”

  “The wound isn’t his fault, you know,” Le Picart said mildly.

  “It’s the one who did this I’m angry at.”

  Charles yelped as Brunet started peeling the bandage away.

  “Sorry,” Brunet said. “We’ve lost a novice—well, nearly a novice—and now some son of a pig—I’d guess the same son of a pig—has carved up Maître du Luc’s back. Who’s next? And what’s that La Reynie doing about it?”

  “Whatever he can, I assure you. He—Monsieur La Reynie—is furious.”

  “Good.” Brunet poured something warm and fresh-smelling onto Charles’s back, and it bit like a swooping falcon. Charles grunted. Brunet made an exasperated sound and stood up. “I forgot the fresh bandage. Don’t move.” He hurried into the room beyond the altar.

  When he was gone, Le Picart said quietly to Charles, “Monsieur La Reynie is furious about the attack, but he’s even more furious because the man attacked you.”

  “He said that?” Charles mumbled into the pillow.

  “No. He said that he was going to Fo
ntainebleau.” The rector’s tone was dark with disapproval.

  Before Charles could ask why La Reynie had gone to the palace where the king spent the hunting season, Brunet came back with a length of folded linen. He wrapped it briskly around Charles’s back and chest and over his shoulder. Charles, gritting his teeth against the pain of being moved, suddenly wished that everyone would go away and stop talking to him. His head hurt and the light was too bright and everything suddenly seemed much too complicated to think about.

  “There.” Brunet laid Charles down again on his right side and put a hand on his patient’s forehead. “Oh, dear. You’re getting hotter. I think I’d better . . .”

  Charles’s eyes closed and the rest of the sentence melted into a dream in which La Reynie was dragging him painfully down the crypt stairs, asking why he’d let the demon hide so many bodies.

  The rest of Thursday and Friday passed in intermittent shivering and sweating, and a confusion of dreaming and waking. Then bells were ringing, the infirmary was dark, and Charles was listening to the bells’ clamor and trying to figure out what day it was. The burning in his back and shoulder had lessened and he was blessedly cool. He was drifting away from trying to think and back into sleep when a big hand enveloped his forehead. He grunted in surprise and tried to twist away.