The cast and Charles looked, too, but Philippe was nowhere to be seen. Heels rapping like hammer blows on the bare wooden floor, Beauchamps strode to an open window and stuck his head out.
“Philippe! Where are you? Get in here and dance before I use your guts for fiddle strings!”
“Um-he was by an open window when you came in, Maitre Beauchamps,” a small, slight blond boy said. “Looking out. And then-he stepped over the sill while everyone was bowing to you. He went toward the latrine. Perhaps he isn’t feeling well.” The boy put a hand discreetly on his belly.
The dancing master rolled his eyes at Charles. “Maitre du Luc, will you be so good as to see if Hercules is in the privy?”
Charles was nearly at the door before he realized that he didn’t know where the latrine was, but Jacques Doute caught up with him and pointed to the southeast corner of the courtyard.
“Through the arch there, on the left behind the screen of rose bushes, Maitre du Luc.” The wind whined across the court and whipped Charles’s cassock around his legs. Behind him, the fiddle began again as Beauchamps drove Hercules’s suite to the Hesperides without its leader. Overhead, clouds scudded past in a sky more like November than July. Half hoping that Philippe really was ill rather than playing the fool, Charles hurried through the arch Jacques had pointed out and into a smaller courtyard. Skirting the hedge of old roses, he stopped in the doorway of the long, low, wooden latrine building.
“Philippe Doute? Are you here? Are you ill?”
Birds fluttered in and out of the latrine’s low eaves, but nothing else disturbed the dark, malodorous quiet. Charles took a few steps inside and was peering along the row of seats when unseen hands shoved him hard between the shoulders. He crashed to his knees and heard someone pound away across the gravel court. Charles scrambled up. Jouvancy’s nephew or not, he thought grimly, this time Philippe Doute would get what was coming to him. A flash of yellow disappeared through a second narrow arch, and Charles followed it into a yet smaller courtyard, which was empty and surrounded on three sides by outbuildings. Its fourth side was a high wall with a wooden gate. The sound of running feet was loud beyond it.
“Philippe! Don’t be an idiot, come back!”
The gate was locked. Cursing his old wound, Charles jumped for the top of the wall, hauled himself up with his good arm until he could get a leg over, and dropped into the narrow cobbled way that ran behind the college. The boy was out of sight, but his running echoed between the walls that hemmed both sides of the lane. Charles’s long legs ate up the distance. And where the lane turned sharply left, he caught another flash of yellow and a glimpse of black hair. He put on a burst of speed and emerged into the rue St. Jacques, only to flatten himself against a building as a carriage flew past inches from his nose. Dodging the end of a ratcatcher’s pole hung with pungent evidence of the catcher’s skill, he darted into the street. A panting, leather-aproned man pushing a bundle- laden handcart stopped beside him and lowered the cart’s handles to the ground for a rest. Intent on the hunt, Charles vaulted onto the cart so he could see over the crowd.
“What are you doing, you crazy priest?” The man pulled angrily on Charles’s cassock. “Get off my cart!”
Charles overbalanced and landed in a passing group of students wearing short scholar’s gowns. “Did you see a boy in a yellow shirt run past just now?” he asked breathlessly.
Smiling unpleasantly, the students closed around him and looked him insolently up and down. Charles added the short gowns to the hostile faces and came up with the unwelcome answer that these were University of Paris students. Though new to the city, he was well aware that its university hated Jesuits in general and Louis le Grand in particular, deploring its influence, its progressive humanist theology, its modern teaching methods, its ballet and drama. Most of all, the university hated the Jesuit college’s enjoyment of so much tantalizing property just across the street.
“Why do you want this boy in a yellow shirt, Jesuit?” one of the students drawled, recognizing the distinctive Jesuit cassock, which wrapped to the side instead of buttoning. “Good luck to him, he’s well away from your lies.”
“And what are you doing out without your priest hat?” another taunted.
