the murders of his father and Martine Mynette. Then the worthies left, and Monsieur Louvois stayed behind to tell me that if I do not charge him, and the people riot because they think I am protecting Jesuits and leaving these murders unavenged, my position is forfeit.”
“But you cannot-”
“For God’s sake, let me finish! Whether or not you and Monsieur Fiennes are right, I must keep Brion here. Having someone arrested for the murders-even if not yet formally charged-is preventing worse in the streets than has already happened. I cannot release him until I am certain he is not guilty-and, by the bon Dieu, that young man’s wide-eyed statement has made me more certain that he is.”
“Have you put him to the question yet?”
“No.”
“Are you going to?”
“Are you going to find this ex-gardener?” La Reynie shot back. “This Tito you’ve been asking about? If by any chance Brion is proved innocent, I have to have someone to put in his place. Not that this Tito sounds likely. So, have you found him?”
“No.”
“Well, keep looking.”
With the slightest of bows, Charles left La Reynie and made his way to where Fiennes was waiting. Forcing himself to keep his anger and disappointment out of his face and voice, he said, “Can your father spare these horses a while longer, Monsieur Fiennes?”
“I imagine so.”
“Then I beg the favor of riding to the Couche. On the Ile.”
Fiennes nodded. “I am sorry if I made things more difficult in there. But what I said was the truth and I had forgotten to tell you.”
“I cannot but wish you had continued to forget, mon ami.”
“Gilles has killed no one, maitre. I do not think God will let him be hanged. Or tortured. Perhaps if he were ready to be a saint-but my poor Gilles is not ready. So there is nothing to fear.”
Charles could find nothing he trusted himself to say in response to that, so in silence they made their slow way across the Pont au Change, stopping while a belated procession in honor of St. Genevieve paced and chanted its slow way across their path. As Charles waited, he thought about the saint. Genevieve’s story said that she’d saved Paris from Attila and his marauding Huns. Deciding that if she could handle Attila, she could probably handle Michel Louvois, he prayed to her to help him save Gilles, show him the real killer.
Keeping the horses to the edge of the narrow rue de la Juiverie on the Ile, to avoid the impassible center where snow dug away from doors and gates had been flung, Charles and Fiennes finally reached rue Neuve Notre Dame. Charles drew rein and caught his breath, gazing at the cathedral’s west front rising in front of him. He’d rarely seen it from this angle since coming to Paris. Its square towers rising into the clearing sky’s icy blue, its crowding sculptures frosted in snow, washed the tiredness from his body and the worry and discouragement from his mind. Beside him, Fiennes also drank in the cathedral’s wonders.
“How did they do it?” he said. “That’s what I always wonder, maitre. Wouldn’t it have been glorious to help build it?”
In spite of his anger at himself and exasperation with Fiennes, Charles found himself smiling. “It would.”
But his smile died quickly when they reached the Couche, the house where abandoned babies found alive were brought. As he stood at the gate, waiting for an answer to the bell, a booted man with a large cone-shaped basket on his back pushed past him with a muttered excuse. The man took a key as long as Charles’s hand from his coat and forced it into the gate’s frozen lock. Swearing under his breath, he worked to turn the key. Tiny cries came from the basket on his back. Charles’s heart turned over as he realized that the man was a city worker paid to search for foundlings at doors, under bridges, in churches. The Couche was getting a new delivery of infants.
When the man finally opened the gate, Charles slipped through with him, leaving Fiennes to look after the horses. The baby finder slid in the courtyard’s deep snow and Charles leaped forward, afraid the basket would upend. The cries coming from it grew frantic, but the carrier found his feet, and he and Charles reached the door together. The Sister of Charity watching the door allowed the baby finder to enter, but barred Charles’s way.
“Yes, mon pere?” she said, not so much unwelcoming as openly puzzled by the Jesuit standing before her with burn holes in his hat and cloak.
“Ma soeur,” Charles began, but his voice died as he watched the man with the basket on his back disappear into a passageway. “What will happen to them?”
Her face softened and she beckoned him inside and shut the door. “They will go to wet nurses.”
“And then?”
“Those who live will be returned to our house in the Faubourg St. Antoine. A few will be adopted. By common people, you understand. Most will be placed as servants and apprentices.”
The terrified and forgotten child in the burning building’s window rose in Charles’s mind, and he nearly bit blood from his tongue to stop himself from demanding the basket and taking the infants with him.
“Ma soeur,” he said, sighing, “I have urgent need of information. About a foundling who came to you as much as twenty years ago. All I know of him is that he was called Tito.”
Her wimple and veil, so white and starched that light bounced off them, made it hard to tell her age. Charles guessed that she might be forty.
“I was not here that long ago.” She smiled sadly. “I entered the order after my husband died.” She paused, thinking. “But yes, there is a sister who was here then. Soeur Mariana, a Spanish woman.”
“Please,” Charles said eagerly, “may I speak with her?”
“No, mon pere. She is old and has been ill.”
His heart sank. “Is she expected to recover?”
“I think so. We are praying for her.”
“If-when-she feels well enough, will you ask her about this boy Tito?”
“This is important?”
“Life and death may depend on it, ma soeur.”
“If she is well enough, I will ask her. Come back in a few days. I am Soeur Madeleine.”
She inclined her head to Charles, who bowed and withdrew. The sky was cloudless now and Charles had to squint against the snow glare as he plodded across the court, trying to pray that Soeur Mariana would recover for her sake, not his.
Chapter 23
The lay brother in the clothing room was not pleased. Charles stood before the clothing counter in his cassock, watching the brother inspect the holes in his cloak. “Another cloak gone.” The brother glared at Charles, demanded his hat, and turned it slowly in his hands. Charles realized that he was counting the singed places, perhaps to charge each one to Charles’s purgatory account as so many extra years of penance. Charles unobtrusively clasped his hands behind his back to hide the tiny cinder burns in his cassock sleeves. As he moved, the brother sniffed the air.
“You smell like a peasant’s fire. That cassock will probably have to be washed. Wool is never the same after washing, you know that. Let me see your shoes.”
Charles held out one cold sodden foot and then the other.
The brother rolled his eyes and sighed. “Take them off. The cassock, too. Behind the curtain there.”
Muttering and shaking his head, he left Charles shivering in shirt and stockings while he searched his stores for replacements. When he came back, he was still muttering.
“Frenchmen are short. Except, of course, you. At least your feet are smallish. Here.”
He thrust a cassock, cloak, and shoes around the curtain. “The cassock hasn’t been worn for I don’t know how long. The smell will air out. Your hat you’ll just have to keep for now,” he added with satisfaction. “I don’t have another one.”
“Thank you, mon frere.” Charles put on the ancient cassock and cincture, which smelled of moth remedies
