The Eloquence of Blood cdl-2

by Judith Rock

  The door opened almost at once, as though Le Picart had been waiting for Charles’s summons, waiting for trouble. As soon as he saw Charles’s face, he reached back into the room for his cloak.

  Charles told him what was happening as they walked. They were nearly at the side door to the passage when wood splintered and furious yelling echoed off the passage walls. Le Picart tried to push past, but Charles unceremoniously stopped him.

  “Wait!” He opened the side door just enough to see into the passage. Damiot and Montville and several lay brothers were trying to shove the intruders back though the ruined postern, all of them tripping and stumbling over the remains of the door as they fought. Their captive was nowhere to be seen. As far as Charles could tell, the only weapons in use were feet and fists. He stepped into the passage, bent swiftly, and grabbed two long, sharp staves of splintered wood.

  “Here!” He thrust one into the rector’s hands. “Stay beside me, mon pere, use your weapon, and we’ll part the waters.”

  Le Picart nodded grimly and hefted the stave of wood, trying its weight and balance. Shoulder to shoulder, they surged into the passage. “In nomine Patrie, Filios, et Spiritu Sanctu,” the rector thundered, and they advanced on the fray. The lay brothers and Montville, who were getting the worst of the fight, looked over their shoulders and renewed their efforts. With sudden inspiration, Charles began declaiming Psalm fifty-three.

  “Deus… salvum me fac… Quoniam alieni insurrexit adverum me et fortes quaesierunt animam mean… averte mala inimicis meis Et in veritate tua disperde illos!”

  Damiot fought his way to Charles’s unprotected side, and he and the rector made the litany bounce off the stone walls.

  “Defend my cause, for haughty men have risen up against me and fierce men seek my life… Turn back the evil upon my foes, in your faithfulness, destroy them!”

  Charles and Le Picart swept their improvised weapons in unison from side to side, as though sweeping uncleanness out of the air itself. Whether it was the sharply pointed wood cleaving the air or the echoing church Latin that made the intruders retreat, retreat they did. Within moments, there was nothing but the sound of running feet. The victors exchanged furtive glances, wiped their streaming faces, and tried to catch their breath.

  “Amen!” Damiot said with relish.

  “So be it!” Le Picart responded liturgically and with equal fervor. He dropped his piece of wood and went out to inspect the damage.

  Snow was starting to fall. The others followed him along the college facade, stepping over broken glass, looking up at shattered windows. Le Picart was the first to see the doors. He stopped as though frozen between one step and the next, and the others stopped behind him, craning their necks. In the light of the nearest street lantern, they saw what else the attackers had done. Scrawled across the doors in

  charcoal letters two feet high was a single word: MEURTRIERS.

  Chapter 9

  THE LAST HOURS OF ST. JOHN THE EVANGELIST’S DAY, FRIDAY, DECEMBER 27, AND THE FEAST OF THE HOLY INNOCENTS, SATURDAY, DECEMBER 28

  The rector refused to let Charles go for the nearest police commissaire.

  “I will pursue my own questions first,” he said flatly to Charles and the others gathered around him. “The fewer who know, the less talk. More of our lay brothers will have to know because work must be done tonight. But otherwise, none of you will speak of this. To anyone. Now, before anything else, are any of you injured?”

  Most had only a few bruises. The two lay brothers bleeding from cuts, Le Picart sent Frere Brunet to the infirmary, along with one whose shoulder had been pulled out of joint. Then he set the rest of the lay brothers to cleaning up the damage, and told them to wake others to help them sweep up the glass in the street, scrub the ugly accusation from the big doors, and guard the postern entrance while a temporary door was constructed and set in place. All before first light.

  “I will arrange for new window glass in the morning,” Pere Montville said grimly. “It’s going to be hellishly expensive. Meanwhile, we’ll cover the windows with canvas.”

  “The canvas over the windows will be noticed, mon pere,” Charles said. “No matter how silent we are, there will be questions and talk.”

  “There is already talk. I will ask my own questions first,” Le Picart repeated.

