Chapter 11
Charles started toward the singer, but La Reynie put out a hand and stopped him. The singer, seeing Charles, grinned and redoubled his efforts, flourishing his song sheets at house windows as he bellowed out the words. An upper casement opened, and a woman shouted down that he should leave a sheet on her doorstep. As she tossed him a coin, two grinning men came out of a shop to buy copies. Charles seethed but held where he was. La Reynie leaned on his walking stick and watched. The singer kept coming. Then he saw La Reynie, shut his mouth abruptly, and disappeared into an opening between houses. Charles hurried to the place where he’d turned and found a tiny alley snaking into shadows.
“Don’t be an idiot,” La Reynie said behind him. “Anyone could be waiting for you down there. Or for me. I am even more unpopular than you are.”
“The man is inciting violence! Men have already—” Charles swallowed the end of his words, belatedly remembering the rector’s order not to talk about the attack on Louis le Grand.
La Reynie cocked an interested eyebrow, but contented himself with saying, “When one broadside seller is peddling a scurrilous song, you may be sure that two dozen others are doing the same across the city. You look like you’ve heard that song before.”
“Last night. As I passed a tavern called The Horse’s Tail, near the Place Maubert. If you let them go on singing the thing all over Paris, Jesuits will not be able to go out into the streets! Nor will our students, and most of our classes for day students are about to start.”
“Maître.” La Reynie sighed. “Even in Provence and Languedoc, you must have had broadside sellers. If the songs are seditious, I imprison the sellers and try to find the printers. But these people are like fleas; who can be rid of them? And this song does not even mention the king. Yes, it stirs up the people and I will try to find out the source. But surely you know that the only thing that will stop it is catching the Mynette girl’s killer. And Henri Brion’s killer, because, as you have already implied, Henri Brion is going to be the song’s next verse unless the killer is quickly found. And now, before I look for the would-be monk, who seems to stick to his Capuchins like a leech and is probably the least likely of my suspects to disappear, I am going to visit Monsieur Bizeul the goldsmith.” He smiled ominously. “I regulate the guilds, you know. If he is innocent, he will tell me what he knows rather than provoke me. If not—I will provoke him. As for you, go back to the college by the main streets. And shut your ears to insults. Your soldier’s training will not serve you against a crowd, nor will a reputation for street brawling improve things for the Society of Jesus.”
“That sounds suspiciously like an order.”
“Does it?” La Reynie laughed softly as he bowed. “Then God go with you as you obey it.”
“Wait, mon lieutenant-général—what about Paul Saglio?”
“Saglio?”The lieutenant-général looked momentarily blank. “Yes, Saglio.” He sighed and shook his head. “Do you have any idea how many men I do not have? When I find someone to send to Vaugirard, I will send him.”
On his way back toward the college, no one challenged Charles, but he felt as though accusing eyes watched him from every doorway, as though everyone he passed were about to start singing the tavern song. He walked along the rue des Fossés, looking out at the Faubourg St. Jacques, the suburb that had grown up south of the walls. The Faubourg was thick with recent monastic foundations, built solidly of stone, with ample land around them. Beyond the gray lace of winter trees lay the walled precincts of the Feuillantines, Ursulines, and Daughters of Mary, their frozen gardens bare and empty. The great dome of Val de Grace, the Benedictine house beloved by Louis XIV’s mother, rose above the convent walls like a sugared Christmas cake.
New private houses of gleaming stone were scattered along the road among the religious foundations, but not far beyond them, the countryside still spread itself. Soon, Charles told himself, plowing would start in the barren fields, fruit trees would blossom, the sun would come back. And, please God, his own heaviness of spirit would lighten. In truth, though, he wasn’t sure. He’d chosen clearly and from his heart to remain a Jesuit. But his grief for what he hadn’t chosen had been ripped wide open by Martine Mynette’s murder, by her loss of the future she should have had. Nothing is wasted, the Silence had said—not death, not grief—unless you waste it. Was this renewed grief of his meant to drive him to find her killer? Was that what the Silence had meant?
