Dying by the sword (36 page)

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Authors: Sarah d'Almeida

BOOK: Dying by the sword
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But now the light of battle was in his eyes, and he was treating Athos as if Athos had never left behind his dignity, which was always a very bad sign. “If you think I’m going to allow you to cede your bed to your friends night after night, and sleep all cramped up in some corner, or worse—I know you!—rolled up on a cloak on the floor, let me tell you, milord, it will not do. And as for Bazin telling me that his master has been out doing holy work, that won’t be believed either. Bazin can pray all he wants to, and lard all his conversations with Latin, but you won’t get me to believe that Monsieur Aramis can come in smelling of liquor and with straw matted in his hair, and talking about dangerous chickens and have been out in the service of the Lord.”
For Grimaud this speech was an epic oration, comparable to other men going on for hours on end, and yet Athos could make neither head nor tail of it.
He frowned at his servant. “Grimaud, I do not have the pleasure of understanding you at all. What happened, and why am I the bout of your wrath?”
“Monsieur Aramis. He came in dead drunk, smelling of wine, and behaving in such a way . . . well . . . he could not stay on his own two feet, and our only choice was to strip him to his shirt and put him in your bed. But if you think I intend to let you pass another unquiet night—”
“Oh, now I see,” Athos said. “Your concern is for how I shall sleep, because in your mind I am still the sickly boy whom you watched for through the long nights. But Grimaud, I’m an adult now, and I would thank you—” His mind had caught up with his mouth, and it was informing him rather urgently of something that Grimaud had clearly said. He looked at the weather-beaten face of his servant, and he took a deep breath. “Grimaud, did you say that Monsieur Aramis told you to beware of dangerous chickens?”
Grimaud glared. “He said that she was intending to kill us all, and that if the fire caught all the chickens would be roasted, or something like that, and then, when he became more or less conscious again, as we were putting him to bed, he informed me with the utmost urgency that the chickens might set fire to the sun and kill us all. What was I to make of all this, pray?”
Athos almost chuckled. He couldn’t help it. He’d seen Aramis drunk quite a few times, in their years of friendship. But what operated there is that he’d never yet seen Aramis drunk when he, himself, hadn’t been drunk. And, in company, when Aramis had got drunk, he had usually amused himself in long arguments with Porthos—or occasionally Athos, though considering that Athos tended to go monosyllabic when drunk, that was a hard feat to achieve—about theology or the manufacture of drinking cups, or whatever else struck his fancy. At the end of it, Aramis would do his best to duel someone, only by that time he was so far gone, he couldn’t take his sword out of its sheath. “So Monsieur Aramis is drunk,” he said. “Given what we’ve gone through in the last few days I can hardly make a comment on that. Besides, last night, it was Monsieur Aramis and Monsieur Porthos who put me to bed.”
“But didn’t strip you down. They didn’t even take your sword.”
Athos, thinking that this was true and also that it betrayed a naivete as touching as it was dangerous, said, “Yes. I daresay they were a bit gone into their cups, as well.” He shook his head. “Don’t worry about it, Grimaud. The bed is large enough to accommodate half a dozen people, and at least a normal person and Monsieur Porthos. It is more than large enough for myself and Monsieur Aramis.”
But Grimaud’s arms remained crossed on his chest. “It’s just no use at all thinking that I will countenance your spending another disturbed night, because I won’t. When you stop sleeping, it is always the beginning of a troubled time, and I have no intention of allowing you to do that again.”
There was this thing about being raised by a male, Athos thought—which in many ways, between his sickly mother and his unbending father, he had been—that should frighten everyone. Mother lions could be scary, but father lions, who had condescended to take notice of their offspring, and devote time to them, could be terrifying.
Still, he knew what lay at the back of it, and he was sure that over the years he’d given the poor man quite a few sleepless nights himself. So, instead of protesting, he put his hand on Grimaud’s shoulder, gently. “Don’t worry. I can let Monsieur Aramis sleep here. I don’t know what he meant by chickens being after him, but I am sure it is nothing but one of those drunken alarms that mean nothing. He will wake tomorrow, and he will be in a better mood, and then we will talk to him and find out what he meant. And meanwhile his taking up a quarter or less of my bed will not disturb me.”
