The Whispering of Bones

by Judith Rock

  “Things from the army?”

  “Yes. But that’s his story to tell if he wants to, not mine. Then his father died suddenly in early spring, and that ruined everything. Amaury came home and broke our betrothal. He confessed to me that while his father lived, he’d been afraid to disappoint him, afraid to refuse what every nobleman is supposed to do—fight and beget sons to carry on his name. He said he loved me and that he’d thought that with me, he could put aside his wanting to leave the world and turn wholeheartedly to another life. But when his father died, he’d realized he couldn’t,” she finished bitterly.

  Charles snorted. “Well, if he thinks being a Jesuit is leaving the world, he’s an idiot.”

  “He’s an idiot about a lot of things. But I love him,” Mlle Ebrard said despairingly. “I’m not giving him up without a fight; you should know that. No matter what you or anyone else says. Not just because I want him, but because I know he’s wrong about himself! He’s trying to give his whole life up to guilt, now that his father’s gone. And he still loves me; I saw that in his face just now in the market.”

  “So did I,” Charles said. “So did anyone who looked at the two of you. And so would the provisioner, if I hadn’t distracted him.” He looked at her curiously. “If you’d made sure the provisioner saw what was going on between you and Amaury, you could have ended his career as a novice by nightfall. Why didn’t you?”

  Her look was full of disdain. “You’ve obviously never loved anyone.”

  A small rueful sound escaped Charles, and he looked away. But he felt her eyes on him as they walked.

  “Forgive me,” she said softly. “I see that you have. Then you must know that I would cut off my hand rather than harm him or cause him pain!” She wiped tears away with her scarf. “I don’t suppose you’ll believe me, but if he really had a vocation, if God had really called him to your Jesuit life, I would die rather than stand in his way. But he doesn’t have a vocation. God hasn’t called him, I’m sure of it! Amaury is only hiding in your Novice House. From his guilt about what happened in the army. What kind of offering is that to God?”

  Charles flinched inwardly at that echo of his cousin Charles-François’s bitter accusation. You’re a coward hiding in your safe Jesuit nest. “One may offer suffering to God,” he said.

  “But is suffering a vocation? Amaury is trying to twist his ordinary devotion into a—a shroud! That’s not a vocation, that’s refusing God’s gift of life!”

  Chastened by her blunt clarity, Charles watched a pair of ravens pecking at something squashed in the street. In the Jesuit rules, there was a list of things that barred a man from becoming a Jesuit. One thing was “An intention that is not as right as it ought to be for entrance into a religious institute but is mixed with human designs.” In Amaury’s case, “human designs” might well include trying to twist guilty self-hatred into Christian humility and penance. In his own case, he’d been wrestling with his army guilt, God knew. But he’d also been sure that he had a vocation to help souls—and in doing that, to come as close to God as he could. But his cousin Charles-François’s visit had forced him to see how deeply he’d buried his guilt over the peasants’ deaths at Cassel—and made him wonder miserably if that guilt should perhaps have disqualified him.

  Charles used his elbow to fend off a maidservant’s market basket full of beets and cabbages. “If your father is so well off, why are you working for your aunt here in Paris? Did you run away to be near Amaury?”

  “When we met, I told you that my father had died. He was killed in August on a trip to Italy, on the route merchants used to call the Murder Road.” She sighed and hugged her cloak tightly around herself. “After my poor father died, I found out how his affairs really stood. Everyone thought he was near to being wealthy. And he had been, but then we learned that one of his two ships had gone down on the way to New France, and that he’d had other losses, some on bonds for loans he couldn’t collect. There was almost nothing left for me. When my uncles met to decide what to do with me, I persuaded them to let me come to Paris and live with my widowed aunt at The Dog. They can’t marry me off profitably now that I’m poor, so they didn’t really care what I did.” She smiled wryly and shrugged. “My aunt is a trial, but at least I’m in Paris.”

