The Eloquence of Blood (37 page)

Keeping the horses to the edge of the narrow rue de la Juiverie on the Île, to avoid the impassible center where snow dug away from doors and gates had been flung, Charles and Fiennes finally reached rue Neuve Notre Dame. Charles drew rein and caught his breath, gazing at the cathedral's west front rising in front of him. He'd rarely seen it from this angle since coming to Paris. Its square towers rising into the clearing sky's icy blue, its crowding sculptures frosted in snow, washed the tiredness from his body and the worry and discouragement from his mind. Beside him, Fiennes also drank in the cathedral's wonders.

“How did they do it?” he said. “That's what I always wonder,
maître
. Wouldn't it have been glorious to help build it?”

In spite of his anger at himself and exasperation with Fiennes, Charles found himself smiling. “It would.”

But his smile died quickly when they reached the Couche, the house where abandoned babies found alive were brought. As he stood at the gate, waiting for an answer to the bell, a booted man with a large cone-shaped basket on his back pushed past him with a muttered excuse. The man took a key as long as Charles's hand from his coat and forced it into the gate's frozen lock. Swearing under his breath, he worked to turn the key. Tiny cries came from the basket on his back. Charles's heart turned over as he realized that the man was a city worker paid to search for foundlings at doors, under bridges, in churches. The Couche was getting a new delivery of infants.

When the man finally opened the gate, Charles slipped through with him, leaving Fiennes to look after the horses. The baby finder slid in the courtyard's deep snow and Charles leaped forward, afraid the basket would upend. The cries coming from it grew frantic, but the carrier found his feet, and he and Charles reached the door together. The Sister of Charity watching the door allowed the baby finder to enter, but barred Charles's way.

“Yes,
mon père
?” she said, not so much unwelcoming as openly puzzled by the Jesuit standing before her with burn holes in his hat and cloak.

“Ma soeur,”
Charles began, but his voice died as he watched the man with the basket on his back disappear into a passageway. “What will happen to them?”

Her face softened and she beckoned him inside and shut the door. “They will go to wet nurses.”

“And then?”

“Those who live will be returned to our house in the Faubourg St. Antoine. A few will be adopted. By common people, you understand. Most will be placed as servants and apprentices.”

The terrified and forgotten child in the burning building's window rose in Charles's mind, and he nearly bit blood from his tongue to stop himself from demanding the basket and taking the infants with him.

“Ma soeur,”
he said, sighing, “I have urgent need of information. About a foundling who came to you as much as twenty years ago. All I know of him is that he was called Tito.”

Her wimple and veil, so white and starched that light bounced off them, made it hard to tell her age. Charles guessed that she might be forty.

“I was not here that long ago.” She smiled sadly. “I entered the order after my husband died.” She paused, thinking. “But yes, there is a sister who was here then. Soeur Mariana, a Spanish woman.”

“Please,” Charles said eagerly, “may I speak with her?”

“No,
mon père
. She is old and has been ill.”

His heart sank. “Is she expected to recover?”

“I think so. We are praying for her.”

“If—when—she feels well enough, will you ask her about this boy Tito?”

“This is important?”

“Life and death may depend on it,
ma soeur
.”

“If she is well enough, I will ask her. Come back in a few days. I am Soeur Madeleine.”

She inclined her head to Charles, who bowed and withdrew. The sky was cloudless now and Charles had to squint against the snow glare as he plodded across the court, trying to pray that Soeur Mariana would recover for her sake, not his.

T
he lay brother in the clothing room was not pleased. Charles stood before the clothing counter in his cassock, watching the brother inspect the holes in his cloak. “Another cloak gone.” The brother glared at Charles, demanded his hat, and turned it slowly in his hands. Charles realized that he was counting the singed places, perhaps to charge each one to Charles's purgatory account as so many extra years of penance. Charles unobtrusively clasped his hands behind his back to hide the tiny cinder burns in his cassock sleeves. As he moved, the brother sniffed the air.

