The Whispering of Bones

by Judith Rock

  As Charles put the stool down where he’d been standing, he saw that Paradis was frowning and turning the scrap of leather over in his hands. Then he looked hard at Charles, with no spark of friendliness in his face.

  “Where did you get this?”

  “I picked it up from the floor of a bookshop up the street. Maître Wing bought a book, mon père,” he said to Le Picart, “on our way back from the Novice House.”

  Paradis said, “This was just lying on the floor?”

  Charles told him about the goats. “I put that little piece into my cassock to throw away. I thought it might be from the cover of something illicit being sold upstairs, since that’s where the goat had obviously gotten it.” He looked at Le Picart. “I thought that if Mademoiselle Ebrard saw it, she might be embarrassed. She’s newly come there to live with her aunt, who owns the shop,” he explained to Paradis. “It’s not her fault if her aunt is selling pornography upstairs, which I suspect that she is.”

  Paradis had handed the piece of leather to Le Picart. The rector examined it and handed it back, seeming as mystified as Charles was by the visitor’s sudden change of mood.

  “Pornography?” Paradis laughed harshly. “Yes, I suppose you could call it that.”

  “But what is it?” Le Picart demanded.

  “I will take it with me and compare it, to be sure. But I am already fairly sure that it is from the cover of a recent edition of the Monita Secreta.”

  Charles and Le Picart looked at the little fragment in Paradis’s hand as though it were a scorpion. The Monita Secreta—Secret Instructions—had long been banned in France. Written in Latin at the beginning of the century, by a dismissed Polish Jesuit furious at the Society of Jesus, it was the origin of many of the falsehoods about Jesuits. It had been declared a forgery almost at once, by non-Jesuit as well as Jesuit scholars, but the poisonous thing had gone through dozens of editions all over Europe and was accepted by many as absolute proof that the Society of Jesus was plotting to rule the world.

  “But how can you tell that this is part of a Monita cover?” Le Picart said. “It only says Cabine.”

  “The Provincial’s office keeps track of editions. I think this is from a recent edition—it’s the same leather, the same color and method of curing, the same lettering. The Monita’s title is sometimes changed. I think this scrap of leather came from an edition called Le Cabinet jesuitique, written in French and printed in Cologne in 1678.” He looked at Charles. “What’s the name of the shop where you found this?”

  “The Saint’s Dog,” Charles said sadly. “It’s just up the rue Saint Jacques.” He was thinking of Mlle Ebrard. If her aunt was secretly selling The Jesuit Cabinet upstairs to improve the bookshop’s fortunes, both women were facing serious trouble.

  CHAPTER 13

  THE FEAST OF ALL SOULS, SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 1687

  Charles spent all of the next day, Saturday, waiting for a summons from La Reynie in the gaps between the festival Mass for the Feast of All Saints, the additional special Mass offered for Maître Louis Richaud that he might yet be found safe and unharmed, and trying to read St. Thomas in his chamber. But no word came from La Reynie and Charles ended the day feeling edgy and deflated.

  On Sunday, as he shivered in the thin sunshine on a bench in the deserted Cour d’honneur, an unread book in his lap, the back of his neck prickled coldly—the sign that someone was too close behind him. He jumped to his feet and turned, arms up to defend himself. Lieutenant-Général La Reynie stood there, his mouth open in surprise and his silver-headed stick half-raised to fend Charles off.

  “I’ve told you, don’t come up behind me like that!” Charles said. “Ever since the army, people coming too close make me want to strike first and question later.”

  “If you were armed, I’d take that very seriously.”

  “Bear in mind that an ex-soldier doesn’t need a weapon to do you serious harm,” Charles shot back. La Reynie blinked in surprise. “Sometimes,” Charles muttered, picking up the book he’d dropped, “I fear I really will strike out at someone before I realize there’s no threat.”

  “I’ll bear that in mind. Meanwhile, I hear you’ve been ordered to help me, after all.”

  “You hear?” Charles said wryly. “I think you heard that news at Fontainebleu.”

