Chapter 27
The morning sun had risen high enough to fall greenly through the small window’s old glass onto Père Le Picart’s desk. The rector sat behind the desk, his long, sinewy fingers lying in the little pool of light, tapping softly and rapidly on the desk’s scarred wood. La Reynie sat in one of the fireside chairs, which Charles had moved closer to the desk for him. Charles stood back, glad—for once—to let his superiors decide what happened next. His horror and astonishment at the morning’s revelations had given way to quiet, and beneath its surface, his mind worked at making sense of what he’d seen and heard, especially at making sense of Jean.
“I will give out that I have the proven killer of Martine Mynette and Henri Brion,” La Reynie was saying. “And then I will give out that he has died of fever.”
Le Picart said nothing, and Charles saw that he was scrutinizing the police chief as he had often scrutinized Charles himself. Some part of him was glad to see that La Reynie was equally uncomfortable under that sharp gray gaze.
“Do you think I am wrong to let him die here?” La Reynie said, shifting in his chair.
“Have I said so?” The rector shook his head. “No, Monsieur La Reynie, I think you have chosen rightly. Why add more suffering to the world than there needs to be?” He looked at Charles. “Maître du Luc will see that he has a priest.” His fingers continued to tap, as though knocking softly at some unseen door. “I suppose that your making it known that the killer has been found will release us from the recent accusations. And from that cursed song.”
“Be assured that it will, in time. I will go on confiscating copies until the sellers and singers turn their attention to the next scandale in Paris.”
“I trust,” Le Picart said dryly, “that the Society of Jesus actually receiving the Mynette money will not be the next scandale.”
La Reynie said grimly, “The closer we get to the end of January, and the king’s visit to the city and grand dinner at the Hôtel de Ville, the faster disturbers of the city’s peace for any reason will find themselves unpleasantly housed in the Châtelet.”
Charles stepped forward. “Mon père, will you give me permission to watch tonight with the beggar woman and the dying boy? In the morning, if he dies as she predicts, I will see that . . . that all is attended to, and that the cave is empty.” Charles glanced at La Reynie. “Monsieur La Reynie has offered to bury the young man, as well as the old beggar he killed.”
Le Picart looked at La Reynie in surprise but said to Charles, “You have my permission, maître. See also that this dying boy and the beggar woman have what they need for their comfort.”
“Thank you, mon père. I will see to it.”
“When they are gone from the cave, I will send lay brothers to block the entrance.” Le Picart’s tapping fingers stilled. “Now that we will have money enough, repairs to the Les Cholets building can go forward, including a stout locked door where you say the beggars have been getting in.”
Charles nodded, remembering what Reine had told him. It was none so bad down there, she’d said. Not bad at all, with fire at hand and water nearby, especially when Paris was freezing or drowning in rain. What she hadn’t told him was where the other entrance was, and how could he tell the rector what he didn’t know?
La Reynie said, “If you will excuse me, mon père, I must send for men to take the beggar’s body away.” He rose from his chair.
Charles took another step forward. “Before I return to the cave, will you give me permission to go to the Couche, mon père? There is an old nun there who may know something about the killer.”
“What does that matter now?” Le Picart and La Reynie said it nearly in concert, and Charles struggled to find an answer.
“I would like to know more about who he is.”
“Curiosity is not a virtue in a Jesuit,” Le Picart said mildly, eyeing him.
The silence stretched and Charles realized belatedly that the rector was waiting for a response to what he’d said.
“Mon père, it seems to me that the idle curiosity of distraction, which leads to meddling, is one thing. But the desire to know truth in order to see justice done and compassion given is another. It seems only right to know whom we are burying.”
Le Picart still said nothing, his eyes boring into Charles.
“And to know why he killed,” Charles made bold to say. “If we do not know why souls grow desperate, how can we help them?”
La Reynie was staring at him in open amazement. But the rector had relaxed into his chair and was regarding Charles with more than a little satisfaction.
“You may go to the Couche. But”—the satisfied look was replaced by one of unmistakable warning—“when you have asked your questions, whether or not you have your answers, the task I set you will be ended. You will then give your full and undivided attention to your duties here.”
