The Rhetoric of Death (18 page)

Antoine's eyes darted sideways at Louvois, who was berating him for his intrusion. Charles saw that, in spite of the sobs, the child's dark eyes were as dry as the gravel.

“They've gone,” Antoine choked, hiding his face on Charles's cassock and pulling him toward the adjoining courtyard so urgently that Charles nearly lost his footing. “Philippe is gone!”

“Forgive me,
messieurs
,” Charles said over his shoulder, “but you see that I must attend to this grieving child.”

He walked Antoine across the Cour d'honneur toward the north courtyard as fast as the boy's short legs could go. When they reached the dividing archway, Charles looked back. La Reynie had a hand on Louvois's arm, obviously restraining him, and Louvois was arguing furiously. But La Reynie was thoughtfully watching Charles.

When they were well into the north court, Antoine pulled away. “That showed them!” he said, looking up defiantly.

“Yes,” Charles said, caught between laughter and bewilderment. “I think it did. My very sincere thanks, M. Douté. But why such a valiant rescue? We've hardly even met. Except when you—ah—sleepwalked, of course.”

“And you knew I wasn't, but you didn't tell on me. And I
hate
old Louvois, he always tells on me and bullies me just like he was bullying you!”

“How do you know him,
mon petit
?”

Antoine scowled. “He comes to our house. And at my stepmother's birthday fête I asked him and Père Guise something and they said I was being rude and telling lies, and my father made me apologize and sent me to bed. And I missed the cakes!”

Charles made a sympathetic face and glanced at the group of boys and tutors talking and reading under a tree on the other side of the court. They seemed to be paying no attention to Antoine or to him. Charles said quietly, “Antoine, why were you in Père Guise's study that night?”

The boy's face closed like a shutter. “I can't tell you. It's a secret.” Antoine looked around uneasily, his bravado suddenly gone. “
Maître
—could we speak in my chamber? It's just there.” He pointed to the tall stone house on the east side of the court, a venerable survivor of one of the older colleges Louis le Grand had swallowed up, Charles guessed. He hesitated, trying to think of some other place to talk, since teachers were not supposed to go to students' chambers. But this was his chance to ask about the note Frère Brunet had mentioned.

“Is your tutor in your chamber?” Every well-born student had a private tutor—often a Jesuit scholastic like Charles—who supervised him, communicated his progress, or lack of it, to his parents, and oversaw the boy's daily life.

Antoine shrugged. “I don't know where he is.”

“All right, then.” It was the perfect excuse, since someone needed to keep an eye on the child until the errant tutor returned.

Antoine led him inside and up a staircase. The building was surprisingly quiet; classes had been suspended because of the funeral and some students had gone out with their families.

Though more lowly boarders shared small dormitories, six or eight to a room, Antoine's large chamber was private, as Philippe's no doubt had been. Its casement stood open and a tall lime tree reached companionably toward the stone sill. The bed looked deep and soft under its red wool coverlet, and there was a sturdy oak table, two chairs upholstered and fringed in rich brown, a flat-topped chest with a decorated lock, and a large carved cupboard. A brazier for heat in cold weather stood in a corner, and a small but good painting of the young John the Baptist playing with the infant Jesus hung at the foot of the bed. The tutor's more austere bed stood in a small alcove between the chamber and a half-open door revealing a study with several desks. Politely gesturing Charles to a chair, Antoine sat down on his bed. Charles turned the chair toward the bed and opened his mouth to ask about the note, but Antoine forestalled him.

“I wanted to go with them.” The boy smoothed the bed's thick cover as though comforting an animal. “With my father. With Philippe.” He looked up, his eyes suddenly blazing, and Charles had an uncanny sense of the older brother looking out of Antoine's black, long-lashed eyes. “My father wanted me to, but she said I couldn't and Père Guise made my father do what she wanted. Did you know Père Guise is my godfather? I wish he wasn't. My father argued, but she started crying about her baby and he gave in. He
always
gives in. I hate her! She said—” His eyes filled with tears, real tears this time. “She said I had to stay here and pray for Philippe, because he's probably in hell. Is he,
maître
?”

Choking on what he wanted to say about Lisette Douté, Charles took a slow, deep breath. “No, Antoine, he is not,” he said flatly.

“But he didn't make his confession before he died.”

“That was not his fault. God still loves him, just as He loves you.”

The boy looked up from bunching the cover into small red hills. “But Philippe ran away—that was his fault.”

Charles stopped himself from saying that Philippe probably hadn't gone farther than the latrine. “Listen, Antoine. People do not go to hell just for being angry. Or scared.”

“They don't?”

“They don't.”

“They don't.”

“Then, if God still loves Philippe, why did He let him get killed?”

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.

T
he 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 seated 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.