  A slow smile spread over the lieutenant-général’s face. “I had good ‘hunting’ there this autumn.”

  “And I was the quarry.”

  “Quite a nice ‘bag,’ if I may say so.”

  Charles gave up and smiled back. “Why do I always lose these sparring contests?”

  “Because they’re with me.” La Reynie jerked his head toward the street. “Come. My carriage is waiting.”

  “My orders don’t include simply roaming over Paris with you.”

  “They do include helping me with questions where Jesuits are concerned. So come.”

  Charles followed him out to the rue St. Jacques. “What Jesuits?” he said, as La Reynie climbed into the low, red-wheeled carriage.

  “I’m stretching the category a little. I want you with me while I talk to Maître Louis Richaud’s family. Your presence may encourage them to talk. Or—as I rather suspect—may anger them enough to make them even more indiscreet than they’ve already been. I sent their neighborhood police commissaire to do it, but la famille Richaud threw him out.”

  The lackey shut the carriage door and climbed up onto his rear perch, and the carriage moved off down the hill.

  “The commissaire, being a promising young man,” La Reynie continued, “came to me and suggested I use that little judgment lapse on their part to my benefit. They are going to discover that they’d rather talk to me than visit the Châtelet.”

  Charles grinned. “Your commissaire does sound promising.” He looked out the window and saw that they were turning off St. Jacques by the little church of St. Yves and heading for the Place Maubert. “Where do the Richauds live?”

  “Near Saint Victor’s abbey. There’s only a sister and a brother, it seems. The brother works in the woodyard by the river.”

  Charles turned from the window. “They’re poor people?”

  “Very, my man says.”

  Charles was silent, staring at the rich coverings of the carriage seats and thinking about Maître Louis Richaud. It had never occurred to him that the scholastic came from poverty. It had been obvious that Richaud came from a modest background, but Charles had imagined him from some careful family of competent artisans, comfortable enough in a small way. Not that he’d ever thought much about it, because Richaud had been only a sour and vindictive minor presence in his life and best avoided. The carriage had turned and turned again, and was moving east along the river now, toward the turreted stretch of the old wall and the St. Bernard gate. The river was white-capped, and the gulls trying to fly against the wind looked as though they were hovering in midair.

  “We’ll go to the house,” La Reynie said, as they passed the gate. “The Richaud brother won’t be at the woodyard on All Saints.”

  The carriage rattled over the rough road along the wall, and Charles gazed across the spreading woodyards at the tower of St. Victor’s church showing above the abbey walls. He wondered if Richaud, growing up here in the abbey’s shadow, had thought of becoming a monk there. Or had he wanted only to get as far from these poor beginnings as he could?

  La Reynie peered from the window beside his seat. “We’re nearly there.” He put his head out, started to call to his driver, and got a mouthful of wig in the river wind. “Stop!” he yelled, spitting out strands of hair. “We’ll get out here.”

  The road was uncrowded on this holiday, and the driver stopped the carriage without the usual outcry from other carriage drivers and pedestrians. La Reynie and Charles descended and stood looking at the narrow shabby houses along both sides of the road. A few people sat on their f
ront steps, in spite of the chill, and a flute was playing somewhere. A worn and stained chemise and a pair of men’s breeches flapped loose from the small leafless tree where someone had put them to dry, and a shrieking little girl raced barefoot after them, her uncoifed brown hair flying behind her.

  “Which house is the Richauds’?” La Reynie called to the girl.

  “There.” She pointed beyond where the laundry had come to rest and leaped to catch the chemise by its tail out of a bush. Then she pulled the breeches from a small thicket—of thorns Charles thought, from the ripping sound the garment made—and trudged back across the road. “He’s drunk,” she said warningly as she passed them.

  The two men picked their way across the badly paved road and around unpleasant puddles. The plaster-and-timber house the little girl had pointed at leaned tiredly against the old house on its left. La Reynie swept a glance up its front wall and tapped at the door with his stick. An indefinable roar came from somewhere above them. He squinted up at the windows again and tapped harder.

