The Whispering of Bones

by Judith Rock

  Behind him, the refectory slowly filled. All the scholastics except Maître Placide Du Pont and the Englishman arrived, grace was said, and the evening reading from the life of St. Ignatius began from the lectern. Charles was trying not to gulp his soup and eat more than his share of the bread when Du Pont hurried to the table.

  Glancing at the reader, he said as quietly as he could, “Have any of you seen Maître Wing?”

  The scholastics exchanged anxious looks and shook their heads.

  Cold with apprehension, Charles put his spoon down and beckoned Du Pont closer. “He went with me to Père Quellier at the Novice House this morning, but he was supposed to come back here on his own. I had to stay on an errand.”

  “Do you know for certain that he returned?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “So you are the last of us to have seen him.”

  “If he didn’t return, yes, I am. I told him to go straight back here by the way we’d come. He couldn’t possibly have gotten lost!”

  “I agree. Will you come with me, please?”

  But Charles was already on his feet. Père Le Picart had not come to supper and they finally found him in the dark chapel, praying before the main altar. While they waited for him to finish, Charles prayed hard that Wing was only lost. The soft movement of cloth recalled Charles as Le Picart got stiffly to his feet, the altar’s candlelight gilding his thin face.

  “What is it?” The rector’s shadowed eyes went from Du Pont to Charles. He glanced around the empty nave. “Tell me here. We are private.”

  Du Pont said succinctly, “Maître Wing seems to be missing, mon père.”

  Le Picart drew in a sharp breath. “God forbid. Where have you looked?”

  “Everywhere he might be. Everywhere I could think of, at least. None of the theology scholastics have seen him since the morning.” Du Pont looked at Charles.

  “You know that he was going to be coming back alone after his extra session with Père Quellier,” Charles said. “He promised me that he would come straight back by the way we’d gone, the only way he knew. I never thought to check that he was back. I should have.”

  Le Picart made no response to that. “Go to the police barrière, Maître du Luc, and—no, it’s late, the sergent may not be there. Go straight to our commissaire and bring him to my office. He will have heard the happenings in the neighborhood during the day and may be of some help. I will also send for Lieutenant-Général La Reynie.” To Du Pont he said, “Check Maître Wing’s room again, also the library, the latrines—in case he is ill—and the other small chapels. I’ve heard that his devotions wander all over the college.” A smile twitched at the corners of his mouth, but his eyes were full of worry. “And Maître du Luc, when you return with the commissaire, send him on to me and stop at the bakery. Ask the LeClercs if they’ve seen Maître Wing. I’ve also heard that he wanders to the bakery and that Marie-Ange slips him little morsels. And we all know that Madame LeClerc keeps a good watch on the street.”

  Charles and Du Pont bowed and left the chapel, nearly running. The neighborhood’s police commissaire lived in the Place Maubert, a few minutes’ walk from the college. As Charles went, running in reckless earnest in the small dark streets where there were few lanterns and no one around to see him, he hoped that the commissaire wouldn’t simply send his sergent. The sergent was slow and stolid, and Charles’s gut told him there wasn’t time for that. But when he reached the commissaire’s house, his heart sank. At night, people often took their problems straight to the house, and the lantern-lit courtyard was full of shouting, arguing people. The sergent, threatening both sides indiscriminately with his stick as he tried to keep order, turned with relief to Charles.

  “What is it, maître? So long as it’s not families, I’ll do anything you want if it’ll get me away from this! We’ve got a girl who’s slapped her mother-in-law over a stolen frying pan, and a sister-in-law who’s come after the girl with a knife, and the husband, intelligent soul—who was the only other witness—has slunk off to some tavern.”

  “I’m almost envious,” Charles said, half smiling. “I’m afraid we have something worse. Another missing Jesuit. The rector begs Commissaire Tourette to come quickly to his office.”

  The sergent grimaced. “Leaving me with these squawking hens. Ah, well. I’ll go and tell him.” A grin split his big, good-natured face. “You want my stick while I’m gone?”

