Free The Eloquence of Blood by Judith Rock Page B

have to find him and bring him here.”
    â€œShall I go to the Châtelet now, mon père ? He may well be there searching for the donation , if he doesn’t yet know that Mademoiselle Mynette is dead. He was not at home this morning, and both his daughter and his uncle said they had not seen him yet today.”
    â€œYes, go there. We will pursue our legal claim to this money, and I must speak with him about how to proceed without further inflaming rumor and gossip. And after he tells me that, he is also going to tell me why he kept knowledge of this donation from us.”
    Charles stood up, bowed, and went to the door. Then he turned back, frowning. “How did they know?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œThe men who attacked Frère Guiscard must have known that we stand to get the Mynette patrimoine . Why else would they link a Jesuit to Martine Mynette’s murder? So how did they know that the money now comes to us?”
    They looked at each other in silence.
    Le Picart said slowly, “I have spoken of the bequest to no one outside the Society. No one at all beyond the college except my superior, our Provincial. Have you?”
    â€œOnly to you and Père Damiot, mon père .”
    â€œVery well. Go now, I want a report from you before midday. Meanwhile, I will discover who has spread our affairs abroad.”
    Charles went, glad he had to face only the weather and not Le Picart’s inquiry.

Chapter 6
    H unched against the snow falling around him, Charles crossed the Petit Pont and most of the Île de la Cité, and then veered right to cross the Pont au Change to the Châtelet. In the old days, money changers had had their banques , or benches, on this bridge. And how ironic, Charles found himself thinking, that the money changers’ bridge led to a prison and law courts. Where money seemed so often to lead, mortals being unable to do without it, and so often unable to do honestly with it.
    In spite of the snow, he slowed as he came to the triangular islet of houses at the north end of the bridge, where the roadway split into a Y. He squinted against the snowflakes, looking up at the larger than life-size bronze statues of the royal family crowning the south-facing point of the triangle, the child Louis XIV standing between his parents, Louis XIII and Anne of Austria. Another family not without its problems, he thought, brushing snow off his eyelashes, and taking the left-hand branch of the Y around the triangle, the way that led into the Place du Châtelet. The looming old Châtelet had been the city’s northern gate when all of Paris was contained on the Île de la Cité, just as the Petit Châtelet on the Left Bank had been its southern gate and was still the entrance to the Petit Pont.
    Charles had a glimpse of thick walls, round stone towers, and conical blue roofs as he crossed the Place, and then the torch-flaring darkness of an arched passage swallowed him into the ancient fortress. He came out onto the roadway dividing the Châtelet’s prison from its law courts. He’d been there once before, but at night, and now, in daylight, he was shocked by how dilapidated the buildings were. Fallen stones and broken roof tiles lay along the road, and a little way ahead was what looked like half a fallen wall. He’d heard Jesuits arguing over whether Julius Caesar had built the Châtelet, which certainly seemed possible, since the Romans had built a town where Paris now stood. But even if it hadn’t been Caesar who built it, the crumbling fortress was unimaginably old.
    Inside, though, the modern love of litigation pursued its tortuous path. Christmas season though it was, a few clerks came and went in the echoing stone-vaulted anteroom, and two lawyers in voluminous curling wigs and silky black robes with ribbons on their sleeves stood arguing loudly, while their clients glowered at each other. Charles had grown up listening to his father’s