  Charles bowed and held silent. When canvas for his window had been found and Le Picart had dismissed him, he returned to his freezing chamber, covered the window as best he could, and went to bed. But the violence of the night kept him long awake. The attack had deepened his anger over Martine’s death, she who had been so defenseless, and when he finally slept, he dreamed about her.

  When Saturday morning came, he prayed for her soul, but his angry certainty that the rector’s attempt to cover up the attack was going to make things worse distracted him from his prayers and made them worth little. When Mass and breakfast were over and the dull gray light was growing, he made his way to the hastily constructed new postern, thinking as he entered the passage that at least the sharp smell of raw wood was an improvement on the usual winter smell of cold dank stone. Before he reached the door, a clamor of voices sounded outside and, to his surprise, the porter opened the postern to let in Pere Joseph Jouvancy and a flock of red-cheeked, bright-eyed boys with their tutors. Jouvancy hailed his assistant rhetoric teacher.

  “Maitre du Luc, well met! I want to see you; come back inside with me one little moment.”

  He waved the boys and tutors through the main building’s side door. Charles laughed to himself as the college’s two shivering Chinese students, usually the essence of politeness, outmaneuvered the rest to get inside first. Jouvancy and Charles followed at the rear, skirting the crush of boys handing swords to a lay brother in the little chamber off the anteroom and receiving in exchange wooden tokens bearing their names. Students whose social rank entitled them to the sword were allowed to wear it when they left the college, but all weapons were strictly forbidden inside the school walls. Jouvancy led Charles through the grand salon and up a staircase to his office, talking nonstop, like the Seine in flood.

  “… which, of course, made it even more glorious at Gentilly than it usually is, maitre,” the handsome little priest was saying happily as he sank into the chair behind his desk. Jouvancy was somewhere in his forties, with the tireless energy of a squirrel. “Snow!” He threw out both beautifully expressive hands as though to catch falling flakes. “One of the bon Dieu’s most beautiful gifts, especially in the quiet of the country. And Gentilly is still very quiet, you know, even though it’s so near Paris. Our chateau flourishes and the flocks seem well. But speaking of snow, do you know that it was all I could do to make those Chinese boys walk back to Paris with us? They tell me they hate the snow, can you believe it? They say it only snows on mountains in their part of China. I tell you, coaxing them away from the fireplace this morning was like trying to tell mice they don’t like cheese!”

  “How peculiar,” Charles said straight-faced, as Jouvancy paused for breath. “Imagine liking warmth. But I thought you were not returning until tomorrow, mon pere.”

  Jouvancy gestured dramatically at the pewter sky outside the office window. “The old woman who keeps our dairy there is a weather prophetess, the best for leagues around, they say. She told me it would surely snow again tonight, and most likely snow hard. So I thought it better to get the boys back to the college now.”

  Charles frowned at the window and hoped the elderly dairy maid was right about the new snow’s timing. Slogging through a heavy snowfall any sooner would make all he had to do take even longer. He needed to find out if the elder M. Brion had returned home. And where the younger M. Brion was. And he had to find Lieutenant-General La Reynie, or at least find out from the police commissaire if anything new had been learned about Martine’s murder.

  Jouvancy was still talking. “… so I wanted to see you to ask if you have heard from Monsieur Charpentier. About whether his music for February is fini
shed.”

  “No, mon pere, I’ve heard nothing.”

  Jouvancy tsked with impatience. “Musicians! They are as bad as builders, always of a lingering humor! Well, we will live in hope. Celsus Martyr, our spoken Latin tragedy, is only three acts instead of five. Monsieur Charpentier’s French Celse, the musical tragedy, has five acts. Though it is longer, it is still the intermedes for the spoken tragedy. But it will have far more singing than dancing, which will make your job easier. We still need all the time we can get for rehearsing, though!”

  Charles thought privately that the short spoken tragedy was going to seem like intermedes for the long musical tragedy. They would certainly need all the time for rehearsal they could get, since-dances or not-he would have to oversee much of the musical tragedy’s staging. “And will the performance be on the same stage where we did Pere Damiot’s farce, mon pere?”

  “In winter, there is nowhere else. Was his Farce of Monks well received?”

  By the end of Charles’s retelling, Jouvancy was laughing nearly as hard as the audience had.