“Yes, mon père.”
Charles and La Reynie bowed and turned to leave. Before the door shut behind them, though, the rector called Charles back.
“I say this only to you, but I think you will want to know. It was one of our own from Louis Le Grand who spoke carelessly, outside the college, about the Mynette patrimoine coming to us.”
Charles remembered his first walk to the Place with the dour Maître Richaud and the gossip Richaud had heard in the chandler’s workshop. “And this Jesuit talked about the patrimoine?”
“Yes. But that is all that needs to be said. The rest is not your business.”
The “rest” meaning consequences, including penance. You should order him to go and see a comedy every day, Charles thought irreverently, remembering Richaud’s dislike of laughter.
“Before you go to the Couche,” Le Picart said briskly, “take food to the cave. And blankets.”
Charles bent his head in acquiescence.
“And Maître du Luc?”
Charles looked up.
“My thanks to you. You have done well what I ordered you to do.” He gave Charles a small, wintry smile. “When I gave you this task, I said that a Jesuit’s obedience should be his superior’s supporting staff. You have upheld me, and also Louis le Grand.”
Charles felt himself flushing with pleasure at the unexpected thanks. Jesuit obedience—no matter how hard he himself found it—was regarded as simply a given, not an occasion for thanks. “I only wish I could have prevented this morning’s death,” he said.
“I wish so, too. But that death and its sin are not yours to carry.” Le Picart’s smile reached his cool gray eyes this time. “What would be the point of growing in obedience only to fall into overscrupulosity?”
Charles found himself smiling, too, and remembering the Christmas Farce of Monks. If the end of a scholastic was to be kicked, the frequent function of a superior was to douse the scholastic with cold water for the good of his soul. “Point taken, mon père.”
Charles collected blankets from the central store of bedding, and soup and bread from the kitchen. With some difficulty, he made his way back into the Les Cholets courtyard and down to the cellar. Nothing had changed. Reine still held Marin’s body on her lap, and Jean was still tossing and shivering with fever. Charles gently unwrapped his cloak from the boy and wrapped him instead in layers of blankets. He put another blanket around Reine’s shoulders and set the soup and bread beside her.
“Where is Richard?” Charles asked, seeing that the beggar was gone.
“He went to tell the others not to return tonight.”
“Where will they stay?”
“There are other places.”
The sound of voices and footsteps announced La Reynie, followed by two sergents with a litter. Reine gathered Marin to her and kissed him.
“Good-bye, mon coeur, my heart, my life.” She looked up at La Reynie, her eyes full of pleading. “Treat him gently, Nicolas,” she whispered.
“You know I will.” He called the two men forward with a look. “You will do this as though for your fathers,” he said curtly, and stepped aside.
Obviously bewildered by so much care for a filthy beggar, but just as obviously flinching from the steel in La Reynie’s voice, his men placed Marin on the litter with the care they might have given a marquis. They covered him with the blanket they’d brought, bowed to La Reynie, and bore the litter away to the Châtelet’s mortuary chapel.
As their footsteps died away, Richard emerged from the passage and sat down beside Reine. “I will take care of her, Monsieur La Reynie.”
“For now.” The lieutenant-général strode out of the cave and Charles followed.
When they reached the front of the college, a red-and-black carriage drawn by a pair of black horses, standing in the little rue des Poirees across from Louis le Grand’s main doors, came to meet them. A serving boy jumped down from his place between the high rear wheels and opened the door. Charles began his farewells, but La Reynie motioned him curtly into the carriage and climbed in behind him.
“La Couche,” he barked at the boy, who told the driver, and they were off.
La Reynie crossed his arms on his chest and stared steadfastly out the window. That suited Charles, who settled back on the red cushioned seat, looking eagerly out his own window. He was so rarely in a carriage that the experience was still new. Beyond the window, people, horses, carriages, carts, mules, shops, dogs, courtyard gates flashed past in a flood of color. Watching the wheels throw waves of muddy snow and water against stone walls and swearing pedestrians, Charles realized that the day was steadily warming. Snow dripped from eaves and gargoyles, and people even leaned on the sills of open windows, airing their rooms. On the Petit Pont, a few well-wrapped women sat in west-facing doorways, their faces lifted to shafts of sunlight and long-absent warmth.
