When Charles finally gained the quiet of his chamber that night, he was too tired even to look out the window at Paris. He stripped down to his shirt, fell into bed, and stretched out, past caring whether his feet hung over the edge. He fell asleep between one thought and the next, to dream that he was dancing a gigue while Pernelle played Beauchamps’s little fiddle.
When he woke, he was curled into a tight ball and the day’s first light was gray around the shutters. He said the waking prayers, yawned his way to the window to open shutters and casement, and leaned out. Across St. Jacques, the dome capping the university’s new church was just visible in the growing light. The air was blessedly mild and birds poured their songs into the early quiet. A sharp rap at the door made him turn reluctantly from the window as Frere Fabre came in, sloshing water out of a pitcher. The brother set the pitcher down, rubbed with his foot at the puddle, and then glared at his wet shoe.
“Shaving will make you late for Mass.” He squelched out of the room. Charles sighed and mopped up the water, shaved, and cleaned his teeth. He was tying the cincture around his cassock when a second rap on the door was followed immediately by Fabre’s red head. “The Mass bell’s about to go, come on, I’ll show you a short way to the chapel.”
Charles clapped an old, darned skullcap on his head and followed his self-appointed guide. This main building of the college had once been a grand family hotel, as townhouses were called, the Hotel au Cour de Langres. Grandeur still lingered on the ground floor, where visitors were received. But in the century and a quarter since the Society had acquired the property, the upper floors had been reconfigured again and again to accommodate the growing college and were now haphazard mazes of small chambers, studies, cramped salons, dead-end passages, and low doorways. Fabre led Charles around corners, up and down inconsequential steps waiting like traps in dark passages, and finally down a last steep flight of stairs to a small door set into a corner.
The door opened on an echoing dimness and a soft rustling, a sound like homing birds folding their wings, as Jesuits and students gathered. At the chapel’s east end, the high altar gleamed with gold and silver. Where the aisles crossed, a faux dome’s painted angels and saints spilled from a tender blue summer sky, and reached their plump hands down to struggling mortals. Charles loved these joyously painted ceilings, with their message that heaven and earth could touch, that mortals could reach heaven from the earth’s muddy ground. He found a place on the end of a backless bench and settled to the business of opening himself to the Mass.
When the Mass was over, the rest of the morning’s business claimed him. He followed his colleagues to the small and private fathers’ refectory for bread, cheese, and watered wine set out informally on the dais table. He ate his share standing beside Pere Montville and successfully avoided Pere Guise. Most of the talk was about Philippe Doute’s flight and continuing absence from the college, and Charles found himself answering a barrage of questions about going after the boy. From there, he went to his morning assignment as assistant in a grammar class on Cicero, where he listened to eleven- and twelve-year-olds translate and corrected their efforts. At the dinner bell, he returned to the refectory to eat undistinguished pea soup and mutton stew, the pleasure of Guise’s absence making up for the blandness of the food. When he arrived in the rhetoric classroom after the recreation hour, he found Pere Jouvancy and Maitre Beauchamps toe to toe and nose to nose. Jouvancy looked as though he had not slept.
“You are not listening, mon cher Maitre Beauchamps,” Jouvancy snapped. “Even if my nephew comes back-and pray God he does-he will forfeit his place in the ballet. You must find another Hercules.”
“Another Hercules?” Beauchamps’s widening smile showed little yellow teeth that reminded Charles of a fox’s. “Oh, but of course!” The dancing master gestured at the room, which was filling with boys. “He grows on trees, Hercules. I have only to reach out and pluck him.” He thrust his face even closer to Jouvancy’s. “There is no other Hercules ripening in your little orchard, mon pere.”
“No. There is not. But you were already threatening to replace my poor Philippe because of his behavior. You have a half dozen Opera dancers who could do Hercules in their sleep, even at this late date. Be so good as to choose one and bring him tomorrow.”
Jouvancy swept away to his actors. Beauchamps ground his teeth, his shoe ribbon bouncing as he tapped one of his beautifully made shoes. With a sinking heart, Charles realized that in the distraction of Philippe’s flight yesterday, he had failed to address the question of the chiming clock headdress. Fortunately, Jouvancy hadn’t yet asked him about it. But now was definitely not the moment to confront the dancing master.
Jouvancy led everyone in a short and uncharacteristically militant prayer and dismissed them to mark out their practice stages. Armand Beauclaire and Jacques Doute tried to ask him about Philippe, but he waved them away without answering and Charles set them to moving benches. After a brief, tense conference, Beauchamps and Charles started the cast on the Hesperides section of the ballet, beginning with the ensemble gigue for Hercules’s suite.
