The Eloquence of Blood cdl-2

by Judith Rock

  La Reynie moved closer to her, and Charles saw coins glint in the firelight. Then Charles followed him back to the front room and the counter where the Sicilian woman was busy over her accounts.

  “On Thursday, madame,” La Reynie said, “not long before you closed, three men were here together. Monsieur Claude Bizeul the goldsmith, Monsieur Henri Brion the notary, and another man. Do you remember them?”

  Her black eyes were opaque, her face expressionless. “No, monsieur.”

  “Surely you are more noticing of your customers than that, madame.”

  “They gave me no reason to notice them.”

  La Reynie leaned closer. “Then tell me what you did not notice, madame. Because one of them, Monsieur Henri Brion, is dead. As I am certain you already know.”

  Dislike flared in her face and was as quickly gone. “Of course I know. Old Reine told me. But it’s nothing to do with Procope’s. And how can I tell you what I did not see?”

  The lieutenant-general gave her his teeth-baring smile. “Easily, if you wish Procope’s to remain in business, madame.”

  She breathed in slowly, her nostrils white and pinched. “Perhaps I remember them slightly. The dead man was here often and so is Monsieur Bizeul. The third, the younger one, I had not seen before. That is the truth, as the Virgin sees me. They argued, but not so I could hear what they said. In his anger, Monsieur Brion spilled his coffee onto the floor. Monsieur Bizeul said to me that Monsieur Brion was drunk. The two pulled Monsieur Brion to his feet, apologized to me for his discourtesy, and the three of them left. That is all.”

  A small hissing sound made Charles look toward the fireplace. The waiter who had served them earlier rolled his eyes at the woman and shook his head. As though bored with waiting for La Reynie, Charles wandered toward the street door. The waiter grabbed a broom and energetically swept his way to the door.

  “I heard your talk with her, mon pere, I cannot help it. She is lying.” He glanced at the woman behind the counter and pulled a towel from the waist of his breeches. Flourishing it across the seat of a chair, he said, “The little notary did not spill the coffee. The young companion, the one she did not name, he pushed it off the table, and they blamed the notary to make him leave. You understand?”

  Charles nodded. “Who was the young companion, mon ami?”

  “Alas, I do not know him. But the notary, he did not want to go! He pulled from them, he cursed them, but they forced him. They repeated that he was drunk and apologized for him.” The waiter’s eyes were as round as the coffee bowls, and his jet eyebrows were halfway up his pockmarked forehead. “But they were very angry with him. And now Reine says he is dead.”

  “Luigi!” The woman’s voice was furious. “To your work!”

  The waiter made an eloquent face at Charles and scurried away. Charles smiled vaguely at several men who had watched the exchange and went casually into the street. When La Reynie joined him, Charles told him what the waiter had said.

  “So the spilled coffee was an excuse for taking Brion out of here,” the lieutenant-general said grimly. “And he has not been seen, so far as we know, by anyone else since he was taken out of here. Why a respectable goldsmith would have a hand in killing him is hard to imagine. But I am going to the barriere for the sergent, and he and I are going to call on Monsieur Bizeul and see what story he cares to tell.”

  “And me? Am I dismissed?”

  Le Reynie’s mouth twitched. “I am only lieutenant-general of Paris. If memory serves, I have not been entirely successful at telling you what to do.”

  Before Charles could answer that, a loud and untuneful voice made them turn toward the end of the street. A street vendor, the frayed and wilting brim of his plumed hat at a rakish angle, his arms full of printed sheets, was walking toward them, singing:

  “Elle etait riche, elle est morte Les Jesuites dansent sur son corps. Elle est perdue, pour ainsi dire, Les Jesuites pour enrichir!”

  Chapter 11

  Charles started toward the singer, but La Reynie put out a hand and stopped him. The singer, seeing Charles, grinned and redoubled his efforts, flourishing his song sheets at house windows as he bellowed out the words. An upper casement opened, and a woman shouted down that he should leave a sheet on her doorstep. As she tossed him a coin, two grinning men came out of a shop to buy copies. Charles seethed but held where he was. La Reynie leaned on his walking stick and watched. The singer kept coming. Then he saw La Reynie, shut his mouth abruptly, and disappeared into an opening between houses. Charles hurried to the place where he’d turned and found a tiny alley snaking into shadows.