  A window opened on the top floor and a man who might have been Richaud’s twin nearly fell out of it. “What?” He hung over the ledge, gazing at them through half-closed eyes until someone pulled him back into the room and slammed the window shut. Heavy shoes clattered down bare stairs and a haggard woman who looked at least forty wrenched open the door.

  “What do you want?” she demanded.

  “I am looking for Maître Louis Richaud,” La Reynie said genially. “Are you perhaps Mademoiselle Richaud? His sister?”

  Her frown turned wary and she stared at them without speaking. Behind her, the man who’d opened the window lurched down the stairs and pushed her aside to glare at La Reynie and Charles.

  “You, I suspect, are Louis Richaud’s brother,” La Reynie said less genially. “The one who pitched my commissaire out the door.”

  The man opened his eyes wider and crouched a little, looking from one of them to the other, like an animal uncertain from which direction an attack might come. The woman stepped in front of him and folded her arms across her filthy apron bodice.

  “What’s it to you who we are?” she said belligerently.

  “I am the head of the Paris police,” La Reynie said, smiling widely. “The two of you threw my commissaire out of your rooms. If you don’t want to go to the Châtelet for that, you will answer my questions.”

  At that, the drunk rushed him, swinging thin arms with muscles like ropes. La Reynie and Charles sidestepped, and La Reynie grabbed the man by the front of his shirt and shook him. “Where is your brother?” he shouted.

  The man shrugged and breathed brandy fumes into La Reynie’s face. The woman pulled her brother free.

  “You want to know where’s Louis?” she shouted back at La Reynie. “Ask him,” she pointed sullenly at Charles. “Louis went to the Jesuits. Why come here to ask about him?”

  Charles said mildly, “Has he been to visit you?”

  She spat at his feet. “Louis? Come here? Jesus himself is about as likely to visit.”

  She reached up and shoved stringy dark hair under her coif with hands stained a muddy blue color. The same color was deep under her fingernails. Charles turned to look at the man, who had slid down the house wall and was sitting on the ground, apparently going to sleep. His hands were in his lap, stained like his sister’s, and his nails harbored the same color. With a wave of guilt, Charles realized that the dark color under Maître Richaud’s fingernails, which had always disgusted him, wasn’t dirt, but dye.

  “Mademoiselle, how did Louis go from being a dyer to being a Jesuit?”

  “We all worked with our father in the dye works. It was down by the river. But Louis—by God’s long cock, Louis was hopeless. All thumbs, couldn’t hold a stirring stick the right way up, couldn’t tell green from red! My father beat him till he screamed. For that and for running away, but it was no use. You’d think the brat could have done something to earn his keep and pay me back for raising him. I raised him, me. I was ten years old when he was born. My mother, oh, she was too good for a poor dyer’s wife. Hardly out of childbed after having Louis, and ran off with a bargeman.” She cast a bitter look toward the river. “Died not long after that, we heard, and served her right.”

  Charles grimaced. “And Louis tried to run away?” He was suddenly full of pity for all three of the dyer’s children.

  “How far can you go at six? He’d sneak away from work. The priest kept finding him in the church trying to steal the Gospel book. Worth something, those books, but Louis couldn’t even manage that much. The stupid old priest thought Louis kept taking the book because he wanted to read, so he taught him how. Lot of good that did the rest of us. All it did was make Louis brag even more about being better than us and everyone else on God’s earth.”

  So that had been the beginning, Charles thought. Reading had been the small opening that let Louis Richaud out into a different world. That world must have come as a godsend to Richaud, as both boy and man. Why then, he wondered, had the man always seemed so joyless, gone to such lengths to dislike everyone and everything? La Reynie’s voice startled Charles out of his musings.

  “I want the truth, woman! Has Louis been here? Have you seen him anywhere? He’s missing and no one knows where he is.”

  The woman paled under the dirt on her face. “You wouldn’t bother with people like us just for ‘missing.’”

  “All right. Your brother may be dead. We don’t know. We’re trying to find out.”

