“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.
His nose led him to a swarthy man in a purple turban and flowing scarlet robe, sitting cross-legged on a patterned rug. Beside him, coffee simmered in a brass pot on a little stove. Charles nodded politely, wondering how to address a Mahometan. The coffee seller cocked a bright brown eye at him, poured coffee into a pottery bowl, and held it out.
“Coffee of the best, mon père, and cheap,” he said, revealing himself as Parisian to the bone. “Wakes up the brain, pours heat into the sinews, balances the fluids, practically writes your sermons for you!”
Charles reached recklessly under his cassock and fished money out of his purse. The “Mahometan” whipped the coins from his palm and handed him the bowl. Charles sipped, half repelled by the bitterness, half intoxicated by the smell. And oddly pleased by the buzzing feeling that grew in his head as he drank. Before he knew it, the bowl was empty. Regretfully, he gave it back, refused a refill, and continued on in search of sugar. The buzzing feeling grew as he walked along the aisle between the stalls. Colors seemed twice as bright and he felt like he could walk to Turkey for a coffee tree and be back before dinner.
A splash of glowing red on a grocer’s stall stopped him in front of a basket of tomatoes. Tomatoes were common at home, but less so here, it seemed. None had appeared so far on the college table. Charles found himself smiling as he drank in their glowing color, remembering that some people still shunned them as the fruit Eve had given Adam, and what Pernelle had had to say about that. “Well, he didn’t have to eat it, did he?” she would say, her black eyes snapping. “But, of course, women are always blamed when things go wrong for a man.”
“Oh, look, let’s get some,” the same rich alto voice went on. Charles froze. Could coffee make him hear voices that weren’t there?
“Never, child!” an older voice hissed. “They’re love apples, they’re poisonous, everyone knows that. It’s a sin to sell them!”
Very slowly, Charles turned his head. The girl with Pernelle’s voice was pretty. But her hair was only brown, not a cloud of midnight. And when she felt Charles’s stare and turned to smile at him from under her little cherry ribboned parasol, he saw that her eyes were only brown instead of sparkling onyx.
“Bonjour, mon père,” she said demurely, dimpling at his admiration.
He sketched a hasty blessing on the air and moved away to gaze fixedly at a length of badly dyed tawny wool on the next stall. Laughing, the girl called a bold good-bye as her chaperone hurried her away. Blind to the wool’s garish color and deaf to the seller’s praise for its quality, Charles was seized with longing for news of Pernelle, if she was well, if she liked Geneva, if David’s family was kind to her. He closed his eyes, prayed for her, and then walked on, earning a muttered curse from the disappointed cloth merchant. And another curse when he reversed direction and passed by the stall again without stopping. He’d been so unnerved by the girl, he’d hardly registered the snowy sugar sparkling on a stall beyond the love apples.
He chose two large cone-shaped loaves and paid for them with Jouvancy’s coins. As the grocer wrapped them, the tower clock chimed from the old Conciergerie palace. If he kept his mind on business, he still had enough time to look for the street porter with the broken nose. He stowed the sugar in Jouvancy’s leather bag and started down the quay that bordered the market, heading west toward the tip of the island. He soon found the sort of scene he wanted. Heavily wrapped bolts of cloth, rounds of cheese, and boxes smelling of cinnamon were being unloaded from a barge and a small boat, and a dozen or so porters were securing bundles to the tall carrying frames they wore on their backs. Charles walked slowly among them, but none had the nose he was looking for. He reached the quay’s end without finding the man and retraced his steps toward the Petit Pont, still looking, but with no success. As he came to the bridge, the tower clock struck the quarter before ten, sending him at a trot across the river, where he went down the slope and along the left bank, seeing plenty of porters, but never the one he sought. He was below the Quay des Augustins, passing small fishing boats with planks laid so that customers could come from the bank and buy, when he collided with a woman stepping off a plank bridge with a basket of eels. The eels went flying and the woman rained abuse on him as he helped her gather their tangled slipperiness back into the basket. He straightened and nearly upended the basket again as he came face-to-face with the man who was trying to step around him.
“Monsieur, thank God!” He pulled the startled and protesting porter to the side of the quay. “Please, monsieur, I must talk with you. About the accident you saw on the rue des Poirées, the little boy—”
“No!” Breathing heavily through his mouth, the porter wrenched his arm away. “Leave me alone!” His long bony face had gone the color of a fish belly. “I told the other one. You’ve no call to hound me!”