  “Don’t be an idiot,” La Reynie said behind him. “Anyone could be waiting for you down there. Or for me. I am even more unpopular than you are.”

  “The man is inciting violence! Men have already-” Charles swallowed the end of his words, belatedly remembering the rector’s order not to talk about the attack on Louis le Grand.

  La Reynie cocked an interested eyebrow, but contented himself with saying, “When one broadside seller is peddling a scurrilous song, you may be sure that two dozen others are doing the same across the city. You look like you’ve heard that song before.”

  “Last night. As I passed a tavern called The Horse’s Tail, near the Place Maubert. If you let them go on singing the thing all over Paris, Jesuits will not be able to go out into the streets! Nor will our students, and most of our classes for day students are about to start.”

  “Maitre.” La Reynie sighed. “Even in Provence and Languedoc, you must have had broadside sellers. If the songs are seditious, I imprison the sellers and try to find the printers. But these people are like fleas; who can be rid of them? And this song does not even mention the king. Yes, it stirs up the people and I will try to find out the source. But surely you know that the only thing that will stop it is catching the Mynette girl’s killer. And Henri Brion’s killer, because, as you have already implied, Henri Brion is going to be the song’s next verse unless the killer is quickly found. And now, before I look for the would-be monk, who seems to stick to his Capuchins like a leech and is probably the least likely of my suspects to disappear, I am going to visit Monsieur Bizeul the goldsmith.” He smiled ominously. “I regulate the guilds, you know. If he is innocent, he will tell me what he knows rather than provoke me. If not-I will provoke him. As for you, go back to the college by the main streets. And shut your ears to insults. Your soldier’s training will not serve you against a crowd, nor will a reputation for street brawling improve things for the Society of Jesus.”

  “That sounds suspiciously like an order.”

  “Does it?” La Reynie laughed softly as he bowed. “Then God go with you as you obey it.”

  “Wait, mon lieutenant-general-what about Paul Saglio?”

  “Saglio?”The lieutenant-general looked momentarily blank. “Yes, Saglio.” He sighed and shook his head. “Do you have any idea how many men I do not have? When I find someone to send to Vaugirard, I will send him.”

  On his way back toward the college, no one challenged Charles, but he felt as though accusing eyes watched him from every doorway, as though everyone he passed were about to start singing the tavern song. He walked along the rue des Fosses, looking out at the Faubourg St. Jacques, the suburb that had grown up south of the walls. The Faubourg was thick with recent monastic foundations, built solidly of stone, with ample land around them. Beyond the gray lace of winter trees lay the walled precincts of the Feuillantines, Ursulines, and Daughters of Mary, their frozen gardens bare and empty. The great dome of Val de Grace, the Benedictine house beloved by Louis XIV’s mother, rose above the convent walls like a sugared Christmas cake.

  New private houses of gleaming stone were scattered along the road among the religious foundations, but not far beyond them, the countryside still spread itself. Soon, Charles told himself, plowing would start in the barren fields, fruit trees would blossom, the sun would come back. And, please God, his own heaviness of spirit would lighten
. In truth, though, he wasn’t sure. He’d chosen clearly and from his heart to remain a Jesuit. But his grief for what he hadn’t chosen had been ripped wide open by Martine Mynette’s murder, by her loss of the future she should have had. Nothing is wasted, the Silence had said-not death, not grief-unless you waste it. Was this renewed grief of his meant to drive him to find her killer? Was that what the Silence had meant?

  He waited, very still on the windswept roadway, hoping the Silence would answer him. And caught his breath, wondering if the white horse galloping along a path beside a snowy field, its rider’s black cloak flying, the man’s streaming hair black as a crow’s feather in the gray light, might be a sign. He watched them out of sight, but the Silence held its peace and the horse and rider only left him yearning to ride in the wind’s teeth and leave grief behind.

  Charles was nearly at the college when he saw a huddle of beggars in the street ahead of him, outside the church of St. Etienne des Gres. A halting voice came from their midst, and he realized that someone was reading aloud. A man hushed a chattering woman, who hit him and started pushing her way out of the huddle. The reader’s voice grew louder. “Elle etait riche, elle est morte, les Jesuites dansent sur son corps…”

  Bursting from the group nearly in Charles’s path, the woman who’d been hushed screeched, “Here’s one, here’s a Jesuit vulture! But he can’t eat us, we’ve no gold for his guts!”

