The Rhetoric of Death Read online

  Now, with the Compline bells about to ring, all Charles wanted was bed and the oblivion of sleep. Instead, still dogged by his questions, he went to the infirmary to see if Antoine had remembered anything of the accident. As he climbed the infirmary stairs, high-pitched wailing met him. At first he thought that Antoine was crying, but then the wailing turned to words.

  “Oh, Blessed Virgin, this child is dying! Fernand, can’t you see? Oh, dear Jesu and all the saints—”

  “Softly, Lisette, hush! He is not dying, he is doing very well, you heard Frère Brunet! Do not distress yourself—Lisette!”The faint sound of scuffling came through the door. “What is that thing? Give it to me!”

  There was a female shriek and a male oath.

  “God’s teeth, madame, what do you want the good fathers to think—”

  “It is only my charm, my maid gave it to me, she cares that I am suffering! If our baby dies, it will be your fault, give it back! Oh, why have men no feelings? St. Anne, help me!”

  Charles turned quickly back, remembering what he’d heard about Mme Douté. At least he now knew that Antoine’s father and stepmother had arrived and that the little boy was better. His other questions could wait. He had started downstairs, thinking with relief that Jouvancy must also have returned, when the door opened and a brief glow of candlelight brightened the antechamber outside the infirmary. Charles looked over his shoulder to see a stout, harassed-looking man hesitating at the top of the stairs.

  “A word, mon père,” the man said curtly.

  Charles retraced his steps. “I am Maître du Luc, monsieur. How may I help you?”

  “I am Monsieur Fernand Douté.” The wall sconce candle cast flickering shadows on the man’s pale, sagging face. “I want to speak with whoever saw my boy Philippe last.”

  “He has not returned home, then?”

  “Not when I left. And I do not believe for a moment that he simply ran away! That is a tale told by some enemy to get him into trouble!”

  “Père Jouvancy told you what happened?”

  “Yes, yes, he told me, but—I simply cannot believe it. He said that some new teacher went after the boy. And who knows what happened? I want to see that man!”

  Charles didn’t react. “Has Père Jouvancy returned with you to Paris, monsieur?”

  “Yes, but he insisted on continuing in my carriage to the college’s country house at Gentilly.”

  “Gentilly?” Charles said, and then remembered that Louis le Grand had a house in a small village a day’s walk south of Paris.

  “He had some idea that Philippe might go there,” M. Douté was saying, “since the boy has spent school holidays there. I doubt that’s where he is, but Joseph—Père Jouvancy, I mean, he is my first wife’s brother—wanted to leave nothing undone.” Douté started to rake his pudgy hands through his hair, knocked his wig askew, and yanked it straight. He clasped his hands tightly at his full-skirted coat’s straining closure. His awkward anguish suddenly reminded Charles of his own father seeing him off to war the first time.

  “It was I who was sent to find Philippe, Monsieur Douté,” Charles said gently. “This is only my third day at Louis le Grand. I am the new assistant in the senior rhetoric class. Philippe went over the college’s rear wall and I followed him, but I lost him in the rue St. Jacques.”

  M. Douté’s little eyes narrowed, and he released his clasped hands and took a step toward Charles. “And what did you do to him that he would run?”

  “Not the smallest thing, monsieur, I assure you. As I said, I had only just met him.”

  “Yes, yes, you did say that. Forgive me.” Douté lifted his hands helplessly and let them drop, his limp lace cuffs fluttering like tired birds. “It is only that—I cannot understand any of this! And Antoine—what was he doing out by himself? No one can even tell me that! Do you let these children run wild?”

  “We have learned that Antoine’s teacher gave him permission to go to the latrine, monsieur. The child must have slipped out by the stable gate. It’s near his classroom. The brother at the street postern swears he never left his post, and never saw the child.” Charles spread his hands apologetically. “The college is not a fortress, monsieur. Is Antoine better this evening?”

  The father’s eyes softened. “Yes. They say he will recover well.”

  “Thanks be to God.”

