ST. STEPHEN’S DAY, THURSDAY, DECEMBER 26
The Feast of Christmas passed in Masses, a modest but welcome feast, and equally welcome rest. When the five o’clock rising bell clanged through the winter darkness the next morning, it pulled Charles from dreams of home and warmth. He forced himself out of bed, shivering in his long white linen shirt and the black knee-length underpants and stockings he’d taken to wearing night and day in the cold. He felt his way into his shoes, easy to do in the dark since they had no right and left, and twitched his woolen cassock down from its old-fashioned hanging rail. Thrusting his arms into its narrow sleeves, he pulled it on over his underclothes and tied the black cloth belt around his waist in the regulation knot. By feel, he pulled a narrow edge of shirt cuff and neckband to show white at neck and sleeve against the cassock’s black, retrieved his cloak from its night duty as an extra blanket, and draped it around his shoulders. Then he knelt at his prie-dieu for the required hour of meditation.
He said the Hours of Our Lady, added prayers for particular people, and finished, as always, with fervent prayers for the safety and well-being of his Huguenot cousin Pernelle and her little girl Lucie, living now in Geneva. Some of his brother Jesuits might have censored his prayers for Protestants-called Huguenots in France-unless he was praying for their conversion. But St. Ignatius had founded the Society of Jesus “to help souls,” and Charles sheltered his prayers under that wide rubric. When he reached his “amen,” he rose resolutely from the prie-dieu, refusing to stay there with the images of Pernelle that rose in his mind. It being still too dark to see the little painting of the Virgin and Child on the wall in front of him, he took his candle into the passageway. Listening to the faint morning sounds from other chambers, he lit the candle from the night lantern on the stair landing and hurried back to his own door, shielding the spark of warmth with his hand.
His chamber and tiny adjoining study were on the third floor of Louis le Grand’s main building, whose tall double doors were the college’s public entrance. The ground floor, which also housed the most important administrative offices, offered a few traces of elegance with its carpets and paintings, but Charles’s rooms were anything but stylish. The white walls were roughly plastered and the low ceiling was crossed with massive beams. Besides the prie-dieu and his little painting of the Virgin and Child, Charles’s sleeping chamber held a narrow uncurtained bed with a painted crucifix at its foot, a single chair without a cushion, and an old-fashioned, age-blackened wooden chest. Everything in the chest, except for his two extra shirts, was black: an extra pair of underpants, two extra pairs of stockings, a skullcap, and a pair of breeches for wearing under his cassock when activities like riding or directing ballet rehearsals threatened modesty.
The work of scholastics differed, and Charles spent more time as assistant rhetoric teacher than he did studying. Rhetoric was the art of communication, and because Jesuits believed that the body should be as eloquent in the service of God and virtue as the voice, rhetoric teachers produced plays and ballets in which their students acted and danced.
The only other things in Charles’s sleeping chamber were two hooks beside the hanging rail, and two niches in the thick plaster walls. The hooks held his two black hats. The flat-crowned, wide-brimmed one was his outdoor hat, and the brimless bonnet with its three corners, or points, was usually worn only indoors, on ceremonial occasions like the one for the Conde on Christmas Eve. The niche over the clothing chest held several books, and the one at the foot of his bed held his mother’s New Year’s gift, a small Pieta-the Virgin cradling her dead Son-carved in black stone. Eventually, it would be put where others could see it, but for now, he was allowed to keep it in his chamber.
In the study, another painted crucifix hung over a large scarred table that served as Charles’s desk. The chair had a hard red seat cushion, and a small frayed piece of brown rug kept his feet off the cold wood floor. Like most rooms in the college, chamber and study were unheated. The rector and a few others sometimes had a brazier in chamber or office, but only the kitchens, the infirmary, the fathers’ small refectory, and the common warming room-the calefactory-had fireplaces. There were also fireplaces in a few large chambers in the student court, but those were strictly reserved for noble or very wealthy boys. Otherwise, the assumption was that a cold and solitary body made for warm devotions, and that in large gathering places, so many bodies crowded together made heat enough.
