Authors: Sarah d'Almeida

the musketeer's seamstress (20 page)

BOOK: the musketeer's seamstress

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Raoul nodded. “I remember being wildly envious of you,” he said. “Not jealous, since I didn’t know the lady, before you married her, nor did I have any interest in her once I met her. But envious, because I had to marry a Spanish noblewoman I’d never seen, while you got to marry your true love. You told me, if I remember, that she was the sister of the priest in your parish? Beautiful and kind like an angel?”

Athos inhaled sharply, as the memory of those words, the memory of Charlotte’s beautiful face and open, kind eyes came back to him. He didn’t know if it had all been a lie, but he hoped it had. He hoped so, because otherwise he was a true murderer. And now, looking back, he already couldn’t recapture the complacency and certainty with which he had killed her.

“Yes,” he said, instead. “I thought so at the time.” He looked away from Raoul’s inquisitive gaze, and took a deep draught from his glass. “And then, about three months after my last letter to you, I was out hunting with Charlotte, which, if I remember well, was merely a pretext for our going out into the fields and spending a lot of time alone. Not that she wasn’t a good huntress. She was. Like the goddess Diana herself.” He shook his head. “But we were racing through the fields, and she was turned back, laughing at me. Her horse went under a lower-hanging bow. It caught her, and she was thrown and fell on the ground, insensible. You can imagine my distress.”

“She died then?” Raoul asked.

Athos shook his head and swallowed. His voice sounded strangled to his own ears. “Wish that she had.”

“Alexandre!”

“No, listen. I jumped from my horse and ran to her. She was breathing, but very shallowly, and she looked pale and I, fool that I was, thought she needed air. So I cut her dress with my hunting knife. And there, upon her white shoulder . . .” He closed his eyes, as if it would help block the sight he still saw every night in his dreams. “Was a fleur-de-lis.”

“Sangre Dieu!”
Raoul said.

With his eyes closed, Athos heard his friend jump up, heard him open the bottle once more, and opened his eyes just in time to see Raoul refill Athos’s glass, before falling back on his own chair, staring horrified at Athos. “
Sangre Dieu
,” he said again, this time softly. “You married a criminal.”

“I thought so,” Athos said, and took a draught of the wine, which was starting to make his head swim. He was used to drinking a lot more, but not this good a quality of wine. “I thought so, and I thought I could not turn her to the local court. At any rate, I was the local court, the judge instituted by God and the unbroken line of my ancestors, to adjucate all local crimes and claims. I know, I know, even so, I should have brought it out in public, flung the case down before the lawyers in my domain, and then got her to tell her story, get her tried—” He took another sip of wine and a deep breath, which came out ragged and fluttering. “The shame to my domain, the shame to my name . . . Forever, I would be known as the Count who married the branded criminal. Myself, and my sons, should I ever have any, would be laughed at. We’d never dare declare what has, until now, been a proud name.” He looked at the flames in the fireplace licking at the dark shadows of the logs, and dancing, like a prefiguration of the hell that waited him after this life was done. His reasoning had seemed so good at the time. “The tree against which she’d crashed was still nearby. I dragged her to it. I had rope in my saddle bag. I . . . I hanged her from an overhanging branch.” The image of Charlotte swinging from the branch, her long blond hair waving like a flag in the wind, made him close his eyes again. The silence went on. So even Raoul disapproved of him.

When Athos opened his eyes again, though, he found Raoul looking at him, pale and shocked. But the expression in Raoul’s eyes was all sympathy, all concern. “By the Mass,” he said. “
Sangre Dieu
, man, how that must work at you. I’ve known you too long not to know you have the sort of conscience that wouldn’t let you sleep at night, after that.”

“Should I be able to sleep at night after that?” Athos asked, and immediately, without giving Raoul time to answer, he continued. “I didn’t even return to my house for a change of clothes. I didn’t want to be there when they found her. Oh, when they found her, they would find the mark on her shoulder too, and they would know that I had reason to kill her. As the local Lord I had the right to kill her for that—”

“You had the right to kill her for lying to you, for luring you into a shameful marriage,” Raoul said heatedly.

