by Judith Rock
“Oh, God, come to my assistance. Oh, Lord, make haste to help me..” Walking slowly, he reached the final “amen” with a deep sense of recovered peace, which shattered when he stepped on fresh, bloody cow guts and nearly slid into the Seine. Cawing laughter rang out behind him.
“Eh, Jean, did you see that? Praying and nearly drowned himself! Priests. Pah! Surprised they let the soft-wits out on their own.”
Butchers working till the last light, Charles thought resignedly. He was glad-for once-of the cold, since it kept down the smell of the blood and entrails not yet disposed of in the river. Leaving the butcher stalls behind, Charles hurried toward the clatter of the Samaritaine pump. Working day and night in its little Dutch pump house at the Right Bank end of the Pont Neuf, it drew fresh drinking water from the river for the city. The color was nearly faded from the sky, and the lantern hanging on the elaborately gabled pump house was already lit. As he turned onto the bridge, a swarm of begging children appeared from nowhere and surrounded him, their small hands fluttering like birds as they patted his cloak, feeling for pockets or purse. Stricken that he had nothing to give them, he showed his empty hands and signed a cross over them.
“Come to the college of Louis le Grand on Friday,” he said, pointing across the river. “We will give you food and clothes.”
Their hands dropped and they stared at him with old eyes. Today was only Monday. One of them picked up a clod of frozen street filth and flung it at him, barely missing his face, and the whole flock ran back the way they’d come. Charles called out to them and then wrenched his cloak loose from his shoulders and ran after them.
“Here, take this, you can sell it, you can-”
But they were gone, expert, like all their kind, at vanishing. Charles slung his cloak around his shoulders, thinking how cold he’d grown without it even for a few moments, and how cold the children must be. Why? he demanded silently of God as he walked. This is Christendom. Our Catholic church is supposed to be reformed now-at least the Protestants have done us that much good, making us look at ourselves. So why do we let children live in the streets? The growing evening quiet of the street remained only quiet.
Most of the vendors in the small roofed stalls along the Pont Neuf were packing up their wares, but a few were still doing business by lantern light. At the weaponer’s, three swaggering, posturing men were trying out swords. Charles barely jumped aside in time to avoid a stumbling experimental thrust, as two of them sparred, laughing.
“Your opponent could have killed you while you were spitting me by mistake,” Charles said laconically to the man who’d nearly skewered him. “Keep track of where your real enemy is, or you’ll be too dead to laugh.”
The man’s eyes narrowed and he moved toward Charles, but his companions roared with laughter and held him back.
At the end of the bridge, Charles headed for the Fosses St. Germain, thinking to go back to Louis le Grand along the old walls’ embankment. Harsh voices behind him made him look over his shoulder and lengthen his stride. The men who’d been trying the swords were closing on him, not with any intent, it seemed, just arguing loudly about the virtues of Spanish steel. To escape their noise, he turned down a short street called Contrescarpe. To his relief, the men stopped, shouting into each other’s faces, and he left them behind.
A coach turned into Contrescarpe at the street’s other end, and he looked for a doorway to shelter in while it passed. But before the coach reached him, it turned right, through an archway, and disappeared. When Charles came to the archway, he saw that it led to an inn whose sign announced it as Le Cheval Blanc. The man begging at the arch held out a hand, and once again Charles had to say he had no coins to give. The White Horse was a rambling stone-built inn with three long-distance coaches standing in its busy yard. A group of beggars moved through the crowd of travelers as grooms changed the teams of horses. Bedraggled passengers clambered out of the newly arrived coach and new passengers boarded the other two. Long-distance coaches were more common now, though Charles himself had never used one. But he knew something from his soldiering days about the state of France’s winter roads, and he pitied the boarding passengers.
