The Eloquence of Blood cdl-2

by Judith Rock

  The two priests went briskly to the high altar, the initially skeptical look on Jouvancy’s face already flaming into enthusiasm. Knowing that, for the moment, anyway, they wouldn’t miss him, Charles stayed behind and picked up the box. He thought at first that it had been resealed since Christmas Eve, but the lid was only tight. He got it open and stared at the Conde’s heart, resting on the blue velvet cushion in its swaddling of gold silk. Then he set the box on the altar and took Jean-Tito’s necklace from his cassock. The red enamel heart glowed like a tiny flame as it rested in his palm. He thought of Tito’s passion for this trinket that meant all he knew of love, of the unknown woman who had put it around her newborn son’s neck in the hope of finding him again, of the nun putting it on another infant to give her a chance at life. He put the little heart on the cushion and coiled its frayed ribbon around it. Then he nudged it farther under the shadow of the Conde’s heart so it was less likely to be seen if someone else opened the box.

  Let both hearts rest here, he thought, replacing the jeweled lid. Both had brought suffering. But one, at least, had been given in love.

  He put the box back on the altar and went to do his small part in surrounding its interment with beauty.

  Epilogue

  STE.-SCHOLASTIQUE’S DAY, MONDAY, FEBRUARY 10

  With less than a half hour to go before the performance, Charles was in one of the small anterooms flanking the stage, overseeing the dancers and actors whose first entrance was from that side. Charles Lennox-St. Ambrose in the musical tragedy Celse-stood before him, wide-eyed and pale with stage fright. As Charles picked up the saint’s mask and rubbed a smear of dirt off its faintly pink cheek, he half feared that the mask, too, would blanch when the boy put it on. But Lennox looked superb. The black-and-gold coat and breeches fit him perfectly, the coat’s short stiff skirts standing well out from the breeches, and the heavy gold braid around the coat’s edge matched the stockings and the gold plumes of the headdress. Wondering again at Jouvancy’s ability to cajole college parents into paying for new costumes, Charles patted St. Ambrose reassuringly on the shoulder and turned his attention to the rest of the room. Michele Bertamelli, beside himself with excitement over his Louis le Grand debut as Celse’s star, was talking incessantly to anyone who would listen-in Italian, which he insisted was only more beautiful Latin.

  From the anteroom on the other side of the stage, where Jouvancy and the rest of both casts waited with the singers, Charles heard the singers’ last-minute limbering of their voices. But only faintly, because the hum of talk in the salle des actes had swelled to a polite roar as the invited audience settled itself for the show’s two o’clock beginning. From the courtyard, the tower clock struck the quarter before two. As though the chime were his cue, Bertamelli shot into the air between one of the Latin tragedy’s Roman soldiers and the dancing master, Monsieur Germain Morel, and executed a jumping passage from his solo. Morel’s startled oath made Charles grateful for the roar of talk in the salle. He grabbed the back of Bertamelli’s shimmering green satin coat.

  “Doucement, Monsieur Bertamelli! Softly, and still your tongue. This is the time for gathering yourself together.”

  “But I am gathered, maitre, I am bursting, I am-”

  Charles lifted an eyebrow at the actors glowering at Bertamelli and bent down till he was face-to-face with the boy. “Still your tongue, signor, or your confreres may cut it out. And I may help them.”

  “Oh, no!” Morel said despairingly, from somewhere behind Charles. “Not now, there’s not time!”

  Laughing, Charles turned around. “I was only joking-”

  But Morel was peering anxiously through the slightly open door onto the stage.

  “What is it?” Charles went to look over the dancing master’s shoulder.

  “Three candles have fallen out of the chandelier, the big one over the middle of the stage!”

  “Never mind,” Charles soothed, “one of the brothers will pick them up.”

  The small stage had no curtain and Charles could see the rector and Pere Montville in the front row of the audience, seated on either side of Mme de Montmorency. Before coming backstage, Charles had met Henri de Montmorency’s redoubtable mother. Short, double-chinned, and solid in sea-green satin and a king’s ransom of ice-white lace, she had eyed him severely.

  “I trust that you have given my son a part worthy of his lineage,” she’d said warningly.

  “Ah, madame, be assured that he is a golden image of martial virtue on our stage, to whom all the others look up and whose commands direct his men,” Charles had answered fulsomely, bowing-and earned himself a quelling frown from Pere Le Picart. Now, watching the rector and Pere Montville inclining their heads courteously toward Mme de Montmorency and her flow of talk, Charles grinned to himself. He could almost see them counting the coins of the gift she might give them if she was pleased with the show. The Mynette fortune being irretrievably lost to the college, a Montmorency gift would be very welcome, and he sent up a fervent prayer that she wouldn’t realize why he’d cast her large, bumbling son as a magical statue and put him safely out of the way on a golden plinth.

