The Eloquence of Blood

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Under a sky the gray of slushy puddles, the afternoon was fading to an early dusk. Silence lay like a glaze of ice over the college of Louis le Grand and its motley facade of stone, plaster, and brick, its honeycomb of courtyards, its slate-roofed towers and gables. Then a door banged open and a flood of boys poured into the Cour d’honneur, the school’s vast main courtyard, followed by two black-cloaked Jesuits. Most of the students started warming games of chase, but two fourteen-year-olds, trailed by a younger boy, sped to the chapel.

“I somehow doubt that those three have been struck by an urge to prayer,” Maitre Charles du Luc said dryly to his companion. “Shall I go and see?”

Pere Thomas Damiot nodded, laughing. “I think you will find them searching diligently for an answer to prayer.”

Huddling into his cloak, Charles crossed the windy courtyard to the always-open chapel door and stopped unnoticed on the threshold. A little way inside, the three boys were gathered around the stone clamshell that held holy water.

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