The Rhetoric of Death (36 page)

“What do you want?” the dwarf 's high-pitched voice demanded.

“Only to speak with you,
monsieur.
I am a cleric and unarmed.”

“Stand where I can see you.”

“I do not wish to speak with your pistol,
monsieur.
”

“And I do not wish to be robbed and murdered.”

But the gun barrel was lowered and Charles moved warily into the dwarf 's line of sight, holding his hands pacifically open in front of him.

“Ah. The beautiful young man looking in the wrong place for sugar. So now you are shopping in the dark?”

“We must talk,
monsieur
,” Charles said.

“I am here. Talk.”

“Do you want to discuss your poison selling here in the street?”

“You are the one who wants to discuss.” A sigh came out of the darkness and the door opened a little wider. “Come in, then.”

“And your pistol,
monsieur
?”

“I am not going to shoot you unless you give me reason. And I am not going to stand here all night.”

Charles took a cautious step toward the threshold. The dwarf's small hand closed like a vise on his wrist and pulled him inside. The little man shut the door, locked it with a key as long as Charles's foot, and picked up the candle from a low chest.

“I am working in the back, there is light there.”

Seeing that the pistol was now pushed into the back of the dwarf 's belt, Charles let himself be led. He could overwhelm his captor by sheer size and weight before the man could get to his weapon. All Charles's senses were alert. The shop's dry warm air was full of the competing odors of herbs. But the dwarf himself smelled of sulfur. As demons were said to smell. Charles's mind had doubts about demons, but his body suddenly declared traditional opinions and he found himself pulling back against his guide. Who only gripped him tighter, towing him like a small horse pulling a boat along a towpath.

The house was utterly silent. They crossed a large, beamed kitchen, where the outline of a sleeping cat showed beside the banked fire. The dwarf let go of Charles to open a door and soft light spilled across the worn stone floor of the kitchen.

“In here.”

“After you.”

“What do you think I am going to do, my dear young man, lock you in?”

Thinking exactly that, Charles waited out of reach. With a shrug, the little man disappeared through the door. Charles followed cautiously and found himself in a large room with a vaulted stone ceiling, perhaps a storeroom when the old house was built. Candles burned on a low wooden table and flickered in sconces, picking out the signs of the zodiac painted on the windowless plastered walls. The apothecary was an alchemist, then, which probably explained the stink of sulfur. It was a common enough combining of crafts. The dwarf tied an apron over his black jerkin and breeches and glanced into a trio of crucibles bubbling on trivets in the small fireplace. He blew more life into the coals with a pair of bellows and plucked a pair of spectacles from the littered the table.

“So talk to me,” he said.

“What poisons do you sell?”

“The ones everyone sells. Look for yourself.”

As though his visitor no longer concerned him, the dwarf blew out the candles on the table and picked up a small clay pot. Charles started slowly around the room, looking for aconite. Between the zodiacal paintings, wooden shelves overflowed with brown, green, and clear glass bottles and beakers, stoppered clay pots, and brightly glazed jars. The contents of the jars were written in their glazes. “Aethiopis Mineralis,” Charles read on a yellow and green one, and remembered his mother telling him it was black sulphide of mercury, good for constipation, toothache, melancholy, and childbirth. Another jar held “Laudanum,” opium in wine, God's gift for easing pain. There was “Elixir Salutis,” a stomach purge, as he knew to his sorrow. And “Ens of Venus,” “Salt of Sylvie,” “Crocus Saturn,” “Bezoar Orientalis,” “Aqua Tofani.” He stopped. “Aqua Tofani,” arsenious oxide, was an Italian poison. Infallibly deadly, as of course it would be, since—as everyone knew—Italians were the world's arch-poisoners.

“You sell Aqua Tofani?” Charles said.

The dwarf looked up from whatever he was doing to a sliver of wood. The narrow circles of horn that held the lenses of his spectacles made him look like an irritated owl.

“A little of something, that's medicine. Too much, that's poison.”