Shivering in spite of his cloak, Charles broke the skim of ice on the water that had stood overnight in a tall copper jug. One of his eccentricities was that he liked to be clean. To most people, “clean” meant wearing a clean white linen shirt or chemise. But to Charles, it meant using water-even soap. Though he had to admit that he was washing less in this winter weather. Last summer, when he’d first come here, lay brothers had brought water to his chambers most mornings, sometimes even warm water, but this autumn, the rector had stopped that small luxury. Money was unexpectedly short, and the lay brothers-who cleaned, cooked, marketed, ran the infirmary, and also took care of many of the college’s mundane interactions with the outside world-were spread thinner because no new brothers could be accepted until college finances improved.
Charles wiped his teeth with a linen rag dipped in the little pot of tooth cleaner he kept. He didn’t shave, because his confessor had taken his shaving mirror and ordered him to go to the college barber like everyone else. Charles missed the mirror. Not from vanity-he didn’t mind going stubble-jawed half the time, nor did he want to look at himself. But the little mirror’s greenish glass had made everything look mysteriously under water, and he’d found that being reminded of mystery, even in the mundane act of shaving, had been a good part of the day’s beginning.
He started toward the window to open the wooden shutters, then wondered if leaving them closed might keep his rooms warmer. Telling himself that was exactly as likely as the miracle of loaves and fishes happening in the refectory and replacing the omnipresent bean pottage, he opened them in case the sun shone, put on the skullcap he’d gotten permission to wear for warmth, and went to Mass.
Unlike Benedictines, members of the Society of Jesus were not cloistered and did not pray the canonical hours together. Besides each day’s solitary hour of meditation, they gathered for Mass before scattering to the day’s duties, and twice during the day took time for an examen, the examination of conscience.
After five months in the college, Charles no longer got lost on his way to the chapel, or tripped over the way’s odd steps and sudden turnings, even in the early-morning dark. The original college buildings had been part of a private hotel, or townhouse. But in the century and a quarter since the Society of Jesus acquired the property, the old buildings had been reconfigured again and again to accommodate the growing number of students and teachers, and these upper floors were haphazard mazes of small chambers, studies, an occasional cramped salon, dead-end passages, and low doorways. He hurried through narrow passageways, around corners, up and down inconsequential steps waiting like traps, and finally down a last steep flight of stairs to a small door set into a corner.
The door opened into Louis le Grand’s main chapel, long and high ceilinged. Charles stopped for a moment, as he always did, under the small false dome where the aisles crossed, and looked up at the well-fed angels in their blue sky, reaching down to struggling mortals. He could barely see them as yet in the dim light, but knowing they were there was enough. The side altars, too, were swathed in shadow, and the gallery and its colored glass windows were black. He went to his usual place on one of the backless wooden benches, knelt on the stone floor, and bowed his head onto his clasped hands. All around him, heels tapped over stone, and cassocks, cloaks, and coats rustled as Jesuits, students, and a scattering of people from the neighborhood, especially men who belonged to the college confraternities, arrived and settled. Then the Mass began and Charles gave himself up to the mystery of God.
After a breakfast of bread, a little cheese, and leftover soup, eaten standing in the fathers’ refectory and as near the fireplace as possible, Charles walked back through the archway between the fathers’ courtyard and the students’ court, thinking about the day before him. His first task was calling on Monsieur Edme Callot, an elderly member of Louis le Grand’s bourgeois Congregation of the Ste. Vierge. These Congregations of the Holy Virgin, based in Jesuit houses and colleges all over Europe, were social groups promoting spiritual formation and charity among men and boys. Besides Louis le Grand’s four student Congregations, two for pensionnaires, boarders, and two for externes, nonboarders, there were also two Congregations for men, one for bourgeois and another for artisans. Charles was in charge of almsgiving in the older pensionnaires’ Congregation, and he also helped with the bourgeois group, which his friend Pere Thomas Damiot served as priest. This morning’s call was a courtesy offering of Christmas greetings, accompanied by a plea to M. Callot for a contribution to the bourgeois Congregation’s alms budget.
Charles’s spirits rose as he emerged from the students’ court into the Cour d’honneur and crunched across its gravel to the street passage. The air was sharp in the nose, but through the bare branches of trees scattered along the court’s edges, the sky showed a thin blue in the growing light. The surprising promise of sunshine made the short walk to the Place Maubert a pleasant assignment. Scholastics were not supposed to leave the college alone without special permission, and his companion this morning was Maitre Louis Richaud, whom he knew slightly and who was visiting a member of the artisans’ Congregation.
