A Plague of Lies (32 page)

There was a blur of movement at the curve of the stairs and something hurtled toward him and glanced hard off his left shoulder. His knees gave way and he fell on his side on the stone threshold. Then a lumbering body was on him and he was flattened facedown into the stones. The bushes outside the door crackled and rustled, and Charles got his head up in time to see a broad, brown-coated back disappearing through them. With a vague feeling that there was something familiar about that back, he struggled to his feet, gripping his injured shoulder, and plunged into the bushes. He half ran to the wall and looked both ways on the street. His attacker was not there. Charles hesitated, wanting to go after the man. But Bertamelli was still in the tower.

Thinking morosely that whatever had been thrown down the stairs at him
would
, of course, hit the shoulder with the old war wound, he made his way back to the tower door. The ruined garden’s quiet seemed ominous now, and the flat bright faces of the old roses looked back at him like red staring eyes. With a snort of disgust at his overwilling imagination, he charged up the tower steps.

“Bertamelli!” he yelled furiously, holding his throbbing shoulder. “Come down here!”

There was no answer.

“Bertamelli!”

Something knocked him off his feet again and down the few steps he’d climbed. But this time the missile was chest high and spouting desperate Italian. Bertamelli fell to his knees beside Charles, wringing his small brown hands and weeping bitterly.

“Latin, Bertamelli. Speak Latin. I can’t understand you.” Wearily, Charles sat up against the tower wall.

“
Maître
,
maître
, I accuse myself, I hate myself, I will cut off my hand!”

This time, there was enough Latin mixed with the Italian that Charles got the drift. “Did your hand throw the stone that hit me?”

“No, no, no hand threw it, the wall dropped itself,
maître
, it is so old, like my grandfather, he falls down because his knees have died and gone to heaven—or maybe hell—before him. I was only looking down the stairs to see who was there and—and—holding on to the wall and—and the stone let go of the other stones and I did not know it was you!”

“Then you’ve gone deaf. Didn’t you hear me yelling for you? Who was up there with you, Monsieur Bertamelli?”

Bertamelli seemed to shrink, his face so white that his huge eyes were black as a moonless night.

“Who?” Charles demanded.

The boy chewed at his lip. “I—I don’t know. I heard him. I was afraid—”

Charles had developed a good ear for boys’ lies. Bertamelli was definitely not telling the truth. “And did you see him?”

“No!” Bertamelli shook his head and went on shaking it, as though that would make his story true.

Charles sighed. “Why did you come to this garden? Why are you out of the college?”

The boy clasped his hands on the breast of his black wool coat. “I didn’t come to the garden. I came to see the Comédie Italienne. It is just there, you know.” He pointed in the direction of the cross street. “Across the street. My cousin is there. I knew the rector would not let me go, so I just went.”

“You could have asked the rector to send for your cousin.”

“But I wanted to go and see him.”

“And his show?”

“Yes!” Bertamelli looked up from picking industriously at a patch of orange lichen. “The Italian comedians are the best, you know!”

“Why did you turn aside into this garden?”

“Oh. Here?” Bertamelli blinked, and he bent over the patch of lichen again. “I only wanted—to see the tower. We have many towers like it in Italy. My family used to have one in Milan, but I have never seen one here before. So I went in.”

“I see. And why did you look into Holy Innocents cemetery?”

“Oh. Were you in there? Is that how you saw me? I just wanted to see what was on the other side of the door.” He shivered. “But I didn’t go very far in. I don’t like dead people.”

“That’s unfortunate, because we’re going back there. Help me up.”

Wordlessly, Bertamelli helped him up and they made their way to the street. Charles noticed that the boy didn’t so much as glance at the Comédie Italienne’s theatre. He walked silently beside Charles, his shoulders hunched as though he were trying to hide inside himself. They turned down the rue St. Denis toward the cemetery in silence, Charles keeping a wary eye on him and trying various ways of putting together the pieces of the morning to make them show what the boy wasn’t telling.

Chapter 17

T
hey 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.