  He was about to tell Monsieur Morel to close the door when he saw Mademoiselle Isabel Brion sitting with her great-uncle Callot about halfway back. The mourning black they both wore did nothing to dim their obvious happiness. Callot was beaming. And Isabel, smiling at the stage, glowed like an earthbound star. Morel leaned farther out the door.

  “I will tell the brothers about the candles, mon ami,” Charles said, pulling him back and closing the door. “I, too, glimpsed Mademoiselle Brion,” he said more softly. “She looks very lovely today.”

  “Ah, Maitre du Luc, she is-I am-we-the first forty days of mourning for Monsieur Brion are over, you know,” he finally managed, in a rush of words, and clasped his hands rapturously on his breast. “It still cannot be public, but-we are betrothed!”

  Charles laughed for pleasure at the news. “I congratulate you both with all my heart!”

  Wondering if Morel had been let into the secret of the contraband silver yet, Charles threaded his way through the crowded anteroom toward its other door, which led directly to a tiny backstage area where two lay brothers waited to change the minimal scenery.

  “Done already, maitre,” a brother said, when Charles put his head around the door. “We picked up the candles. No time to replace them now, but the chandelier will do well enough.”

  As Charles turned away, the clock struck two. He braced himself for the beginning of the musical overture by Monsieur Charpentier and his musicians, positioned in the salle at the side of the stage. But nothing happened. Shrugging, Charles started to gather the boys for the customary prayer. Delays and theatre production were nearly synonymous, after all.

  Then Pere Montville hurried into the anteroom, hissing “Maitre, messieurs, before you begin, a word!” His small dark eyes were bright with excitement. “We are unexpectedly honored with the presence of two Legitimes of France! A son and daughter of the king and Madame de Montespan have arrived, the Duc du Maine and Mademoiselle de Rouen.” He eyed the performers sternly. “When you go out onto the stage, they will be directly in front of you. Do our college all the honor in your power by your dancing and acting today, messieurs. Let your eloquent voices and bodies speak feelingly of the teaching you have received in this college named for our king.”

  Charles seized the moment of quiet for the prayer. “And that we may do as Pere Montville has bidden us, let us pray, messieurs.” The quiet in the little room deepened. Even Bertamelli was utterly still, his head so bowed on his clasped hands that the boy next to him reached out and steadied his slipping headdress of flowers and small birds.

  “Our Father in heaven,” Charles prayed, “let what we do today be a means of grace to those who watch and those who perform. Let us tell the story of your saints with reverence and joy. Grant us, we pray, a blessed Lenten season”-he hesitated, visited by the remembered taste of Lent’s end
less salt fish-“but first, grant us a happy Fat Tuesday tomorrow!”

  That got a rousing “amen,” everyone crossed himself, and the delayed musical overture sounded from the salle. Charles and Morel lined up their troops in order of appearance, eased open the stage door into the wings, and Charles walked between the flats to take a last look at the audience before the ordered mayhem of performance began.

  From the chandelier hanging over the middle of the stage and the iron holders fixed to the side flats, candles cast a welcome yellow glow. But the gray light from the long room’s windows was as somber as Lent itself. Charles reminded himself that nevertheless, the snow was gone, melted in the chill, dripping rain that had come with February. And that Lent brought spring as well as salt fish.

  He feasted his color-starved eyes for a moment on the deep blue satin of the Duc du Maine’s suit and his sister’s rose brocade, bright among the more sober colors of their attendants. As he looked, though, he wondered whether the young woman, whose voice was more carrying than Bertamelli’s, was going to chatter to her brother throughout the show. The overture was nearing its end. Charles’s gaze swept one last time over the audience, and he smiled in surprise as he saw Lieutenant-General La Reynie standing at the back of the salle des actes, next to Pere Damiot. Wondering if they’d found something to talk about before the music began, and hoping that they had, he went back through the wing to the stage door and pulled it all the way open.

  Celse’s overture was ending. Michele Bertamelli was waiting in the doorway in his spring-green coat and breeches, the wreath of flowers and birds-symbols of youth-nested in his dark curling hair, a branch of yellow silk flowers in his hand. Charles put a hand on his shoulder and guided him farther into the wing, ready for his entrance. In the pause between the overture and the first notes of Celse’s first act, Bertamelli lifted his radiant face to Charles and gave him a smile that made Charles’s breath catch in his throat, a smile so joyous and young that winter and sorrow might never have existed. Then the music began again, and the little Italian filled his lungs and burst onto the stage like spring itself.

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