by Judith Rock
“Older, I think.”
“Then we go across Paris. All the way across Paris. Out the rue St. Antoine to the faubourg. Where I devoutly hope the populace is not starting its year arguing about how much better the world would be without Jesuits.”
In a loud silence, they rode across the river and turned east. In spite of the cold, holidaymakers strolled along the rue St. Antoine in their best clothes. The bourgeoises wore sober black and gray and brown, but their inferiors were bright against the snow in reds and yellows and greens rarely seen on workdays. Fastrolling carriages flashed by. Street peddlers bellowed the virtues of their hot coffee, chocolate, small pies and cakes, and smiled under a rain of small coins. Charles wanted to buy something to eat, but Damiot curtly refused and Charles decided not to argue. Most people ignored them, though as they rode past a snowball fight, a few angrily flung snowballs came their way; harmlessly, however, since the throwers’ holiday drinking was influencing their aim.
Just past St. Catherine’s well, at the Jesuit church of St. Louis, Charles put out a warning hand to Damiot and drew Flamme to a sudden halt. The beggar Marin, hatless but wearing his green almsgiving coat, already torn and dirty, was sitting on the church steps and holding out an insistent hand to passersby.
“Give alms, for love of the Sacre Coeur! Give alms for the Sacred Heart, have luck all year,” he chanted, scowling blackly at anyone who ignored him. “Refuse, you’ll have a year of tears! Give alms for love of the Sacre Coeur.”
Charles saw that tears were running down Marin’s face. The people who dropped coins into his hand kept a tight eye on his massive walking stick, careful not to come too close. His long, tangled white hair and beard made him look like a prophet, and he seemed not only at the end of his patience, but nearly as distraught as when Charles and Mme LeClerc had seen him following the mules on the rue St. Jacques.
“Blessed Sacred Heart,” he mourned, his voice rising in a wailing lament. “God and all the saints forgive me, blessed Claire, forgive me
…” He began to beat his chest. “Sacred Heart, see my tears-” The words trailed off into keening and he rocked himself from side to side.
Charles got down from his horse. Leading Flamme, he went as close to Marin as he dared. “Marin, softly, hush, it’s all right. God forgives you.” He put a hand gently on the beggar’s shoulder. “Claire forgives you, the Sacred Heart forgives you.”
The old man’s eyes flew open and he pulled away. His tears stopped and he stared wordlessly up at Charles, his eyes full of fear.
“What is it, Marin? You know I won’t hurt you.” Marin’s eyes darted from Charles to the street. “Where is Jean, Marin? Is he here to take care of you?” There was no answer. Charles looked in vain for the beggar’s keeper and then took money from the purse the rector had given him and put coins into Marin’s gnarled hand. “For your supper and Jean’s, too. Come now, get up, you can’t stay here. You may not remember Christmas Eve, but if the Professed House rector sees you here, he’ll surely remember and give you to the archers.”
Charles was pulling Marin to his feet when the old man froze, staring past him. Then the beggar lurched upright, ducked away from Charles, and fled. Turning to see what had frightened him, Charles saw Lieutenant-General La Reynie, imposing in a black-brown cloak and a wide beaver hat with a white plume, coming toward him. Behind him marched a solid phalanx of a dozen or more men in thick brown coats and breeches, with pistols in their belts.
Pere Damiot, his back to the approaching police, said impatiently, “If we have to go to the Foundling House, let’s go and get it over.” Even the stolid Boeuf was shaking his reins, wanting to be gone.
Charles raised his eyebrows. “Turn around, mon pere,” he said quietly, “and you’ll see why we can’t leave just yet.”
Damiot turned. “Oh, dear.” He shifted miserably in his saddle.
“Mon lieutenant-general, a good New Year to you,” Charles said courteously, as though they were in a salon and there were not a small army at La Reynie’s back.
“And to you, Maitre du Luc.” La Reynie looked at Damiot.
“Monsieur La Reynie, may I present Pere Thomas Damiot?”
La Reynie bowed slightly and Damiot acknowledged him.
“Damiot?” La Reynie studied the priest’s face. “Your father is head of the Six Corps. A merchant goldsmith, I believe.”