“He is snoring fit to wake the saints,” Grimaud said. “He is snoring louder than the final trumpet.”
“Well, then I shall snore in competition with him,” said Athos, feeling like he might very well do that, because his late night the night before, the alcohol ingested, and the emotional shocks of the last few hours had all dropped on his shoulders like a heavy burden, making him totter. The duchess had reminded him that he would not see thirty again and, right then, he felt it. He said, “But first, if you could procure me some broth, or a slice of meat, or something. Just to take the edge off the hunger. I don’t think I can sit through an entire dinner just now.” At any rate, he had a dread of sitting alone and eating at that polished table, where Grimaud would attend to him as though he were still the Count de la Fere in his ancestral estate.
Grimaud’s mouth grew thinner and harder. “I have,” he said, speaking while barely decompressing his lips, “prepared you a chicken, and a soup of mutton and lentils, and a sweet of . . .”
Oh, there would be no use arguing with this. When Grimaud took the time to prepare a full meal—when they had enough money to warrant preparing a full meal—there was no gainsaying him. Athos sighed. “Very well. Bring me water to my room, so I can at least wash my hands and face.” Because sitting in estate while covered in dust and feeling like he still smelled of his drunken sweat—which was true—would be insupportable. He must at least wash his hands and face, comb his hair and change his shirt.
He was in the middle of combing his hair, when Grimaud came up and, silently, his lips still compressed, poured warm water into the basin in the room. Athos splashed it on his face, and washed his face and neck, his hands and arms, and turned to find Grimaud holding out a clean shirt for him.
The servant left while Athos was tidying his doublet over his shirt, which was the first time that Athos dared cast a look at his friend, on his bed—mostly because he was afraid doing so while Grimaud was there would have caused some withering comment about straw or chickens.
Aramis was indeed snoring, something else that Athos was not aware Aramis could do—and they had often shared lodgings on campaign and in travel. Never before had he seen Aramis lying like this, faceup, his mouth slightly open, snoring in loud, prolonged bursts. Were it not for the stubble, glimmering on his face by the light of the five candles that stood on the nearby table, and for the creases around his eyes that spoke of recent dissipation, Aramis might, in fact, have looked like a young child.
The light of the candles was also more than enough for Athos to catch sight of a few bits of straw stuck to Aramis’s normally impeccable hair. What had he been doing? Out tumbling farm girls? While he had the duchess? And could bed her at will or close to it?
Athos shook his head, pityingly. “Ah, Aramis. You don’t know what you are ignoring.”
And on that, Aramis half sat up and stared at Athos with bewilderingly intent green eyes. “She means to kill us all,” he said. “She has asked for our heads as her reward.”
In a moment of sick feeling, his stomach lurching within him, Athos felt as though Aramis were answering his innermost thoughts and warning him against the Duchess de Chevreuse. He took a step forward. “Who? Who means to kill us all, Aramis? To whom did she ask for our heads?”
Aramis looked at him, bewildered. Or rather, did not look at him, but at something that appeared to be on a parallel line with Athos’s face, but possibly some miles distant. “The chickens,” he said, very firmly. “And the goats.” He made a gesture with his hand, flat, palm downward, and swept it from left to right, in a circular half motion, as though indicating all the expanse of the room, or possibly of the Earth. “All of it in the service of the Cardinal.”
And then, he fell back on his back, and resumed snoring. Athos smiled and shook his head. His verdict to Grimaud, as Grimaud served him some sort of compote, which he said was “made from pears from the north orchard, sent to me by my daughter, for you, milord,” was, “Monsieur Aramis is drunk as a wheelbarrow and you know, Grimaud, if you wish me to sleep well, you might not insist I sleep on that bed.”
