The Rhetoric of Death (10 page)

Montville nodded, his ebullience dimmed for once. “To have these things happen to both boys—” He shook his head. “We're hoping that Philippe has simply gone home to Chantilly, but there is no word yet. Keep praying,
maître
.”

Montville walked quickly toward the college and Charles went to the place where Antoine had lain. He stared thoughtfully at the patches of slightly rounded cobbles glistening with a roux of street debris, dung, urine, and last night's rain. The lay brothers had released the blocked traffic, but Charles, heedless of the stream of people, animals, and carts parting around him, protected the piece of road with his body while his eyes moved steadily out from the place where Antoine's head had been.

“What are you doing here, Maître du Luc?”

Charles looked up to see Guise glowering from under his wide hat brim. “I brought something Père Jouvancy needed,
mon père
. Like all of us, I am wondering how the accident happened.”

Guise looked around pointedly. “Père Jouvancy is gone. And so should you be. There is nothing more to gape at.”

“No? Père Montville said the child is your godson.”

Guise's expression rippled and smoothed, like water when wind blows over it. He moved to the side of the street, and gestured Charles to follow.

“The child's name is Antoine,” he said gravely. “I saw him fall. The man who rode him down was going like a demon out of hell. Oh, I know it happens all the time, but I would dearly love to get my hands on the cur.”

“Was Antoine with you?”

“He was not. I have no idea how he got out of the college. He should have been in his grammar class. Why he was not, will be for his tutor and his teacher to answer,” Guise said grimly. “And answer they will. No, I was coming from the bookseller's back there on the corner. Reading, as is my bad habit, as I walked.” He held up a small, elaborately bound book. “When that street porter cried out a warning to Antoine, I looked up and saw the horse galloping at the child.”

Charles nodded encouragingly, surprised at Guise's sudden friendly spate of words. “The rider came around the turn. I thought the horse was going to fall, it was going at such a pace. Poor Antoine tried to get out of the way, but—” Guise shook his head sadly. “To the rider's credit, he leaned down—at some risk to himself, I may say—and tried to push the boy aside. But Antoine stumbled and fell. And then the cursed man just kept going. Afraid he'd killed him, I suppose. Well, all we can do now is pray.” He gestured toward the rue St. Jacques. “Will you walk back with me?”

Wooden shoes clattered on the cobbles and the woman Charles had noticed earlier pushed her way between the men.

“I saw you over there with your nose nearly on the cobbles,” she said to Charles. “
You
seem to have eyes in your head, anyway. Unlike
some
.” She twitched a shoulder at Guise behind her. “I must talk to you,
mon père
.”

“Be off, woman!” Guise pushed her aside. “Do not waste your time on this excessively stupid woman, Maître du Luc. Her lurid tale is nonsense.”

“Tale, is it?” The woman spun around and looked Guise up and down. “It's the truth and you know it, you saw it yourself! Antoine never fell, the man rode him down on purpose, I saw it with these two eyes!” She turned back to Charles, pointing at her round brown eyes as though Charles might not know where to find them.

“If you must talk to someone, Maître du Luc,” Guise said, barely opening his mouth, “talk to the street porter. He is a reliable man.”

He departed in a whirl of cassock skirts and Charles turned to look for the porter, but the man was gone.

“Now that there is no
man
available, perhaps you will listen?” The woman's curling chestnut hair was escaping from her white linen cap in every direction and her eyes snapped with outrage. “That priest is lying. Lying, do you hear me?” She spat over her shoulder at the place where Guise had stood. “But what can you expect from such a
mignon
?” She picked up her coarse brown skirt and mimicked the way Guise was holding his hem away from the street dirt as he walked toward the rue St. Jacques.

“Mignon?”
Charles turned involuntarily to stare after Guise. Surely she didn't mean “darling” the way the court meant it, as a jibing name for the pretty men so beloved of the king's brother. Whatever else Guise seemed, it wasn't that.