Damiot nodded. “I see that you know everything about the city you keep, Monsieur La Reynie.”
La Reynie looked at Charles. “Unhappily, not everything.” He said something to the officer standing just behind him and then to Charles, “A small word, maitre.”
Warning Damiot with a look to stay where he was, Charles led Flamme after La Reynie, a little way along the street and out of earshot of the other police.
“What has happened, Monsieur La Reynie?” he said, when the lieutenant-general stopped. “I doubt this is how you normally spend your New Year’s Day.”
“You doubt correctly. My spies told me last evening, and again this morning, that trouble is likely here at St. Louis. At your college and your novice house, too. I have put armed men at each place, nearly all the daytime men I have. At dark, the night patrol will replace them.” La Reynie’s head whipped around as shouts and loud laughter erupted from across the street. He watched a gesticulating knot of men in knee-length mantles, their broad hats askew as they argued. “Drunks.” La Reynie sighed. “But it’s drunks who generally start the trouble. Which they’ll go on doing, until someone is charged with these murders.” His gaze swept the length of the street. “Until someone confesses,” he said flatly, refusing to meet Charles’s eyes.
Charles’s stomach turned over. La Reynie was talking about Gilles Brion. The Chatelet was notorious for its ways of making people “confess.”
“I still have not found Monsieur Bizeul’s friend Cantel. I did find three more investors in the smuggling scheme,” La Reynie went on. “Two proved beyond doubt that they were elsewhere during the time when Brion must have been killed.” La Reynie smiled sourly. “The third, on the other hand, has no proof. But he doesn’t need any. He’s seventy and frail, with only one foot. He lost the other forty years ago as one of Conde’s men in the Fronde revolution.” He stopped to watch his own men walking up and down the street in pairs, missing nothing, staying always within earshot of their fellows. “I can keep things quiet a while longer with shows of force in the street. And arrests, too, if it comes to it, though arrests may only stir the fires.” He shook his head. “But the weather is growing colder, there’s more and more sickness about, especially among the workers in the St. Victor quartier, prices are rising again-and we haven’t even begun the worst of the winter! People are ready to take their fears out on whatever comes to hand.”
“And Jesuits have come to hand.”
The lieutenant-general’s eyes held Charles’s. “And therefore, I have to produce the Mynette girl’s killer and Henri Brion’s. Do you understand?”
“I understand,” Charles said, colder inside than out, “that you have Gilles Brion in the Chatelet and will use him if you must.”
La Reynie twitched his cloak angrily aside, as though his smoldering anger were heating him. “I will not ‘use’ him! I have never, to my knowledge, executed the wrong man and I never want to. But Brion seems more than likely as his father’s killer, if not the girl’s. And he had plenty of reason for her murder, as you well know.” La Reynie sighed heavily. “There are other reasons for haste. On the thirtieth day of this month, the king is coming to a reception and dinner with the city worthies at the Hotel de Ville. Do you know how rarely the king comes to Paris? He hates Paris. But you wouldn’t know that, you’re a foreigner. I cannot let him come into a city on the edge of riots.” In Paris, a foreigner was anyone not from Paris.
“I may be a foreigner from darkest Languedoc,” Charles said dryly, “but I can count. We have nearly all of January to find the killer.”
“No. The king already kno
ws of the unrest here. Have you forgotten that his confessor, Pere La Chaise, is one of your own? I have been told that the king wants this affair concluded, and quickly. He is furious that his own confessor’s order is being accused of murdering for gain. And furious at the thought of riots. I tell you, he hates unrest in Paris more than the pope hates the devil!” The lieutenant-general’s head whipped around again, as a roar of laughter rose by St. Catherine’s well. Someone’s hat, blown off in a gust of east wind, was rolling away down the street, chased by three skinny dogs.
La Reynie rubbed his tired face and turned back to Charles. “Do you have anything for me? Anything at all?”
With a pang of sympathy for the man’s obvious exhaustion, Charles gave up arguing.
