As Lieutenant-General La Reynie reached the edge of the stage, the man he’d sent to the Hotel de Guise came running back across the courtyard, spurs clanking. Charles went closer to hear the man’s report. He’d seen the female spy working at the house, the officer told La Reynie, and it was true that a woman had given birth there a few hours ago. In the Guise chapel, he added, with avid relish. Neither the woman nor the child had lived. Gossip in the house had it that the child was full-term.
Charles crossed himself and said quietly, “Her child was due in October, I heard.”
“So M. Doute no doubt believed,” La Reynie returned. “I suppose she would have prepared him to welcome a surprisingly large and healthy early-born babe.”
Behind them, the rector groaned. They turned around as he crossed himself and got to his feet. “May God forgive her,” Le Picart said sadly. “May God forgive us all. Monsieur La Reynie, I must call brothers to take charge of the bodies and prepare them for their graves. Will you wait in my office? We can finish saying what needs to be said there. And you, Maitre du Luc, go to your bed. You and I will talk tomorrow. You have done more than enough for us today.”
“Thank you, mon pere. Will you release Frere Fabre now? Tonight?”
“Immediately. And you will see that boy of Mme LeClerc’s home?”
When Le Picart and La Reynie were gone, Charles went to get Pernelle, who had withdrawn again into the stage wings. He wanted to have her gone before the lay brothers came for the bodies.
“Is it really true?” she whispered, grasping his hands. In the torchlight, her face was white with shock. “I thought you had gone deranged. Am I really going, and so easily? Can we trust him?”
“Yes.” Charles wasn’t sure he liked La Reynie, but he had misjudged him badly. “We can trust him.”
“I can never thank you for what you’ve done, Charles.”
“Seeing me through the show was thanks enough.” His effort at lightness was a failure. His insane gamble had succeeded and she was going. He cleared his throat and dropped her hands. “Go back to Mme LeClerc tonight, Pernelle. It’s safe. I’ll meet you outside the postern before first light.”
She looked almost as though he’d struck her. “Is that what you want?”
“You’ll be more-” He couldn’t force the lie through his tightening throat. “Please.”
She studied him for a moment. Then she drew his face down and kissed him, spun quickly away, and ran across the stage and jumped to the ground. When Charles heard the porter open and close the postern, he sighed out what started as relief and ended as desolation.
In his rooms, he shed his cassock without bothering to light the candle. He went to the window, opened the casement, and leaned out, remembering his first Paris night. There were fewer candles now in the windows up and down the street. Schools were closing for vacation, as Louis le Grand shortly would. He lifted his face to the damp air and clouded sky and wondered if there would be rain before morning. Think of rain, weather, the tragedy, the ballet, he told himself. Even of the real tragedy, whose final act had played out tonight on the stage. Think of anything but Pernelle.
He felt his way to the prie-dieu, groping like a blind man, but not because of the dark. He sank to his knees and prayed for the Doutes, living and dead, for Lisette’s dead child, for her maid Agnes waiting for her trial in the Chatelet, and the porter and the tutor. He even brought himself to pray for Guise and Moulin, because guilty and innocent alike had been brought to ruin by greed and hatred and the love of power. He turned then to giving thanks for the preservation of his own life and for La Reynie’s unexpected humanity. Finally, he prayed for Pernelle’s safe journey and that she would find her daughter and sister-in-law waiting for her. But those last prayers cost him dearly and his heart overflowed with the pain of her going. These last few days, even with their danger, exhaustion, and worry, had been so full of the happiness he’d always felt in her presence. Just knowing she was there, at Mme LeClerc’s, even when he hadn’t seen her, had lit a small, bright fire in his heart. What will I do now, he asked the Silence. Finish the school term, make my yearly Jesuit retreat, and during it make my decision about the Society? He dropped his head onto his arms. “Tell me,” he begged aloud. “I love her. What do you want of me?” The Silence held its peace. Some quality in the air, or maybe it was only his misery, made Charles feel that It was holding Its breath.
“Charles?” The door closed softly and Pernelle’s feet moved lightly across the ancient floorboards.
Charles raised his head. “What’s wrong? How did you get here?”
“Shhh.” Her fingers were warm on his lips. “Nothing’s wrong. Mme LeClerc found her stairway key; it was in a flour barrel.” She withdrew her hand and he waited, like a man in a trance. “She said spending my last night down there was a terrible waste. She said it wasn’t fair. To either of us.”
“And what do you say?” he said in a choked whisper. “What’s fair to you?”
“I am here,” she said simply. “David is gone, I am not breaking any vow.”
“But I would be.”
“Not a final vow.”
“That’s hair splitting.”
