Sullen clouds hung over Paris. The day had grown so ominously dark that side streets were black tunnels pricked here and there by candle flames in rooms otherwise as dark as the streets. The street lantern lighters were not due out for an hour or so, but shops were closing and most people walked quickly, eyeing the ominous sky.
“Snow, for sure,” Charles heard a Pont Neuf broom peddler call to a bookseller packing up his stall. “Not a little snow, either. I’m for home and the soup pot.” She hefted her armload of brooms and made off across the bridge. The first flakes started to fall as Charles turned left from the bridge and cut up the rue de L’arbre Sec toward the rue St. Honore. By the time he reached the Capuchin monastery’s gate, north of the Tuilleries, he was brushing snowflakes from his eyelashes, and he had dumped snow off his hat twice.
He rang the bell and then waited so long that he wondered if the friars, who rose at midnight like the Benedictines to sing Matins and Lauds, had already gone to bed. The gate offered little protection from the weather, and there were few buildings across the street to block wind. Finally, footsteps slapped over stone, the grille slid back, and a lantern was lifted to let the friar see who was there.
“Bonsoir, mon frere,” Charles said through chattering teeth. “Forgive my intrusion, but I must speak with Pere Michaut.”
The grid closed, bolts were undone, and the gate opened narrowly. Charles went through and the silent friar, bearded and brown robed, closed and locked it behind him. With a gesture, he bid Charles follow and led the way across cobbles, the long point of his hood swinging at his back, and through a small door in a stone wall. Watching the man’s sockless, sandaled feet flash in and out below his gown of raw wool, Charles thought how decadent he must seem to a brother of this deeply reformed Franciscan order. Even in leather shoes, stockings, shirt, and two layers of good, well-woven wool, he was shivering. They rounded the turn of the covered cloister walkway and the monk took him through another door, into a small, bare candlelit room. The monk signed to him to wait and left him there.
New-built a hundred years ago by Catherine de Medici, the monastery was more modern than some of the old monastic houses, but because it was Capuchin, Charles knew that it would be as austere as any ancient monk could have wished. The small room had no fireplace, and Charles walked briskly up and down, rubbing his hands together and working his cold-numbed face so that he could speak when the time came. He stopped before the lifelike crucifix on one wall and prayed for words to convince Pere Michaut, the Capuchin superior, that what he’d come to do was necessary. Even if Michaut would not give permission, the heavy snow might work in his favor. If it went on as it had begun, returning across the river would be dangerously difficult, if not impossible. And any return would of necessity be on foot, since Capuchin houses kept no animals of any kind, not even horses or mules. Staying the night might well prove useful, even if the superior did not.
“God be with you, mon pere,” a deep voice said behind him.
Charles turned and saw an elderly, white-bearded Capuchin regarding him out of blue eyes sunk in a nest of wrinkles.
“And with you, Pere Michaut.” Charles bowed. “I am Maitre Charles du Luc, come from Louis le Grand with the permission of my rector, Pere Le Picart, to ask your help.”
“You are welcome. How may I help you?”
With a last hurried inward prayer, Charles told him about Gilles Brion’s danger, his own certainty that Brion was innocent, and the pressure on Lieutenant-General La Reynie to extract a confession. Then he asked Michaut if he remembered Gilles Brion coming to the monastery as a guest a week earlier, on Thursday, December twenty-sixth.
Michaut nodded, but said nothing.
Nerving himself, Charles said, “Might young Monsieur Brion have spoken to someone else in your house during that night? Someone who could tell us for certain about his frame of mind?”
Michaut shook his head, his eyes never leaving Charles’s face.
“A man may have need for spiritual counsel in the night hours, mon pere,” Charles said softly.
“We sleep early, we rise for the midnight offices, and we sleep again. We are a very silent fraternity, maitre.”
“Gilles Brion needs your help, mon pere. I know that he wants to join your house.”
“He is very young.” Michaut smiled slightly. “Even for a young man.”
“Mon pere, are there other young men just now who mean to join you, young men Gilles Brion may have talked to that night about their mutual hope? Was there another young man staying as a guest that night?”
Michaut studied the plain stone tiles at his feet. In the utter silence of the monastery, the wind whining around the building was almost indecently loud.
“No one else was a guest here on the Thursday night after Christmas.” He sighed and looked at Charles. “Maitre, a Capuchin monastery is not for the faint of heart or spirit. Only a few find the vintage of our vineyard sweet. But God knows better than I who those few shall be. He brings them to us in His own time. Until then, judging is not my business. Nor is breaking my own peace over the matter. I will pray that if the young man is innocent, he will be delivered.”