On the Île de la Cité, the carriage wound its way to the rue Neuve Notre Dame and stopped in front of the gate to the long, stone-built Couche. La Reynie and Charles got out, still in silence, and La Reynie rang the bell. Charles waited silently behind him. A young, bright-eyed Sister of Charity hurried across the court and let them in.
“Our thanks, ma soeur,” La Reynie said, lifting his hat, as Charles bowed. “We are seeking one of your sisters.” He gestured to Charles to take over the asking.
“She is called Mariana,” Charles said.
“Oh, you are in luck, come with me.” The girl led them across the muddy court. “Soeur Mariana has been ill, but she is better now, and back with us.” She ushered them through the door and into the anteroom. “Will you wait one little moment, please? I will see if she is busy.” With another curtsy, she hurried away.
The dark, rambling old house smelled of babies. Dirty swaddling, sour milk, and strong soap scented air already rank with the closed-in smells of winter, while wailing cries, hurrying feet on stone floors, and sharply urgent commands smote their ears. The young nun returned, as serene as though they were all in a summer garden.
“Soeur Mariana will see you. Come.”
She took them through the anteroom and along a dark, low-beamed passage to a small plaster-walled room where an elderly nun sat singing under her breath as she fed an eagerly sucking newborn with a rag soaked in milk. It was a common way of feeding babies, especially when there were several to feed at once. Wet nurses were sometimes accused of letting babies die, because the ones who got only the rag and not the breast often starved to death. Watching, Charles hoped this child—and the half dozen others in the cradles ranged around the room—would soon go to wet nurses of their own.
“Ma soeur,” La Reynie said, “I have questions to ask you, if you will be so kind.”
The old woman’s reedy singing stopped and she peered at him, blinking shortsightedly. Her aquiline nose was like a blade, and her starched white headdress stood away from her dark face in wide quivering wings.
“And who are you?”
“I am Nicolas de La Reynie, ma soeur, head of the Paris police. And this is Maître Charles du Luc, from the college of Louis le Grand.”
Her black eyes flicked from La Reynie to Charles, and she pulled the rag from the infant’s mouth, dipped it in the basin of milk on the table at her elbow, and wrung it out a little. “What do you want?” She gave the baby the rag tit again and resumed her singing.
La Reynie frowned impatiently. “Soeur Mariana, I beg the favor of your attention.”
“You see me here, speak,” the old woman said, and kept singing.
La Reynie shook his head in exasperation and looked at Charles.
Charles knelt beside her. “Ma soeur, did you have a child in your care, perhaps as many as twenty years ago, a boy called Tito? Also perhaps called Jean?”
“Tito?” She drew in a quick breath and looked up, seeming to see La Reynie and Charles for the first time. “My Tito? Where is he?”
Charles said softly, “When did you last see Tito?”
“Thirteen years ago. Only once. Soon after he went to be a servant, I was sent to see how he did. He was eight years old then.” She sighed. “I missed him sorely. But it was best for him; it was a place and a way into the world.” The nun stared into the distance, her pale lips moving in prayer or memory, Charles couldn’t tell. The child in her lap had sucked the rag dry and began to wail before she sighed and said, “Thirteen years ago he went to Madame Anne Mynette. Such a long time.”
“Madame Anne Mynette?” Charles said mildly.
“So she called herself four years before, when she came looking for her own child. I doubted then she had a right to the title,” the nun said acidly. “Women who come here to retrieve their babies—not that many ever come—hardly ever have a right to it.”
La Reynie raised an eyebrow at Charles. “It seems a long time for you to remember the woman’s name,” he said skeptically, watching her soak the rag again and quiet the baby.
“Oh, no, when she came in search of a little servant, I remembered her. Why would I not, when I’d already given her one of our babies?”
Charles frowned in confusion. “But you just said that when she came earlier, it was to get her own child.”
