Domine, Iesu Christe, Rex gloriae, libera animas omnium fidelium defunctorum de poenis inferni et de profundo lacu. Libera eas de ore leonis…”
The funeral Mass’s offertory prayer beat like a muffled bell against the black-draped chapel walls. From where he stood with the senior rhetoric class, Charles could just see Antoine, wearing only a small bandage over his cut now, and sitting rigidly upright beside his father on one of the cushioned chairs placed for the Doute family near the candle-banked coffin. The little boy’s shoulders shook as he stared at his brother’s coffin, draped with a silk pall so black, it seemed to absorb all the light there ever was or would be. The priest was asking God to “free the souls of all the faithful departed from infernal punishment,” from “the deep pit” and “the mouth of the lion.” “Lion” meant the devil, and Charles wondered if Antoine was not only grieving for Philippe’s death, but worrying because he’d died unshriven.
Charles could hardly believe that it was only the twenty-ninth of July, that he’d been at Louis le Grand only a week and in that week, one of his students had been murdered. And that in barely more than another week, the ballet and tragedy would be performed. He tried to drag his mind back to the Mass as it neared the words that would make God present in the bread and wine. Philippe’s cousin Jacques Doute, who was serving as acolyte, blinked away tears, picked up a little cluster of bells, and shook them as the rector raised the round white wafer above his head. The gay frivolity of the sound jarred against the dense funereal black of draped walls and coffin pall, vestments and mourning clothes, cassocks and scholar’s gowns.
Charles’s students were dignified and quiet, subdued into a preview of the manhood that would soon be upon them. Charles ached for their having to grapple with Philippe’s death. Not that death was unfamiliar to anyone, young or old. Death descended on every family and took whom it would. But murder, especially the murder of a fellow student, was more than these boys should have to grieve for yet.
Sunlight streamed through the windows and threw a gold and ruby oriole around Pere Le Picart and his assistant priests-Montville, Jouvancy, and Guise-as they moved about the altar. Charles tried not to watch Guise. He didn’t want to swallow the Body of Christ into anger, but even if he did, he had to swallow it. Anyone who refused the sacrament today would set everyone else wondering what they had on their conscience.
Everyone communed and the Mass wound toward its end. “Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them.” As Le Picart reached the “amen,” a shrill wail rose from the front of the chapel, as though the soul of the departed were refusing to go anywhere, light or not. But the shrill voice was all too human and Charles wasn’t the only one who recognized it. Students stifled nervous laughter, adults exchanged knowing looks, and Charles, hearing Mme Doute’s name whispered through the nave, pitied Antoine and M. Doute from his heart. Then the organ burst into life, and it would have taken all the wails of hell itself to cut through the throbbing noise.
The Mass’s celebrants and their attendants left the church in solemn procession, and the Doutes were escorted after them through the courtyard door. High-ranking mourners bidden to the funeral feast in the fathers’ refectory went next. Resisting the urge to plug his ears that organ music always gave him, Charles waited until the way was clear and led his boys into the Cour d’honneur.
Glare bounced off the gravel, and in the courtyard’s center, the little Temple of Rhetoric seemed to sag in the heat. The temple, an aging structure of thin wood and paper-mache with a plank floor, was the last of the funeral decorations to have been assembled during the three days that Philippe’s leadcoffined body had lain in state in the chapel. Charles and the rhetoric class had hastily extracted the structure from a cellar early that morning, and set it up to display poems and allegorical drawings (known as emblems) made by students and faculty to honor Philippe. After the funeral meal, the mourners would come to read the elegiac verses and study the emblems. For courtesy’s sake-and to keep too many people from crowding into the fragile structure-Charles and the rhetoric class would take turns guiding the mourners through a few at a time, speaking decorous Latin to the men-whether or not they understood-and French to the women.
“What do we do if it falls down?” Armand Beauclaire whispered anxiously, as the students and Charles stood in a tight group, looking dubiously at the temple. In spite of all their efforts, its thin wood and tired paper-mache looked what they were, shabby and worn with age.
“If it falls down, we act surprised,” Charles said, drawing brief smiles from the somber young faces. “Meanwhile, let’s be out of the sun. There’s food and drink in the senior refectory-get yourselves something and wait there, I’ll join you.”
