The Eloquence of Blood (32 page)

“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 Hôpital Général.”

Charles shook his head in disbelief. “
Mon ami
, haven't you heard what's said about places like the Hôpital? 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 pères
.” 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 Hôtel Dieu on the Île, someone there may remember. Go with God,
mes pères
.” She shut the grille and its bolt scraped across the iron.

 

T
he 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.

“Maître!”
Père 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 Frère 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 twist 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 Frère 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.

Not a dead body, thank God. Charles bent closer and put his hand on the warm face. The boy was breathing, but he was ominously still. His scholar's gown was torn half off him, and Charles's hand came away wet with blood from the smooth cheek. He wiped the boy's face with his cloak, seeing in the slowly growing light that the blood was from a badly broken nose. Probably from snow packed around a stone, which had also knocked its victim out of his wits. As he picked the boy up, another hail of snowballs came at him, along with raucous singing from farther down the lane.

The doggerel hammered at Charles as he carried the boy toward the gate. It was the first time he'd actually heard this verse. “The notary was strong, but he is dead, lost to enrich the Jesuits.”Trying to shut his ears, he reached the courtyard, half running. Frère Brunet had set up a temporary infirmary in the lamplit stable. With the help of two other lay brothers, the infirmarian was tending boys injured on both sides of the melee. Père Montville, just inside the stable door, was grimly questioning two half-grown boys. One was a shame-faced Louis le Grand student, and the other, in a shorter scholar's gown, was a student from another college. Each had a rapidly blackening eye.

Brunet looked up from sponging blood off another boy's forehead. “Blessed saints, that one looks bad, bring him over here,
maître
.”

Charles put the boy down beside the one Brunet was working on. “Do you need me in here,
mon frère
?”

Brunet shook his head, absorbed in checking his new patient for broken bones, and Charles hurried back to the lane. The brawl was mostly over, the last apprentices and alien students in rapid retreat, pursued by large lay brothers doing their best to lay hands on them. The more culprits Montville questioned—on both sides, Charles thought wryly, since the Louis le Grand day students were as likely as their adversaries to have started this—the more chance a coherent picture would emerge. Now that the way was clear, Charles went to the end of the lane, where it joined the side street near the old college of Les Cholets. The woman he'd glimpsed was no doubt long gone, but it wouldn't hurt to make sure.

As he reached the side street, his way was blocked by winter street cleaning—a plodding cart horse pulling a wide, heavy triangular drag that captured garbage and frozen horse and mule droppings, which workmen gathered into the cart alongside it. Waiting for drag and cart to pass, Charles eyed the ill-kept wall around Les Cholets and wondered if the shadow might have used the easy toeholds of missing stones to climb into the courtyard. He grabbed the wall's uneven top and pulled himself up, then wished he hadn't as pain shot through the old wound in his left shoulder. The price for striking useful fear into the hearts of the brawling boys he'd held off the ground, he realized ruefully. As far as he could tell in the poor light, Les Cholet's courtyard was empty, and he let himself carefully down again to the lane's snowy cobbles.

He hurried around to Louis le Grand's main doors. Père Le Picart was there, as Charles had thought he would be, talking to two of La Reynie's officers. The horse drag was toiling noisily up the rue St. Jacques, and the last day students were streaming into the college. These were the oldest day boys, fifteen to eighteen or so, and the only ones allowed to come and go by the main doors. From the look of the students, the fight here hadn't been as fierce, or it had at least been more equal. Some had black eyes, cuts, and bruises, but overall they seemed not much damaged.

“. . . most likely to be last night, our informers told us,” the older officer was saying unhappily to Le Picart. “Either they were in on it, or
their
informers were wrong.” He smiled bleakly. “These bravos launched their attack just after the night patrol was gone, before we got here. That gap shouldn't have happened.” With grim anticipation, he added, “And someone's head will roll for it. In any event, the
lieutenant-général
has assigned guards here all day, and you'll have the patrol again tonight.”

Le Picart said, “And that song? What have you discovered?”

“Nothing. But as of today, we're confiscating all the copies we come across and arresting the sellers for inciting violence. That's all I know,
mon père
.”

Le Picart nodded and dismissed them to their places on either side of the doors. He turned to Charles. “Were any of the boys at the stable gate badly hurt? I have not yet been there.”

“That's why I came to find you. One boy at least seems badly hurt. I found him unconscious in the lane. Frère Brunet took charge of him.”

“May God forgive our enemies for attacking the youngest ones so savagely, because I am not sure that I can.” The rector turned back through the double doors, toward the back door to the Cour d'honneur.

A carriage came rolling up from the Seine, its occupants leaning out the windows to stare at the police around the college door. Charles stood his ground and gazed back at them, wondering if they thought he was a killer.

“
O
NE-two-three, ONE-two-three, sink-and-RISE, stepstep.” Banging his stick on the floor, Charles tried to ignore the competing counting from Morel's corner of the
salle des actes
, Jouvancy's shouts at his actors on the stage, and the mess Montmorency was making of the simple
pas de bourrée
Charles was counting in a misguided effort to help the boy. With equal lack of success, he tried to ignore the headache he had from banging the stick. And from the day in general, which had gotten steadily worse as it went on.

Lieutenant-Général La Reynie had come to the college to apologize to the rector for the failure of the police to keep the morning's attackers away, and Le Picart had called Charles to be part of the talk. La Reynie's mood had been as black as Charles had ever seen it, and the reason was quickly clear. The
lieutenant-général
had told them that the minister of war, Michel Louvois, had been informed of the attack on Louis le Grand and had come to the Châtelet just after dawn. Outraged by the burgeoning disorder in the city, Louvois had given La Reynie until Tuesday to announce that the murderers of Martine Mynette and Henri Brion were under arrest. Which meant that if new and compelling evidence had not turned up by Monday, Gilles Brion would be put to the question. Tortured into a confession, that meant. Charles had pleaded. La Reynie had been implacable. The rector had been called to the
grand salon
to talk to the angry parents descending on the school and, left alone, Charles and La Reynie had been reduced to shouting at each other. The end result was that La Reynie had refused to let Charles go to visit Brion.