“Well, that thing Jesuits do-casuistry, isn’t it called? Don’t you teach that the end justifies the means?”
“It’s much more complicated than that.” Suddenly he was laughing. And thinking that any man who thought body and mind had no commerce had never loved a brilliant woman. “Is it the custom among Huguenots to discuss theology when considering-um-?”
“Considering bedding together? It has been known,” she said gravely, but he could hear her smile even though he couldn’t see it. “But it is not required.”
“What is the end the means might justify, Pernelle?”
“Whole-heartedness.”
“Whose?”
“Ours. But especially yours.”
“Expound, my learned maitresse,” he said laughing softly.
“We loved each other, Charles. We meant to marry. When they pulled us apart, I thought I would die. But I learned to love David and he loved me. My heart grew into one whole piece again. But I think yours has not been able to. You need a whole heart to give to God.” She put her hand on his cheek and a small yearning sound escaped her. “Make love with me, Charles. For both our sakes. If we go through this last door together, then perhaps we can go on apart.”
Her fingers fumbling at his neck to untie his shirt stirred him into fire. He rose to his feet, untied the cloak she wore, and pushed her shirt-his shirt-off her shoulders. He held her against his naked chest, his face buried in her hair, and felt like every lost creature who has ever found its home again. The Silence, or the air around him, or maybe just he himself, released a long-held breath.
Hours later, when he woke, it was deep night and rain was blowing against the window. For a moment, he thought he was a boy at home again and his brother was taking up most of the bed. Then his heart nearly burst with thankfulness as he realized that the knees in his back and the arm across his waist were Pernelle’s. He wriggled closer to her, and she stirred and kissed his spine.
“Good morning,” he said.
“Not morning yet, but very, very good!”
He rolled onto his back, hardly feeling his wound, and pulled her on top of him. “My joy, my heart, my love.” He was nearly singing. “Thank you. For your wisdom, for your great gift. I kneel at your feet, I-”
Laughing, she covered his mouth with hers and then pulled away. “That’s all very pretty, but get to business, sir.”
So he did.
When he woke again she was sleeping soundly. Her head was on his chest and he breathed in the sweet scent of her hair. He hoped he hadn’t been repulsive, still wearing his day’s sweat. But she hadn’t seemed repulsed. His smile was broad enough to light the dark. But dawn was coming. His arm tightened around her. Before dawn, she would go. He tensed against grief’s assault, but it didn’t come. But I love her with all my heart, he said to the Silence, appalled at his lack of feeling.
Yes, Something said very distinctly in the dark. Charles froze, feeling like Adam discovered with Eve after they’d shared the apple, and everything else. Pernelle sighed in her sleep and put a warm hand over his heart. Light too bright to look at seemed to come from nowhere and flood everything, every smallest piece of him. And he finally understood, though he also didn’t understand at all. She would go and he would love her. And he would love many other things, though not any other woman. Yes, the Silence said.
Darkness still held Paris in its arms when Charles and Pernelle went hand in hand to the street passage. The college was sleeping and the porter hadn’t yet come to his post. Pernelle was in her boy’s clothes, wearing her cloak and with the last of the rector’s pouch of coins in her pocket. Before they reached the postern, the bell rang beside it. They stopped and turned to each other. Charles put down his lantern.
“Go with God, beloved heart,” he whispered, and kissed her. “Always.”
Her dark eyes were silvery with tears. “Always.”
Charles unbarred the postern door and Lieutenant-General La Reynie, booted and cloaked, stepped out of the darkness.
“Quickly,” he whispered.
Pernelle’s hand rested briefly against Charles’s heart. Then she turned to La Reynie and Charles closed and rebarred the door. He listened to the two pairs of feet walk toward the river and when he could no longer hear them, he went to the chapel. He meant to go to the Virgin’s altar, but he found himself instead standing in front of the statue of Jeanne d’Arc, the Maid of Orleans. He knelt where he and Pernelle had knelt just a few days before, and waited for the blow of her leaving to hit him. Instead, an emptiness grew inside him. Not a grieving emptiness. A waiting emptiness, he thought, gazing uneasily up at the Maid. She stared over his head, as though she were waiting, too, waiting for the English army and knowing, against all the odds, that she would prevail.
“But they killed you,” Charles said out loud. The statue calmly studied the horizon. “They burned you,” he said. But only after she had saved France. His breath began to come short. “I have no power,” he protested, “no power at all!” But neither had she, only belief in her truth. They could take her mortal life-and they had-but God had held her soul’s life. So she had clung to nothing but God; her enemies had had nothing she wanted. She’d had no price. That was her power. Charles stood up. Or something pulled him upright.