The Rhetoric of Death (20 page)

“I didn't know you worked here. That was a nicely done little fable you played with her. Does she come here often?”

“She loves horses, poor little chit. I let her in sometimes, just into the stables, no farther. She's also quite smitten with our Antoine, you know.”

“Does he come here, too?” Charles asked, following Moulin toward the stable door.

The brother looked over his shoulder, wide-eyed with mendacious innocence. “I wouldn't like to get anyone in trouble, now.” His eyes darkened. “But yes, he does. I've caught the two of them playing in the hayloft. Nosing. Prying where they shouldn't.”

“Surely there's not much to find in a hayloft. And they aren't your responsibility, you won't be in trouble because they misbehave.”

“You're right there,
maître
.” Moulin gave Charles a brilliant smile. “I won't be. Fair is fair.”

“They shouldn't be in the stable at all, but I understand liking horses,” Charles said, going to the first stall. “This is a good-looking young fellow. How many horses do we have?”

“These two and one other. Père Guise has that one today. He's off again to Versailles.”

“Versailles?”

Moulin's eyes widened. “Where the king lives,
maître
,” he said, stepping closer and lowering his voice, as if imparting a state secret. “Very nice house, a bit small for my taste. Full of courtiers, who need a lot of confessing. Our Père Guise does a good business there, you might say. A penitent of his, some noble old lady who's been ill, took a turn for the worse and he galloped off to grab her soul before the devil gets it.”

“God defend her,” Charles said ambiguously. “What's the third horse like?”

“Another gray. A gelding. Why?”

Charles shrugged. “I suppose I'm a little homesick. But horses are the same everywhere, aren't they?” And none of the three college horses was the rangy roan Antoine's attacker had ridden. Not that he'd thought it would be, but it was one possibility eliminated.

Moulin leaned the shovel against a stall and wheeled a handcart from its place by the door. “I'd better get this place mucked out, or they'll stick me back in that hellhole of a kitchen.”

“You like working in the stable, then?”

He flashed Charles a look. “We work where we're needed. No choice for servants.” The tone was light but the blue eyes were full of bitterness.

He wheeled the cart toward the stall where Marie-Ange had been and Charles drifted into the tack room. In the sunlight slipping through cracks in the wooden walls and barring the leather-scented shadows with gold, he went quickly over the few bridles, saddles, and saddlebags, noting where there were narrow strips of leather and looking for any place where there should have been such a strip and wasn't.

T
he college clock had yet to chime nine the next morning when Père Jouvancy burst into the grammar class where Charles was assisting and spoke briefly with the grammar master, who nodded reluctantly. Jouvancy led Charles out of the room and thrust coins, an old leather satchel, and a hat at him.

“I took the liberty of fetching your hat; it's Wednesday, the markets are open. Now, listen.” Pouring out a steady stream of instructions on where and how to buy the perfect sugar, as though Charles were sailing for Martinique instead of walking to the Marché Neuf, he walked Charles at double time to the street postern.

“A companion?” Jouvancy pushed him through the postern. “No time for that, I exempt you. Just bring me sugar—and it had better be white as an angel's wing!”

Charles loped happily toward the Seine. While he'd listened to his students' halting reading, he'd been trying to think how to get out of the college on his own. If this Marché Neuf had blamelessly white sugar and he didn't have to search farther, he should have plenty of time to look for the street porter who'd seen Antoine's accident. Charles reached into his cassock pocket and felt his nearly flat purse with the few coins left from what he'd been given in Carpentras for his journey north. With all that had happened, he'd kept forgetting to give what was left to the rector. He told himself that if his errand was successful, the money would be spent for the good of the college.