  The others turned and Charles saw that the reader was the young man who’d pleaded for the old beggar on Christmas Eve. When he saw Charles, his eyes grew round with fear and he dropped the sheet of paper and backed away. Some of the beggars started singing the words of the tavern song, but the old man who’d attacked the Conde’s reliquary limped close to Charles, thrust his head forward, and squinted at him.

  “Shut your mouths,” he yelled over his shoulder. “This death-bird gives good alms, he gave me this coat.”

  Charles picked up the broadsheet from the cobbles and smiled reassuringly at the reader.

  “Where did you get this, mon ami?”

  The young man ran. Seeming to catch his fear, the others ran, too, and the old man limped after them, yelling at them to stop and cursing them for idiots. They rounded the corner of St. Etienne des Gres and Charles followed them, wondering suddenly where they sheltered. But in the scant moments it took him to reach the side street that ran in front of the college of Les Cholets, they disappeared. He turned back to the rue St. Jacques, studying the broadsheet as he went. This sheet, at least, still had only the one verse, which was somewhat reassuring. No printer’s name, of course-no one would put his name to an effort to stir up unrest and disturb the city’s peace.

  As Charles neared the postern door, a shop sign on the college facade creaked in a burst of wind. Charles looked up. The sign’s crusty, golden loaf of bread made him smile, thinking of the LeClercs, the family of bakers who rented the shop and its living quarters. Mme LeClerc and her small daughter Marie-Ange had taken him to their hearts when he arrived last summer, helping him when he’d sorely needed it. The family should soon be back in Paris from their Christmas visit to M. LeClerc’s brother in the nearby village of Gonesse.

  His spirits lightened a little by that thought, Charles went to the rector’s office, where he found Pere Le Picart sitting by the fireplace, his breviary in his hand.

  “I see news in your face, Maitre du Luc,” Le Picart said. “Please, sit.”

  Charles took the chair on the other side of the hearth and loosened his cloak. “News indeed, mon pere. Henri Brion is dead. Stabbed to the heart.”

  Le Picart crossed himself. “Brion? Dear God. So that is why the poor man never came to see me?”

  “I don’t know how long he’s been dead. A beggar found him in a midden ditch near the Place Maubert. Someone came from the Brion house to tell me, and I’m just back from seeing the body.”

  “May God receive his soul. This is the last thing I expected! Certainly the last thing we needed. Of course,” he added dryly, “poor Monsieur Brion hardly needed it, either. Were the police there? Is there any thought of who killed him? Or why?”

  “Lieutenant-General La Reynie was there. He has gone to question a goldsmith called Bizeul who, according to one of The Procope’s waiters, took Brion forcibly out of the coffeehouse on Thursday night. The waiter and a woman who was begging at the coffeehouse door say that this Bizeul and another man pretended that Brion was drunk, but he wasn’t. And since then, no one seems to have seen Brion alive.”

  Le Picart frowned thoughtfully. “A notary may come to know financial secrets, after all.”

  “True. Though family secrets are often more deadly.”

  “So you don’t suspect this goldsmith?”

  “He must be suspected, if it is true that he took Henri Brion forcibly out of the coffeehouse. But I can imagine no reason for him to have killed the girl. I cannot help but think that there is only one killer. Martine Mynette and Brion were both stabbed. Their lives were joined in family friendship as well as in the donation entre vifs transaction. For both to die on the same day is too much coincidence.”

  “I agree. So who had reason to kill them both?”

  “The most obvious answer is Henri Brion’s son, Gilles,” Charles said reluctantly. “His father was trying to force him into a marriage with the Mynette girl. And if he killed only the girl, his father would surely have tried to force him to court another heiress. But from the little I’ve seen of Gilles Brion, I simply cannot imagine him as a killer.”

  “Anyone may be tempted to kill. And until we find the person who has been so tempted,” Le Picart said grimly, “the connections between the two victims mean that Brion’s death will be laid at our door along with Martine Mynette’s.”

  They were both quiet under the weight of that certainty. The dim light through the small window’s greenish glass made the rector’s face look even more tired and drawn than it was.

