The Whispering of Bones by Judith Rock Page B

happen until everyone in the room had finished. Charles kept his eyes on his plate and worked his way through his dinner. Finally, the reader finished, Le Picart and everyone else stood, and the rector said the final grace.
    When the scholastics were outside, they made their way without consultation to their common room in the main building, where their living chambers were, for the midday hour of quiet recreation. The Englishman started to take the chessboard from the cupboard, but Du Pont smiled and shook his head.
    â€œNo,” he said, “not chess just now. I have been thinking that we should finish the talk we were having yesterday at recreation. About women.”
    The scholastics settled themselves willingly enough on the room’s hard chairs.
    Maître Henry Wing spoke first, in his accented Latin. “Well, the last thing I said yesterday was that surely God made women, too.”
    Maître Owen Rhys, a red-haired Welshman also from St. Omer, whose Latin was even odder than the Englishman’s, said, “Ye-e-es. He did. But only as an afterthought. Adam was first. So women are less important than men.”
    â€œAnd so the Mother of God is less important than you are? Because you have the—um—dangly parts?” Maître Jean Montrose, from the part of France called Auvergne, was built like a cart horse and argued like St. Thomas.
    The Welshman bristled, but Du Pont intervened. “Aren’t we getting away from the question? The question that began our talk yesterday was how much time we should give to women penitents when we are priests.”
    â€œWe should give women as much time as we give men,” Charles said. “Or more, if more women ask our assistance. It would depend on one’s assignment, would it not?”
    â€œMore time for women?” Richaud said from the doorway.
“More?”
    â€œYou are late joining us,
maître
,” Du Pont said mildly.
    Ignoring that, Richaud sat down in the empty chair and drew his skirts close around him. His nostrils were pinched as though he smelled a woman at the table. “But you would want more time for women, wouldn’t you, Maître du Luc? You like women. Perhaps too well. We’re celibates—aren’t we?” The question’s questioning cadence hung in the air, and Richaud folded his hands in his lap with an air of satisfaction.
    Charles gazed with distaste at Richaud’s dirty fingernails, wondering why no one ever made him clean them. “Isn’t hearing confessions and directing penitents part of the duty of a priest?” he said. “Both men and women confess and are penitents. When a Jesuit priest hears a woman’s confession, there is always another Jesuit nearby, watching without hearing what’s said. Where’s the difficulty?”
    Richaud licked his thin lips. “There
should
be another Jesuit nearby when one speaks at all with a woman. But there isn’t always. Is there, Maître du Luc?”
    â€œLife,” Charles said lightly, “sometimes overtakes rules. Even our Lord told his disciples to harvest grain on the sabbath if they were hungry. Think on this, Maître Richaud. Are we supposed to hate half of God’s human souls because we’re celibate? Are we supposed to hate our Lord’s mother?”
    Wing slipped a fragment of tart crust, purloined from the refectory table, into his mouth and nodded enthusiastically. “Well argued, Maître du Luc!” he cried, spraying crumbs.
    Du Pont sighed. “You are not to take anything from the refectory, Maître Wing. You are a scholastic, not a novice. You should know that.”
    Wing’s pink face flamed. “Oh. Yes. I should. I mean—I do. But I’m always hungry,” he said plaintively. “Because there’s never any beer. Beer is very filling.”
    The others exchanged hopeless glances.
    Montrose, the Auvergnat, brushed Wing’s crumbs from his