He waited, very still on the windswept roadway, hoping the Silence would answer him. And caught his breath, wondering if the white horse galloping along a path beside a snowy field, its rider’s black cloak flying, the man’s streaming hair black as a crow’s feather in the gray light, might be a sign. He watched them out of sight, but the Silence held its peace and the horse and rider only left him yearning to ride in the wind’s teeth and leave grief behind.
Charles was nearly at the college when he saw a huddle of beggars in the street ahead of him, outside the church of St. Étienne des Grès. A halting voice came from their midst, and he realized that someone was reading aloud. A man hushed a chattering woman, who hit him and started pushing her way out of the huddle. The reader’s voice grew louder. “Elle était riche, elle est morte, les Jésuites dansent sur son corps . . .”
Bursting from the group nearly in Charles’s path, the woman who’d been hushed screeched, “Here’s one, here’s a Jesuit vulture! But he can’t eat us, we’ve no gold for his guts!”
The others turned and Charles saw that the reader was the young man who’d pleaded for the old beggar on Christmas Eve. When he saw Charles, his eyes grew round with fear and he dropped the sheet of paper and backed away. Some of the beggars started singing the words of the tavern song, but the old man who’d attacked the Condé’s reliquary limped close to Charles, thrust his head forward, and squinted at him.
“Shut your mouths,” he yelled over his shoulder. “This death-bird gives good alms, he gave me this coat.”
Charles picked up the broadsheet from the cobbles and smiled reassuringly at the reader.
“Where did you get this, mon ami?”
The young man ran. Seeming to catch his fear, the others ran, too, and the old man limped after them, yelling at them to stop and cursing them for idiots. They rounded the corner of St. Étienne des Grès and Charles followed them, wondering suddenly where they sheltered. But in the scant moments it took him to reach the side street that ran in front of the college of Les Cholets, they disappeared. He turned back to the rue St. Jacques, studying the broadsheet as he went. This sheet, at least, still had only the one verse, which was somewhat reassuring. No printer’s name, of course—no one would put his name to an effort to stir up unrest and disturb the city’s peace.
As Charles neared the postern door, a shop sign on the college façade creaked in a burst of wind. Charles looked up. The sign’s crusty, golden loaf of bread made him smile, thinking of the LeClercs, the family of bakers who rented the shop and its living quarters. Mme LeClerc and her small daughter Marie-Ange had taken him to their hearts when he arrived last summer, helping him when he’d sorely needed it. The family should soon be back in Paris from their Christmas visit to M. LeClerc’s brother in the nearby village of Gonesse.
His spirits lightened a little by that thought, Charles went to the rector’s office, where he found Père Le Picart sitting by the fireplace, his breviary in his hand.
“I see news in your face, Maître du Luc,” Le Picart said. “Please, sit.”
Charles took the chair on the other side of the hearth and loosened his cloak. “News indeed, mon père. Henri Brion is dead. Stabbed to the heart.”
Le Picart crossed himself. “Brion? Dear God. So that is why the poor man never came to see me?”
“I don’t know how long he’s been dead. A beggar found him in a midden ditch near the Place Maubert. Someone came from the Brion house to tell me, and I’m just back from seeing the body.”
“May God receive his soul. This is the last thing I expected! Certainly the last thing we needed. Of course,” he added dryly, “poor Monsieur Brion hardly needed it, either. Were the police there? Is there any thought of who killed him? Or why?”
“Lieutenant-Général La Reynie was there. He has gone to question a goldsmith called Bizeul who, according to one of The Procope’s waiters, took Brion forcibly out of the coffeehouse on Thursday night. The waiter and a woman who was begging at the coffeehouse door say that this Bizeul and another man pretended that Brion was drunk, but he wasn’t. And since then, no one seems to have seen Brion alive.”
