“Any kind,” Charles said, stifling the urge to tear a strip off a discarded sheet and strangle Richaud with it.
“Well… I did hear something.” Richaud dumped his stack of sheets into the open chest. “About the Brion son,” he said, straightening. “Gilles, he’s called.”
Charles nodded encouragingly.
“He hated that Mynette girl. Because his father was making him court her and he didn’t want to, he wants to be a monk.”
“A monk?” Charles said in surprise. Well, that explained a lot.
“But his father won’t give him an endowment to take to the monastery,” Richaud said. “Refused to give him anything at all unless he married the girl, who was supposed to get a lot of money after her mother died.”
“Oh?” Charles tried to keep his tone even. “Who told you this?”
“The chandler’s apprentice.”
Charles went on studying the sheet in his hands and considered what Richaud had just said about Isabel’s brother. Was it a motive for murder? An argument could be made either way. On the one hand, Martine would probably have had no qualms about opening the door to Gilles Brion. So he would have had easy entrance to the house if he wanted to kill her. But on the other hand, though Gilles might well have killed Martine in sudden desperation, his father would almost certainly try to force some other heiress on him. So what would taking such a terrible risk gain him in the end? Most people had few choices about their lives beyond what their parents chose for them. Even when they came of age, defying parental choice usually meant losing not only the means to live, but the social connections necessary to get on in the world. Parental will and family gain ruled everything.
Charles wondered if the neighborhood police commissaire knew about young Brion’s forced courtship of Martine. Probably, if even the neighborhood apprentices knew. But it wasn’t something to leave to chance.
“Thank you, maitre.” Charles thrust his bed sheet at Richaud and made for the street passage, leaving Richaud complaining loudly that he could at least have folded the sheet first.
But before Charles reached the postern, he was overtaken by a small crowd of teenage boys escorted by their tutors. The boys were all helping to carry a deep basket full of dark round loaves and piles of clothing.
“It’s time, maitre!” one of them said excitedly.
Charles had forgotten completely about overseeing the distribution of alms by these representatives of the older pensionnaires’ Congregation of the Ste. Vierge. With an effort, he swallowed his frustration at the delay in seeing the police commissaire and in finding Lieutenant-General La Reynie, for whom no detail of policing the city was too small and who might be anywhere in Paris. Charles dismissed the escorting tutors and followed the boys into the main building’s anteroom, where the big double doors opened directly onto the street. The boys brought a heavy walnut table from the neighboring grand salon, placed it before the doors, and piled the loaves and clothing on it. Then Charles drew them together to pray for God’s poor and ask the Holy Virgin to increase mercy and generosity in their own hearts. At the “amen,” two boys pulled the doors open to the snowy street. Everyone knew that alms were given out on Friday afternoons, but no one approached until the doors stood open. Charles pulled his cloak more tightly closed, wondering aloud if the weather might keep people away, but the boys all shook their heads.
“No, maitre,”Walter Connor said. Connor was one of Charles’s rhetoric students and dancers, and the journey to his home in Ireland was too long for the short holiday. “The worse the weather, the more they need. They’ll come.”
He had hardly finished speaking before three ragged men and a woman appeared at the doors, as though they’d conjured themselves from the air. Charles stepped forward, greeted and blessed them, nodded at the students, and stood back. His role now was to see that the boys distributed the alms courteously and evenhandedly, intervening only if there was need.
The crowd of beggars grew quickly. Connor and three other boys handed out loaves, and the rest offered the worn but serviceable clothing and shoes from the store they’d brought with them. One of the boys held out a long manteau of soft brown wool, hardly worn, to a thin, pockmarked woman. She snatched it from him and held it against her chest, stroking the cloth, wide-eyed at her good fortune. Watching her, Charles thought of the young butcher in the artisans’ Congregation who had given it. Knowing that the man’s wife had recently died in childbirth and that he had other small children to provide for, Charles had urged him to sell it to the secondhand clothing dealers. But the butcher had pushed it into Charles’s arms, saying brokenly that it was his wife’s and that she had always been tenderhearted to the poor.
