“But, mon père—”
The rector stopped him with a look. “When you came to the infirmary after Antoine was hurt, I saw that you are a man who wants to understand events. And you confirm that impression every moment. You are one of those who cannot resist the thread that leads into the maze. But under your vow of obedience, Maître du Luc, let the thread lie. Others will follow it. Others with more understanding of this particular maze than you can possibly have.”
“But—”
The rector’s eyes turned cold. “I have given you an order, maître.”
Charles bowed his head and forced the words across his tongue. “Yes, mon père.”
“Good.” Le Picart got to his feet and Charles rose with him. “I look forward to seeing your first Louis le Grand production,” he said genially.
“Thank you for your good wishes, mon père.” Charles made himself smile politely. “And for all that you have explained to me.”
He walked slowly back to the classroom, turning the conversation over in his mind and simmering with frustration. It was true that he didn’t have Le Picart’s knowledge of the tangled history and connections that might bear on what had happened. But he could put facts together and how could that come amiss to Lieutenant-Général La Reynie, who had the whole city to keep? And whether it came amiss or not, Charles told himself, he was already involved. Philippe was in the ballet and Charles had been sent to find him. And the cut on Antoine’s head was still unexplained, and no matter how Charles looked at Guise’s and Mme LeClerc’s tellings of the accident, they did not match and he wanted to know why. Two such happenings to two brothers, in as many days, was too much coincidence; he wanted to know the truth. But he was a Jesuit and his superior had given him an order.
Partly to give his frustration time to settle, he passed the rhetoric classroom and went through the little archway to the outside latrine. The warmth was opening new blossoms on the thick hedge of old rosebushes, giving a faint sweetness to the air. But the stench inside the latrine nearly made him retch. Holding his breath and wondering when the dung cart had last carried away the waste, he went to the far end of the long bench, lifted his cassock, and started to unlace his breeches. Then he froze, staring into the hole’s noisome murk. Something pale was growing there. Something like a five-petaled flower. Only, of course, it couldn’t be. Flowers didn’t grow in privy muck. Like someone in an evil dream, Charles reached down to pluck at whatever the thing was.
Chapter 10
Charles stumbled out of the latrine and wiped his fouled hand on the grass. Swallowing hard and trying to force his stomach back where it belonged, he relaced his breeches and went to the classroom. Père Jouvancy was rearranging the placement of actors in a scene and Charles let him finish, because what difference could haste make now? When the boys were placed to the rhetoric master’s satisfaction, Charles took him aside. The color drained from the older man’s face as he listened, and Charles reached for his arm, afraid he was going to faint. Jouvancy shook him off and blundered headlong toward the door, like a badly worked marionette. Hastily, Charles told the oblivious Beauchamps to oversee both rehearsals and ran after Jouvancy.
When Jouvancy had looked into the latrine hole and been sick behind the rosebushes, he and Charles took off their cassocks, rolled up their shirtsleeves, and went back into the shadowy stench. Charles pulled at the seat’s front edge. With a protesting shriek of old hinges, a two-holed section lifted, opening a rectangle about four feet by two. When they finally had the body lying on the dirt floor, they were splashed with shit and urine, and swallowing hard. They knelt beside the body. Jouvancy wept as Charles gently wiped Philippe’s face with his handkerchief. The young curve of the boy’s cheek, where a beard had been just beginning to grow, emerged from the filth.
“Blessed Jesu,” Jouvancy groaned, rocking back and forth on his knees as Charles scrubbed at Philippe’s chest. “Oh, Philippe, dear child. How could this have happened? Only a very small child could have fallen in—I know that sometimes happens, but—”
“This was no accident,” Charles said flatly. He was wiping at the boy’s neck, staring at the swatch of discolored skin revealing itself. “Someone put him there.”
Against a background of little boys’ piping voices from a nearby classroom, they said the prayers for a violently dispatched and unshriven soul. Jouvancy reached out to caress Philippe’s face and caught back a sob.
“He looked so much like my sister. He had Adeline’s beautiful eyes. And her grace. Always her grace.” He used Charles’s shoulder to push himself shakily to his feet. “I must go for the rector.”
“I will stay with him, mon père, and see that no one comes in.”
When Jouvancy was gone, Charles stepped briefly outside and found a stick. He used it to stir the latrine’s contents where he’d discovered Philippe, but found nothing more. He stood in the doorway, gulping clean air and feeling his grief and anger at what had been done to the boy sharpen into thought. Philippe’s body was shirtless. Which made Charles grimly certain that the body had been here all the time, had already been here when someone shoved Charles to the ground and provoked the chase away from the latrine and out of the college.
A small boy hurtled around the rose hedge and stopped, staring wide-eyed at Charles.
“Yes, mon brave,” Charles said wearily, “I am covered in shit. And no, you cannot come in. Piss somewhere else, please.”
“But, maître—”
“Somewhere else. Please. Go.”
The boy backed hurriedly away, his blue eyes growing even larger as Jouvancy, Le Picart, and two lay brothers carrying blankets came around the hedge. The rector watched the little boy stumble hastily toward a corner of the courtyard, still staring over his shoulder. Shaking his head, Le Picart motioned to the brothers to wait and went into the latrine with Charles and Jouvancy. Le Picart’s eyes were wintry pools of sorrow as he signed a cross over Philippe’s body. He turned to Jouvancy.
“I am so sorry, mon père. So very sorry.” Ignoring the filth, he put an arm around Jouvancy’s bowed shoulders. “We will take him to the washing room. Below the infirmary,” he explained to Charles, “where we occasionally have to prepare bodies for burial—though we have no cemetery here, of course.” He gave Charles a long, unreadable look. “Maître du Luc, when the body is clean, I want you to examine it. You were a soldier, you have seen violent death more often than most of us.”