by Judith Rock
“Ah, you’ve got her!” A lined brown face under a dirt-colored, bag-shaped cap was looking over the wall. “Would you mind throwing the lady back, mon père? They’re heavy as lead when I put ’em in, and light as feathers when I pull ’em out. Just a little flick of my old spade sends them flying. Trying for heaven, no doubt, only a little late!”
Laughing in spite of himself, Damiot lobbed the skull back into the cemetery, and the digger grinned his thanks, let go of the wall, and dropped out of sight.
They walked on, Charles keeping a wary eye on the top of the wall. “Before the-um-lady-dropped into our midst, you were saying something, mon père?”
“Oh. Yes, it’s the baser sort-little merchants and unsuccessful notaries and so on-who are buried in Holy Innocents ground. The poor get mass graves. It’s said of Holy Innocents dirt that it cleans bones faster than any other dirt on earth. So the trenches aren’t as crowded as the Hôtel Dieu’s trenches for the destitute out at Clamart. At Holy Innocents, it’s magistrates and lawyers, and wealthy bourgeois like the Delarmes-and my family-who have tombs in the arcades along the charnel houses.”
They turned right at the rue aux Fers and when they came to a gate in the wall, just short of the church, Damiot said, “We’ve a little time still. I’ll show you the cemetery so you’re not gawking during the burial.”
Meekly, Charles followed him through the gate. And stopped short, staring at the scene spread in front of him, at first glance more like a fair than a burial ground. A group of strolling men had stopped to listen to a lute player and female singer. An old woman with a tray of small cakes hung on a strap around her neck strolled toward the men and the musicians. Dogs slept on the shady side of several spirelike monuments topped with crosses, or lolled in the sun, scratching and gnawing-Charles realized he didn’t want to know on what. Half a dozen beggars lay in the sun like the dogs. Another beggar, nearly naked, stood in an open grave, gesticulating and haranguing passersby like a preacher, and Charles wondered if the others were waiting their turn, in a cooperative effort to gather coins. A swath of color caught his eye and he watched two heavily painted women, their dirty red and yellow satin skirts trailing on the ground, stop beside the group listening to the lute player. All but one of the men quickly abandoned the music, and what looked like bargaining began.
Damiot pointed to the low buildings around three sides of the churchyard, whose wide cloisterlike arches had been filled in with wood. “Those are the charnel houses. The one with the Delarme tomb is there on the east side.”
Charles saw a few small doors in the closed-in arches and wondered what it smelled like beyond the doors. He’d heard that the cemetery itself, with its full and shallow graves, sometimes smelled like death itself. It didn’t today, but it smelled like the memory of death, which was somehow worse.
Damiot turned toward the church. “I have to robe for the Mass,” he said. “And we have to find you a server’s surplice.”
The nave of Holy Innocents Church was a pool of deep, cool shadow. They walked up a pillared side aisle toward the altar, which was draped in black for the funeral, and Charles thought how much he liked churches like this, churches in the old style. Not that he disliked the new style’s streaming light and open space, and he loved the airy elegance of the nearby Jesuit church of St. Louis. In St. Louis, light was the symbol of faith; people could see the altar and the Mass and feel themselves part of what the priest did. But Holy Innocents was very old and full of soaring, echoing darkness, full of mystery, and something in Charles answered back that yes, God was like that.
They went into the tiny, low-vaulted sacristy, and found the Holy Innocents priest already robing.
“Père Lambert, this is Maître Charles du Luc, one of our scholastics, who helps me with the Congregation of the Holy Virgin. He will serve with us today and needs a surplice.”
Charles greeted the bent, elderly priest, who paused in pulling a wide, flowing chasuble, black for the funeral Mass, over his head and nodded toward a wall cupboard. “In there. I hope there’s one long enough to cover you,” he said, smiling as his eyes measured Charles’s considerable length. “And I’ve laid out your vestments on the table there, mon père.”
