Chapter 9
THE LAST HOURS OF ST. JOHN THE EVANGELIST’S DAY, FRIDAY,
DECEMBER 27, AND THE FEAST OF THE HOLY INNOCENTS,
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 28
The 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!”
“How peculiar,” Charles said straight-faced, as Jouvancy paused for breath. “Imagine liking warmth. But I thought you were not returning until tomorrow, mon père.”
Jouvancy gestured dramatically at the pewter sky outside the office window. “The old woman who keeps our dairy there is a weather prophetess, the best for leagues around, they say. She told me it would surely snow again tonight, and most likely snow hard. So I thought it better to get the boys back to the college now.”
Charles frowned at the window and hoped the elderly dairy maid was right about the new snow’s timing. Slogging through a heavy snowfall any sooner would make all he had to do take even longer. He needed to find out if the elder M. Brion had returned home. And where the younger M. Brion was. And he had to find Lieutenant-Général La Reynie, or at least find out from the police commissaire if anything new had been learned about Martine’s murder.
Jouvancy was still talking. “. . . so I wanted to see you to ask if you have heard from Monsieur Charpentier. About whether his music for February is finished.”
“No, mon père, I’ve heard nothing.”
Jouvancy tsked with impatience. “Musicians! They are as bad as builders, always of a lingering humor! Well, we will live in hope. Celsus Martyr, our spoken Latin tragedy, is only three acts instead of five. Monsieur Charpentier’s French Celse, the musical tragedy, has five acts. Though it is longer, it is still the intermèdes for the spoken tragedy. But it will have far more singing than dancing, which will make your job easier. We still need all the time we can get for rehearsing, though!”
Charles thought privately that the short spoken tragedy was going to seem like intermèdes for the long musical tragedy. They would certainly need all the time for rehearsal they could get, since—dances or not—he would have to oversee much of the musical tragedy’s staging. “And will the performance be on the same stage where we did Père Damiot’s farce, mon père?”
“In winter, there is nowhere else. Was his Farce of Monks well received?”
By the end of Charles’s retelling, Jouvancy was laughing nearly as hard as the audience had.
“Ah, Maître du Luc, I wish I had seen you chasing Frère Brunet with that clyster! I often wish we could risk more comedy here. But public comedy is such a vexed question.” He frowned and shook his head. “All comedy is a vexed question when one is dealing with young people.”
“Do you disapprove of comedy, then, mon père?”
“Oh, in most cases, yes, I do! Because the young are so easily led astray, you understand. And so much comedy in public theatres is frankly scurrilous.” He looked furtively at the door and lowered his voice. “I must admit, though, that I dearly love some of Molière’s pieces—I once saw the incomparable Gentilhomme and laughed myself silly at poor Monsieur Jourdain! Our little Molière sometimes went too far, I admit,” Jouvancy said affectionately. The great playwright had once been a day student at Louis le Grand, back when he was only little Jacques Poquelin, the upholsterer’s son. “A genius, though. And cut off in his prime, poor man.”
Interested in Jouvancy’s opinion, Charles ventured, “Do you think, then, that the church is too severe on actors?”
“In truth, I do! Excommunicating them, as happens too often, only drives them farther away from virtue, yet as we prove regularly in our colleges, the theatre can be an excellent school for virtue. If only actors would use it as that, there is no reason they should be denied the sacraments any more than dancers—and the church certainly does not excommunicate dancers!”
Charles laughed a little cynically. “If it did, it would have to excommunicate half the nobility of France! Not to mention the king.”
“Well, Louis does not dance himself anymore, but yes. Speaking of dancers, who are you going to cast in the musical tragedy?”
“Walter Connor, I think. And Armand Beauclaire, who in spite of his directional difficulty is an excellent dancer.”
“But poor Maître Beauchamps,” Jouvancy said, his lively face a mask of mendacious concern. “Do you want to be answerable for the results if our dear dancing master has, yet again, to teach Beauclaire the difference between right and left?” Pierre Beauchamps, probably the greatest dancing master alive, was dance director of the Paris Opera and also Louis le Grand’s ballet master. And an indispensable thorn in the rhetoric master’s side. “There might well be murder done, maître!”