Richaud was waiting in the passage. A scholastic like Charles, he was lean and quick moving, with perpetually watchful black eyes. Unlike Charles, he was not a teacher, but a cubiculaire, who helped provision the private student chambers and the small dormitories for the less well-born and wealthy boys, and also supervised students. Students in Jesuit colleges were rarely left alone, especially boarding students, most of whom were the scions of rich and influential families.
Charles and Richaud greeted each other, and the porter let them out into the shadowed street.
“My man lives just off the Place Maubert,” Charles said, as they started down the hill. “In the rue Perdue, I’m told, at the Sign of Three Ducks. And yours?”
“He’s a tallow chandler, well off for his kind, I think. His shop is on the west side of the Place. Where the gallows used to stand, he says.”
Richaud sounded almost regretful that the gibbet was gone, but Charles shuddered. He’d seen too many corpses in the army, including too many poor souls left hanging for the birds.
Though the Christmas festival lasted until the Feast of the Epiphany on January sixth, working people couldn’t afford to stop work for so many holidays in a row, and the street was fairly busy. A carter bawled encouragement to his horse pulling a load of cured skins up the hill for the bookbinders along the rue St. Jacques. Cheaply cured skins, Charles thought, as the smell from the cart hit his nose. Farther along, at the corner of the Benedictine Hotel de Cluny’s property, a clutch of tonsured, black-robed monks argued with three fishwives who had blocked most of the small side street with a temporary stall. The oldest woman was giving as good as she got, and swinging a large fish by its tail in wider and wider arcs. Charles grinned at Richaud.
“Looks to me like she’s warming up her arm to use that fish on someone,” he said, surprising Richaud into what Charles sensed was rare laughter. On impulse, Charles said, “Are you coming to our Christmas farce tonight?”
Richaud’s mouth tightened angrily and he walked a little faster.
Charles eyed him. “A Farce of Monks, I mean. By Pere Damiot. It’s good, very funny, you’ll like it.”
“I doubt it. But I have to go.”
“Have to? What do you mean? Every group of Jesuits puts on an in-house farce of some kind at Christmas! Surely you go every year?”
“No.” The negative fell like a stone at Charles’s feet. “But this year my confessor, Pere Dainville, has ordered me to go. He thinks I dwell too much on sin.” Richaud sniffed disdainfully, making his disagreement clear.
How like Pere Dainville, Charles thought, smiling to himself. The old man was his confessor, too. Though he seemed frail, he was as implacable as a wall in demanding truth from his penitents. But once he had it, he was compassion itself in setting penances. He was also inventive at finding ways to puncture the self-absorption that guilt so easily bred. During these last months, Charles had had the hard but comforting experience of just how inventive Dainville could be.
The next turning to the right, and the second to the left, brought them out in the long, Y-shaped Place Maubert. Its stone houses were well kept: some set back behind tall, solid wooden gates, others with doors opening onto the street. Some had been rebuilt in a more modern style, with brick and stone, but one still showed timbering, and another was old enough to have a corner finished with a small, round tower capped with blue slate. Most of the houses had ground-floor shops with garish signs. There was an enormous red-brown boot, a loaf of golden bread the size of a carriage wheel, and a towering candle with an orange flame as long as Charles’s arm. The painted tumble of chops and trotters and tongues on the butcher’s sign was so realistic, it made his stomach growl.
“I’ll be over there,” Richaud said, pointing to the candle.
“Can you wait there for me, if my business takes longer than yours?”
“Of course. The chandler loves to talk. Bon chance with your Monsieur Callot.”
“Good luck to you, too, with your chandler.”
Circling around servants and housewives gossiping and filling pots and jugs at the fountain in the middle of the cobbled Place, Charles angled south, looking for the rue Perdue. It turned out to be hardly wider than a footpath, and he wondered as he started along it if it was called Lost Street because of its size. Its houses, whose doors opened directly onto the street, were also smaller and looked less prosperous than those on the Place. He found three ducks carved in stone over a door just beyond the lane’s sharp turn. The door was opened by a gangling serving man tugging at the sleeves of his tight gray jacket, as if that would make them long enough.
