The Whispering of Bones

by Judith Rock

  “Whatever may come of that, mon père, I am certain that he had nothing to do with bringing Le Cabinet into the Novice House. I’ve questioned him closely, and I believe what he tells me. Someone put the book where it was found, but it was not him. And he’s very offended that you doubt his noble word of honor. As you well know, that’s grounds for a duel in the world he comes from.”

  “He’s no longer in that world. And cursing anyone, let alone a fellow Jesuit, is forbidden.”

  Charles was politely silent, wondering if this sincere and stern man ever looked anything but tired. Though how could a man in charge of novices—and by that charge, responsible for the Society’s future—look anything but tired?

  Guymond frowned. “If you really did goad him, perhaps you should ask his pardon.”

  “Willingly,” Charles said. “But about the book, what are you going to do?”

  “I cannot simply take your word for his innocence. You are his friend. I don’t say you are lying. I do say you may be too trusting. I must pursue the matter with him until I am certain.” A small bell rang somewhere in the house and Guymond stood up. “That’s the ring for the examination of conscience. I must go. You may do as you choose until dinner, maître.”

  Charles went out into the garden, where most of the novices were still walking or sitting as they made their examination of conscience, called the examen, and he realized he’d have to wait until after it to make his apology to Amaury. He’d meant to make his own examen, but instead he went toward a gate beyond the mostly bare flowerbeds and let himself out into an autumn-bleached meadow. He wished he’d been able to convince Guymond that Amaury had nothing to do with Le Cabinet being found in the Novice House. But he’d done his best. And if he was wrong about Amaury’s vocation, then Amaury was going to have to learn humility. And that he could do nothing about.

  Trying to remember how long it had been since he’d been footloose in the real countryside, he wandered slowly toward a wooden fence and leaned on it, watching cows drowsing under a huge oak. Cows, sheep, and goats, he thought, growing drowsy himself. He wondered idly if the goatwoman brought her flock to the Novice House. Ignatius had charged all Jesuit superiors to take great care of their men’s health and there might be someone at the novitiate who needed goat’s milk . . .

  Charles jerked awake as behind him another bell was ringing. He retraced his steps reluctantly toward the house. When he reached the refectory, the places beside Amaury were taken, and during the meal, Amaury avoided Charles’s eye. Talking was permitted, but Charles ate his mutton silently, while an elderly priest beside him cataloged all the reasons why the ancient fragment of cloth preserved in Chartres Cathedral was certainly a piece of the Virgin’s nightdress, worn for the holy birth of Christ. Charles bit his tongue along with his mutton, to keep himself from gravely asking the old priest’s opinion of the reputed slice of our Lord’s holy foreskin at Chartres, which was reverenced by women wanting, or about to have, babies. That unkind temptation set him to praying sincerely for the safety of Mme LeClerc and her baby, and for Marie-Ange and M. LeClerc.

  When dinner ended, Amaury went quickly from the room before Charles could disengage himself from his talkative neighbor. As Charles went to look for the novice, the click of billiard balls began from the upper floor. Wishing he could go up and join the game, Charles went through the house and garden and finally found Amaury in the small bare chapel, kneeling before the altar. Charles waited patiently just inside the door, but Amaury was rigidly still, his long back bowed and his face hidden in his hands. After half an hour, Charles left him, found the rector, and said he would make his apology when he went next to the Novice House. Then he took his leave and started back to Paris.

  At least, he thought, letting himself out onto the dusty track from the gate to the road, he’d shaken Amaury de Corbet momentarily out of his grim submission to novice discipline and, God willing, made him think again about what he was doing. Walking briskly, eyes mostly on the dirt track at his feet, Charles prayed his way north, working through his worry over Amaury and Maître Wing and Mlle Ebrard and Mme LeClerc. As he turned east toward the rue St. Jacques, the most direct way back to the college, he remembered guiltily that he should also pray for the vanished Richaud. But as he started his prayer, he realized that a footpath he was passing would take him a shorter way to the rue St. Jacques and started down it.