His hand was still on the purse when a book display caught his eye. The rue St. Jacques was lined with booksellers and printers, and clots of students and teachers risked life and limb around the display tables in the street. Charles edged among them toward the book he'd seen. The
Itinerarium Extaticum
, by the Jesuit Kircher, was a tale of traveling to the moon, Venus, and the fixed stars in the company of the angel Cosmiel, who showed Kircher that what he'd seen through his telescope, the moon's craters and mountains and the sun's occasional dark blemishes, were real. Charles picked up the battered copy. It wasn't expensive. He'd longed for years to read it. Of course, it might be in Louis le Grand's library, but the Carpentras library didn't have it . . . A boy with his nose in a mathematics tome backed heavily into Charles. The Kircher flew out of Charles's hands and was grabbed by a white-haired man who clutched it to his chest and scuttled into the bookshop.

Charles walked on. If he was lucky, he was going to need his small store of coins. He lengthened his stride, his cassock flapping smartly around his ankles. But his head swiveled from side to side as he gawked like any newcomer to Paris. The glazed windows everywhere surprised him all over again. Even the windows of the gilded, painted carriages were glass. A half dozen black-robed Benedictine monks cut across his path and he craned his neck to glimpse the turrets of the old Hôtel de Cluny, lodging for Benedictine abbots visiting Paris. Nearly colliding with a pair of gowned students debating humanist theology versus the older approaches, he wished he had time to stop and weigh in on the humanist side. But he kept going, dodging a sloshing bucket on a milkmaid's shoulder pole and a double line of small boys pattering in their teacher's wake like ducklings, who made him think of Antoine. When he'd stopped by the junior refectory after breakfast to check on Antoine, the boy's tutor, Maître Doissin, had come to the door. Using Antoine's grief and proven ability to leave the college on his own for excuse, Charles had urged Doissin not to leave his charge alone. Without quite asking about the funeral afternoon scene in Antoine's room, Doissin had said happily that he would watch the boy with all his eyes and added that anything he could do to annoy Guise would be gladly done.

Bells began to ring from every direction. “Be pleased, O Lord, to deliver me; O Lord, make haste to help me,” Charles responded silently, slowing his pace and beginning the prayers for Tierce. Though he wasn't required to say the offices yet, he loved them and they were already carved years deep into his memory. The words came as easily as breathing and made a satisfying counterpoint to his weaving in and out among the hawkers yelling the virtues of milk, scissors, brooms, drinking water fresh out of the Seine, ribbons, and doubtful summer oysters.

The rue St. Jacques ran straight to the Petit Pont and Charles reached the approach to the bridge as he reached the last psalm's end: “The Lord shall watch over your going out and your coming in, it is He who shall keep you safe . . .” Flooded with sudden peace, he bowed his head and let the traffic flow around him.

“Go pray in a church,
mon père
, or you'll be praying over your own corpse!”

Charles jumped aside as a string of mules trotted past, their exasperated driver shaking his head and cracking his whip. Another of the many dangers of religion, Charles thought wryly, and moved into the shade of the ancient bridge's fortified gate for a quick look at the river. The day was already hot, though a narrow ruffle of pearly clouds lined the horizon. Below him, huge barges mounded with goods floated west—downstream—like mammoth turtles. A few boatmen sent their small craft darting among the behemoths as they ferried passengers across the water. Most boats were loaded with goods, like the small barge piled with casks and guided by a huge sweep tiller just passing under the bridge. A flat-bottomed boat full of unhappily bleating sheep was being tied up at the bank below the quay. Other pedestrians stopped to watch as the gilded and carved prow of a noble's open boat came in sight, rowed upriver by thirteen pairs of oars and full of richly dressed men and women lounging on cushions, idly watching Paris pass by. Amid all the waterside busyness, an occasional fisherman sat motionless beside his lines. Charles turned to look upriver, where the towers of Notre Dame soared at the end of the Ile de la Cité. Beyond the cathedral, gleaming mansions lined the newish island called St.-Louis. Real estate speculators had made it, Charles had been told, by linking together the little Ile Notre-Dame and another island where people used to pasture cows.

With difficulty, he pulled himself away from the river's panoply and hurried through the Petit Pont's massive gate onto the short bridge road. Houses, mostly stone, a few still plaster and timber, crowded close on both sides. A shout of
“Gardez l'eau!”
sent him to the other side of the roadway as a girl emptied a chamber pot from an upper window.

