The Whispering of Bones by Judith Rock

would die. Either there and then, or soon after by hanging. So he stood still, listening helplessly to women screaming in the second cottage. He hadn’t hidden behind Charles-François, or caused his cousin the loss of his arm. But Charles-François’s assessment was right—he was a coward.
    Except for the partial account he’d given Le Picart, he’d never told anyone about that day at Cassel, not even his confessors. His mother knew, but only because she’d pieced together things he’d said during the fever that came after his wound. She’d reassured him over and over that he hadn’t fired his musket because the men were the king’s soldiers and he was loyal. But she was wrong. He hadn’t fired his musket because he’d been afraid. When he began to recover, he’d prayed constantly for forgiveness. Just before he’d entered the Jesuit Novice House in Avignon, his mother had told him flatly that he’d never hear God’s forgiveness until he stopped shouting accusations at himself.
    He raised his head. The bells had long since stopped and the rue St. Jacques was quieter than it was in the daylight. The lanterns hanging from the sides of buildings had been lit and cast small pools of light on the cobbles. A little way up the hill, an upper window opened in a house on the other side of the street and a woman leaned on the sill, her white coif gleaming in the lantern light. She was singing, though too quietly for Charles to hear the words. But he recognized the melody, because he’d heard it in the streets. He remembered its words, too, about the pleasure of seeing a lover, and about love’s danger. He leaned his elbows on the windowsill, thinking about his own youthful love, Pernelle. He’d chosen God above all else. And she had also made her own choices. But a deep place in his heart would always belong to her. They had let each other go for many reasons, good reasons, but love songs still wrung his heart.
How long are you going to stand here spinning yourself another drama? Don’t you have work to do?
his critical inner voice said. Charles sighed and swung the small-paned window shut. Then he picked up the malodorous tallow candle from the stool beside his bed, nodded as though in greeting toward the small painting of Mary and her Child that hung nearly invisible in the shadows, and went into the tiny study that opened from his sleeping chamber. He shut the door behind him, as though that would keep his needling inner voice out.
    The study was like his sleeping chamber, with whitewashed plaster walls, beamed ceiling, bare floor, no fireplace, and little furniture. He put his copper candlestick beside a thick book on the table that served him as a desk, sat down beneath the painted crucifix over the chair, and eyed the book with distaste. He liked studying. Or he
used
to like studying, he thought sadly, shifting on the hard chair’s thin red cushion, trying to get comfortable. Half seriously, he wondered if it was too late to just be a lay brother. Lay brothers didn’t have to read St. Augustine. And if he were a lay brother, he could work in the stable, take care of the horses. One of the things he missed most about his father’s—now his brother’s—house and fields and vineyards far away in the south, in Languedoc, was being around horses.
    But he knew he couldn’t be a lay brother, not even to be around horses, because during the summer he’d come to know even more deeply—beneath complaining and fears and even beneath his terrible secret—that he wanted to be a priest more than he’d ever wanted anything.
Anything?
the needling inner voice replied, having apparently wormed its way under the door.
More than Pernelle? Yes
, he told it.
More than I wanted Pernelle. So shut up.
    That silenced the voice, and Charles opened the book. But instead of reading, he leaned back in the chair, trying to let the