Damiot and Charles laid aside their hats, and Damiot went to the table. In the cupboard, Charles found a white, smocklike linen surplice that more or less reached his knees, drew it on over his cassock, and shook the wide sleeves to hang freely. Damiot was putting on a black silk-and-wool chasuble, the usual outer garment worn to celebrate Mass, that matched the other priest’s.
“I’ll wait in the nave, mes pères.” Charles said. He went out and stood at the foot of the altar steps. As the quiet closed around him, he felt the unquiet he was carrying inside himself. And would go on carrying until-when? He looked up at what he could see of the delicately arched stone ceiling, as though the answer were up there somewhere, under the prayer-soaked roof. Until Lulu was safe in Poland? Until it was clear there was no baby? Until Montmorency was gone from Louis le Grand? Until the Prince of Conti tripped up and was exposed? Until Louis XIV was dead and the burden of his search for gloire was lifted from France and his ineffectual son ruled in his stead? Until sin was unwound and humankind was back in Eden, whatever the weather there might be?
Charles told himself sternly that, for the next hour, all that mattered was the Mass, which he would be more intimately part of than he usually had the chance to be. Serving at Mass was part of a scholastic’s learning, toward the time when he would be ordained priest. But Louis le Grand had many scholastics, and the chance didn’t often come Charles’s way. He closed his eyes where he stood, began a prayer for his serving, felt its self-importance, and let it go. Finally he just stood there letting the quiet hold him.
The sacristy door opened, the two priests came out, and Damiot handed Charles a smoking censer, whose bittersweet scent floated around them as they went to the street doors. When they had the door standing wide, they saw the funeral procession coming down the rue St. Denis, taking up nearly its whole width. The black-draped coffin was carried on the shoulders of Monsieur Delarme’s fellow members of the Congregation of the Holy Virgin. Behind the coffin came the men of the bourgeois Congregation of the Holy Virgin, friends, and family. Behind them a mass of hired mourners shuffled, beggars who’d been given coins and black hooded robes and candles to follow the coffin. People in the street made way for the procession, men doffed hats, and everyone crossed themselves as it passed. One day, they would each want the same courtesy.
The priests led the procession into the church, Charles swinging his censer in the lead. As the familiar and majestic Latin floated through the nave with the clouds of smoke as Mass began, Charles carried the Gospel book and the Mass book from one side of the chancel to the other, and brought water and a towel for Damiot’s ritual hand washing. When Damiot spoke the words of consecration that made the bread and the wine into Christ’s sacrifice for lost humanity, each word sank into Charles’s flesh. When he rang the little silver bell as his friend’s long sinewy fingers held up the Host like a small rising sun, Charles knew with almost physical pain that he wanted more than anything on earth to do what Damiot was doing, knew it in spite of his struggles with obedience, in spite of his arguments with God.
Then the Mass was over and the procession carried Monsieur Delarme out to his tomb, Charles stumbling and blinking in the light like Lazarus, still swinging his censer. Only the priests and the close family went with the coffin into the small stone room under the arcade where the tomb was. Charles stood just outside the door, slowly coming back to the ordinary world as he waited with the hired mourners and the confraternity members. He turned slightly so that he could see part of the cemetery. The bedraggled women and the group of men were gone, and the musicians were leaning against the shady side of what looked like an outdoor pulpit, sharing a loaf of bread and a leather bottle of something. A neatly coiffed woman came in through the rue aux Fers door with several young children,
who broke from her shepherding and raced, shrieking with delight, across the cemetery, the two little boys leaping joyously across the empty open grave. The door in the wall opened again and an older boy, wiry and slight, wearing a big plumed hat, came a few steps inside and gazed at the burial ground and the church. Then he backed out of the doorway, but his grace and sureness told Charles his name. What was thirteen-year-old Michele Bertamelli, Charles’s student and wildly talented dancer, doing out of the college alone and at Holy Innocents?
Charles pulled his surplice unceremoniously over his head and thrust it at the startled man beside him. “Monsieur, give this to Père Damiot, I beg you,” he said in the man’s ear. “Tell him, please, to wait for me. I will return.”
Charles ran toward the street door. Behind him, the man hissed, “For the bon Dieu’s sake, just use the wall, maître-it’s no great matter!”
