La Reynie’s newest fly leaned on the Pont Neuf’s parapet, staring at the unlovely face of his cowardice. Refusing the lieutenant-general would have been his death warrant, whether sooner in the Chatelet or later in the Place de Greve or a Mediterranean galley. At least, thank every saint there was, Pernelle was out of La Reynie’s reach. Out of M. Louvois’s reach, too, and Louvois terrified Charles even more than La Reynie did. And refusing would have unleashed scandal and retribution on the Society, the college, and on the whole du Luc family. God knew, he didn’t want anyone else to suffer for what he’d done.
Mostly, though, he didn’t want to die. Charles shuddered and closed his eyes, suddenly back at the siege of St. Omer. He heard the din of drums and trumpets and smelled the crazy battle energy, like the air before a storm. He heard the screams of men and horses, saw the blood gleaming on pikes and swords, heard the crack of muskets, and breathed the bitter smell of gunpowder. He’d been as full of battle lust as any man there, secure in the immortality of being eighteen. When the musket ball hit him, he’d thought at first that someone’s horse had kicked him. Then he’d seen the bright flower of blood blooming on the shoulder of his padded doublet. The certainty that he was going to die had wiped away his adolescent fantasy of noble death after thwarted love, and he’d thrown back his head and howled-not from the pain, but in grief for his unlived life. He had even less desire to die now.
He opened his eyes and watched the sky shed its last thin veil of fog, watched hunting swallows skim the slow, olive green river, watched a pair of bargemen sprawled on their canvas-wrapped load passing a leather bottle back and forth, watched as though he were going to paint it all. The words of another ex-soldier rose from the depths of memory. “Let it make no difference to thee,” Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus had written, “whether thou art dying or doing something else.” With a mental salute to the old stoic, Charles straightened. Time to get on with the something else. With being La Reynie’s fly, which he wouldn’t be if he’d obeyed the rector’s order to leave Philippe’s murder and Antoine’s accident alone. But if he started obeying now, he’d die. La Reynie would see to that. If he kept on disobeying and the rector found out, he’d lose his vocation. Which he preferred to lose by choice, if he was going to lose it. But he wasn’t dying, not yet.
He pushed off from the parapet, waved away a man selling cherries from his donkey’s panniers, and walked on. He squeezed around a sedan chair, set down beside the mackerel sellers while the lady inside chose her dinner, and hesitated at the end of the bridge. He’d reached the Pont Neuf from the quay, but cutting through the streets might be a faster way back to the college. Paris, like other towns, had no street signs, and he was too new to have a map in his head. But the sun was out now and the college lay to the southeast. How lost could he get?
He set off along the busy street that continued from the Pont Neuf, beside the wall of the Grand Augustin monastery, looking for a southeast turning. As he walked, he set himself to go over everything he knew about the murders and Antoine’s injury. He wasn’t at all sure of La Reynie’s motives, not completely sure that finding the killer was what La Reynie really wanted. It had crossed his mind that La Reynie might be looking for something else inside the college, something Charles didn’t know about, and be using the search for the killer as an excuse. But finding the killer was what Charles wanted. That and surviving his indenture as a fly, with minimal betrayal to the Society and his vows. All of which was going to depend on concocting reports that were true as far as they went and went only as far as he wanted them to.
Like an orator making his first point, he held up a thumb. One: The fact that La Reynie needed a spy in the college meant that what had happened was part of something that stretched from Paris into Louis le Grand. Or, of course, the other way around. His first finger went up. Two: According to the ex-soldier who’d taken him to the Louvre, the murdered porter had complained that someone was following him. But the man had been killed before he could tell Charles what he knew, so someone had been following both of them. Charles swallowed and looked over his shoulder, suddenly remembering the menacing gravel-voiced porter who’d stopped him from chasing Pierre. Had the man had his own reasons for trying to keep Pierre from talking to Charles?
