Chapter 17

They found Père Damiot with the Holy Innocents priest, just inside the church doors on a bench built out from the wall and deep in talk about doves. Charles had encountered Damiot’s dove obsession before and wondered how long it would take to get his attention.

“…and she had the prettiest little curl of feathers on her head,” Damiot was saying rapturously. “Like a lady’s fontange. Have you ever seen one like that?”

“No. But I think my brother—he’s the seigneur of Pont-Rouge—has talked of one like that.”

Charles coughed. Damiot looked around and frowned, as though trying to remember who Charles might be. His frown deepened when he saw Bertamelli.

“Well.” Damiot sighed and got to his feet. “I thank you for your company, mon père,” he said to Père Lambert. “But we must go back to the college.”

Lambert stood up slowly, wincing and putting a gnarled hand on his knee. “When the bon Dieu made knees, he did not remember how much priests have to kneel.” He smiled at Charles. “Remember that.” His faded blue eyes studied Charles’s face. “I watched you serving the Mass.”

A tremor went through Charles. “Yes, mon père?”

“Don’t forget what you feel. It is easy to forget.”

Charles was too startled to speak. Damiot, bent over Bertamelli, had seemed not to hear. Damiot said their good-byes and they went out into the street, Bertamelli between them. Over the boy’s head, Damiot looked questioningly at Charles, who was rubbing his shoulder and thinking about what the priest had said.

“Where did you go? What’s the boy doing here?”

“Forgive me, mon père,” Charles said. “I know I should not have left. But when I saw Monsieur Bertamelli in the cemetery, I thought I should discover how he came to be there.”

“Well thought,” Damiot said dryly. “And how did you come to be there, Monsieur Bertamelli?”

“I was only looking, mon père,” the boy mumbled uneasily, his eyes on the cobblestones. “At the burial ground.” Something of his usual insouciance returned, and he clasped his hands under his chin and gazed soulfully up at Damiot. “You tell us to remember we are all going there. To the burial ground. I was remembering!”

Damiot’s mouth twitched. “And when you had remembered? Then what did you do?”

Bertamelli’s head drooped like a dying flower. “I sinned, mon père,” he sighed mournfully. And glanced up from under his long lashes to gauge the response. When none came, he said, “I was going to the Italian Comedy. For the honor of my family. My cousin is one of the players and I felt I must go and pay my respects. That is all.”

“Not quite all.” Charles looked at Bertamelli, but spoke to Damiot. “Monsieur Bertamelli went into a little wasteland across the street from the theatre. With an ancient tower in its center. When I started up its steps to find him, someone heaved a stone down the steps and ran past me while I was flat on the floor. Monsieur Bertamelli says no one threw the stone, it only came loose from the wall when he leaned on it.”

“I am so sorry for that, maître!” Bertamelli struck his thin chest. “I abhor myself, I abase myself before you, before my mother, before all Milan!” He made to fall to his knees, but Charles caught him and hauled him up again.

“None of that will help my shoulder. Nor will it help your case. What will help—”

The boy’s sudden strangled cry silenced Charles, who looked anxiously around for its reason. Bertamelli’s feet stuttered to a halt and he clutched Charles’s cassock, staring ahead. They were walking toward the Pont au Change, on the covered, cobbled way that divided the Châtelet’s criminal court from its prison, and Charles saw nothing more threatening than hurrying robed lawyers with their clerks and pages. There was also a massive Châtelet guard walking toward them, his brimmed pot helmet pulled low on his forehead. But he was smiling and humming to himself, making the pike on his shoulder bob in time to his rumbling music. Bertamelli let out another terrified squeak, which broke off when the man shoved his helmet back as he passed, showing more of his wide, placid face. Charles felt the boy sag against him with relief. Puzzled, Charles turned to look again at the guard. His broad back, like the broad back of the man who’d run from the tower, struck a chord of memory in Charles. He tipped Bertamelli’s face up to the light.

“What frightened you so?”

The boy twisted out of Charles’s grasp and turned away, shaking his head.

“What?” Charles demanded, increasingly worried about whatever it was Bertamelli wasn’t saying.