Le Picart frowned thoughtfully. “A notary may come to know financial secrets, after all.”
“True. Though family secrets are often more deadly.”
“So you don’t suspect this goldsmith?”
“He must be suspected, if it is true that he took Henri Brion forcibly out of the coffeehouse. But I can imagine no reason for him to have killed the girl. I cannot help but think that there is only one killer. Martine Mynette and Brion were both stabbed. Their lives were joined in family friendship as well as in the donation entre vifs transaction. For both to die on the same day is too much coincidence.”
“I agree. So who had reason to kill them both?”
“The most obvious answer is Henri Brion’s son, Gilles,” Charles said reluctantly. “His father was trying to force him into a marriage with the Mynette girl. And if he killed only the girl, his father would surely have tried to force him to court another heiress. But from the little I’ve seen of Gilles Brion, I simply cannot imagine him as a killer.”
“Anyone may be tempted to kill. And until we find the person who has been so tempted,” Le Picart said grimly, “the connections between the two victims mean that Brion’s death will be laid at our door along with Martine Mynette’s.”
They were both quiet under the weight of that certainty. The dim light through the small window’s greenish glass made the rector’s face look even more tired and drawn than it was.
The quiet was broken by a knock at the door. The rector gave permission to enter and a lay brother came in, holding out a folded piece of paper.
“This was left with the porter, mon père. For Père Damiot.” He handed the folded paper to Le Picart, bowed, clasped his hands against his apron skirt, and composed himself to wait.
“Please excuse me, Maître du Luc.” Le Picart opened the letter and scanned the page. Like the older religious orders, the Society of Jesus required that any letter sent to or written by a Jesuit be read by a superior. When he finished reading, he stared open-mouthed at the page in his hand. “Unbelievable,” he breathed. Still looking at the letter, he said to the lay brother, “Mon frère, bring Père Damiot to me, please.”
The brother bowed and went out.
“Well,” Le Picart said, looking up. He seemed more at a loss for words than Charles had ever seen him. “Well. This suggests that your initial impression of Gilles Brion may be correct, maître. But we must wait until Père Damiot has read this, since it is written to him.”
“Of course, mon père.”
“A goldsmith,” Le Picart murmured to himself, thoughtfully tapping a finger on the letter in his lap. “Very likely.”
Charles folded his hands tightly in his lap to keep himself from snatching the letter and devouring it.
“Mon père,” he said after a moment, both to take his mind off the letter and also because he needed to relieve his conscience, “after Monsieur La Reynie finished examining Brion’s body, he asked me to go with him to talk to the people at Procope’s. I went. I sat with him and drank coffee. I felt it was part of doing the task you’ve set me. But—well—it is a coffeehouse.”
The rector sighed. “Maître du Luc.” He sounded as though he were talking to a sixteen-year-old novice. “I am not aware that Rome has condemned coffee.” He smiled at Charles. “Rather the contrary, if gossip serves.”
“Oh, yes?” Charles was momentarily diverted by the thought of His Holiness in papal tiara, sipping coffee in some Roman Procope’s.
“You are pursuing these questions at my express order, maître. Where the questions take you, you will go. I charge you only to remember that Monsieur La Reynie pursues his own interests first and last.”
A flurry of knocking came at the door, and Père Damiot was inside almost before Le Picart could bid him enter. His thin, olive-skinned face was alight with curiosity.
“Yes, mon père? A letter for me?”
The rector waited serenely until Damiot remembered the required reverence to his superior. Then Charles rose and offered his chair to Damiot who, as a priest, was his superior.
“Bonjour, maître,” Damiot said hurriedly. “Thank you. With your permission, mon père?”
Le Picart nodded and Damiot sat. Charles’s mouth twitched. Damiot was looking at the letter in Le Picart’s hand the way Charles’s boyhood beagle had watched meat roasting in the kitchen fireplace.