“Bonjour,” Charles said, “I am Maitre du Luc. I would like to see Monsieur Callot, if I may.”
Still pulling at his sleeves, the servant nodded and stood back from the door. Charles walked into a small antechamber with a worn but handsomely patterned black-and-red stone floor. An oak staircase rose on the right, against dingy plastered walls. The manservant disappeared through a doorway opposite the street door, leaving Charles at the foot of the stairs, listening to violin music, thumps, and loud laughter from the floor above.
Minutes went by. In a pause in the music, Charles heard the manservant arguing heatedly with someone. The voices seemed to come from beyond the door the servant had gone through, and wondering how long he was going to be left waiting, Charles opened the door cautiously and looked in. The bed with faded green curtains, the ragged cushioned chair, and cooking utensils scattered around the cold hearth told him this was a lodger’s chamber-not surprising, since Parisians of all ranks rented out any extra foot of space, especially on ground floors or in attics. The voices came from beyond a door straight across the room.
“Oh, blessed saints,” a woman said impatiently, “he doesn’t care, so why should we?”
Quick light steps approached and Charles withdrew his head just in time. An exasperated maidservant walked through the lodger’s chamber, tucking stray black curls under her white coif. Her gray woolen skirt and bodice were old, but better fitting than the young footman’s jacket. Ignoring Charles, she hurried up the stairs and into the room the music was coming from. And almost immediately backed out of it, as a man burst onto the landing.
“Maitre du Luc!” M. Edme Callot, bent and brittle and in his seventies, leaned precariously over the wooden stair railing, his long, high dressed chestnut wig threatening to slip off his bald head and land at Charles’s feet. “Welcome, maitre! Come up, come up and be at home!”
The maid hovering behind Callot threw up her hands and bustled back down the stairs, this time rolling her eyes at Charles as she passed him.
Charles gave her a rueful smile and started up to the landing. “Bonjour, Monsieur Callot,” he said as he climbed. “I have come to wish you a blessed Christmas season. And to have perhaps some talk about the Congregation of the Sainte Vierge.”
“Good, excellent!”
Callot wove his way back toward the music. Charles sighed and followed. But he was hardly through the door of the small salon when a young woman leaped at him. Her full red lips were smiling and her lemon-colored skirt was bouncing on the small hoops supporting its inverted cone shape. He jumped backward. She pirouetted without missing a beat and struck out toward the salon windows in a series of simple but prettily done chassees. A young dancing master bowing a little pocket violin beside the fireplace nodded at her enthusiastically and redoubled his efforts.
“Ha! She almost had you, maitre!” M. Callot was convulsed with mirth. In a parody of the girl’s chassees, he sidled to Charles and smote him on the shoulder. “Christmas, maitre, make the most of it!”
From the fumes accompanying Callot’s words, and the glass and bottle on a table near the fire, Charles gathered that the old man had already been making the most of it, with the help of the distilled spirits called eau de vie. This was definitely a new view of the quiet, pious elder whom Charles had glimpsed at gatherings of the bourgeois Congregation.
“May we talk somewhere a little quieter, monsieur?” Charles said, raising his voice to be heard over the music. “About the Congregation.”
“No, no, stay and dance! I know you can dance, I saw your Louis le Grand show in August! That Labors of Hercules was a good ballet, though why you bother with those godforsaken Latin tragedies, the sweet Virgin only knows. Ah, me, I would dearly like to dance Hercules
…” He posed unsteadily in fourth position, his right arm straight out as though he held a sword. As the girl danced past him, her feet flickering in swift pas de bourrees, he lunged, swiping the imaginary sword left and right, overbalanced, and fell into her arms. Laughing, she stopped and pushed him back onto his feet. The dancing master stopped playing and glowered.
“Oh, no you don’t, uncle,” the girl admonished, one capable-looking hand spread on Callot’s chest to hold him at arm’s length. “No more Christmas kisses.” She glanced at Charles, shrugged a wry shoulder, and dipped the best curtsy she could in the circumstances. She was perhaps nineteen or twenty, Charles thought, robust and auburn haired, a little too broad-faced for conventional beauty, but her tip-tilted nose and slightly down-slanting brown eyes were appealing. Her mouth, which Charles saw now was naturally red, looked as though it nearly always smiled. And her body-Charles lowered his eyes and firmly refused to consider her body.
