“Bonjour, Maitre du Luc, though a good day it hardly is, the poor young man. Little Antoine is heartbroken. As well he should be. No small thing to lose a brother. Marie-Ange and I stayed a moment in the chapel, praying to the Virgin for him. Ah, well. Make your reverence, Marie-Ange.”
Mme LeClerc curtsied and pulled the child forward. Still scowling, the little girl studied Charles, who studied her gravely in return. She was perhaps eight or nine, with her mother’s round brown eyes and curly, bright brown hair under her white coif. Her mother prodded her. With a much put-upon sigh, she fluffed her dark blue skirt and curtsied prettily.
“I suppose we shouldn’t really be here,” Mme LeClerc said, her work-roughened hands fussing with the black scarf loosely wound over her white coif and around her throat. “But we had to come. Antoine and Marie- Ange-”
“Maman, shhh!” The little girl shook her head and her curls danced.
Charles suddenly remembered the rector saying that Mme LeClerc’s daughter sometimes strayed into the college stable.
“Maitre du Luc won’t mind, ma petite. Though I know your boys aren’t supposed to play with girls,” she said to Charles. “But they’re just children, and it’s only in the shop. That-” Her face darkened and Charles thought for a moment she was going to spit, but she restrained herself. “-that Guise would bring Antoine to buy a treat, or his brother would, and he and my little one took a liking to each other.” She stopped for breath.
“Antoine needs friends.” Charles smiled at Marie-Ange, who smiled back in surprise. “Especially now. The Doutes are taking Philippe back to Chantilly for burial, but Antoine is staying here.”
Mme LeClerc frowned and stepped closer to Charles. “But, maitre,” she hissed, “do you think that’s wise?”
“Wise, madame?”
She looked over her shoulder to be sure no one else was near. “I hardly slept a wink last night,” she whispered, “thinking about the poor young man they’re burying and wondering if that masked man will try again for Antoine! Have you thought that he is likely the one who killed Philippe?”
The thought had certainly occurred to him, and Charles looked at Mme LeClerc with new respect. Her eyes darted warily around the court and she took a step toward the street passage, shooing Marie-Ange ahead of her.
“Will you see me to the postern, maitre?” They began walking and she said, “One cannot accept it, maitre. Two brothers attacked in three days? Who can believe in two villains?”
“Madame, you said that the horseman leaned down toward Antoine. Was there anything in his hand?”
She eyed him shrewdly. “Like a dagger, you mean? Not that I saw. But a dagger would explain why he leaned so far. Nearly out of the saddle the man was. And how else did the child get that gushing cut?”
“When I got there, Antoine was lying on his back. Is that how he fell?”
“Yes, backward. I tell you, maitre, my heart warns me that we have not seen the last of that man. If only Antoine were going home-anyone would think his parents would want him there at such a time!”
“His stepmother feels that he will be better off here at school than moping at home.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Stepmother, is she? Ah. I see. Poor little cabbage. So how do you mean to find that man, maitre?”
But before Charles could decide what to say, peals of laughter came from the street passage.
“Ah, mon Dieu, what is she doing now?” Mme LeClerc picked up her skirts and hurried ahead of him.
Marie-Ange was standing beside the postern door and Frere Martin, the porter, was rocking with laughter on his stool. When he saw Mme LeClerc, he heaved himself up, greeted her as an old friend, and nodded to Charles.
“Do you know what this child said, maitre? I asked her if she knew her catechism, and she said she could tell me about Adam and Eve and the garden. So I said, ‘Yes, do, ma petite.’ And she said, ‘Well, who is in the garden, mon frere?’ ” The brother shook with laughter. “ ‘ In the garden,’ she said, ‘are un pomme, deux poires, et beaucoup des pepins!’ One apple, two pears, and a lot of seeds! Seeds of sin, maitre, get it? A doctor of the church, this one!”
Charles smiled politely at the old joke. Poire meant pear, but it also meant fool. Mme LeClerc had gone peony red. Marie-Ange was grinning at her own cleverness and avoiding her mother’s eyes.
