The Eloquence of Blood (12 page)

“Forgive me for coveting the money,” he said softly. “In my heart, I try not to want it. But in my mind, I covet it for what needs doing.” He forbore mentioning what his body wanted to see on the dinner plate.

Mary, smiling gravely, cuddled the dimpled baby on her lap and gazed back at Charles. Her gown was a rich blue and she wore a thin gold necklace. The polished wooden bench she sat on was cushioned in red and there were rose-red curtains at her open, leaded window. A silver vase of lilies stood on the mantel, and a silver pitcher and basin and linen towel waited on a small table, ready for the baby's bath.

“Not a poor room,” Charles said to her, and flinched at his accusing tone. Though what he said was true; his own room was far poorer. But God's mother didn't need the discipline and sacrifice of poverty, he chided himself. Bitter sacrifice awaited her when the fat laughing baby she held grew up. The painter had surrounded Mary with beauty and luxury to honor her. Honor mattered, of course, but money bought far more basic gifts. Like safety, especially for women like poor little Martine Mynette, who had been rightly terrified should her lost
donation
not be found.

“If the Garden of Eden were now,” Charles told Mary, “the serpent wouldn't bother with an apple; he'd offer Eve a handful of gold. And who, in these days, would blame her for taking it?”

Beyond the shuttered window, the bells began to ring for Compline, their untuned clanging growing across the city. Something about their clashing notes comforted Charles, reminding him that he didn't have to fit things perfectly together. He only had to pray.

Though as a scholastic he wasn't required to say the offices, he began a psalm. He was praying, “I will bless the Lord who gives me counsel; my heart teaches me night after night . . .” when something smashed against his window, a shutter banged open, and glass shattered musically on the floor. Charles jumped to his feet, shivering in the flood of freezing air. Keeping as much as he could to the side of the window, he looked down into the street. A half dozen men, maybe more—they were moving so fast he couldn't tell exactly how many there were—launched another hail of stones at the building. Across the street, a group of shadowy singing figures cheered them on from the open door of a University house.
“. . . elle est perdue, pour ainsi dire, les Jésuites pour enricher!”

Charles ran from the room and took the stairs down three at a time, ignoring opening doors and questions behind him. Then someone else was running and overtook him.

“What is it?” Père Damiot said as they reached the bottom of the stairs. “I heard glass breaking.”

“Some men throwing stones. Come on.”

In the street passage, Charles grabbed a key from the porter's room, opened the postern a little, and stood still and hidden, watching. Damiot was at his shoulder. There were only five attackers. The bystanders across the street were cheering loudly as two men did something in front of the big double doors. Two more were farther down the façade, prying up loose cobbles to throw at windows. The fifth was standing a dozen feet from the postern, his back to Charles, glancing up and down the street, looking out for the watch, most likely.

Charles slid into the street, Damiot silent behind him. Praying they wouldn't slip in the rutted snow, Charles closed on the man whose back was turned. Before he was aware, Charles and Damiot had him by the arms and were walking him swiftly to the postern. The man started to yell, but his captors jerked his arms up behind his back and he grunted and shut his mouth. But the men across the street saw what was happening and cried a warning to the other attackers, who fled toward the river. As the bystanders surged across the rue St. Jacques, shouting threats, Charles and Damiot pulled their captive through the postern door. Charles slammed it and turned the key. Fists pounded on the door's planking and voices demanded the man's release. These were definitely students, Charles thought, hearing their swearing—too inventive and polished for anyone else.

“Stretch your arms straight out against the wall and keep them there,” Charles told the captive as he and Damiot shoved the man against the stones.

“Going to crucify me?”

“Don't blaspheme,” Damiot snapped. “Who set you to this?”

The man licked his lips. “No one,” he said sullenly, breathing a miasma of
eau de vie
into the air. “I think for myself. I know who murdered that girl.” He was short and thickset, dressed in a workman's rough brown coat and breeches, with unkempt black hair and a battered felt hat.

“Excellent,” Charles said briskly. “We'll take you to our police
commissaire
, and you can tell him who the killer is. And then we'll explain to him how you and your
confrères
have been ‘thinking for yourselves' this evening.”

The flickering night lantern suspended halfway along the passage roof showed the hot anger in the man's eyes. What bothered Charles, though, was that the eyes held no fear. And they should have. Did the
peuple menu
, the ordinary people, dislike the Society of Jesus so much? Did they truly think it had so little power and influence these days? Where was the respect it usually commanded?

The flurry of fists on the postern grew louder. As it began to bounce in its frame, the door from the main building burst open and Père Montville, the new principal, stormed into the passage.

“Bring the rector, Maître du Luc,” Montville ordered. “His windows face the courtyard and I doubt he has heard this rough music.”

Running feet sent echoes along the passage's vaulted roof, and a young and very large lay brother skidded to a stop beside Charles.

“Don't move,” Charles told his captive. “Not a muscle.” He stepped cautiously back from the man and glanced from the enormous brother, whose eyes were shining with illicit battle lust, to Damiot.

“Our friend here surely has a knife somewhere. Which, just as surely, he knows better than to use on clerics. But if he moves even the slightest fraction of the length of your thumb, grab his arms, both of you, shove him down, and sit on him.”

Charles turned and ran for the passage door. When he reached Le Picart's rooms, he knocked softly. The fewer people who got up and followed them, the better, at least for now.

“Mon père,”
he said, with his mouth against the space between the side of the door and the frame, “come, you are needed.”

The door opened almost at once, as though Le Picart had been waiting for Charles's summons, waiting for trouble. As soon as he saw Charles's face, he reached back into the room for his cloak.