“From your esteemed father, mon père,” the rector said, holding the letter out. “Read it here, please; it touches on what Maître du Luc and I were discussing.”
“Yes, mon père.” Damiot glanced at Charles and then was absorbed in reading. Fortunately, the letter was short. Incomprehensibly, before Damiot reached the end of it, he was laughing. Eyes dancing with mirth, he looked at Le Picart. “Incredible! Have you ever heard anything to match this, mon père?”
“Certainly nothing financial,” the rector said dryly. He turned to Charles, who was utterly at sea. “We will tell you shortly what is entertaining Père Damiot, maître, but first you need to know that his esteemed father is a merchant goldsmith and a member of the Six Corps.”
“I do know from Père Damiot that his father is a goldsmith, mon père—but, what is the Six Corps?”
Damiot looked at Charles in disbelief.
The rector said kindly, “The association of Paris’s six most influential guilds.”
“My father is head of the goldsmiths’ guild.” Damiot looked questioningly at Le Picart, who nodded at him to continue. “It is like this, maître. This morning, my father heard something that closely concerns Monsieur Henri Brion. He had already heard about the Mynette bequest coming to us—I think everyone in Paris has heard of it by now.” Damiot looked apologetically at Le Picart. “I hope I did not speak out of turn, mon père, but when my father visited me yesterday, he asked me if we had sure proof of Monsieur Simon Mynette’s intention, and I told him we had Simon Mynette’s letter, notarized by Monsieur Henri Brion.”
“Continue,” Le Picart said noncommittally.
“Well, now my father has written to me because he is worried that news that has just reached him about Monsieur Brion may somehow touch us—because of the Mynette property, you understand. Are you with me, Maître du Luc?”
“Barely.”
He leaned almost gleefully toward Charles. “What has come to light is a scheme for smuggling silver through customs. It was just uncovered at the port in Brest. This scheme has been traced to Paris, and rumor has it that our Monsieur Henri Brion is its creator.”
Le Picart lifted his hand slightly to pause Damiot. “What you do not know, Père Damiot, is that Henri Brion left Procope’s coffeehouse on Thursday evening with a goldsmith named Bizeul and another man. Those who saw him go say he didn’t go willingly. And this morning Henri Brion was found dead.”
“No!” Damiot looked incredulously from the rector to Charles. “Is this certain?”
Charles nodded. “I saw his body.”
“Well, I can easily imagine,” Damiot said, hastily crossing himself, “that Brion’s investors may have been tempted to kill him over losing so much money because this smuggling scheme has failed. But I know Monsieur Bizeul and I cannot imagine he would do murder.”
“Why not?” the rector said sharply.
“Many reasons, mon père. My father has known Monsieur Bizeul longer than I have been alive. And Monsieur Bizeul is a senior member of our bourgeois Congregation of the Sainte Vierge. As both my father’s son and the priest in charge of that Congregation, I have had many dealings with Bizeul. If he is not as upright and devout as I have supposed, I am badly deceived.” His face changed suddenly. “Though it is true that he recently dowered his last daughter very generously. Overgenerously, some said. Oh, dear.”
“Go back a little,” Charles said. “What is the role of investors in this scheme?”
“Ma foi! Do you understand nothing about money?”
“I’m noble, remember? We never understand anything about money. That’s why we don’t have any.”
A snort of laughter escaped Le Picart.
Damiot rolled his eyes. “You’re only minor nobility. Listen. Notaries are the middlemen in French investment schemes. We, unlike the English, have not seen fit to have a national bank, so notaries like Monsieur Brion bring together those who have money and those who need it. A notary has to know not only where money is, but who wants it and who will pay for it. And that includes things that can be turned into money, one way and another. Especially things like silver.”
“Which brings us to the details of Henri Brion’s scheme,” Le Picart said.
Damiot’s eyes were brimming with laughter. “So let me set the scene. The silver might not have been discovered, you know, Maître du Luc, except for the drunk. And the handcart, of course.”
