Read the musketeer's seamstress Online
Authors: Sarah d'Almeida
the musketeer's seamstress (37 page)
“I didn’t think Porthos stupid,” D’Artagnan said, then felt heat on his cheeks. “Well, at least not since I first met him. After I got to know the three of you a little better, I could not imagine either you or Aramis having a close friend who was impaired in judgement or thought.”
He’d noted the bandage on Athos’s thigh, stained with blood, and he wondered how Athos’s judgement was, on the other hand. What kind of man runs and then fights duels while nursing a wound through the thigh.
D’Artagnan was starting to suspect that Athos was not fully human or more than human. He didn’t know which, but whichever it was it gave the older musketeer a glittering hard edge that both made him capable of accomplishing the impossible and kept all people—even his closest friends—at a distance.
“But Porthos must be wrong,” D’Artagnan said. “He has to be. Our theory is the only one that makes sense.”
Athos inclined his head, and shrugged, as he finished tying his breeches and slipped on a clean doublet of the old-fashioned type he preferred.
The clothes seemed to fit perfectly, D’Artagnan noted, and wondered if Monsieur de Treville kept clothes in all sizes around, just in case one of his musketeers arrived without breeches. Having seen the unruly mob in the antechamber, he could well believe that they ruined several breeches and doublets, tunics and shirts per day.
“We might have been wrong about this, D’Artagnan. Or at least, I think we’ve hit a dead end,” Athos said.
D’Artagnan said nothing, as he wasn’t absolutely sure of what the older musketeer spoke of.
Athos sat on his bed. “I asked Monsieur de Treville about the knife. It occurred to me that he spends a lot more time with the King than we do, and he has known the King much longer. In fact, so far as the King has any friends and not merely courtiers, we’d have to admit that Monsieur de Treville is one of them. And the Cardinal, possibly, the other.” Athos shrugged. “I apologize for sending you upstairs but I was afraid the captain wouldn’t speak frankly with you there. He has at least as high a regard as the Cardinal for the King’s reputation and for protecting it, even from his musketeers. Though I doubt,” he said, and permitted one of his quick smiles. “That Monsieur de Treville intends to send men to kill us just to prevent us from talking.”
“The men—” D’Artagnan started, as it occurred to him that the last time they’d killed a large number of guards it had occasioned an incident at the court.
“I’ve forewarned Monsieur de Treville. In fact, even now, he should be at the palace, complaining to the King about how the Cardinal sent a mob to kill his innocent musketeers.”
“I hope he gets there before the Cardinal,” D’Artagnan said.
“He will, or he’ll find a way to get the King’s ear and convince him. Trust the captain, D’Artagnan. He would not have kept his post all these years if he couldn’t convince the King that we are not an undisciplined bunch of ruffians.” This time the brief grin was far more than an elusive smile. “Which, at times, must take some skill and effort.” Athos looked up, fully. “But the knife, D’Artagnan, and who might have owned it, will apparently lead us nowhere.”
“Why?” D’Artagnan asked blinking. “Was it truly the King’s and no one else’s? Was it . . . Did . . .”
“You must banish the thought from your head,” Athos said. “Even if he had, he would be our lord and liege.” He shook his head. “But I doubt it. Our . . . His weakness is not of the sort that strikes out suddenly, with a knife. If he’d truly felt such a great animus against the woman, he would have exiled her or hounded the Cardinal to make her life miserable. He’s done it often enough, before, to other friends of the Queen. No. The reason I say the knife is a dead end, is that I believe it was in possession of the Duchess herself.”
“The Duchess?”
“Monsieur de Treville says he was with the King, when the King sent the knife, via a valet, to Madame de Dreux as a sign that her scandalous and immoral behavior had her walking on the thin edge of the King’s good graces. This was the day before the murder.”
“A knife? He sent an ivory knife of such manufacture as a warning?” D’Artagnan asked.
“You have to remember he pays very little attention to such things, which he considers mere trinkets. And sending a knife saved him the need to write a letter—a task to which he is at least as averse as our dear Porthos.”