  Douté nodded distractedly. “But Philippe—I have called on everyone he might go to here in Paris, but no one has seen him. My God, when I sent the boys back here on Sunday—no, I am going distracted, it was a week ago Sunday—I never thought—” He pressed his lips together and shook his head.

  “Sent them back after your wife’s birthday fête, you mean?” Charles said, remembering that Jacques had mentioned the fête when he came to see Antoine in the infirmary.

  “Yes. They don’t come home often, but the thirteenth was their stepmother’s first birthday since we married, and we celebrated with a small family fête. I particularly wanted them there. So they will know her better.”

  “I see. Did Philippe seem—worried about anything while he was there?” Charles said carefully. “I only ask because Père Jouvancy mentioned that lately the boy has seemed—distracted.”

  “Yes, Père Jouvancy told me that. But I can’t say I’ve noticed much. Only that on the evening of the fête he was somewhat sullen, and refused Mme Douté her birthday kiss. And he was rude to Père Guise. Count yourself fortunate that you will never know the shame discourteous sons bring on their father! In the end I had to box Philippe’s ears to remind him of his manners.” M. Douté tried to smile. “Well, we all know what youth is. And Père Guise can be very—definite, shall we say, in his opinions. Young men are not always patient with that. But he has long been a dear family friend, and is godfather to Antoine. He was Adeline’s—my first wife’s—confessor, and Philippe and Antoine have known him all their lives. Père Guise is nearly as distraught as I am over this accident.” Douté sighed. “Indeed, I should speak with him. Can you bring me to him?”

  Trying to imagine the dour Guise as anyone’s dear family friend, Charles led the way outside and through the infirmary garden’s deep summer green, fading to black now in the twilight. They entered the main building by its back door and went to the grand salon, where Charles rang a bell on a side table. Slow steps padded across the antechamber and an elderly lay brother stuck his head around the doorway.

  “Oui?” he rasped, his bald head shining in the light from a copper sconce.

  “Mon frère, will you please ask Père Guise to come down? M. Douté would like to speak with him.”

  The brother grunted, dodged a drip of wax from the sconce, and trudged upstairs. Wanting a glimpse of Guise’s relationship with this family, Charles tried to keep up a conversation with Douté, but it was hard going.

  “Fernand?”

  They both jumped slightly and turned. Guise had arrived behind them as soundlessly as a wraith. He stretched out his hands to Douté.

  “I have been giving thanks that my godson is so much improved,” he said. “And praying for his brother. I was about to come to you.”

  Douté held Guise’s outstretched hands as though they were a lifeline. “Sebastian, I cannot stop asking myself how all this happened. Have you any more thoughts on where Philippe could be? Lisette is hysterical.”

  “Of course she is, mon ami, she loves them like her own.”

  Guise gestured a curt dismissal at Charles and led Douté to a pair of high-backed chairs placed against a wall. Ignoring his conscience’s lecture on eavesdropping, Charles withdrew to the most shadowed corner of the antechamber, under the stairs.

  “This worry over the boys is not at all good for Lisette,” he heard Guise say gravely. “Not in her condition.”

  Douté murmured something Charles didn’t catch. Then Guise’s voice rose.

  “No, no, Fernand, never think so, of course it was only an accident! The other is nothing but an evil story and I am sorry the rector m
ade you hear it. But—forgive me—Père Le Picart is a peasant at heart and he takes the baker’s stupid wife at her word. Our poor Antoine simply slipped in the eternal mud of Paris, and that drunken ass rode over him. An accident and nothing more. I have the word of a good honest man as witness to that.”

  Douté’s sad basso murmured interrogatively.

  “Yes,” Guise said, “this man saw everything and that is what he swears. Of course no one meant to harm the child! You can make yourself easy on that point. Now. Tell me again what you have done to find Philippe, so that my efforts do not waste time by duplicating yours.”

  “I don’t know what more to do, Sebastian! I have spoken or sent messages to all our family and friends here in town. No one has seen the boy. My manservant asked at livery stables round about if Philippe had hired a horse, but learned nothing.”

