He resorted to bargaining. Help me, Blessed Mother, and I will put my questions aside and serve you as a Jesuit all my life. Help me crush them. Guise and his hatred, Louvois and his cruelty. The strength of his desire turned the knuckles of his clasped hands white. Mary’s gaze seemed to darken. Justice? Or revenge? Her questions were loud in the stillness. Charles bowed his head and prayed for forgiveness. Prayed to want justice and not vengeance.
Slowly, heartbeat by heartbeat, the room’s quiet filled with the Silence that came to him sometimes. He lifted his head. The painting was dim now. Mary’s half-hooded eyes veiled her thoughts. She was so often like that in paintings. Pondering things in her heart, he supposed, as Scripture said. Worrying, probably, about those three ominous gifts to the baby. Gold, frankincense, and myrrh. The myrrh especially, that bitter funeral spice, must have haunted her as she suckled her fat, happy baby. The painter had put a little window in the wall behind her. Its curtain was pulled back and its casement stood open, showing green hills dotted with tiny white sheep. The hills were suspiciously rounded and matched in size, like green breasts. Charles wondered confusedly if the painter meant to say that Mary had to suckle all the world’s poor stupid human sheep.
“Holy Queen, mother of mercy,” he prayed, imagining himself sitting beside her and talking quietly while evening filled her little room. “Hail, our life, our sweetness, and our hope. To you do we cry, poor banished children of Eve; to you do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this vale of tears. Most gracious advocate, turn your eyes of mercy toward us . . .”
As he reached the “amen,” he looked again at the painting and noticed that the curtain at the painting’s window was red. Blue was the Virgin’s color. Did the red stand for blood? That funereal myrrh again? This red wasn’t a scarlet, flaunting red. It was more rose, such a feminine color, rose . . .
Charles was on his feet and out the door, words of thanks-giving tumbling from his lips as he pelted down the stairs two at a time, hardly feeling his wound. The antechamber at the stair foot was shadowed in twilight, and he nearly didn’t see Fabre at the side table, stopped in the act of putting a new candle in a copper candlestick.
“What’s happened now, maître?” Fabre said anxiously, putting the candle down.
Charles didn’t slacken his pace. “I just remembered something, that’s all.”
“It’s after Compline! Where are you going?” Fabre grabbed at Charles’s sleeve, but Charles shook off his hand and disappeared into the street passage.
Chapter 28
Frère Martin was just locking the postern. He opened it again and Charles made for the river, but once through the bridge gate’s torchlit passage, he slowed. The Petit Pont’s narrow roadway with its tall old houses was in deep twilight and he didn’t want to miss the shop. Voices and occasional music floated through open windows, a descant to the rougher music of the light traffic’s wheels, hooves, and feet. Charles stopped under the apothecary’s sign. No light showed in the shop or anywhere else in the house. He pounded on the door, waited, and pounded again. As he stepped back to see if a light showed in any upper window, the door grated over uneven stones. A candle flame wavered in the crack between the door and its jamb, and the barrel of a long pistol gleamed below it. Charles stepped hastily aside.
“What do you want?” the dwarf ’s high-pitched voice demanded.
“Only to speak with you, monsieur. I am a cleric and unarmed.”
“Stand where I can see you.”
“I do not wish to speak with your pistol, monsieur.”
“And I do not wish to be robbed and murdered.”
But the gun barrel was lowered and Charles moved warily into the dwarf ’s line of sight, holding his hands pacifically open in front of him.
“Ah. The beautiful young man looking in the wrong place for sugar. So now you are shopping in the dark?”
“We must talk, monsieur,” Charles said.
“I am here. Talk.”
“Do you want to discuss your poison selling here in the street?”
“You are the one who wants to discuss.” A sigh came out of the darkness and the door opened a little wider. “Come in, then.”
“And your pistol, monsieur?”
“I am not going to shoot you unless you give me reason. And I am not going to stand here all night.”
Charles took a cautious step toward the threshold. The dwarf’s small hand closed like a vise on his wrist and pulled him inside. The little man shut the door, locked it with a key as long as Charles’s foot, and picked up the candle from a low chest.
“I am working in the back, there is light there.”
Seeing that the pistol was now pushed into the back of the dwarf ’s belt, Charles let himself be led. He could overwhelm his captor by sheer size and weight before the man could get to his weapon. All Charles’s senses were alert. The shop’s dry warm air was full of the competing odors of herbs. But the dwarf himself smelled of sulfur. As demons were said to smell. Charles’s mind had doubts about demons, but his body suddenly declared traditional opinions and he found himself pulling back against his guide. Who only gripped him tighter, towing him like a small horse pulling a boat along a towpath.
The house was utterly silent. They crossed a large, beamed kitchen, where the outline of a sleeping cat showed beside the banked fire. The dwarf let go of Charles to open a door and soft light spilled across the worn stone floor of the kitchen.
“In here.”
“After you.”
“What do you think I am going to do, my dear young man, lock you in?”
Thinking exactly that, Charles waited out of reach. With a shrug, the little man disappeared through the door. Charles followed cautiously and found himself in a large room with a vaulted stone ceiling, perhaps a storeroom when the old house was built. Candles burned on a low wooden table and flickered in sconces, picking out the signs of the zodiac painted on the windowless plastered walls. The apothecary was an alchemist, then, which probably explained the stink of sulfur. It was a common enough combining of crafts. The dwarf tied an apron over his black jerkin and breeches and glanced into a trio of crucibles bubbling on trivets in the small fireplace. He blew more life into the coals with a pair of bellows and plucked a pair of spectacles from the littered the table.
“So talk to me,” he said.
“What poisons do you sell?”
“The ones everyone sells. Look for yourself.”
As though his visitor no longer concerned him, the dwarf blew out the candles on the table and picked up a small clay pot. Charles started slowly around the room, looking for aconite. Between the zodiacal paintings, wooden shelves overflowed with brown, green, and clear glass bottles and beakers, stoppered clay pots, and brightly glazed jars. The contents of the jars were written in their glazes. “Aethiopis Mineralis,” Charles read on a yellow and green one, and remembered his mother telling him it was black sulphide of mercury, good for constipation, toothache, melancholy, and childbirth. Another jar held “Laudanum,” opium in wine, God’s gift for easing pain. There was “Elixir Salutis,” a stomach purge, as he knew to his sorrow. And “Ens of Venus,” “Salt of Sylvie,” “Crocus Saturn,” “Bezoar Orientalis,” “Aqua Tofani.” He stopped. “Aqua Tofani,” arsenious oxide, was an Italian poison. Infallibly deadly, as of course it would be, since—as everyone knew—Italians were the world’s arch-poisoners.
“You sell Aqua Tofani?” Charles said.
The dwarf looked up from whatever he was doing to a sliver of wood. The narrow circles of horn that held the lenses of his spectacles made him look like an irritated owl.