“She calls me uncle to make me feel younger, but in fact she is my all-too-lovely great-niece,” Callot was saying. He waved his hand airily between the girl and Charles. “Maitre du Luc, Mademoiselle Isabel Brion.”Then he stepped back from her and grinned at the scowling dancing master. “And that is her very devoted maitre de danse, Monsieur Germain Morel.”
Monsieur, Charles noted, which meant that the dancing master was just beginning in his profession and had not been at it long enough to be called by the more honorable title of maitre, given not only to Jesuit scholastics but to many positions in French society. With a visible effort, Morel composed his face and managed a civil bow to Charles.
“Come now, mon cher Monsieur Morel,” Callot laughed, “it’s Christmas, we must make the most of it!”
“Hush, uncle, I fear you have already made the most of it,” Mlle Brion chided. “I think today you put eau de vie even in your morning chocolate!” She turned to the red-faced dancing master. “Do forgive us, monsieur,” she said sweetly. “Shall I try it once more?”
“Of course! By all means!” The young man’s face cleared and he set his violin on a chest against the tapestry-covered wall. “But first, mademoiselle, allow me to correct your pas de bourree.”
With a dazzling smile, Isabel Brion presented herself in front of him. Morel began to demonstrate, dancing in a circle around her so that she could see the step from every angle. Charles, only half listening to Callot rambling on about Hercules, watched with pleasure. The young teacher might be a beginner, but he was good, very good. Slender and supple, of middle height, wearing his own chestnut hair cut several inches above his shoulders, he had grace and speed, and his technique was perfect. Morel stopped beside Mlle Brion and resumed the pose from which the step began. She studied his well-muscled, stockinged legs, his tautly poised torso, his graceful arms, as though they were Holy Writ, and copied his stance almost exactly. But somehow, her right arm, in its ruffled sleeve that showed her round, firm forearm was just enough wrong that he had to stretch his own arm around her to make the correction. Color flooded their faces and they gazed earnestly at each other. Somehow, Morel forgot to withdraw his arm from around her shoulders.
Charles turned to Callot to hide his smile, wondering what the girl’s father would do if he walked into the salon and hoping he wouldn’t. Callot was still practicing unsteady sword thrusts and mumbling a running commentary on his own performance.
Charles watched him for a moment and said, “I think, monsieur, that I should return another day. I wish you-”
He broke off as the front door opened and shut and voices rose. Callot turned anxiously toward the landing, and the dancing master and Mlle Brion moved apart.
“Mademoiselle,” a deep voice rumbled, “I beg you, calm yourself. It will all come right, I assure you. And now-”
“But if we cannot find it?” It was a girl’s voice, shaking with emotion. “I will have nothing, Monsieur Brion, what will happen to me? No one will want me without money!”
“Ma chere, you forget your faithful Gilles. My son may seem shy in his suit, but I assure you, his heart is yours. But now that you are coming to live in my house, you will have more time to learn that he loves you.”
“No, Monsieur Brion,” the girl said with sudden spirit. “You are very good, but I have told you that I want to stay in my mother’s house. I want to be where she was.”
“Now, ma petite, do not start on that again. You are a minor and must do as I, your guardian, tell you. You will enjoy living with my Isabel, will you not? And as I say, you will come to know Gilles better.”
With an anxious look at Morel, Isabel Brion ran out onto the landing. “Papa,” she called down, “didn’t you find it?”
“We will, ma chere Isabel,” her father called back. “We will! This is only a little setback. I have brought Martine to you to amuse. I am going again to the Chatelet to search. Some disgracefully careless clerk has brought us to this pass, but we will find what we need, never fear, no reason in the world to fear. I don’t know what the Chatelet has come to, it is disgraceful…” The front door opened and shut again, cutting off the stream of words, and feet ran lightly up the stairs.
Frankly curious, Charles moved so that he could see the landing. A weeping girl pushed back her wide black hood and threw herself into Isabel Brion’s open arms. She was so small she hardly reached the other girl’s chin.