  Both voices dropped into antiphonal murmuring until a chair creaked and Douté said clearly, “I pray that he will simply come home. If God will grant me that, and Antoine’s recovery, I swear I will never trouble Him for anything else.” He sighed like a small bellows. “Now I must go back to Lisette.”

  “I will come with you. Let me get a candle to light us.”

  Taking the stairs silently and two at a time, Charles climbed to the staircase landing, where his cassock made him one more black shadow in the darkness. Douté followed Guise to the salon doorway, which was directly beneath Charles, and Guise came into the antechamber, took a candle from the side table, and lit it from a sconce.

  “If Philippe is at home when I get back,” Douté said, “I will have his miserable hide for causing us this worry. God knows I already have too much worry without breaking my heart over the boys. You know the old Condé is failing. And if he dies—when he dies, God save him—what am I to do? His son will not want me as secretary. And, to tell the truth, I do not want him. A strange man and his temper is foul. I tell you, too, I am at my wit’s end with Lisette—she is terrified about this birth. Adeline was never like that.” Douté sighed again and the flame of Guise’s candle wavered. “But I suppose I must make allowances. Lisette is so young—and her own mother died when she was born, I suppose I must remember that, too. The poor girl badgers me every day to go to Chartres and pray before Le Saint Prepuce for her safe delivery.” Douté let out a small bark of laughter. “Can you see me doing that?”

  Charles smothered his own laughter. One of his aunts was a fervent believer in the childbed virtues of Le Saint Prepuce, Our Lord’s Holy Foreskin. Treasured since His circumcision, it was touted as the only part of Him left behind on earth. Charles had often thought that it must have been of an impressive size, since so many places claimed parts of it. A snippet displayed in a sumptuous reliquary at Chartres attracted droves of pilgrims. Mostly women, of course, but always with a sprinkling of sheepish men, according to Charles’s aunt.

  Guise had turned from the table with his candle and was facing Douté, giving Charles a clear view of his disapproving expression. “There is no holier relic for childbed than Le Saint Prepuce, Fernand,” he said severely. The candle flickered in the breath of his words. “Chartres is not so far away. And is it really so much to ask, to insure the safe delivery of a son—another son?”

  “Well, well, I will see about going. There is time enough, she is only in her sixth month.” He frowned anxiously. “Or is it seventh?”

  “Go soon, Fernand. Children come in God’s time.”

  Douté turned away and Guise watched him for a moment, a mixture of satisfaction and contempt on his face. Then he padded silently after his friend.

  Charles climbed to his rooms and lit his own candle. He unlatched the window and leaned out, thinking about what he’d heard and seen. He supposed Guise had met Lisette Douté when he was at court seeing his noble penitents—“confessor to many at court,” Guise had proudly informed Charles that first day at dinner. Though why anyone would choose Guise as confessor, Charles couldn’t imagine. A breeze brought a faint stench of decay—from nothing worse than the dead cat that had claimed his new skullcap, he hoped—and he shut the window and took his meditations on mortality to the prie-dieu in the corner. Fixing his candle securely in the wall holder, he knelt and gazed at the small painting of the Virgin and Child on the wall in front of him. Then he said Compline and asked the Blessed Mother to protect Antoine, Pernelle, his uncle suffering in the galleys—if he still lived—and all prisoners, captives, and fugitives. Including the silly young idiot Philippe.

  Charles stayed on his knees and tried to let the flowing, melting images that filled his mind carry him deeper, into wordless prayer. Instead, they carried him into the past. He saw himself on the June morning nine years ago, when he was still recovering from his war wound, and his father came to his chamber to tell him that Pernelle was married. He watched himself ignore his mother’s fussing and go out through the vineyards to climb at a breathless snail’s pace up a path yellow with dust. He watched himself take refuge in the cool shallow cave where he and his brother and sisters had played, where he and Pernelle had talked and kissed. He watched his nineteen-year-old heart shrivel and curl in on itself. Then he watched himself go home in the cool of the evening, as dry inside as the sunbaked path, and give all his energy to recovering, watched himself take leave of his parents a month later and go back to the army, resolved to die heroically and as soon as possible.

