The Rhetoric of Death Read online

  Charles sighed. Why, indeed? “That is a very hard question, mon brave. Everyone asks it when someone they love dies. But if God reached down and stopped people from doing bad things, even very bad things like killing, then we would just be puppets. Like the marionettes at fairs. God makes us able to choose good or bad. Puppets can’t choose anything.”

  But so many people couldn’t choose much about their lives, Charles thought, remembering Frère Fabre. Charles and Antoine were two of the lucky ones. Antoine, who had stopped pulling at the coverlet and listened without moving, suddenly flung himself facedown in a storm of relieved weeping. In spite of the college rules, Charles went to sit beside him.

  “I will tell you something else I think, Antoine. Everyone dies, but love never does. Philippe still loves you.” He patted the heaving little back. “Just as much as you love him. He’s safe with God now. Nothing else bad will ever happen to him. You don’t have to worry.”

  He murmured and patted until Antoine gave a great, shuddering sigh and sat up. Charles handed him a crumpled linen towel from the table and went back to his chair. Antoine mopped his tears, blew his nose, and slid off the bed to kneel at Charles’s feet.

  “Forgive me, Father,” he said, looking pleadingly at Charles. “For I have sinned.”

  Charles exclaimed in alarm and tried to raise the child to his feet. “I am not your confessor, I am not a priest yet. You cannot—”

  “Please, I have to tell someone, maître!” the boy said desperately. “It’s all my fault Philippe died. And nobody knows and everyone’s being kind to me and I don’t deserve it!”

  For a horrible moment, Charles wondered if Antoine had killed his brother. But that was absurd and probably physically impossible. “Get up, Antoine. I will listen, but not as a confessor. If something needs to be told in that way, you will have to tell it twice, understood?”

  The boy nodded and sat down again on his rumpled bed. Further breaking the rules, Charles closed the chamber doors, though the study door refused to latch properly. Wondering what on earth was coming, he resumed his seat.

  “Now. What do you want to tell me?”

  “After Philippe ran away, he sent me a note,” the boy said miserably.

  “How?”

  “I found it in my Latin dictionary after dinner. It said he needed help and to come to where the rue des Poirées turns and he’d be there. I went, but the accident happened and I woke up in the infirmary. I tried to go and find him again, but you found me instead.” He leaned toward Charles, begging him to understand. “Mostly, Philippe thought I was too little to do anything. But this time he trusted me and I failed him and someone killed him! I meant to go, I tried to—oh, Maître du Luc, I’m so sorry, please don’t let God send me to hell, because then I’ll never see Philippe again!”

  Antoine buried his head on his knees and tried to muffle his sobs. Charles opened his mouth, closed it, and gathered the distraught little boy into his arms, rocking him like a baby. But Charles’s face was hard with anger. Someone had lured Antoine out of the college to what was surely meant to be his death. Someone had wanted this boy dead, too.

  When Antoine had cried himself out and slid off Charles’s lap to wipe his face on the already soaked towel, Charles said gently, “Are you sure it was Philippe’s writing on the note?”

  Antoine nodded and then frowned. “Well—the writing was sloppy. Big and sort of wobbly, but—it would be, wouldn’t it? Because something was wrong, that’s why he needed me.”

  “Do you still have this note?”

  “It was in my pocket, but Père Guise took it when I got hurt, Marie-Ange saw him, and he won’t give it back!”

  Charles tried to keep his tone reassuringly conversational. “How would Père Guise know you had the note? And how do you know she saw him take it?”

  “I don’t know how he knew. But when I woke up in the infirmary, I made Frère Brunet give me my breeches and the note wasn’t there. Today, when we came out from the funeral, Marie-Ange told me she saw Père Guise take something out of my pocket after I was hurt. So he must have it!”

  “Could it have fallen out of your pocket?”

  “No! I tucked it deep down. It’s the last thing Philippe gave me, Maître du Luc, the last thing he’ll ever give me! Please make Père Guise give it back!”

  Charles had to take several breaths before he could trust his voice. The note had been the bait. If Guise had known about it, then he had set—or helped to set—the trap. “I can’t make him do anything, Antoine. But,” Charles said, trying to make his voice bright so Antoine wouldn’t see his worry, “you can do something for me, if you will. Something very important.”