Admonishing them to keep their gowns on in spite of the heat, he dismissed them to a chorus of groans and watched them cross the court, their scholars’ gowns making them look like a flock of dejected young crows. Wishing he could shed his own cassock, he went up the temple’s three shallow steps and repinned a swag of black drapery hanging between two pillars. Usually the Temple of Rhetoric was the scene of debate competitions and recitations from heroic tragedy, with laurel crowns handed out to the posturing winners. But today it was a monument to real tragedy.
“A terrible thing.” The dancing master Pierre Beauchamps, just emerged from the chapel, stood at Charles’s elbow, impeccably turned out in black taffeta breeches, knee-length coat with ebony buttons, and black plumed beaver hat. He shook out a black lace handkerchief and blotted his perspiring face with it. “Terrible!”
“Yes, maitre, a tragedy,” Charles answered, surprised and pleased that Beauchamps’s feelings had extended beyond lamenting his heroless ballet to grieving for its dead hero.
“I told them last year to get rid of it,” Beauchamps clarified, glowering at the temple. “The thing is a disgrace, it’s falling apart.”
Charles stared at him. “Hardly the worst thing about this day, maitre.”
The dancing master cocked an eyebrow at him. “You think me heartless? I watched Philippe grow up, from the day he came here. I trained him. He was perhaps the best dancer I ever trained outside the Academies and the professional theatre. Be assured that I will grieve for him. After this ballet is over. If it ever is over. I have found us a Hercules.”
“What? Who?” Charles, too, forgot Philippe for a moment.
“A good enough dancer.” Beauchamps sighed gustily. “But whether even I can make a hero out of him, Terpsichore, she only knows. Well. I shall be off, not being invited to the funeral feast. Not that I expected to be, of course.” His voice dripped honeyed venom. “Though I was Philippe’s teacher and nurtured his best talent. But we who are mere practitioners-and not noble theoreticians-know our humble place. Until tomorrow, Maitre du Luc.”
With an austere smile, Beauchamps stalked majestically toward the street door, pausing to raise his hat to a small plump woman dressed in plain black, who bustled out of the chapel and across his path. Mme LeClerc, Charles realized, as she threw up her hands and hastened toward two children talking animatedly together. As she pulled the little girl away, another woman swooped down on the boy, whom Charles saw now was Antoine. The woman hurried him away and Mme LeClerc made for Charles, towing the protesting little girl behind her.
“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 them to enter the temple first. Moving at Mme Doute’s slow pace, Charles ushered the bereaved couple up the steps. As he guided them through the temple, gently pointing out the compliments paid to Philippe, M. Doute wept openly. With barely a glance at each exhibit, his wife pulled on his arm to hurry him. Halfway through, she stopped and pushed her veil back. She had large brown eyes and fair hair, and would have been pretty had she not looked so fretful.
“I am hot, husband,” she said. “And my back hurts me.”
“Where is your maid?” M. Doute took a wet handkerchief from his sleeve and wiped his eyes. “Do not grudge me this last glimpse of my son, Lisette.”
She reddened and her small pouting mouth opened, but the fat man who had walked with La Reynie appeared at the bottom of the steps that surrounded the open-sided temple, looking like a dark moon in his funeral black.
“Allow me, my dear Mme Doute,” he purred. “Leave your poor husband to mourn.” He mounted the steps, bowed to M. Doute, and with a severe look at Charles, as though Mme Doute’s discomfort were his fault, led her out of the temple.
When M. Doute had thoroughly wrung Charles’s heart by weeping over each tribute to Philippe, Charles murmured condolences and turned him over to the rector. For the next half hour or so, Charles kept watch over the student guides and answered questions about the exhibits, especially about the large drawing of Philippe as a fallen Hercules, shown lying gracefully on his cloak in a cypress grove, costumed as he would have been in the ballet. Achilles, Ulysses, Virgil, Homer, Hannibal, Julius Caesar, Apollo, Terpsichore, and Minerva stood weeping over him and a cohort of winged cherubs grasped the corners of his cloak, ready to carry him to heaven, where the Virgin Mary held out her arms to him from a cloud.