“You want to tell me something, madame?” He hoped that Beauchamps was not keeping track of how long he'd been gone from the classroom. “I have only a moment.”

“I have been
trying
to tell you something,” she said severely.

“I am listening, madame.”

“Well.” She gave herself a small shake, like a ruffled bird. “Little Antoine comes into our shop sometimes with his brother, Philippe, and—”

“Your shop?”

“Ah, I thought so from your accent, you're new, that's why you don't know anything. We're the first shop to the right of your chapel door. My daughter Marie-Ange and I were returning from delivering bread to the boardinghouse kitchens. We're bakers, LeClerc the baker, that's us. The amount of bread these skinny students eat, you'd hardly believe it—but, there, I suppose you would. Anyway, we were walking back toward St. Jacques and Antoine was running this way, toward us. Though he hadn't seen us. Marie-Ange called out to him, but just then a man coming toward us, that street porter, shouted, and I turned and saw a horse coming around the turn and galloping straight at Antoine. I yelled out to warn him and the porter jumped out and tried to frighten the horse and make it turn. Antoine dodged—he's very fast, that little one—and I thought he was safe, but—” She shook her head and dropped her voice dramatically. “The rider swerved and went after him! And pushed him down! Antoine fell and the man kept going, if you can believe it. I sent my little girl running to the college for help and I went to see how badly the child was hurt. But that son of a pig Guise got there first and warned me off.”

“The rider swerved and went after the boy? Are you sure, madame?”

“As sure as I stand here and hope for salvation!”

Charles turned to stare at the place where Antoine had fallen. “You say the man reached for him—Père Guise saw that, too. He said the rider was trying to push the boy out of the way.”

“Then why didn't he try to stop the horse or turn it?” She frowned and her eyes opened wider. “Unless he was reaching out for the boy because he was trying to snatch him up and ride off with him!” She stepped closer, her eyes avid. “Another thing I can tell you, he wore a mask!”

“A mask, madame?” Charles quickly reassessed his informant, remembering Guise's sneer at what he'd called her “lurid tale.”

She crossed her arms over her straining bodice. “I see you don't believe me. But I saw what I saw. I swear it. It was the kind of mask ladies wear when it's cold. Or at Carnival. But—” She looked expressively up at the sky. “—it is not cold, not today, anyway. And it is not Carnival. And he was not a lady.” She eyed Charles triumphantly, as though she'd just bested him in a rhetorical display.

“Did the porter also see the mask?”

“Is he blind? Of course he did. And so did your
mignon.
But the porter will never tell you he saw it, now that your
mignon
has got hold of him.” She held a hand under Charles's nose and rubbed thumb and fingers together in the age-old sign for money.

Charles's head was beginning to spin. “Père Guise gave him money?”

Her shrug nearly took her ears off. “Why did the porter run away before you could talk to him? And Guise does not like my version of the story at all, you heard him.”

“Did he offer you money to change your story, madame?”

Mme LeClerc spat again. “That object knows better than to try his tricks with me.”

“Madame, Père Guise is Antoine's godfather. Why would he pay the porter to lie about what happened?”

“Why would the masked man ride the child down?”

Charles opened his mouth, then shut it. It was not the moment for a logic lesson. “Did you notice anything else about the man, madame? What was his horse like?”

“A rangy chestnut. Missing his manhood, if you know what I mean, poor thing.” She dimpled and Charles suddenly realized that she wasn't much older than he was. “The horse was. About the man, of course, I couldn't say.”

Charles struggled to keep a straight face, thinking that the baker was a lucky man.

“The rider's hat was pulled down low.” She paused, watching the air, obviously seeing the whole thing happen again. “Plain and flat the hat was, a floppy brim, no feather. His hair I didn't notice. He looked wiry—not thin or reedy, though, he looked strong. A good rider. Not so tall, not nearly so tall as you.” She looked Charles up and down approvingly. “His coat and breeches were ordinary brown. Like this.” She touched her worn bodice. “The only thing good was his boots. A blackish color like burnt sugar, and they folded over at the top.”

