The Whispering of Bones

by Judith Rock

  They talked about language the rest of the way to the Novice House. They were very nearly late, but Père Quellier had heard about the attack on Charles and didn’t seem to mind. He asked Charles politely if he was well and then plunged into the session. Wing proved a much more congenial fellow student than Richaud had been, and Charles felt a new respect for the round little Englishman’s mind. He was outwardly timid—though sometimes as blunt as a child—but he was sure of himself in debate and bold in his thinking and questioning. Charles could see that Père Quellier was pleased with his new pupil. When they stood to take their leave, the priest clapped Wing approvingly on the shoulder before turning to Charles with questions about the attack in the chapel and about Richaud.

  “We heard about the attack on you almost at once. And then Maître Wing and poor Maître Richaud said more about it on Friday. And now Maître Richaud is gone.” Charles noticed that Quellier didn’t say dead. “I thank God,” Quellier continued, “that you are recovering so well. But many in this house are wondering if the man who attacked you was the same man who killed our poor Paul Lunel. And if the same man has abducted and apparently killed Maître Richaud.”

  “Why do you say ‘apparently’?” Wing asked him.

  “Because,” Quellier said, turning a professorial eye on Wing, “his cassock and rosary were found, but so far as I know, his body has not been. You must always examine the logic of your assumptions.”

  Charles was thinking about Paul Lunel. “Père Quellier, many of us—many Jesuits—are thinking that Monsieur Paul Lunel’s murder, and the attack on me, and Maître Richaud’s disappearance have happened because we are—or almost were—Jesuits. If I may ask, have you ever heard anything about Monsieur Lunel or his family that might make someone want him dead for reasons that have nothing to do with the Society of Jesus?”

  Quellier frowned, considering Charles’s question. “No, I don’t think so. His father, who died last spring, was a judge in the Parlement of Paris. He had great respect for the Society, but his widow does not. The family town house is in the rue Jean Tison across the river, near Saint Germain-l’Auxerrois.” He looked thoughtfully at Charles. “What about Maître Richaud? Is his family from Paris?”

  “I believe so. But I don’t know for certain.”

  “Well, I will continue to pray that he is alive and will return to Louis le Grand.”

  With remonstrances to keep their wits about them on the way home, Quellier opened the study door. “Oh, Maître Wing,” he said, as they went out, “you are to come on Tuesday morning to make up the Saint Augustine sessions that Maître du Luc and Maître Richaud attended before you joined us. And we will have to find a time for you also, Maître du Luc, to make up what you missed during your recovery.”

  The scholastics went down the stairs to the long gallery. As they passed its tall windows, Charles looked out at the garden, hoping to catch a glimpse of Amaury de Corbet. But the young men walking and murmuring to themselves as they memorized passages from their studies were too alike in their cassocks and hats to be recognized from a distance. A lay brother let them out into the street. As he started to close the door, a black-coated boy of thirteen or so dove between Charles and Wing and slipped inside like an eel. The door banged shut on the lay brother’s sharp admonishment and the boy’s indignant protest.

  “I wonder who that was?” the Englishman said, looking at the door.

  “One of the young lay servants,” Charles said. “Didn’t you have them at your novitiate? They’re poor boys hired for menial tasks, who get lodging and food and some teaching in return.” He looked back over his shoulder, wondering suddenly if the boy could be the one La Reynie had mentioned, the son of one of his servants.

  “Oh. Yes, we had them at my Novice House, I’d forgotten.” He looked happily up at Charles. “That was a very good class, didn’t you think?”

  Charles agreed, and they started down the dusty rue du Pot-de-Fer, unpaved beneath the trees leaning over high garden walls. Two small boys with feathers in their hats passed on sedate ponies, a groom walking between them and keeping a firm hand on the reins. A cart full of rosy bricks trundled by on its way to a building site, and several servants were coming back from the nearby market with full baskets. At the mouth of a narrow lane between tall stone houses, barking dogs, a girl’s distressed voice, and raucous male laughter made Charles and Wing stop and look down the lane toward the noise. A slender woman in a black and green gown was backing away from two men in workmen’s rough woven coats and breeches, who were closing on her with taunts and grins. From behind a garden wall, a small dog was barking hysterically at the voices.