The music began to ripple from Beauchamps’s fiddle and Charles settled on a bench with a ballet livret in his lap, ready to prompt anyone who forgot his entrance and exit cues. The dancing master sawed away, stamping the rhythm on the floor when the dancers lost the beat, and yelling corrections. What Beauchamps was able to pull from the students amazed Charles. As he watched, he thought how lucky he was to live in an age when dancing had reached the very height of perfection. At once lively and dignified, it really was the true expression of the soul, as the best classical principles inherited from the ancient writers directed it should be. Arms, hands, and fingers were held softly curved, arms were never raised above the shoulder, legs never higher than a forty-five degree angle from the hip. Feet in their heeled and ribboned shoes flashed like knives in small, precise steps and jumps. Dancers pirouetted as smoothly as cream pouring from a pitcher, balanced as solidly as statues. When all went well, not the slightest sign of effort showed. Charles sighed with satisfaction.
Then he frowned and looked down at his own feet. They were twitching, sketching the gigue’s steps as the dancers did them, and he realized that his body was remembering what his mind had long forgotten. Dances and their music were often passed among colleges and reused for different characters in different ballets. Between them, he and the Carpentras ballet master had taught this gigue to a suite of comets a year or so ago, in a ballet about the classical myths behind the names of the constellations. The six dancers in the suite all had the same steps, though their floor patterns differed. Charles had taught the part that Armand Beauclaire, yesterday’s logician with the thatched head, now had. He winced as Beauclaire, an accomplished technician-with, apparently, no ear for music-strayed further and further from the melody.
Beauchamps stopped playing in the middle of a measure and flung his violin to his hovering servant. Grabbing a handful of papers from a bench, the dancing master bore down on Beauclaire. The other dancers exchanged resigned looks and studied their shoes.
“Your steps are perfect, as usual, Monsieur Beauclaire. But that is all that is perfect and it is not enough, as I have told you more times than I have gray hairs! Your steps are on the wrong notes. Why? You do not know the music. And you do not know the shape of the dance on the page, so you do not know your path on the floor. Though how you cannot know all that by now, the goddess of dance Terpsichore, she only knows.” He cast his eyes up toward a classical heaven and thrust his handful of pages at the boy. “First, the music. Sing it.”
Panic crossed Beauclaire’s round face. “Sing?” he faltered, staring at the pages.
Each page had a line of music printed at the top, and below that, a maze of vertical lines crosshatched with what looked like the tracks of a crazed chicken. Jouvancy had told Charles that Beauchamps’s pet project was a way of writing dance, which he was teaching the students to read. That, Charles guessed, was what Beauclaire was staring at so hopelessly.
“But, maitre, I…”
“You sing like a donkey, yes, we know that. There, at the top, that line is the music that goes with this page of steps. As you should know by now,” he sighed.
Sweat broke out on the boy’s face, but he drew himself up manfully. “Would you give me the first note, please, maitre?”
Beauchamps sang a pure and liquid note, and Beauclaire plunged into the gigue’s tune like a prisoner jumping from a gangplank. Charles looked away and bit his lip. The boy really did sound like a donkey.
“No, no, no!” Beauchamps grabbed the papers away and gave them to the small blond who had suggested yesterday that Philippe might have been taken ill. The boy calmly started the melody with perfect pitch and in perfect time, his surprising treble clear as birdsong.
“There, Monsieur Beauclaire, you see? Compound duple meter. Six beats to the measure, distributed over the underlying beat of two.” He beat the six on his thigh while counting the two. “You see? Come, the rest of you, join in. Not you!” Beauchamps pulled the escaping Beauclaire back from the group. “You will listen as you follow the music and read your steps on the page.”
Charles listened in amazement as the boys sang the lilting melody line. Everyone who learned to dance learned to read music, of course, but these boys were musicians as well as dancers. What would happen on the courtyard stage on the seventh of August would indeed have more in common with court and professional performances than with the earnest little shows he had helped to produce at Carpentras.
“Now, Monsieur Beauclaire,” Beauchamps said, with terrifying gentleness, when the singers finished. “Now let us see you put it all together.”
The dancers took their places. Beauchamps closed his eyes briefly in what looked like prayer and began to play. All was perfection and Charles released his held breath, still marking the steps with his feet and singing quietly along with the melody. Then all six boys went down in a writhing tangle.
“Ow! Get off, you ass!” Indignant howls rose from the heap as Beauclaire struggled to his feet. “You go left, idiot,” someone cried at him despairingly, “left!”