“Her own child had died.”
“Died? But—”
Soeur Mariana bridled. “I remember quite well how it was. A wet nurse left the child, because her own children had fallen ill, and she feared the infant would too. The infant she brought to us did sicken, and when ‘Madame’ Mynette came, it had just died. But I saw a chance for another child.” She made a derisive little sound. “Babies look much the same when they’re very young. And ‘Madame’ Mynette had told me that she hadn’t seen her child for some weeks. So I found a baby girl about the same age and with the same color eyes, though lighter hair. I wrapped her in a clean blanket, but then I was afraid the Mynette woman would see the difference and I would be in grave trouble. But God used little Tito to show me what to do. Tito was with me that day—I often kept him with me, though he lived in the older children’s house by then. Well, that day he was playing with the little trinket he had, a heart on an old ribbon. He’d always had it. It was around his neck when he was found in Notre Dame.” The nun’s face softened and she shook her head sadly. “His mother no doubt put it on him when she left him in the stone cradle that’s been there time out of mind for leaving babies in. So I—”
“Wait, ma soeur! Tito’s mother? But Martine Mynette told her friend that Mademoiselle Anne Mynette had put it on her when she was a baby!”
“Nothing of the kind.” Soeur Mariana gave Charles a shrewd look. “The Mynette woman was desperate with guilt when she came searching for her infant. Guilt for leaving her with the wet nurse, I suppose. Well, she deserved guilt, if a woman has a child, she should feed it with the breasts God gave her. If she told the girl that she’d given her the heart, it was no doubt to make herself seem a better mother.”
Charles’s head was spinning. “Tito’s mother,” he murmured, trying to make sense out of what he was hearing. “So the baby Mademoiselle Anne Mynette took home was a foundling like Tito himself.”
“Yes. Left on the Pont Neuf, if I remember rightly. Du Pont—from the bridge—we would have given her for a surname.”
Charles’s heart contracted as he tried to imagine young, desperate mothers, newborn children in their arms, watching to see that they were unobserved, putting their babies down somewhere that seemed safe. And walking away.
“The mothers often leave some trinket,” the nun said. “They think they’ll come and claim the baby, but they don’t. They’re whores, most of them.”
“So you are saying, ma soeur, that you took Tito’s necklace and put it on the baby who became Martine Mynette.”
“I thought the Mynette woman would be more likely to accept the child as hers, if I said I’d put the little heart on her baby when the wet nurse left her, to be sure she wasn’t mixed with the others and lost.” Soeur Mariana smiled complacently. “‘Madame’ Mynette made us a very large gift for that.” She rose and laid the sucking child in one of the beds, ignoring its cries when she pulled the rag from its mouth. Then she went to a different bed and busied herself with another infant.
Charles looked at La Reynie. The lieutenant-général looked like he was holding himself in the chair and in the room by main force.
Charles said, “What did Tito do, ma soeur? When you took his necklace?”
“Do?” Soeur Mariana sat down with the new child and soaked the rag again. “Oh, he cried. He even tried to kick me, but I beat him and he said he was sorry. It’s the only way with them.” She frowned, sucking her yellowed teeth. “I thought he would forget, as children do, but when I went to check on him after he was in the Mynette household, ‘Madame’ Mynette said she was going to send him back if he didn’t stop trying to steal her adopted daughter’s necklace. So I talked sharply to him and told him that if he didn’t stop, she would throw him out in the street and no one would take care of him. Tito was bright enough, he took to heart what I said, and she kept him.”
Charles swallowed hard. “Yes, she kept him.”
“Is he there still, maître?”
“No. Anne Mynette is dead,” Charles said. “And so is the little girl you gave her.”
Soeur Mariana put the rag tit into the new baby’s mouth and stared beyond Charles and La Reynie, as though into the past, still saying nothing. Finally, with a faint sigh, she said, “Tito is dead, too, isn’t he?”
Charles hesitated. “Yes,” he said, and left it at that, because it seemed the kindest thing to do. “I am sorry.”