His middle finger sprang to attention. Three: The mark on the porter’s neck was like the mark on Philippe’s. Who knew how Philippe had died? The Louis le Grand faculty and lay brothers. Probably most of the students by now. La Reynie and some of his men. And, no doubt, Louvois, which meant that all three persons of that unholy trinity-La Reynie, Louvois, and Guise-knew about the braided cord the murderer had used.
Charles turned down a lane lined with old houses faced with stone and straightened his ring finger. Four: Guise was the only other person at the college-as far as Charles knew-who had talked to the street porter Pierre. But surely, Charles told himself, if Guise had followed him yesterday, he would have noticed. And he couldn’t imagine the fastidious Guise slinking through the beggars’ Louvre in the dead of night to murder poor Pierre. But there were the old stairs. If Guise watched his chance in the bakery, he could come and go from his rooms unseen whenever he pleased.
Charles’s little finger jabbed the air. Five: Mme LeClerc had witnessed the accident, and had no qualms about talking, yet no one was trying to silence her. The thought of anyone trying to silence Mme LeClerc, however, made Charles laugh out loud, earning him a wary look from a woman with a basket of squawking chickens. So why had the porter been a danger, but not the baker’s wife?
The little street dead-ended and Charles stopped, waiting for a clutch of Augustinian monks to pass on the cross street. He turned right and his left thumb stood up. Six: The dead porter, Antoine’s story of the note, and the old staircase were all connected, one way or another, to Guise.
Charles’s thoughts suddenly jumped their logical track. Guise seemed not to know what Charles had done in Nimes. Which must mean that La Reynie had not told him. Charles frowned, remembering how La Reynie had watched Louvois accuse him after the funeral, neither contradicting nor agreeing. And then La Reynie had kept Louvois from following him and Antoine. Puzzling over La Reynie, Charles turned east at the next street crossing. But that street curved north and took him nearly back to the river. He stopped, looked around, and held up his next finger. Seven: He was lost.
By the time he found the rue St. Jacques and the college again, the midday meal was half over. He apologized to the rector, slid into his seat, and bolted the boiled beef, brown bread, and cucumber salad, made all the more palatable by the fact that Pere Guise ate with his back half turned to Charles, talking only to Pere Montville on his left. Pere Jouvancy caught Charles on his way out of the refectory to ask solicitously after his tooth. Swallowing guilt, Charles said that his courage had failed him and he’d decided to try medicine before facing the tooth-drawer. Nodding sympathetically, Jouvancy told him to ask Frere Brunet for something to ease the pain. And added an admonition not to be late for rehearsal.
Charles checked to see that Antoine was where he should be, waiting with his class to leave the junior refectory, and went outside, where the quiet recreation hour had started. He sat down on a bench against the refectory wall, pretending to watch a chess game two boys were playing at the bench’s other end. When Guise emerged, Charles let him get halfway across the court and then strolled, unnoticed, in his wake. He watched Guise enter the latrine courtyard and go into the building where the students’ library was. Assuming the air of a man who wanted only to be alone with his sore tooth and his thoughts, Charles settled on the shady stone bench built into the archway between the two courts and waited, but Guise didn’t reappear. Ostentatiously rubbing his jaw, Charles made his way back toward his rooms through an illicitly rowdy game of tag.
Taking the stairs two at a time, he went to Guise’s door and listened, then eased it open and went quickly through the empty chamber to the study. Just where Antoine had given his sleepwalking performance, a brown and gold tapestry of Hannibal and his elephants crossing the Alps hung on wooden rings from a pole. Charles slid it aside and uncovered the low, arched door he’d seen from the other side. He tried the latch. The door swung silently inward, revealing the staircase Charles had climbed. As he put his foot on the top step to go and see if the lower door was still unlocked, he heard footsteps climbing the stairs quickly toward him. Noiselessly, he shut the door, pulled the tapestry across it, and raced into the chamber. As he slid out of sight between Guise’s bed and the wall, the hanging rattled on its rings and footsteps crossed the study. He pressed his cheek to the floor and saw a pair of spurred boots with folded tops stride quickly across his line of vision. Jackboots the color of burnt sugar, like the boots Mme LeClerc said Antoine’s attacker had worn.