As he walked on, another coach turned into Contrescarpe and lumbered toward the inn. Charles scrambled for a door to press his back against. By the time the coach had passed him and rumbled into the innyard, he realized that the door he was leaning against led to a tavern and that inside, people were happily shouting, “Tu es riche? Tu es mort…” The street was slowly filling with early-winter dusk, and a frisson of fear ran down his spine. He walked quickly away, just as the tavern door burst open behind him. Forcing himself not to run, Charles held to his brisk walk, tilting his wide hat slightly and hitching his cassock up a little under his cloak to make him harder to identify from the back as a cleric.
For a dozen steps, he thought he was going to get away with it. Then someone yelled, “There he is, take him!” and feet pounded over the cobbles. Hands grabbed his cloak. He pulled its ties loose, left it to the grabbing hands, and ran. The street was filling with darkness and shouts of “vultures, deathbirds, killers!” A lumbering man with a massive belly came at him from the side and he dodged. But he tripped over uneven cobbles, went down, and someone else jumped on his back. Charles’s body, firmly convinced that alive and doing penance was preferable to dead and virtuous, took over. Flinging up an arm to block a kick to his head, he twisted half onto his side and smashed a fist into the face of the man who’d leaped on him. He scrambled to a crouch and set his back against a house wall. People were running toward him from the innyard, and the street was filling with people fighting each other. As Charles reached to arm himself with a loose cobble, someone swung a piece of wood at him. He ducked, kicking like a madman, and the attacker fell backward. Charles grabbed the piece of wood, swung it in a circle, and got his back against the wall again. A grinning man came at him from the side. Charles swung and the man went down, but the piece of wood hit the house wall, sending a numbing shock up his arms. Two women wrenched it away from him, shrieking with laughter, but other people grabbed them and pulled them back. Then light from the open tavern door glinted on steel and in the instant before the man with the knife lunged, Charles dropped to the ground, swung both legs from the hip, and scythed the man’s feet from under him. A deep voice thundered curses, someone swung a club at the man with the knife, and he lay still on the cobbles.
“Get up,” a pile of rags hissed at Charles. Past questions, he took the hand offered and stumbled to his feet. The pile of rags, also pulling someone along on its other side, hurried him to the end of the street and around the corner into a dark courtyard.
“Stay here!” the rags ordered the other person it had dragged to the courtyard, and turned to Charles. “Are you hurt?”
“No.” After nearly being stabbed, bruises hardly counted.
“They wanted to kill you.”
“Yes.” Charles finally recognized the voice. “It’s Reine, isn’t it?”
“It is.”
“How-where did you come from? And the others?”
She jerked her head at the man beside her, whom Charles could see only dimly in the near dark. “We were begging at the inn. I saw you pass.” She paused and listened, her head on one side. “It’s quieting down, the others will be coming. We have to be away from here. The man who came at you with the knife won’t be getting up again and-”
The half-seen man beside her banged his heavy walking stick on the ground and roared, “By holy Saint Michel, he won’t, the rotting son of a pig!”
It was the deep voice that had cursed so well in the street, and Charles recognized it now as the voice of the reliquary’s attacker and the almsgiving coat snatcher.
“-and because of that, we must be away before the guet comes,” Reine was saying fiercely. The guet was the nighttime police patrol.
A half dozen more beggars had drifted into the yard. Among them Charles spotted the old man’s young keeper, who
hurried to his charge’s side. Reine started to lead them all away.
“Wait,” Charles said. “You’ve saved my life. Come to the college and I will feed you, all of you, it’s the least I can do.”
No one spoke or moved. The old man roared out, “Mary’s holy milk, of course we’ll go! And if it’s a trick, we’ll kill him.”
Chapter 15
“They can’t come in here.” Frere Tricot, the usually genial head cook in the lay brothers’ kitchen, was blocking the kitchen doorway with his bulk. Firelight danced across the tonsure age had given him as he shook his head at the beggars. “They’re verminous, see them scratching, even in the cold? You know how hard we work to keep the fleas down. Not to say the lice.”
“Bonsoir, Guillaume.” Reine moved into the light spilling from the doorway and stood beside Charles.
Tricot caught his breath and crossed himself. “Blessed Virgin,” he whispered. “I thought you were dead.”