  “Leave her alone!” Charles strode down the lane, leaving Wing standing in the street and begging him to come back.

  Charles managed to get between one of the men and his quarry, but the other had the girl by the wrist. As she cursed and tried to pull away, her thick green scarf fell away from her dark hair, and Charles saw her face and recognized Mlle Rose Ebrard. The man he’d thwarted ran at him, and Charles shifted slightly and stuck out a foot. The man fell flat, the breath knocked out of him.

  “Leave her, I said!” Charles thundered at the second man and drew himself to his six feet and more, feeling how tired he was and how sore his back still was, and praying that his size would be intimidation enough and he wouldn’t have to grapple further with either of his opponents. To his relief, the man holding the girl let her go. Then he helped his fellow up, cursing Jesuits in general and Charles’s private parts in particular.

  Charles drew the girl away and hurried her back to the street, hoping he could finish this heroic little rescue without falling on his face from exhaustion. But even more, he wondered what Mlle Ebrard had been doing alone in the lane.

  “Are you all right, mademoiselle?” Charles said, halting to catch his breath as they reached Wing. “Walking down a narrow deserted way like that is unwise for a woman out alone in Paris. Unwise even for a man, at night.”

  Rose Ebrard readjusted her scarf in silence. She seemed embarrassed, and as wary of the two Jesuits as of the men who’d accosted her. Charles wondered again what she’d been doing. Surely she wasn’t afraid of him and Wing, especially with Wing fussing like a nurse with a nursling.

  “Oh, mademoiselle, you must have been so frightened!” the Englishman said, hovering close but not daring to touch her. “I thank the Blessed Virgin you’re safe. I always tell my sisters she won’t forsake them, and it’s true! Here, lean on me,” he begged, in a sudden burst of daring. “I’ll explain to my superiors.”

  “For the bon Dieu’s sake, stop fussing!” she said, waving him away.

  Wing’s face fell. “Oh. Was I? I’m sorry.” He gazed wistfully at her. “Forgive me, mademoiselle, I always think people are as frightened as I would be.”

  “Never mind.” With an obvious effort, she smiled at him. “You’re right, I was frightened.” She glanced gravely at Charles and he saw that she meant it. “Thank you both for helping me.”

  “Where were you going?” Charles asked.

  “Where? Oh, I thought the lane was a shortcut. To the market.”

  “That lane’s a dead end. The nearest market’s back the other way. Toward the Foire Saint Germain, where the roads come together.”

  “Is it?” She shrugged at him. “I seem to have lost myself, then. But I’m new here, I still don’t know where things are.”

  “So am I, mademoiselle,” Wing said. “I find Paris most confusing.”

  “It is, isn’t it? Well, since I’ve missed my way to the market, I should go home now. May I walk back with you? If you’re going back to the rue Saint Jacques, that is.”

  “Of course you may,” Wing said eagerly, and the three began walking slowly toward the rue de Vaugirard, Mlle Ebrard in the middle.

  Glad for his hat brim shading his face, Charles eyed her empty market basket. “But won’t
your aunt scold you for not bringing back whatever it is you were going to buy? Of course, there’s a much closer market on the rue Saint Jacques by the old wall. Just steps from The Dog.”

  “Oh, yes, I know.” Her blue-purple eyes were wide and guileless. “But my aunt wanted needles. She said the best needles are at the Saint Germain market.”

  “I see,” Charles said. “Are you sure you don’t need to go and find them?” Needles, he was thinking. A quick-witted choice of something a pair of celibate men might know nothing about. But Jesuits learned to mend small tears in their clothing when they were novices, and Charles knew that it was the needles at the market by the old St. Jacques gate, not the St. Germain market, that were some of the best in Paris.

  “Your aunt should send a maid with you,” Wing was telling her earnestly. “At home, my mother would never let my sisters go out alone when we went to York.”