By which Charles understood that Michaut was not going to tell him anything about Gilles Brion or any friend of his. He made one last try.
“But if breaking your own peace might save his life, mon pere? Is that not your business?”
Instead of answering, the Capuchin looked at the room’s small window, which shook a little in its frame as the pitch of the wind rose.
“Let me offer you our hospitality tonight, Maitre du Luc. I doubt you could see your way home safely. Even if the lanterns have been lit, they will not stay lit in this storm.” He turned his gaze on Charles, his blue eyes suddenly sharp with intent. “You may have our guest cell, where Monsieur Brion sometimes stayed.”
“You are very kind, mon pere. I accept most gratefully,” Charles said politely. He was grateful not to have to brave the weather. But he thought wryly that trying to find his way through blowing snow couldn’t be any harder than trying to pierce this man’s determined silence.
Because he counted as a monk, even if a sadly decadent one, Charles was invited to share the friars’ meager supper. Seated at the bottom of a long table bare of cloth, he silently ate the dark bread, young cheese, and boiled vegetables. Outside the refectory windows, the storm had grown louder and drafts made the flames of the two tallow candles on the table jump and bow. When thanks had been said, the friars filed out of the rectory and Michaut gestured to Charles to follow.
They went to the church and into the candlelit choir for Compline, the last office of the day. Charles withdrew into the blackness of the nave. Not wanting to stumble over anything looking for a bench, he stood still and composed himself to pray with his hosts. Murmuring under their monotone chant, which was not quite singing and not quite speaking, he felt as though the Compline prayers washed through and over him, carrying away his worry and his fear. For the first time, he found himself wishing Jesuits did this, even wondering whether he should be a Capuchin, to have this vast healing silence as his home.
When the office ended, he moved toward the choir and followed the friars out into a passageway. The Capuchins turned toward their cloister. The friar who had brought Charles from the gate, now carrying a lit candle, made a sign and led him a different way. Stopping at a low door, the friar went into a tiny guest cell, lit a candle in an iron holder on the stone wall, bowed, and left Charles on the threshold.
Looking around the cell with a sense of shock that threatened to become shame, Charles’s thoughts about becoming a Capuchin died a quick and permanent death. He could cross this cell in three strides. There was one narrow, shuttered window high up in the stone wall. There was no furniture whatever. The bed was a bare board with one rough blanket folded on it. No wonder Capuchins get up at midnight and go to church, an irreverent part of him said silently.
He sat down on the board. Did this austere nest have anything to tell him? His eyes went to the window. Gilles and his friend could not have come and gone that way. The window was too high to reach without something to stand on, and too narrow to go through, even if reached. He got to his feet, already glad to be off the bed, and took the candle from its iron ring. Huddling his cloak around him, Charles opened the low door and looked out. This guest cell was far away from the friars’ cells, he guessed, nearer the front court and worldly comings and goings. But it wasn’t far from the church. If the church was not only for the friars, but also a parish church, then it would have a door on or near the street. Germain Morel had heard Gilles thanking God that his friend lived “close to the house.” The Capuchin house, Charles thought he’d probably meant. Perhaps Gilles had simply slipped out of the church door in the night and gone to visit his friend. Charles took the candle out of its holder and stole out of the cell into the dense silence and darkness of the house.
He found the door into the friars’ choir and went from there down into the nave. Shielding his candle flame, which was writhing and dancing from the drafts under doors and around windows, he walked the length of the nave to the wide west door. It opened easily, into a courtyard smaller than the one he’d entered by. The falling snow was blinding, as heavy a snow as he’d ever seen, but as it swirled and shifted in the wind, he glimpsed a gate that had to lead to the rue St. Honore.
Charles withdrew into the church again and leaned all his weight on the door to shut it against the wind. Now he knew for certain that leaving and returning to the enclave at night was possible. All Brion would have had to do was avoid coming and going during the midnight office. And if, by some chance, he was discovered in the passage between the church and his cell, he could easily claim prayer as his excuse. So going out to the friend who lived nearby was possible. And surely more pleasant than the bare, cold guest cell. How, though, to find out where the friend lived?
