the musketeer's seamstress (29 page)
Read the musketeer's seamstress Online
Authors: Sarah d'Almeida
He was sure that if he solved those two puzzles—who might have gained access to the balcony, and why whoever had done it wore a mask, he would have the solution to the whole thing.
But right now it seemed a hopeless endeavor.
Meanwhile, it was getting dark. He felt his meager coin pouch. He couldn’t wait for Mousqueton, nor send Mousqueton to get him food as he normally would. And he really couldn’t hope that Mousqueton would steal something for him. For one, because he was afraid the cook would avenge herself on Mousqueton for her disappointment in Porthos.
He would, he thought, go to a nearby tavern and see if he could get some bread and cheese, and think over the whole puzzle of how a human being could grow wings.
In his mind, he could hear Aramis say that wings were the reward for a life well lived, for an attainment of sanctity.
Somehow, he didn’t think the person who’d come into the room, for all his or her devotion to the little cross, was a saint. Or an angel.
Messengers and Queries; The Elusiveness of Musketeers; Where Aramis Gets Tired of Waiting
“
M
ONSIEUR,
”
Aramis said. “I never meant to cause you difficulties, or—”
M
ONSIEUR,
”
Aramis said. “I never meant to cause you difficulties, or—”
Monsieur de Treville waved it all away and sighed. “Oh, it means nothing,” he said. “I’m sure you didn’t mean it, just as I know you did it. You musketeers are all the same. Sometimes I feel I would have fewer foolish actions and intemperate, unconsidered plots to contend with had the King put me in charge of the royal nursery at the palace.”
Aramis said nothing. He said nothing because he couldn’t feel offended by such a claim, which was one of Monsieur de Treville’s favorite claims, an expression of his exasperation at his headstrong subordinates.
Monsieur de Treville drummed his fingers upon his desk. “The devil of it,” he said, “is that I believe you’re innocent.”
Aramis nodded, slightly. He was still in shock over having found out how close he’d come to fatherhood. The whole thing was a nightmare. He’d thought he’d lost a lover, the other half of his soul. As it turned out, he might have lost much more than that.
He might have lost a chance at future generations of Herblays, at continuing his father’s name. He might have lost a chance at uniting his blood with that of the highest families in France, even if his son would never have been able to claim the connection.
Had her husband known of the child? Could he have killed her for that?
Somehow Aramis doubted it. Violette spoke of her husband occasionally and from the sound of it what they possessed between them had all the warmth of a business arrangement. In the midst of the feasts for the King and Queen’s marriage, they’d never even consummated their marriage.
Not that Violette had come to Aramis’s bed a virgin. No. By the time she’d asked him to lay between her silk sheets that cold winter’s night, Violette had already had several lovers, most of them more important personages than Aramis.
But she had loved him . . .
Lost again in his misery, he was looking at his boots and pondering the futility of life in general and the futility of his own life in particular.
Monsieur de Treville’s closing the door between the office and the antechamber roused him. He looked up. The captain stood at the door, tapping the toe of his boot in an unconscious gesture of impatience. “None of your comrades are in the antechamber,” he said. “Neither Porthos, nor Athos, nor even the young Gascon. I’d have sworn they, all three of them, live in the antechamber, hoping for an invitation to dinner or a duel, both of which they seem to consider essential for their lives, but now none is there.”
Aramis made a gesture of dismissal, trying to remember the day of the week. Wrinkling his brow with the effort of thinking of anything but his sudden and cruel bereavement, he said, “I think D’Artagnan is standing guard at Monsieur des Essarts. And they’re probably with him.”
“I’ve thought of that,” the captain said. “And I’ve sent three runners, one to each of their lodgings and one to my brother-in-law’s palace. One or the other of them should be home, and I’ve asked that he come here right away.”
Aramis didn’t understand this at all. “Why?” he asked.