Murder. Charles winced, seeing in his mind the word scrawled on the college doors—innocent of the slander now after the lay brothers’ long and hardworking night. Unbidden, his mind also showed him Martine, lying dead as he’d last seen her. Jouvancy, oblivious, had risen to hunt along his bookshelf for something. He looked up as someone tapped at the door.
“Come!”
A lay brother stuck his head into the room. “Your pardon, mon père. There’s a Monsieur Germain Morel to see Maître du Luc.” He looked at Charles. “In the anteroom by the main doors.”
Startled, Charles looked at Jouvancy for permission to leave, wondering uneasily what Mlle Isabel Brion’s dancing master could want.
“Yes, yes, very well, go.” The rhetoric master sat down again, leafing through his leather-bound costume book. “We will talk again before all this madness starts.”
“Thank you, mon père.” Charles rose. “Please tell Monsieur Morel I am coming,” he said to the lay brother, who withdrew and clattered down the stairs.
Charles left the chamber quietly and hurried down behind him. Before he reached the anteroom at the bottom of the curving stone staircase, Morel was bowing, words tumbling out of his mouth.
“Forgive me for troubling you, Maître du Luc. But Mademoiselle Brion begged me to come.” Morel was sweating in spite of the cold and seemed hardly able to catch his breath. “Because—” He gulped air. “Monsieur Brion is dead!”
Charles stared in confusion. “Her brother? Or do you mean her father?”
“Monsieur Henri Brion. A sergent of police came to tell Mademoiselle Brion that her father had been found murdered!”
Charles tried to think past his surprise. Lying awake during the night, he’d wondered whether, for some unguessed-at reason, it was Henri Brion, and not his son, who had killed Martine and fled, which would explain why no one had seen him since her death was discovered. But if that was true, why would he be suddenly dead himself? “Who found him, Monsieur Morel? Where?”
“I don’t know who found him. His body was—is—in a ditch very near the rue Perdue. The ditch is behind some old houses near the Place Maubert. Can you go there with me, maître? Isabel—Mademoiselle Brion, I mean—wants you to pray for him. And she says”—color rose in Morel’s face—“she says you will know what to do.”
“I am sure that you will know quite well what to do yourself,” Charles said diplomatically. “But of course I will come.” He gathered his cloak around him and led the way to the postern door, thinking irreverently that it would take a papal bull to keep him away.
When he and Morel reached the Place Maubert, Morel led the way across it and down the small street that ran past the Mynette garden’s side gate.
“This is a back way to Henri Brion’s own house,” Morel said. “I think he must have been on his way home when he was attacked.”
The small street crossed a larger one and became an alley between old timbered houses. At the mouth of the alley stood a huddle of talking, eager-faced women. Servants, most of them looked to be, but the one at the center of the group was a wood seller resting the legs of her heavy carrying frame on the ground. She nodded to Charles. “They said you’d be coming, mon père. It’s down the alley, in the ditch.”
Charles thanked her, and he and Morel hurried between the houses to a snowy ditch that had perhaps once been a streambed and was ending its life as an illegal neighborhood midden. Two men stood in the ditch with their backs to the path. Charles didn’t know the man in workaday brown, but the one in the plumed hat and long black wig he knew all too well, even from behind.
Giving thanks for the cold for once, because it lessened the ditch’s stench, Charles picked his way down the snowy slope, Morel behind him. Morel arrived at the bottom with his dignity intact, but Charles stepped on something nastily soft under the snow and slid precipitously, saved from falling flat only by a long arm and a lace-cuffed iron grip.
“Bonjour, Maître du Luc. I thought you might be arriving.” A spark of warmth flickered in Nicolas de La Reynie’s dark eyes, and a corner of his mouth turned up beneath the moustache arching like a gray half moon above his lips. La Reynie was not a young man. But he was a commanding presence, tall and strong and powerfully built.
“And I am glad to find you here, mon lieutenant-général,” Charles said. “And not only because you saved my poor bones, if not my dignity.”
