ST. GENEVIEVE’S DAY, FRIDAY, JANUARY 3
Without the horses, they would never have made it to the Chatelet. Even with them, a ride that should have taken a few minutes took nearly an hour. People wrapped in coats, cloaks, and shawls were wielding brooms and shovels to clear drifted snow from doors, gates, church porches, and streets. It was the Feast of St. Genevieve, the patron saint of Paris, a day full of processions through the city, coiling lines of laymen and clergy chanting and carrying relics and candles. Today, though, the saint’s processions were going to be late beginning, because in most of the streets the snow was still deep and uncleared. As the Chatelet’s white-blanketed roofs and towers rose before them, Charles realized belatedly that Lieutenant-General La Reynie might well not be there. He might simply have decided to stay at home beside his fire in this weather.
The guards at the prison entrance were cold and irritable. The one Charles approached only shrugged and wiped his dripping nose on his sleeve. Cold and largely sleepless, Charles implied harm to the man’s immortal soul if he refused. The guard finally left his fellow holding the entrance and conducted them to La Reynie’s office. An even more irritable voice behind La Reynie’s door called “Come!” when the guard knocked, and Charles released his held breath in a sigh of relief. The guard stalked away. Charles and Fiennes went in.
La Reynie stood in front of a dying fire, rubbing his face. His cloak was on the floor beside one of the armchairs and his wig lay on the other chair’s seat. Startled at this state of undress, Charles wished him a good morning.
“It is not a good morning,” La Reynie growled, raking a hand through his spiky gray hair. “What do you want?” He glanced unhappily at Fiennes. “And who is this?” His frown deepened as he looked more closely at Charles. “What’s happened to you?” He reached out toward the burn holes in Charles’s cloak.
Charles smiled. “Monsieur La Reynie, may I present Monsieur Fiennes? We have been helping the Capuchins fight a fire.”
The two men bowed to each other.
“The Capuchins do well,” La Reynie said, eyeing Fiennes. “I wish we had them all over Paris. And how did you come to be helping them, monsieur?”
“He is soon to be a Capuchin novice,” Charles said, before Fiennes could answer.
La Reynie grunted, glowering at Charles. “And? Have you come to tell me you’re joining the Capuchins, too?”
Charles bit back a reply, taking in the lieutenant-general’s shadowed eyes and limp, wrinkled linen. La Reynie had apparently been up most of the night, too.
“I know now where Gilles Brion was the morning his father died. I have brought Monsieur Fiennes to tell you himself. And there is also another witness to confirm some of what he is going to say.”
La Reynie closed his eyes and swore softly. Then, still without inviting his guests to sit, he went to the door, jerked it open, and bellowed into the passage. “Guillaume! Wine! Bread! Now!” He turned back into the room, swore at the freezing air sweeping through the open door from the passage, went back and slammed the door shut, and dropped into an empty chair.
“Maitre du Luc, put that wig somewhere-no, give it to me, at least it’s warm.” He jammed the wig on his head. “Forgive me, Monsieur Fiennes, please, sit down. I apologize for being somewhat en deshabille this morning. Maitre, bring a chair for yourself.”
Charles went to pull a chair away from the wall and closer to the dead fire.
La Reynie was looking morosely at the cold hearth. “Who would have thought this day could get so much worse, so quickly?” he muttered. He scowled over his shoulder and bellowed “Fire!” at the closed door.
As Charles sat down in the chair he had brought, the door opened and a cheerful, middle-aged servant edged in, carrying a bucket of kindling and balancing a small pewter tray crowded with pitcher, glasses, and a loaf of bread.
“Here you are, mon lieutenant-general.” He put the tray on the table beside La Reynie and knelt in front of the fire. “And just so you know,” he said, poking and prodding the ashes as he looked for live embers, “you’re not here today.”
“I am very glad to hear it,” La Reynie said, sarcasm dripping from his words like melted butter. “Where am I? Am I enjoying myself, wherever it is?”
“I couldn’t say where you are, monsieur, but I’m certain you’re enjoying yourself more than you would be if I’d told Monsieur Louvois’s man you’re here.”
“Blessed saints. Thank you, Guillaume. Every day I am so much deeper in your debt, I will never be able to repay you.”
The man smiled to himself and fell to blowing on a live coal. La Reynie poured wine into the glasses Guillaume had brought, handed two to Charles and Fiennes, and took his own.
“Tell me then, Monsieur Fiennes,” he said resignedly, “this tale that may help to release Monsieur Brion from his present accommodation.”