Deadpan, Charles said back, “Ah, yes, it always is a drunk, isn’t it? The handcart, though, figures less often.” And waited to see how much of a comic script Damiot was going to make up right there in the rector’s office.
The rector shifted warningly in his chair.
“Yes, well,” Damiot said quickly, “it seems a drunk dock workman ran the wheel of his cart into the end of a barrel lying on its side on the dock. The barrel was one of fifty full of chocolate from Mexico. The barrel’s bottom split and chocolate seeds—beans, whatever you call them—spilled out. As the drunk tried to push them back in, he felt something hard in the barrel and pulled it out. It was a pretty little bar of silver, thickly wrapped in wool. All fifty barrels turned out to be salted with these small silver bars.”
“But wouldn’t the weight of the silver in the barrel give the whole thing away?” Charles said, frowning.
“That’s why the bars were so small. And there weren’t many of them, maybe a half dozen to each barrel. But a fifty-barrel shipment of chocolate would net you enough silver—on which you’d paid only the customs charge for chocolate—to make it worthwhile.”
“Reprehensible. I’m shocked.” Charles tried to stifle his grin. He might be from the south, but he was enough of a Frenchman to enjoy a story of tax evasion. “Henri Brion thought of this? That surprises me, after all I’ve heard of him.”
“My father says the customs people think he did. And that now Monsieur Henri Brion’s investors are out a great deal of money.”
“Because the investors financed the shipment,” Charles said, finally understanding.
“Habes,” Damiot said, classroom Latin for “you have it.” “And though what they would have paid Henri Brion for being allowed into the potential profit was far less than they would normally pay for silver, it was still too much to simply lose.”
“Not to mention facing prosecution for smuggling,” Le Picart said. “A substantial enough motive for murder, if Brion refused to give them their money back. Or if they feared he would try to lighten his own penalty by giving up their names to the authorities.”
So much, Charles thought, for his certainty that there was only one killer. “Does your father say if Monsieur La Reynie knows about this?”
Shaking his head, Damiot started to say something, but the rector, whose thoughts were going in other directions, forestalled him.
“Could this scheme of Henri Brion’s have given him—Brion, I mean—a reason to kill Martine Mynette? Could he have stolen money from her and used it to promote this smuggling? While her mother was ill, perhaps?”
“I don’t know. I suppose it’s possible. But it isn’t clear yet which of them died first.”
Damiot was looking from Charles to the rector and frowning. “The police are keeping us so well informed?”
Le Picart said, “For our own protection, we are following their efforts regarding both murders. You know that people are accusing us of involvement in Martine Mynette’s murder. People are going to say the same about Monsieur Brion’s murder, too, until the real killer is found. Have you not heard the song already in the streets? I heard it yesterday.”
Damiot shook his head. “I have not been out the last few days.”
“I have a copy,” Charles said, suddenly remembering. He brought out the broadsheet and handed it to Le Picart. “Still only the one verse, thank all the saints. A beggar was reading it to his confrères, but when he saw me, he dropped it and ran.”
Le Picart glanced at the sheet and passed it to Damiot.
Damiot read it and grimaced. “Not bad. Though I could do better,” He said it lightly, but his dark eyes were worried as he handed the paper back. “I wonder,” he said slowly, “whether my father could help us.”
The rector studied him. “How?”
“He knows all the rich merchants in the city. If Monsieur Brion found his investors by trawling The Six Corps, my father could probably find out whom he caught besides Monsieur Bizeul. Assuming he did catch Monsieur Bizeul, of course.”
“Yes, write to him,” Le Picart said. “Ask if he knows who the investors are. Casually, as though you are only curious.” He smiled slightly. “As though you are indulging in a little worldly gossip. I feel sure you could do that convincingly.”
“I can only try, mon père,” Damiot said modestly.
