The Eloquence of Blood (13 page)

“How peculiar,” Charles said straight-faced, as Jouvancy paused for breath. “Imagine liking warmth. But I thought you were not returning until tomorrow,
mon père
.”

Jouvancy gestured dramatically at the pewter sky outside the office window. “The old woman who keeps our dairy there is a weather prophetess, the best for leagues around, they say. She told me it would surely snow again tonight, and most likely snow hard. So I thought it better to get the boys back to the college now.”

Charles frowned at the window and hoped the elderly dairy maid was right about the new snow's timing. Slogging through a heavy snowfall any sooner would make all he had to do take even longer. He needed to find out if the elder M. Brion had returned home. And where the younger M. Brion was. And he had to find Lieutenant-Général La Reynie, or at least find out from the police
commissaire
if anything new had been learned about Martine's murder.

Jouvancy was still talking. “. . . so I wanted to see you to ask if you have heard from Monsieur Charpentier. About whether his music for February is finished.”

“No,
mon père
, I've heard nothing.”

Jouvancy tsked with impatience. “Musicians! They are as bad as builders, always of a lingering humor! Well, we will live in hope.
Celsus Martyr
, our spoken Latin tragedy, is only three acts instead of five. Monsieur Charpentier's French
Celse
, the musical tragedy, has five acts. Though it is longer, it is still the
intermèdes
for the spoken tragedy. But it will have far more singing than dancing, which will make your job easier. We still need all the time we can get for rehearsing, though!”

Charles thought privately that the short spoken tragedy was going to seem like
intermèdes
for the long musical tragedy. They would certainly need all the time for rehearsal they could get, since—dances or not—he would have to oversee much of the musical tragedy's staging. “And will the performance be on the same stage where we did Père Damiot's farce,
mon père
?”

“In winter, there is nowhere else. Was his
Farce of Monks
well received?”

By the end of Charles's retelling, Jouvancy was laughing nearly as hard as the audience had.

“Ah, Maître du Luc, I wish I had seen you chasing Frère Brunet with that clyster! I often wish we could risk more comedy here. But public comedy is such a vexed question.” He frowned and shook his head. “All comedy is a vexed question when one is dealing with young people.”

“Do you disapprove of comedy, then,
mon père
?”

“Oh, in most cases, yes, I do! Because the young are so easily led astray, you understand. And so much comedy in public theatres is frankly scurrilous.” He looked furtively at the door and lowered his voice. “I must admit, though, that I dearly love some of Molière's pieces—I once saw the incomparable
Gentilhomme
and laughed myself silly at poor Monsieur Jourdain! Our little Molière sometimes went too far, I admit,” Jouvancy said affectionately. The great playwright had once been a day student at Louis le Grand, back when he was only little Jacques Poquelin, the upholsterer's son. “A genius, though. And cut off in his prime, poor man.”

Interested in Jouvancy's opinion, Charles ventured, “Do you think, then, that the church is too severe on actors?”

“In truth, I do! Excommunicating them, as happens too often, only drives them farther away from virtue, yet as we prove regularly in our colleges, the theatre can be an excellent school for virtue. If only actors would use it as that, there is no reason they should be denied the sacraments any more than dancers—and the church certainly does not excommunicate dancers!”

Charles laughed a little cynically. “If it did, it would have to excommunicate half the nobility of France! Not to mention the king.”

“Well, Louis does not dance himself anymore, but yes. Speaking of dancers, who are you going to cast in the musical tragedy?”

“Walter Connor, I think. And Armand Beauclaire, who in spite of his directional difficulty is an excellent dancer.”

“But poor Maître Beauchamps,” Jouvancy said, his lively face a mask of mendacious concern. “Do you want to be answerable for the results if our dear dancing master has, yet again, to teach Beauclaire the difference between right and left?” Pierre Beauchamps, probably the greatest dancing master alive, was dance director of the Paris Opera and also Louis le Grand's ballet master. And an indispensable thorn in the rhetoric master's side. “There might well be murder done,
maître
!”

