“And that is the most important reason why I ask you and not another to do this. Your heart is in it. So,” Le Picart said briskly, “I will tell my own superior what I have set you to do. If he tells me I am wrong, then I will call you back. If any… difficulty arises from your task, I will take it wholly on myself. You are acting on my orders and you are acting as Ignatius said a Jesuit should: as the strong stick supporting your feeble superior.”
“Feeble?” Charles snorted with unapologetic laughter.
Le Picart smiled slightly. “Our founder’s words, not mine.”
“Mon pere, am I to tell the lieutenant-general what you have asked me to do?”
“Yes. As I said before, I have told Pere Pallu that you will not, after all, be assisting in his morning classes for now. Also, I caution you again not to neglect your duties to Pere Jouvancy and the February performance, unless- God and His saints forbid-a dire emergency arises. Furthermore, hear me well-you will use violence to no one.”
“No, mon pere. Unless-”
“No ‘unless.’ You have taken first vows-which you have renewed-and you are a Jesuit, if only a scholastic. But you have also been a soldier. And what you did and saw and learned as a soldier are not far under your skin. That is very clear to me and is another reason you are suited for what I have asked you to do. But you belong to the Society of Jesus now, you are one of ours, not the army’s. Use what you know, but use violence to no one.”
“And if it is a question of life or death? Mine or someone’s whom I must protect?”
“Our Savior told us to turn the other cheek.”
“My own cheek is my own to turn. Allowing someone else to die seems to me another thing altogether.”
Le Picart looked long at Charles, who felt as though the man were seeing through his flesh and bone to his soul.
“That will have to be between you and God,” Le Picart said.
Chapter 14
Gilles Brion sat hugging himself at his cell’s battered table. He wore a black cloak over the same brownish- black coat and breeches Charles had seen him in before, and his elegant linen was still crisp and white. A single candle lit the small chamber and a tall brazier had been brought in for heat, but it did little to dispel the cold of the ancient stone walls. Still, it showed that M. Callot had laid out more than a little money to the jailor. Brion had started up when the thick-planked, iron-bound door opened, but slumped again into his chair when he saw Charles.
“What do you want?” he said listlessly.
“To know whether you’ve killed anyone.”
“Don’t mock me.”
“I am not, I assure you. Did you kill Mademoiselle Mynette? Did you kill your father?”
“What does it matter? I am a dead man, anyway.”
Charles turned abruptly and pounded on the cell door. “Jailor, I am through here,” he shouted through the open grille.
Behind him, the chair scraped on the stones and Brion cried, “No, wait, please!”
Praying for patience, Charles turned around.
“Wait for what?” If harshness was the only thing that could penetrate this idiot’s posturing, then harshness he would have.
“I didn’t kill either of them. I own I wanted sometimes to kill my father. But I didn’t. And I would never have killed Mademoiselle Mynette. I swear by all the saints, by my hope of heaven!”
“But you went to her house before dawn on Friday morning. The morning she died.”
Gilles gasped and clutched the back of the chair. “Isabel betrayed me! Dear God, women are of the devil! Their tongues forge the chains of hell, they-”
Charles turned back to the door and raised a fist to pound on it.
“Don’t go!” Gilles clutched Charles’s arm. “Women are weak, I know that, Isabel surely didn’t mean-forgive me-”
Charles shook off Brion’s hand. The young man was swaying where he stood, his face was colorless.
“Have they fed you?”
“I don’t want anything.”
Charles sighed. “At least sit down before you fall.” He pushed Gilles into the chair and picked up the cloak, which had fallen to the floor. “You were seen,” he said, draping the cloak back around Brion’s shoulders. “You were seen leaving the side gate to the Mynette’s garden Friday morning. Why did you go there, Monsieur Brion? And why so early?”
Gilles froze as booted feet walked past the door. As the sound faded, he groaned and shook his head hopelessly. “I went to ask her to help us both out of the coil my father had made. I knew she would be awake. She always woke early to dress and say the early prayers.” Haltingly, he told Charles the same story Isabel Brion had already given him.
“And when Mademoiselle Mynette refused to help you, what did you do?”
“I left. I went back to the Capuchins for Prime and Mass.”
“They can confirm that you were there?”
“Yes.”
Sitting now with his back turned to Charles, Gilles took something from his pocket. It caught the candlelight in a small red flash, and in one stride, Charles was at the table and wrenching open Brion’s hand. But the thing was a rosary with reddish beads, not a red enamel heart.
“Forgive me,” Charles said, laying it carefully on the table. “I thought this was something else. I was mistaken.”
Brion, cowering away from him, snatched up the rosary and began to pray.
“Monsieur Brion, you most certainly need God’s help. But you also need mine. Please listen to me. Your sister says you stayed at the Capuchin monastery on Thursday night. Is that true?”
“Yes,” Brion said resentfully, opening his eyes. He glanced at Charles and ducked his head over the rosary again. “In a-a guest cell. I often stay there.”
Charles watched him thoughtfully for a moment. “So you stayed the night in the monastery. Praying. Solitary. Celibate. Just as a future monk should be. Admirable. And regrettable, since there is no one who can swear you never left your guest chamber on Thursday night and the early hours of Friday morning. No one can swear for you that you were at the Capuchins during the hours when your father must have died.”
Brion, clutching the rosary so tightly that his knuckles were bone white, seemed to stop breathing.
Charles decided to risk everything on one throw. “It is not unknown,” he said, as though to himself, “for young men to decide to enter religious life together. Two heartfast friends sometimes vow to enter the same monastery, to live there chaste, but in each other’s company.”
Brion stared at him as though ensorcelled, his eyes like black pits in his white face.
“Do you have such a friend, Monsieur Brion?”
A silent sob convulsed the young man’s body. He shook his head.
“I think you do, mon ami,” Charles said gently.
Brion leaned his head on his folded arms and wept. “Don’t tell them, I beg you, don’t tell them. We’ve done no wrong. We are chaste, maitre, I swear it!” Then, to Charles’s surprise, he made an effort to pull himself together and took a square of linen from his pocket. He mopped his face and pushed back his lank brown hair. “It is not just for him that I want to be a monk,” he said softly, running his fingers over a roughly formed rose some prisoner before him had carved into the table’s surface. “But I want to spend my life serving and praying where he is. Is that wrong?”
Charles hesitated. The church, the law, and the world harshly condemned that kind of love between men, even when it was chaste. Sodomites were rarely burned alive now, but they could be-even though the king’s brother and more than a few courtiers were notorious for “the Italian vice,” as it was called. A century ago Henri III, who had piously inscribed and laid the cornerstone for Louis le Grand’s chapel, had confounded his ministers by appearing at state functions in jeweled gowns, with purple powder in his hair and beard.