  The quiet was broken by a knock at the door. The rector gave permission to enter and a lay brother came in, holding out a folded piece of paper.

  “This was left with the porter, mon pere. For Pere Damiot.” He handed the folded paper to Le Picart, bowed, clasped his hands against his apron skirt, and composed himself to wait.

  “Please excuse me, Maitre du Luc.” Le Picart opened the letter and scanned the page. Like the older religious orders, the Society of Jesus required that any letter sent to or written by a Jesuit be read by a superior. When he finished reading, he stared open-mouthed at the page in his hand. “Unbelievable,” he breathed. Still looking at the letter, he said to the lay brother, “Mon frere, bring Pere Damiot to me, please.”

  The brother bowed and went out.

  “Well,” Le Picart said, looking up. He seemed more at a loss for words than Charles had ever seen him. “Well. This suggests that your initial impression of Gilles Brion may be correct, maitre. But we must wait until Pere Damiot has read this, since it is written to him.”

  “Of course, mon pere.”

  “A goldsmith,” Le Picart murmured to himself, thoughtfully tapping a finger on the letter in his lap. “Very likely.”

  Charles folded his hands tightly in his lap to keep himself from snatching the letter and devouring it.

  “Mon pere,” he said after a moment, both to take his mind off the letter and also because he needed to relieve his conscience, “after Monsieur La Reynie finished examining Brion’s body, he asked me to go with him to talk to the people at Procope’s. I went. I sat with him and drank coffee. I felt it was part of doing the task you’ve set me. But-well-it is a coffeehouse.”

  The rector sighed. “Maitre du Luc.” He sounded as though he were talking to a sixteen-year-old novice. “I am not aware that Rome has condemned coffee.” He smiled at Charles. “Rather the contrary, if gossip serves.”

  “Oh, yes?” Charles was momentarily diverted by the thought of His Holiness in papal tiara, sipping coffee in some Roman Procope’s.

  “You are pu
rsuing these questions at my express order, maitre. Where the questions take you, you will go. I charge you only to remember that Monsieur La Reynie pursues his own interests first and last.”

  A flurry of knocking came at the door, and Pere Damiot was inside almost before Le Picart could bid him enter. His thin, olive-skinned face was alight with curiosity.

  “Yes, mon pere? A letter for me?”

  The rector waited serenely until Damiot remembered the required reverence to his superior. Then Charles rose and offered his chair to Damiot who, as a priest, was his superior.

  “Bonjour, maitre,” Damiot said hurriedly. “Thank you. With your permission, mon pere?”

  Le Picart nodded and Damiot sat. Charles’s mouth twitched. Damiot was looking at the letter in Le Picart’s hand the way Charles’s boyhood beagle had watched meat roasting in the kitchen fireplace.

  “From your esteemed father, mon pere,” the rector said, holding the letter out. “Read it here, please; it touches on what Maitre du Luc and I were discussing.”

  “Yes, mon pere.” Damiot glanced at Charles and then was absorbed in reading. Fortunately, the letter was short. Incomprehensibly, before Damiot reached the end of it, he was laughing. Eyes dancing with mirth, he looked at Le Picart. “Incredible! Have you ever heard anything to match this, mon pere?”

  “Certainly nothing financial,” the rector said dryly. He turned to Charles, who was utterly at sea. “We will tell you shortly what is entertaining Pere Damiot, maitre, but first you need to know that his esteemed father is a merchant goldsmith and a member of the Six Corps.”

  “I do know from Pere Damiot that his father is a goldsmith, mon pere-but, what is the Six Corps?”

  Damiot looked at Charles in disbelief.

  The rector said kindly, “The association of Paris’s six most influential guilds.”

  “My father is head of the goldsmiths’ guild.” Damiot looked questioningly at Le Picart, who nodded at him to continue. “It is like this, maitre. This morning, my father heard something that closely concerns Monsieur Henri Brion. He had already heard about the Mynette bequest coming to us-I think everyone in Paris has heard of it by now.” Damiot looked apologetically at Le Picart. “I hope I did not speak out of turn, mon pere, but when my father visited me yesterday, he asked me if we had sure proof of Monsieur Simon Mynette’s intention, and I told him we had Simon Mynette’s letter, notarized by Monsieur Henri Brion.”