  Charles was about to ask her what she planned to do next to get Amaury back, when three grave-faced men dressed in black, the same three he’d seen in the market, stopped beside him.

  They bowed and the oldest man gazed sadly at Charles. “We are Gentlemen.” He gave the word an audible capital letter. “Think, we beg you, on what you are doing. Go quickly to your confessor.” His glance brushed Rose Ebrard, who was staring openmouthed at him, and fled back to Charles. “A Jesuit must spurn women like this one. You are somewhat young—a scholastic, I suspect, and not a priest. But that cannot excuse you. Think on this. For the good of souls and Christian society.” He and his comrades bowed and paced solemnly away.

  Mlle Ebrard said angrily, “Who are they? Did you hear them? ‘Women like this one’ indeed!”

  Charles looked after them in disgust. “They’re called Gentlemen of the Professed House. That’s the name for laymen from the Congregation of the Holy Virgin overseen by Jesuits who live at our Professed House. Some of these Gentlemen see themselves as everyone’s moral guardians. And some of them are terrified of women.” He sighed. “Those three will go to Louis le Grand to tell my rector that I am on my way to hell in the public street for talking alone to you.”

  She tossed her head and straightened her tight-fitting, orange jacket that matched her skirt. “I know that those congregations do good things. But men like that must make God blush!”

  “I hope so. Mademoiselle—” Charles hesitated, but he had to ask. “What are you going to do now about Amaury?”

  She met his question with her own. “ Are you going to warn them about me at the Novice House?”

  “I don’t know. Have you sent other notes to Amaury?”

  “No.” Her chin went up and her mouth was a firm, tight line.

  “But you’ll go on fighting us for him.”

  She stepped in front of Charles, forcing him to stop. “Of course I will go on fighting,” she said fiercely. “No matter what you and the rest of them do. And if you accuse me to them of trying to get him out of there, I’ll deny everything and say that you pursued me with talk. So be warned.”

  To her further anger, Charles’s mouth twitched toward smiling. “Oh, I’m feeling very warned about many things,” he said. “Between those three Gentlemen and you. Please, will you walk?” He tilted his head toward two avidly watching Franciscans who had stopped near them. “It’s bad strategy to let your campaign become notorious before it has to.”

  “Stop laughing at me.” She turned on her heel and walked quickly ahead of him.

  He caught up with her. “Mademoiselle, we may be enemies in this.” Though I rather think we are not, he thought, but wasn’t ready to say aloud. “But there is one thing I beg you to tell me. Did you give someone at the Novice House a copy—or copies—of Le Cabinet jesuitique from your aunt’s bookshop? Are you distributing copies of it for her?”

  “No.” She stared at him, mystified. “She hardly ever offers to have books delivered. And the only person from the Novice House I’ve ever spoken to—besides Amaury just now—is the servant boy, and I certainly never gave him a book. I doubt he can read.”

  “I imagine he can, he gets teaching in return for his work. Well, that’s one question answered. Here’s another. Is your aunt selling Le Cabinet jesuitique upstairs at The Dog?”

  A flush crept up the girl’s throat and she kept her gaze determinedly on the street in front of them. “I know what’s upstairs. Is this Cabinet one of those Dutch books?”

  “Have you seen a book with that title among the Dutch books?” Charles countered.

  “I don’t remember a titl
e like that. But I don’t—I try not to look at them. My aunt doesn’t make me sell them. But she says that if The Dog doesn’t have them, someone else will make the profit. She’s trying to make a living for us both, and the shop hasn’t done so well since her husband—my mother’s brother—died.”

  They moved aside to let a string of porters go by, bent under carrying frames loaded with bales of cloth.

  “Mademoiselle Ebrard, do you swear by the Virgin that you are not helping your aunt distribute Le Cabinet jesuitique?”

  Impatience flared in her deep blue eyes. “Yes! How many ways do I have to say it? Why does it matter so much?”