“You smell like a peasant's fire. That cassock will probably have to be washed. Wool is never the same after washing, you know that. Let me see your shoes.”

Charles held out one cold sodden foot and then the other.

The brother rolled his eyes and sighed. “Take them off. The cassock, too. Behind the curtain there.”

Muttering and shaking his head, he left Charles shivering in shirt and stockings while he searched his stores for replacements. When he came back, he was still muttering.

“Frenchmen are short. Except, of course, you. At least your feet are smallish. Here.”

He thrust a cassock, cloak, and shoes around the curtain. “The cassock hasn't been worn for I don't know how long. The smell will air out. Your hat you'll just have to keep for now,” he added with satisfaction. “I don't have another one.”

“Thank you,
mon frère
.” Charles put on the ancient cassock and cincture, which smelled of moth remedies and looked as though they'd been in the clothing store since one of St. Ignatius's original companions turned them in. The shoes, for a miracle, came close to fitting him. And the cloak was heavier than the one he'd lost at the fire. Clothed again, he walked around the curtain and bowed to the clothing master. “Again, my apologies,
mon frère
, and my thanks.”

“I trust your confessor will hear how much of my stores you have destroyed.”

“He will,
mon frère
.”

Charles bowed again and escaped. The bright sunshine was at its early January zenith, striking rainbows from ice crystals and glittering on the snow, but it had no more warmth than a painting of sunshine. Père Le Picart had received Charles's report before dinner with some alarm at the firefighting story, and disappointment that what Charles had discovered was not enough to confirm Brion's claims of innocence. Le Picart had also given Charles permission to return to the Couche when need be. For now, though, Charles had his usual duties to perform. He turned his steps toward the
grand salon
for the student confraternity's almsgiving, trying to ignore how little his wet stockings were doing for the comfort of the new shoes. He'd gone to the Capuchins wearing both his pairs of stockings for warmth and had not had the courage to ask anything more of the clothing brother.

Arriving early in the
grand salon
, he sat down in one of the armchairs to wait for the students. His eyes closed almost immediately and he slept till the jarring of his head falling forward woke him. He stared sleepily at the framed paintings of Jesuits on the
grand salon
's walls, and the other paintings and engravings scattered among them. The nonportrait drawings were changed from time to time, and Charles got up to look more closely at one he hadn't seen before. It was an engraving of a heart—not the familiar symbol of Christ's Sacred Heart, but a liverish-red anatomical rendering that might have been drawn at an autopsy. It was pierced with a myriad of tiny black swords. Sins, the caption explained, damaging and deforming the heart of the sinner. Which should have made him consider the state of his own sinful heart, but instead made him wonder what the Condé's heart might look like under its silk wrappings.

“Here they are,
maître
,” a tutor said from the street passage door.

The boys distributing the week's alms for the older
pensionnaires'
Congregation of the Ste. Vierge came in. Two carried a hip-high basket of loaves between them, and three others were nearly hidden behind the piles of garments in their arms. The remaining pair of boys brought the walnut table from the
grand salon
to the antechamber and placed it in front of the double doors.

Charles thanked and dismissed the tutors, helped the boys arrange the loaves and clothing, and gathered them for prayer. Then Armand Beauclaire and Walter Connor pushed open the great doors, the snow in front of them having been cleared aside by lay brothers. To Charles's surprise, Marin was already standing there. The old man hobbled forward.

“Have you medicine,
maître
?” He seemed much more himself than when he'd fled from Charles outside the church of St. Louis.

“Not here. Are you ill, Marin?”

“Not me. My boy Jean. He's coughing up his guts. Has been for a while, but it's worse now.”

Charles grimaced in sympathy, remembering the young man's thinness and harsh cough. “I can ask our infirmarian for something to help him.” Charles called Beauclaire to him. “Monsieur Beauclaire, go to Frère Brunet and ask for the remedy he uses for coughs. As many lozenges as he will give you. Quickly.”