“I’ve thought so myself, more than once. But never with you.” Her smile widened.
The brother scowled, scarlet-faced, and pursed his lips. “Wait there. Stand away from the door. You.” He pointed at Charles. “Come and help me.”
Keeping his questions behind his teeth, Charles followed him into the kitchen. A thick soup simmered in a three-legged iron cauldron standing in the fireplace. A few tallow candles burning in wall sconces showed strings of onions and braids of garlic hanging from the ceiling beams. Muttering unhappily under his breath, Tricot handed Charles a knife and a basket and nodded toward the loaves on a table in the center of the room.
“Cut bread,” he said curtly. “Two pieces for each one. I suppose you’ve counted them?”
Charles pulled several loaves toward him, mentally making the nine beggars waiting in the courtyard into eighteen and wondering if he could cut forty thick slices before Tricot caught him. Tricot banged a wire-handled copper pot down in front of the fireplace and ladled soup into it. Lentil, from the smell, Charles thought, and with bacon in it. Keeping himself between the lay brother and the bread, he shoved an uncut loaf into the bottom of the basket and covered it with a mound of cut slices.
“Here, then.” Tricot held out the wire-handled pot. Two large spoons stood in it. “How am I supposed to account for all this food?”
“As a corporal act of mercy?”
Tricot grunted.
“Thank you, mon frere. If there are questions, I will take responsibility.”
Charles took the pot, staggering a little at the weight, and led his flock of beggars past the well and through an archway into the tiny stable court. As he’d hoped, the lantern-lit stable was empty, except for the college’s three horses.
He set the pot down and pulled the double doors closed. The beggars gathered eagerly around the pot. Reine surveyed the stable and then sat gracefully on a bale of straw. The old man sank down beside her and leaned back against the wooden wall. The thin, dark young man-boy, he almost seemed-who was his keeper saw him settled and then sat at his feet with his knees drawn up. The young man’s eyes were shadowed and he was coughing harshly. Charles handed Reine the spoons, put the basket of bread beside the pot, and stepped back, wishing he had left the doors a little open to cut the beggars’ fetid smell. A flurry of hands reached for the bread.
Reine looked at Charles. “A blessing?”
The hands stilled and Charles prayed. Reine gave a spoon to the old man’s keeper at her feet and tossed the other to a young woman on the other side of the pot. Everyone fell on the food. Charles had expected them to be loud and rude, to grab for everything they could reach. But they ate in near silence, passing the spoon carefully from one to another, scooping the lentil and bacon soup from the pot without spilling a drop. When a boy of twelve or thirteen kept the spoon too long, a man cuffed him lightly, plucked it out of his hands, and offered it to the boy’s neighbor. The beggars were indescribably filthy, and in the lantern light, Charles saw that many had some deformity. A young man had a twisted foot and there was a woman with a grossly swollen neck. A blind woman was so marked by smallpox that she seemed to have a webbed veil of white over her face and hands. A man who looked to be in his forties had what Charles thought was a withered cheek, but then saw it was a fleur de lys, the cruel identifying mark burned into the flesh of thieves.
When the soup was gone, the beggars clustered over the pot and wiped it nearly dry with hunks of the coarse brown bread.
The young man sitting with the old man leaned his head on Reine’s knees and slowly ate the last of his bread. She leaned down and pulled his coat more tightly closed as a new fit of coughing took him. The old man absently stroked the young man’s head. But the youth kept coughing, and Reine pulled a length of worn tawny velvet from her neck and wrapped it around his shoulders. He gave her a smile of such sweetness that Charles smiled as he watched. Reine looked at the old man half dozing beside her.
“Marin, will you eat more? There is more bread.”
“Eh? Me, I will always eat more! Where is it?”
A young girl with greasy black braids wrapped around her head brought him the basket. He took the last piece of bread, showing his few blackened teeth in a wide grin, and began chewing carefully. Reine looked up at Charles. Her eyes were like green flares in the dimness.
