books. Or over wine and argument, more likely, Charles thought, a little enviously. When he’d been a student in Carpentras, enjoying wine with his academic arguing had meant risking expulsion by climbing a wall and going to a tavern. Most arguments, and tavern wine, hadn’t been worth it. This quarter, however, named for the Latin that was still the language of academic life, not only teemed with colleges-secondary schools for boys-but had at its heart the University of Paris, where older students, at least, must have more freedom-even if the wine wasn’t any better. Prayers forgotten, Charles stayed at the window, unwilling to let the darkling city go from his sight.
This wasn’t his first time away from the south. But nothing-certainly not the little town of Carpentras, not even his two years in the army or his novitiate in bustling Avignon-had prepared Charles for Paris. The heavy rain on this last day of his journey had brought early dusk, and it was long past Compline and dark in earnest by the time he’d ridden past the embankment where the city walls and the St. Jacques gate had once stood and joined the scattering of people hurrying home on horseback and foot. Keeping a wary eye on the fast-moving, lantern-hung coaches and carts, he’d fumbled in his travel purse for coins to give the beggars following his horse in spite of the weather and the late hour. The city had closed around him and he’d welcomed her embrace.
Now, standing at the window, he felt as though the goddess Fortuna had picked him up by the scruff of the neck and set him down in ancient Athens or Rome. As though, at any moment, the revered ancients whose works he taught would gather under his window to study him, peering into his brain, his heart, his very soul, to see if he was still worthy to pass on their learning. Romans had lived where the College of Louis le Grand stood, just as they had in the countryside where he’d grown up. From the time he could walk, he’d climbed on their ruined statues and played around the broken fluted column leaning at one corner of his father’s olive grove. Part of a black-and-white mosaic plowed up in a field was tiled into his mother’s kitchen fireplace. The Romans’ ghostly presence had fired his imagination and helped to make him a teacher of Latin rhetoric. So strong was his sudden sense of their presence here on the hill they’d called Lutetia, that he stood up straight and smoothed his cassock. But it was the reeking cart and its pair of muttering attendants that stood below him in the street, not Cicero and the rest. Laughing at his foolishness, he reached to pull the window shut, but before he closed it, he kissed his hand to sleeping Paris.
He latched the casement, glad for its glass against the night’s unseasonable chill, and closed the plain wooden shutter over it. These two little rooms were the first he’d ever had with glassed windows, since most windows in the warmer south-except in churches and grand houses-were still made of oiled paper. He turned to survey his chamber. Its roughly plastered white walls held a narrow, uncurtained bed, a backed but uncushioned chair, an age-blackened wooden chest for his linen, a hanging rail for his cassock, and a small oak table against one wall. A candle stood on a three-legged stool beside the bed and a couple of nichelike plaster shelves were built into the thick walls. The low, massive ceiling beams weighed on the small space, and he fought the urge to crouch as he went to trim his guttering candle’s wick. Neither the chamber nor the even smaller adjoining study had a fireplace, and he was too cold for the fumbling process of finding his flint and tinder in the dark and relighting the candle.
He shed his cassock, riding breeches, shoes, and stockings and stood in his long linen shirt eyeing the bed’s thin brown blanket. His woolen cloak was still wet, so he spread his cassock on top of the blankets, stirring the candle flame and sending shadows winging out from the crucifix hanging at the foot of the bed. He knelt, said the night prayers, gave thanks for his safe journey and this new assignment, and added prayers for Pernelle and her family. Surely, in the two months since he parted from them, they had reached Geneva. Let her-let all of them-be safe, he whispered, leaning his head on his clasped hands. Then he blew out the candle and slid between the coarse and worn flax sheets.
He woke to freezing feet and the clamor of bells. Peering blearily over the covers, he saw that his feet had neither mattress under them nor blanket over them. A common occurrence and his mother’s fault. His maternal forebears were the Norsemen who’d swept down from the Viking lands long ago to leave their name to Normandy, and their blondness and long bones to future generations. Charles was still gathering his sleep-sodden wits for morning prayers and rubbing one foot against the other for warmth, when a sharp rap at the door made him draw his feet out of sight like a startled turtle.
“Still sleeping, I see.”The lay brother sent the door bouncing back against the wall. He set a tray on the table and flung open shutter and casement to a flood of morning light that turned his red hair to a shock of flame. Charles grimaced. The light was as accusatory as the brother’s voice. It was obviously long past five o’clock, the normal rising time in a Jesuit college.