  Except for a man walking some way ahead of him, the path was empty. The man looked up at a flock of squawking crows, and the midday sun lit his profile beneath his stylishly cocked hat brim. It took Charles a moment to realize what he was seeing. Then he broke into a run.

  “Richaud! Maître Richaud, is it you? Stop!”

  The man glanced over his shoulder and fled around a turn in the lane. When Charles reached the lane’s end at the rue St. Jacques, Richaud—or the man who looked like him—was gone. Charles stopped in confusion. The profile and meager body were very like the missing scholastic’s. But this man wore a wig and layman’s clothes, a short cloak over gray breeches. Charles thought suddenly of Richaud’s drunken brother and wondered if that was who he’d been chasing. There was a family resemblance between the two, and Charles could easily imagine the brother running from a pursuing Jesuit.

  He shook his head and went on north toward the city wall. A little way ahead, he heard outraged female cries rise beyond a stone wall running along the road. Charles put his foot on a projecting stone, caught the wall’s top with his good arm, and pulled himself up. Three nuns with rakes and hoes were chasing the man in the short cloak and gray breeches across their neatly laid-out convent garden and calling him names nuns were rarely suspected of knowing. Thinking that if the fleeing man was Richaud’s brother, he must have some unusually urgent reason to run, Charles jumped over the wall, passed the startled sisters, and put on a burst of speed. His quarry reached the wall on the garden’s far side and was up and over in a flash. Which made Charles doubt even more that this was the missing scholastic, because he couldn’t imagine the Richaud he’d known being so fast and agile.

  Charles pulled himself up onto the wall, half fell from it to a narrow road, and picked himself up. There was no one in sight except a small girl leading a donkey and a farmer driving a dung-laden cart. But then he saw a swath of bushes thrashing and trembling on the slope beyond the road. He leaped across the road and climbed quickly and quietly up a dry water channel, watching the moving bushes as he went. He was almost at the top of the slope when a stone rolled under his foot and he went down. On the little ridge above him, the man broke from cover and disappeared again. When Charles reached the top, the narrow path there was empty and the man was gone.

  Charles strode along the path, keeping an eye out for his quarry and feeling more and more confused. If the man he was chasing was Richaud, then Richaud was neither dead nor being held captive. So why had his bloody cassock and his rosary been found? Why hadn’t he returned to the college? Had Richaud simply walked away from the Society of Jesus? But if that was what he’d wanted, why not go through the procedure for leaving? Like Charles, he hadn’t yet taken final vows. The vows taken after the two novice years contained a promise to make final vows at some time in the future, but the promise could be broken. The Society wanted wholehearted commitment.

  A honking, dust-raising gaggle of geese was being driven toward Charles from the lane on his right, and he drew aside to let them pass. He recognized the lane as Talking Flea Street and realized that he was half fearing and half hoping to see the goatwoman again. No matter how much he tried to dismiss her cryptic prophecy, it haunted him. She’d begun to seem always there in the shadows of his mind, muttering and shouting and singing her warning. Follow the dead, find your death.

  Charles walked determinedly down Talking Flea Street. Jacques Coriot had said she lived somewhere on it. The man he’d chased was gone. But her he could maybe find and make tell him what she’d meant, and have do
ne with this nonsense. A woman in one of the first houses, spreading wet laundry on bushes, glanced at Charles and turned away. Two children drawing in the lane’s dirt looked up fearfully and edged away from him. Not from him personally, Charles suspected, but from anyone unlike themselves, anyone not poor, who might wring more coins or unwilling obedience from them. Wishing he had something to give the children, he walked on, searching the gardens and waste ground for the little herd of goats.

  As he passed the garden where the pig had run when he’d walked down the lane with his students, two crows flew low over his head and dived at something on the ground. Because he liked crows—and wasn’t unwilling to put off finding the goatwoman—he stopped to watch them. A third crow was waddling through the overgrown garden with something shiny in its beak. The shiny thing flashed in the sunlight as the fortunate crow with the treasure hopped closer to him, and the other two crows swooped again, trying to snatch it. Then all three crows fled into the air as a hawk’s shadow stooped from the sky above them. The fortunate crow dropped its treasure, and Charles bent down and picked it up. It was a small silver oval, a medal of the Virgin, finely worked with a surround of tiny lilies. He held it up and turned it to catch the light. Unless his memory played him false, he was looking at the missing medal of the Virgin that Maître Richaud had worn on his rosary, or at least at its twin.