Charles burst from his hiding place as the chamber door closed behind his quarry. He scrambled across the bed, yelling at the man to stop, and wrenched the chamber door open. But in the passage, he collided with Pere Dainville and had to stop and steady the old man while his quarry’s footsteps pounded down the main staircase. By the time Charles reached the foot of the stairs, no one was there but Frere Moulin, coming from the grand salon with a bundle of wet rags in his arms.
“Did you see him? Where did he go?” Charles demanded, nearly falling over a bucket of dirty water,
“Frere Fabre?” The lay brother nodded toward the door to the street passage where Fabre, barefoot like Moulin and with his cassock kilted, was shouldering his way out with a bucket in each hand.
“The man who just ran down the stairs! Quick, which way?”
“We’ve been cleaning, maitre, just finished.” Moulin nodded over his shoulder at the salon, whose floor gleamed wetly. “What’s wrong?”
Charles strode to the side door and into the street passage. “Did anyone come this way just now?” he called to Frere Martin, the porter, but Martin shook his head. Charles ran into the Cour d’honneur, still crowded with boys playing darts, chess, checkers, reading, and talking. He pushed his way among them, searching desperately for Antoine. The man in the boots was no casual thief, he hadn’t searched Guise’s rooms and he had known where he was going. If he was Antoine’s attacker, if he’d come to finish what he’d bungled in the rue des Poirees… Charles went weak with relief when he finally found Antoine in a shaded corner of the student residence courtyard, lying on his belly and frowning over a chessboard. His tutor lay beside him, sound asleep. Charles managed a smile for the child and prodded Maitre Doissin hard with his foot. Doissin grunted and Charles pulled him up and walked him out of Antoine’s hearing.
“I asked you to watch this child, for God’s sake!”
“Doucement, maitre, softly, sweetly! I am watching him, there he is!”
Remembering the bloody patterned necklace that strangling had left on the porter’s neck and Philippe’s, Charles said through his teeth, “Do not let him out of your sight. Do you hear me? That means keeping your damned eyes open!”
The tutor spread his arms wide in injured innocence. “He is just there. I am just here. Maitre du Luc, your humors must be out of balance-you should ask Frere Brunet to examine a specimen of your water.”
Charles turned on his heel and squatted beside Antoine. The other boy, frowning over his next move with his tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth, paid no attention.
“Remember our talk, mon brave?” Charles said in Antoine’s ear. “Here’s something else you can help me with. Stay close to Maitre Doissin. Don’t let him nap. Don’t let him out of your sight. Even when you go to your grammar class, make sure he stays by the door.”
Antoine rolled over and sat up. “Why?” he said eagerly.
“I can’t tell you yet. Will you do it? Knights cannot always tell their squires everything, you know,” he added, as Antoine began to frown.
“That’s true. All right.” Antoine glanced tolerantly at his tutor and nodded. “I’ll look after him. He needs it.” He went back to his game.
Charles went quickly through the rest of the courtyards without finding the man in the jackboots. Trying to search the college buildings by himself was pointless and he went back to the Cour d’honneur. How had the man gone so unnoticed and disappeared so quickly? Charles’s head snapped toward the latrine court and he broke into a run.
He ran past the latrine and up the stairs to the students’ library, ignoring the bell ringing for afternoon classes. The long, silent library, its walls lined floor to ceiling with book cupboards, with more cupboards set crosswise, making aisles, seemed empty until Guise emerged from an aisle with an open book in his hand.
“What are you doing here?” he snapped. “The bell has rung.”
“A student, mon pere,” Charles murmured vaguely, and walked past him into a cross aisle.
“No student has come in here,” Guise turned his attention back to his book.
Noting the “no student” rather than “no one,” Charles walked quickly through the aisles, searching for other ways out of the single room and finding none. But Guise’s lack of concern had already told him the man was not there. As he passed Guise on his way to the door, he glanced at the librarian’s open book.
“English?” Charles said in surprise, looking at the crisp new pages.