Fiennes told him. As he talked, La Reynie’s attention sharpened. By the end, he was gazing open-mouthed at the young man.
“You are very frank, monsieur,” he said, when Fiennes had finished. “Either you are far too clever and devious an actor to waste yourself as a Capuchin, or you are so transparent that even the Capuchins may have difficulty coping with you.”
Fiennes simply smiled like a small glowing sun. Watching him, Charles almost imagined that the air grew warm. The lieutenant-general drained his wineglass and reached for the pitcher.
“However, your rather startling story changes nothing.” He glanced irritably at Charles. “You have confirmed for me that Gilles Brion was indeed at the Mynette house that morning. And in the three-quarters of an hour about which you are so certain, he had enough time to-”
“Oh,” Fiennes interrupted, “I had forgotten, there is something else! Forgive me, Monsieur La Reynie-and you also, Maitre du Luc. I forgot to tell you both that when Gilles returned that morning for Prime, he told me he had barely avoided encountering his father.”
La Reynie was out of his chair and standing over Fiennes. “Saw his father where? Did they talk?”
Charles put a hand over his eyes, feeling like he’d just pushed Gilles Brion’s head the rest of the way into the noose. How could Fiennes be so stupidly naive? That guilelessness was dangerous was a thought Charles hadn’t had before.
Fiennes was looking earnestly up at La Reynie. “Gilles said that as he came out of the gate into the Mynette garden, he saw his father, hurrying across the Place Maubert.”
“It wasn’t light enough to recognize a face. How did he know it was his father?”
“Oh, he knew him from his shape and walk-it was his father, after all! But after what had just happened with Mademoiselle Mynette, Gilles didn’t want to meet his father, so he turned and ran.”
“So he told you.”
“Gilles has never lied to me.”
Charles hardly heard him, suddenly seeing Gilles’s father walking toward the Mynette house that dark morning. Was that the answer after all? That Henri Brion had killed his ward to have her money? But Henri Brion was dead, and what mattered now was keeping his son alive.
“I see,” La Reynie said to Fiennes. “Well, at least we know exactly how long he was gone from you. And that he was where both murder victims were. With time to kill them, since they were in the same place. Very valuable knowledge. Don’t you agree, Maitre du Luc?”
Charles got to his feet and said doggedly, “It will be valuable. When the whole truth comes out. But there’s a bright side, even for me. Now that you’ve decided that you don’t want any more truth, you have less reason to put Brion to the question.”
Fiennes was looking in dismay from one to the other. “Put him to the question? Torture him, you mean? You must not do that, Monsieur La Reynie. Gilles is weak. He will lie to you to save himself pain. And his lie will be on your soul, surely you see that. It is for the good of your own soul that you must not torture him, monsieur.” Fiennes walked closer to the lieutenant-general. Charles was almost embarrassed by the gentleness and sadness in the young man’s face as he studied La Reynie. “Do not take your own unhappiness out on him. It will do no good.”
La Reynie’s face was like stone. Fiennes stepped away and sighed. “I will wait for you outside, maitre.”
In silence, Charles and La Reynie watched him leave.
“He may talk like a saint, but he’s just handily convicted his friend.” La Reynie laughed harshly. “Not what you intended, was it?”
“No. But you’re still wrong. Gilles Brion didn’t kill anyone.”
“After what you just heard? You have more brains than that.”
“You’re not sure he’s guilty, either. I see it in your face. So did Fiennes.”
“What you don’t see is that Monsieur Louvois was here again last night, in spite of the snow. He brought a delegation from the Hotel de Ville. The good city worthies came to demand that I formally charge Gilles Brion with the murders of his father and Martine Mynette. Then the worthies left, and Monsieur Louvois stayed behind to tell me that if I do not charge him, and the people riot because they think I am protecting Jesuits and leaving these murders unavenged, my position is forfeit.”
“But you cannot-”
“For God’s sake, let me finish! Whether or not you and Monsieur Fiennes are right, I must keep Brion here. Having someone arrested for the murders-even if not yet formally charged-is preventing worse in the streets than has already happened. I cannot release him until I am certain he is not guilty-and, by the bon Dieu, that young man’s wide-eyed statement has made me more certain that he is.”
“Have you put him to the question yet?”
“No.”
“Are you going to?”
“Are you going to find this ex-gardener?” La Reynie shot back. “This Tito you’ve been asking about? If by any chance Brion is proved innocent, I have to have someone to put in his place. Not that this Tito sounds likely. So, have you found him?”
“No.”
“Well, keep looking.”
