the musketeer's seamstress (18 page)

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Authors: Sarah d'Almeida

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She locked the door again, then hurried out of the house, keeping two steps ahead of him, despite his walking fast on his long legs that often allowed him to keep up with Porthos effortlessly and made D’Artagnan, and even Athos, run to catch up. But then he thought he’d probably inherited his legs from his mother, as he had inherited her blond hair, her blue eyes, and her ability to seem innocent and in-approachable even while ruling the house with an iron fist. At least, he could rule everyone but her.
“
Maman
, wait,” he said. But she didn’t stop and he had to run down the front steps to catch up with her . . . at least only two steps behind.
He remained two steps behind her as they reached the family cemetery north of the park. This was not a place that the little Rene D’Herblay had visited often. Oh, he was brought here for Masses on the anniversary of his father’s death, and for certain solemn occasions in which the life of the departed Chevalier D’Herblay was celebrated. But he had never had that morbid turn of mind that brought some adolescent boys to brood upon family cemetery stones.
And, of course, it had been many years since he passed through the ivy-choked gate in the half-ruined stone walls surmounted by rusty ironwork.
Within the cemetery, Madame D’Herblay stopped so suddenly that Aramis almost collided with her. He managed to arrest his movement just short of it, and go around to stand beside her.
She was looking around at a panorama of headstones and statues. The statues were few. The estate while wealthy when compared to the surrounding countryside, was, after all not a ducal estate, not even a count’s portion. Most of the statues were very old, their features erased by sun and rain, by succeeding winter and summers till you could not tell if it was an angel’s face or an old Roman goddess at which you were staring. In fact Aramis had often suspected that some of his ancestors had stolen the statues from nearby pagan temples.
Needless to say this was not an opinion that could be shared with his mother, who was looking around, her blue eyes lightly covered in trembling tears.
“So many graves,” she said. “Your family has been here since the time of Charlemagne, you know?”
Aramis knew. Or at least he’d been told so. If he were asked his true, honest opinion he’d have said his family or someone else who’d succeeded to the same name had been here a long time and left it at that. But now he contented himself with nodding.
“Do you know what I think when I come here?” his mother asked.
Did she come here often? Aramis had left the maternal abode for seminary in Paris when he was just fifteen. He’d been away, now, almost ten years. His mother looked very different to this older Aramis than she had looked to the dutiful and shy seminarian. Did his mother walk the cemetery at night? Or during the day for her afternoon stroll? And why?
He realized she was waiting for an answer from him. “What do you think of,
maman
?” he asked, though fairly sure he didn’t want to know.
“I think that families share a lot more than coats of arms,” she said and nodded, sadly. “Yes.”
Aramis looked upward at the darkening sky and wondered what in heaven’s name that meant.
“A lot more,” Madame D’Herblay said, as if speaking out of her own thoughts. Then she looked back over her shoulder, her countenance suddenly animated. “Rene, do you know where your father lies?”
“Maman?”
“Oh, come, surely you know where your father’s tomb is.”
Aramis did. He thought. “Down this lane,” he said, pointing. “And around that cluster of cypresses.” He called to mind the memory of the last time he’d come into the cemetery, at his mother’s instigation, to lay flowers on the paternal tomb before leaving for the seminary. “It is a white marble tomb, I think.”
His mother nodded and led him the right way through it. “Here,” she said, stopping in front of the tomb he’d described. “Can you read to me what the words say, Rene?”
“
Maman
, I’ve known how to read since the age of three. And Latin since the age of five.”
His mother only shook her head. “Read the words to me, Rene, please.”
Aramis sighed and nodded. “It says ‘Here Lies Rene D’Herblay, gone to his rest at the age of twenty-five, October 1598.’ ” He paused, shocked, because every time he’d come to the cemetery before, he’d somehow had the impression his father was older. Not an old man, exactly, but older, more seasoned. “Twenty-five,
Maman
?”
She only nodded. “There, Rene, your grandfather lies. Can you read his headstone?”
As though in a dream, Aramis went from headstone to headstone. The headstones of his female relatives ran the gamut from those who’d died very young—including Aramis’ own sister, dead just a year after his birth, at less than a month of age—to the very old. But all his male ancestors seemed to have died in their early to mid-twenties. All of them. Had the D’Herblays, then, always been raised by fearsome women like his mom?
“What do you see, Rene?”
“I see that most of my ancestors were raised by their mothers alone.”
“And why do you think that is?” his mother asked.
Aramis shrugged. “I suppose illness and war did for their husbands?”
“For some,” his mother said. “Come with me Rene.”
And, giving him no time to protest, staying just ahead of him as before, she took him into the house again and down a long unused corridor to the portrait gallery. On the way she received a lit candle from one of her seemingly invisible, invisibly controlled servants. It had grown dark, and the portrait gallery was a long room immersed in the evening gloom.
As his mother passed, with the pool of light thrown by her candle, Aramis was aware of the ancestors peering down at him, many—so it seemed to him—disapprovingly.
Most of them were, he noted, as fair as he. He also didn’t remember this from his younger visits to the place and he’d always assumed he’d got his coloration from his mother. Most of his ancestors, too, male and female alike, seemed to prefer the type of clothes that his mother believed brought with them the deadly contagion of sin.
Oh, there were portraits, here and there, of men in the somber attire of the church, or even in all black suits. But most of the men seemed to favor brightly colored silks and velvets in whatever the state of fashion was for their day. And they’d ornamented ears and fingers, hats and even their sword belts, with enough sparkling jewels to blind a passerby.
“Here,” his mother said, stopping. “What do you see?”