His candle was out now, but Charles found his way back to his cell with only one false turn and huddled on the straw-covered board, wrapped in his cloak and the blanket. He tried to think out what to do next. He was certain that the Capuchin superior knew who Brion’s friend was. But he doubted he could make any more headway through the silence of these famously silent monks. He would have to scrutinize everyone who came to Prime and early Mass and afterward try to talk to any young men. Or at least follow the one who mostly closely fit the bare description Morel had given him of Brion’s friend. Shivering and dissatisfied, Charles fell uneasily asleep.
He woke what seemed like hours later with his left shoulder aching with cold and shrieking its disapproval of the board. He sat up, looking for any sign of light around the cell’s window, but there was only thick darkness. The wind seemed to be less, though. Telling himself that the cell was at least out of the weather and no worse than places he’d slept in the army, he thought about going again to the chapel to see if it was time for the midnight office, though he hadn’t heard any bell. But before he could make up his mind, a bell’s clanging split the night.
Thinking that such frantic clanging had to be more than the signal for prayer, Charles leaped up and went into the passage. He had no way to relight his candle and could see nothing. When the bell fell silent, he heard running feet and started toward the sound, feeling his way along the passage wall. Moving light sprang up ahead of him, and a line of silently hurrying friars carrying lanterns, a ladder, and enormous buckets crossed the passage and disappeared through the door he had entered when he first arrived. Charles ran to the door, but the friars were already pushing through the court’s deep snow. The snow had nearly stopped falling and the big gates stood open. Beyond them and along the street to the left, an orange glow lit the night. Fire. And all too near.
Remembering that Lieutenant-General La Reynie had once told him that the Capuchins were the city’s firefighters, Charles made his way into the street to offer help. A gang of robed and hooded Capuchins had just come through a smaller monastery gate, pushing and pulling what looked like a monstrous wheeled pot toward the fire. Others with shovels were clearing snow as fast as they could in front of the wheels. Silhouetted against the blaze, people were gathering along the street. Charles grabbed part of a rope and threw his weight into dragging the wheeled water cistern. He could hear the roar of the flames now and saw that the fire was in the ground floor of a modest house standing alone, between two vacant lots. A weeping, wild-haired woman stood in the street, struggling in a man’s hold.
When the cistern was close enough, the friars formed lines, filling buckets and passing them forward to the flames. Other friars waited to run the empty buckets back to the cistern. As Charles moved to take a place in the bucket-passing line, he passed the struggling woman, who held a mass of something white against her chest.
“But the new lace, the ribbons!” she sobbed. “Madame de Fiennes is coming tomorrow-” Then he heard an anguished shriek. “The mules, ah, bon Dieu, the mules!”
Charles spun around. Mules? Trapped in a burning stable behind the shop?
“No one is coming tomorrow!” the man shouted at the woman. “There will be nowhere to come to! Never mind the stupid pink mules; you are not supposed to sell them, anyway. No more than you are supposed to work by candlelight and burn the shop down!” He pulled her toward the gates of a townhouse farther down the street. “See, the Fiennes maidservants are at their gate. Come and let them salve your burns.”
Ah, Charles thought, enlightened, pink mules. Thanks to his mother, he knew that mules were a woman’s backless slipper. The sobbing woman was a marchand de mode, then, a seller of fashion accessories. Though why she wasn’t supposed to sell mules, he had no idea.
A roar and a crash came from the burning shop, and one of the friars called from the front of the line, “A ceiling beam’s come down!”
For a bizarre moment, Charles thought that burning white birds were fluttering toward him, but the birds were fragments of the shop’s lace and linen carried on the fire’s heat and vanishing into cinders as he watched.
A shrill, terrified cry above him made him stumble backward, craning his neck. A boy of eight or nine years was crouched on a window ledge above the shop door, weeping with terror and staring down into the maelstrom of smoke, water, and running people below him. At his back, a wall of flame reared itself where the beam had collapsed into the ground-floor room.
One of the friars came running with a ladder and tried to lean it against the building, but a sudden draft sent tongues of fire reaching through the shop door and he jumped back, cinders burning holes in his robe and catching in his hair.
“The boy must jump,” Charles called to the friar with the ladder. He thrust his bucket at someone and hurried as close to the building as he could. “Mon brave,” he called up to the child, “hold on to the casement and stand up.” He turned to the young and sturdy-looking friar. “Do you have rope?”
The friar looked wildly around, put his ladder on the ground, and ran. Within a few breaths, he was back with a coil of rope.
Charles took it and shouted up to the child, “Catch the rope and hold it as tightly as you can!”
But the little boy was clinging to the window casement with his eyes shut, too frozen with terror to move. Behind him, flames rose again from the ground floor, and tongues of flame licked out of the shop door.