  “My aunt is not rich. She has few servants. I think the book business is not doing as well as it was when my uncle was alive.”

  “Which reminds me, we want to stop at The Dog and buy a book,” Charles said. “A small help, but a little something.”

  “You’ll be welcome, maître.” She looked ahead of them. “That’s the rue de Vaugirard we’re coming to, isn’t it?” Her voice took on a mocking tone. “Since it’s a busier street, shall I walk meekly aside? Or behind you? Otherwise, it may look like the two of you are wandering the streets with a woman.”

  Charles wondered at the sudden bitterness of her words. “We aren’t required to shun women, you know.”

  “I know. Forgive me.” She sighed and her long black lashes veiled her eyes. Then she looked up at him. “How often do you come to the Novice House? Do you go to visit someone there?”

  “We go on Wednesdays and Fridays, mademoiselle,” Wing said, eager to offer her something she would like, even a mundane answer to her question. “Not to visit, to study Saint Augustine.”

  “How did you know we were at the Novice House, mademoiselle?” Charles said absently, feigning absorption in watching three men throwing dice.

  Her eyes flashed at him blue and sudden as a kingfisher. “Someone told me the Novice House was there. So I just assumed that’s where you’d been.” She turned to Wing. “Saint Augustine is the one who prayed for chastity, is he not?” she said, smiling into his eyes.

  Wing gulped and blushed to the roots of his fair hair.

  Charles bit his lip to hide his grin and keep from further embarrassing the Englishman. “Why do you ask about that prayer in particular?” he said mildly. “Does it seem to you a bad idea?”

  “That depends on who is praying.”

  “But, mademoiselle,” Wing said, “should we not all—” He yelped and skipped nimbly aside as two dogs in his path began quarreling over a bone.

  “No,” Mlle Ebrard said tartly, as though he’d finished his sentence, “Not all of us should.”

  Wing stared at her in confusion.

  “Chastity is not the same as celibacy, you know, mademoiselle,” Charles said.

  “True.” She blushed and walked faster.

  Charles’s questions were multiplying with every word she said. Matching her pace, he asked mildly, “Did you see that boy who just made it to the Novice House door as we came out? He nearly knocked us over.”

  “What’s that you say? This traffic is making it hard to hear, I think.” She made a business of shifting her empty basket to her other arm and walked a little faster.

  The rue de Vaugirard was indeed full of noise. Peasants walking and driving two-wheeled farm carts were on their slow, tired way back to their villages after bringing goods to market before dawn. A religious procession in honor of St. Follian, whose day it was, made its way toward the city gate, the saint bucking on his canopied platform as the chanting clergy who carried him tried to avoid puddles and dung. Charles and his companions crossed themselves as the procession passed, then jumped back against a wall as two young riders turned out of a side street and galloped through the congestion, using their riding whips to clear a path. The priests stopped chanting and bellowed heaven’s curses after them.

  “Saint Follian?” Wing said doubtfully, when procession and pedestrians had sorted themselves out. “I don’t think we have him in England.”

  “All I remember about him,” Charles said, “is that robbers killed him and he lay unfound for months. Why that made him a saint, I don’t know.”

  “That’s like poor Maître Richaud,” Wing said. “Since someone must have waylaid him.”

  “I doubt our Maître Richaud will be made a saint for it,” Charles responded, watching Mlle Ebrard, who was walking ahead of them now, as straight-backed as a soldier. The servant boy he’d asked her about had come running from the rue du Pot-de-Fer, the road in front of the Novice House. The dead-end lane where they’d found her was only steps from the Novice House, and the rue du Pot-de-Fer was the only way into that lane. When Charles had asked her about the running servant boy, she’d avoided his question, but he was willing to bet that she’d not only seen the boy, she’d seen him and Wing come out of the Novice House, and that she’d turned down the lane to avoid them.

  Post hoc was not propter hoc—one thing coming immediately after another didn’t mean that the two things were connected. But it also didn’t mean that they weren’t. But if they were, what had she been doing on the road in front of the Novice House? And why would she try to avoid him and Wing?

