Judith Rock - The Eloquence of Blood

“With pleasure.” Damiot strode out of the kitchen, his boot heels striking like hammers on the stone tiles.

“If you want to know who killed Martine,” Saglio said, watching Charles, “look for her ex-gardener. Tried to get into her bedroom, he did.” He grinned. “Always saying she had something he wanted. Don’t we kill the ones we love? Or lust for, anyway?”

“Do you mean Tito La Rue?”

“I mean Tito La Rue, indeed.”

Charles gazed thoughtfully at a ham hanging from the ceiling, wondering if there might after all be reason to find the gardener and question him. “How old is this Tito? Describe him.”

“I don’t know his age, younger than me. Middle height, hair something like mine, not as black. Well fleshed, he liked his food.”

“And where is he now?”

“Paris? Peru? Hell? Who knows?” Sniffing the air, Saglio whipped around and opened the oven. With the long paddle, he brought out four brown-crusted loaves and slid them onto the table. Charles’s mouth watered at the rich, yeasty smell.

Saglio gazed with approval at his work. “Look, mon ami, I’m busy, I have to cook dinner for all the people madame is bringing back with her.”

If the rest of the dinner measured up to the delicious-smelling bread, it would indeed be a feast. “Where did you learn to cook?” Charles couldn’t help asking.

“From my mother, in Rome.” He took a plucked chicken out of a cupboard, slapped it down on the table, and picked up a knife. “Like I said, ask my mistress where I was when Mademoiselle Mynette died. She’ll tell you the same as I have.”

“Shall I also ask her what you were doing in Paris on Monday?” Charles doubted now that Saglio was actually the man who’d tried to stab him outside the tavern that evening, but he had to put Reine’s insinuation to rest.

The man stared at him. “I haven’t been to Paris since Christmas. My dear mistress has kept me too busy here feeding her holidaying belly. What are you trying to make me guilty of now?”

“Of trying to stab me,” Charles said conversationally, watching the knife in Saglio’s hand.

“If I’d tried, you’d be dead.” Saglio scowled, flourishing the knife, whether at the chicken or Charles, Charles wasn’t sure. “Now go away and let me cook.”

Charles found Pere Damiot chatting amiably with the two servants at the well.

Charles nodded to the three of them. “Have you discussed Monsieur Saglio’s whereabouts last Friday morning?”

“Oh, yes,” Damiot said. “We have, and I’ve learned that he was here, though we’ve agreed that it is always preferable to have him elsewhere.”

“That I agree with wholeheartedly,” Charles said. “What about the day before yesterday, Monday?”

Both servants began to laugh.

“He was here, mon pere,” the maid said, with a glance at the manservant. “Very much here!”

“And why?” the manservant broke in gleefully. “Because sometimes madame makes him wait at table as well as cook, so she can gaze at his pretty face-and on that Monday, at dinner, he poured hot cream sauce into her lap! By some terrible mistake, you understand. He spent the rest of the day apologizing and making dainties to soothe her temper and make her love him again.”

Charles gave them each a few coins and he and Damiot took their leave. As they rode away from the house, Charles told Damiot what the cook had said about Tito La Rue.

“I think I need to find this gardener. To eliminate him, if nothing else. And he’s the only other name we have just now. What exactly did the servants say about what Saglio was doing on Friday morning?”

Damiot shifted uncomfortably in his saddle and reached under his cassock to pull at his breeches. “Dear God, it’s sixteen hundred eighty-seven, why hasn’t someone invented a comfortable saddle?” He stood up in his stirrups, twitched his cassock out from under him, and sat again. “They say he was here, up well before daylight, packing food for their mistress to take with her to Paris, and then cooking a five-course dinner for the friends she brought back that afternoon. I think it’s true, because the maidservant said she spends her days running from his unwanted attentions. She’d be glad to help fork him into hell.”

“Well, it seems that he’s not a murderer-at least not lately-but based on what I saw and smelled in the kitchen, he’s a good cook.”

“I’m hungry.”

“Me, too.”

They left the village behind and turned onto the dirt track, back to the Faubourg St. Jacques. Tito La Rue, Charles thought glumly. With a description that could suit half the young men in Paris and a name as common.

“I want to stop at Procope’s before we go back to the college,” Charles said to Damiot. “Maybe the kitchen woman Renee knows more about this Tito than she said before.”

“Then we should turn around and go up the rue Vaugirard to the old St. Andre gate. Otherwise we’ll have to backtrack when we get to the city, and I’m not riding a step farther than I must.”

Flamme shook the reins as Charles turned him, obviously hoping for another run, but Charles held him to Boeuf’s slow pace. The road was full of traffic now, a steady stream of people and carriages heading from the city to Vaugirard, to celebrate the holiday in its taverns with cheap local wine. Charles heard angry murmurs from a few people who passed them, and ignored more than a few hostile glances, but that was all. They soon left the village’s vineyards and fields behind, riding past country houses and gardens, which gave way to houses and shops built wall next to wall. When they reached what was left of the old city walls and the gate, Charles looked at Damiot, surprised by his silence. Judging from the man’s pinched lips, he was in real pain.

“We’ll have some coffee at Procope’s before we talk to Renee,” Charles said recklessly. “Pere Le Picart gave me money, and I’ll tell him that spending some of his coins was the only way to save you from death by horse.”

“Which will be Gospel truth,” Damiot muttered.

They reached Procope’s back courtyard by the narrow lane that ran behind the cafe. As they were tethering the horses, Renee came out of the kitchen with a basin of apple peelings.

“Bonjour, mademoiselle, and a bonne annee to you,” Charles said, and jumped aside as she threw the peelings. Not at him, as he’d first thought, but at the waste pile behind him. Nonetheless, there was no welcome in her expression as she looked from him to Damiot.

“Madame won’t let you into the coffeehouse. The customers are arguing about that song and some are saying Jesuits killed Mademoiselle Martine and her mother and the notary, too. If you go in there, there’ll be a riot. So go away.”

Renee turned back toward the kitchen and tried to close the door on them when they followed her. Charles grabbed the door’s edge and held it open.

“The song is a lie; we have killed no one. But we are trying to find out who did, and we need your help.”

“I have already helped you.”

She struggled for a moment to shut the door, then shrugged and let it go. Inside, the silent cook seemed not to have moved from his stool beside the fire where Charles had last seen him. He glanced at the Jesuits without interest and went on eating a piece of pungent cheese. Two glasses of wine stood on the floor beside him. Reine wasn’t there.

Renee picked up one of the glasses and faced them. “What do you want of me?” Her eyes were as hard as green pebbles.

“Anything more you can tell us about Tito La Rue.”

“Why?”

“We have seen Paul Saglio, and-”

Her eyes lit with hope. “Did he ask about me?”

“No,” Charles said ruthlessly.