Isabel led her into the salon and sat her down in one of the high-backed chairs beside the fire. Murmuring comfort, she untied the girl’s cloak, a heavy black manteau, and pushed it gently back to reveal a front-laced, stiffened bodice and skirt of fine black wool, trimmed with lace like black spiderweb. Callot hurried to his bottle and half filled the glass beside it. Morel came hesitantly forward and bowed to the newcomer.
“Bonjour, Monsieur Morel!” The girl’s voice was high and sweet. She wiped her tears with a matching spiderweb handkerchief and glanced from the young man to her friend. “I am so happy to see you here, monsieur,” she said, smiling a little.
Callot returned and went awkwardly down on one creaking knee beside the chair. “This will do you good, ma petite.” He put the glass into her hand.
Charles was trying not to stare. From her little low-heeled, bronze leather mourning shoes to her black taffeta coif, the girl was breathtaking. Her bright hazel eyes were enormous, her lashes thick and dark. Her brows slanted like little wings. Her skin was milky, and the sun coming through the salon windows made a golden aureole around the ringlets showing under the coif. But even with such beauty, Charles knew that she was right to be afraid for herself if she was without family or finances. Beauty without money was rarely enough, marriage being nearly always made for social or financial advancement, and preferably both. For most people, building up the family fortune was the eleventh commandment.
The girl handed the glass back to Callot. “You are very kind, monsieur.”
“Ah, ma belle Martine, if I were forty years younger, I would be kinder still.” He opened his eyes wide at her, and she laughed in spite of herself.
“Even if-” She looked down and bit her lip. “-if I have no money?”
Callot smote himself on the chest. “On my honor, I would be your faithful knight until the bon Dieu’s stars fall from the sky!”
They both laughed and she touched him playfully on his withered cheek. Mlle Brion, who had perched on the arm of the chair, shook her head impatiently and leaned closer to her friend.
“But, Martine, if you would only marry Gilles, as my father so earnestly wishes you to, you would be safe forever. And we would be sisters!”
Callot snorted. “Gilles. Much use that one would be as a husband.”
Martine turned her head away. “You know that my mother did not wish me to marry your brother, Isabel,” she said softly. “I would be your sister with all my heart, but my mother saw that-well, that Gilles and I would not suit each other.”
“Oh, I know Gilles is not exciting,” the other girl cajoled. “But-” She shrugged expressively. “How many husbands are exciting?”
The dismay on the dancing master’s face made Charles clear his throat in an effort not to laugh. Callot laughed heartily.
Isabel blushed and stood up, seeming suddenly to remember her manners. “Maitre du Luc, forgive me for my discourtesy. This is my dearest friend, Mademoiselle Martine Mynette. The bon Dieu is testing her sorely. As you see, she is in mourning. Her mother, whom we all loved, had been ill for many months, and she died just over a week ago. Martine has no other family, and my father is now her guardian. The trouble is that the paper that assured Martine’s inheritance-drawn up many years ago by my father, who is a notary-is lost. He is trying every day to find it. But so far, he has not and we are very worried.”
Charles frowned in confusion. “But surely children must always inherit something of the family fortune?”
Martine Mynette glanced at her friend and drew herself up in her chair.
Isabel Brion said quickly, “Children of the blood always inherit, yes.” The two friends exchanged another glance. “But Mademoiselle Mynette is an adopted daughter, maitre.”
Charles looked from one to the other, even more confused. “I thought adoption was not legal here in the north. In the south it is, where we still follow Roman law, but-”
Sudden fire flashed in Martine Mynette’s eyes. “Some of our judges say adoption is not legal, but they are stupid, because people do it all the time. You have only to go to a notary like Monsieur Brion and promise to raise and care for the adopted child as though it were your own. And if the notary draws up for you what is called a donation entre vifs, you can give the child whatever you wish. Even if there are blood relatives, they cannot take away what the donation gives you. But the donation Monsieur Brion helped my mother make cannot be found.” Her lips quivered and she put a hand to her mouth.
Feeling increasingly at sea, Charles said, “I have never known a lone woman to adopt a child.”
Both young women looked at him disapprovingly.
