Charles turned down a lane lined with old houses faced with stone and straightened his ring finger. Four: Guise was the only other person at the college—as far as Charles knew—who had talked to the street porter Pierre. But surely, Charles told himself, if Guise had followed him yesterday, he would have noticed. And he couldn’t imagine the fastidious Guise slinking through the beggars’ Louvre in the dead of night to murder poor Pierre. But there were the old stairs. If Guise watched his chance in the bakery, he could come and go from his rooms unseen whenever he pleased.
Charles’s little finger jabbed the air. Five: Mme LeClerc had witnessed the accident, and had no qualms about talking, yet no one was trying to silence her. The thought of anyone trying to silence Mme LeClerc, however, made Charles laugh out loud, earning him a wary look from a woman with a basket of squawking chickens. So why had the porter been a danger, but not the baker’s wife?
The little street dead-ended and Charles stopped, waiting for a clutch of Augustinian monks to pass on the cross street. He turned right and his left thumb stood up. Six: The dead porter, Antoine’s story of the note, and the old staircase were all connected, one way or another, to Guise.
Charles’s thoughts suddenly jumped their logical track. Guise seemed not to know what Charles had done in Nîmes. Which must mean that La Reynie had not told him. Charles frowned, remembering how La Reynie had watched Louvois accuse him after the funeral, neither contradicting nor agreeing. And then La Reynie had kept Louvois from following him and Antoine. Puzzling over La Reynie, Charles turned east at the next street crossing. But that street curved north and took him nearly back to the river. He stopped, looked around, and held up his next finger. Seven: He was lost.
By the time he found the rue St. Jacques and the college again, the midday meal was half over. He apologized to the rector, slid into his seat, and bolted the boiled beef, brown bread, and cucumber salad, made all the more palatable by the fact that Père Guise ate with his back half turned to Charles, talking only to Père Montville on his left. Père Jouvancy caught Charles on his way out of the refectory to ask solicitously after his tooth. Swallowing guilt, Charles said that his courage had failed him and he’d decided to try medicine before facing the tooth-drawer. Nodding sympathetically, Jouvancy told him to ask Frère Brunet for something to ease the pain. And added an admonition not to be late for rehearsal.
Charles checked to see that Antoine was where he should be, waiting with his class to leave the junior refectory, and went outside, where the quiet recreation hour had started. He sat down on a bench against the refectory wall, pretending to watch a chess game two boys were playing at the bench’s other end. When Guise emerged, Charles let him get halfway across the court and then strolled, unnoticed, in his wake. He watched Guise enter the latrine courtyard and go into the building where the students’ library was. Assuming the air of a man who wanted only to be alone with his sore tooth and his thoughts, Charles settled on the shady stone bench built into the archway between the two courts and waited, but Guise didn’t reappear. Ostentatiously rubbing his jaw, Charles made his way back toward his rooms through an illicitly rowdy game of tag.
Taking the stairs two at a time, he went to Guise’s door and listened, then eased it open and went quickly through the empty chamber to the study. Just where Antoine had given his sleepwalking performance, a brown and gold tapestry of Hannibal and his elephants crossing the Alps hung on wooden rings from a pole. Charles slid it aside and uncovered the low, arched door he’d seen from the other side. He tried the latch. The door swung silently inward, revealing the staircase Charles had climbed. As he put his foot on the top step to go and see if the lower door was still unlocked, he heard footsteps climbing the stairs quickly toward him. Noiselessly, he shut the door, pulled the tapestry across it, and raced into the chamber. As he slid out of sight between Guise’s bed and the wall, the hanging rattled on its rings and footsteps crossed the study. He pressed his cheek to the floor and saw a pair of spurred boots with folded tops stride quickly across his line of vision. Jackboots the color of burnt sugar, like the boots Mme LeClerc said Antoine’s attacker had worn.
Charles burst from his hiding place as the chamber door closed behind his quarry. He scrambled across the bed, yelling at the man to stop, and wrenched the chamber door open. But in the passage, he collided with Père Dainville and had to stop and steady the old man while his quarry’s footsteps pounded down the main staircase. By the time Charles reached the foot of the stairs, no one was there but Frère Moulin, coming from the grand salon with a bundle of wet rags in his arms.
“Did you see him? Where did he go?” Charles demanded, nearly falling over a bucket of dirty water,
“Frère Fabre?” The lay brother nodded toward the door to the street passage where Fabre, barefoot like Moulin and with his cassock kilted, was shouldering his way out with a bucket in each hand.
“The man who just ran down the stairs! Quick, which way?”
“We’ve been cleaning, maître, just finished.” Moulin nodded over his shoulder at the salon, whose floor gleamed wetly. “What’s wrong?”
Charles strode to the side door and into the street passage. “Did anyone come this way just now?” he called to Frère Martin, the porter, but Martin shook his head. Charles ran into the Cour d’honneur, still crowded with boys playing darts, chess, checkers, reading, and talking. He pushed his way among them, searching desperately for Antoine. The man in the boots was no casual thief, he hadn’t searched Guise’s rooms and he had known where he was going. If he was Antoine’s attacker, if he’d come to finish what he’d bungled in the rue des Poirées . . . Charles went weak with relief when he finally found Antoine in a shaded corner of the student residence courtyard, lying on his belly and frowning over a chessboard. His tutor lay beside him, sound asleep. Charles managed a smile for the child and prodded Maître Doissin hard with his foot. Doissin grunted and Charles pulled him up and walked him out of Antoine’s hearing.
“I asked you to watch this child, for God’s sake!”
“Doucement, maître, softly, sweetly! I am watching him, there he is!”
Remembering the bloody patterned necklace that strangling had left on the porter’s neck and Philippe’s, Charles said through his teeth, “Do not let him out of your sight. Do you hear me? That means keeping your damned eyes open!”
The tutor spread his arms wide in injured innocence. “He is just there. I am just here. Maître du Luc, your humors must be out of balance—you should ask Frère Brunet to examine a specimen of your water.”
Charles turned on his heel and squatted beside Antoine. The other boy, frowning over his next move with his tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth, paid no attention.
“Remember our talk, mon brave?” Charles said in Antoine’s ear. “Here’s something else you can help me with. Stay close to Maître Doissin. Don’t let him nap. Don’t let him out of your sight. Even when you go to your grammar class, make sure he stays by the door.”
Antoine rolled over and sat up. “Why?” he said eagerly.
“I can’t tell you yet. Will you do it? Knights cannot always tell their squires everything, you know,” he added, as Antoine began to frown.
“That’s true. All right.” Antoine glanced tolerantly at his tutor and nodded. “I’ll look after him. He needs it.” He went back to his game.