The Whispering of Bones

by Judith Rock

  As he talked, the carriage started moving again, though slowly, toward the turrets of the Petit Châtelet. The squat little fortress had guarded the Petit Pont from the time when the bridge was the only southern way across the Seine and the whole city huddled in the middle of the river on the Île de la Cité. The snarl of carriages, pedestrians, and pack animals crawling toward the Petit Châtelet suddenly unwound itself, and the carriage rolled through the narrow echoing gate and onto the short bridge.

  “So,” Charles said, “I gather that the Lunel boy’s mother and brother are back from the country now.”

  “Just arrived. I had the neighborhood commissaire watching for me, and he sent word. I’m going to have out of them why they made no response to the message that Paul Lunel was missing.”

  “But”—Charles frowned and shook his head—“surely you don’t think the mother or the brother had anything to do with his death?”

  “Only if their coming home to try to find him might have prevented it.”

  The carriage passed the Louvre and turned into the rue Jean Tison. It stopped in front of a marble façaded porte cochère, the high and wide double doors that barred the courtyards of the wealthy. Before Charles and La Reynie could get out, someone started consigning La Reynie’s driver to hell or worse.

  Charles looked incredulously at the police chief. “Either I’m going mad or that’s Maître Beauchamps!” Pierre Beauchamps, dance director of the Paris Opera, was the most eminent dancing master in France, probably in all of Europe. He was also Louis le Grand’s dancing master, and Charles had worked on two Louis le Grand ballets with him. Charles climbed quickly out of the carriage and found Beauchamps standing in front of it, threatening the driver with his ebony walking stick.

  “What are you trying to do?” he shouted at the driver. “My legs are no longer what they were, but there’s no need to take them off entirely!”

  “Then get out of the way, mon vieux,” the coachman said, laughing and eyeing a very pretty and very young woman who stood close to the wall of the Lunel courtyard, biting her plump red lip and bubbling with laughter.

  “Old? You call me old?” The fifty-six-year-old Beauchamps swelled with insult until Charles thought his midnight blue coat might split at the seams. “Have some respect for your betters, you mud-born lackey! I’ll report you! Not that our La Reynie will take any notice of what a carriage driver does; he lets them unpeople Paris with their driving. But if you care to dismount from your seat, I’ll show you who’s old and who’s not!”

  “No need for that, Monsieur Beauchamps.” The lieutenant-général stepped forward and bowed low to the dancing master. “I assure you that La Reynie is taking notice, even as you speak.”

  Beauchamps squinted at him. “What? Who—oh, it’s you? You sat there and let this man all but run over me? You see?” Beauchamps said triumphantly to the driver. “I told you he’d be utterly indifferent!”

  Struggling as hard as the girl to keep his countenance, Charles caught Beauchamps’s eye and nodded gravely. Beauchamps was as demanding, and even more autocratic, than La Reynie, and Charles watched gleefully to see who would come out on top in this encounter. It was the young woman who came out on top. She lifted her orange and white striped skirt above the cobbles and came to Beauchamps’s side. “Don’t upset yourself, maître,” she said soothingly, taking his arm and looking up at him with warm brown eyes.

  “I’ll thank you not to treat me like your grandfather, mademoiselle,” he snapped, but Charles saw that he tucked her arm close to his side.

  “Come, now,” she cajoled, “you are going to give me a lesson, and I’d rather not be shouted at every moment simply because you do not have this poor coachman to shout at.”

  “Hmmph.” Beauchamps glared at La Reynie, who smiled affably back at him. “Well, mon lieutenant-gènèral, since you are not hurrying to take the hide off your rogue of a driver, what are you doing here?” He raised an eyebrow at Charles, whom he’d hitherto ignored. “And you, Maître du Luc. Are the police already at such a loss over my poor neighbor’s murder that you must find their answers for them? Again?”

  “Your neighbor?” Charles and La Reynie said, almost in concert.

