stone walls.
“Defend my cause, for haughty men have risen up against me and fierce men seek my life… Turn back the evil upon my foes, in your faithfulness, destroy them!”
Charles and Le Picart swept their improvised weapons in unison from side to side, as though sweeping uncleanness out of the air itself. Whether it was the sharply pointed wood cleaving the air or the echoing church Latin that made the intruders retreat, retreat they did. Within moments, there was nothing but the sound of running feet. The victors exchanged furtive glances, wiped their streaming faces, and tried to catch their breath.
“Amen!” Damiot said with relish.
“So be it!” Le Picart responded liturgically and with equal fervor. He dropped his piece of wood and went out to inspect the damage.
Snow was starting to fall. The others followed him along the college facade, stepping over broken glass, looking up at shattered windows. Le Picart was the first to see the doors. He stopped as though frozen between one step and the next, and the others stopped behind him, craning their necks. In the light of the nearest street lantern, they saw what else the attackers had done. Scrawled across the doors in
charcoal letters two feet high was a single word: MEURTRIERS.
Chapter 9
THE LAST HOURS OF ST. JOHN THE EVANGELIST’S DAY, FRIDAY, DECEMBER 27, AND THE FEAST OF THE HOLY INNOCENTS, SATURDAY, DECEMBER 28
The rector refused to let Charles go for the nearest police commissaire.
“I will pursue my own questions first,” he said flatly to Charles and the others gathered around him. “The fewer who know, the less talk. More of our lay brothers will have to know because work must be done tonight. But otherwise, none of you will speak of this. To anyone. Now, before anything else, are any of you injured?”
Most had only a few bruises. The two lay brothers bleeding from cuts, Le Picart sent Frere Brunet to the infirmary, along with one whose shoulder had been pulled out of joint. Then he set the rest of the lay brothers to cleaning up the damage, and told them to wake others to help them sweep up the glass in the street, scrub the ugly accusation from the big doors, and guard the postern entrance while a temporary door was constructed and set in place. All before first light.
“I will arrange for new window glass in the morning,” Pere Montville said grimly. “It’s going to be hellishly expensive. Meanwhile, we’ll cover the windows with canvas.”
“The canvas over the windows will be noticed, mon pere,” Charles said. “No matter how silent we are, there will be questions and talk.”
“There is already talk. I will ask my own questions first,” Le Picart repeated.
Charles bowed and held silent. When canvas for his window had been found and Le Picart had dismissed him, he returned to his freezing chamber, covered the window as best he could, and went to bed. But the violence of the night kept him long awake. The attack had deepened his anger over Martine’s death, she who had been so defenseless, and when he finally slept, he dreamed about her.
When Saturday morning came, he prayed for her soul, but his angry certainty that the rector’s attempt to cover up the attack was going to make things worse distracted him from his prayers and made them worth little. When Mass and breakfast were over and the dull gray light was growing, he made his way to the hastily constructed new postern, thinking as he entered the passage that at least the sharp smell of raw wood was an improvement on the usual winter smell of cold dank stone. Before he reached the door, a clamor of voices sounded outside and, to his surprise, the porter opened the postern to let in Pere Joseph Jouvancy and a flock of red- cheeked, bright-eyed boys with their tutors. Jouvancy hailed his assistant rhetoric teacher.
“Maitre du Luc, well met! I want to see you; come back inside with me one little moment.”
He waved the boys and tutors through the main building’s side door. Charles laughed to himself as the college’s two shivering Chinese students, usually the essence of politeness, outmaneuvered the rest to get inside first. Jouvancy and Charles followed at the rear, skirting the crush of boys handing swords to a lay brother in the little chamber off the anteroom and receiving in exchange wooden tokens bearing their names. Students whose social rank entitled them to the sword were allowed to wear it when they left the college, but all weapons were strictly forbidden inside the school walls. Jouvancy led Charles through the grand salon and up a staircase to his office, talking nonstop, like the Seine in flood.
“… which, of course, made it even more glorious at Gentilly than it usually is, maitre,” the handsome little priest was saying happily as he sank into the chair behind his desk. Jouvancy was somewhere in his forties, with the tireless energy of a squirrel. “Snow!” He threw out both beautifully expressive hands as though to catch falling flakes. “One of the bon Dieu’s most beautiful gifts, especially in the quiet of the country. And Gentilly is still very quiet, you know, even though it’s so near Paris. Our chateau flourishes and the flocks seem well. But speaking of snow, do you know that it was all I could do to make those Chinese boys walk back to Paris with us? They tell me they hate the snow, can you believe it? They say it only snows on mountains in their part of China. I tell you, coaxing them away from the fireplace this morning was like trying to tell mice they don’t like cheese!”
“How peculiar,” Charles said straight-faced, as Jouvancy paused for breath. “Imagine liking warmth. But I thought you were not returning until tomorrow, mon pere.”
Jouvancy gestured dramatically at the pewter sky outside the office window. “The old woman who keeps our dairy there is a weather prophetess, the best for leagues around, they say. She told me it would surely snow again tonight, and most likely snow hard. So I thought it better to get the boys back to the college now.”
Charles frowned at the window and hoped the elderly dairy maid was right about the new snow’s timing. Slogging through a heavy snowfall any sooner would make all he had to do take even longer. He needed to find out if the elder M. Brion had returned home. And where the younger M. Brion was. And he had to find Lieutenant- General La Reynie, or at least find out from the police commissaire if anything new had been learned about Martine’s murder.
Jouvancy was still talking. “… so I wanted to see you to ask if you have heard from Monsieur Charpentier. About whether his music for February is finished.”
“No, mon pere, I’ve heard nothing.”
Jouvancy tsked with impatience. “Musicians! They are as bad as builders, always of a lingering humor! Well, we will live in hope. Celsus Martyr, our spoken Latin tragedy, is only three acts instead of five. Monsieur Charpentier’s French Celse, the musical tragedy, has five acts. Though it is longer, it is still the intermedes for the spoken tragedy. But it will have far more singing than dancing, which will make your job easier. We still need all the time we can get for rehearsing, though!”
Charles thought privately that the short spoken tragedy was going to seem like intermedes for the long musical tragedy. They would certainly need all the time for rehearsal they could get, since-dances or not-he would have to oversee much of the musical tragedy’s staging. “And will the performance be on the same stage where we did Pere Damiot’s farce, mon pere?”
“In winter, there is nowhere else. Was his Farce of Monks well received?”
By the end of Charles’s retelling, Jouvancy was laughing nearly as hard as the audience had.
“Ah, Maitre du Luc, I wish I had seen you chasing Frere Brunet with that clyster! I often wish we could risk more comedy here. But public comedy is such a vexed question.” He frowned and shook his head. “All comedy is a vexed question when one is dealing with young people.”
“Do you disapprove of comedy, then, mon pere?”
“Oh, in most cases, yes, I do! Because the young are so easily led astray, you understand. And so much comedy in public theatres is frankly scurrilous.” He looked furtively at the door and lowered his voice. “I must admit, though, that I dearly love some of Moliere’s pieces-I once saw the incomparable Gentilhomme and laughed myself silly at poor Monsieur Jourdain! Our little Moliere sometimes went too far, I admit,” Jouvancy said affectionately. The great playwright had once been a day student at Louis le Grand, back when he was only little Jacques Poquelin, the upholsterer’s son. “A genius, though. And cut off in his prime, poor man.”
Interested in Jouvancy’s opinion, Charles ventured, “Do you think, then, that the church is too severe on actors?”