  “Something important? What?” Antoine’s eyes lit with hope.

  “Promise me that you will not talk about this note. Not even to Marie-Ange. Let everyone think you have forgotten about it. Promise me that, Antoine.”

  Antoine’s face fell. “But why?”

  “What are you doing here, Maître du Luc?”

  Antoine and Charles whipped around to see Père Guise standing in the study doorway. His black eyes glittered and his face was the color of parchment.

  “Get out,” he said, “you know you are not supposed to be here.”

  “Antoine’s brother is dead, mon père,” Charles said evenly. “He is grieving. He doesn’t know where his tutor is and he needed company.”

  “My godson is not in your charge.”

  Antoine, glowering at Guise with his arms folded tightly across his chest, was about to speak. Charles stood quickly and with his back to Guise formed his mouth into a silent warning. “Sshhhh.”

  “I will be checking on Antoine, mon père,” Charles said mildly as he turned around. “To see how he does, you understand.”

  “The rector will hear of your arrogance in exceeding your rank and duties.” Guise’s lips barely moved. “And of your being here alone with him.”

  Charles ignored that for the red herring it was. “I know you heard us speaking of Philippe’s note, Père Guise. It would be a kindness to return it to Antoine, don’t you think?”

  “I know nothing about a note.”

  “Oh?” Charles frowned in apparent confusion. “Then why did you search his clothing after the accident?”

  “I did no such thing.”

  “So many curious contradictions in accounts of the accident. What do you make of that?”

  As they stared at each other, Antoine’s tutor walked in. Oblivious of the atmosphere in the room, Maître Doissin greeted everyone, then looked more closely at Antoine and put an arm around him.

  “Good news on a very sad day, Monsieur Antoine,” he said, smiling down at the boy. “I hear there’s custard for supper. Your favorite.”

  Antoine smiled a little and Charles’s opinion of Doissin rose. At least he felt some warmth and kindness for the child. Charles reached out to ruffle Antoine’s hair.

  “I will see you tomorrow, mon brave.” He nodded to Guise and Doissin, and forced himself to walk sedately out of the chamber. But he felt as though Guise’s furious stare were a dagger traveling toward his back.

  Chapter 14

  The next day was even hotter than the funeral day had been. Charles stood on a ladder, wiping his face on his damply clinging shirtsleeve. Hot air rose, so they said, and it was definitely doing that in the rhetoric classroom. Though he and Père Jouvancy had doffed their cassocks earlier in the rehearsal, Charles licked sweat from his upper lip as he flung another handful of sugar over François de Lille, the Opera stand-in now playing Hercules, who was leading his suite through a raging sugar snowstorm with the pretty lightness of a windblown feather. Beauchamps’s pinched nostrils as he sawed at his fiddle did not bode well for Hercules.

  “No, no, no, the snow is too brown!”

  Jouvancy stormed down the room. Maître Beauchamps stopped playing, still looking daggers at the Opera dancer. The student dancers rolled their eyes at each other. At the ladder’s foot, two boys sea
ted on the floor stopped scraping their knives down the tall cone-shaped sugar loaf that stood between them on a plate. Before sugar could be used, for snowstorms or anything else, it had to be scraped from the hard cone it came in and put through a sifter. Trading a conspiratorial look, the two boys put down their knives and began surreptitiously eating the remains of their efforts.

  “Whiter sugar,” Jouvancy snapped at Charles. “I want whiter sugar! It’s supposed to be snow. Not mud oozing from Olympus.”

  Charles wiped his sleeve across his face again. “Is there mud on Olympus?” he murmured and smiled down at Jouvancy. “Shall I get whiter sugar now, mon père?”

  “Of course not now, don’t be absurd.” Jouvancy rounded on the new Hercules. “And you, try to dance like a hero, for the love of God! Hercules is not a lovesick girl in a garden!”

  De Lille turned helplessly to Beauchamps. Beauchamps abruptly stopped looking as though he wanted to smash his violin over de Lille’s beautiful head and bore down on Jouvancy like a sow defending her one piglet.

