Read the musketeer's seamstress Online

Authors: Sarah d'Almeida

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BOOK: the musketeer's seamstress
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The door opened to show a young girl, the daughter of the family that rented lodgings to the musketeer.
Athos bowed to her and said, “We’re here to see our friend,” before pushing on, past her and up the stairs, to Aramis’s lodgings.
There his knock went unanswered, but his whispered, “It is I, Bazin,” at the crack of the door, brought a satisfying sliding of the bolts from the other side.
“My master is within,” was all Bazin said, pointing at the door that led to the inner room of the lodging. Aramis’s room.
“Is he awake?”
Bazin nodded. “He’s washed and dressed, and now he waits you.”
This was very much like Aramis. Like any of them, truth be told. Over the years of their friendship—which had enlarged a month ago to include the Gascon D’Artagnan— they had always dealt with private crisis by holding a war council and listening to the advice of their fellows. That Aramis treated this no differently might mean that he harbored no guilt.
Or it might mean that he trusted all of them to protect him despite what his private guilt might be.
And he was—as much as Athos hated to admit it— probably right. While Athos wasn’t sure that Aramis hadn’t committed murder, he was very sure that the murder—if such it had been—would have been justified.
He knocked at the door to the inner room and Aramis answered, “Come,” in what could reasonably be described as his normal voice.
The room, twice as large as Bazin’s pass-through room, still looked too Spartan for the Aramis that Athos had come to know. There was just a tall, dark, curtained bed that had probably come with Aramis from his estate, a tall wardrobe and, in a corner, a writing desk, with plain paper.
But Athos, who had known Aramis for very long, knew that the wardrobe concealed enough blue suits to outfit a whole regiment of the musketeers, and in silk and velvet enough to make even Porthos jealous. He’d seen those suits on Aramis often enough. He’d also wager that some false drawer on the desk, or some false bottom on the wardrobe concealed perfumed sheets of paper ornamented with a crest. Though Athos had to admit he’d never seen those, he could not imagine Aramis writing his duchesses, his countesses, his princesses, on plain and unmarked paper.
However that were, today Aramis was dressed in clerical black, as unadorned as Bazin’s outfit. Still cut in the latest stare of fashion it consisted of venetians falling from waist to ankle, and a loose doublet with a ruffle that covered the hip. But unadorned and plain for Aramis. A breviary, the daily readings recommended for priests, sat close to his hand. Despite this, his hair shone, newly brushed, and it was quite clear he’d shaved and trimmed his beard. Which must mean, Athos thought with some relief, that Aramis was close to his normal state.
As if to prove this, Aramis nodded to them as they came in and stood up—since there was no place for them to sit. “I want to thank you,” he said. “All three of you, for lending me succor in my extremity yesterday. I shudder to think what would have happened to me without your help.”
Porthos shrugged and shuffled uneasily. “You’d have done the same for us,” he said.
“But we do wonder,” D’Artagnan said. “What brought you to such need and what the circumstances were . . . why you fled the way you did, leaving even your uniform behind.”
Even in his state of grave seriousness that implied, perhaps, true mourning, Aramis’s lips quivered and his green eyes sparkled at D’Artagnan’s tactful probing. “I did not have time to dress,” he said. “Because the servants were knocking the door down. I’m afraid I screamed when I found . . .” He swallowed. “When I realized that Violette was truly dead and it was not a prank she was playing on me.”
“You were surprised at finding her dead, then?” Athos asked.
“Of course he was, Athos, what a question,” Porthos said. “Who would expect his lover to be killed?”
Athos didn’t answer Porthos, but looked steadily at Aramis, whose gaze, meeting his, showed an understanding of Athos’s question. Aramis, himself, clearly didn’t think he was incapable of murder, no matter what Porthos thought.
“I was,” he said. “Shocked. I’d only stepped to this little closet beside her room, in which she keeps—kept a
chaise percée
for . . . such needs as arose. Only a few minutes. And I came out to find Violette dead. I was quite shocked. Though . . .” Aramis’s green eyes flickered with something, like a shadow passing over a sunlit landscape.