Murder. Charles winced, seeing in his mind the word scrawled on the college doors—innocent of the slander now after the lay brothers' long and hardworking night. Unbidden, his mind also showed him Martine, lying dead as he'd last seen her. Jouvancy, oblivious, had risen to hunt along his bookshelf for something. He looked up as someone tapped at the door.

“Come!”

A lay brother stuck his head into the room. “Your pardon,
mon père
. There's a Monsieur Germain Morel to see Maître du Luc.” He looked at Charles. “In the anteroom by the main doors.”

Startled, Charles looked at Jouvancy for permission to leave, wondering uneasily what Mlle Isabel Brion's dancing master could want.

“Yes, yes, very well, go.” The rhetoric master sat down again, leafing through his leather-bound costume book. “We will talk again before all this madness starts.”

“Thank you,
mon père
.” Charles rose. “Please tell Monsieur Morel I am coming,” he said to the lay brother, who withdrew and clattered down the stairs.

Charles left the chamber quietly and hurried down behind him. Before he reached the anteroom at the bottom of the curving stone staircase, Morel was bowing, words tumbling out of his mouth.

“Forgive me for troubling you, Maître du Luc. But Mademoiselle Brion begged me to come.” Morel was sweating in spite of the cold and seemed hardly able to catch his breath. “Because—” He gulped air. “Monsieur Brion is dead!”

Charles stared in confusion. “Her brother? Or do you mean her father?”

“Monsieur Henri Brion. A
sergent
of police came to tell Mademoiselle Brion that her father had been found murdered!”

Charles tried to think past his surprise. Lying awake during the night, he'd wondered whether, for some unguessed-at reason, it was Henri Brion, and not his son, who had killed Martine and fled, which would explain why no one had seen him since her death was discovered. But if that was true, why would he be suddenly dead himself? “Who found him, Monsieur Morel? Where?”

“I don't know who found him. His body was—is—in a ditch very near the rue Perdue. The ditch is behind some old houses near the Place Maubert. Can you go there with me,
maître
? Isabel—Mademoiselle Brion, I mean—wants you to pray for him. And she says”—color rose in Morel's face—“she says you will know what to do.”

“I am sure that you will know quite well what to do yourself,” Charles said diplomatically. “But of course I will come.” He gathered his cloak around him and led the way to the postern door, thinking irreverently that it would take a papal bull to keep him away.

When he and Morel reached the Place Maubert, Morel led the way across it and down the small street that ran past the Mynette garden's side gate.

“This is a back way to Henri Brion's own house,” Morel said. “I think he must have been on his way home when he was attacked.”

The small street crossed a larger one and became an alley between old timbered houses. At the mouth of the alley stood a huddle of talking, eager-faced women. Servants, most of them looked to be, but the one at the center of the group was a wood seller resting the legs of her heavy carrying frame on the ground. She nodded to Charles. “They said you'd be coming,
mon père
. It's down the alley, in the ditch.”

Charles thanked her, and he and Morel hurried between the houses to a snowy ditch that had perhaps once been a streambed and was ending its life as an illegal neighborhood midden. Two men stood in the ditch with their backs to the path. Charles didn't know the man in workaday brown, but the one in the plumed hat and long black wig he knew all too well, even from behind.

Giving thanks for the cold for once, because it lessened the ditch's stench, Charles picked his way down the snowy slope, Morel behind him. Morel arrived at the bottom with his dignity intact, but Charles stepped on something nastily soft under the snow and slid precipitously, saved from falling flat only by a long arm and a lace-cuffed iron grip.

“
Bonjour
, Maître du Luc. I thought you might be arriving.” A spark of warmth flickered in Nicolas de La Reynie's dark eyes, and a corner of his mouth turned up beneath the moustache arching like a gray half moon above his lips. La Reynie was not a young man. But he was a commanding presence, tall and strong and powerfully built.