“Bon jour, mon frere,” Charles said, trying to reclaim some dignity.
The lay brother, lean and wiry under the heavy canvas apron over his shorter version of the Jesuit cassock, looked to be still in his teens, a good ten years younger than Charles.
“It’s half after six,” the brother said. “Those bells were for first classes. But I was told to let you sleep. Since you were so late getting here.” He stared down his long thin nose at Charles, who couldn’t tell whether the boy disapproved of all lateness, or was simply envious of his chance to stay in bed.
“I am Maitre Charles du Luc, mon frere. May I know your name?”
“I am Frere Denis Fabre.” His disapproving gaze shifted to Charles’s feet, showing again beyond the end of the bed. “Your bed is too short,” he said, as though Charles had made away with part of it during the night. He turned to the table and began taking things off the tray. “The assistant rector, Pere Montville, wants to see you,” he said over his clattering. “Immediately.”
Charles shot out of bed and hurriedly straightened its covers. “Mon Dieu, why didn’t you say so sooner?”
“You were asleep sooner. Here’s shaving water. And something to break your fast. The bread is stale. And the water won’t be hot now.”
“Good, fine, thank you.” Charles was searching in his bag for his razor. “Where do I go when I’m ready?”
“I’ll have to show you, won’t I?” Frere Fabre drifted out of the room, sighing faintly.
Charles rolled his eyes, laughing in spite of himself, and dug his razor out of his bag. He shaved himself badly in the cold water and got a crick in his neck peering at his greenish reflection in the little round mirror he’d brought. He nearly choked himself trying to get quickly through the dry bread and cheese. But in spite of his hurry, he uncorked his little pot of wine vinegar, salt, alum, and honey and gave his teeth a sketchy cleaning with the end of the towel. Not something most people would have done, but another thing he had to thank his mother for. He cleaned his teeth most days, and he even washed with water fairly often, instead of only changing his linen or wiping himself down with a dry towel. He took his brother Jesuits’ warnings about the likely consequences of his eccentric habits in good part and went his way, usually free of lice and, so far, with all his teeth.
He recorked the pot and pulled on his cassock. With a final gulp of heavily watered wine to dull the sting of his tooth cleaner, Charles clapped a new skullcap on his head for extra warmth and hurried into the passage. The lay brother, slumped against the wall and whistling tunelessly under his breath, broke off abruptly and was running a critical eye over him, when the door across from Charles’s opened and a thick-bodied Jesuit with long, curling black hair emerged. Ignoring both Fabre and Charles, he swept toward the stairs with his Roman nose in the air.
“Your cap is crooked, maitre,” Fabre said to Charles laconically.
Gravely, Charles straightened it. “Better?”
Fabre nodded curt approval and loped down the stairs. After two narrow flights, the bare wooden stairs widened and became pale stone. A grand, stone balustraded curve decanted the two of them into an anteroom between the college’s tall double front doors and the grand salon, where the rector, Pere Le Picart, and the senior rhetoric master, Pere Jouvancy, had briefly greeted Charles the night before. Fabre led Charles across the salon to another anteroom and stopped at a closed door. Before he could knock, the door opened and a Jesuit backed slowly through it.
“But, mon pere,” he was saying earnestly, “I beg you, you cannot imagine what this glorious painting would add-”
“I can imagine what our superior, our good Paris Provincial-not to mention Rome-would say about the cost,” someone beyond the door said tartly. “No, and again no. I am sorry.”
Pulling the door shut harder than was strictly necessary, the disappointed Jesuit muttered a greeting to Charles and clumped dispiritedly away. Fabre tapped on the door and it flew open.
“No, I tell you! Oh. Sorry, not you.” The speaker’s middle-aged pudding face relaxed into a beaming smile and he bowed slightly. “I am Pere Montville, assistant rector here. You must be Maitre du Luc. Come in, come in,” he said, as Charles bowed in return. “So long as you don’t want me to buy paintings. Thank you for delivering him, Frere Fabre.” He ushered Charles into his tiny office. “Every Jesuit wants something for his pet enthusiasm,” he sighed. “More paintings for the chapel, more telescopes, maps, books, I don’t know how the bursar keeps his