“Nothing you will like. Paul Saglio, the servant Martine Mynette dismissed for being too forward, is innocent. We talked to him and his fellow servants in Vaugirard this morning, and it seems certain that he was there when she was killed. But I learned more about the Mynettes’ ex-gardener, Tito La Rue, the one Renee told us about, who was turned out in November for trying to get into Martine’s bedchamber. It seems that, from a child, he claimed Martine’s missing necklace as his own-God knows why. It seems unlikely that he’d come back and kill her over such a tiny thing. And I cannot imagine any reason for him to kill the notary. But since the necklace is missing, he ought to be questioned.”
“Find him. Did Renee tell you where he went when he left the Mynette house?”
“No. All I know is his name and that he’s in his midtwenties, middling tall and well fleshed, and that his hair is dark. And that he started life as a foundling.”
La Reynie’s face fell. “That’s all?”
Charles nodded toward the east. “I’m going now to the Foundling Hospital to ask about him.”
“The man was a foundling? And what-twenty years ago? Do you know how many thousands of children they care for? And their houses have been reformed and moved several times, so who knows what records they have?” The lieutenant-general looked ready to weep. “Oh, well, report to me what you find.” He turned away, his face eloquent with exactly how much help he expected to come out of Charles’s inquiries. Charles remounted and signaled to Damiot, and they rode toward the Faubourg St. Antoine.
“Old Marin looked more frightened than I’ve ever seen him,” Damiot said, as they passed the stately redbrick houses of the Place Royale. “What was the matter?”
“You know Marin?”
“I’ve seen him often enough in the streets.”
“I don’t know why he was so afraid. Maybe he’s getting crazier.”
“I feel sorry for beggars, but Paris has too many. How can ordinary people go about their business?”
“Rich people, you mean. Why shouldn’t they share what they have with God’s poor?”
“Why should they be assaulted by stench and sickness and insanity and the demon possessed every time they leave their houses? All those people can be cared for in public institutions like the Hopital General.”
Charles shook his head in disbelief. “Mon ami, haven’t you heard what’s said about places like the Hopital? They’re horrible. People who can’t help being poor don’t deserve that!”
Damiot sighed. “But there has to be something better than the street. Or that filthy mess those beggars have made out of the Louvre colonnade!”
“Well, think of something and make the Society of Jesus do it as a work of mercy.”
A quarter mile or so outside the city, Damiot drew his horse to a halt beside a long high wall on the left of the road. “There it is.”
A stone-shingled roof surmounted by a cross rose above the wall. Charles dismounted, leaving Damiot waiting in the dirt road, and led Flamme to the bell beside the stout wooden gate. Shivering in the wind that had risen, he rang the bell. In the last few minutes, the bright day had darkened, and as the grille slid open, Charles hoped for an invitation to talk inside.
“Yes?” The nun on the other side of the grille studied him and then glanced beyond his shoulder at Damiot. A small frown appeared between her black eyebrows. “A good year to you, mes peres.” Her voice was soft but there was no friendliness in her dark eyes. “How may I help you?”
“A good year to you, ma soeur. I am hoping to learn something about a foundling who may have been here fifteen years ago, perhaps a little more.” Even as he said it, Charles realized what a hopeless question it was. “He was called Tito La Rue.”
“We name many of them La Rue. The street is where we find them, after all. This Tito would not have been here. Our house for older children was in the Faubourg St. Denis then.”
“Do you have records of the children?”
“Not here, not so far back. If he was brought as an infant to the Couche, near the Hotel Dieu on the Ile, someone there may remember. Go with God, mes peres.” She shut the grille and its bolt scraped across the iron.
Chapter 19
ST. BASIL’S DAY, THURSDAY, JANUARY 2
The night was quiet, but Charles’s sleep was not. He dreamed of grilles and prisoners. Martine Mynette reached through the Foundling Hospital’s grille to give him the little heart she wore around her neck, but when he reached out to take it, her hand was full of blood. Gilles Brion stared through the grille in his cell door until Reine, who had come to visit him, reached through and strangled him with his red-beaded rosary. Wearing a galley slave’s iron collar and chain around his neck, La Reynie chased Marin through the church of St. Louis. Then a hand reached through the wall behind the altar and they both screamed in terror. The screaming turned into the rising bell and Charles sat up in bed, sweating in spite of the frigid air seeping through the temporary canvas over the window.