  “Dead?” Her mouth trembled and Charles thought for a moment that some hidden well of feeling had been touched in her. But she only hugged herself, as if she’d suddenly felt the cold wind that was blowing, and went back into the house.

  The thin mournful sound of the flute they’d heard earlier followed La Reynie and Charles at they returned to the waiting carriage.

  “Did you believe her?” La Reynie asked Charles, as the carriage turned.

  “About not having seen him? Yes. And if you should find a body and wonder if it’s his, look at the fingernails. He has dye under his just like those two.”

  “A good observation. I only wish we had a likely body. Then we could be done with at least that question.” He frowned at Charles. “I think that I’m about to have a worse coil to solve. When I leave you at the college, I’m going to your Provincial’s office.”

  Charles returned La Reynie’s resigned gaze with a sinking heart. “Why?”

  “Your Provincial’s note said they think that the Monita Secreta is being circulated in Paris again.” La Reynie’s gaze sharpened. “Why do I suddenly think you know more about this than I do?”

  Charles sighed. “Because I do.” He told La Reynie how and where he’d found the fragment of cover.

  “Of course it would be you who’d find the thing. Oh, well, at least it’s not another murdered man.”

  The carriage pulled up at Louis le Grand’s postern and the lackey sprang down and opened the door for Charles.

  “When you talk to the women at The Dog,” Charles said, “please remember that whatever the owner may be doing, the young one has nothing to do with anything illegal. She’s only just come to live there and, well—”

  La Reynie laughed. “And she’s young and pretty. Yes, I’ll bear it in mind. Out with you, now, I’m going home for once. I doubt I’ll need you tomorrow. Besides other things—including an argument I’ve been avoiding about the cost of candles for the street lanterns—I’m going to see the abbess at Notre Dame des Champs. I want to ask more questions there, and look again at that well chamber before her workmen go in there on Thursday. So I won’t need you tomorrow. Soon after, though.”

  Charles got out of the carriage and watched it roll away up the hill. All the saints were witness that he needed to study, after his time in the infirmary and the time he’d just spent with La Reynie. But the saints also knew
that he’d hoped that the lieutenant-général would turn out to need him tomorrow, after all. So, he asked himself with a sigh, as he rang the postern bell, does that mean you’re insincere about wanting to be a priest? Should you accept La Reynie’s old offer to join the police? With that uncomfortable thought, he went into the college and slowly climbed the stairs to his books.

  CHAPTER 14

  THE FEAST OF ST. CHARLES BORROMEO,

  TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 1687

  To Charles’s disappointment, Lieutenant-Général La Reynie didn’t come looking for him on Monday. On Tuesday, during the recreation hour after dinner, Charles was in the library, in the small room reserved for consulting books considered dangerous or rare. He’d asked for the library’s copy of Le Cabinet jesuitique, and was standing with it at the little reading room’s tall, small-paned window to have better light. When Frère Brunet had released him back to his own chamber on Saturday, it had been with strict orders to come straight back if the wound opened, or his fever came back, or a long list of other unhappy developments. None of those had so far happened, but the more he read of Le Cabinet, the sicker he felt. He was reading the “fourth directive” of the forged Secret Instructions for Jesuits. In it, the vengeful author purported to tell Jesuit confessors how to gain political power for the Society.

  “In order that ours undertake well the direction of princes and aristocrats, they should thus steer matters so that it appears that the direction tends to the good that the princes believe in. But little by little . . . the directions should aim at political governance.”

  Charles stared helplessly at the page. How would anyone unacquainted with the Society’s real rules know that this was false? Even the language sounded like the language of Jesuit documents, using the customary ours to refer to Jesuits. But the content would be even more confusing to outsiders. Most Catholic princes, including Louis XIV, had Jesuit confessors, and anyone with easy access to a ruler was regarded with uneasy suspicion. Charles knew how hard King Louis’s confessor, Père La Chaise, worked to influence his royal charge for good—or to at least lessen some of the harm the king could do. But Charles had also seen how easily enemies twisted La Chaise’s fallible efforts into a Jesuit quest for political power at court.