  Charles laughed and the sergent plodded through the furious women, shaking his head and his stick at every question. Charles drew back into the courtyard shadows, but not before a bedraggled matriarch holding a gnarled hand to her face spotted him and came at a waddle.

  “You tell her, mon père, she’ll never go to heaven treating me like she does! Honor your mother, it says! And your mother-in-law, too. I only borrowed her filthy frying pan and that’s another thing. Dirty?! You’ve never seen—”

  She was still in full spate several minutes later when the commissaire came out of the house in his official black robe and hat. He nodded at Charles, set the matriarch briskly aside, and made for the courtyard doors like a man sighting freedom. Charles glanced over his shoulder at the abandoned sergent and saw that the outraged woman had cornered him and was starting over with her story.

  A wind had begun to blow again from the river, tangling cloaks and sending the reaching fingers of winter down collars. Commissaire Tourette jammed his hat more securely down on his wig. Charles reached up to secure his own hat and realized he’d rushed from the refectory without it. As they walked, he told Tourette all he knew about Maître Henry Wing. When he finished, the man pulled a wadded handkerchief from his coat pocket, honked into it, and shook his head.

  “I hate this wind. Well, I’ve been praying you wouldn’t lose another one. But it seems God’s not hearing me. Has anyone found this one’s clothes?”

  Charles felt his stomach twist at the commissaire’s bluntness. “No. Not that we know of. That may be to the good.”

  But Tourette’s assumption that Wing was dead hung in the air like fog. When they reached the bakery, Charles sent Tourette on to the college postern and knocked on the LeClercs’ door. No one came. Charles tried to peer through the crack in the shutters. The shop was dark, but light showed from the room next to it. He was about to knock again, when an approaching light glimmered.

  “Who’s there?” a deep male voice bellowed.

  The baker, Charles thought, realizing he’d only seen the baker, whose name was Roger, twice in all the time he’d been at Louis le Grand. Not surprising, since bakers did much of their work at night, but it was Mme LeClerc Charles wanted to see.

  “It’s Maître du Luc from the college,” Charles shouted back. “I must speak with you and your wife.”

  The bar on the door thudded as the baker set it aside, a key grated in the elaborate lock, and Roger LeClerc held up his candle and glared at Charles. “You’ll have to speak with me. What?”

  “Forgive me for disturbing you, monsieur,” Charles said. “The rector sent me to ask if you or Madame LeClerc have seen our English scholastic Maître Wing today. He’s missing.”

  LeClerc blinked at Charles, frowning, but before he could answer, his wife’s voice called, “Who is it, Roger? If it’s not the police or beggars or students, bring him in, I haven’t seen anyone all day and what am I to do, be as silent as a turnip because of a baby?”

  Charles’s eyes opened wide. “Has the baby come already?”

  LeClerc shook his head and sighed like a storm gust. He opened the door a little wider and Charles saw the worry in his face. “It’s trying to come but it’s too early. She’s had hell since the afternoon.”

  “Roger, bring whoever it is inside and shut the door, I am freezing!”

  Reluctantly, the baker let Charles in. Marie-Ange put her head around the door between the shop and the room next to it, and when she
saw Charles, she ran to him and hung on his arm. Her father started to pull her back, but Charles smiled over her head at him.

  “It’s all right, monsieur.” He looked down at the little girl. “How is your mother, ma petite?”

  Her brown eyes were wide with fear. “It’s hurting her so much. I don’t know how to help her. She—”

  “Maître!”

  The three in the shop jumped and looked toward the inner doorway. Charles, at least, was reassured by the volume of Mme LeClerc’s impatient shriek.

  “I can hear that it’s you, maître, come in, don’t mind my old Roger, he thinks I’ll break if anyone looks at me, but if no one comes to talk to me, I tell you I will die of boredom just to spite you all—that is a joke, Marie-Ange. But come in here, all of you, if you don’t want to find a madwoman in the morning!”