Bertamelli was gone, of course, before Charles reached the door and the rue aux Fers. But he saw the hat’s white plume bobbing as Bertamelli turned left at the corner and started up St. Denis. Loping after him, Charles opened his mouth to call out to the boy, then shut it. He wanted to know where Bertamelli was going. But Bertamelli, nearly as agile with words as with dance, was unlikely to tell him straight out. Following him would yield better results. Keeping the boy in sight, Charles walked seemingly at ease among the crowd, pulling his cassock skirts aside from the street dirt, shaking his head at beggars and vendors, having nothing to give or spend, and nearly falling flat when a dog chased a cat almost under his feet. Bertamelli kept straight on until the rue du Mauconseil, where he turned left again, past a low stone building with scallop shells carved on its gateway. In spite of his hurry, Charles stopped, staring at the sculptures of the apostles across the building’s front and realizing that this was the Hospital of St. Jacques, a shelter for the poor where St. Ignatius himself had lived as a penniless student. Telling himself he’d come back, Charles put on a burst of speed.
He quickly had Bertamelli in sight again. Mauconseil was almost tranquil after the din of the rue St. Denis, and Charles had to follow slowly, keeping the sparse traffic and scattered vendors’ stalls between him and the little Italian. The street curved briefly to the south, and as it straightened, Bertamelli stopped at a corner where crumbling walls enclosed an overgrown garden. In the midst of the tangle of greenery, an old, half-ruined tower rose, looking bereft, as though it had once been part of something more. Charles hung back, thinking that Bertamelli was waiting for a pair of horsemen to turn out of the side street before he crossed. But the boy suddenly disappeared into the garden.
Charles hurried to the breach in the wall, but Bertamelli was gone from sight. The tower, with its empty arched windows and battlemented top, was just the sort of place a thirteen-year-old would want to explore. But surely the boy hadn’t slipped out of the college only for that. How would he even know the tower was here? Charles stepped back out of sight and waited for Bertamelli to come out when he’d satisfied his curiosity and go on to wherever he was really going.
But he didn’t come out, though from somewhere a clock struck the half hour. Charles began to worry. Suppose he’d fallen down the no doubt half-ruined stairs? Charles waded into the rank grass, grunting in exasperation as he stumbled over hidden stones and pulled his cassock out of the grasp of wickedly thorned roses long gone wild. He started to call out, then again bit off the sound before it shattered the quiet. He still wanted to know where Bertamelli was really going.
Halfway around the tower with still no sign of a door, he looked up at the dark blank window arches and saw that the structure was at least five stories high. Wondering who had built it, and why it stood forlorn in this tiny rank wilderness, he kept on until he was nearly where he’d started. And saw the low arched doorway, visible only from the place he’d reached because dense bushes blocked it from every other angle.
Cautiously, stepping over and around stones and the remains of crumbled steps, he went to the threshold. Just inside, stone stairs twisted upward into cobwebbed shadow, but there was enough light from the broken roof to show him lichened walls enclosing the deeply worn steps like a shell. Steps it would be all too easy to slip on. If Bertamelli lay hurt higher up, wherever he’d been going was a moot question.
“Bertamelli!” Charles’s voice echoed off the stones like a drum roll. “Are you-”
There was a blur of movement at the curve of the stairs and something hurtled toward him and glanced hard off his left shoulder. His knees gave way and he fell on his side on the stone threshold. Then a lumbering body was on him and he was flattened facedown into the stones. The bushes outside the door crackled and rustled, and Charles got his head up in time to see a broad, brown-coated back disappearing through them. With a vague feeling that there was something familiar about that back, he struggled to his feet, gripping his injured shoulder, and plunged into the bushes. He half ran to the wall and looked both ways on the street. His attacker was not there. Charles hesitated, wanting to go after the man. But Bertamelli was still in the tower.
Thinking morosely that whatever had been thrown down the stairs at him would, of course, hit the shoulder with the old war wound, he made his way back to the tower door. The ruined garden’s quiet seemed ominous now, and the flat bright faces of the old roses looked back at him like red staring eyes. With a snort of disgust at his overwilling imagination, he charged up the tower steps.