Beauchamps barreled onto the stage and grabbed Beauclaire’s hand. “This is your right hand.” He dropped it and grabbed the other hand. “This one is your left. Do I have to tie colored ribbons on them so you can remember?” He marched Beauclaire, who had clearly given up all hope, through the floor pattern again and picked up his fiddle. “Now. With perfect timing. With perfect directions. Or I may kill you.”
The dejected Beauclaire looked as though that might be preferable, but he and his fellows dutifully began again. Beauchamps played and sang the tune, leaning precariously in whatever direction Beauclaire was supposed to turn. As the boys turned accurately and on the correct notes, Charles relaxed again, his feet still marking the remembered steps. Then Beauclaire did a series of small beautiful leaps in the wrong direction, two other boys skidded out of his way, and Beauclaire cannoned into Jacques Doute, who was standing offstage. The dancing master sank onto the bench beside Charles, laid down his violin as though it were his dead beloved, and put his head in his hands. A deathly quiet descended on the ballet end of the room.
“Maitre du Luc,” Beauchamps said into his hands. “Show him how it is done.”
Charles blinked. “Maitre?”
“You know the part,” Beauchamps said without looking up. “I saw your feet. Would you rather dance it for him or would you rather I kill him? Let us hear what Jesuit casuistry has to say to that proposition.”
“Please, Maitre du Luc, we have never seen a professor dance, not really!” the boys clamored.
“On the other hand, we have never seen a teacher kill one of us, either,” someone else said in an interested tone.
Charles wished he could disappear like Philippe. Everyone of his social class learned to dance, of course. And he was a good, even gifted, dancer, indeed had thought more than once when he was younger of running away to join a theatre company. But now he was a Jesuit, and while teaching was one thing, performing, even for these boys, was quite another. He hadn’t danced-not really danced-since the ball where his secret betrothal to Pernelle had been discovered.
“Well?” Beauchamps was glowering at Charles from under his eyebrows.
“Yes-I do-I did-know Monsieur Beauclaire’s part of this gigue. But you must excuse me, maitre, you know that Jesuits do not perform.”
“Nonsense. Is your Superior General going to drop through the ceiling and excommunicate you if you dance this gigue for us? You are a teacher. What I ask is part of teaching M. Beauclaire. So teach.”
“But, maitre, I can no longer position my left arm exactly as it should be and-”
“You have another arm and two legs, use those. We’ll get the idea.”
He positioned his fiddle and waited. Charles turned toward the front of the room to enlist Jouvancy’s help. The senior rhetoric master could put a more courteous stop to this than he himself could. But Jouvancy was busy demonstrating dance’s fourth position, a stance used by actors, lawyers-and most males having their portraits painted-as well as by dancers. As Charles watched, Jouvancy threw up his hands in exasperation and pulled off his cassock to stand in his linen shirt and black breeches, then struck the fourth position pose, his black stockinged legs and small feet in their low-heeled shoes turned out just so, his arms, hands, and fingers softly curved, his whole stance imbued with arresting, silent beauty. Charles shrugged and pulled off his own cassock. Jubilantly, the boys cleared the stage for him and he took up the gigue’s beginning position, wondering how much he really remembered. And what Beauchamps would do to him when he reached the end of his memory.
The dancing master gave him a nod, attacked the fiddle with the bow, and they were off. Charles plunged into the gigue like a hooked fish thrown back into water. He stepped, he leapt, he flew. He balanced on one foot’s tiptoe as though merely pausing during levitation. A wild joy possessed him. His feet invented effortless, flickering steps for what he’d forgotten. He pirouetted, flashing like a top as he spun. He wove a lover’s knot of a pattern on the ancient floorboards and sprayed his audience with sweat as he skimmed past them. When the fiddle achieved its finish, his blood and his heart went on singing. Grinning from ear to ear, he bowed to Beauchamps, who bowed in return, though with one raised eyebrow to mark Charles’s inspired improvisations.
The boys clapped wildly. As Jouvancy and his actors turned to see what was happening, Pere Montville, the rector’s assistant, burst into the room. For one startled moment, Charles thought Montville had come to censure him. But Montville hurried to Jouvancy and whispered urgently in his ear. Jouvancy blanched and grabbed up his cassock. Montville left as quickly as he’d come. Beauchamps and Charles looked questions at each other as Charles shrugged hastily back into his own cassock.
“Gather both casts, please,” Jouvancy said as he passed them, “work on the finale, the ballet general.”
He rushed from the room, his cassock billowing behind him. Seeing that Jouvancy had dropped his black cloth cincture, Charles grabbed it up. “I must take him this,” he told Beauchamps, and hurried after the rhetoric master.