“Before I joined the Sisters of Charity, I was a wife,” the nun said, murmuring so that Charles had to lean closer to hear her. “We left Spain and came here. I had two children. They died, and my husband, also. So I became a nun. Little Tito came back to us from his wet nurse, and I had the charge of him at the house for the older children. But sometimes when I came here to work for a day, I brought him with me. He was like my son who died. Very like.” Her voice trailed into silence.
“Was your son’s name Tito?”
She shook her head. “They called my little foundling Jean Baptiste, because he was found on St. Jean Baptiste’s day. In Spanish that is Juan Bautisto, and I called him that. But he couldn’t say it, he could only say Tito, so that became what everyone called him.”
Charles nodded, wondering if Tito had called himself Jean after he left the Mynette house because he wanted to be a man, called by a man’s name, and not just little foundling Tito.
The nun was looking down at the child in her lap. “I only wanted to give another child a chance at life. So many die before we can even find them wet nurses.”
“The baby you put Tito’s necklace on had time to grow up, ma soeur. With a mother who loved her as her natural daughter.”
She gave Charles a bleak smile. “That is something, then.”
A sound from La Reynie made Charles turn to see him emptying his purse onto the table beside the basin of milk. “For the children,” he said through stiff lips, and left the room.
Hurriedly, Charles thanked the nun and gave her the last of the coins from Le Picart’s purse, made the sign of the cross over the babies, and caught up with La Reynie in the courtyard. When they reached the carriage, La Reynie dismissed it.
“Walk with me,” he said.
Instead of turning toward the Right Bank and the Châtelet, the lieutenant-général walked toward the towers of Notre Dame at the tip of the island. Charles kept pace with him, watching him covertly and thinking about what the nun had told them. In the open square below the cathedral’s west face, La Reynie stopped and looked up, past rank upon rank of stone saints wet with snowmelt, past the climbing towers, up at the brilliant blue sky.
“Sometimes,” he said, staring at the soaring stones, “when I cannot face this city or myself any longer, I come here. I tell myself that no matter what happens, no matter the evil and suffering, day and night into day and night, the saints still stand there. So God must still be there, too. Still somewhere.”
Too astonished to speak, Charles stood as motionless as the carvings, until the lieutenant-général began to walk again. They went around the side of the cathedral, along its line of buttresses.
“You want to know about Reine,” La Reynie said abruptly. “Because you saved her life, I will tell you. She was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. But her face and her body were the least of her beauty. Oh, not that I didn’t appreciate them, I did, and fully.” He glanced sideways at Charles. “You have known women, you will understand that. Though perhaps not the rest of it. I—I met Reine soon after coming to Paris and this impossible job. I think you know what she was then. A gloriously beautiful, royally expensive courtesan. I spent more and more time with her, time I didn’t have, money I didn’t have, but she kept me from losing my sanity. I would have married her, even with all I knew about her. But, of course, I could not, I was already married to my second wife. And Reine would not have had me, anyway. And why?” He laughed sadly. “Because she loved Marin. The beggar. Then, a few years later, when I was seeing her rarely, she was in great danger. I cannot tell you more than that, only that I was able to help her. And she has often helped me. For more than twenty years now, my heart has been more than half in her keeping.”
They had reached the eastern tip of the île and turned to look at the cathedral again.
“And what of your own love?” La Reynie said roughly. “So far away in Geneva.”
Charles caught his breath. La Reynie knew Pernelle, but this was the first time he had ever called her Charles’s “love.”
“As you say, she is in Geneva. I am here. That will not change.”
“I see. And have you accepted your penance and done it?”
“Yes.” Charles was shaken by how good it was to speak about her. “I did willing penance.” He fell quiet, looking up at Notre Dame’s great rose window. “I renewed my vows,” he said finally. “God helping me, I will keep them.” He caught La Reynie’s glance and held it. “I did not do penance for loving.”
“Is that an overfine Jesuit distinction?”
“I hope not.”
Charles wanted to say something more, something to ease La Reynie’s unhappiness, but before he found anything to say, the lieutenant-général faced him and held out his hand. Surprised, Charles took it. La Reynie nodded slightly, disengaged himself, and walked rapidly away.