“I am so sorry for that, maître!” Bertamelli struck his thin chest. “I abhor myself, I abase myself before you, before my mother, before all Milan!” He made to fall to his knees, but Charles caught him and hauled him up again.
“None of that will help my shoulder. Nor will it help your case. What will help-”
The boy’s sudden strangled cry silenced Charles, who looked anxiously around for its reason. Bertamelli’s feet stuttered to a halt and he clutched Charles’s cassock, staring ahead. They were walking toward the Pont au Change, on the covered, cobbled way that divided the Châtelet’s criminal court from its prison, and Charles saw nothing more threatening than hurrying robed lawyers with their clerks and pages. There was also a massive Châtelet guard walking toward them, his brimmed pot helmet pulled low on his forehead. But he was smiling and humming to himself, making the pike on his shoulder bob in time to his rumbling music. Bertamelli let out another terrified squeak, which broke off when the man shoved his helmet back as he passed, showing more of his wide, placid face. Charles felt the boy sag against him with relief. Puzzled, Charles turned to look again at the guard. His broad back, like the broad back of the man who’d run from the tower, struck a chord of memory in Charles. He tipped Bertamelli’s face up to the light.
“What frightened you so?”
The boy twisted out of Charles’s grasp and turned away, shaking his head.
“What?” Charles demanded, increasingly worried about whatever it was Bertamelli wasn’t saying.
Bertamelli stayed mute. And that worried Charles even more, much more than any words would have. And Damiot, too, from the look on his face. Charles had never seen the boy this forlorn, never seen him speechless, rarely even seen him quiet outside the imposed silence of a classroom. The little Italian’s frightened silence also reminded Charles of Anne-Marie, Lulu, the Duc du Maine, even of Montmorency, and by the time they were passing the Ste-Chapelle, he felt as though he had a clutch of frightened, endangered young hanging to his skirts.
Damiot suddenly pointed to the Ste-Chapelle’s spire. “Look up, Monsieur Bertamelli,” he said kindly, “and see the angel.”
Bertamelli cast a dull but obedient look upward at the lead-cast angel on the Ste-Chapelle’s roof slowly revolving to show the cross it held to all points of the compass. But the angel clearly failed to comfort him.
“What do we do with him when we get back?” Charles asked Damiot in French, so Bertamelli would not understand. The boy’s French was rudimentary. “I need to find out from him what he was doing.”
Damiot eyed him. “Why?”
“I can’t tell you,” Charles said. “But I’ll tell the rector,” he added quickly, seeing Damiot’s disapproval.
“We’ll certainly have to take him to the rector. He and Père Montville should be back-they were supposed to return this morning.”
“But if they aren’t back? Must we go to Père Donat?” Donat would probably dismiss Bertamelli from the college forthwith. Charles had thought for some time that the boy would leave them early because of his talent as a dancer, and Pierre Beauchamps, the college dancing master, had even said that he wanted to take Bertamelli’s further training in hand. But being dismissed by Donat wasn’t how Charles wanted Bertamelli’s leaving to be. “I don’t want him thrown out and sent home!”
“Neither do I. Though he deserves to be dismissed and sent home!” Damiot said in Latin, for Bertamelli’s benefit. Then he went back to French. “Here’s a thought, if the rector isn’t back. You say there’s something our friend here can tell you and that the rector understands you need to know it. So I will use that as an excuse not to go immediately to Donat. The boy is in your rehearsal this afternoon, yes?” When Charles nodded, he said, “Then you can be responsible for him during the afternoon. Oh, but I’m forgetting. What about his tutor? Surely he went to Père Donat when he found the boy gone.”
“Monsieur Bertamelli,” Charles said, switching back to Latin, “how did you get out of the college? Where was your tutor?”
Bertamelli hunched his shoulders still farther. “I am poor and share a dortoir with five others. One of us was taken ill last night, and so was our tutor. They’re both in the infirmary.” He glanced up, and Charles saw a glint of satisfaction in his eyes. “Getting out was easy. I won’t tell you how,” he added stubbornly.
“Blessed Saint Benedict!” Damiot was shaking his head, but not over Bertamelli’s stubbornness. “This illness is spreading like plague.”
“Plague?” Bertamelli looked up, wide-eyed with fear.
“No, no, it isn’t plague, people don’t die of it. They just feel like they might. All right,” Damiot said to Charles, “if the rector still isn’t back when your rehearsal is over, I’ll collect this miscreant and take him to whoever’s been given charge of his dortoir.”
The three of them crossed the Pont St. Michel and turned along the river to the rue St. Jacques. As they climbed the hill to the college, Bertamelli was visibly drooping and Charles was gritting his teeth against the pain in his shoulder. Damiot had begun discoursing educationally on doves, but neither of them was listening.
When they reached the college postern, Charles tugged at the bellrope and a small thin lay brother nearly hidden under his canvas apron opened it.
“Bonjour, mon frère,” Damiot said. “Do you know if our rector has come back?”
The brother shook his head sadly as he shut the door behind them. “Alas no, and won’t for now. Nor Père Montville, either. They’re ill, both of them. We had word from Gentilly. The sickness is there, too.” He lowered his voice. “So we’re left tiptoeing around His Holiness till they’re well.”
Charles and Damiot traded a look, and the college clock began to ring the dinner hour.
“It will have to be the second plan, then,” Damiot said, and he and Bertamelli and Charles started through the arched stone passage toward the Cour d’honneur. Behind them, someone pulled hard at the postern bell and Charles heard his name called.
“You in there!” Mme LeClerc’s voice was even more urgent and impatient than usual. “Maître du Luc, wait, I beg you, I need one very little word with you!”
Mme LeClerc was Marie-Ange’s mother, wife to the baker who had the shop beyond the chapel’s street door. She and Charles shared a warm liking, but she talked like the Seine in flood, and listening took more effort than Charles wanted to make at the moment. And he didn’t want to miss dinner. Suppressing a sigh, he waved Damiot and Bertamelli on and turned back. The brother had the postern open again and was trying to tell Madame LeClerc that Charles was in the refectory.
“He is not, he is behind you. Maître, please-”
“I’ll be just a moment,” Charles said to the brother.
“A moment only? Then that will be a miracle,” the brother murmured with a grin, and stepped aside.
Mme LeClerc was already launched on her news. “-so don’t let them burn, I told Marie-Ange when I saw you from the shop just now and ran out. We are still baking, the fire went out this morning. If it’s not one thing, it’s one hundred! But I’m taking a moment to tell you, maître, but don’t think he goes there all the time-a man must have his pleasures, all of them, and who knows that better than a wife?” Her round brown eyes dropped meaningfully to her middle.
Charles rubbed his shoulder and tried to wait patiently for the point. Mme LeClerc looked up and rolled her eyes in exasperation.