“But then . . .” D’Artagnan said. He couldn’t imagine how Athos, wounded, tired, could still think clearly. Thoughts trickled through D’Artagnan’s mind like bubbles in mud, each in complete isolation and seemingly invisible from the others. It was an effort to string them together. “But then the knife would be in the Duchess’s room.” He could imagine the object, tossed carelessly on one of the many ornate side tables, amid books and discarded jewelry and who knew what else. “And the murderer might simply have got hold of it as a convenience. You are right. We are indeed at a dead end.”
Athos nodded. “Only perhaps,” he said, as he lay back on the bed. “We’ll be lucky and Porthos’s investigations won’t be as fruitless as ours. He was, perhaps, right and the intruder in the room was the murderer. Perhaps—”
But Athos stopped, and D’Artagnan realized that he, himself, had toppled onto his bed, and his eyes were closing of their own accord.
“Sleep, D’Artagnan,” Athos said. “It’s a been a long day and a longer night. I doubt the morning daylight will keep us awake.”
D’Artagnan took the words with him into deep sleep. Sometime later, he thought he heard Porthos come in, open the door, close it. The shudder of the middle bed as Porthos collapsed on it made D’Artagnan smile in his sleep.
Sometime later, still in the depths of a dream, D’Artagnan was aware of one of his friends leaving the room.
Fire and Color; The Very Deep Reasoning of Porthos; Where Aramis Becomes Acquainted with a Different Side of Petticoats
P
ORTHOS came to Monsieur de Treville’s house late. He’d been looking for acrobats, but found none, and finally exhaustion led him to Treville house, where he was directed to a room in which D’Artagnan and Athos lay asleep—Athos face up, arms at his side, looking like a marble statue upon a noble tomb; D’Artagnan sprawled, one arm above his head, a leg angled towards the floor.
ORTHOS came to Monsieur de Treville’s house late. He’d been looking for acrobats, but found none, and finally exhaustion led him to Treville house, where he was directed to a room in which D’Artagnan and Athos lay asleep—Athos face up, arms at his side, looking like a marble statue upon a noble tomb; D’Artagnan sprawled, one arm above his head, a leg angled towards the floor.
Porthos looked at them and smiled. He couldn’t understand these two and their conviction that the Cardinal was trying to . . . kill them, make them seem guilty of murder, and who knew what else they might have come up with to ascribe to His Eminence by now.
Shaking his head, he collapsed on the middle bed, and fell into a deep sleep. Only to wake with what seemed like the dim light of sunset coming through the window.
He started at the reddish light. He truly didn’t want to stay till they woke and have to listen to them discuss the Cardinal’s designs to their fate as though they were vitally important to the most powerful man in France. So important, in fact, that he would go to all this trouble just to do something to them. He didn’t want to be told that the person on the balcony was a prank or a dream.
Fine, he was willing to concede it was probably not a ghost, since ghosts didn’t need to disguise themselves and rarely wore masks. But in the same way, why should a prank or a dream disguise herself and wear a mask.
He got up quietly and got out of the room and out of Treville house through the back gate, unnoticed.
Last night he had been working towards something. There was, in his mind, as yet mostly hidden, a shape, a puzzle that was about to be completed. He felt as though he had all the pieces. Almost. But not quite yet.
In fact, the problem was that Porthos didn’t seem to be filling in a puzzle but two, and he didn’t know where, in the middle, the puzzles would converge. Or if they would.
On one hand, he still thought the right way to find out who had killed Aramis’s Violette was to find out who could have done it. In the circumstances, this immediately limited the field. And Porthos had an idea as to that. It had started forming when he first saw the acrobats on the street, leaping about, walking on stilts.
Oh, he took Athos’s opinion on that, that it was unlikely anyone would feel comfortable walking on stilts near the palace: That near the palace. Though Porthos didn’t view it as impossible. That by itself was manageable. Put the stilts near the tree, totter across, remove them. Porthos knew enough of how these big houses worked to suspect that two boards leaning up against a balcony would not particularly call anyone’s attention.
No, the problem there was that Porthos did not believe it was possible for anyone to walk on stilts tall enough to reach the balcony.