  LeClerc rolled his eyes and shrugged. Marie-Ange seized Charles’s hand and dragged him into a large, square room with whitewashed walls, warm from its big fireplace surrounded by cooking utensils. Mme LeClerc lay back on pillows in the large bed, under a faded green quilt. The green bedcurtains were wound tidily around the bedposts and a picture of the Holy Family was tacked to the wall above the bed. There was a table, a bench and an armchair, a tall cupboard, and several old chests. Beyond the hearth, a small bed stood in a shallow alcove.

  Mme LeClerc’s round face was pale and sweating, but she smiled at Charles across the hillock of her belly and held out her hand to him. “You see me as God made me,” she said, tucking a swath of curling chestnut hair under her white linen cap. “Well, not exactly, perhaps, but . . .” Her eyes closed and she grimaced in pain. “Ah, blessed Saint Anne, enough! Roger, I’ve said it before and I say it again, the furnishings for marriage beds are green because green is the color of fools and here you see what happens to one of the fools in the bed!” Another spasm shook her.

  Charles looked anxiously at the baker. “Has the midwife been?”

  “Yes. She’s coming back tonight. She says the baby may come or may wait.” The man’s tired face softened a little. “Marie-Ange asked your porter Frère Martin for a tisane from the infirmarian. I said how would a Jesuit know what to give a pregnant woman, but whatever he sent gave her some ease and I’m grateful.” He sighed and rubbed his drawn face. “As for what you asked me—no, I’ve not seen your Englishman today. And my wife and Marie-Ange have been only in the chamber there.”

  “Have you lost Maître Wing?” Marie-Ange said, pouring water into a cup. “I hope not, I like him.”

  “Wing?” Mme LeClerc drank a little as Marie-Ange held the cup to her lips. “That English Henri, like the old king? Hah. If that one’s gone off somewhere, I can imagine where. To put some other poor woman in this plight.”

  Charles stared at her and then laughed out loud. “No, madame, truly, not this Henri.” He patted her hand. “I will pray for you, madame, and that the little one waits his time. Or if not, that you’ll both be well and strong.”

  “Tell Père Le Picart to pray, too,” Marie-Ange demanded, tucking more of her mother’s newly escaped curls under the cap again.

  “I will. Whatever else we can do,” he said to the baker, “I trust you will ask us.” He signed a cross over Mme LeClerc. “My mother always said, madame, that Saint Anne is listening to every woman in childbed.”

  In spite of the spasm of pain showing on her face, Mme LeClerc’s dimples flashed. “Of course she is! That’s what a woman needs, a little good conversation and all is well!” Then she closed her lips hard together and Marie-Ange stroked her belly, her face full of worry.

  Charles and the baker backed out of the room.

  “I’ll go for the midwife if she’s not here soon.” The baker looked back at the bed. “Please pray hard for her.”

  “I will. God be with you all tonight.”

  Charles went out into the street and the bar thudded back into place across the door. The wind struck cold on his face as he started toward the college postern, and he prayed that wherever Henry Wing was, he was alive and warm enough. And that the coming baby, and the woman bringing him into the cold world, would both be well.

  Suddenly, the wind leaped up the rue St. Jacques like a wild thing, and the street lanterns creaked on their hooks and chains, their candles flickering, guttering, going out. Charles was suddenly back in the dream that had made him cry out and wake Père Damiot. The wind sounded like the breath of a hunting animal as it tossed and worried the one lantern still lit, making shadows spin like the leaves coming down from the trees. As the shadows closed around Charles, it seemed to him that they were full of faces: the goatwoman’s face, the face of the peasant woman at Cassel, the face of his cousin Charles-François, Amaury’s face and Wing’s and Richaud’s. Then Père Dainville’s serene face flashed past him and the shadows calmed and the wind drew back. But the evil dream went on. A door opened and a man came striding out to kill him. Charles ran.

  “God’s tears, maître, what’s come to you?” La Reynie shouted. “Get back here!”

  Charles’s feet faltered and he looked over his shoulder. “Mon lieutenant-général?”