  Even kneeling at the prie-dieu, Charles had to laugh. Instead of a heroic death, he’d gotten near fatal dysentery and been back home within the year, weak as a newborn puppy. During his long and difficult recovery, someone had loaned him a life of St. Ignatius. He’d read it and reread it, and when his strength finally returned, he’d presented himself at the Jesuit novitiate in Avignon.

  He started to get up and then sank down again, remembering that he’d missed his hour of private meditation. Grimacing as his knees met the kneeling bench’s worn padding, he yawned and set himself to imagine a scene from the life of Christ and then imagine himself into it, as St. Ignatius had taught. He found himself imagining Mary’s baby as a little boy Antoine’s age, getting in the way in the carpenter shop, bothering his mother with questions, playing noisily in the street with other boys. Had Mary worried that those long-ago streets were dangerous for children? Charles yawned again and the candle flickered. The Virgin’s sad eyes seemed to sharpen their gaze. His own eyes closed, and he heard her soft voice.

  Philippe is nearly at the river, she said, run if you want to catch him. Charles sprinted out of the college and along the rue St. Jacques. The night sky was as brilliant with stars as the sky in his mother’s old painted Book of Hours. All of Paris was silent, holding its breath until Philippe was found. Suddenly Charles saw him, running toward the Petit Pont, his yellow shirt shimmering in the starlight. Charles overtook him in a burst of speed and grabbed his shirt. Philippe spun around, laughing behind a half mask. Twisting out of Charles’s grip, he flung up his arm and the dagger in his hand flickered cold and bright.

  Pain in his cheek woke Charles. He’d slumped down on the prie-dieu and the sharp edge of its little shelf, where his elbows should have been, was pressing into his face. The candle had gone out and Mary and the Child were as black as the wall. He got stiffly to his feet, shed his cassock, and felt his way to bed. As he slid under the covers, he made the sign of the cross against dreams or anything else that might try to follow him into the little death of sleep.

  Chapter 9

  When the rhetoric class began the next afternoon, Père Jouvancy was still not there. Charles and Maître Beauchamps shrugged worriedly at each other and set the boys to work. While the rest of the college enjoyed Saturday afternoon’s rest, the senior rhetoric class rehearsed grimly, still without a Hercules, in an atmosphere charged with unspoken questions over Philippe’s continuing absence. Beauchamps hissed scalding corrections through his teeth. The dancers were preternaturally quiet and made more mistakes than usual. At the other end of the room, Charles set the actors to relearn
lines that had evaporated from their brains overnight and then stood watching Beauchamps. It was still not the moment to settle the clock problem, but there was obviously never going to be a right moment and he had to do it before Jouvancy returned.

  When a pair of dancers finished capering through a piece of buffoonery as misguided Huguenots, Beauchamps gave the cast a short break and Charles beckoned him to the windows. Beauchamps heard him out without moving a muscle. Then he turned his head slightly and glared one-eyed at Charles, like a falcon considering a skinny rabbit.

  “No clock? No clock? First we have no Hercules—oh, I had a new Hercules. A perfect Hercules. M. Louis Pecour, perhaps the most perfect dancer now alive. Who would be a better Hercules than Louis Pecour? No one. Who twisted his cursed ankle and will not be walking for a week, much less dancing? Louis Pecour. Now you say we are to have no clock. Perhaps no ballet master? No ballet?”

  “No, maître, no, not at all! But I agree with Père Jouvancy that the clock will be too much for the boy who has to wear it. And since you have not even begun working with it yet—”

  “It was late from the workshop. Someone smashed the first one. The boy is to begin wearing it today.”

  “Maître—once—at Carpentras—” Charles grimaced inwardly, wishing he hadn’t chosen an opening that sounded so much like “once on a time.” “We had a beautiful headdress—as your clock is, I’m sure—well, our headdress was for Fortune. A departure from Ripa’s design, you understand.”