the musketeer's seamstress (14 page)
Read the musketeer's seamstress Online
Authors: Sarah d'Almeida
Porthos frowned. Part of the frown was automatic. He’d known Aramis since Aramis was little more than an apprentice priestling, his words all rounded, his manner all meek and mild. He still could not imagine Aramis killing a woman, particularly not that woman on whom so much of Aramis’s heart and soul hung.
The other part of the frown was calculated, a deliberate move to draw in the attention of the woman.
It worked. The cook, her eyes on him, frowned, slowly. “You know something, don’t you? You don’t think he killed her.”
“Oh, it is not that,” Porthos said, and, because he was not used to deceiving anyone, he felt an odd excitement, his heart beating in his throat. He felt prouder than he ever did of his wins on the battlefield, and he wished that Aramis, who always said that Porthos couldn’t deceive a child, would see him now. “It’s just that Aramis loved the woman so much.”
“Well, it is often the greatest lovers who kill their beloved, isn’t it?” the cook asked, raising her thick eyebrows while a no less thick finger beat a delicate tattoo on the handle of her mug. “Passion is fickle, is it not? They discover that she has another on the side, or that she is intending on replacing them and . . . well . . . there it is.”
“But . . .” Porthos felt his heart shrink within his chest. Perhaps there was something here that the entire palace knew, something that Aramis had kept from even his closest friends. As Porthos had told Athos, the servants always knew about everyone’s lives.
“But was there such a one? One that she loved more, or that she intended to replace Aramis with?” He asked, and watched while the woman bit her lower lip, as though in deep thought.
Was that possible? While Porthos could not imagine Aramis killing the woman he loved even then, well . . . In Porthos’s knowledge, Aramis just moved from girl to girl, from flower to flower hardly giving them time to realize they’d been loved, much less to experience the disappointment of losing him. But Aramis hadn’t been quite normal about Violette. He’d stayed with her for years now, and he talked of her as other men talked about their wives. He trusted her with everything, even—Porthos suspected—his true identity.
But the cook shook her head, slowly. “No . . .” she conceded at last. “No . . . I can’t imagine . . .” She shrugged. “Well, to tell you the truth, monsieur, before the musketeer came to her bed, she dallied with many. Sometimes we took bets as to whether a valet sent to her room with hot water or a tisane would return quickly enough and unmolested. But then all of a sudden there was the blond musketeer. Aramis, as he’s called. And all the kitchen wenches,” she made a dismissive gesture towards the various girls and women laboring at the various fireplaces, chopping foodstuffs, kneading bread, throughout the expansive area. “All the kitchen wenches made jokes about how he must be endowed that he could make Madame de Dreux want no one else. And also . . .” She grinned. “About how long before she gave the Duke de Dreux a blond heir.” She nodded as if to herself. “The woman was that smitten that she might have lost all sense of propriety.”
Porthos took a deep breath in relief. If Violette didn’t have a lover, then Aramis hadn’t killed her. The whole case was that simple to Porthos who was not willing to entertain a moment of doubt on the subject of his friend’s morals.
Aramis dallied with women—as, who didn’t? Well, perhaps Athos whose taste in women was so wretched that it was safer for everyone, and himself too, if he didn’t dally with anyone—and sometimes the women were married. It was just the way musketeers lived. What single woman would want to attach herself to a man with few prospects except those of living in the army forever, going here and there at the command of his king and risking his life on battlefields?
But Porthos couldn’t imagine Aramis maltreating a woman for the fun of it. As far as that went, he was a good man. He fought in duels, with those who insulted or challenged him, and he dallied with the occasional married woman, but in neither case did he overrun his bounds. He didn’t kill for fun.
He sighed, a sigh of deep frustration.
“I’d swear my friend didn’t do it.”
“And yet,” the cook said. “He was alone with her, in a locked room. He jumped from the balcony so fast that he left his clothes behind.”