  “Because Le Cabinet is an illegal and poisonous book full of clever lies about the Society of Jesus, and someone in Paris is selling it. I was sure it was your aunt.” Charles’s tone grew lightly ironic. “And if she were, what a stroke of luck that would be for you. Le Cabinet might well persuade a Jesuit novice that he’d made a bad decision.”

  Her eyes were as cold as a Paris winter. “I mean to win Amaury back, but not with lies.”

  She put a pleading hand on Charles’s arm. “Maître, if I know that Amaury has no business in your Novice House, surely God must know it!” She tried to laugh. “I wish I could send God a note! Because I need a miracle. I’m so outnumbered—there are so many of you—so many Jesuits—standing between me and Amaury.”

  “He’s taken no vows. He can leave if he wants to. We don’t keep anyone in the Society who doesn’t want to be there.”

  “But so long as he tells himself he has a vocation, and is surrounded by men with vocations, he will want to be there. And I know that your Society always wants nobles.”

  They were nearing the rue St. Jacques. Behind his calm face and carefully lowered eyes, Charles was in turmoil. He doubted Amaury de Corbet’s vocation as much as the girl beside him did. He’d seen the way the two looked at each other, and he knew what it was to look at a woman like that and lose her. He also thought that Amaury needed time and refuge for enough penance to help him leave the Battle of Cassel behind. But a man could have those things without having a religious vocation. On the other hand, Charles told himself, who was he to pronounce for certain on another man’s vocation? And who was this girl to pronounce on the vocation of a man she wanted for herself?

  What am I to do? he flung at God. And waited, hoping against hope that the Silence would come to him now, there in the street. Instead, he heard something crack like a musket shot. It came again, and terror flooded Charles. The world around him was suddenly a battlefield and he smelled death. He grabbed Rose and shoved her against a building wall, covering her with his body to shield her. His heart pounded and sweat poured from him as he heard gunfire and screaming. His closed eyes showed him a flood of stumbling, bleeding men. The blood smell and his own acrid fear were sharp in his nostrils as something hit his shoulder. He tasted salt and knew that he was weeping, not for pain, but for life gone, for failure, for death . . .

  “Let go! Let go of me!”

  Something went on thudding against Charles’s shoulders and he heard a growl of angry voices. He opened his eyes. The guns had stopped. Rose Ebrard stopped pounding at him with her fists and pulled hysterically away as his hold slackened. A workman built like a barrel, with sweat-soaked black hair plastered across his forehead, grabbed Charles by the throat and bounced his head off the wall.

  “You false rotten cleric, that’s the last girl you try to take!”

  “Move away! Me, I’ll teach him,” a bigger and broader workman said, planting his feet and flexing hands the size of skillets. A rumble of approval rose from the half dozen bystanders.

  “No, leave him,” someone else said in disgust. “He’s not worth what you’ll bring on yourself! He’s a Jesuit, can’t you see his cassock? He belongs down the street there. Take him there and they’ll see to him, never fear.” The first man started dragging Charles toward the college.

  Charles tried to wrench himself free. “I wasn’t trying to harm her. I was trying to protect her. I heard—” He looked in bewilderment at the ordinary Paris street. “I thought I heard shots and screams and—I thought we were about to die.”

  “That’s likely, in broad daylight. You come, too, mademoiselle, and tell the priests what this scum in a skirt tried to do.”

  But Mlle Ebrard was watching Charles and shaking her head doubtfully. “I think he’s speaking the truth. He frightened me, but there was a loud, sharp sound. I heard it, too. But I didn’t think it was a shot.”

  “Oh. I know what that was.” The youngest and smallest man grinned at her and hefted an enormous mallet. “It was me, ma belle, splitting cobblestones with my mallet. It makes a crack like the coming of doom, maybe that’s what he heard.”

  “Yes. Yes, that was it.” Charles looked at Mlle Ebrard. “Forgive me. I meant no disrespect. I was afraid for you. Sometimes—I—” His face was hot with embarrassment. “Since the army, if there’s a loud sound or someone comes too close behind me, I”—he glanced at the workmen and shrugged—“sometimes I think there’s danger when there’s not.”