  “Of course it’s me! Come back!”

  Charles went slowly to the postern. “Forgive me. I—I thought—” He shook his head. “I don’t know what I thought.” He looked at the street in a daze, the wind whipping his hair into his eyes.

  La Reynie led him to the postern and into the passage. He stopped under the passage lantern and peered anxiously at Charles.

  “What happened out there?”

  Charles shook his head. “The wind—the lanterns went out and it was like a dream I had. I thought I saw faces . . . the goatwoman and—”

  “What goatwoman?” La Reynie said sharply.

  “It wasn’t really her, only shadows—”

  “Which goatwoman?”

  “The one called Hyacinthe. She’s old and”—Charles shrugged—“just an old woman. She lives on Talking Flea Street, out beyond the wall.”

  “Has she told you something?”

  Charles stared at him. “How did you know?”

  “She’s a seer,” La Reynie said grimly.

  Charles felt his skin crawl. “Surely you don’t believe that!”

  “I believe what I see. I’ve seen what she says come to pass.”

  “What she said made no sense. She said, ‘Follow the dead, find your death.’ She’s said it twice—the first time was when I saw her in the Lunel courtyard, which I told you about.”

  “You didn’t tell me she’d said something to you!”

  “It didn’t seem important. And the other time was this afternoon by Talking Flea Street. She said it again, and shouted at me to stay away. I suppose she’s just a mad old woman.”

  “Who frightened you enough that you ran when you thought you saw her face just now in the street.”

  “I was a little bewitched by shadows and my dream,” Charles said impatiently. “That’s all.”

  “Bewitched is exactly the word. Listen to me. The woman warned you against finding. And you are searching—for a killer. Everyone in the Latin quarter knows that her words are not to be brushed aside.”

  The lieutenant-général’s flat certainty about that, coming after Père Damiot’s, settled over Charles like a cold mist, and he could find nothing to say.

  La Reynie nodded with satisfaction. “Good. You’ve heard me. You’ve been a soldier and no matter what you are now, you haven’t forgotten how to protect yourself. So be on your guard. Now. I’ve seen Père Le Picart and the commissaire and heard about your missing Englishman, and we’ll search for him. I was also called to your Novice House this evening.” He eyed Charles sourly. “The Novice House rector is breathing fire at me because of Le Cabinet. As though I have enough men to keep every illegal book out of the city.”

  Irritably, he flicked a speck of dirt from the
breast of his tobacco-colored coat. Charles saw the blue shadows under his deep-set black eyes and wondered, as he often had before, when La Reynie went home and slept.

  “The Novice House rector told me he suspects your friend de Corbet of bringing Le Cabinet into the house,” La Reynie said. “Though de Corbet swears the copy of Le Cabinet is not his and refuses to say anything more. I got the strong impression that de Corbet is acting more like an offended noble than a Jesuit novice learning humility.”

  “The Novice House rector was going to let me be there when he talked to de Corbet,” Charles said. “But he never sent word.”

  “He tells me he did, late this afternoon, but you weren’t here. I wanted to take de Corbet to the Châtelet for a little talk, but the rector suddenly shifted his ground to play father hen and refused to give up his chick. I didn’t press him. We agreed that you would walk with the novices tomorrow morning to their country house at Montrouge. You are to talk with de Corbet about the book during the walk. You are also to eat dinner with them there, he says, and then come back to the city on your own. He has sent a note to your rector about it.” La Reynie glowered at Charles. “I tell you now that if you don’t find out what your friend knows, he will find himself at the Châtelet.”

  Charles bristled. “And I tell you what I’ve already told the Novice House rector. Amaury doesn’t know anything about that damned book. However lacking he may be in Jesuit humility, he’s the image of the old stories’ ‘perfect knight.’ I didn’t know him well in the army, but everyone knew that his word was his word, and that honor probably meant more to him than his hope of heaven.” He eyed La Reynie balefully. “And yes, if Père Le Picart permits, I’ll walk with them and find out what I can.”