With the slightest of bows, Charles left La Reynie and made his way to where Fiennes was waiting. Forcing himself to keep his anger and disappointment out of his face and voice, he said, “Can your father spare these horses a while longer, Monsieur Fiennes?”
“I imagine so.”
“Then I beg the favor of riding to the Couche. On the Ile.”
Fiennes nodded. “I am sorry if I made things more difficult in there. But what I said was the truth and I had forgotten to tell you.”
“I cannot but wish you had continued to forget, mon ami.”
“Gilles has killed no one, maitre. I do not think God will let him be hanged. Or tortured. Perhaps if he were ready to be a saint-but my poor Gilles is not ready. So there is nothing to fear.”
Charles could find nothing he trusted himself to say in response to that, so in silence they made their slow way across the Pont au Change, stopping while a belated procession in honor of St. Genevieve paced and chanted its slow way across their path. As Charles waited, he thought about the saint. Genevieve’s story said that she’d saved Paris from Attila and his marauding Huns. Deciding that if she could handle Attila, she could probably handle Michel Louvois, he prayed to her to help him save Gilles, show him the real killer.
Keeping the horses to the edge of the narrow rue de la Juiverie on the Ile, to avoid the impassible center where snow dug away from doors and gates had been flung, Charles and Fiennes finally reached rue Neuve Notre Dame. Charles drew rein and caught his breath, gazing at the cathedral’s west front rising in front of him. He’d rarely seen it from this angle since coming to Paris. Its square towers rising into the clearing sky’s icy blue, its crowding sculptures frosted in snow, washed the tiredness from his body and the worry and discouragement from his mind. Beside him, Fiennes also drank in the cathedral’s wonders.
“How did they do it?” he said. “That’s what I always wonder, maitre. Wouldn’t it have been glorious to help build it?”
In spite of his anger at himself and exasperation with Fiennes, Charles found himself smiling. “It would.”
But his smile died quickly when they reached the Couche, the house where abandoned babies found alive were brought. As he stood at the gate, waiting for an answer to the bell, a booted man with a large cone-shaped basket on his back pushed past him with a muttered excuse. The man took a key as long as Charles’s hand from his coat and forced it into the gate’s frozen lock. Swearing under his breath, he worked to turn the key. Tiny cries came from the basket on his back. Charles’s heart turned over as he realized that the man was a city worker paid to search for foundlings at doors, under bridges, in churches. The Couche was getting a new delivery of infants.
When the man finally opened the gate, Charles slipped through with him, leaving Fiennes to look after the horses. The baby finder slid in the courtyard’s deep snow and Charles leaped forward, afraid the basket would upend. The cries coming from it grew frantic, but the carrier found his feet, and he and Charles reached the door together. The Sister of Charity watching the door allowed the baby finder to enter, but barred Charles’s way.
“Yes, mon pere?” she said, not so much unwelcoming as openly puzzled by the Jesuit standing before her with burn holes in his hat and cloak.
“Ma soeur,” Charles began, but his voice died as he watched the man with the basket on his back disappear into a passageway. “What will happen to them?”
Her face softened and she beckoned him inside and shut the door. “They will go to wet nurses.”
“And then?”
“Those who live will be returned to our house in the Faubourg St. Antoine. A few will be adopted. By common people, you understand. Most will be placed as servants and apprentices.”
The terrified and forgotten child in the burning building’s window rose in Charles’s mind, and he nearly bit blood from his tongue to stop himself from demanding the basket and taking the infants with him.
“Ma soeur,” he said, sighing, “I have urgent need of information. About a foundling who came to you as much as twenty years ago. All I know of him is that he was called Tito.”
Her wimple and veil, so white and starched that light bounced off them, made it hard to tell her age. Charles guessed that she might be forty.
“I was not here that long ago.” She smiled sadly. “I entered the order after my husband died.” She paused, thinking. “But yes, there is a sister who was here then. Soeur Mariana, a Spanish woman.”
“Please,” Charles said eagerly, “may I speak with her?”
“No, mon pere. She is old and has been ill.”
His heart sank. “Is she expected to recover?”
“I think so. We are praying for her.”
“If-when-she feels well enough, will you ask her about this boy Tito?”
“This is important?”
“Life and death may depend on it, ma soeur.”
“If she is well enough, I will ask her. Come back in a few days. I am Soeur Madeleine.”
She inclined her head to Charles, who bowed and withdrew. The sky was cloudless now and Charles had to squint against the snow glare as he plodded across the court, trying to pray that Soeur Mariana would recover for her sake, not his.