“Oh, la! Pardon, mon père!”
she shouted, laughing without the least sign of regret.

“You should get a penance for that,” he returned, laughing, too. “Chuck it out the back,
mademoiselle,
into the river!”

“Come up and give me a penance, then!”

She leaned her round arms on the windowsill and smiled down at him, as people in the street yelled ribald encouragement. Fighting an unclerical grin, Charles kept walking. A shop sign brought him to a halt. The black sign showed a white skeleton Death being ground under a red apothecary's pestle. Not so long ago, apothecaries had sold sugar. If by some chance this shop still did, he could be done with his errand now, with that much more time for his other business. He ducked through the low doorway and stood blinking in shadow.

At first Charles couldn't locate the treble voice. Then he saw the gleam of eyes peering at him just above the level of the counter.

“Bonjour,” he returned, not sure whether he was addressing a monsieur, a madame, or a child. The eyes vanished and a bulky shape clambered onto a tall stool, settled itself, and became recognizable as a tiny old man. He crossed his short arms and legs, tilted his big head to one side, and waited resignedly for Charles to finish realizing that he was a dwarf.

“Now that we've got that over,” he said briskly, “what can I do for you, my fine young cleric?”

“I wondered if, by chance, you have sugar,
monsieur.
Very white sugar.”

“If your grandfather had come in asking that, or your father, even, the answer would have been yes. But we don't sell sugar now, you should know that.” The little man shrugged. “Though I hear your accent and maybe apothecaries still sell it in the south, people are backward down there. But sugar's too common here for Parisians to think it cures anything. And it tastes too good. They could excuse that when it was rare as unicorn's horn and nearly as expensive. But common as mud
and
lovely to eat, who spends silver for medicine like that? Pigeon dung, now, powdered crab's eye, a little urine from a red-haired boy, some dried mouse liver, those are worth money and they'll cure you, sure as saints have halos! Why? Because they're disgusting. And who ever gets well without suffering?”

“
Will
they cure you?”

“People think they will and that's probably just as good. Nothing much cures anything, young man. Oh, oh, yes, prayer, of course. We mustn't forget prayer, must we?” His sarcasm was acid enough to strip the varnish from his counter.

“It sounds as though you don't believe that cures much, either,” Charles said.

“One thing cures every ill.”

“What's that?”

“Death.”

But the dwarf didn't laugh and his eyes were as somber as a funeral Mass. He looked Charles over, enviously but without malice.

“Death will come even to beautiful young men like you eventually, I don't need to sell you that.” He jerked his head to the north. “Sugar is across the bridge, at the Marché Neuf.”

Thanking him, Charles escaped. As he emerged into the street, a woman brushed past him toward the shop. Her gown and head scarf were unrelieved black, but a surprising froth of rose-colored petticoat swirled under her skirt as she stepped over the apothecary's high threshold. Charles heard the dwarf's voice rise warmly in welcome.

Charles turned away quickly. He didn't need anything more to tell his confessor. He covered the short distance to the Ile de la Cité, turned right onto rue Neuve Notre Dame, realized when he ended up in front of the cathedral that he should have turned left, and retraced his steps. The Ile was the oldest part of Paris, settled even before the Romans came, and the so-called Marché Neuf, the New Market, was old, too, though not that old. This morning it was happy and lucrative chaos, as sellers called their wares, buyers bargained, and sweating jugglers and tumblers vied for whatever coins they could wring from the crowd—deniers, even a few sous if they were lucky, or nearly worthless old copper liards if they weren't. Dogs barked, chickens squawked, and the barefoot children who weren't gathered in front of a marionette show chased each other among the market stalls. The savory smell of roasted meat set Charles's stomach rumbling. Then the deep strong scent of coffee caught him by the nose. He'd tasted coffee and liked it. The Dutch, of course, were mad about it, and had more or less cornered what market there was for it. Paris had coffeehouses, but Charles suspected it was just one more passing craze.