  “Of course, my neighbor. I live just there.” He pointed at the next pair of courtyard doors. Not quite so impressive a pair as the Lunels’, but harbingers of a solid and comfortable town house behind them. “And before you ask me, I knew Paul, the dead boy, only slightly, and the brother, Alexandre, and the parents only to bow to in the street. The father, as you no doubt know, is dead.”

  La Reynie said, “And how did you know that Paul Lunel is dead?”

  Beauchamps cast his eyes up to heaven. “Have you no servants? The Lunel servants told mine, of course. They said you’d been to the house with the news.”

  La Reynie nodded. “And what else do you and your servants”—he glanced at the girl—“and your friends, of course, know about this Lunel family, Maître Beauchamps?”

  Beauchamps also looked at the girl, who drew herself up and turned her head to look from one eye at La Reynie, like an annoyed bird.

  “May I know your name, mademoiselle?” the lieutenant-général said.

  “Forgive me,” Beauchamps said. “Monsieur La Reynie, Maître du Luc, may I present Mademoiselle Marie-Thérèse de Subligny? A heavenly dancer. And a new ornament to the Opera. I am giving her some extra teaching.”

  La Reynie eyed her and bowed slightly. “I congratulate you, mademoiselle. Few women dance on the professional stage. Did you perhaps know Monsieur Paul Lunel?”

  “Paul?” She shrugged slightly. “No.”

  La Reynie kept watching her. “You call him by his Christian name. So you know the family?”

  The girl managed somehow to draw dignity visibly around herself, which told Charles that she must be a very good stage performer.

  “Monsieur Alexandre Lunel comes to see me dance,” she said. Her eyes dared the men to draw the obvious conclusion from that. “But I have not seen him lately. I only knew that his brother was dead because Maître Beauchamps told me.”

  “Ah. I am surprised indeed that you have not seen Monsieur Alexandre Lunel lately. How could he stay away?” La Reynie’s tone made his assumptions about her relationship with Lunel very clear. Charles wondered if the mostly straightlaced lieutenant-général disapproved of her dancing on the Opera stage. Nearly all female courtiers performed in court ballets, but the Opera was another thing altogether.

  Her eyes flashed with anger, and Beauchamps, with the air of someone slamming a door before it was too late, said quickly, “Monsieur Lunel is a very busy man with many friends. He is a prominent young lawyer. Soon, no doubt, he’ll be a judge, and being busy is part of being a successful man. Like Mademoiselle de Subligny, I also have not seen him lately.”

  “How well did you know Monsieur Paul Lunel?” La Reynie asked him.

  Beauchamps sighed a little. “When he was small, I caught him climbing my wall to watch a dancing lesson through the windows. After that, I sometimes let him come inside to watch. He had his own dancing master, but the master used his stick freely to correct mistakes, and poor Paul didn’t like him much. He learned little from that tyrant.”

  “He never saw you use your stick?” Charles couldn’t resist saying.

  “I never used it on him. Paul was a good boy with a good brain. I liked him.” He sighed. “He had the makings of a good dancer.” From Beauchamps, the accolade had the feeling of a eulogy. “But he would never have matched your young Bertamelli,” the dancing master said, smiling suddenly at Charles.

  “And how is Bertamelli?” Charles asked. “Is he well? Are you pleased with him?”

  Michele Bertamelli, a fourteen-year-old from Milan, had been Charles’s rhetoric student and a spirited dancer in the college ballets. Now—partly owing to Charles’s help—he was Beauchamps’s youngest Op
era dancer.

  Beauchamps sighed rapturously, as though seeing a holy vision. “He’s magnificent. Simply magnificent. I could fall at his feet, his technique grows so exquisite. At least, I could fall at his feet on the days when I am not considering killing him for one thing or another.”

  Charles grinned. “A familiar set of choices where Bertamelli is concerned. Please give him my greetings and say that I am glad to hear such a good—well, mostly good—report of him.”

  Seeing that the diversion to dance threatened to go on, La Reynie looked at Charles and nodded toward the Lunel gates. Charles ignored him.

  La Reynie, exasperated, said, “If we are through with Opera business, is there anything more you can tell us about the Lunel family, Monsieur Beauchamps?”