“Well?” she said challengingly. “Now you know my name and his.”
Unsure what his response should be, Charles bowed. “Thank you.” And added almost involuntarily, “madame.”
Her eyebrows lifted. “Very pretty. But at my court, young man, the courteous thing is to give us your name in return. I have heard your name, but the rest of us have not.”
“Gladly. I am Maitre Charles Matthieu Beuvron du Luc.” He bowed to the others. “Mesdames et messieurs.”
They stared at him open-mouthed. No one bowed to beggars. Or addressed them with titles of courtesy. The girl with the braids stood up again and curtsied.
“I am Belle,” she said gravely.
The man with the brand said, “I am Richard.”
Then they were all speaking. “I am Matthieu-the same as you!” “I am Therese.” “I am Alain.” “I am Edouard, and the skinny one there who keeps Marin out of trouble is Jean.” “I am Pasquier.” “I am Raymond.”
“Thank you,” Charles said. “You saved my life tonight and I am deeply in your debt. But I cannot help asking why you risked yourselves for a stranger.”
Richard stood up, moved a little aside, then cleared his throat and spat. “You gave Marin the new coat,” he said. “And I saw those bastards standing at the corner when you turned down the street toward the tavern. I was at the innyard gate while we begged, it was my turn to keep an eye out for the archers.” He narrowed his eyes and studied Charles. “You know about the archers?”
Charles said uncertainly, “From the Hotel de Ville?”
“Yes.” Richard spat again. “Them. They’re not good for much except rounding us up and throwing us into the Hotel Dieu or the Hopital General. You’re let out after a while, but if they take you a second time, the men go to the galleys and the women are exiled from Paris. It’s a terrible crime to be poor.”
“It’s not!” The blind woman turned her face toward Richard’s voice. “If needing to eat’s a crime, then Adam and Eve were criminals as much as us!”
“We know for sure Eve was,” a man called out, laughing.
“Shut your mouth, Alain,” the blind woman said. “If she was hungry as me most of the time, she’d eat a sour quince and not care who gave it to her.”
“Well, your belly’s full now,” Richard said placatingly. “The thing is, maitre, we knew those three bastards in the street. And when the fight started, we thought you’d need help.” He scratched his ribs. “Though now I come to think of it, they faded away from the fight fast enough. So maybe they weren’t following you. Anyway, you did need help.”
“Indeed I did. And-which bastards do you mean exactly?”
Richard grinned ap
preciatively. “But yes, one must always be specific, there are so many bastards. We don’t know their names.” He looked at Marin, who was still chewing the last piece of bread. “They’re archers from the Hotel de Ville, all three of them. They took old Marin in the autumn. To kill him, but Marin got away.”
Charles looked in surprise at the old man. “Why would anyone want to kill Marin?”
Richard grunted sardonically. “Remember when King Louis had the problem with his ass? The doctors were scared to cut on him. I mean, wouldn’t you be? Think you’d be living long, if your cutting didn’t work? So they wanted to practice. The archers started rounding up men and asking them if they had the same problem as the king. No women, just men. Sent them to Versailles and locked them up and the king’s doctor tried out the surgery on them, one by one. A lot died and, when they did, they got dropped out a window, early in the morning, and taken away in a cart.”
Horrified, Charles looked at Marin, who seemed not to be paying any attention to the story. “He told you this?”
“He did. Our Marin’s old, and his ass hurts and his wits wander, but he’s no fool. He got away before they cut him. Hid in the woods and walked all the way back to Paris.”
Charles was speechless, thinking of the college’s approaching celebration for the king’s return to health. Pulling himself back to the need to preserve his own health, he said, “Were the three archers actually fighting outside the tavern?”
“They came down the street behind you, slow like, and they were in the beginning of it; that’s why we came out after them. But then they disappeared and it was just the ones from of the tavern.”
“Again, I am in your debt.”
Old Marin grunted in satisfaction at Charles’s words. Then he planted his stick and climbed slowly to his feet. “We thank you for our supper, maitre.”