“Thank you.” He shook his head in amazement. “Who would ever have thought we’d work on a Jesuit performance together?”
Her eyes danced. “Shall we do a Huguenot ballet next?”
“In which King Louis can be hubris-crazed and fall off the giants’ ladder!”
They laughed and then a silence fell between them. The court was nearly dark now and the sounds of revelry from the student receptions were growing louder. Charles sighed, reluctant to leave their refuge and face all that waited for them. “We should escape upstairs before the students’ guests start heading for the postern.” He picked up a scholar’s gown from the stage floor and tossed it down to her. “Put this on—someone left it on a bench. If we meet anyone, keep your head down and look like a boy caught over-reveling.” He stood up and stretched. “I took more food from the reception up to my rooms, so we—”
“Du Luc!”
The voice’s rage jerked Charles sharply around, automatically feeling for the sword he hadn’t worn in years. A disheveled and haggard Père Guise strode out of the street passage into the torchlight.
“Hide,” Charles barely had time to say to Pernelle, before Guise was at the foot of the stage. Charles pushed his astonishment aside and said mildly, hoping to quiet the man, “What is it, mon père? Where have you been?”
Guise vaulted onto the front of the stage with a ferocious ease that made Charles back up quickly and reassess his own danger.
“I beg you, mon père, calm yourself,” Charles said soothingly, as though Guise were a threatening dog. He edged upstage toward the rhetoric classroom windows. “What has angered you?”
“You,” Guise bellowed, matching him step for step. “You hell-born bitch spawn! You heretical piece of garbage! I should have killed you the first day I saw you.”
“Why should you want to kill me?” Charles kept his eyes on the priest’s hands. He doubted Guise had a weapon, but the man seemed insane with rage. “What have I done?”
“You dare ask me what you’ve done?” Guise threw his head back and his voice boomed and echoed beneath the awning. “You killed my son, you devil from hell! My son, my only son.”
Charles shook his head in bewilderment. “What—but how—what do you mean, your son?”
“He lived only a few moments.”Tears streamed down Guise’s face. “You killed him. If you hadn’t terrified her and made her flee, he would have lived!”
A blaze of revelation brought Charles to a halt, and instantly Guise had him by the throat. Charles thrust his hands between Guise’s arms and tried to hook the priest’s feet from under him. Guise fell and Charles twisted free, throwing himself across the man’s writhing body.
“Get help,” he yelled toward the trap door, “I can’t hold him!”
Other hands shoved Charles aside. There was a grunt, a cry, and then the hot metallic smell of blood. Charles struggled to his feet, staring in horror at Frère Moulin sitting astride Guise’s back and holding him by the hair. Neatly avoiding the spreading pool of blood from Guise’s throat, the lay brother jumped up and wiped his knife on his gaping cassock, whose cincture had come loose in the struggle.
“Frère Moulin? Dear God, what—” Charles made himself breathe, searching for words. “Dear God, did you have to kill him?”
“You’d rather be dead yourself ?” Moulin moved closer. “You’re not hurt, maître?” He peered anxiously at Charles.
“No. I—but—” Charles shook his head. “Thank God and all his saints that you were here. But could you not have—” Charles looked at Guise’s body and tried to regret that the man was dead.
“No, I couldn’t. He was crazed, maître. I heard him yelling and came running.”
“He said there was a child—his son, he said. A newborn child.”
“His woman birthed his babe a little while ago and like he said, it died. So did she.”
“His woman?” Charles whispered, staring at Moulin.
“Lisette Douté. I can see that’s what you’re thinking, and you’re right.”
“How do you know all this?” Charles said, trying to make his shocked mind work.
“He sent for me this morning. From the Hôtel de Guise, where he’d hidden her. And now all his plans are undone. Classic tragedy,” Moulin said, with a bitter laugh. “You could make something of it for your show next year.”
Charles started to reprove Moulin for his jest, then didn’t. Moulin had just killed someone—to save a life, but still, Charles knew what that did to men. “What do you mean, his plans are undone?”
Moulin put a shaking hand on Charles’s sleeve. “He had great plans. But he was stupid and mad! And the Douté woman was stupid and greedy. But neither of them—”
“Frère Moulin, please—” Charles took a few steps away from him, toward the stage’s edge.
Moulin followed him. “Let me speak truth for once! Neither of them was as stupid as old Douté. Thought he was the prize bull, getting her pregnant so fast. But that was Guise’s work. Couldn’t marry her himself, of course, so he made a quick match with Douté. Insane about blood and dynasty, Guise was. God, he wanted that babe! No Guises left now but him and the old duchesse. She has brats by a lover, I heard—but it seems they don’t count as Guises. This babe couldn’t be a real Guise, either, being a bastard, but he was going to be the Jesus Christ of a bigger and better Catholic League—maybe that’s why Guise wanted him born in the old League chapel—”
“The chapel? Surely not,” Charles said, horrified, but Moulin ignored him.
“The Duchesse Marie couldn’t leave her money to Guise, right? Him being a Jesuit. So to finance his League, he had to be sure his son would inherit all the Douté money. Exeunt omnes, as we say on the stage, don’t we, exit the first Douté wife’s two brats. And that mealymouthed Fabre helped him.”
“Are you sure?”
“Sure as shit. He’s next to me in the dormitory, I know all about him.”
Charles felt sick. “If you’d told someone all this earlier,” he said angrily, “fewer people might have died!”
Rising wind made the courtyard torches flare, and Moulin’s eyes gleamed blue. “I was afraid, maître,” he said, so close that Charles could feel his breath. “Guise was mad but powerful, and I’m only a servant.”
“Go and find Père Le Picart, mon frère,” Charles said wearily. “We need him here.” They did need the rector, but Charles had also remembered that Pernelle was still hiding in the understage. He had to get her away before the stage was overrun by all the people this latest death would bring.
Moulin, quiet now that he had purged himself of his terrible knowledge, had turned to look toward the street passage. As he turned toward Charles, the torches flamed brightly in the wind and teased a brilliant yellow gleam from the shirt beneath his gaping cassock. Charles’s eyes widened. Time seemed to stop and his heartbeat with it. The hair rose on his neck. He raised his eyes to Moulin’s and what he saw there turned him faint.
“You,” Charles breathed. He wanted to run, but couldn’t move. Moulin’s crow of laughter slapped him back to Père La Chaise’s terrace, where the man who’d tried to slit his throat had laughed exactly the same way.
“Had you going, didn’t I, feeling so sorry for me! Philippe’s shirt becomes me, don’t you think?” Moulin had darted between Charles and the edge of the stage and was bouncing happily on the balls of his feet, tossing his knife lightly from hand to hand. “That was fun, making you chase me out of the shit-house and over the wall that day!”
Moving with the infinite caution terror bestows, Charles took a small sideways step, trying for a clear path around Moulin. “You did Guise’s killing for him. You, not Frère Fabre.” If he kept Moulin talking, the brother might not notice what Charles’s feet were doing.