“And what would you sell ‘a little' Aqua Tofani for?” Charles said acidly.

“A little rat.”

“Of course.” Charles bent to peer at a squat round jar of clear glass with muslin tied over its top and stepped quickly back. Leeches. He stared in frustration at a blue glazed jar with “Vanilla” blazoned on it, thinking that if he tried to read every label, he would be here till morning. Following his gaze, the dwarf said, “Oh, now I see. You want a love potion and are too embarrassed to say so.”

Charles's eyebrows rose. “Vanilla?”

“A fine aphrodisiac, yes. Very popular with priests.”

“I am not yet a priest,” Charles said dryly. And thought,
I definitely do not need an aphrodisiac. The contrary, if anything
.

He finished his circuit of the room, past a stack of firewood, a huddle of small unlabeled barrels standing oddly in the middle of the room, and a tier of shelves crammed with books, including the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher's
Sphinx Mystagoga
, in Latin with Egyptian hieroglyphs. He came back to the little fireplace.

“When I was here before,” he began, but a brilliant flash of light and a harsh stink of sulfur sent him cowering back against the wall.

“When you were here before, what?” the dwarf said, as though nothing had happened.

“What in the name of all hell's devils did you just do?” Fear made Charles's words sharp with anger.

The apothecary turned, holding up another sliver of wood. “You see this common match,” he said, assuming a lecturer's tone. “A piece of wood with a little sulfur on the end to make it light when you hold it to a flame.” He held up a piece of paper. “On this paper, I have smeared phosphorus. From that jar. An Englishman has found that this phosphorus burns as soon as it touches sulfur, so that the match lights instantly. And burns brighter. If I draw the unlit sulphur-tipped match through the phosphorus-treated paper—”

He did and produced another small burst of fire. He extinguished the burning sliver in a bucket of water beside the table and tipped the jar toward Charles. It was full of an eerie white light that made Charles hurriedly cross himself.

“Phosphorus, not demons,” the dwarf laughed. “I made the stuff myself.”

“How?” Charles said, fascinated in spite of himself, but still unsettled by the glow. “Is it poison?”

“It looks like it should be, doesn't it? Would you believe I made it from piss? An ungodly lot of piss, you have no idea. Long, nasty process. My books say piss will eventually produce gold. They're wrong, it produces fire. Think about that the next time you're watering a wall.”

“Monsieur—”
Charles walked around the table and faced the apothecary. He suddenly realized he didn't know the man's name. “What are you called?”

“Called? I am called Monsieur Rivière.”

“Well, Monsieur Rivière, a man died this afternoon at the college of Louis le Grand. I think he died from poison you sold. The day I came asking about sugar, a woman came in as I left. A young woman. She wore a black veil and gown, but with a rose-colored petticoat under it. You greeted her as though you knew her. Who is she?”

The dwarf was carefully examining his pieces of wood and sorting them by size. “Do I remember everyone who comes through my door?
And
their petticoats?”

“You are required by law to keep a register, with the names of all who buy poison and the reason they give for buying it. You are also required to sell poison only to people you know.”

“And why should you think this rose-petticoated woman bought poison? Are you certain you do not wish a love potion, my beautiful cleric?”

“Are you certain you do not want me to return with Lieutenant-Général La Reynie?”

The apothecary sighed and took off his spectacles. “Always such a fuss about death,” he murmured, rubbing his eyes. “So much death, always, and no one gets used to it. Isn't death the only way to your heaven? You'd think—”

Your
heaven? Charles decided he didn't have time for whatever that meant. “I heard you greet her,
monsieur,
you know her. Give me her name.” He stepped closer, forcing the little man to crane his neck back and look nearly straight up. “If you can't remember, go and get your register. If you keep a register.”

The dwarf moved away and rubbed his neck. “I think you mean Mademoiselle La Salle.” His deep brown eyes were full of the sadness Charles remembered from his first visit. “She is a servant in the Place Royale.”

“The Place Royale? You're sure?”