When everyone had made their way through the allegories, Charles rounded up his students, thanked them, and dismissed them to their chambers and the comfort of shedding their gowns. He longed to go to his own chamber and do likewise, but too many noble mourners still lingered in slices of shade along the western wall of the courtyard, murmuring and sipping from small glasses of sweet wine that the lay brothers were offering. M. and Mme Doute had already left on the sad journey back to Chantilly with Philippe’s coffin.
Charles circulated briefly and then paused in the shade with a glass, watching men reach surreptitiously under their hats to lift their wigs and cool their sweating heads. The few women present stood whispering together, their black fans beating the air like the wings of funereal hummingbirds. Two of them drew apart and the shift of their stiff skirts and tall headdresses revealed Guise, deep in talk with the police chief and the fat man who had escorted Mme Doute from the temple. As though he felt Charles’s eyes on him, Guise glanced up. He said something to his companions, who both looked at Charles. Not wanting an encounter with any of them, Charles moved toward a group of departing guests to say his formal farewell. But the police chief and the fat man cut off his escape.
“Maitre Charles du Luc?” The westering sun scattered gold over the black plumes in Lieutenant-General La Reynie’s hat as he stopped in front of Charles.
“Yes, monsieur,” Charles said. “May I help you?”
“I am Nicolas de La Reynie, Lieutenant-General of Police.” He turned to his companion. “Monsieur de Louvois, may I present Maitre Charles du Luc?”
The little hairs stood up on the back of Charles’s neck and he nearly lost his balance as he bowed. Michel de Louvois was in charge of the king’s dragoons, the most powerful man in the kingdom after the king. And Charles had heard, since his first sighting of La Reynie, that the police chief was probably the third.
“You are new here, I understand,” La Reynie said conversationally. “Newly come from the south. Nimes, I believe?”
“Carpentras, monsieur.” The words came out in a croak and Charles drank quickly to wet his throat, studying La Reynie over the edge of his glass. “You are searching for Philippe’s killer, monsieur?” he said, hoping to turn the talk away from himself.
La Reynie inclined his head. “A shame that you arrived just in time for this terrible tragedy,” he said, studying Charles in return.
“I did not know Philippe, monsieur, but I am told he was an honor to the college in every way.”
“Did not know him,” Louvois said flatly.
“No, monsieur, I regret that I did not.”
“But he knew you.” The war minister’s little black eyes glittered with malice.
“Knew me? No, Monsieur Louvois. We met for the first time the afternoon he disappeared.”
“Perhaps he knew of you, then,” La Reynie put in helpfully.
In spite of the heat, a chill was creeping down Charles’s back. “I very much doubt it, messieurs. I have no fame.”
“Oh, I think you are too modest,” La Reynie murmured.
Louvois said curtly, “Pere Guise says that you were the last to see poor Philippe.”
“His killer was the last to see him, monsieur. When he disappeared from the classroom, I was sent to find him. I chased someone wearing a yellow shirt, thinking he was Philippe.”
Louvois’s lip curled. “Though no one else saw this convenient phantom.”
“He was no phantom, monsieur. And we would only know that no one else saw him if we could question everyone along the route he took. Which is, of course, impossible.”
Louvois’s eyes narrowed and he stepped closer. La Reynie stepped back, planted his silver-headed walking stick in front of him, and folded his hands over it, watching Charles.
“Pere Guise says you were gone too long when you went to find Philippe.” Louvois was breathing wine up into Charles’s face now. “Far longer than necessary.”
“I was gone a little more than twenty minutes. Which Pere Guise knows. But perhaps he runs faster than I do.”
“Do you think this is a jesting matter?” Louvois hissed. “We know nothing about you. Except that you come from the south. And hold heretical opinions.”
A wave of pure fury at Guise broke over Charles. “I beg your pardon, Monsieur Louvois. I am not aware that believing in the love of God is heretical. May I suggest, messieurs, that you take your questions back to Pere Guise? Unlike me, he knew Philippe well. Whatever led to the boy’s disappearance and death, Pere Guise is more likely to understand it than I.”
Charles bowed and started to walk away, but Louvois grabbed his arm and jerked him sharply back. Charles winced as pain shot through his old injury, and his glass slipped from his hand and shattered on the gravel. He wrenched himself free and what might have happened next fortunately did not, because Antoine burst from nowhere, shoved Louvois aside, and wrapped his arms around Charles’s waist, sobbing his heart out.