  “I am the dancing master, Père Jouvancy, and I and no one else will correct him!”

  “I am the livret’s author and I will not see my ballet spoiled by this—this—”

  “You only hate him because he is not Philippe!”

  “I don’t care who he is not, he dances like a lovesick girl!”

  Charles yawned and leaned on the top of the ladder to wait out the squabble. He’d lain awake far into the night, wrestling with his conscience and the order he’d been given to leave the murder and the accident to Père Le Picart and Lieutenant-Général La Reynie. It wasn’t only Charles’s desire for justice that was pushing him to disobey now, but fears for his own safety. His heart had nearly stopped yesterday when La Reynie mentioned Nîmes. Louvois and La Reynie had been in close talk with Père Guise before they accosted him, and Guise had already accused Charles to the rector as a “heretic lover.” Charles was fairly certain, though, that Guise didn’t know he’d rescued his Protestant cousin. Guise would have trumpeted that knowledge to the skies. But he’d insinuated to the faculty that Charles might have killed Philippe, and yesterday Louvois had virtually accused Charles of the murder while La Reynie had stood back and watched, like someone at a mildly interesting play. If any of the unholy trio started digging for damning information, what Charles had done in Nîmes might well come to light. If it did, reprisals would fall not only on him, but on his family, both Catholics and Protestants alike.

  A new thought made him catch his breath. Le Picart had duly turned the murder over to La Reynie. But had he done it planning to side-step the spectre of scandal by making a scapegoat of the “foreigner” from the heretic-tainted south? Charles shook his head involuntarily. However much Le Picart feared scandal, he seemed too honest for that kind of lie. But that didn’t solve Charles’s problem of the triumverate of Guise, Louvois, and La Reynie and their ominous scrutiny.

  At the foot of the ladder, Jouvancy and Beauchamps were still muttering furiously at each other. Except for de Lille, who was happily and obliviously practicing graceful little jumps, the college was dangerously on edge. Too many were relishing Guise’s titillating insinuations and looking sideways at Charles. Jouvancy, by all accounts usually the mildest and best loved of teachers, was grieving and exhausted, his temper shorter than Charles’s thumb. Half the students were also grieving for Philippe, while the other half were pleasurably frightened over who might be next.

  Beauchamps, whose mind was not on Philippe at all, turned abruptly from Jouvancy, ordered de Lille back to earth, and led him away to the windows, pouring a stream of instruction into his ear. Jouvancy snorted in disgust and pushed the remains of the offending sugar cone and its plate toward Charles with a disdainful toe.

  “Take this—this”—Jouvancy clamped his lips together and tried again—“sugar to the lay brothers’ kitchen. At least they can get some good out of it.”

  “Now?” Charles said.

  “Of course now!”

  Jouvancy stalked back to the silent Clovis cast, who stood huddled together like a flock of anxious sheep. Charles, thankful to escape the charged atmosphere, picked up the plate and held it out to the two sugar scrapers, who eagerly took last pinches of sweetness. Everyone needed whatever small comfort he could get just now.

  The lay brothers’ kitchen and refectory were in the same courtyard as the outdoor latrine and next to the stable court. If he was quick about his errand, he might be able to settle another question about Antoine’s “accident.” He hurried through the archway between the courtyards, toward the kitchen and the savory smell drifting from its open door. Startling a flutter of sparrows away from a crust of bread, he poked his head into the big room, where a cauldron bubbling in the huge fireplace poured steam into the oven-hot air. Two red-faced brothers with their cassock sleeves folded back to their shoulders were slicing bread at a scarred table, while another brother, whose age had spread an old-fashioned tonsure over most of his freckled scalp, piled peaches onto a tray.

  “Trust me, maître, you don’t want to come into our nice little hell here,” the old man called to Charles.

  “Not this or any other hell, I hope, mon frère!” Charles held out the plate. “Can you use some sugar?”

  “But yes, of course, always!” He wiped his sticky hands down his canvas apron and came to the door. “Where did you get it?”

  “It was meant for snow. But now Père Jouvancy says it’s too brown.”

  The old brother laughed heartily as he took the plate. “Yes, we usually get a good bit of his snow. Very picky about snow, Père Jouvancy is. We could use some real snow in here today, I’ll tell you!”