  The workmen looked at each other and then at Charles, but now there was a kind of understanding in their eyes. They moved away, muttering among themselves. Charles looked up at the gray sky, feeling both relieved and shamed. A breath of wind chilled his face, and he realized it was wet with tears. So those, at least, had been real. He stumbled with sudden weariness and braced a hand on the building wall. God knew this grief that haunted him was real—grief for that day at Cassel, for failed courage and deaths wasted. Grief without end, it seemed. How could he be so arrogant as to think that he knew what Amaury de Corbet should do with his own grief?

  The silent question hung in the cold air, without complaint, without hope, and the Silence came. Between one breath and another, it was there and gone again. Charles. Nothing is wasted, not even death. The words splintered into blinding clarity in Charles’s heart.

  When he could see again, he felt so light that he looked down at his feet to see if they were on the cobbles. The clarity seemed to lie over everything. The gray wall under his hand glinted with small points of silver. A swirling cloud of crows blackened the sky and left it seeming almost white. A fold of Rose Ebrard’s tawny skirt blew against his cassock, burning like sunset.

  “Are you all right?” she said hesitantly.

  He wasn’t sure whether moments or years passed before he straightened and turned to her. “I think finally I am.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “What happened just now?”

  “Listen,” he said, leaving her question unanswered. “When I talked with Amaury, I, too, doubted his vocation. I will find a way to talk to him again. But only he himself—and his superiors—can finally judge. That will take time. Are you willing to wait? For whatever his decision finally is?”

  Hope made her eyes shine. “I can wait.”

  CHAPTER 19

  Charles went back to the college and across the Cour d’honneur to the chapel. He signed himself with holy water from the font and went to St. Ignatius’s altar on the side wall. He sank to his knees and covered his face with his hands. Nothing is wasted, not even death. He said the words to himself over and over. Not yet asking what they meant, but drawing them around him like a cloak. He knew from experience now that the gift in the words would push him further than he wanted to go. But not yet. So he let himself just rest there beneath the painting of St. Ignatius. Until a different voice—not the Silence, though perhaps the saint—reminded him of what he’d promised Rose Ebrard. That promise pitted the Jesuit rules he tried to live by against the new clarity in his heart. That flat contradiction made him look up uneasily at Ignatius, whose austere face gave so little away. But perhaps there were no contradictions. Nothing is wasted, the Silence had said. Not even death.

  “I don’t believe in Amaury de Corbet’s vocation,” he said silently to Ignatius. “But
I do believe in my own. Amaury gave me the chance for my vocation, my right life, when he saved my life at Saint Omer. How can I not do what I can to give him back his right life?”

  How arrogant, Charles’s acid inner voice said. So you’ve already forgotten the story about Père Dainville. Will you never learn to leave things to God and your superiors? Who are you to say Amaury doesn’t have the life that’s rightfully his?

  Charles ignored the voice and held out open hands, pleading for the saint’s understanding. We’re linked, Amaury and I. That day at Cassel, we became more than brother soldiers. Ignatius would understand that, Charles thought; the saint knew all there was to know about soldiers. Don’t you see? Amaury and I became like those unfortunate children born with their bodies grown together, Charles said. Only we’re joined by death, not birth, by the deaths we were too afraid to prevent. And by the guilt that’s grown in us since. If a surgeon tries to cut apart two children born monstrously together, they always die. It’s like that for Amaury and me. The suffering for what we failed to do at Cassel can only end for both of us or for neither.

  Angry shouting pulled Charles rudely back to the outer world. It was coming from somewhere beyond the chapel’s always-open north door. The noise grew louder and he got to his feet, crossed himself, and went hastily out into the courtyard. But the shouting was coming from a small Mary chapel built against the big chapel’s east end, the meeting place of the day students’ Congregations of the Holy Virgin. Two courtyard proctors running toward the Mary chapel converged with Charles at its door.