“Because one or the other of them should have some idea of where to hide you. I confess I don’t. I could put you in one of several monasteries where I have acquaintances, but I think you’re rather well known at all of them. You have, if you forgive me saying so, Aramis, a recognizable face. And everyone knows the story of the musketeer who quotes theology.”
Aramis nodded. He supposed he’d made himself notorious. It was only one of his many sins. Woe to him who gives scandal.
He continued contemplating the sad state of his boots and the sorry state of his soul. He never quite felt as though he owed enough penance to go back to his mother’s house and face the humorless Dominican again.
If he had to, at any rate, he’d profess here in town and with the Jesuits.
Of course, no order would take him. Not now, when half of Paris believed him guilty of murder, and the other half didn’t only because they’d never heard of him or met him.
Monsieur de Treville brought him out of the reverie by closing his door to the antechamber again. The captain stood by the door, his hands open in a gesture of impotence in the face of the trials of life. “None of them are at their lodgings and the man sent to Monsieur des Essarts couldn’t find the Gascon.” Monsieur de Treville shrugged. “I truly don’t know what to do with you, Aramis.”
Aramis didn’t quite know what to do with himself either. But he knew sitting in this chair, listening to the accustomed chatter from the antechamber was sheer torture. After all, the chatter was as distant from him just now, as barred to him, as if it had been the language of the angels or the musings of the gods. Aramis couldn’t simply walk out there and meet his old comrades at arms and fall easily into the pattern of gossip and bragging, of friendship and rivalry that had been his life for these many years.
The corps of musketeers was not so different from a monastery, he thought. Both offered brotherhood. And he imagined that being defrocked hurt as much as having suspicion and doubt bar him from the musketeers.
He turned to Monsieur de Treville, “Let me go,” he said. “I will find my own way.”
As he spoke, he was gathering his own hair—the fine, soft mass of it, twisting and knotting it, till he could pile it at the top of his head and pull his black hat down over the whole.
“How are you going to leave?” Monsieur de Treville asked. “My plan was to get one of your friends here, or preferably all of them, and have you follow them, through the antechamber, play the part of one of their servants.”
Which meant only that either it had been a very long time since Monsieur de Treville had engaged in any sort of covert intrigue, or that even their captain had no idea of how well the musketeers, as a body, knew each other.
They’d fought together, roomed together at the battle fronts, challenged each other on the stairs up to the antechamber, got drunk together and wenched together. There were very few men in the corps, and those new acquisitions only, that Aramis wouldn’t know even with the degree of disguise he was wearing.
As for himself, as long as he’d been in the corps, as notorious as he was? A turn of the head, a step into that antechamber, and a dozen voices would call out “Aramis.”
Which meant that Monsieur de Treville’s plan had been useless all along.
“I will go out the same way I came,” he told Monsieur de Treville.
And saying this, he perched on the parapet of the window and prepared to jump. The tree was a little ways away, but nothing like what it had been jumping from Violette’s window. And what was more, he could—if he got to the tree—run along it right to the wall. Some of the branches seemed to overhang the wall or close enough. That meant he could leave here, and not go around to one of the entrances that were doubtless watched.
If he took minimal precautions, to jump when the street was not busy, no one would notice.
And then . . . And then he would make his way to Porthos’s house—the one that offered the best view of its front door, being situated on an ample, broad street.
He’d hide on the other side of the street, in some doorway. And contrive to intercept Porthos or Mousqueton, before they got to the door. Hopefully before they fell within observation of whoever had been set up to observe the door.
It wasn’t a wonderful plan, but it would have to do.
Aramis jumped towards the thin limb of the tree.
The Drawback of Good Jewelry Stores; The Horrible Suspicion; Attacked in the Night
A
THOS had been to most of the jewelry stores, or at least to most of those that were still open at night and which either had some ivory piece in the window or had been recommended to him as being knowledgeable in ivory.
THOS had been to most of the jewelry stores, or at least to most of those that were still open at night and which either had some ivory piece in the window or had been recommended to him as being knowledgeable in ivory.