Bertamelli stayed mute. And that worried Charles even more, much more than any words would have. And Damiot, too, from the look on his face. Charles had never seen the boy this forlorn, never seen him speechless, rarely even seen him quiet outside the imposed silence of a classroom. The little Italian’s frightened silence also reminded Charles of Anne-Marie, Lulu, the Duc du Maine, even of Montmorency, and by the time they were passing the Ste-Chapelle, he felt as though he had a clutch of frightened, endangered young hanging to his skirts.

Damiot suddenly pointed to the Ste-Chapelle’s spire. “Look up, Monsieur Bertamelli,” he said kindly, “and see the angel.”

Bertamelli cast a dull but obedient look upward at the lead-cast angel on the Ste-Chapelle’s roof slowly revolving to show the cross it held to all points of the compass. But the angel clearly failed to comfort him.

“What do we do with him when we get back?” Charles asked Damiot in French, so Bertamelli would not understand. The boy’s French was rudimentary. “I need to find out from him what he was doing.”

Damiot eyed him. “Why?”

“I can’t tell you,” Charles said. “But I’ll tell the rector,” he added quickly, seeing Damiot’s disapproval.

“We’ll certainly have to take him to the rector. He and Père Montville should be back—they were supposed to return this morning.”

“But if they aren’t back? Must we go to Père Donat?” Donat would probably dismiss Bertamelli from the college forthwith. Charles had thought for some time that the boy would leave them early because of his talent as a dancer, and Pierre Beauchamps, the college dancing master, had even said that he wanted to take Bertamelli’s further training in hand. But being dismissed by Donat wasn’t how Charles wanted Bertamelli’s leaving to be. “I don’t want him thrown out and sent home!”

“Neither do I. Though he deserves to be dismissed and sent home!” Damiot said in Latin, for Bertamelli’s benefit. Then he went back to French. “Here’s a thought, if the rector isn’t back. You say there’s something our friend here can tell you and that the rector understands you need to know it. So I will use that as an excuse not to go immediately to Donat. The boy is in your rehearsal this afternoon, yes?” When Charles nodded, he said, “Then you can be responsible for him during the afternoon. Oh, but I’m forgetting. What about his tutor? Surely he went to Père Donat when he found the boy gone.”

“Monsieur Bertamelli,” Charles said, switching back to Latin, “how did you get out of the college? Where was your tutor?”

Bertamelli hunched his shoulders still farther. “I am poor and share a dortoir with five others. One of us was taken ill last night, and so was our tutor. They’re both in the infirmary.” He glanced up, and Charles saw a glint of satisfaction in his eyes. “Getting out was easy. I won’t tell you how,” he added stubbornly.

“Blessed Saint Benedict!” Damiot was shaking his head, but not over Bertamelli’s stubbornness. “This illness is spreading like plague.”

“Plague?” Bertamelli looked up, wide-eyed with fear.

“No, no, it isn’t plague, people don’t die of it. They just feel like they might. All right,” Damiot said to Charles, “if the rector still isn’t back when your rehearsal is over, I’ll collect this miscreant and take him to whoever’s been given charge of his dortoir.”

The three of them crossed the Pont St. Michel and turned along the river to the rue St. Jacques. As they climbed the hill to the college, Bertamelli was visibly drooping and Charles was gritting his teeth against the pain in his shoulder. Damiot had begun discoursing educationally on doves, but neither of them was listening.

When they reached the college postern, Charles tugged at the bellrope and a small thin lay brother nearly hidden under his canvas apron opened it.

“Bonjour, mon frère,” Damiot said. “Do you know if our rector has come back?”

The brother shook his head sadly as he shut the door behind them. “Alas no, and won’t for now. Nor Père Montville, either. They’re ill, both of them. We had word from Gentilly. The sickness is there, too.” He lowered his voice. “So we’re left tiptoeing around His Holiness till they’re well.”

Charles and Damiot traded a look, and the college clock began to ring the dinner hour.

“It will have to be the second plan, then,” Damiot said, and he and Bertamelli and Charles started through the arched stone passage toward the Cour d’honneur. Behind them, someone pulled hard at the postern bell and Charles heard his name called.