“You don’t really believe that, Raoul,” Athos said, softly. All his thought of trapping his friend was gone, and he knew, knew with the certainty of an old friend that Raoul for all his heated words would never kill a woman merely for lying to him.

Raoul shook his head. “Perhaps I don’t, but Alexandre, how can you expect your oldest friend to forgive a woman who has done this to you? Who has destroyed your life? You were the noblest and most accomplished man I’ve ever known. I expected—we all expected—great things of you.”

“By the next day, I sent a message back to Grimaud, who had been my valet,” Athos said. “And told him to join me in Paris and what to bring with him. When he joined me, they hadn’t found her, yet, but I presume it can’t have taken much longer.

“I made use of my father’s friendship with Monsieur de Treville to get a post in the musketeers, under the name Athos.”

There was a silence, then Raoul wrinkled his forehead. “Isn’t that the name of a mountain?”

“In Armenia,” Athos said. “The site of a famous monastery.”

“Oh, Alexandre,” Raoul said, half exasperated, half amused. “How your mind is still what it was as a child. A monastery, of course. Expiating your sin. Alexandre, you are a fool.”

“I realize that,” Athos said. “Only a fool would have married her.”

“No,” Raoul said. “Only a fool would indulge in such browbeating recrimination over executing a criminal. Because that’s all you’ve done. You administered the justice she had too long evaded.”

“But . . . what if the brand wasn’t real? What if it had been set there by an enemy? What if—”

“A fleur-de-lis brand? By an enemy? Do you have any other fairy tales you wish to tell yourself, my friend? You executed a criminal. You’ve punished yourself enough. We heard you and your wife had both disappeared and, when you weren’t found, were presumed abducted and dead. Since there is some doubt, your cousin, de Falonage, has been administering La Fere from a distance. But you should go back. Go back, marry again, marry a worthy woman, sire half a dozen sons. All this guilt, all this—” Raoul waved his hand as if to do way with the musketeers, Paris, with Athos’s obsessive recrimination. “Drama will disappear. Like a bad dream. Which is all it is.”

Athos shook his head. It wasn’t that easy. He had always known that he and Raoul were made of different stuff, hewn of different material. He couldn’t explain to Raoul that his guilt felt real, that his doubt about Charlotte was real. Nor that he loved her still. Instead, he forced a smile on his lips. “Is that what you intend to do, now, then? Sire half a dozen sons?”

Raoul smiled in turn and finished his own wine in the glass he’d been holding, seemingly forgotten, between his fingers. “The good Lord willing,” he said. “You know, the funny thing is that my envy for what I thought was your love match inspired me. When it became obvious to me that madame my wife and I had nothing in common, I let her stay in Paris and I came here, to my vineyards, to the fields I love.

“Please don’t think me bitter. There was nothing in it one way or another. Ysabella and I were two very different people, and she was no more than a stranger to me. My father had let our estate get to such a ruinous degree of downfall—between his bookish obsessions and his ignorance of all land management—that for me to go on living in it and raise a family in it, in estate, was impossible. My two choices were to run away from the debtors and do something like what you’ve done.” He smiled at Athos, and waved his hand vaguely again. “The musketeer uniform, the . . . All that. Or I could find someone to marry who brought a large enough dowry to cover the expenses of restoring the estate. My father’s distant cousin, his majesty, himself, wanted me to marry Ysabella and she certainly fit the bill.”

He got up and threw one more trunk into the fireplace, then turned to smile at Athos. “Would you believe I was relieved she didn’t actually wish to live with me? She had no interest in living in Dreux, or in being mother to my children.” He nodded, possibly at something he saw in Athos’s expression. “Believe me, I was. After all, if she didn’t want to live with me, I had the time, the possibility, the ability to fall in love. And I could find someone who—like me— could never marry, but who would be happy with just our love.”

“You took a mistress.”