He didn’t bother asking why La Reynie had been expecting him. Or why the lieutenant-général of the Paris police had come himself to stand in this noisome ditch. The man knew more than anyone except God about what happened in the city, and probably knew it faster. He would certainly know of Martine Mynette’s murder and no doubt knew quite well that Henri Brion had been her notary. And that the Mynette money would now come to the Society of Jesus. Pressed unwillingly into La Reynie’s service last summer, Charles had quickly learned that nothing was beneath the lieutenant-général’s attention.
The other corner of La Reynie’s mouth lifted. “Dignity? Oh, Jesuits have dignity to spare, I find. Though no more bones than the rest of us. And perhaps, just now, no more money? At least, not yet.”
Charles smiled affably. La Reynie was not the only one who could play verbal games. “Certainly not more money, monsieur, since we take a vow of poverty.”
La Reynie gave him a small ironic bow and presented his sergent , the man in brown breeches and coat, lean and hard bitten. Charles, in turn, presented Morel, who eyed La Reynie warily. The four of them turned their attention to the most recent dead creature to be thrown into the ditch.
Charles crossed himself and the others followed suit. Henri Brion’s frost-glazed dark eyes stared past them at the sky. Charles looked at his dead face, recalling that although he had heard the man’s voice, he had never seen him until now. He was somehow surprised to see how much Brion looked like his daughter, robust and wide-faced, and how little he resembled the small frail Gilles.
“I have heard that our corpse was a notary and had worked for your college,” La Reynie said.
“Yes. And you no doubt also know that he was Mademoiselle Mynette’s notary. And her guardian. I know his family slightly, but I had never met him. How was he killed?” Charles asked.
“Stabbed in the back. To the heart. We found him lying on his face and turned him to have a look at his other side. There’s little blood on the ground around him, because his clothes are good thick cloth and his shirt and coat soaked up most of it.”
Morel flinched. Charles said nothing, again seeing Martine Mynette lying in a sea of red. But that blood was let by a little blade, not the long knife needed to pierce a heart.
Charles said, “Then you don’t think he was killed elsewhere and moved here?”
La Reynie shook his head. “I see no reason yet to think so. Though I wonder how he ended in this ditch.”
“He must have been on his way home.” Morel swallowed hard. “He lives in the rue Perdue, very near here.”
“Ah.” La Reynie nodded consideringly.
“Do you have any thought about how long he’s been dead?” Charles said. “I know that in cold like this, it’s very hard to tell. But it may help you to know that his family has not seen him since at least Thursday evening.”
“That may help indeed.” La Reynie eyed the body. “And there was snow off and on yesterday and through the night, and snow mostly covered the body when we found it. And that bush screens it. The body wasn’t immediately obvious.”
In silence, they looked down at the dead man. A sense of futility assailed Charles. Brion had been described to him as greedy and unsuccessful at his work. He’d seemed somehow negligible, even in his own household. Unfortunately, he had not seemed negligible to his killer. If he had, murder would not have been necessary. But no human soul was negligible. Charles began the prayers for the dead, and the other men bowed their heads.
When the prayers were finished, there was a moment of sober quiet and then the sergent folded his arms over his chest and said, as though continuing an argument Charles had interrupted, “I still say the beggars would have found him yesterday, if he’d been here.” Seeing Charles’s questioning look, he explained, “Beggars search the ditches for anything usable. They would have had that cloak and everything else off him and he’d be mother naked.”
Charles frowned. “They’d search even a midden like this?”
The sergent’s eyes widened in disbelief at the naive question. “Beggars would search your chamber pot and lick your empty plate, mon père, if they thought there might be anything they could sell.”
Charles took the rebuke to his naiveté in silence, wondering why he’d asked such a stupid question when he’d seen firsthand the half-ruined part of the old Louvre palace, which destitute Parisians had made into a warren of fetid living quarters.
La Reynie nodded toward the muddy path. “The woman with the load of wood there met a beggar, a woman called Reine, coming out of the alley this morning with a good beaver hat. Reine told her she’d found it on a dead man in the ditch and named him as Henri Brion.”