“You in there!” Mme LeClerc’s voice was even more urgent and impatient than usual. “Maître du Luc, wait, I beg you, I need one very little word with you!”

Mme LeClerc was Marie-Ange’s mother, wife to the baker who had the shop beyond the chapel’s street door. She and Charles shared a warm liking, but she talked like the Seine in flood, and listening took more effort than Charles wanted to make at the moment. And he didn’t want to miss dinner. Suppressing a sigh, he waved Damiot and Bertamelli on and turned back. The brother had the postern open again and was trying to tell Madame LeClerc that Charles was in the refectory.

“He is not, he is behind you. Maître, please—”

“I’ll be just a moment,” Charles said to the brother.

“A moment only? Then that will be a miracle,” the brother murmured with a grin, and stepped aside.

Mme LeClerc was already launched on her news. “—so don’t let them burn, I told Marie-Ange when I saw you from the shop just now and ran out. We are still baking, the fire went out this morning. If it’s not one thing, it’s one hundred! But I’m taking a moment to tell you, maître, but don’t think he goes there all the time—a man must have his pleasures, all of them, and who knows that better than a wife?” Her round brown eyes dropped meaningfully to her middle.

Charles rubbed his shoulder and tried to wait patiently for the point. Mme LeClerc looked up and rolled her eyes in exasperation.

“Tch! Do you need a little story about storks? Of course you don’t, you are a man, we know that.” She thumped her belly impatiently. “A baby! On top of everything else, my Roger has given me a baby and then what does he do, he goes off to the tavern every night with that brother who thinks he’s God’s own baker and refuses to believe that our good Seine water is better than the Gonesse water he’s always talking about, and you can take it from me it is not water those two drink at the tavern! Well, I suppose it is in a way, they call it eau de vie, but it makes me doubt even more whether he saw what he says he saw, though the truth of that the bon Dieu only knows.”

Charles caught at what sounded like a point. “What did Monsieur LeClerc see?”

“Hmmmph. The cobblestones in front of his nose, that’s the pig’s share of what he saw, because he fell down in the street on his way up from the river, and getting Paris mud off breeches, do you know what that takes? I am sick enough every morning without the smell of that!” She stepped closer to Charles and dropped her voice to a whisper. “He saw your Henri de Montmorency riding onto the Petit Pont and it was after ten o’clock and black dark, the tavern was closing, and what was your student doing out at such an hour?”

She had Charles’s full attention now. “What night?” he said brusquely.

“Thursday night, maître. And then, as you know, on Friday morning he tried to run away again and nearly ran inside my shop, but they caught him just here on the pavement. I was in the back room and we were all shouting, Roger and his brother and me, but we still heard the noise outside, the dead in their tombs in St. Étienne up the street must have heard the noise, and we went to look and saw it was this Montmorency. But my turnip-brained Roger never told me till today he’d also seen the boy on Thursday night.”

“He’s sure it was Montmorency?” Charles said dubiously.

“He says he is. This morning I told him I was going to the apothecary on the Petit Pont to get his specific against this sickness that’s all over Paris and—”

“Has your household been ill?”

“No, not yet, thanks to the apothecary’s medicine, don’t ask me what it is, it looks like mud. So when I told him I was going to get it, Roger said oh, I never told you I saw that young devil of a Montmorency riding onto the Petit Pont late Thursday night. I said of course you didn’t, you were too drunk and what would he be doing on horseback that time of night? But Paul—that’s Roger’s brother—said Roger wasn’t all that drunk and only tripped over a cobblestone when he fell on his face and there was a young man riding and Roger had told him it was Montmorency.”

“May I speak to Monsieur LeClerc and his brother?”

“Certainly, maître, but not today. Roger’s gone with Paul back to Gonesse, or more likely to every tavern between here and Gonesse, and left me and the apprentice and Marie-Ange to do all the work.” She crossed her arms on the little mound of her belly and looked at Charles with what he thought was probably the look Eve had given Adam when he swore that eating the apple had been all her fault.