Raoul nodded. “Are you that surprised? Didn’t Ysabella have her lover?” He paused and looked shocked. “Good Lord, his name was Aramis, wasn’t it? He’s your friend whom you mentioned.”

Athos shrugged, as if this were of little importance. “How do you know his name?”

Raoul smiled. “There were always helpful people in Paris. My friends, or those who would have me believe them my friends. All too eager to send me information about what Ysabella was doing. I couldn’t get any of them to understand I didn’t care. And I didn’t. Ysabella and I had a bargain, and she fulfilled it. Her part of the bargain was that she could do whatever she pleased, provided she didn’t overspend her allowance, and she didn’t . . . get herself with child. As far as I know, she kept both ends of it. Oh, the Queen often gave her jewels and money, so the first one wasn’t difficult. And if she ever violated the second, she hid the pregnancy and got rid of the child, so I was not saddled with a bastard.”

“And you?” Athos asked.

Raoul de Dreux shrugged. “I found myself a friend, first. She is one of my tenants. Widowed, with a large farm to her care. Common, with common ancestry. But I started dropping by her farm, and we started talking, and after a while, insensibly, I realized I was in love with her. She’s a sensible woman, whose ancestors have been in this region as long as mine, and who loves the land as much as I do. The implementing of that irrigation project was as much her brainchild as mine.”

“And do you have . . . bastards?” Athos asked. His friend’s flinch at the word did not escape him.

Raoul took a deep breath. Athos guessed that if they were not such close friends, and if it weren’t, in point of fact, the absolute, legal truth, Raoul would have challenged Athos to a duel then and there.

Instead, he shrugged and in a voice that sounded more brittle than indifferent, he said, “As a point of fact, though we’ve been very careful all these years, just these last two months, Cunegunde has found herself . . . embarrassed.”

Athos’s turn to flinch, inwardly, because this provided Raoul with the best motive for killing his absent wife. How could this family-proud, upright man not want his son or daughter to be legitimate? How could he not wish to have for his children the benefit of that established solidity that had graced his own birth and childhood.

“What do you plan to do?” Athos asked.

“What I planned to do,” Raoul said. “Was acknowledge the child, of course. Most of the people in my domain know that Cunegunde and I are lovers. Not to acknowledge the child as mine would be churlish. And then I thought, particularly if it were a boy, I would apply to Rome, through the hierarchy of the church, and have him legitimized. Make him my heir.”

“You said it’s what you
planned
to do?”

“Well, by God, Ysabella set me free at a most convenient time,” Raoul grinned, a wide grin. “I can now marry Cunegunde. Oh, there will be talk because she is not noble, but my father is dead, the king has problems of his own, and I’m, fortunately, my own man, free to choose as I please. I’ll marry her, and if the child is two months too early and seems a little well developed, who’s to talk?” He turned his smile on Athos, then his smile froze and he chuckled. “Alexandre, did you come all this way to see whether I might have murdered my wife? Only you look as though someone plunged a dagger into your heart. Was my wife murdered? Do you suspect me, my friend?”

And Athos, who had indeed been suspecting his old friend and whose breath was frozen middrawing, now realized that were Raoul truly guilty he would never have come out and said that. He would certainly never have used the image of a dagger plunged in one’s heart. And he wouldn’t be smiling at Athos like a fool. Raoul was different from Athos, but that difference hinged on a more open nature, on a milder outlook on life. Not on his ability for consummate acting.

Athos took a breath, another and glared at his friend. “No, I do not suspect you.”

“But you did? Did you think I actually traveled to Paris to kill her? I didn’t, I assure you. You can ask any of my servants and verify—” He looked at Athos and guffawed, delightedly. “You did, you fool. You did already.”

“I did,” Athos confirmed, refusing to laugh with his friend. “But a man of your position, of your income, does not need to kill his wife himself.”

“What, and subject myself to never ending blackmail? Or did you think me so lost to all proper feeling that I’d then kill the wretch who killed her?”

Athos shook his head. “I confess I can’t imagine you doing either.”

BOOK: the musketeer's seamstress

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