  “Nothing. I wish you luck. Paul Lunel’s killer deserves to hang. Or worse.” He bowed, Mlle de Subligny looked down her nose at La Reynie and curtsied like a duchess, and they went together to Beauchamps’s double doors.

  La Reynie pulled on the bell beside the Lunel porte cochère. After a long wait and another pull that nearly wrenched the rope from its mooring, steps sounded on the cobbles.

  The inner shutter was lifted from a small grille and round eyes peered at them. “Who’s there?”

  “Lieutenant-Général La Reynie. Open the doors.”

  The shutter banged back over the rectangle, bolts slid, and the right-hand half of the big door was pulled back. They went into the courtyard and the very young groom bowed awkwardly and looked around the court, as though hoping to see someone who would tell him what to do next. To Charles’s surprise, La Reynie said kindly, “The next thing, mon brave, is to take us to the door.”

  With a grateful look, the little groom scuttled across the cobbles, leaving his charges to exchange grins and follow. The imposing house of honey-colored stone was straight across from the double carriage doors, flanked by a carriage house with open doors on one side and a stable on the other, into which another groom was leading a sweated bay horse. The boy pounded on the house door as though he were a siege army. A fat red-nosed man, wearing a suit of good black cloth that proclaimed him a high-ranking indoor servant, flung the door open angrily. When he saw the visitors, he composed himself with an obvious effort and the boy fled toward the stables.

  “Bonjour, Monsieur La Reynie,” he said, bowing. He seemed not to see Charles.

  “My companion and I must speak with your master,” La Reynie said, and waited until the man had bowed very lightly to Charles. “I judge, by the fact that a carriage is in your carriage house and the horses are being stabled, that he has returned. Please tell him that I am here, and Maître Charles du Luc also.”

  “I regret, mon lieutenant-général, that I cannot do that. As you say, Monsieur Lunel is only this moment arrived from the country. With his mother. They are fatigued from their journey. And they are in mourning, as you well know. They are seeing no one.”

  “Do they not care who killed their son and brother? Whether they do or not, they will see me. Go and tell them.”

  Stiff with offense, the man left them on the step and disappeared into the house. La Reynie pushed the door wider with his stick and went in, Charles behind him. The high-ceilinged foyer with its floor of red and white patterned stone was full of light. They heard a door close, and then voices approached from beyond the dark red velvet curtain between the foyer and the next room.

  “It can’t be helped.” The light tenor voice sounded tired and resigned. “Of course I must see him.”

  “But the other—”

  “Never mind. Bring them in and go back to work. I’ll see to this.”

  The servant pushed the curtain aside and exclaimed in anger when he saw La Reynie and Charles standing in the foyer.

  “As your master just said,” La Reynie told him, “never mind. We have taken the liberty of not waiting on your doorstep, Monsieur Lunel,” he said, raising his voice.

  A stocky, strong-featured man of about thirty pushed the curtain aside and stood framed in the archway. His suit and coat of mourning black were wrinkled, and his dark brown wig was windblown. With a look that sent the furious servant quickly away through a side door, the young man said, “Monsieur La Reynie. You must forgive my servant Laurent. He was very fond of my brother and cannot seem to pull himself together.” He bowed, ignoring Charles as the servant had done. “How may I help you?”

  La Reynie stepped aside and presented Charles with a flourish. “This is Maître Charles du Luc. He and I have come to speak with you about your brother.”

  Lunel gave Charles the slightest of nods. To La Reynie he said eagerly, “You have found his killer, mon lieutenant-général?” His strained face was lit with hope.

  “I regret, no, monsieur. I must speak with you, and with madame, your mother. The more I know about your brother, the better chance I have of finding his killer.”

  Lunel hesitated. “And may I ask what Maître du Luc’s part is in this?”

  “But surely that is obvious, monsieur. Your brother was on the verge of being a Jesuit novice. Maître du Luc and his brother Jesuits have, in a way, lost a brother, too.” La Reynie smiled as though he had explained everything. “May we go now to your mother?” He moved toward the gracefully curved stairs.