“Please tell him as soon as he returns that I need to speak with him, madame. My thanks for telling me what Monsieur LeClerc saw.” Charles was skeptical, though, about whether the brothers had seen Montmorency. He glanced down at Mme LeClerc’s belly and smiled. “I will pray daily for you and your new little one.”

That brought a sharp, anxious nod. “I thank you. There have been others, besides Marie-Ange, I mean. But—” Her voice softened. “They died. Always, there are too many little bodies in the churchyards.” She cradled her belly. Then she dimpled, looking exactly like Marie-Ange. “Roger is hoping for a son. So am I. But Marie-Ange wants it to be a little horse.”

Her laughter mingled with Charles’s and followed him back through the postern. Wondering over her story, he made his belated way to the senior student refectory, where he helped to oversee meals. As he went into the enormous high-ceilinged hall, he saw Bertamelli sitting with his dormitory mates at one of the long tables and that a harried-looking cubiculaire had taken the tutor’s place. Charles went up onto the dais, where old Père Dainville, his confessor, was presiding at the professors’ table.

“I was assisting Père Damiot at a confraternity member’s funeral Mass, mon père. Please forgive my coming late.”

Casting an ironic glance down the table at Damiot, already in his place, Dainville nodded mildly enough at Charles, who slipped into his own place at the table’s end.

Damiot interrupted his talk with the Jesuit on his other side long enough to raise a questioning eyebrow at Charles.

Charles shrugged and shook his head. “It was nothing. She only wanted to talk about seeing Montmorency apprehended outside the bakery on Friday afternoon,” he said, knowing that the rector wanted to keep Montmorency’s sins as quiet as possible. He nodded toward the table where Bertamelli sat. “Did you tell the cubiculaire to keep our Italian friend under his eye until he delivers him to the rhetoric class?”

“I did. The poor cubiculaire is feeling very unsure of himself, so I’ll come for Bertamelli when your class is over.” Damiot raised his eyes to the faded gold stars painted on the refectory ceiling. “I pray to all the saints,” he said under his breath, “that keeping so much from His—from Père Donat doesn’t get us dismissed along with Bertamelli.”

He went back to his talk with his other neighbor. Charles scanned the room for Henri Montmorency and was relieved to see him where he should be, sitting with his tutor. Charles ate in silence, hardly tasting the thick mutton soup with its lump of bread soaking at the bottom of the bowl, hardly hearing the buzz of voices that made the refectory sound like a giant beehive. He finished the soup and drank the last of his watered wine, looking up at the faded stars painted on the ceiling long ago. He loved the sense they gave him of sitting under God’s sky. He’d been told the stars had been there since the refectory was part of the Hôtel de Langres, the private townhouse the Jesuits had bought more than a hundred years ago, and he kept hoping the college would repaint them, but there was never enough money.

But even the stars couldn’t stop his thoughts circling each other. His thoughts about what the Holy Innocents priest had said to him. The unlikely puzzle of Montmorency on horseback on the Petit Pont at ten o’clock at night. The oddly familiar look of the man who had barreled down the tower stairs, pushed him down on his face, and disappeared through the tangled garden. Identifying him would tell something about what Bertamelli had been doing there, but Charles could not call to mind anyone who seemed to fit.

His shoulder’s ache hadn’t much lessened after dinner, and he asked Père Dainville’s permission to go to the infirmary for some of Frère Brunet’s ointment, saying he’d slipped and fallen on his shoulder. Brunet was not in the fathers’ infirmary on the ground floor, so Charles went upstairs to the student infirmary and came almost nose to nose with the infirmarian at the door. Brunet was standing motionless, staring straight ahead and frowning.

“What is it, mon frère?” Charles said in surprise.

“Hmm? Oh. I’ve forgotten where I was going! It happens more and more often. And Saint Anthony refuses to do a single thing about it, though I pray daily. Tch! Oh, well. Do you need something? Come in.” He turned and went back inside.

Leaving Charles openmouthed with revelation as the short, broad-backed lay brother plodded ahead of him between the rows of beds. From the back, Brunet looked exactly like the Grand Duchess of Tuscany’s short, stocky servant. It was Margot’s servant who had attacked him at the tower. But why?