Charles told him what was happening as they walked. They were nearly at the side door to the passage when wood splintered and furious yelling echoed off the passage walls. Le Picart tried to push past, but Charles unceremoniously stopped him.

“Wait!” He opened the side door just enough to see into the passage. Damiot and Montville and several lay brothers were trying to shove the intruders back though the ruined postern, all of them tripping and stumbling over the remains of the door as they fought. Their captive was nowhere to be seen. As far as Charles could tell, the only weapons in use were feet and fists. He stepped into the passage, bent swiftly, and grabbed two long, sharp staves of splintered wood.

“Here!” He thrust one into the rector's hands. “Stay beside me,
mon père
, use your weapon, and we'll part the waters.”

Le Picart nodded grimly and hefted the stave of wood, trying its weight and balance. Shoulder to shoulder, they surged into the passage. “
In nomine Patrie, Filios, et Spiritu Sanctu
,” the rector thundered, and they advanced on the fray. The lay brothers and Montville, who were getting the worst of the fight, looked over their shoulders and renewed their efforts. With sudden inspiration, Charles began declaiming Psalm fifty-three.

Damiot fought his way to Charles's unprotected side, and he and the rector made the litany bounce off the stone walls.

Charles and Le Picart swept their improvised weapons in unison from side to side, as though sweeping uncleanness out of the air itself. Whether it was the sharply pointed wood cleaving the air or the echoing church Latin that made the intruders retreat, retreat they did. Within moments, there was nothing but the sound of running feet. The victors exchanged furtive glances, wiped their streaming faces, and tried to catch their breath.

“Amen!” Damiot said with relish.

“So be it!” Le Picart responded liturgically and with equal fervor. He dropped his piece of wood and went out to inspect the damage.

Snow was starting to fall. The others followed him along the college façade, stepping over broken glass, looking up at shattered windows. Le Picart was the first to see the doors. He stopped as though frozen between one step and the next, and the others stopped behind him, craning their necks. In the light of the nearest street lantern, they saw what else the attackers had done. Scrawled across the doors in charcoal letters two feet high was a single word:
MEURTRIERS.

Murderers.

 

T
he rector refused to let Charles go for the nearest police
commissaire
.

“I will pursue my own questions first,” he said flatly to Charles and the others gathered around him. “The fewer who know, the less talk. More of our lay brothers will have to know because work must be done tonight. But otherwise, none of you will speak of this. To anyone. Now, before anything else, are any of you injured?”

Most had only a few bruises. The two lay brothers bleeding from cuts, Le Picart sent Frère Brunet to the infirmary, along with one whose shoulder had been pulled out of joint. Then he set the rest of the lay brothers to cleaning up the damage, and told them to wake others to help them sweep up the glass in the street, scrub the ugly accusation from the big doors, and guard the postern entrance while a temporary door was constructed and set in place. All before first light.

“I will arrange for new window glass in the morning,” Père Montville said grimly. “It's going to be hellishly expensive. Meanwhile, we'll cover the windows with canvas.”

“The canvas over the windows will be noticed,
mon père
,” Charles said. “No matter how silent we are, there will be questions and talk.”

“There is already talk. I will ask my own questions first,” Le Picart repeated.

Charles bowed and held silent. When canvas for his window had been found and Le Picart had dismissed him, he returned to his freezing chamber, covered the window as best he could, and went to bed. But the violence of the night kept him long awake. The attack had deepened his anger over Martine's death, she who had been so defenseless, and when he finally slept, he dreamed about her.

When Saturday morning came, he prayed for her soul, but his angry certainty that the rector's attempt to cover up the attack was going to make things worse distracted him from his prayers and made them worth little. When Mass and breakfast were over and the dull gray light was growing, he made his way to the hastily constructed new postern, thinking as he entered the passage that at least the sharp smell of raw wood was an improvement on the usual winter smell of cold dank stone. Before he reached the door, a clamor of voices sounded outside and, to his surprise, the porter opened the postern to let in Père Joseph Jouvancy and a flock of red-cheeked, bright-eyed boys with their tutors. Jouvancy hailed his assistant rhetoric teacher.

“Maître du Luc, well met! I want to see you; come back inside with me one little moment.”

He waved the boys and tutors through the main building's side door. Charles laughed to himself as the college's two shivering Chinese students, usually the essence of politeness, outmaneuvered the rest to get inside first. Jouvancy and Charles followed at the rear, skirting the crush of boys handing swords to a lay brother in the little chamber off the anteroom and receiving in exchange wooden tokens bearing their names. Students whose social rank entitled them to the sword were allowed to wear it when they left the college, but all weapons were strictly forbidden inside the school walls. Jouvancy led Charles through the
grand salon
and up a staircase to his office, talking nonstop, like the Seine in flood.

“. . . which, of course, made it even more glorious at Gentilly than it usually is,
maître
,” the handsome little priest was saying happily as he sank into the chair behind his desk. Jouvancy was somewhere in his forties, with the tireless energy of a squirrel. “Snow!” He threw out both beautifully expressive hands as though to catch falling flakes. “One of the
bon Dieu
's most beautiful gifts, especially in the quiet of the country. And Gentilly is still very quiet, you know, even though it's so near Paris. Our chateau flourishes and the flocks seem well. But speaking of snow, do you know that it was all I could do to make those Chinese boys walk back to Paris with us? They tell me they hate the snow, can you believe it? They say it only snows on mountains in their part of China. I tell you, coaxing them away from the fireplace this morning was like trying to tell mice they don't like cheese!”