“Of course a woman can adopt a child on her own,” Isabel Brion said. “Spinsters and widows without children have done it for ages. Even married women, though they must have their husband’s permission. My father often draws up such papers, though he does say women seem to do it less often now. But it is still perfectly possible. The trouble is that Martine’s mother’s copy of the donation is gone from their house, and my father found that mice had nested in his ledger for that month. And the stupid Chatelet clerks cannot find the original.”
“I see.” Charles offered an arm to M. Callot, who was struggling up from his chivalric pose beside the chair.
“Oof! I thank you, maitre. The knight would suffer all for his lady, though his knees greatly object.” Either the effects of the eau de vie had somewhat worn off or Callot was covering them for Martine Mynette’s benefit. He gazed sorrowfully at the girl. “I will bet anything you like, maitre, on any game you like, that my lazy, useless nephew never even took that original donation to the Chatelet!”
Isabel shook her head angrily. “Of course he did, Uncle Callot, that’s only your eau de vie talking. Some clerk has put the paper in the wrong place, that’s all. The point is, what are we going to do? Shall I come and help you search again, Martine?”
“I have looked and looked in the house,” the girl said, shaking her head hopelessly. “I’ve done little else since the morning my mother died.” She looked at Charles. “As Isabel said, she died on St. Gatien’s Day, exactly a week before Christmas. The donation was not where she’d always kept it, but I was sure I would find it when Monsieur Brion had the inventory done just a few days later. You know how the inventory clerks go through everything. But it has disappeared.”
“Where did you expect to find it, mademoiselle?” Charles asked, and then felt himself blushing at his naked curiosity. “Forgive me, I have no reason to-”
“I am glad to tell you. My mother hid her copy for safety behind a painting of Saint Elizabeth in her oratory, a little alcove in her chamber. She fixed it to the back of the painting with glue-you can still see a spot of glue where it was attached. But one night, a few days before she died, she told me to go and get it for her, she wanted to hold it in her hands and know that I would be safe when she was gone. I went to get it, but it wasn’t there. I thought she must have moved it and forgotten. I never doubted I would be able to find it. But-” She shook her head and gazed sadly into the fire. “My mother had terrible pain in her breast, and the poppy syrup they gave her made her confused.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I sat with her every night toward the end. By then, even the syrup didn’t help. I could do nothing for her.”
No one spoke, and the only sound was the crackling fire.
“Come,” Isabel Brion said briskly. She pulled her friend to her feet. “Let me get my cloak and we will go and search one more time. Two are always better than one.” She smiled at the dancing master. “And perhaps Monsieur Morel will be so kind as to escort us to your house? It is barely a step, Monsieur Morel, just to the Place Maubert, at the Sign of the Rose.”
“I am entirely at your service, mesdemoiselles!” Morel grabbed his hat from the chest and stowed the little violin in a deep pocket inside his wide-skirted coat.
Charles said he would walk as far as the Place with them, and Callot made as if to come, too, but his great-niece firmly refused him and he wandered sadly back to his bottle.
The little party went out into the thin sunshine, the two girls walking arm in arm and talking earnestly. Once, Martine Mynette laughed and looked archly at Morel, and Isabel Brion blushed crimson. Morel walked beside Isabel, studiously seeing and hearing nothing. Charles was silent, admiring the Mynette girl’s teasing attention to her friend’s romance, even as she herself faced disaster. His heart ached for the grieving girl, and he hoped that she had proof that she was the orphan of legitimately married and respectable parents, which she surely was, since Mademoiselle Anne Mynette had adopted her as her heir. And since Henri Brion wanted her as a wife for his son. People made an inflexible distinction between the orphans of respectable married parents and those nameless foundlings left on the street. The children were received in different institutions and faced vastly different fates. The best a foundling could hope for was to be taken in and raised as a servant, or sometimes as a future apprentice. Without the donation, and if she couldn’t prove her parentage to strangers, Martine would have very little chance of a good marriage. Her future could well be bleak indeed, if she went on resisting her guardian and his unexciting son.
When the little party reached the Mynette house at the Sign of the Rose, a substantial stone house with gates in a stone arch protecting its cobbled court, Charles made his polite farewells. But he was frowning as he started back across the Place to the chandler’s shop. How could a notary-and a guardian-lose track of such an important document?