“Do I hear the voice of experience?”
Damiot smiled complacently.
“I see. Well. I am indeed fortunate, mon père, to have such a pious example before me. You also handled Père Donat as though you’d done it before.”
Damiot rolled his eyes. “There’s very little that doesn’t offend His Holiness. I imagine he’s offended every morning that the sun doesn’t ask his leave before rising.”
“His Holiness?” Charles wasn’t feeling in much mood to laugh, but he laughed at that. Only the pope was called His Holiness.
“Some of us call him that. But only behind very thick locked doors.”
The narrow cobbled street, sun-soaked in strong morning light and bordered by high stone walls that held the heat, almost made Charles feel that he was walking on a street in Nîmes, the town near his family’s vineyards. Here the street ran between the beginnings of Les Halles market on the left and Holy Innocents cemetery on the right. Though Charles was basking in the warmth like a lizard as he walked, he was still nearly as worried as he’d been yesterday. La Reynie had agreed to send a message ordering one of his female court spies to watch Lulu, but Charles was uncomforted. His heart was sore over Bouchel’s death, and over Lulu’s possible guilt. And over what she and Anne-Marie and the Duc du Maine must be feeling on this last day before the proxy marriage. And beyond his worry over all of them, too much was unexplained. Or perhaps he himself was only unconvinced. He felt like someone crouching in the dark after thunder, waiting for lightning. Whenever he closed his eyes, he saw Versailles’s new lake. Saw the gardener’s body lying beside it, soaked and pathetic. And saw Bouchel in his imagination, saw him dying miserable and terrified and alone in his dark little room. Charles told himself sternly to stop dramatizing his sorrow and fear. But still, just beyond the edge of hearing-some hearing of his spirit or mind-there was thunder.
“I’m sweating!” Père Damiot wiped a sleeve across his forehead and squinted at the sky. “This much sun is unnatural.”
“Unnatural?! So you think Eden was gray and cold and wet, like Paris usually is?”
“I have no information on the weather in Eden. Let’s hope there’s shade to stand in during this burial.”
Charles looked up at the stone wall on his right. “I don’t see any trees, at least none tall enough to show.”
“There aren’t any trees. Every morsel of space is used for bodies. I meant shade in the charnel house arcade. Monsieur Delarme’s family has done well in trade and has a tomb in an arcade. It’s the baser people who-”
Something flew over the wall above their heads, bounced, and rolled to a stop nearly at Damiot’s feet, where a pair of thin dogs fell on it, barking happily.
A passing rider guffawed. “Looks like someone wants your prayers, mes pères,” the rider called. “Maybe it’s even hotter than this where he’s ended up!”
Damiot kicked halfheartedly at the dogs and picked up the human skull. “Really!” he exclaimed. “This happens nearly every time I walk along here. You’d think the diggers would learn. I’d swear they do it on purpose. I’ve seen skulls land among parties of women, and the shrieks are enough to open all the graves in the city.”
“Ah, you’ve got her!” A lined brown face under a dirt-colored, bag-shaped cap was looking over the wall. “Would you mind throwing the lady back, mon père? They’re heavy as lead when I put ’em in, and light as feathers when I pull ’em out. Just a little flick of my old spade sends them flying. Trying for heaven, no doubt, only a little late!”
Laughing in spite of himself, Damiot lobbed the skull back into the cemetery, and the digger grinned his thanks, let go of the wall, and dropped out of sight.
They walked on, Charles keeping a wary eye on the top of the wall. “Before the-um-lady-dropped into our midst, you were saying something, mon père?”
“Oh. Yes, it’s the baser sort-little merchants and unsuccessful notaries and so on-who are buried in Holy Innocents ground. The poor get mass graves. It’s said of Holy Innocents dirt that it cleans bones faster than any other dirt on earth. So the trenches aren’t as crowded as the Hôtel Dieu’s trenches for the destitute out at Clamart. At Holy Innocents, it’s magistrates and lawyers, and wealthy bourgeois like the Delarmes-and my family-who have tombs in the arcades along the charnel houses.”
They turned right at the rue aux Fers and when they came to a gate in the wall, just short of the church, Damiot said, “We’ve a little time still. I’ll show you the cemetery so you’re not gawking during the burial.”
Meekly, Charles followed him through the gate. And stopped short, staring at the scene spread in front of him, at first glance more like a fair than a burial ground. A group of strolling men had stopped to listen to a lute player and female singer. An old woman with a tray of small cakes hung on a strap around her neck strolled toward the men and the musicians. Dogs slept on the shady side of several spirelike monuments topped with crosses, or lolled in the sun, scratching and gnawing-Charles realized he didn’t want to know on what. Half a dozen beggars lay in the sun like the dogs. Another beggar, nearly naked, stood in an open grave, gesticulating and haranguing passersby like a preacher, and Charles wondered if the others were waiting their turn, in a cooperative effort to gather coins. A swath of color caught his eye and he watched two heavily painted women, their dirty red and yellow satin skirts trailing on the ground, stop beside the group listening to the lute player. All but one of the men quickly abandoned the music, and what looked like bargaining began.
Damiot pointed to the low buildings around three sides of the churchyard, whose wide cloisterlike arches had been filled in with wood. “Those are the charnel houses. The one with the Delarme tomb is there on the east side.”
Charles saw a few small doors in the closed-in arches and wondered what it smelled like beyond the doors. He’d heard that the cemetery itself, with its full and shallow graves, sometimes smelled like death itself. It didn’t today, but it smelled like the memory of death, which was somehow worse.
Damiot turned toward the church. “I have to robe for the Mass,” he said. “And we have to find you a server’s surplice.”
The nave of Holy Innocents Church was a pool of deep, cool shadow. They walked up a pillared side aisle toward the altar, which was draped in black for the funeral, and Charles thought how much he liked churches like this, churches in the old style. Not that he disliked the new style’s streaming light and open space, and he loved the airy elegance of the nearby Jesuit church of St. Louis. In St. Louis, light was the symbol of faith; people could see the altar and the Mass and feel themselves part of what the priest did. But Holy Innocents was very old and full of soaring, echoing darkness, full of mystery, and something in Charles answered back that yes, God was like that.
They went into the tiny, low-vaulted sacristy, and found the Holy Innocents priest already robing.
“Père Lambert, this is Maître Charles du Luc, one of our scholastics, who helps me with the Congregation of the Holy Virgin. He will serve with us today and needs a surplice.”
Charles greeted the bent, elderly priest, who paused in pulling a wide, flowing chasuble, black for the funeral Mass, over his head and nodded toward a wall cupboard. “In there. I hope there’s one long enough to cover you,” he said, smiling as his eyes measured Charles’s considerable length. “And I’ve laid out your vestments on the table there, mon père.”
Damiot and Charles laid aside their hats, and Damiot went to the table. In the cupboard, Charles found a white, smocklike linen surplice that more or less reached his knees, drew it on over his cassock, and shook the wide sleeves to hang freely. Damiot was putting on a black silk-and-wool chasuble, the usual outer garment worn to celebrate Mass, that matched the other priest’s.