“Though?” Athos prompted.
Aramis sighed. “Though in the next few seconds, as I contemplated the locked door, the impossibility of a passage into the room, the inaccessibility of the balcony, I wondered if I . . .” Again he floundered, and he gestured, with his hands, as if expressing the inability of language to translate his meaning. Then he rubbed the tips of his fingers on his forehead, as if massaging fugitive memory. “I wondered if I could have committed the monstrous deed and forgotten all about it.”
The Wisdom of the Tavern; A Musketeer’s Regrets; An Unpleasant Decision
A
RAMIS saw the look of disbelief in Porthos’s eyes, before his friend said, “You did not kill her.”
He wished he could be as certain as Porthos was. The truth of it was that his and Porthos’s friendship had been founded on the fact that the two men were as different as two men could be. Aramis’s mind ran on words and maxims, on remembered readings, on the wisdom of the ages, while he very often thought that if someone cut off Porthos’s massive and skillful hands the man would become unable to think at all.
In Porthos’s world the idea that one might not know whether he’d killed someone or not was preposterous, insane. If Porthos had taken the trouble to murder anyone, Porthos would very well remember it.
But Aramis knew his own mind and the perfidious way in which his thoughts could hide behind his words and his feelings behind his thoughts so that he could never be sure of himself until he’d acted. And sometimes not even then.
Take Violette, for instance. It had all started as a harmless flirtation on a summer night, when she’d been too bored to remain alone in her room and had sought him out, at his guard post, to talk.
And he had told himself it was just a silly romantic game, even as it progressed, from the guard post to her bedroom, from the bedroom to a thousand talks and discussions in her receiving room, until she knew all his thoughts and he knew all of hers. Until they were closer than most married people and, in fact, were married in all but law. That final union, her married state and his vocation forbade, as did the width of different classes that separated them.
But he had loved her. And what lunacy will love not induce? “I don’t think,” he started, and his voice cracked and wavered shamefully. He cleared his throat. “I don’t think I killed her,” he said. “Truly, I don’t. But I cannot imagine how anyone else could. The inaccessible room, the locked door . . .” He shrugged. “I tell you, for a moment I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure at all.”
“If you’d killed her,” Porthos said. “Why would you cry out when you found she was truly dead? Why would you think it was all a prank and a joke?”
And in this, Porthos was correct, would be correct. Aramis was grateful to his friend for bringing the witness of his own actions to his rescue. “Perhaps I wouldn’t,” he said.
But Athos cleared his throat. “You know how sometimes, when you drink too much you wake in the morning and have no memory at all of what you’ve done?” And to Porthos’s nod, he added. “I’ve heard this happens sometimes, too, when you do something the mind finds too terrible to accept. There was . . .” He paused. “There was this woodcutter in my father’s estate, who one day cut up his entire family with an ax. People saw him do it.” Athos shook his head, in wonderment. “And yet, he would swear by the Virgin and all the saints that he’d never done it, that his enemies must have gone in, behind him, and killed all his loved ones. And he wasn’t lying. We are sure of it. He just couldn’t remember it.”
Aramis stared at Athos’s stern features for a moment. Could Aramis have? Could he have killed Violette and forgotten all about it? He heard a low groan escape his throat and put his face down into his hands.
“Oh, nonsense,” Porthos said. And added in a tone of someone making the final argument, “Aramis is not a woodcutter.”
But Aramis wasn’t sure at all that his social class protected him from suspicion. He wasn’t a woodcutter. He was a musketeer. He had become used to killing people. It would be easier for him than for some peasant. He groaned again.
D’Artagnan drew in breath loudly, a sound that, in the otherwise still room, echoed like a shot. “Porthos makes a good argument,” he said. “For a woodcutter, perhaps, killing someone would be something to forget forever. But Aramis . . . has killed people before. With no forgetfulness.”