  Still laughing, he went back to his peaches. Charles turned toward the stable court and nearly collided with another lay brother, who danced aside, grinning, and stuck his head inside the kitchen.

  “Frère Tricot, one more little one! Come on, mon frère, you have Lady Automne’s cornucopia there—and it’s not even quite August yet!”

  A peach flew out the door. The newcomer caught it, nodding enthusiastically, and held up his other hand. A growl from the kitchen followed another peach through the air. The brother caught it, bit into it, and turned to Charles, who had stopped to watch.

  “We should always admire the abundance of the bon Dieu,” the brother said around his bulging mouthful. “Should we not?”

  “Nice to be able to accommodate so much of the abundance at once,” Charles laughed.

  “Ah, I must stretch to it, whenever Lady Abundance deigns to visit me.” He dropped the second peach into his apron pocket. “She’s a woman, after all, and they always turn on you in the end, don’t they?”

  “Do they?”

  “Mine do.”

  “Do?” Charles looked pointedly at the short cassock under the man’s canvas apron and then added hypocrisy to his mental list of sins for his next confession. Who was he these days to admonish anyone for thinking about women?

  “Oh dear, what is wrong with my tongue? Did turn on me, I mean, in my far distant past!”The brother’s sapphire eyes danced like light on water as he held out his cassock skirt. “But even leaving this aside—and leaving women sadly aside—I suppose I should never predict what anyone will do. Mere sinful men are forbidden to predict the future, are we not?”

  Standing at ease, he finished his peach and looked Charles over. Charles was visited by a vision of this wiry, taut-muscled man—who seemed neither to know his place nor care about keeping it—wearing velvet in a grand salon, appraising the company and finding it wanting.

  “What is your name, mon frère?” Charles said, realizing suddenly that he’d seen the man before. “I saw you juggling in the Cour d’honneur on my first day here.”

  The brother sketched Charles an ironic bow. “Ah, my one poor talent. I am Frère Moulin, maître.” He made an ironic fuss of straightening the regulation high shirt collar just showing above his cassock.

  He took three peaches
from his apron pocket and began to juggle, spinning them into a golden blur. Charles watched, enjoying the man’s skill and thinking that his speech and manner—and juggling, for that matter—consorted ill with the apron and cassock. Lay brothers were the Society’s servants, mostly peasants or the sons of poor artisans, as Frère Fabre was. Charles thought that he would eat juggling balls before he’d believe that this Moulin sprang from a peasant’s cottage.

  “Very impressive, mon frère,” he said. “I am Maître Charles du Luc, newly come from Carpentras to teach rhetoric.”

  “I know.” Moulin sent the peaches fountaining higher, spilling their fragrance into the air. “I have heard all about you.” He tossed a peach at Charles and caught the other two in one hand.

  “All?” Charles plucked the peach out of the air and bit into its warm succulence. “Only the bon Dieu knows all, Frère Moulin.”

  “Alas, too true. Rest assured I will be confessing arrogance next time I go to my confessor. Too true, indeed. ‘No man knows even the day or the hour,’ so it says in Holy Scripture. But the real truth is, no man knows anything worth a piss. Least of all me.” He fixed Charles with a look like a strike of blue lightning and his voice went flat. “Or you.”

  Then the easy brilliance was back, and with a wide smile and a bow that would have done Versailles credit, Moulin disappeared toward the stable. Charles swallowed the last of the peach and followed. Except for doves pecking around the well, the stable court was empty. Charles stopped in the stable’s broad entrance, gazing at the straw-strewn floor and listening to the horse noises—tails switching to keep off flies, soft snorts, the occasional stamp of a hoof, and high-pitched swearing. His eyebrows lifted and he peered into the dimness redolent of hay and dung and leather. No horse he’d ever known swore.

  The three stalls on his left were empty. A restless black horse in the first stall on the right thrust its nose over the half door and pricked its ears at him. The next stall was untenanted, but in the third, a stocky little figure astride a placid dappled gray swore steadily as she struggled to kilt her rough brown skirts and blue petticoat above her knees. Her bare legs and feet stuck nearly straight out from the gray’s broad back.