  CHAPTER 12

  When they reached The Dog, Mlle Rose Ebrard stopped. “Do you still want to come in and buy your book?”

  Charles looked at Wing, who nodded eagerly, and the three of them crossed the rue St. Jacques to the bookshop. As they mounted the few steps to the open door, they were assailed by what sounded like a score of small tapping hammers, a landslide of small rocks, and a woman’s exasperated cries.

  “You cursed little pigs! Now look what you’ve done!”

  “Oh, Blessed Virgin, not again.” Mlle Ebrard cast her eyes up and ran to the foot of a narrow staircase at the back of the shop.

  The sound of little hammers grew louder as two brown and white goats clattered down the stairs and slipped past her. A half dozen more followed and fanned out in the shop, nibbling at paper and books and customers’ coat skirts. A furious woman flew down the stairs after them, black ribbons flying from her headdress and her skirts gathered recklessly high. With a shriek, she caught one of the goats by its scruff.

  “Give me that, you little devil!”

  Charles saw that the goat had torn a page from a book dropped by a startled customer. Shaking the goat, the woman pulled at the paper until the goat swallowed it and bit her. She shrieked and let go her hold, and the goat ran out of the shop, bleating indignantly. As she stood huffing and nursing her finger, a tattered elderly woman appeared on the stairs, white hair flying around her coif as she brandished a stout stick.

  “Leave my beauties be, you old plague!” The goatherd thumped down the stairs and started gathering the rest of her herd.

  Charles and Wing, along with two other customers who had prudently gathered their coat skirts close, stayed where they were against the walls. Two small goats, one white and one piebald, came to examine the Jesuits. One nibbled at Wing’s cassock and the other, with something already in its mouth, stretched its neck toward Charles. He rescued the appalled Wing from the white goat’s attentions and was gently pushing away the one delicately tasting his own skirts, when the goatherd reached them and smacked the piebald goat smartly on its rump. Startled, it dropped what was already in its mouth and leaped to join its fellows at the shop doorway.

  Charles picked up what the goat had dropped and saw that it was a piece of cheap brown leather. Part of a book cover, he realized, seeing letters stamped on the leather. Cabine was all that was readable. He looked thoughtfully at the stairs. The goats had been upstairs, a
nd booksellers often kept their more questionable stock—pornography, usually—on the floor above the open shop. He looked at the other two customers, wondering if they’d been up there before he came in. One of them had gone back to browsing the tables, but the other was unhappily examining his coat front. Mlle Ebrard was listening resignedly to her scolding aunt. The older woman stalked back up the stairs and the girl started toward Charles, but was stopped by the customer frowning at his coat, who complained loudly that a goat had eaten one of his buttons. Charles quickly slipped the torn piece of book cover into the breast of his cassock in case it had come from upstairs. No reason to embarrass the girl. What her aunt sold wasn’t her fault.

  Wing sidled closer to Charles. “Why were those goats in here, maître?”

  “Ah. Right. You said you grew up in the country.”

  “Yes. We didn’t have goats. We had cows. But not in the house. And certainly not upstairs!”

  “The goatherd was delivering milk to the bookstore owner, who lives upstairs.”

  Mlle Ebrard, who had joined them and heard what Charles said, burst out laughing. “Goats like to climb, Maître Wing. Which means that city people who want fresh goat’s milk can get it easily, without going down and up the stairs themselves. They call out from a window and the goatherd drives the goats upstairs, milks one, and drives them down again. My aunt—Madame Cheyne—uses goat’s milk on her face, she thinks it’s good for her complexion.” She cast a dark look at the stairs. “But it’s not. Now, what book did you want?”

  “Monsieur Hindret’s new book on French pronunciation,” Charles said.

  She went to a table against the wall, sorted through the scatter of books on it, and brought back a small, cheaply bound volume. Wing dug coins from his nearly empty travel purse, she gave him the book, and he and Charles took their leave. At the door, a pair of men coming in shoved their way rudely past the two Jesuits. Wing protested, but Charles hushed him and watched the men go straight to the stairs.