“For now.” The lieutenant-general strode out of the cave and Charles followed.
When they reached the front of the college, a red-and-black carriage drawn by a pair of black horses, standing in the little rue des Poirees across from Louis le Grand’s main doors, came to meet them. A serving boy jumped down from his place between the high rear wheels and opened the door. Charles began his farewells, but La Reynie motioned him curtly into the carriage and climbed in behind him.
“La Couche,” he barked at the boy, who told the driver, and they were off.
La Reynie crossed his arms on his chest and stared steadfastly out the window. That suited Charles, who settled back on the red cushioned seat, looking eagerly out his own window. He was so rarely in a carriage that the experience was still new. Beyond the window, people, horses, carriages, carts, mules, shops, dogs, courtyard gates flashed past in a flood of color. Watching the wheels throw waves of muddy snow and water against stone walls and swearing pedestrians, Charles realized that the day was steadily warming. Snow dripped from eaves and gargoyles, and people even leaned on the sills of open windows, airing their rooms. On the Petit Pont, a few well- wrapped women sat in west-facing doorways, their faces lifted to shafts of sunlight and long-absent warmth.
On the Ile de la Cite, the carriage wound its way to the rue Neuve Notre Dame and stopped in front of the gate to the long, stone-built Couche. La Reynie and Charles got out, still in silence, and La Reynie rang the bell. Charles waited silently behind him. A young, bright-eyed Sister of Charity hurried across the court and let them in.
“Our thanks, ma soeur,” La Reynie said, lifting his hat, as Charles bowed. “We are seeking one of your sisters.” He gestured to Charles to take over the asking.
“She is called Mariana,” Charles said.
“Oh, you are in luck, come with me.” The girl led them across the muddy court. “Soeur Mariana has been ill, but she is better now, and back with us.” She ushered them through the door and into the anteroom. “Will you wait one little moment, please? I will see if she is busy.” With another curtsy, she hurried away.
The dark, rambling old house smelled of babies. Dirty swaddling, sour milk, and strong soap scented air already rank with the closed-in smells of winter, while wailing cries, hurrying feet on stone floors, and sharply urgent commands smote their ears. The young nun returned, as serene as though they were all in a summer garden.
“Soeur Mariana will see you. Come.”
She took them through the anteroom and along a dark, low-beamed passage to a small plaster-walled room where an elderly nun sat singing under her breath as she fed an eagerly sucking newborn with a rag soaked in milk. It was a common way of feeding babies, especially when there were several to feed at once. Wet nurses were sometimes accused of letting babies die, because the ones who got only the rag and not the breast often starved to death. Watching, Charles hoped this child-and the half dozen others in the cradles ranged around the room-would soon go to wet nurses of their own.
“Ma soeur,” La Reynie said, “I have questions to ask you, if you will be so kind.”
The old woman’s reedy singing stopped and she peered at him, blinking shortsightedly. Her aquiline nose was like a blade, and her starched white headdress stood away from her dark face in wide quivering wings.
“And who are you?”
“I am Nicolas de La Reynie, ma soeur, head of the Paris police. And this is Maitre Charles du Luc, from the college of Louis le Grand.”
Her black eyes flicked from La Reynie to Charles, and she pulled the rag from the infant’s mouth, dipped it in the basin of milk on the table at her elbow, and wrung it out a little. “What do you want?” She gave the baby the rag tit again and resumed her singing.
La Reynie frowned impatiently. “Soeur Mariana, I beg the favor of your attention.”
“You see me here, speak,” the old woman said, and kept singing.
La Reynie shook his head in exasperation and looked at Charles.
Charles knelt beside her. “Ma soeur, did you have a child in your care, perhaps as many as twenty years ago, a boy called Tito? Also perhaps called Jean?”
“Tito?” She drew in a quick breath and looked up, seeming to see La Reynie and Charles for the first time. “My Tito? Where is he?”
Charles said softly, “When did you last see Tito?”
“Thirteen years ago. Only once. Soon after he went to be a servant, I was sent to see how he did. He was eight years old then.” She sighed. “I missed him sorely. But it was best for him; it was a place and a way into the world.” The nun stared into the distance, her pale lips moving in prayer or memory, Charles couldn’t tell. The child in her lap had sucked the rag dry and began to wail before she sighed and said, “Thirteen years ago he went to Madame Anne Mynette. Such a long time.”
“Madame Anne Mynette?” Charles said mildly.
“So she called herself four years before, when she came looking for her own child. I doubted then she had a right to the title,” the nun said acidly. “Women who come here to retrieve their babies-not that many ever come- hardly ever have a right to it.”
La Reynie raised an eyebrow at Charles. “It seems a long time for you to remember the woman’s name,” he said skeptically, watching her soak the rag again and quiet the baby.
“Oh, no, when she came in search of a little servant, I remembered her. Why would I not, when I’d already given her one of our babies?”
Charles frowned in confusion. “But you just said that when she came earlier, it was to get her own child.”
“Her own child had died.”
“Died? But-”
Soeur Mariana bridled. “I remember quite well how it was. A wet nurse left the child, because her own children had fallen ill, and she feared the infant would too. The infant she brought to us did sicken, and when ‘Madame’ Mynette came, it had just died. But I saw a chance for another child.” She made a derisive little sound. “Babies look much the same when they’re very young. And ‘Madame’ Mynette had told me that she hadn’t seen her child for some weeks. So I found a baby girl about the same age and with the same color eyes, though lighter hair. I wrapped her in a clean blanket, but then I was afraid the Mynette woman would see the difference and I would be in grave trouble. But God used little Tito to show me what to do. Tito was with me that day-I often kept him with me, though he lived in the older children’s house by then. Well, that day he was playing with the little trinket he had, a heart on an old ribbon. He’d always had it. It was around his neck when he was found in Notre Dame.” The nun’s face softened and she shook her head sadly. “His mother no doubt put it on him when she left him in the stone cradle that’s been there time out of mind for leaving babies in. So I-”
“Wait, ma soeur! Tito’s mother? But Martine Mynette told her friend that Mademoiselle Anne Mynette had put it on her when she was a baby!”
“Nothing of the kind.” Soeur Mariana gave Charles a shrewd look. “The Mynette woman was desperate with guilt when she came searching for her infant. Guilt for leaving her with the wet nurse, I suppose. Well, she deserved guilt, if a woman has a child, she should feed it with the breasts God gave her. If she told the girl that she’d given her the heart, it was no doubt to make herself seem a better mother.”
Charles’s head was spinning. “Tito’s mother,” he murmured, trying to make sense out of what he was hearing. “So the baby Mademoiselle Anne Mynette took home was a foundling like Tito himself.”
“Yes. Left on the Pont Neuf, if I remember rightly. Du Pont-from the bridge-we would have given her for a surname.”
Charles’s heart contracted as he tried to imagine young, desperate mothers, newborn children in their arms, watching to see that they were unobserved, putting their babies down somewhere that seemed safe. And walking away.
“The mothers often leave some trinket,” the nun said. “They think they’ll come and claim the baby, but they don’t. They’re whores, most of them.”
“So you are saying, ma soeur, that you took Tito’s necklace and put it on the baby who became Martine Mynette.”
“I thought the Mynette woman would be more likely to accept the child as hers, if I said I’d put the little heart on her baby when the wet nurse left her, to be sure she wasn’t mixed with the others and lost.” Soeur Mariana smiled complacently. “‘Madame’ Mynette made us a very large gift for that.” She rose and laid the sucking