“Mon père,” Charles said to Le Picart, “Martine Mynette’s funeral is on Monday morning, at Saint-Nicolas du Chardonnet. Mademoiselle Isabel Brion has asked me to attend. It would be a good way to listen to what’s being said on the Place. It’s possible that someone in another house heard or saw whoever came to the Mynette house just before Martine was killed.”
The rector pursed his lips and shook his head. “I think your presence at the funeral would be too incendiary. Go, but wait outside for Mademoiselle Brion. When she comes out of the church, offer to escort her to her house. You can watch and listen as people leave the church and as you walk. I will tell the senior priest at Saint-Nicolas that you will be there—he is well disposed toward us and can speak a word from the pulpit to calm difficulties. And Maître du Luc, I want you to write a note to Lieutenant-Général La Reynie about Henri Brion’s silver scheme, on the chance that the news has not yet reached him. You do not need to show it to me, but have someone take it right away.”
Damiot’s eyebrows rose at Charles’s familiarity with the head of the police, but he asked no questions. “And I will write a message to my father as you ask, mon père,” he said, “before I immerse myself again in preparations for Monday’s classes.” He sighed. “Though I could recite the venerable Nouveaux Principes grammar textbook in my sleep.”
“Unfortunately, the goal is for your students to be able to recite it in their sleep,” Le Picart said, laughing. “You are excused, mon père. And you, too, maître. You must also have preparations to make. And so do I. I am still putting the final touches on our New Year’s Day celebration of King Louis’s recovery from his recent surgery.”
Charles groaned inwardly, having forgotten about the celebration since he wasn’t directly involved. Having a long list of grievances against the constantly lauded Louis XIV, he wondered if staying on the heels of the police could be made into an excuse for absenting himself.
But Damiot said enthusiastically, “I would be only too glad to write a little something for the occasion, mon père. Such a delicate assignment, considering the kind of surgery . . .”
Charles choked back laughter. The surgery had been for an anal fistula, and what Damiot could make of that did not bear thinking about, at least not in the rector’s presence.
Le Picart smiled blandly. “I think we will not trouble you, Père Damiot. Just write the message to your father.”
Damiot acquiesced gracefully, and he and Charles bowed themselves out of the office.
When they were far enough away, Damiot said gleefully, “Too bad, that livret would have been my masterwork!”
“That livret would have been your ticket to life as an over-age apprentice to some crabbed goldsmith,” Charles said through smothered laughter.
“Yes, not worth it, after all my efforts to avoid that very thing. Ah, well, back to work. First the note to my father and then the wretched Nouveaux Principes again.” Humming under his breath, Damiot loped upstairs to his study.
Charles went into an alcove off the big reception salon, where writing materials were kept. Assembling paper and a quill, he quickly wrote his note to La Reynie and found a lay brother to take it to the lieutenant-général at the goldsmith Bizeul’s house, or if La Reynie was no longer there, on to the Châtelet.
That done, Charles decided to go to the stage in the salle des actes, over the refectory. The Christmas farce, private and very quickly put together, had used no scenery. The February performance would have scenery, though not the elaborate stage machinery of the summer show, and taking time now to begin considering what would be needed would save time later. He went out the back door of the main building into the Cour d’honneur. Snow was falling again. And with it, somehow, the cold weight of loss and death settled on him. He went heavy-footed into the silent refectory building and up the elaborately curved staircase. In the empty salle des actes, he stopped at one of the long, small-paned windows and stared bleakly out at the snow, hating its cold, dead white and the wet black and gray that were all the color left to the miserable world. A sudden flurry of swirling black and the sound of laughter nearly made him jump, as seven or eight half-grown boys in their long scholars’ gowns burst from the student court into the Cour d’honneur. They stood with their faces lifted, catching flakes on their tongues. Then they grabbed hands and began whirling in a circle, black gowns flying, a spinning, laughing hieroglyph on the white page of the courtyard. Eased somehow, Charles murmured his thanks for the small visitation of joy and walked on toward the bare stage.