  Charles looked up at the house in the abandoned garden and the equally decrepit houses up and down the lane. Crows picked up small shiny things and flew away with them. The medal could have come from anywhere. It seemed too valuable a thing to have come from these houses. He started down Talking Flea Street again, thinking that he could show the goatwoman the medal and ask her if she’d seen it before. And if she’d seen the man who looked like Richaud. Above his head, the crows were suddenly back, a half dozen of them this time, raucous as boys let out of school. He looked up and pain bloomed in the back of his head. The sunlight dazzled into fireworks and went out.

  CHAPTER 23

  THE FEAST OF ST. WILLIBRORD, FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 1687

  Charles’s sense of touch returned before his sense of sight. And his sense of smell, unfortunately, came with it. He felt damp straw under his cheek and tried to turn his head away from the reek of mold. But turning his head made it sing with pain, and he sank back into oblivion.

  “Maître?”

  Something scrabbled at Charles’s cassock skirts and a crack opened in oblivion. He thought he heard a voice. But it was blurred and seemed to be speaking a language he didn’t know.

  “Maître . . .”

  The voice whispered on unintelligibly and Charles inched away from it, heard someone groan, and went back to sleep. The next time he woke the crack was wider and the voice had switched to blurred but recognizable Latin.

  “Maître, please, wake up. It’s morning, he’ll be down soon.” Fingers scrabbled again and pulled hard on Charles’s cassock. “It’s me, Henry. Oh, dear, are you dead?”

  Charles groaned and opened his eyes. He was in complete darkness, lying on his side in stinking straw. The back of his head felt as though a horse had kicked him, and his stomach lurched when he tried to move.

  “Oh, thank you, blessed Mary, thank you, Saint George! I was so afraid you were dead, maître. Can you hear me?”

  “Wing?” Charles managed to say. His mouth was dry as a March drought.

  “How did they get you?” Wing said.

  “Who?” Speaking was an enormous effort, and Charles felt himself sliding back into blessed unknowing.

  Then he seemed to be in something that rocked. Wing was there, too, because he was still talking, and Charles thought gratefully that someone must be taking them home in a carriage.

  “Maître, please! You have to wake up before he comes down.”

  The fingers pulling rhythmically at his cassock pulled harder and pain clutched his head like claws. “Stop that!” Charles demanded.

  “You’re awake.” Wing heaved a sigh. “Good.”

  Charles opened his eyes to see light coming in around broken window shutters. His hands were tied painfully behind him and he swore as he shifted on the straw to look at Wing. “Dear God, what happened to you?”

  The Englishman’s face was bruised and one side of his mouth was so swollen, Charles wondered that he could talk at all.

  “He hit me,” Wing explained, seeing Charles’s expression. “But when he brought you in last night, I knew that everything would be all right. You were a soldier; you’ll know how to get us away. But you have to think of how to do it quickly.” His blue eyes were round and trusting. “Because when they’re tired of hitting us, they’re going to make Maître Richaud kill us.”

  Charles closed his eyes and tried to make sense of that. Until footsteps sounded and someone kicked him in the side.

  “Wake up, Jesuit.”

  Charles half opened his eyes. “Bonjour, Richaud,” he said wearily. “I suppose I should no longer call you maître.”

  “Very clever. You always have to be so much cleverer than anyone else. But I’ll still be charitable. Here.”

  Charles cried out as cold water hit his face. Then he tried to lick all the drops his dry tongue could reach. He heard Wing reacting to the same treatment. Then a cup was shoved against Charles’s lips and he drank thirstily. The water was fetid but wet, which was all that mattered. A little revived—though more consciousness brought more pain—Charles stared up at Richaud.

  “Why so kind? And what are you doing here?”

  “I have to keep you alive for a while yet. I’m here because I’ve come to my senses.”