“Bertamelli!” he yelled furiously, holding his throbbing shoulder. “Come down here!”
There was no answer.
“Bertamelli!”
Something knocked him off his feet again and down the few steps he’d climbed. But this time the missile was chest high and spouting desperate Italian. Bertamelli fell to his knees beside Charles, wringing his small brown hands and weeping bitterly.
“Latin, Bertamelli. Speak Latin. I can’t understand you.” Wearily, Charles sat up against the tower wall.
“Maître, maître, I accuse myself, I hate myself, I will cut off my hand!”
This time, there was enough Latin mixed with the Italian that Charles got the drift. “Did your hand throw the stone that hit me?”
“No, no, no hand threw it, the wall dropped itself, maître, it is so old, like my grandfather, he falls down because his knees have died and gone to heaven-or maybe hell-before him. I was only looking down the stairs to see who was there and-and-holding on to the wall and-and the stone let go of the other stones and I did not know it was you!”
“Then you’ve gone deaf. Didn’t you hear me yelling for you? Who was up there with you, Monsieur Bertamelli?”
Bertamelli seemed to shrink, his face so white that his huge eyes were black as a moonless night.
“Who?” Charles demanded.
The boy chewed at his lip. “I–I don’t know. I heard him. I was afraid-”
Charles had developed a good ear for boys’ lies. Bertamelli was definitely not telling the truth. “And did you see him?”
“No!” Bertamelli shook his head and went on shaking it, as though that would make his story true.
Charles sighed. “Why did you come to this garden? Why are you out of the college?”
The boy clasped his hands on the breast of his black wool coat. “I didn’t come to the garden. I came to see the Comédie Italienne. It is just there, you know.” He pointed in the direction of the cross street. “Across the street. My cousin is there. I knew the rector would not let me go, so I just went.”
“You could have asked the rector to send for your cousin.”
“But I wanted to go and see him.”
“And his show?”
“Yes!” Bertamelli looked up from picking industriously at a patch of orange lichen. “The Italian comedians are the best, you know!”
“Why did you turn aside into this garden?”
“Oh. Here?” Bertamelli blinked, and he bent over the patch of lichen again. “I only wanted-to see the tower. We have many towers like it in Italy. My f
amily used to have one in Milan, but I have never seen one here before. So I went in.”
“I see. And why did you look into Holy Innocents cemetery?”
“Oh. Were you in there? Is that how you saw me? I just wanted to see what was on the other side of the door.” He shivered. “But I didn’t go very far in. I don’t like dead people.”
“That’s unfortunate, because we’re going back there. Help me up.”
Wordlessly, Bertamelli helped him up and they made their way to the street. Charles noticed that the boy didn’t so much as glance at the Comédie Italienne’s theatre. He walked silently beside Charles, his shoulders hunched as though he were trying to hide inside himself. They turned down the rue St. Denis toward the cemetery in silence, Charles keeping a wary eye on him and trying various ways of putting together the pieces of the morning to make them show what the boy wasn’t telling.
Chapter 17
They found Père Damiot with the Holy Innocents priest, just inside the church doors on a bench built out from the wall and deep in talk about doves. Charles had encountered Damiot’s dove obsession before and wondered how long it would take to get his attention.
“…and she had the prettiest little curl of feathers on her head,” Damiot was saying rapturously. “Like a lady’s fontange. Have you ever seen one like that?”
“No. But I think my brother-he’s the seigneur of Pont-Rouge-has talked of one like that.”
Charles coughed. Damiot looked around and frowned, as though trying to remember who Charles might be. His frown deepened when he saw Bertamelli.
“Well.” Damiot sighed and got to his feet. “I thank you for your company, mon père,” he said to Père Lambert. “But we must go back to the college.”
Lambert stood up slowly, wincing and putting a gnarled hand on his knee. “When the bon Dieu made knees, he did not remember how much priests have to kneel.” He smiled at Charles. “Remember that.” His faded blue eyes studied Charles’s face. “I watched you serving the Mass.”