“Mon frere,” Charles said to the Capuchin, “put your arm through the rope coil and climb onto my shoulders. Quickly, here, use my hands!”
Charles crouched. The friar took his proffered hands, put a foot on Charles’s thigh, and scrambled onto his shoulders. Slowly, Charles stood up. They loosed hands, Charles gripped the monk’s ankles, and the monk stood upright. Above them, the child was watching their acrobatics, momentarily distracted from his terror.
Charles said, “I will tell the child what to do. Then you will throw him the rope. Ready?”
“Ready.”
“Mon brave,” Charles called to the boy, “we will throw you a rope. You must put it around your waist and tie it and then hold it with both hands as tightly as you can. Do you hear me?”
The child nodded.
“Throw it,” Charles shouted to the friar.
To his relief, the man’s aim was true and the child caught the rope and fumbled it around his waist. But before he could tie it, a gust of air sent new flames rising behind him.
“Hold it tight, mon petit!” Charles bellowed. And to the man on his shoulders, “Pull!”
The child flew toward them, the friar yanking with all his strength to pull the boy past the flames in the shop door, and Charles caught him as he fell. All three of them toppled backward into the fire-melted snow. Capuchins surrounded them. One of them took the child and began to comfort him. The others pulled Charles and their brother to their feet, thanking and blessing them.
“Well done.” Pere Michaut, the Capuchin superior, bowed slightly to Charles. His white beard was singed and streaked with soot, and his gown was spattered with small holes from burning cinders. Behind him, a young layman in coat and breeches, equally singed and soot blackened, was smiling at Charles and the friar who had helped him.
Charles said, “Who is the boy, mon pere? Didn’t the shopkeepers know he was up there?”
“He is their servant.”
Charles stared at Michaut, remembering the woman’s grief for her lace and pink mules. “And they left him to burn?”
“You have saved him.” Michaut’s eyes held Charles’s for a long moment. “I am reminded anew that God arranges all things.” He turned to the young man standing behind him, who looked to be twenty years old or so. “Allow me to present Monsieur Fiennes. He lives very near us.” Michaut nodded toward the gates of the townhouse where the shop owner had gone to have her burns tended. His eyes sought Charles’s again. “And he will soon be among us as a novice.” With that, Michaut turned away and took the listening friars with him.
Fiennes bowed. “Enchante, mon pere.”
“The pleasure is mine, Monsieur Fiennes. But I am only maitre. Maitre Charles du Luc. Our Jesuit formation is long, and I am still a scholastic.”
“I hope I will be as faithful in my own vocation.” The young man’s smile was sweet. “I am Aubin d’Auteuil de Fiennes, but Monsieur Fiennes is enough name to call me by.”
“You do me honor. But after what I have seen tonight, my choice seems a far easier one than yours.”
“God puts us where our souls need to be,” Fiennes said with a little shrug, as though murderous fire, bare boards, scant food, and wicked cold were things of no account.
Charles studied the boy. “Will you speak with me for a moment, Monsieur Fiennes?”
“With pleasure.” The youth looked back at the fire with a sigh. “At least the wind has died and it will not spread. Thank God the house stands by itself. There is not much more we can do. It is so often like that. If only God would show us some better way to fight fire.” Fiennes looked down at his feet. “Shall we move farther away? The water is nearly over our shoes.”
Charles’s cloak and cassock were wet against his back, and his shoes squelched audibly as he went with the young man toward a townhouse where a knot of servants clustered beside the lantern-lit gate.
“You seem to know something about fires,” Charles said, as they made their way into the courtyard.
“With God’s help, I am going to be a Capuchin, and Capuchins are the firefighters of Paris. But I hear from your accent that you are not Parisian, so perhaps you didn’t know.”
“I did, but I had never seen them at it. I am much impressed by their bravery and effort.”
“They impress devotion on my heart in every way. Please come inside, maitre, you are welcome.”
Inside the townhouse, a maid took them to a small salon where fire, reduced to the role of good servant, crackled welcomingly in the fireplace. A basin of warmed water and towels were brought, and when they had cleaned their soot-blackened faces and hands, Fiennes bade Charles sit beside the fire and served him wine and cakes from a side table. Charles looked at the salon’s sumptuous carpets and tapestry, at the rich red wine in his gold-veined Venetian glass, at the upholstered chairs fringed with gold. He, too, had given up some comfort, but nothing compared to what Fiennes was about to leave. Yet seeing him in the light, Charles realized that this son of wealth was dressed very differently from Gilles Brion, with his frothing lace and up-tothe-minute suit. Fiennes’s coat and breeches were of plain, even rough, brown wool, with only a glimpse of coarse white linen at the throat and wrists.