  Charles stared at him. “What do you—” He licked his lips, trying to manage his still dry and stumbling tongue. “—mean, ‘come to your senses’?”

  A triumphant smile spread over Richaud’s narrow face. He reached into his coat pocket. “I mean this.” He dangled a small book in front of Charles.

  Charles couldn’t see to read the book’s cover, but he didn’t need to. “Le Cabinet jesuitique.”

  Richaud burst into crowing laughter, the first laughter Charles had ever heard from him.

  “Clever to the end, aren’t you?” He kissed the little book and put it back into his pocket.

  Charles stared at him in horror, “You? You brought Le Cabinet into Louis le Grand and the Novice House?”

  Richaud smiled enigmatically. “God saw to that.”

  “But you know the book’s a forgery, every Jesuit knows that! If you’ve come to hate the Society of Jesus for some reason, why not just leave, for God’s sake?”

  Richaud leaned close over Charles. “You know that no one just leaves the Society! If you leave, they harass you, they hunt you, they’ll kill you if they can, so you won’t tell the world their secrets!”

  “That’s insane,” Charles said flatly.

  “That’s the devil speaking in you!” He shoved Charles hard down into the straw. “The Society bewitched me,” he shouted. “I thought they saw who I really am and what I can do. But I was wrong, they saw that my wit was far above theirs and they were envious. They hid me away and made me tend to dirty linen! They’ll suffer for that now! I was too smart for them,” he said, his eyes going from Charles to Wing, as though inviting them to share his glee. “I learned the truth and got away, and God has told me to spread the truth about Jesuits everywhere. God has meant that to be my greatness all along. He let me become a Jesuit so that He could enlighten me. And through me, the world.”

  “And where do Maître Wing and I fit in your plan for enlightenment?”

  “Nowhere. The Englishman is too stupid and you’re too far gone in the Society’s evil. The world will be rid of two more Jesuits.” The ex-scholastic gazed at the wall beyond Charles as though a vision hovered there. “You will be gone, du Luc, and I will be left in the place of honor. His dark eyes glittered. “The last shall be first!”


  A chill crawled under Charles’s skin. Wing started to argue with Richaud, but Charles moved a warning foot against him and shook his head.

  “I see, Monsieur Richaud,” Charles said respectfully, hoping that submission might forestall the violence he felt simmering in the man. “God has told you to do this alone? A great responsibility.”

  “Prophets bear a greater burden than anyone else,” Richaud said matter-of-factly, turning from his vision and picking up the cup from the straw. “But God has given me handmaids to help me sow the good seed.”

  “Maids?” Charles said carefully. “Women?”

  Richaud spun around from putting the cup on a table. “How dare you, you unclean lecher! Of course I don’t mean women! But you’d like that, wouldn’t you? I’ve seen the way you talk to women, I’ve seen them fawning over you. I’ve seen you with the baker’s wife! And that little girl, she’s the worst, she hangs all over you and you like it! I’ve begged the rector to get rid of you, but no, you’re his favorite, aren’t you?” He came back and stood over Charles. “But no more! It’s his turn to weep! I won’t fail this time.”

  Appalled understanding flooded Charles. “This time?”

  Richaud patted his pocket. “This time.”

  Charles swallowed, trying to make himself say what he knew. The words came out in a whisper. “It was you in the chapel gallery. You, my brother Jesuit. You stabbed me.”

  “And fooled you all, didn’t I? None of you even imagined it might have been me. It was so simple. I took off my shoes and left them at the top of the north stairs. I made a few silly schoolboy noises. And up you came like a little lamb.”

  “But why? Why, Richaud?”

  “Because you can’t leave anything alone. You found Paul Lunel’s body and brought La Reynie and his people swarming over the Carmelite crypt. I keep—”

  “Are you telling me you killed Paul?”

  “Killing Paul was unnecessary. I’m not stupid. As I was saying, I keep my copies of Le Cabinet there in the well chamber, until I need them.” He shrugged. “I thought if you died, La Reynie’s attention would be on you. Because you’re his little mignon, his handsome little pet, aren’t you? Just like you’re the rector’s pet.”