  “I will go first and warn her,” Lunel said quickly. “She is devastated by my brother’s death and may be lying down.”

  “But of course.” La Reynie stood aside and watched Lunel mount the stairs. Charles half expected him to follow, but the lieutenant-général stayed where he was. When Lunel was out of sight, he said softly to Charles, “After we are settled and talking, excuse yourself to the privy. Have a look around, especially down here. Say you’re lost, if someone sees you. See what the servant who dislikes us so much is doing. And who those belong to.” He flicked a glance at the outdoor cloaks and the amber-headed stick on the foyer’s side table.

  “You suspect the servant?” Charles said softly.

  La Reynie shrugged. “More information is always better than less.”

  Lunel’s returning footsteps sounded. “My mother invites you to come up.”

  They followed him up gracefully curved stone stairs to a light, welcoming salon. A faded woman in her fifties lay half reclining in a chair covered in green velvet, a soft gray blanket spread over her black skirts. Her son made the introductions, Charles and La Reynie bowed, and she inclined her head to them.

  “Forgive me for not rising. As you see, I am something of an invalid just now.” Her oval face was pale and lined but showed the remains of beauty. She kept her eyes on her folded hands, and Charles had to strain to hear her low voice. “What do you want to know about my darling Paul?”

  “Were you happy when he decided to become a Jesuit, madame?” The lieutenant-général pulled up a small footstool and sat as near her as courtesy allowed.

  Lunel had withdrawn beyond his mother’s chair. Charles remained standing near the door, where he could watch everyone.

  “I will be frank with you. No, I was not.” Mme Lunel picked up a snowy handkerchief lying in her lap and smoothed its lace edges. “But my husband had given him permission to enter the Society of Jesus, and it was not for me to prevent him. His going was a great grief to me. Poor Paul, he could have gone any time since last April, but he waited, hoping, I think, to win me over to his plan. But that he could never do. I told him so, and he decided to enter with the new novice class in October, after the feast of San Rémy.”

  “May I ask, madame,” La Reynie said, “what your objection was?”

  A small muscle moved in her cheek and she looked briefly at him. “If you have a son, do you want him to be a”—she looked down—“a religious?”

  “Not greatly. But I hope for his happiness.”

  Charles heard the small catch in La Reynie’s voice, though he didn’t think the others did. Even if they had,
they wouldn’t know what Charles did, that the lieutenant-général and his son were estranged.

  “I did want his happiness,” she flared. “But do children necessarily know what their happiness is?”

  No one spoke, and a tense silence grew.

  Finally, La Reynie said, “I know that word reached you that Paul did not arrive at the Novice House. Why did you not come back to Paris and search for him? It seems you made no response to that news at all.”

  Madame Lunel looked reproachfully at Alexandre. “Word did not reach me that Paul was missing. Only later, that he was dead.”

  La Reynie was also looking at Alexandre Lunel. “And why was that?”

  Lunel averted his gaze. “It was my fault,” he said disconsolately, “and I’ve been doing penance for it ever since, I assure you. I—well, I confess I also was not pleased with Paul’s decision. I wanted him to go into the law, like me. Like our father. I took it badly when he chose his own path. Seventeen seemed so young and I felt—oh, I don’t know—rejected, I suppose. Which was very childish of me.” He glanced at Charles. “I found his ‘vocation’ hard to credit, but who am I to say whom God is calling?”

  Charles nodded uncomfortably, thinking of Amaury de Corbet and his own doubts about Amaury’s vocation.

  Lunel went on. “When I learned that Paul hadn’t arrived at the Novice House, I thought—no, to be honest, I hoped—that he’d changed his mind.”

  One of La Reynie’s black eyebrows was climbing steadily as he listened. “You never feared that some ill fortune had come to him?”

  “I should have, I see that now. But a strong, healthy, peaceable young man who sets off in daylight to go a short way—what could happen to him? I thought he’d gone to some friend’s house to, well, hide for a little. Because of the embarrassment of changing his mind. He always minded what people thought of him.”

  “So you saw him go?” La Reynie said.