Grimaud narrowed his eyes and made his lips very thin indeed, but, before he could start on his tirade, Athos sighed. “It’s no use, Grimaud. We can move him, but if we put him on one of the chairs, or even on the floor, he’ll not sleep well, and will be more likely to get up and get into some mischief than otherwise. So, I recommend we leave him on my bed, and you can take my thickest cloak and make me a sleeping area in the sitting room.”
Grimaud didn’t say anything, but the glare of his eyes said everything. Notwithstanding which, when Aramis was done drinking a small glass of brandy after his dinner, he found that Grimaud had in fact made him an admirable sleeping area, with cloaks and cushions and who knew what else. He stripped down to his shirt, threw clothes and sword over the back of a nearby chair, and climbed into it, too tired to care if by rights he should have had his bed or not. He was bone tired—weary with a weariness that mere physical tiredness couldn’t explain.
For what seemed like a few minutes, he was blessedly, happily unconscious. Only to be brought awake again, by loud, repeated pounding on the door. From the sound of it, it seemed very much like it would be Porthos. Athos, hearing Grimaud hastening down the stairs and calling out, “I’m coming, I’m coming, wait,” assumed that he could go back to sleep.
He relaxed in his nest of cloaks and cushions, and started to close his eyes again. Which is when, upon his sleeping ears, there erupted the oddest sound in the world—Grimaud, yelling at a stranger. Or at least the words sounded like they were directed at a stranger. “Get away you hussy, you strumpet. This is a respectable household and we want none of your tricks.”
In Athos’s recently awakened mind, these words mingled with images of the duchess and more alarming images of his long-lost wife, and he realized he was bolt upright and moving, as he ran down the stairs, towards the front door.
The woman at the front door could not be the duchess, she was not rounded enough. And she could not have been Charlotte. She was much too short. A short, flat little woman, with disproportionately broad shoulders, attired in a dark red dress that would be in the latest fashion, except for the fact that it was much too long on her, and broad and narrow in all the wrong places. She looked, in fact, not so much like a strumpet, as like someone who wore another woman’s discards. And the bits of scraggly black hair that peeked from underneath her broad brimmed hat with its veil didn’t help at all.
She was bravely resisting Grimaud’s attempts at pushing her out and, considering her previous pounding on their door, Athos had to consider the possibility that this was, after all, if not a hussy, at least a madwoman. He wasn’t sure which one he would have liked better. And then the woman advanced a foot, and Athos realized that she was barefoot.
He was about to step forward and intervene, when Grimaud, reaching widely, managed to knock the intruder’s hat off. His words of “Monsieur D’Artagnan” hit Athos’s ear at the same time as the sight of that pale face, those staring, horrified dark eyes, the hair standing all on end, the two-day growth of scraggly eighteen-year-old beard, all of it above the satin and silk of a very expensive dress.
The sound of his own laughter, ringing out, surprised Athos, but not enough to make him stop. In fact, once he had started laughing, he who rarely indulged in display of emotion of any kind, could not stop. His laughter rang out louder and louder, while he sat down on the steps—his knees gone too weak to support him—and tears ran down his face in rivulets.
He calmed down sometime later, with D’Artagnan grasping him by the arm and saying, “Athos, for the love of God, you must listen to me.”
He looked up at the boy’s face, and read the very real terror in it. Looking for a handkerchief in his sleeve and not finding it, because he was not wearing his doublet but solely his shirt left loose to fall almost to his knees, he wiped his streaming eyes and soaked face to the sleeve itself. “Yes, D’Artagnan,” he managed, swallowing to maintain his composure. “You must forgive me, it was your looking so male and . . .”
Grimaud had closed the front door and now went by them, on the stairs, cleaving to the opposite wall. The look he gave Athos made Athos aware that if he got his sleep any more disturbed, it was, after all, Athos’s fault in allowing his insane musketeer friends the liberty of the house.
Athos looked up and managed to keep his countenance—barely. The boy’s fear made that easier. It wasn’t something to sport with. “What happened? How come you here, in this attire.”
“It is the only clothes I could find on my way out of her bedchamber. She was after me with a dagger.” D’Artagnan shuddered.
“She?” Athos asked.

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