It all came back to that again. That damned locked room. How could a murderer have got in it without Aramis’s noticing? “Perhaps . . .” Porthos said. “Well, palaces are notorious for having . . . I mean, kings get jealous. And kings like to have a secret way to get at their mistresses. I mean . . . Passages and corridors and things with eyes in pictures.”
He thought he’d made rather a bad jumble of it, but the cook’s eyes widened. “Secret passages.” She smacked her thick lips together. “Oh . . . I hadn’t thought of that. Mind you, I don’t think there are any passages, but then I’m not the one who cleans or supplies the nobles up there . . .” She grinned, displaying crooked teeth. “Oh, I shall ask around, Monsieur. Thank you so much for giving me such an idea. Perhaps I can discover something . . .”
And while Porthos was thinking that there must be some way he could ask about what she found, without being too conspicuous, he looked up and found her staring at him with an expression akin to hunger.
“I don’t suppose, Monsieur,” she said. “Musketeers have to eat too. I don’t suppose you would stay till dinner and then . . . perhaps . . .” She did her best at a coquettish expression. “I have my own room, you know, behind the kitchens.”
Porthos blinked. He had never thought the woman would think of him in that way. Not that he, in the way of such things, disdained working women. On the contrary. He’d been aware for some time that he preferred hardworking women with callused hands. But this woman, though in a certain light she could be considered appetizing if not pretty—in a very dim light—simply could not have Porthos.
Porthos shifted uncomfortably in his seat. Truth be told, he was as attached to a woman as Aramis had been to his duchess. Perhaps more so. Madame Athenais Coquenard, an accountant’s wife, might not be pretty. She was certainly no longer young. And nothing in her wardrobe compared to the clothes a duchess commanded. As for the largess she could bestow upon the musketeer that held her heart . . . well, that, too, was little and measured out, as her husband kept control of the household finances.
However, since he’d first climbed to her window, Porthos found that all other women had lost their allure. Oh, he could admire them, and he knew the turn of a full bosom or an elegant ankle would always catch his eye.
But when it came to it, and strange as it might seem, he would feel as guilty for sleeping with another woman as if he were committing adultery—oh, not the pleasing kind he committed with Athenais. Rather, as if he were betraying her. And his own heart. And that he could not do.
And yet, he needed to get this woman to tell him what she found.
Porthos managed to plaster a look of regret on his face—it was half felt. He could have used the dinner—and he bowed to the woman. “Madame. I would love to accept your very generous invitation, but I have business tonight.” And seeing her face fall, he hastened. “Important business. For . . . Monsieur de Treville himself.” He got up from the bench, and bent over the woman’s hand, lightly kissing the fingers which were pleasantly perfumed of roast. “I shall return tomorrow, though, if I should be so favored.”
“Oh, do,” the woman said. “Do return tomorrow. Perhaps I’ll have some gossip about secret passages for you.”
Porthos hoped so. He also hoped that he would find some way to evade spending the night. In fact, he thought he’d best prearrange it.
He bowed again, and left the kitchen, thinking.
The Prodigal’s Awakening; Brushes and Mirrors; Monacal Disciplines
A
RAMIS turned in bed and woke up with the sun in his eyes. For a moment he was confused. His room in Paris didn’t have a window directly facing the bed through which daylight could arrive and intrude upon his sleeping hours.
RAMIS turned in bed and woke up with the sun in his eyes. For a moment he was confused. His room in Paris didn’t have a window directly facing the bed through which daylight could arrive and intrude upon his sleeping hours.
He blinked disconsolately in the light, while his mind caught up with the location of his body. His nose filled with a smell he hadn’t smelled in a long time, a clean smell of . . . grass? Flowers? His eyes, wide open, gave him an impression of overwhelming light and whiteness. And his ears filled with the noise of birds and, distantly, the just-tuneless song of women in the repetitive, monotonous tone of a folk work song.
All of this worked in his memory to one thing. His childhood home.