“Could she have killed him?” Charles said.
“No. The sergent just told you beggars scour all the ditches. But Reine told the other woman that she didn’t go on her rounds yesterday because she wasn’t well. And Reine’s scavenging places aren’t often bothered by other beggars. After Reine found the body, the woman selling wood sent one of her friends to the police post and the sergent came. And he sent for me.” Police posts, called barrières, were scattered across the city and were usually the fastest way of appealing to the law.
The sergent said, “We both know old Reine. She begs outside coffeehouses, and says she often saw this Henri Brion at Procope’s.”
“But she didn’t see him there or at any of the other coffeehouses on Friday,” La Reynie added. “Which is another reason why I think he was already dead and lying here yesterday.”
“Messieurs! A small word!” A canvas-aproned man came slithering into the ditch, pulling a sullen, white-faced boy of thirteen or so after him. “This parsnip-brained apprentice of mine has something to tell you that may be about your body here.”
La Reynie scrutinized them both. “And who are you, monsieur?”
“I am Michel Bernard, mon lieutenant-général. Oh, yes, I know you, all Paris knows you. I am a carpenter.” Raising a work-hardened hand in a fingerless glove, the man pointed at an old house backing on the ditch. “We’re working on that house there. My wife just inherited it and she wants to rent it out for good money.” He rubbed his hands together and blew on his exposed fingers. “I’ll start after the Epiphany, I told her, but no, I must start now, why should we lose money, she says, so here I am freezing my”—he suddenly registered Charles’s presence—“my immortal soul off while she sits by the fire at home. But you may be sure that body’s been there awhile.”
“And why is that?”
“Go on, tell him!” The carpenter pulled his apprentice forward. “I’ve been leaving him in the house at night to keep out the beggars while it’s empty.” He poked the boy hard in the ribs. “Talk!”
“I heard people running,” the boy mumbled, staring wide-eyed at the body. “On Friday morning before light. I heard one of them yell out.” He shut his mouth, and his lips trembled.
His master prodded him again. “Well, go on! Tell the rest.”
“Then, when I came down here to piss after I got up—Friday morning, I mean—he—it—was here. But I was afraid to say anything. I thought if I did, you’d think I killed him. I didn’t, I don’t know him, I never saw him before, as the bon Dieu sees me!”
Everyone gazed speculatively at the boy. Tears began to trickle down his cheeks and he fell on his knees in the snow.
“I swear it, messieurs!”
La Reynie sighed. “Unfortunately, I believe you. But the next time you find a body, for God’s sake tell someone if you don’t want to be suspected. Where can I find you both if I need you again?” he asked the carpenter.
“My workshop’s at the sign of the Magdalene, rue Clopin, mon lieutenant-général.”
“Thank you. You may go. Both of you.” La Reynie dismissed them. When they had clambered out of the ditch, the boy still crying and his master berating him, La Reynie turned to Charles and the sergent. “Well. If the apprentice is telling the truth, we have good reason to think that Monsieur Brion was killed before dawn on Friday morning and has lain here ever since. A popular time for murder in this quartier, it seems. Your Mademoiselle Martine Mynette and her notary, both murdered on the same day.”
Charles said, “You think the two are related?”
“A child would think they are related.” La Reynie walked over to Morel, who was still staring disconsolately at Henri Brion’s body. “May I ask why you are here, monsieur?” he said pleasantly.
Startled, the dancing master tore his eyes from the body and bowed. Graceful, Charles noted, even in a midden beside a corpse.
“As Maître du Luc told you, I am a friend of—of the Brion family. One of your men came to tell Mademoiselle Brion of her father’s death, and she sent me to find out what happened.”
La Reynie nodded slowly. “And you brought our friend Maître du Luc. Mademoiselle Brion is fortunate in her champions. I had understood that she also has a brother. Perhaps I am misinformed?”
“Her brother was not at home, mon lieutenant-général.”
“And where is he?” La Reynie and the sergent exchanged a look.
