The Whispering of Bones by Judith Rock Page A

day’s shocks and fears recede. The study’s closed window did little to muffle the occasional sound of carriage wheels echoing off the buildings that lined St. Jacques. In a space of quiet, he heard someone shout, someone else shout back, and running feet pounding downhill toward the Seine. Then a loud group—University students, judging by their garbled Latin drinking song—came out of the little rue des Poirées across from Louis le Grand and turned toward the taverns in nearby Place Maubert. When quiet settled again in the room, he watched a mouse come out of its hole beneath the window. She—Charles felt sure it was a she—watched him warily, whiskers twitching, and edged cautiously toward his feet. Irrationally glad to see another creature, he leaned over to see what she might be after and saw that she was stalking crumbs from the cakelike
sable
Marie-Ange had given him yesterday when he passed the bakery. He’d eaten it at his desk last night, in an effort to sweeten reading St. Augustine. The mouse snatched a tiny piece from the floor and sat up, turning it in her paws and watching him, bright-eyed and unafraid. Charles, too, sat up, opened his book and tried to find as much contentment in St. Augustine’s
Confessions
.
    But the clamor in his mind returned, growing louder than the bells had been, and soon blinded him to what was on the pages. Finally, he took his candle and went to the prie-dieu in his sleeping chamber. He put the candle in the sconce beside the prayer desk and knelt. The little painting of Mary and her Child on the wall in front of him glowed in the candlelight. He gazed at Mary, who sat on a bench in a small room, with the Child on her lap and an open window at her back. She was smiling down at her son, and Charles thought again about the murdered boy in the well chamber.
You know what will happen to your son
, he told her.
How do you bear it?
She went on smiling at the laughing baby as though darkness would never fall over the green hills beyond the window, or over the Child, or in her heart.
Will Père Dainville live?
Charles asked her. She was so quiet that he seemed to hear the fire in her grate crackling and murmuring. For the first time since he’d come to the college, he felt that she didn’t hear him, felt shut out of the room in the painting. He put his head down on the ledge of the prie-dieu, exhausted and forsaken.
    He fell asleep there and woke sometime in the dead of night to stumble to his bed.
    When the college’s five o’clock rising bell pealed, he greeted God’s new day with a groan. He mumbled his waking prayer and crossed himself, straightened his bed covers, found his cassock in the dark and pulled it on over his knee-length linen shirt, and was kneeling at the prie-dieu before he was more than half awake. Mary and the Child were remote and silent. He prayed, lit his candle from the passage sconce, washed his face with water from his copper pitcher, and cleaned his teeth with a linen rag and the thick paste his mother regularly sent him. Then he shouldered the small satchel he would need for his classes and started through the dark maze of uneven passageways to the back stairs that led to the chapel and Mass. Père Thomas Damiot, the young priest who lived just across the passage and was one of Charles’s closest friends at the school, was already on the stairs. They smiled a greeting at each other but didn’t speak, breaking the night’s silence before Mass being frowned upon. Charles, yawning, stumbled off the bottom step. Damiot grabbed his arm to keep him upright and gave him a questioning sideways look that Charles pretended not to see.
    On most mornings, when Charles went into Louis le Grand’s chapel, the sight of the rosy, open-armed angels reaching down from the painted ceiling of the chapel’s false dome lifted his spirits, no matter what else was happening. But this morning, he kept his eyes