Charles’s thoughts jumped from that death to Martine’s. Forcing aside his memory of her lifeless body on the bloodfouled floor, he told himself that even if the drunken maid had not left the house door open, only forgotten to bar it, it was possible that someone had a key, honestly or by stealth. Gilles Brion, for example, could easily have come by a key. His father, as the family notary and the girl’s guardian, surely had a key. Charles took a mental step back and reconsidered the elder Brion. Whom no one admitted to seeing since yesterday. Who had apparently lied about searching for the lost donation at the Chatelet. But why would Henri Brion lie about searching for the donation? He had forced his son to court the girl for the Mynette money. Why would he intentionally conceal the document that ensured that the money would come to her? And if the donation was not found, presumably the Jesuits would get the money. Which was the last thing Henri Brion would want. Those thoughts led Charles back to the younger Brion. If Gilles had killed Martine, what would he do next? Had Henri Brion vanished because he knew his son had killed her and was busy helping him get out of France, busy working out a pretext for the boy’s sudden absence? But would Henri Brion try to save his son if the boy had killed the pretty goose and lost the family’s chance at the golden egg? A son-an only son, as far as Charles knew-was a son, though. For some men, nothing mattered more than that.
“I don’t want that, give me that thicker one, the green one there, you bloated whelp, hand it over!”
Charles came abruptly back to the almsgiving and was at the doors before the angry demand reached its end. A bearded old man leaning on a stick had flung a brown coat onto the table and was grabbing for a green one held by one of the younger students. The boy had backed away from the shouting beggar and was looking anxiously at Charles.
“Calm yourself, monsieur.” Charles took the coat from the boy. “And have some respect for the Virgin’s alms. We are glad to give you this coat, no need to grab for it.”
The man glowered at him, his eyes hollow under straggling gray brows. “No need to grab from them with money and feasts on their table every day? Them with their golden boxes, while other men starve in the street!”
Golden boxes? Charles peered more closely at the dirty seamed face and recognized the man who had attacked the Conde’s reliquary on Christmas Eve. He looked for the young companion who had seemed to be the old man’s keeper, but didn’t see him.
“That box is not ours to sell, monsieur. We must do with it what its giver asked. What is your name?”
The man froze like a wary animal. Then his sinewy hand shot out and snatched the green coat, and he limped away with surprising speed. The boys began to murmur indignantly, but Charles hushed them.
“Do you think men always control their fate?” he asked reprovingly, and reminded them of all the things that could bring an ordinary man to begging. Sin, surely, but also simple ill luck, sickness of body or mind, all the misfortunes that crushed a man as though he were a flea. No matter how much the flea might pray, some impious voice said in Charles’s mind. Then a clutch of women surrounded by crying, shivering children pushed their way to the front of the crowd, and for the next half hour, he and the boys were too busy for thinking.
By the time the store of alms was gone, the final blessing given, and the great doors shut, the short winter afternoon was already beginning to fade. The boys put the walnut table back in the salon and gathered around Charles. He led them in prayers of thanksgiving to the Virgin, finished with an Ave, and dismissed them to their waiting tutors. Before anyone else could want him for something, he was through the postern and on his way to the Place Maubert police commissaire and the rue Perdue.
The commissaire was not at home. His sergent, of course, had no idea where Lieutenant-General La Reynie might be found. Henri Brion was still not at home, either. The maidservant took him up to the salon, where Mlle Brion and M. Callot rose from their chairs on either side of the fire to greet him. Isabel Brion was dressed in black now. Her eyes were red and her face tired and drawn. She looked a different creature from the rosy, exuberant girl Charles had met the day before. Callot was sober and nearly as subdued as his great-niece. He placed a cushioned and fringed chair for Charles between the other chairs, and they all sat quietly until Charles broke the silence.