But there were other things. He had seen acrobats flip and dive midair, with every appearance of near flight. If they could do that, perhaps they could reach the balcony from the tree. After all, even Aramis had managed to survive going the other way.
As he thought this, he heard the noise of an acrobat troupe down the street. He let his feet walk that way, because he thought he should watch this. Acrobat troupes, who performed on the street and did everything from short burlesques to juggling, thronged to Paris in the spring and early summer. They came from as far away as Italy or Spain. And this fit, in Porthos’s head with the image of the person in Violette’s room. Perhaps she had looked as though she were performing because she was, in fact, used to performing. She was used to cavorting around on the street, for the entertainment of the crowds. Every gesture, every movement would have been honed to entertain, to please, to call attention. Hence, the exaggerated kissing of the cross.
But the cross was a problem. As was why the woman would cover her face. The only reason for her to cover her face would be if she was known at the palace. Or thought she would be known at the palace. Which was why Porthos had asked Aramis if Violette had a portrait of her sister.
Of course, the idea of a nun becoming an acrobat was insane. But then, hadn’t Athos said that Fasset, the Gascon fighting demon, almost as lethal as D’Artagnan himself, had been brought up to be a monk? Why shouldn’t an acrobat have been brought up to be a nun?
But alas, Violette didn’t seem to have a picture of her sister.
What then? Was it possible that the acrobat was someone else? Someone from Violette’s family? If it were for that Athos was so sure it was a woman, Porthos would suspect an ex-lover of the Duchess.
He stopped, as he’d reached the edge of the street carnival, and he watched, with divided attention, his mind going through the steps of imagining who or what could have done it. Perhaps a minor noblewoman whose lover Violette had stolen? Perhaps that woman had become an acrobat and then . . .
His eyes, with very little attention from his brain, looked over fire-eaters and dancers, and a man who was making a bear do very amusing tricks.
Porthos wondered how to find out if there were any troupes from Spain in the capital, and then it came to him that, of course, the people most likely to know would be the acrobats themselves. He didn’t quite know how it worked, but he imagined that living a vagabond life, and playing on the streets for coin, they’d all bump into each other a lot.
He plunged his fingers into his sleeve, looking for his small purse where he kept his ready money and change. If he meant to get answers out of these people, he would need to pay them.
Pushing through the crowd, with his huge frame, he made it to the edge, near the dancers. And when one of them twirled close, he asked, as close as he could come to a whisper, “Mademoiselle, pssst, mademoiselle?”
She looked at him, so startled that she missed her step. Her motley skirt, in sparkling colors and much too short— displaying her leg almost to the knee—fell.
Porthos whispered again, “Mademoiselle,” and took care to make sure the coin pinched between his two fingers sparkled enough for her to see. Her eyes widened and she whispered something to the girl next to her, then she sidled up to Porthos.
“Can you wait?” she asked. “Till after the show? Then we can go to your room or—”
“Mademoiselle?” Porthos said, not sure what she was talking about and certain that she was confusing him with someone else. And then he realized that possibly these girls, who danced and twirled and performed acrobatics for the amusement of the crowds might also do other things, on the side, for the amusement of strangers. He shook his head, and held the coin just poised over her fingers. “I only want to ask you a question,” he said.
She looked puzzled for a moment, then smiled. “Then I am at your disposal, gentleman, provided I know the answer.”
“Well, the coin is yours whether you do or not. All I want to know is, are there any Spanish troupes in town? That you know about?” He saw her start to move her head and said, “Or any other troupes that might make to Spain in . . . other seasons.”
The girl laughed, a pleasant, musical sound. “As to that, gentleman, all of us go into Spain when the weather turns cold in France. Sometimes as far as the South of Spain. And all of our troupes have members from Spain and France both—and sometimes from Italy for those troupes that go that far. Whoever runs away from home, or is sent away, or just wants to be a member. You understand?”
Porthos nodded. He understood. He started to hand off the coin, but then stopped. “I’ll pay you in either case, but if you’d answer just one more question.”
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