“The silly chit brags about it. She makes it sound as though the close stools are solid gold and her mistress shits rubies. She goes on about how high and great and rich the woman is, and says that soon she will be rich, too.”

“Who is her mistress? Which house is it?”

The apothecary shrugged. “She told me once that she watched a duel in the Place from her window. But I suppose you could do that from any of those houses.”

“Did she buy aconite?”

“She often buys it. Her mistress uses it to make a salve to ease backache, the girl says. I make the same salve myself, it's a perfectly good reason for buying aconite. Dangerous to handle, but I tell them how to be careful. Now may I see you out and get back to my work?”

Charles's inheld anger flared like the phosphorus match. “By all means,
monsieur
. And as you get on with your work, pray for the soul of Maître Doissin. Dead from your aconite. Which wasn't even meant for him. Mademoiselle La Salle meant it for an eight-year-old child.”

He left the dwarf standing there and felt his way through the dark house. Behind him, the dwarf's voice rose in a strange, minor-keyed lament, sad enough to mourn all the world's dead, past and to come. Charles shivered as the despairing music coiled around his heart.

L
a Salle. La Salle. The name beat in time to Charles's footsteps like a funeral drum. Who was she? If La Salle was really her name, which he doubted. Whoever she was, what was her connection to Antoine Douté? She had a connection, of that he was certain, though his certainty was irrational and fragile, woven from glimpses of her petticoat: red, rose red, bloodred now in his mind's eye. It was full dark now and the streets were as close to quiet as Paris streets ever seemed to get. Someone's Nemesis, Le Picart had called him, and Charles felt like Nemesis as he descended on the Place Royale and strode through the south gate beneath the Pavillon du Roi. A carriage rolled in front of him along the gravelled roadway that divided the arcaded, nearly identical houses from the square's garden. In the garden, a few murmuring, laughing strollers still crisscrossed the paths around Louis XIII's statue. An outburst of coarse laughter made him turn to see an obvious
fille de joie
dart from the ground-floor arcade and run like the wind toward the square's ungated north-west corner. Her bare-scalped customer pounded behind her, yelling for help and pointing to his long, expensive wig, which the girl carried aloft like a trophy.

Charles left them to it and walked along the roadway, past the arcade's closed shops and the lanterns burning by house gates. He descended abruptly from tragedy to farce: Nemesis didn't know which house held the poisoner. Or what she looked like, except that she was small and wore a gaudy petticoat. Hoping for inspiration, he kept on doggedly around the square, looking up at the big windows glowing with candlelight and watching the gates. He supposed he could ring at every house, but a strange Jesuit asking for a servant girl would raise a flurry of questions, maybe warn his quarry and give her time to escape by a back way. His frustrated sigh was answered by a gasp from a dark stretch of arcade.

“Who's there?” he demanded and immediately felt his face grow hot. A gasp in the dark could have reasons that were none of his business. A stifled sob followed the gasp.

“Who's there?” he said more boldly. “Is something wrong?” Offering help was certainly his business.

Frère Fabre emerged from the arcade, his red hair shining in the light from the windows. His face was a mask of misery.

For a moment neither of them moved. Then Charles grabbed the boy, twisting his cassock into hard knots. “You followed me. Why?” Fabre turned his head away and Charles shook him. “
Why
?”

“When you went out,
maître
, I was afraid you knew, but you went into that house on the bridge. I came here, anyway, but I didn't warn her, I swear it! I meant to, but I couldn't!” The boy covered his face and sobbed in earnest.

“Didn't warn who?”

“Agnes.” Fabre tried to wipe his face on his cassock skirt and Charles released his hold. “When I got here, I kept remembering Maître Doissin. And that it might have been Antoine. And I—” He shook his head wordlessly.

“Frère Fabre, who is Agnes?”

“My sister. My half-sister, her surname is La Salle. She's Mme Douté's maid.”

Charles stared at him, bereft of speech.

“You saw her at Philippe's funeral,
maître
. I was talking to her.”

“Yes,” Charles managed to say, “I remember. I didn't know she was Mme Douté's maid.”