Charles whirled as the second speaker plucked off his skullcap from behind and tossed it to one of his friends, who threw it into the gutter in the middle of the street. Hands twitching with the urge to thrash the lot of them, Charles planted his feet and locked eyes with each boy in turn. They seemed to register his height and breadth of shoulder for the first time and drew closer together.
“Perhaps you didn’t hear me, messieurs,” Charles said pleasantly. “Did any of you see a boy in a yellow shirt just now?”
They shook their heads.
“Then I thank you for your help, messieurs,” Charles said, sounding as though they were all in someone’s salon and still showing his teeth in what might be taken for a smile by the unwary.
The boys walked quickly away, casting apprehensive glances over their shoulders. Charles went to see if his new skullcap was salvageable. It was true that he shouldn’t be in the street without his hat, but he hadn’t planned on chasing a runaway Hercules out into Paris. Sadly, he surveyed his new skullcap, which rested like a funerary offering on a very dead cat and definitely was not salvageable. He left it where it was and started back to the college, zig-zagging through the traffic and peering down side streets and into shops in case Philippe was hiding somewhere. He guessed, though, that the boy was long gone, absorbed into the melee of the streets.
The cacophony that was Paris traffic-voices, feet, hooves, rattling wheels, barking dogs-beat against Charles’s ears as he walked. Everyone and everything shared the square-cobbled pavement and shouting matches erupted constantly, everyone being certain that the bon Dieu had put the next open foot of pavement there for him or her alone. Charles wove his way among the high-wheeled, painted carriages, students in short gowns, white-, black-, and brown-robed clerics on foot and on mules, professors lost in private fogs of thought, coiffed and basket- laden serving girls, the scavenging dogs, ragged street porters with loaded wooden carrying frames on their backs, and bewigged gentlemen whose ice-white linen gleamed against the jewel colors of their skirted coats as they swept iron-tipped canes before them to clear a path. Over it all, bawling street vendors cried everything from “brooms, brooms,” to “Portugal, Portugal,” which sounded so warmly exotic but meant shriveled little oranges.
Charles wondered why on earth Philippe had run. Running away from the college was not a light offense. Nor was shoving a professor to the ground in the process, though now that his temper had cooled, Charles didn’t intend to report that. But even without that black mark, Philippe had almost certainly lost his place in the ballet, if not in the college. Charles had seen him watching the classroom windows before he vanished, seen that his mind was anywhere but on his dancing. Had something-or someone-in the courtyard drawn him away? Jouvancy had said that the boy was bright. But he was also sixteen, and sixteen, whether bright or dull, wasn’t known for its wisdom.
Charles rang the bell at the college’s small postern door to the right of the formal entrance and then stepped back to look up at the carved and painted tympanum above the tall double doors. When the Jesuits opened their Paris college more than a century ago, they’d called it the College of Clermont. Now the tympanum said “Collegium Magni Ludo,” The College of Louis the Great, and was topped by a crown and the royal fleur de lis, which proclaimed King Louis XIV’s patronage.
A lay brother opened the postern and Charles hurried through the echoing stone-vaulted passage to the Cour d’honneur, toward the sound of Beauchamps’s violin. The dancing master was still driving the harried, and now heroless, dancers toward the mythical Hesperides. With a sigh for the ephemeral allure of earthly paradises, Charles went to report his failure to find Philippe Doute.
Chapter 5
When Charles finally gained the quiet of his chamber that night, he was too tired even to look out the window at Paris. He stripped down to his shirt, fell into bed, and stretched out, past caring whether his feet hung over the edge. He fell asleep between one thought and the next, to dream that he was dancing a gigue while Pernelle played Beauchamps’s little fiddle.
When he woke, he was curled into a tight ball and the day’s first light was gray around the shutters. He said the waking prayers, yawned his way to the window to open shutters and casement, and leaned out. Across St. Jacques, the dome capping the university’s new church was just visible in the growing light. The air was blessedly mild and birds poured their songs into the early quiet. A sharp rap at the door made him turn reluctantly from the