“A new translation of our Pere Bouhours’s life of St. Ignatius,” Guise said, unbending a little. He stroked the book’s calf binding lovingly. “Just published in London,” he said, his voice warming. “Thanks to good King James and his open loyalty to the true faith.”
“Yes, an interesting situation in England just now. Well. If you’re sure no one has come in…”
“I have told you. No student has been here, they would all rather play than use their time wisely.” The momentary warmth was gone and Guise looked pointedly at the door.
Charles went slowly back to the Cour d’honneur, caught between his conscience and his own needs. In the interest of college safety-especially Antoine’s safety-Pere Le Picart had to know about the intruder. Which meant that Charles would have to confess his presence in Guise’s study and his reason for it. He found Le Picart in the chapel, where two workmen were peering at a crack in the altar’s marble. When the rector heard Charles’s steps, he looked up and frowned.
“What are you doing here, Maitre du Luc?” He hurried down the chancel steps. “Has something happened?”
Charles told him, steeling himself for the inevitable question.
“And how do you know all this, maitre?” Le Picart’s voice was dangerously quiet.
He listened to Charles’s answer with a face like thunder. “I will alert the proctors and see to Antoine. And I will see you in my office after supper. Go to your rehearsal and apologize to Pere Jouvancy for your lateness.”
“Yes, mon pere.”
Charles left the chapel with a heavy heart and the fear that he’d just made sure his first Louis le Grand show would be his last. He hoped Le Picart would be content with shipping him back to the south instead of to some foreign mission. On the other hand, Lieutenant-General La Reynie was less likely to find him in China or New France. And what La Reynie would do to him if he failed as a “fly” might well be worse than what hostile pagan natives could come up with.
Jouvancy was coaching a sword fight when Charles arrived in the classroom. He waved away Charles’s apology and Charles went to the ballet end of the room, where Maitre Beauchamps was picking up Time’s much-mended chiming clock from the floor at Walter Connor’s feet. The dancing master flung it over his shoulder to his servant, who was taken off guard for once and missed it. It crashed to the floor, and as the man stolidly picked up the black and gold pieces, Connor flashed Charles a relieved and triumphant smile. Behind Beauchamps’s back, Charles raised clasped hands over his head in a gesture of victory.
It was a long afternoon. Charles and Beauchamps coaxed and threatened the ballet cast through a decent rendering of three of the ballet’s four parts. Hercules’s suite remembered their steps, Francois de Lille danced Hercules with more spirit, and Armand Beauclaire knew his left from his right, all of which argued divine collusion between the goddess of dance, Terpsichore, and St. Genesius, patron of anyone crazy enough to be a performer.
But the demons of chaos, expelled for the moment from the ballet, ran gleefully riot in the tragedy. The Montmorency boy playing Clovis jibed once too often at the Lithuanian general’s son playing Ragnacaire for dying like a sissy. Ragnacaire’s languid patience deserted him and he told Clovis what he could do with his bad acting. Montmorency hit him. Ragnacaire defended his honor while the rest of the cast clapped and cheered. Jouvancy stunned everyone by boxing both combatants soundly on the ears-foreign to his practice and against college rules-and setting them long passages of Virgil to copy out and translate by tomorrow.
When the students had fled and Beauchamps had staggered away, Jouvancy collapsed onto a wooden bench, leaned against the wall, and closed his eyes. Charles slumped down beside him, thinking how much he’d come to like the little priest and how much he wanted to stay in Paris. He turned his head slightly to see if Jouvancy had gone to sleep. The rhetoric master’s eyes stayed closed and Charles studied him. Grieving was leaving its mark. Jouvancy’s eyes were darkly shadowed and he was noticeably thinner than he’d been a week ago. Charles shook his head and leaned back against the wall. Philippe’s murder was eating at the whole college like a canker worm.
He half wished now that he hadn’t gone to the rector. He thought now that the man in the boots had likely been on his way to Guise rather than looking for Antoine. He’d used the old stairs, come so confidently through Guise’s rooms, seemed to know where he was going. And if the rector used what Charles had told him and confronted Guise, then Guise and the man would both be on their guard and harder to catch. Charles sighed. The chickens were out of the coop. He had gone to the rector. And whatever the rector said or didn’t to Guise, he was either going to send Charles away in disgrace or discipline him severely for his disobedience.
