“What do you teach, mon père?” he asked his still anonymous neighbor politely.
“I am in charge of the student library. We have an extraordinarily fine collection here, nearly thirty thousand volumes in our new main library. I also have the honor to act as confessor to many at court.” He managed to look simultaneously down his nose and sideways at Charles. “I am Père Sebastian Victoire Louis Anne of the House of Guise.”
The man rolled the syllables of his name off his tongue as though proclaiming an addition to Holy Writ. Charles choked on a mouthful of bread. Dear God, the House of Guise. Instigators of the Wars of Religion, leaders of the Huguenot-hunting Catholic League. Nearly kings of France, with the help of the League’s Guise-financed army. The irony of getting away with rescuing Pernelle, only to become the colleague and tablemate of a Guise, made Charles uncertain whether to weep or toast the bon Dieu’s sense of humor. Still coughing, Charles picked up his wineglass. Guise turned his broad back and began talking to his other neighbor.
Charles gulped wine, catching his breath, and gazed up at the faded stars between the ceiling’s wide black beams. No luxury here, Guise had said. The little yellow stars, the Virgin’s symbols, did indeed need repainting. Even dull and chipped and faded, though, they comforted him. Mary’s stars made him think of the glittering sky of his childhood in the dry nights of the south. Until he got too big to curl up in the stone window-seat, he’d moved his bedding there most clear nights and fallen asleep watching the sky through the open shutter, imagining that Mary had spread her star-strewn cloak over the sleeping world to keep it safe. He emptied his glass, reached for a pitcher, and drew back his hand. There was no point in trying to drown the Guises of the world in watered wine. And even if there were, he couldn’t go fuddled to his first day of rehearsal.
He turned his attention to eating and watching the sea of students in front of him. In spite of the proctors’ frowns, the boys gestured energetically as they talked. The black sleeves of their scholar’s gowns fell back, lighting the dim room with flashes of white linen and the occasional sheen of richly colored silk. Most of the boys were European, but there were two who had to be the Chinese students he’d been told about, and several others with an exotic slant to eyes or cheekbones. As his eye wandered over the faces, he saw the handsome black-haired youth who had stopped to watch the lay brother’s juggling. Charles jumped as Guise, still turned away from him, slapped the table.
“. . . they serve God and their king. Souls are saved. No faithful servant of the Church—or the Society of Jesus—can deplore that.”
Charles reached for a strawberry tart from the platter that had appeared on the table, and craned his neck to see who Guise was lecturing. Several places away, a hawk-nosed old man shook his head, his wispy white hair waving like feathers around his skullcap. Charles caught the word heretic and then the old man sat back in his chair, disappearing from view.
“Old woman,” Guise said savagely under his breath.
Wanting more than anything not to talk about heretics, Charles stuffed the whole tart into his mouth, turned his head away from Guise, and pretended to be absorbed in the checkerboard pattern that continued around the side wall.
“And you?” Guise demanded at his back. “Do you agree with me?”
“About what?” Charles said, around the mouthful of pastry and without turning.
“Heretics.”
Hoping to give deliberate offense so that Guise would leave him alone, Charles chewed the rest of his tart and swallowed before he turned. Guise was still waiting, his nostrils pinched with anger.
“Saving souls is part of what God requires of us,” Charles said evenly.
“And are you squeamish about the method, like old Dainville?”
An updraft of anger seared Charles’s chest and heated his face. Squeamish? Method? Squeamish about the king’s dragoons tying his uncle Jean Marc du Luc’s new young wife to a bedpost and refusing to release her until she recanted her faith? While her frail newborn screamed for food? Annette du Luc had pleaded through the night to be allowed to feed the sick child. Finally, her little boy’s misery was too much and before the sun rose, she agreed to become Catholic. But the baby died, worn out with sickness, terror, hunger, and wailing. Annette died, too, because she wrested a knife from a half-drunk dragoon and attacked the soldier who had kept her from her child. Jean Marc had been sent to the galleys. That had been more than a year ago, and no one knew whether he still lived, or even whether to hope he did, considering what everyone knew about the living death of galley slaves. Charles forced words through his anger.
“Our Savior is a God of love, Père Guise.”
Guise’s sculptured lip curled. “Is it loving to let heretic souls be damned?”
“Is it loving to torture them into false conversion?” Charles shot back. “Is it loving to kill children?”
Something moved behind Guise’s eyes, and he gazed at Charles with new interest. “The south,” he said lazily, “Provence, Languedoc, the filthy strongholds of heresy.” He leaned toward Charles like a cold shadow. “Have you grown so loving to your neighbors—and your kin, perhaps—that heresy no longer troubles you? Holy Scripture commands us to ‘compel them to come in.’ ”
“If you read further in that same fourteenth chapter of St. Luke’s Gospel, you will find that those who refuse are not hunted down and tortured until they accept the invitation. More to the point, can we ever be too loving to our neighbors? Whom Holy Scripture commands us to love as ourselves?”
“And whose souls we are required to save. Un roi, une loi, une foi, Maître du Luc. Or has your tender heart carried you as far as treason?”
An insane desire to plunge his little table knife into Guise’s well-padded ribs washed over Charles. He folded his hands tightly in his lap and studied his white knuckles.
“Consider our Jesuit rule of education,” he said softly. “Our Ratio. About which we cannot possibly disagree. It directs us to make learning pleasurable. Should we not, even more, make the learning and acceptance of God’s true religion pleasurable?”
Guise sat back, watching him as a cat watches a wounded bird. “A follower of Epicurus, are you? The highest good is pleasure? How interesting.”
“Epicurus held that pleasure comes from the practice of virtue. And few faithful theologians would dispute that our savior preached love and virtue.”
“So love and pleasure are one?”
“Hah, Père Guise, you old dog, you should know,” Montville said loudly from Guise’s other side. “Corrupting our new professor already?” He leaned around Guise, smiling broadly, his eyes warning Charles to smile with him. “I hope your dinner was to your satisfaction, maître?”
“Very much so,” Charles said warmly, profoundly grateful for the boisterous interruption.
“Good, you’ll need sustenance to get through your first afternoon of rehearsals.”
“Ballet!” Guise spat on the floor, narrowly missing Charles’s arm. “Womanish nonsense. A waste of time and money.”
“I’ll be sure and tell King Louis you said that, next time I’m at court.” Montville laughed, slapping Guise on the back.
“Our official plan of studies says nothing about ballet!” Guise replied stiffly. “‘Tragoediarum et comoediarum, quas non nisi latinas ac rarissimas esse oportet, argumentum sacrum sit ac pium.’ That is what it says!”
“Yes, yes.” Montville laughed. “‘Tragedies and comedies should be rare,’ we all know what it says.”
“It says extremely rare,” Guise snapped. “And pious.”