Charles ate and drank gratefully, but also guiltily. If Fiennes was who Charles thought he must be, then God-or Michaut-or the fire-or all three together-had delivered him into Charles’s hands. And what Charles needed to ask was not going to be easy.
But he was wrong. The youth was so radiantly happy that nothing seemed to trouble him.
“Yes, maitre,” he said simply, in response to Charles’s question, “Gilles Brion is my dear friend. Dearer than life itself to me.” His soft brown eyes were the most guileless Charles had ever seen. “I pray for him day and night. I have gone to the Chatelet, but the guards will not let me see him. He has done no murder, of that I am certain. Why God has put him into prison, I cannot understand.”
“I think you may be able to help get him out, if you will answer what I have to ask.”
“I will.”
“Monsieur Henri Brion was killed early on the Friday morning after the Nativity. And Pere Michaut says that on Thursday night, Gilles Brion was a guest at the Capuchin monastery.”
“Yes.”
“Did he come to this house during that night?”
Fiennes looked down. “Yes.” He looked up again, and Charles was disconcerted to see his smile.
“How long did he stay with you?”
“He came just after Compline and he stayed until an hour or a little less before Prime. He left me then to go and do something we’d been praying about during the night.”
“What was that?” Though Charles thought he knew, he wanted to be sure.
“We prayed that the young woman his father was forcing on him would agree to tell Monsieur Brion that she would not marry Gilles.”
“And how long was he gone on this errand?”
“Perhaps three-quarters of an hour. It was still dark when I met him in the Capuchin church for Prime. We were there well before the Prime bell, so no one knew that Gilles had left the monastery.”
Whether or not Pere Michaut knew that Gilles had been out on that particular night, it was clear to Charles that the Capuchin superior was aware of the pair’s mutual devotion. Though whatever doubts it may have given him about Brion, he seemed to have none about Fiennes. If only Gilles had not left Fiennes to go and plead with Martine. Because that three-quarters of an hour’s absence was plenty of time to do murder. To do both murders, in fact, since Henri Brion’s body had been found so near the Mynette house. And Fiennes’s story also confirmed Gilles’s presence at the Mynette house that morning. Still, though Gilles Brion seemed weak and self-regarding, he was not mad. Charles could not believe that he could pray all night with Fiennes, leave to go murder two people, and then return to Prime as though nothing had happened.
“How did Gilles seem when you joined him for Prime?”
Fiennes sighed. “Very upset. His errand had not sped. In spite of all our prayers.”
Very upset. A detail that would not help convince La Reynie that Gilles had done nothing but talk at Martine’s house. Charles was staking everything on the hope that La Reynie would be swayed by Fiennes’s guileless innocence and demeanor. “Is there anyone here in your house who saw Gilles Brion come and go?” Charles said. “And could swear to the times?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Who?” Charles asked skeptically. It was not the answer he had expected.
“My mother’s maid. She has been here for years and knows all about Gilles; she lets him in when he comes. And she’s a very early riser and opened the door for him when he left to go across the river.”
Charles blinked. “Well, what you’ve told me may help your friend. But if you agree to also tell the police, you will be risking hard questions about your connection to Monsieur Brion.”
“There is nothing wrong in our connection, Maitre du Luc. We love each other, yes. We consider ourselves spiritual brothers. Gilles has been tempted to a baser connection with me. But I have persuaded him that it would be grave sin. Now he wants only for us to be near one another and be truly brothers, Capuchin brothers, serving God together. We have nothing to hide.”
“Still, it may not be easy to convince the police of that. They may well be merciless in asking what you did that night.”
Fiennes’s face shone. “We prayed for Gilles. And talked about God. What else would we do?”
Charles found himself speechless and rebuked. The young man’s words rang with truth. He only hoped La Reynie would hear what he heard, and that it would weigh against that damning three-quarters of an hour’s absence. “Will you go to the Chatelet with me when it’s light? If we can get through the snow.”
Fiennes jumped up and went to a window. “It’s not snowing anymore. Though the snow is deep. I will ask my father for horses.”
“Thank you, monsieur. The sooner we get there, the better.” Charles was hoping that Gilles Brion’s long, dark night in the prison had been no more than lonely and uncomfortable, hoping that La Reynie was still holding out against Louvois.