  “Ah, Maitre du Luc, I wish I had seen you chasing Frere Brunet with that clyster! I often wish we could risk more comedy here. But public comedy is such a vexed question.” He frowned and shook his head. “All comedy is a vexed question when one is dealing with young people.”

  “Do you disapprove of comedy, then, mon pere?”

  “Oh, in most cases, yes, I do! Because the young are so easily led astray, you understand. And so much comedy in public theatres is frankly scurrilous.” He looked furtively at the door and lowered his voice. “I must admit, though, that I dearly love some of Moliere’s pieces-I once saw the incomparable Gentilhomme and laughed myself silly at poor Monsieur Jourdain! Our little Moliere sometimes went too far, I admit,” Jouvancy said affectionately. The great playwright had once been a day student at Louis le Grand, back when he was only little Jacques Poquelin, the upholsterer’s son. “A genius, though. And cut off in his prime, poor man.”

  Interested in Jouvancy’s opinion, Charles ventured, “Do you think, then, that the church is too severe on actors?”

  “In truth, I do! Excommunicating them, as happens too often, only drives them farther away from virtue, yet as we prove regularly in our colleges, the theatre can be an excellent school for virtue. If only actors would use it as that, there is no reason they should be denied the sacraments any more than dancers-and the church certainly does not excommunicate dancers!”

  Charles laughed a little cynically. “If it did, it would have to excommunicate half the nobility of France! Not to mention the king.”

  “Well, Louis does not dance himself anymore, but yes. Speaking of dancers, who are you going to cast in the musical tragedy?”

  “Walter Connor, I think. And Armand Beauclaire, who in spite of his directional difficulty is an excellent dancer.”

  “But poor Maitre Beauchamps,” Jouvancy said, his lively face a mask of mendacious concern. “Do you want to be answerable for the results if our dear dancing master has, yet again, to teach Beauclaire the difference between right and left?” Pierre Beauchamps, probably the greatest dancing master alive, was dance director of the Paris Opera and also Louis le Grand’s ballet master. And an indispensable thorn in the rhetoric master’s side. “There might well be murder done, maitre!”

  Murder. Charles winced, seeing in his mind the word scrawled on the college doors-innocent of the slander now after the lay brothers’ long and hardworking night. Unbidden, his mind also showed him Martine, lying dead as he’d last seen her. Jouvancy, oblivious, had risen to hunt along his bookshelf for something. He looked up as someone tapped at the door.

  “Come!”

  A lay brother stuck his head into the room. “Your pardon, mon pere. There’s a Monsieur Germain Morel to see Maitre du Luc.” He looked at Charles. “In the anteroom by the main doors.”

  Startled, Charles looked at Jouvancy for permission to leave, wondering uneasily what Mlle Isabel Brion’s dancing master could want.

  “Yes, yes, very well, go.” The rhetoric master sat down again, leafing through his leather-bound costume book. “We will talk again before all this madness starts.”

  “Thank you, mon pere.” Charles rose. “Please tell Monsieur Morel I am coming,” he said to the lay brother, who withdrew and clattered down the stairs.

  Charles left the chamber quietly and hurried down behind him. Before he reached the anteroom at the bottom of the curving stone staircase, Morel was bowing, words tumbling out of his mouth.

  “Forgive me for troubling you, Maitre du Luc. But Mademoiselle Brion begged me to come.” Morel was sweating in spite of the cold and seemed hardly able to catch his breath. “Because-” He gulped air. “Monsieur Brion is dead!”

  Charles stared in confusion. “Her brother? Or do you mean her father?”

  “Monsieur Henri Brion. A sergent of police came to tell Mademoiselle Brion that her father had been found murdered!”

  Charles tried to think past his surprise. Lying awake during the night, he’d wondered whether, for some unguessed-at reason, it was Henri Brion, and not his son, who had killed Martine and fled, which would explain why no one had seen him since her death was discovered. But if that was true, why would he be suddenly dead himself? “Who found him, Monsieur Morel? Where?”