“I will kill Roger for telling her that,” Mme LeClerc muttered as she took her daughter none too gently by the hand. “Au revoir, maitre. Mon frere.”
Still laughing, the brother opened the postern, and Mme LeClerc hurried Marie-Ange away. Charles went back to the Cour d’honneur, squinting in the harsh light and wondering how long the funeral feast would last. A musical peal of laughter made him catch his breath and look up. In a corner beyond the senior refectory, the usually dour lay brother Frere Fabre stood talking with a woman in plain mourning. Her back was to Charles and her head and shoulders were draped in a voluminous black scarf, but her laugh was as bright and full of life as the sunshine. So like Pernelle’s laughter that he had to stop himself running across the gravel to see her face. Please God, he prayed, forcing himself to keep his measured pace, let Pernelle have a good life now, a life with laughter in it.
Without letting himself look more closely at the woman, he went into the refectory and scanned the crowd to be sure his students were still there and still gowned. When he saw them, he lifted a hand in greeting and went to the dais, where the food and drink were laid out. To his surprise, Fabre was already there as well.
“I didn’t expect to see you back inside so soon,” Charles said, as Fabre filled his plate and poured the watered wine. “I saw you in the court just now.”
The young brother flushed so red that his freckles seemed to melt together. “It was nothing,” he said hurriedly. “Only talk. I was hardly gone at all.”
“Softly, mon frere, I am not accusing you of anything.”
The boy turned away to refill the pitcher. “She’s my sister.”
Watching him curiously, Charles set his plate on the edge of the table and sipped his wine. He liked this boy, in spite of his prickliness. Or maybe even because of it. “How did you become a lay brother, mon frere? I am always interested in how men come to the Society.”
Fabre gave him a wary glance. “My father is a tanner out by the Bievre River.” He shuddered. “A horrible, stinking trade. I begged our parish priest for schooling.” Fabre rubbed at the water beaded on the pitcher. “He taught me to read a little and got me in here as a scholarship student. With a scholarship, you get to live in the college with the pensionnaires. Crowded together in a dortoir, but it’s a higher place than being just a day boy.” His face clouded. “But my reading never got better.”
“But why? You obviously have more than enough wit for it.”
Fabre ducked his head and smiled fleetingly at the compliment. Then he shrugged. “The letters won’t stay still for me. They get backward on the page and I can’t make out the words. Pere Dainville thought I was possessed. He exorcised me, but I still couldn’t read much. They said I had to leave, but Pere Guise made them keep me as a lay brother.”
“Pere Guise?” Charles was too startled to cover his surprise.
Fabre turned away and busied himself rearranging a plate of tarts. “He said I would be a good servant.”
“And are you content?”
“I am not a tanner.” Fabre glanced at Charles, his eyes hard, and started filling plates for the group of boys approaching the table.
Charles joined his students. When a brother came to say that the feast was ending, they drained their glasses, trudged back into the sweltering courtyard, and positioned themselves on the temple steps. After another interminable wait, the guests appeared, walking in slow procession. M. and Mme Doute came first, escorted by Pere Le Picart and Pere Jouvancy. Mme Doute, a head shorter than her none-too-tall husband, walked slowly, her wide black brocade skirts swaying and her coming child apparent even under her long mourning veil. Behind them, red- eyed and tear-streaked, Antoine and his cousin Jacques Doute walked hand in hand. Pere Guise came next with a veiled woman Charles had heard was Mme Doute’s sister. Pere Montville and a thin, gray-haired man representing the Prince of Conde’s household followed. To Charles’s surprise, the police chief Lieutenant-General Nicolas de La Reynie, whom he had seen leaving the rector’s office the day he found Philippe’s body, was also in the line, companioned by a short round man Charles didn’t know. The rest of the company, twenty or so relatives and friends, both clerics and lay, stretched behind them.
When the Doutes reached the Temple of Rhetoric, Le Picart and Jouvancy bowed and stepped back to allow