Before starting on his quest, he’d taken the trouble to stop at a public water fountain and wash from the dagger any vestige of blood. No reason to excite the curiosity of the jewelers about the use to which the dagger had been put.
A connoisseur of blades, or at least a frequent user of them, Athos felt somewhat guilty washing the fine metal in cold water. But there was no oil nor polishing compound on hand. So water would have to do for now. And water was, doubtless, better than blood on the blade and the handle.
Naked of its red patina, the dagger handle looked almost white, with only that slight tinge that ivory always had to it. Athos, examining it under the flickering light of a lantern over the nearest shop, had thought that it was new ivory.
The owner of the very first shop he visited, one of the better shops, with an actual display of jewelry up front, and a guard beside it, had agreed. He’d also looked from the dagger to Athos’s worn musketeer’s uniform and frowned.
“How did you come by this?” he asked. “Won it at the die?”
Athos had thrown back his head and assumed his most haughty expression. He’d been using it long enough and in enough varied circumstances to know that when he looked that regal it intimidated even the most hardened of noblemen, much less a lowly shopkeeper, not matter how grand he thought himself.
“It is hardly any business of yours to interrogate a King’s musketeer,” he said.
The man visibly shrunk from the words and, probably—if Athos knew himself—from the glimmer of anger in the musketeer’s eyes. It was well known all over Paris that offending a musketeer could very well get your ears cut. Or—if you were so unlucky and a lot of them were nearby and drunk enough to react with furor at whatever trivial insult one of them had suffered—you might get your shop and house burned down.
The jeweler looked towards his guard, but he was not so foolish as to imagine that this down-at-heels man could hold his own against a musketeer. He polished the dagger handle on his sleeve and passed it to Athos, handle first. “It’s fine work,” he said. “But we don’t do anything like it, and know next to nothing about it. If you want to talk to someone about ivory work, you should go down the street, to my brother-in-law at the sign of the Lit Candle. He is the man to talk to about ivory.”
And so Athos had gone, from shop to shop, and from jeweler to jeweler, until the last of the shops sent him to a place that wasn’t even on jewelers’ row, but on a side alley.
The shop was clearly not very prosperous. Indeed, on first approach, Athos thought they were quite closed and no more than the door of yet another home.
The alley on which it was located reeked strongly of urine and vomit both, since it made a convenient pass-through between two streets where taverns abounded. And the only light there was the light that came from the lanterns of those distant taverns.
He looked at the dingy door that looked as though it were in the terminal stages of wood rot. Set in a wall that was probably stone but seemed like caked dirt, it looked unappetizing in the extreme. If you concentrated mind and eye both, and got very close, it was possible to see that the door was open a crack and that a wavering light shone from within. The type of light cast by homemade candles burning the fat that had been saved from the pot.
Athos almost turned around and left. He’d not been brought up even near extreme poverty. In his father’s domain, the peasants tended to look clean and well fed. And even if Athos was not too sure that they ate well, or how they were provided candles, he would wager that none of them lived in a place as dirty or dismal as this one.
But the man at the last shop had told him. “Oh, but if you want to know who might have done work such as this, you must go and interview Pierre Michou.”
That man, a voluble creature with rapid-flowing words and rapid-moving hands, and a suit that was more flashy than good, had told Athos all about how the brother of Pierre Michou, Antoine Michou, had been the best worker in ivory this side of the Indies. How commissions had come for him even from the kings of France and Spain and even, it was rumored, from England and Germany and, once, from Venice.
Unfortunately for the Michou family, the promising Antoine had died, leaving the business and the family fortunes in the hands of his brother Pierre, who had some problems. And here, the voluble jeweler had made the motion of someone tipping a glass onto his mouth. Besides, Pierre had never been as talented as Antoine, and now ran a little shop that specialized only in the buying and selling of jewelry and not always from the most legitimate sources, if Monsieur Musketeer quite understood the jeweler’s meaning?
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