Warned by the new quality in their attention, Morel’s eyes went to Charles in silent appeal.
“You will probably find Monsieur Gilles Brion at the Capuchin monastery across the river,” Charles said. “He hopes to be a monk.”
“And cannot be interrupted at his prayers even for his father’s death? A devout young man,” La Reynie murmured, making it clear that he would have that whole story from someone and soon. His gaze settled on Charles. “What do you know about this, Maître du Luc? You did not come here only to pray.”
“No,” Charles agreed, returning the gaze. “I came to find out about Monsieur Brion’s death. As I told you, I was already wondering where he was, since no one seems to have seen him since Thursday evening.” Charles sorted rapidly through what he wanted and did not want to say. “Monsieur La Reynie, you said you knew that Henri Brion was Martine Mynette’s guardian. You may not know that she was adopted. Her adoptive mother died a week or so before Christmas and the donation entre vifs, drawn up some years ago by Henri Brion to ensure that the girl would get the mother’s considerable property, has been lost. There is no other family to inherit.”
La Reynie smiled. “But there are Jesuits.”
Charles let that pass. “Monsieur Brion claimed to be searching for the original of the adopted girl’s donation at the Châtelet, where he long ago registered the document. But it seems he was not.”
“Was not?” La Reynie echoed.
Morel was frowning angrily at both of them.
“A clerk there told me that Monsieur Henri Brion has not been seen at the Châtelet recently.”
La Reynie studied Charles. “What else?”
“Nothing,” Morel said, before Charles could answer.
“No?” The lieutenant-général smiled genially at Morel. “I see. Since you are Mademoiselle Brion’s representative, monsieur, will you go and tell her that after we have taken her father to the Châtelet and examined him for other wounds or anything else his body might tell us about his death, I will have him brought to his house?”
“I—she—” Morel chewed his lip. “Monsieur, this Mademoiselle Mynette of whom you have been speaking was Mademoiselle Brion’s dearest friend and she is grieving terribly for her. It is too much to expect her to see her father’s body, after what has been done to him!”
Charles put a hand on the young man’s shoulder. “It will be a shock to her, yes. But do you not think that, even so, she will want to do the last offices for her father?”
“But wasn’t he a member of one of your confraternities? Couldn’t they see to him?”
“His uncle, Monsieur Callot, is a member of the Congregation of the Sainte Vierge, but Monsieur Brion was not. Forgive me, Monsieur Morel, but I wonder if you are not thinking too little of Mademoiselle Brion’s courage. That is an easy mistake to make with women. I have known Mademoiselle Brion a very short time, but I suspect she has more than enough courage—and love—for this new ordeal.”
Reluctantly, Morel nodded. “Yes, she has courage. And she loved her father. In spite of his faults.”
La Reynie said kindly, “Monsieur, please do me the favor of going now and telling her to expect her father’s body this afternoon. I will see that he is conveyed to her with all respect. She will be grateful for your coming now with my message, because she will have preparations to make.”
Morel hesitated and looked at Charles. “You will come with me, maître?”
“I have another matter to discuss with Maître du Luc,” La Reynie said smoothly. “Better not wait for him. For Mademoiselle Brion’s sake.” He gestured courteously toward the street.
With a last warning look at Charles, the dancing master went. When he was out of hearing, La Reynie said, “His reason for protecting the Brion daughter is obvious, but I also noticed that when the Brion son was mentioned, Monsieur Morel didn’t want us to talk about him. Is this son already a novice?”
“No, his father did not approve of his wish.”
“Ah. Did they quarrel over it? Could the son have killed him?”
“Yes to both. But I’ve met him and I don’t think he has the stomach for it.”
“Monsieur Morel was trying so hard to keep us from discussing him, I can only think he disagrees.”
“He is trying to save Mademoiselle Brion from more grief. As I would like to do, too. What he didn’t want you to know is that her brother has been quarreling with his father over more than religious vocation. His father was forcing him to court Martine Mynette for her money and he, of course, didn’t want to marry.”