Aramis looked up at the youth with hope. D’Artagnan, he had suspected for sometime, was the cleverest of them all. Oh, not the most cultured. That honor belonged to Athos. And not the most cunning. Modest though his beliefs and his future chosen profession obliged Aramis to be, they didn’t force him into blatant lying. He was the most cunning and this he must admit. But D’Artagnan was the cleverest, capable of penetrating to the heart of a question or the main point of an event.
The heart of the matter here was that Aramis had no reason to forget, had he killed Violette. He blinked at the young guard.
D’Artagnan nodded, as though having read the desired response in Aramis’s eyes. “Did you have any reason to wish her dead?” he asked. “Had she played you false or somehow betrayed you?”
Aramis took a deep breath and shook his head. “And even if she had,” he said, then shrugged, unable to explain fully. “We were never . . . I was never for her nor she for me. She has a husband somewhere and I am bound for the church, eventually. If she had another lover or twenty, as long as she did not turn me away from her door . . .” He shrugged again.
“And that she clearly hadn’t done,” D’Artagnan said, and bit at the corner of his upper lip, a gesture he made when deep in thought.
Aramis shook his head.
“The problem is,” D’Artagnan said, and his hand went to the pommel of his sword as though the very words required a defensive posture. “The problem is that not everyone in Paris knows you as we do, or can think through your actions as I can.”
Aramis drew in breath. He understood the words D’Artagnan had not said. “I am suspected?” he asked.
D’Artagnan waved his hand in a way that reminded everyone forcefully that he came from Gascony, near the border with Spain. “It is only tavern rumor,” he said unhappily. “But tavern rumor has it that you killed your . . . seamstress because she loved another better.”
“It is hardly to be wondered at,” Athos said. “When you left your uniform behind, and it is well known that you visited the lady at all hours.”
“And stayed for hours too,” Porthos said.
“I’ve often told you, Aramis, that associating with a woman in that way only gives her power—”
Aramis didn’t think that he could listen to Athos’s ideas on women and men’s best way to interact with the female of the species. In the five years Aramis had known Athos, Athos had been involved with exactly one woman and that brief and disastrous. “They say I killed Violette?” he asked D’Artagnan, unable to believe it. “Who says it?”
D’Artagnan shrugged. “It’s the talk of every tavern,” he said. “I went to a lot of them this morning, you know, to gather the talk, and it is the talk in every tavern.”
“By name?” Aramis asked.
D’Artagnan nodded. “It is said everywhere that you stabbed her, and then jumped from her balcony and were brought to Paris by accomplices, just ahead of the pursuers.”
“But it can’t be very serious talk,” Porthos said. “The guards of the Cardinal have not come by to arrest you, have they? And surely they would not fail to do it, and would rejoice in it, given the excuse? Besides the Cardinal thinks it is his duty to keep peace over all of Paris.”
“This is true,” Aramis said. He shrugged. “If it’s just tavern gossip . . .”
“I’m afraid it isn’t,” Athos said. “This morning, before coming here, I went to visit Monsieur de Treville, our captain, to set his mind at ease should he hear rumors . . .”
“And?” Aramis asked.
“The rumor mongers had been there ahead of me. He’d already heard of the events of the night, only—knowing us a little better than most people—he guessed we helped you escape.”
Aramis felt a groan leave his throat, heard it echo in his ears with a sound of despair. “Monsieur de Treville believes me guilty then?”
Athos started to shake his head, then shrugged. “He did not weigh on his belief of your guilt. But he said the case looks bad for you, since the lady is well born and well above your station.” Athos reached into his doublet and pulled out a filled leather pouch. “He sent this, which he says is an advance on your wages, which you can earn after you return when your name is cleared.”
“Return?” Aramis asked.
Athos nodded. “Monsieur de Treville says he lacks the ability to protect you and, as such, must advise you to get out of Paris and stay out till your name should be cleared and you are no longer at risk for arrest.”
BOOK: the musketeer's seamstress
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