He reached beneath himself to feel his narrow bed with its scrupulously clean sheets and looked around his small, clean room. No, not clean, bare. White walls. A wooden cross on the wall, watching over his bed, his every move, his very thoughts. A peg on the far wall was supposed to hold all his suits—all it held at the moment was the two black suits—velvet, but still black—that he’d been allowed all the time he was growing up. They consisted of knee breeches and tightly laced doublets in the fashion of twenty years ago, the fashion that Athos favored. Where his trunk with the clothes he’d bought in Paris had gone, was anybody’s guess. No, not guess. His mom would have seen to it that it was . . . disposed of.
Aramis’s head ached, and the previous day ran through it like a series of scenes, a series of shadows on the blankness that had invaded his brain. As if they’d happened to someone else, he saw his escape from Paris, his gallop across the late-spring countryside, his arrival here, his mother.
His mother had led him inside and to Mass, as if whatever had driven him from Paris had necessitated immediate shriving. She hadn’t even asked what had happened.
He rubbed his fingertips upon the center of his forehead, as though trying to unknot the pain there. His mother had never asked. She’d never shown the slightest surprise that her only and prodigal son should show up like this, upon a fine spring afternoon.
She’d treated Aramis exactly as if he’d been fourteen and home from seminary on vacation. A Mass of thanks-giving for his safe arrival—said by his mother’s tottering priest, who must be over a hundred, or at least looked it. And then dinner. Thin soup, bread and some boiled vegetables, because it was Friday and therefore a day of abstinence and mortification.
All through the meal one of the servants—or possibly one of his mother’s hired companions—had stood and read passages from the lives of saints.
And at the end of the meal, at a movement or a gesture from Aramis’s mother, Bazin had emerged from the shadows and escorted Aramis here.
And now . . . And now, Aramis became aware of heavy breathing from near the foot of his bed, by the window. He realized the heavy shutters on the window had just been pulled open to let daylight in.
Aramis sat up. Bazin, dressed in his clerical black, stood by the window. “Blessed be our Lord Jesus Christ,” Bazin said, in the tone he had said it throughout all of Aramis’s childhood, to wake him up.
“Oh, leave off, Bazin,” Aramis said.
“Blessed be our Lord Jesus Christ,” Bazin repeated, frowning.
“Bazin, I am warning you. I am not in the mood for this.” Aramis pawed at his hair which, during the night, had lost the bit of ribbon with which he normally bound it. It had knotted upon itself and stood in clumps and whirls around his face, obscuring his vision.
“Blessed be—”
Aramis picked up his pillow and threw it at Bazin’s pious face, before resuming combing through the tangled mess of his hair with his fingers.
“Monsieur, the lady your mother told me I was to wake you as I always did. She said that the rules of the house were to be followed, and Chevalier, this is her house.”
“Don’t. Call. Me. That.” Aramis pawed through his hair and bit his lip at the sudden pain as he tugged on a knot. “And where are my hairbrushes?”
“What else am I to call you, Chevalier?” Bazin said. “We are at your mother’s house and you—”
And he had foolishly come back into prison for asylum. Oh, he needed to be safe and he was safe enough. No one could penetrate this house and wrest Aramis from his loving mother’s arms. But then, neither could Aramis escape. The first time, he’d managed it by going to Paris to study theology. And then by killing a man, by disappearing, by . . .
And he’d come back because Violette was dead. And in his heart of hearts he wasn’t even sure he hadn’t killed Violette. Oh, he didn’t think he had, but . . .
He groaned aloud, let go of his hair and covered his face.
“Blessed be our Lord Jesus Christ,” Bazin said, again.
“And forever blessed his mother, the Virgin Mary,” Aramis moaned from behind the hands clasped on his face. The hands that, somehow, could not block the recalled image of Violette. Cold, waxen Violette with blood—
“As it was in the beginning,” Bazin prompted.
“Be it now and forever.”
“Secolum secolorum.”
“Amen.”
Aramis realized he was rocking back and forth, sitting on his childhood bed, with Bazin standing at the foot and, from the sound of his breathing, fairly alarmed.
He removed his hands from his face with an effort. Violette was dead. Nothing could be done about that. Aramis was sure he hadn’t killed her. He couldn’t have killed her. If he had killed her he would remember, wouldn’t he?
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