He dressed in a fever of haste and flung himself down at his prie-dieu. Fervently, he said the rising prayers, giving thanks for deliverance from night and darkness, and the Hours of Our Lady. He also gave thanks that the trouble La Reynie feared at the college had not come in the night, that the only troubles had been in his dreams.
In the chapel, kneeling on the icy stone floor and blowing on his clasped hands to warm them, he saw that a red chalk drawing of St. Ignatius’s death mask was newly hung near the altar. Studying the saint’s face comforted him a little, made him feel the littleness of his own fears and desires. Somewhat calmed, he prayed his way into the sacrament of communion, trying to open his heart to whatever the Silence had to say to him. Little by little, as the sacrament was celebrated and the Mass wound to its end, his heart filled with a terrible urgency. Nothing is wasted, the Silence had told him. Unless you waste it. If he wasted the chance he’d been given to find Martine Mynette’s killer, and Henri Brion’s, Gilles Brion was going to die as a double murderer. Isabel Brion and her great-uncle would be ostracized and indelibly marked by the scandal. Isabel would no doubt refuse to marry Germain Morel-for his own good, she would say. An innocent man would die horribly and at least three lives would be twisted past mending.
Gilles Brion’s hopeless face seemed to follow Charles through the dark morning to the fathers’ refectory. Dry-mouthed with fear that he would fail to prevent tragedy, Charles found he couldn’t force the breakfast bread down his throat. He swallowed the icy watered wine and fled, thinking how to find out where the city’s foundling records were kept, but the day’s trouble found him before he reached the street passage.
“Maitre!” Pere Montville, the new principal, loomed out of the dark of the Cour d’honneur. “Our day boys are being attacked at the stable gate. Go and do what you can, I’m going for Frere Brunet!”
Charles sprinted across the courtyard’s riffs of snow. Every morning, Louis le Grand’s day boys poured in through several gates and doors opening on surrounding streets. The youngest used the stable gate. In the court where the student library was, a half dozen other breathless Jesuits caught up with Charles, all spilling together through the archway into the stable court, hindering each other in their haste. Charles felt the familiar momentary t
wist of his mind back into battle. Engulfed in the furious shouts ringing in the cold air, in shifting darkness and lantern light, in the cries for help, he threw himself at the gate into the lane, where a tangle of boys punched and kicked and shouted abuse. But these combatants were ten, twelve, fifteen years old, most wearing scholars’ gowns and apprentices’ aprons, and Charles was abruptly back in his present life. He reached into the tangle with both hands, grabbed two grappling boys by the backs of their clothing, and held them off the ground.
“Stop it,” he said quietly, having learned from teaching that an ominously quiet voice did more than yelling. Both boys went limp. The boy in the long Louis le Grand scholar’s gown looked about twelve and seemed to be bleeding from his eye. The other, perhaps fifteen and aproned like an apprentice, held his ribs as though they might collapse into fragments if he let them go. “Go for each other again, or for anyone else, and I’ll throw you back into the fight and let the rest finish you off.”
The student nodded, but the apprentice was too busy fighting tears as pain overcame his battle lust.
Charles set them on their feet. “Take your enemy here to Frere Brunet,” he told the Louis le Grand boy. “He can have a look at you both.”
The student pushed the apprentice none too gently toward the archway. When the apprentice stumbled and cried out, the student offered a reluctant arm, and they wobbled away together.
Other Jesuits had sorted out the rest of the gateway tangle, and Charles pushed his way into the lane, which was still full of shouts and wrestling and shoving. Ducking to avoid a rain of snowballs-laced with rocks, by the sound they made hitting the college wall-he was reaching for another pair of adversaries when a shadow running toward the end of the lane caught his eye. The shadow’s shape told him it was a woman, and something about her seemed familiar. Charles went after her. As he knew to his cost from the brawl outside the tavern, it was not only men accusing the Jesuits of conniving at murder. Anyone running through the lane this morning needed to account for himself. Or herself. But before Charles caught up with the woman, he stumbled over a body.