“Which way did he ride?”

She pointed toward the rue St. Jacques. “I was looking at the child, I didn't see which way the man turned.”

“Do you know the street porter's name, madame? Or where I could find him?”

“I never saw him before. But you might find him on the quays, they wait there for the boats to unload.”

“And you, madame, can you be found in your shop?”

“But of course. You can't miss it, as I said, it's beside your chapel door. Which is beside your little postern, in case you don't know yet. Our bakery and the bookbinder farther along are the only shops left in your frontage now.”

Charles thanked her and began his farewells before he remembered that she didn't know his name.

“Forgive me, Madame LeClerc, I have not introduced myself. I am Maître Charles du Luc.”

She nodded her approval of his manners and made him a small reverence. Then she frowned. “Why are you not
père
? What did you do?”

Charles burst out laughing. She sounded exactly like his mother. “Nothing, madame—at least, not in the way you mean. It takes a long time to become
père
in the Society of Jesus.”

“That Guise is
père
and you're not? Pah. It's the same in the church and out, the bad ones get everything, the good ones go begging.” Her face softened. “I will pray for our Antoine,
maître
.”

“As we all will.
Au revoir,
madame.” Head down, he walked toward the college, thinking about what he'd learned and scrutinizing the paving stones as though he'd lost a handful of gold.

I
nstead of making speed back to the classroom, Charles went in search of Père Le Picart. A lay brother directed him to the infirmary, in a small court with a tidy garden of herbs and flowers, above the workroom where the infirmarian prepared what medicines weren't bought from apothecaries. Le Picart answered his tap at the infirmary door.

“Maître du Luc?” The rector frowned. “Has something else happened, God forbid?”

“No, please forgive my intrusion,
mon père
, I came because a woman in the street, the wife of the baker LeClerc, told me she saw the accident. But perhaps Père Guise has already told you . . . ?”

“He told me what he saw. He has just gone. But come in, the more we know, the better.”

The big square room was dim and herb-scented, with wooden shutters half-closed over the windows and rush matting on the floor to muffle footsteps. The infirmarian, a bear of a man with hands the size of soup bowls, sat on a stool beside one of the dozen narrow beds, busy with a cloth and pitcher.

“Maître du Luc, this is Frère Brunet, who sees to our health.”

Brunet glanced up and nodded.

“How is the boy?” Charles asked him softly.

“The head wound seems to be the only injury,” Brunet said. “Except for bruises. If he wakes soon, he'll do well enough.”

“Mother of God, let him wake,” Charles murmured and crossed himself, watching Brunet sponge wine into the gash on Antoine's forehead to help against infection. Wine stung an open wound, but the boy's eyes stayed closed and he lay ominously still. Charles peered over the infirmarian's beefy shoulder.

“A sharp slice,
mon frère
,” Charles said. “Though in the place where he fell, what cobbles there are, are rounded. And where the cobbles have come up, there's only mud. Nothing sharp that I could see.”

“Perhaps the horse's hoof caught him,” Brunet said, spreading a foul-smelling unguent on the cut.

“But wouldn't the injury be worse? And the flesh more bruised?”

Charles had seen men horse-kicked in battle, and most of them had gotten not only cuts and bruises, but their skulls broken in the bargain. The infirmarian's hands stilled for a moment as he considered.

“Maybe not, if it was a glancing hit.”

Charles held his peace. The injury could have happened like that. He looked up to find the rector watching him narrowly.

“The baker's wife?” Le Picart prompted him. “Père Guise told me that Mme LeClerc was there, but he dismissed what she said.”There was a fractional pause. “Myself, I have always found her reliable.”

Charles repeated what she'd said about the masked man riding straight for Antoine and reaching out for him. But he left out her insistence that Guise had bribed the porter. He needed to be very sure of his ground before he made an accusation that serious.