Which brought Charles face-to-face with the question he didn’t want to ask. If he felt so penned by his vow of obedience, what was he doing here? First a soldier, now a Jesuit, why did he keep putting himself into situations where obedience-often unquestioning obedience-was required? Because I’m an idiot, he told himself sourly.
True, said the cool-eyed part of him that stood perpetually aside from his feelings, the part that rose up to challenge him when he least wanted it. But leaving that sad fact aside, it went on, you know very well that without obedience there is no order. No justice.
Perhaps, Charles returned, yet just a few hours ago La Reynie told me that Louvois is merciless because of his passion for order.
Does that make all order evil? the cool-eyed part of him asked. Or is it the man who is evil because he has too much power and too little heart and mostly obeys no one? Because without obedience, you have only yourself. Do you know everything, see everything? Is your own will the right answer to every question?
No, all right, of course not, Charles thought irritably. But I’m still an idiot for going to the rector without stopping to think.
True, the unwelcome part of himself murmured, and left him in peace.
“Is something wrong, Maitre du Luc?” Jouvancy was watching him in concern.
Charles felt himself flush, hoping he hadn’t said any of his inner argument out loud. “No, mon pere. Well, yes,” he amended. “May I apologize again for being late, mon pere?” He had no quarrel with courtesy, one of obedience’s sweeter fruits.
“If you must.” Jouvancy smiled back.
“Thank you.”
They went on sitting, listening to a fly buzz lazily in the companionable quiet.
“Cistercians,” Jouvancy said into the silence, with the air of a man reaching a conclusion. “On the eighth of August, I shall join the Cistercians.”
“What? Why, mon pere?”
“No children. No Siamese delegation. No theatre.”
Charles laughed and then realized what Jouvancy had said. “Siamese delegation?”
“Pere La Chaise told the rector that they arrived yesterday at Berny-just outside the city. They will stay there until their presents for the king catch up with them. The king receives them at Versailles on September first.”
“But that’s not our concern, is it?” Charles said, puzzled.
“I didn’t tell you? The Siamese ambassadors are coming to our show.”
Charles slid lower on the bench. Just what they needed. Exotic-and no doubt bewildered-strangers from the other side of the world sitting in the front row and mesmerizing the student performers. French Jesuits had been talking for months now about the delegation, which was accompanied by the famous Jesuit mathematician Pere Guy Tachard. Siam’s King Narai was interested in foreign realms and foreign kings, and King Louis was very interested in elbowing the Dutch out of the center of Siamese trade. Pere Tachard wanted to strengthen the Jesuit mission in Siam and make a Christian out of King Narai. If the delegation needed entertainment, Charles had to admit that the Louis le Grand performance was a natural choice.
“I cannot wait to see them!” Jouvancy said, his pique evaporating. “They’re said to be little, amber-skinned men. Wonderful clothes, lots of gorgeous silk draped just so. I hear that everywhere they stay, the ladies crowd in to watch them eat their supper.” Jouvancy smiled sideways at Charles and raised his eyebrows. “The ambassadors offer fruit to the prettiest ones.”
“If our dancers and actors are as fascinated as the ladies, our show is in big trouble.”
Jouvancy grunted in agreement. The silence lengthened and Charles fell into a near drowse. “Maitre du Luc!”
“What?” Charles shot bolt upright and looked anxiously around.
Jouvancy had turned to face him, his eyes shining. “We can study the Siamese and make drawings, and have a Siamese entree in next year’s ballet!”
But I probably won’t be here next year, Charles didn’t say. “I thought you were joining the Cistercians, mon pere,” he said lightly.
“After we do the Siamese entree.”
They both burst out laughing. Glad for even a glimmer of humor in Jouvancy’s tired face, Charles shoved away his worry about his meeting with the rector and pulled the rhetoric master to his feet. They went companionably in search of a presupper glass of watered wine.