Charles quietly retraced his steps. When he reached the bottom of the stairs, he could hear Mme LeClerc’s and Roger’s voices, but when he peered around the door, he saw that the shop was empty and the voices were coming from the bakery workroom. He realized that this door, like the door at the other end of the stairs, made no sound. He ran a finger over the heavy iron hinges and it came away coated with thick grease. He went quickly through the shop to the street door. Its hinges, too, were newly greased. He had no key to try in the lock, but he would bet that it, too, worked silently. He slipped out of the shop unseen, his mind racing. The stairs changed everything.
Chapter 16
Thick fog blanketed the city, and though it was the first day of August, summer seemed to have fled in the night. Hunched against the chill, Charles slid on patches of slippery grass as he made his way to the water level on the downriver side of the Petit Pont. The weather was no doubt punishment for the lie that had gotten him out of the college, he thought wryly. But at least he had permission to go alone. A twinge in his jaw made him wonder if his excuse of needing a tooth-drawer was becoming reality and part of the list of penances he was earning. He’d come to the river, that much was true. And he was meeting the porter down toward the Pont Neuf, where Frère Fabre had said there were tooth-drawers’ booths.
Shouts and grunts were loud in the wet air and the smell of wood was sharp in Charles’s nose as he threaded his way through men unloading logs from a barge tied up at the quay. The ghostly outlines of bales, baskets, crates, boats covered with hooped canvas like wagons, boats with masts, flat-bottomed boats poled from their sterns, appeared and disappeared as he walked. Hoping he’d recognize the place where he’d seen Pierre and the other porters the day before, he peered through the fog’s shifting veils and caught a glimpse of the Louvre’s east end across the river. This must be more or less the right place. He started whistling a marching song he’d learned at the siege of St. Omer. After a few repetitions, a wheezy voice came back out of the fog, singing the melody’s bawdy words.
“Do they know you know that one?” the ex-soldier said, materializing in front of Charles. “Your abbot and such, I mean.”
“We don’t have abbots.” Charles laughed. “But you’re right, I don’t sing that song much. I realize I don’t know your name, monsieur,” he added politely.
“And I’ve forgotten yours, if I ever knew it. Better that way. Come on, I’m taking you to where Pierre lives, he doesn’t want to be seen talking to you.”
“Where?” Charles didn’t move.
“Nothing to worry about, I wouldn’t do a fellow soldier wrong. Pierre’s jumpy, is all.”
They moved off into the fog, which seemed to thicken. Charles matched his stride to the man’s short legs, but looked warily back over his shoulder, wishing he could see more than a foot or two in any direction.
“Someone after you, too?” His guide cocked an assessing eye up at him. “About this ‘accident?’ ”
“Why?” Charles noted the way the man said accident. “Is someone after Pierre?”
“He says so. Following him, he says. But he’s drinking a lot, mind you, so it might all be out of his cup.”
Charles hoped it was too early in the day for Pierre to be in his cups. They started across the Pont Neuf, turning a little more of Charles’s lie into truth. Unlike the city’s other bridges, this one bore no houses, just small open shop booths built into its half-round niches, with a raised walkway along them. The booths and the vendors’ stalls set up wherever there was room were all doing a brisk business. Fabre had said that on the bridge you could have your dog barbered, hire an umbrella, join the army, buy a mackerel for supper, or a glass eye or wooden leg if a battle or duel turned out badly. Street criers carrying their wares were thick as the fog and Charles glimpsed a wild-eyed man in a tattered scholar’s gown standing on a stool and proclaiming the virtues of ancient Greek comedy to a cluster of laughing students. Fog-blinded carriages hurtled across the bridge, making Charles grateful for the raised walkways. The ex-soldier led him off the bridge, past the clanging Samaritaine water pump that drew drinking water out of the Seine, and turned to the left.
“That’s it,” the ex-soldier said. He pointed at the Louvre’s bulk looming fitfully through the fog and quickened his pace. “Where Pierre lives.”
Charles stopped abruptly, with an unpleasant vision of yesterday’s Gravel Voice and minions waiting for him to walk into a nicely set trap.
“What are you playing at?” he said harshly. “The Louvre’s a palace.”
The man looked over his shoulder with a puzzled expression. “Of course it is. And Pierre lives there. Him and a few hundred more. They won’t eat you. Probably won’t even rob you, not with me there. Come on.” He vanished around a pile of broken stone and wood, thickly grown with weeds. “Watch yourself,” he called back. “The ground’s full of holes.”
Following the often misunderstood Jesuit teaching that ends must be considered and means appropriately chosen, Charles pulled a long stave of weathered oak from the pile and followed the porter. He found himself in what could have been stage décor for hell. A freshening wind was thinning the fog, revealing pitted and broken ground. His guide led him across hard puddles of spilled mortar, past scattered rotten lumber. The remains of a flat-bottomed cargo boat lay like a skeleton amid the debris. As they neared the long colonnade ahead of them, Charles saw small fires flickering among the rubble and the smells of doubtful cooking assailed his nose. Grimy faces peered sullenly at them through the fog.
“What is all this?” Charles asked, keeping his voice low.
“What, never been here? Oh, well, I guess you wouldn’t, would you? See that long part we’re coming to?”
He pointed to the three-story colonnade that was revealing its full length as the fog blew away. Half of it looked more or less finished, though roofless. The unfinished half was covered with the remains of wooden scaffolding. Neither end of it seemed to be connected to anything.
“What happened was, see, the king started building, wanted to fancy up the place. But in ’78, I think it was—around then, anyway—he tired of it. Turned his back on the whole thing and went off and built that Versailles. Just left all this. Which turned out a blessing, really, because a lot of people with no place to live moved into this side. Nice, some of it. Taverns, too. And there’s a well. Even a garden, some of the women have.”
They reached the abandoned colonnade and Charles saw that the upper halves of the big windows in this south wall of the palace were glassless and boarded over. For warmth, he guessed. In a few places, the makeshift shutters on the lower part of the windows had been set aside to let in what light the morning offered, but oil lamps and candles flickered deep in the cavernous interior. Talk and laughter and arguing echoed as men and women went in and out. Ragged children raced along under the scaffolding, jumping up to hang from pieces of it and laughing uproariously when their rotten handholds broke. A huddle of barefoot women pushed past Charles, carrying hoes and baskets. Their eyes slid sideways at him and quickly away again.