Beauclaire bowed, happily important at being trusted with the errand, and sped away. One of the other boys handed Marin a loaf, and the old man tore off a piece and moved aside, eating while he waited.

People were crowded around the doors now, narrow-eyed against the light. Charles stood back as the students distributed bread and clothes. Filthy hands reached for the round loaves, and pinched faces lightened at their solid weight. Charles smiled with satisfaction at the intensity of the boys' concentration, the effort they made to be courteous, in spite of the running noses, the breath stench, and the sores. In spite of wariness, and sometimes a little fear, they listened courteously to the grumbling, most of it merely sullen, some of it outright crazed.

The icicles hanging from the stonework above the doors were beginning to drip, lifting Charles's spirits somewhat to see that the thin sunshine had that much warmth. A man leaning against one of the open doors and trying on a pair of shoes cried out and leaped backward as a foot-long icicle fell to the snow beside him.

“Trying to kill you for your coins, are they?” a University of Paris student called merrily from the other side of the street. “Be on your guard!”

“Animals!” Old Marin began wading furiously through the snow toward the student, swinging his stick. “I don't see your kind giving anything, you pigs!”

The boy and his laughing fellow students hurled snowballs at him and darted down the rue des Poirees, which led off the rue St. Jacques deeper into the University's territory. Cursing them and their fathers back to Adam, Marin brushed snow off his face and coat. Most of those receiving alms had prudently ignored the University students, but a few women cast frightened eyes at Charles, who sighed and stepped farther back into the antechamber's shadows. The almsgiving wore on. The last of several pairs of gloves (all worn and denuded of their trimming but still a rarity in the alms box) were given out, the man who'd dodged the icicles went away with his new shoes, and a student handed the last loaf to an old woman. Marin came back to the doors and looked anxiously into the antechamber, his face lighting with relief as Armand Beauclaire ran breathlessly in from the street passage.

“Here they are,
maître
, he just finished making them, that's what took me so long.”

Thanking him, Charles took the little package wrapped in paper, told the boys to clear away the table, and went to Marin.

“These should help your Jean,” Charles said. “I will pray for him.”

Marin turned the little package over with his swollen, knotted fingers and glanced worriedly up at Charles. “Angels can't die, can they,
maître
?”

“Angels cannot, no.”

“My Claire sent Jean to me.” The old beggar's faded eyes shone with unshed tears. “I know, because he told me just how she looked. She won't let him die.” Marin frowned suddenly. “Will Jean have to die for my sins?”

Charles was lost once more in Marin's crazy logic. Before he could answer, the tutors arrived to escort the boys to afternoon classes.

“Wait a little, Marin,” Charles said, and called the boys together.

“Shall we close the doors,
maître
?” Beauclaire asked, but Charles shook his head.

“I will see to that. We will pray now.”

He led them in giving thanks that they had alms to give, and asked that their giving be a means of grace, to themselves and to the beggars. As the boys left, the afternoon class bell began to ring. The bell also meant rehearsal, but Charles hesitated, feeling somehow reluctant to leave the old man. He went outside and pushed the double doors closed. Marin, standing in the street and murmuring to himself, didn't seem to notice.

“Marin, shall we go and stand by the postern door? I need to see someone as he comes in.” Charles had decided to give Germain Morel a message for Jouvancy. “And then I will walk with you back to where you stay. And you can tell me about Claire.”

For a moment, the old man's wandering wits were as clear as Charles's own. “No, no. You can't go with me.” He shook his shaggy head until his ancient leather hat fell off. “Foxes have holes,” he said sonorously. “But the Son of Man has no place. No son of man and no daughter of woman.” He picked up his hat. “That's Scripture.”

Glancing up and down the street for some sign of Morel, Charles led Marin to the postern. But before he could ask again about Claire, the dancing master arrived panting at the postern door.