“And I am glad to find you here,
mon lieutenant-général
,” Charles said. “And not only because you saved my poor bones, if not my dignity.”

He didn't bother asking why La Reynie had been expecting him. Or why the
lieutenant-général
of the Paris police had come himself to stand in this noisome ditch. The man knew more than anyone except God about what happened in the city, and probably knew it faster. He would certainly know of Martine Mynette's murder and no doubt knew quite well that Henri Brion had been her notary. And that the Mynette money would now come to the Society of Jesus. Pressed unwillingly into La Reynie's service last summer, Charles had quickly learned that nothing was beneath the
lieutenant-général
's attention.

The other corner of La Reynie's mouth lifted. “Dignity? Oh, Jesuits have dignity to spare, I find. Though no more bones than the rest of us. And perhaps, just now, no more money? At least, not yet.”

Charles smiled affably. La Reynie was not the only one who could play verbal games. “Certainly not more money,
monsieur
, since we take a vow of poverty.”

La Reynie gave him a small ironic bow and presented his
sergent
, the man in brown breeches and coat, lean and hard bitten. Charles, in turn, presented Morel, who eyed La Reynie warily. The four of them turned their attention to the most recent dead creature to be thrown into the ditch.

Charles crossed himself and the others followed suit. Henri Brion's frost-glazed dark eyes stared past them at the sky. Charles looked at his dead face, recalling that although he had heard the man's voice, he had never seen him until now. He was somehow surprised to see how much Brion looked like his daughter, robust and wide-faced, and how little he resembled the small frail Gilles.

“I have heard that our corpse was a notary and had worked for your college,” La Reynie said.

“Yes. And you no doubt also know that he was Mademoiselle Mynette's notary. And her guardian. I know his family slightly, but I had never met him. How was he killed?” Charles asked.

“Stabbed in the back. To the heart. We found him lying on his face and turned him to have a look at his other side. There's little blood on the ground around him, because his clothes are good thick cloth and his shirt and coat soaked up most of it.”

Morel flinched. Charles said nothing, again seeing Martine Mynette lying in a sea of red. But that blood was let by a little blade, not the long knife needed to pierce a heart.

Charles said, “Then you don't think he was killed elsewhere and moved here?”

La Reynie shook his head. “I see no reason yet to think so. Though I wonder how he ended in this ditch.”

“He must have been on his way home.” Morel swallowed hard. “He lives in the rue Perdue, very near here.”

“Ah.” La Reynie nodded consideringly.

“Do you have any thought about how long he's been dead?” Charles said. “I know that in cold like this, it's very hard to tell. But it may help you to know that his family has not seen him since at least Thursday evening.”

“That may help indeed.” La Reynie eyed the body. “And there was snow off and on yesterday and through the night, and snow mostly covered the body when we found it. And that bush screens it. The body wasn't immediately obvious.”

In silence, they looked down at the dead man. A sense of futility assailed Charles. Brion had been described to him as greedy and unsuccessful at his work. He'd seemed somehow negligible, even in his own household. Unfortunately, he had not seemed negligible to his killer. If he had, murder would not have been necessary. But no human soul was negligible. Charles began the prayers for the dead, and the other men bowed their heads.

When the prayers were finished, there was a moment of sober quiet and then the
sergent
folded his arms over his chest and said, as though continuing an argument Charles had interrupted, “I still say the beggars would have found him yesterday, if he'd been here.” Seeing Charles's questioning look, he explained, “Beggars search the ditches for anything usable. They would have had that cloak and everything else off him and he'd be mother naked.”

Charles frowned. “They'd search even a midden like this?”

The
sergent
's eyes widened in disbelief at the naive question. “Beggars would search your chamber pot and lick your empty plate,
mon père
, if they thought there might be anything they could sell.”

Charles took the rebuke to his naiveté in silence, wondering why he'd asked such a stupid question when he'd seen firsthand the half-ruined part of the old Louvre palace, which destitute Parisians had made into a warren of fetid living quarters.