“And now the unwelcome bride and the implacable father are both dead. Even a would-be monk may strike back if you push him too far. But how does this donation fit into that convenient picture—I would think Monsieur Henri Brion would have searched for it very diligently indeed. Why marry his son to a failed heiress? Which makes what the Châtelet clerk told you more than a little odd. Who is this clerk?”
“I don’t know his name,” Charles said absently, as his thoughts about Gilles Brion shifted suddenly. It was hard to see the young man as a killer. But a thief? Henri Brion indeed had no reason to want the donation lost, since he wanted the Mynette money. But Gilles Brion had an urgent reason. And he would have had opportunities to steal it, frequenting the Mynette house as a suitor. If the document disappeared permanently, so would the reason for the marriage. But Gilles Brion did not have his father’s access to the Châtelet records, so how could he also have stolen the original? Had he realized that he could not hope to get his hands on the original document and decided that killing his father was the only way to put an end to his difficulties?
La Reynie had turned to his sergent. “Leave the wood seller and her friends to guard the path, and get men to take the body to the Châtelet. And then to the Brion house. Which is where, Maître du Luc?”
“Off the Place Maubert in the rue Perdue, at the Sign of Three Ducks.”
La Reynie nodded his thanks. “But before you do any of that,” he said to the sergent, “send a man to watch the Capuchin house on the rue St. Honoré. If any young layman comes out or goes in, stop him. You are looking for Gilles Brion. What does he look like, Maître du Luc?”
“Small, frail looking, brown hair. He wore embroidered linen the only time I saw him. And high heels on his shoes.”
“And if you find him, hold him there at the monastery until I come—tell him only that I need to speak with him.”
“Yes, mon lieutenant-général.” He climbed quickly up the slope and disappeared into the alley.
“Now,” La Reynie said, “as we climb out of here, maître, tell me the rest of the reason you are concerning yourself in this.”
“As you obviously know, the Jesuit college stands to get the Mynette money. Simon Mynette, the father of the murdered girl’s adoptive mother, promised the money to the college when his daughter was gone, because there was no other family left. But that was before the adoption and the donation entre vifs. Now that Martine Mynette has been murdered, rumor is growing that Jesuits connived at her death to have the inheritance. I met Mademoiselle Mynette at the Brion house the day before she died. Père Le Picart has asked me to find out what I can about her death to help quell the rumors that are flying. Unless Henri Brion’s killer is found quickly, this death is going to make them fly even faster.”
La Reynie nodded, and they made their way in silence up the narrow path between the old houses. The gathered women, quiet now, were still standing in the rutted little dirt street.
“Mesdames,” La Reynie said, sweeping off his white-plumed hat, “where might I find Reine now?”
The women traded looks and the eldest said, “Probably at The Procope, monsieur.”
“I thank you. And my thanks to you especially, madame,” he added to the wood seller, “for sending to the barrière for the sergent . He is going to ask you and your friends to keep people from the path here for a short while. I hope you will oblige him.”
To Charles’s surprise, these poor, lowborn women did not curtsy to La Reynie. They simply nodded regally, and La Reynie nodded respectfully in return and replaced his hat.
“I find it interesting,” he said, as he and Charles walked away, “that men mostly ignore each other until someone’s honor is threatened. But women! They ignore nothing and so they know everything that goes on in a quartier. I could not do my job without them.”
Charles murmured acknowledgment, but his thoughts were across the river. “Are you going to the Capuchins to look for Gilles Brion?”
“Not yet. If young Brion killed his father and fled, he is gone. If he is still at his prayers, the sergent will find him easily enough. We are going to Procope’s coffeehouse.”
The thought of hot fragrant coffee nearly brought tears to Charles’s eyes. But Jesuits did not go to coffeehouses and La Reynie knew it.
“That is a wickedly tempting suggestion, mon lieutenant-général. You know I cannot sit in a coffeehouse.”
“The Society of Jesus forbids tobacco, not coffee. If the head of the Paris police compels you to sit in a coffeehouse, you can sit there. Two sets of eyes and ears are better than one.” He smiled a little. “Even if the one is me.”