A Plague of Lies (33 page)

“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?

Chapter 18

T
rying to make sense out of his revelation, Charles went to his chamber for the ballet
livret
and then made his way through the last of the after-dinner hour’s quiet recreation in the Cour d’honneur to the rhetoric classroom. He went to the professor’s dais at the front of the long, white-walled room and put the
livret
on the seat of a high-backed oak chair. Experimentally moving his shoulder, which hurt less after Frère Brunet’s salve and rubbing, he walked between the rows of benches, straightening the ones pushed out of line and casting an eye along them to be sure the morning class had left nothing behind. When the college clock began to chime, he went to the classroom door, where a line of boys, watched by tutors and
cubiculaires
, was forming. Henri de Montmorency’s tutor was there, Montmorency was safely in the line, and Bertamelli was last, just behind him.
So far, so good
, Charles thought, and then saw that Montmorency was looking over his shoulder as Bertamelli whispered urgently to him. Charles and the little Italian’s
cubiculaire
hushed them—Montmorency’s tutor looking indolently on—and as the students came into the classroom, Bertamelli walked to his place as though tiptoeing over meringue. Jouvancy, arriving hard on Bertamelli’s heels, walked to the dais with Charles.

‘Welcome back to the classroom,
mon père
,” Charles said warmly. “You look very well.”