  “I don’t know who found him. His body was-is-in a ditch very near the rue Perdue. The ditch is behind some old houses near the Place Maubert. Can you go there with me, maitre? Isabel-Mademoiselle Brion, I mean-wants you to pray for him. And she says”-color rose in Morel’s face-“she says you will know what to do.”

  “I am sure that you will know quite well what to do yourself,” Charles said diplomatically. “But of course I will come.” He gathered his cloak around him and led the way to the postern door, thinking irreverently that it would take a papal bull to keep him away.

  When he and Morel reached the Place Maubert, Morel led the way across it and down the small street that ran past the Mynette garden’s side gate.

  “This is a back way to Henri Brion’s own house,” Morel said. “I think he must have been on his way home when he was attacked.”

  The small street crossed a larger one and became an alley between old timbered houses. At the mouth of the alley stood a huddle of talking, eager-faced women. Servants, most of them looked to be, but the one at the center of the group was a wood seller resting the legs of her heavy carrying frame on the ground. She nodded to Charles. “They said you’d be coming, mon pere. It’s down the alley, in the ditch.”

  Charles thanked her, and he and Morel hurried between the houses to a snowy ditch that had perhaps once been a streambed and was ending its life as an illegal neighborhood midden. Two men stood in the ditch with their backs to the path. Charles didn’t know the man in workaday brown, but the one in the plumed hat and long black wig he knew all too well, even from behind.

  Giving thanks for the cold for once, because it lessened the ditch’s stench, Charles picked his way down the snowy slope, Morel behind him. Morel arrived at the bottom with his dignity intact, but Charles stepped on something nastily soft under the snow and slid precipitously, saved from falling flat only by a long arm and a lace-cuffed iron grip.

  “Bonjour, Maitre du Luc. I thought you might be arriving.” A spark of warmth flickered in Nicolas de La Reynie’s dark eyes, and a corner of his mouth turned up beneath the moustache arching like a gray half moon above his lips. La Reynie was not a young man. But he was a commanding presence, tall and strong and powerfully built.

  “And I am glad to find you here, mon lieutenant-general,” Charles said. “And not only because you saved my poor bones, if not my dignity.”

  He didn’t bother asking why La Reynie had been expecting him. Or why the lieutenant-general of the Paris police had come himself to stand in this noisome ditch. The man knew more than anyone except God about what happened in the city, and probably knew it faster. He would certainly know of Martine Mynette’s m
urder and no doubt knew quite well that Henri Brion had been her notary. And that the Mynette money would now come to the Society of Jesus. Pressed unwillingly into La Reynie’s service last summer, Charles had quickly learned that nothing was beneath the lieutenant-general’s attention.

  The other corner of La Reynie’s mouth lifted. “Dignity? Oh, Jesuits have dignity to spare, I find. Though no more bones than the rest of us. And perhaps, just now, no more money? At least, not yet.”

  Charles smiled affably. La Reynie was not the only one who could play verbal games. “Certainly not more money, monsieur, since we take a vow of poverty.”

  La Reynie gave him a small ironic bow and presented his sergent, the man in brown breeches and coat, lean and hard bitten. Charles, in turn, presented Morel, who eyed La Reynie warily. The four of them turned their attention to the most recent dead creature to be thrown into the ditch.

  Charles crossed himself and the others followed suit. Henri Brion’s frost-glazed dark eyes stared past them at the sky. Charles looked at his dead face, recalling that although he had heard the man’s voice, he had never seen him until now. He was somehow surprised to see how much Brion looked like his daughter, robust and wide-faced, and how little he resembled the small frail Gilles.

  “I have heard that our corpse was a notary and had worked for your college,” La Reynie said.

  “Yes. And you no doubt also know that he was Mademoiselle Mynette’s notary. And her guardian. I know his family slightly, but I had never met him. How was he killed?” Charles asked.

  “Stabbed in the back. To the heart. We found him lying on his face and turned him to have a look at his other side. There’s little blood on the ground around him, because his clothes are good thick cloth and his shirt and coat soaked up most of it.”

  Morel flinched. Charles said nothing, again seeing Martine Mynette lying in a sea of red. But that blood was let by a little blade, not the long knife needed to pierce a heart.