Aramis, not sure what the joke might be, looked up at a vast portrait that showed . . . himself. It couldn’t be himself. He was fairly sure he hadn’t sat for any portraits. And besides, this was a portrait of himself as he was now, wearing somehow oddly old-fashioned clothes. The collar was too narrow and the doublet in the old-fashioned, restrictive Spanish style that Athos was so fond of.
“It’s remarkable,” he said, forgetting all his annoyance at his mother. “How did you have this portrait of me made? And why? How could you have got an artist to Paris to take my likeness without my knowing? And why am I wearing clothes I’ve never owned?”
Madame D’Herblay sighed. “Rene, this was your father,” she said, very softly.
“My father?”
“Your father, painted just days before he died. Rene, those men in the cemetery, most of them died in a duel over an affair of honor. As did your father. I never wanted to tell you because, after all, it doesn’t edify a young boy to know that his father didn’t take his vows of marriage seriously. Your father was courting . . . or paying attention to a young lady. The same young lady was being courted by a young man named Armand de Richelieu. They clashed, and de Richelieu challenged your father for a duel. Upon which your father lost his life, when he was just a few years younger than you are now.”
Aramis was speechless.
“This, Aramis, is why I tried to bend your steps towards the church, your mind to holiness. I would rather you are the last of your name and do not leave descendants behind, than you die young, as your father did. Do not let me have that pain, of seeing you dead before your time, son.”
Aramis swallowed. “De Richelieu? The Cardinal?”
Madame D’Herblay nodded slowly. “Indeed. He lived to go into the church and to attain the highest honor of the kingdom. Unlike your poor father.”
“The Cardinal killed my father?” Aramis said, and ran his hand down in front of his face, as though this would clear his vision and somehow show him something else than his look-alike father smiling down at him with his own sparkling green eyes and impudent mouth. “No wonder he hates me. No wonder he seeks my life when he can . . .”
“And am I right,” his mother asked. “To think that you have given him some way to press his animus against you?”
Aramis thought of Violette, dead in her room, seemingly without anyone else’s having a chance to murder her. If Aramis hadn’t been very lucky and very quick that night, he would have been caught and probably summarily executed upon the moment.
But . . . No one could have got into the room to kill Violette. And yet, someone must have, or else Aramis was the one who had done it. And Aramis was sure he hadn’t.
The agents of the Cardinal were everywhere. They often accomplished what seemed impossible.
“Wouldn’t it be better, Rene, to stay here, this time? There is a nearby Dominican order that has offered to send over one of their confessors to examine your conscience and your learning and determine whether you might not be ready to profess.”
“I always thought to join the Jesuits,” Aramis said, without thinking. “They have no set habits, so I could dress almost as I pleased.” He became aware of what he had said and of his mother’s reproachful gaze upon him.
“As you say,
Maman
,” he thought. Could he go to Paris? Would he dare go to Paris? If the Cardinal had murdered Violette solely to destroy the last descendant of his enemy, his friends would not find any proof of Aramis’s innocence. He would look guiltier than sin. And if he ever set foot in Paris again, he would surely be immediately ensnared. “As you say,
Maman
,” he said. “Send for the confessor.”
Where Dead Wives Mean Nothing Near Horses and Vineyards; The Happiness of a Rural Estate
A
THOS didn’t know whether to be amused or flattered that—while Grimaud tended to the horses—Raoul was kind enough to send a valet in to help Athos dress.
He settled on amused. It probably never occurred to Raoul—considering how both of them had been brought up—that Athos might have got used to dressing and undressing without the constant presence of a valet.
Not that Grimaud couldn’t serve his turn, and quite honorably too, as a gentleman’s valet when the need arose. The excellent Grimaud was most accomplished in all domestic arts, having been trained in the domains of la Fere and brought up to do all the jobs in turn, as he aged. However, since Athos was asking him to be housekeeper, cook and whatever else chanced to need doing in the house, including running messages when Athos required it, Athos did not think it was fair to also ask him to be his valet.
And so, for the last five years, Athos had dressed himself. But he could not turn away the valet Raoul had sent, a shy young man probably just recently trained. If he had, Raoul might take it amiss, or think that he had, somehow, offended Athos.
So Athos endured the young man’s presence and his help as he washed and changed into the slightly less wrinkled clothing he had packed.
He was glad that Raoul’s personal quirks meant the servants were used to noblemen who went about dressed like farmers. For the first time ever, in these surroundings which were close to the surroundings in which he’d grown up, Athos was aware of how shabby he’d allowed his wardrobe and his appearance to become.
The valet did not sneer at his mended clothes, nor at the worn through velvet of his old-fashioned doublet, but Athos still felt as if he had. And so, as soon as his doublet was laced, he thanked the young man and hurried out of the room and next door, to D’Artagnan’s.
A knock on the door brought D’Artagnan’s invitation to enter.
Athos opened the door. D’Artagnan also had changed, this time into his guard’s uniform, probably because it was the newest clothing he owned.
Athos impressed upon him the reasons and need for secrecy and then why he thought that Raoul hadn’t heard of his Duchess’s death.
The young man stood by the window, with his back turned, and did not turn around to greet Athos. Instead he motioned for Athos to approach.
“There is a rider come,” D’Artagnan said. “Express. He came down the lane, horse flying, both of them, horse and rider, foaming—I swear. Now the servants are taking the horse away, see there . . .” D’Artagnan pointed at two liveried servants leading away a horse that had doubtlessly started his journey black but was now greyish red with dust.
“I think,” D’Artagnan said. “That our host has received news of his wife’s death.”
Athos nodded. “Perhaps, my friend,” he said. “We should go downstairs and see how Raoul takes the revelation. A lot more can be discovered from a word or a look in a moment when one believes himself unobserved. Or at least not looked upon suspiciously.”

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