the musketeer's seamstress (8 page)
Read the musketeer's seamstress Online
Authors: Sarah d'Almeida
Athos pounced forward. D’Artagnan had often seen him in this state. He knew that the urbane, learned man whom he called a friend was the outward manifestation of something else—something repressed and dark, deep and brutish—that peeked out of Athos’s eyes only on two occasions: when the musketeer was deeply drunk, and when he felt the bloodlust of a duel.
Bagot pounced backwards and put up his sword.
Bagot was a better fighter than D’Artagnan expected. Perhaps not as good as Athos, but good enough to defend himself from Athos’s blind fury. For a moment, the two advanced and retreated in the narrow distance of the first three rungs of staircase and the tiny landing. Back and forth, in a scuffle of boots, an echo of grunts and wordless exclamations, a flash of swords hitting each other and sliding, metallic, along each other’s length.
For just a breath, Bagot pressed Athos backwards, onto the door of Aramis’s lodgings, forcing Porthos to retreat, and D’Artagnan to glue himself to the wall to allow the combatants room.
But Athos recovered. A low growl making its way through his throat, he charged forward, forcing Bagot to retreat. With remarkable cunning and even more remarkable agility, Bagot stepped back and back and back, halfway down the stairs, keeping Athos at bay but managing to retreat, without ever turning his back to escape. Halfway down the staircase, he jumped over the railing and to the hall downstairs. But there he turned to face Athos, as if to show he wasn’t running, just seeking more space for his sword arm.
Athos yelled something that was no word, just formless fury, and jumped after the man.
And now Dlancey stepped forward. “We must look in there,” he said, looking past D’Artagnan, still plastered to his wall, and to Porthos. “For the murderer.”
“Aramis never murdered anyone,” Porthos said, surging forward. “Killed, sure, lots of people. But he never murdered anyone. If you call him a murderer again, I shall have to cut your tongue out and feed it to you.”
Dlancey grinned, a grin that made his thin and worried face appear more like the devil-may-care expression of a seasoned man of war. He pulled his sword out. “I should like to see you try.”
“Oh, that you shall,” Porthos said, and in the next moment, the two of them were fighting on the staircase, step up and step down, calling boasts to each other and advertising to each other the horrible things they intended to do to the other.
“I don’t suppose you’ll be reasonable about this,” Fasset asked. He looked at D’Artagnan calculatingly.
D’Artagnan grinned. He knew better than to argue with a stooge of the Cardinal. And besides, if he judged the game properly, Athos meant to delay these men as much as humanly possible, keeping them busy, to give Aramis a chance to get a horse and escape Paris. “I’m always reasonable,” he said, and let his sword hand fall upon the pommel of his sword with accustomed ease. “And here is my reason.”
Fasset had anticipated D’Artagnan’s response. His sword was out, and as D’Artagnan lunged, he parried most ably.
They fought silently for a few minutes, D’Artagnan taking care to close the door of his friend’s room behind him in the one moment he had a chance to. They fought up and down the staircase, D’Artagnan keeping the upper hand but never quite prevailing. In the hall beneath, Athos had a spot of blood on his right sleeve and had moved his sword to his left hand.
At the bottom of the staircase, Porthos and Dlancey fought, cursing and threatening each other, but neither looked the worse for the wear, save for sweat and reddened features.
“I don’t suppose he’s even in his lodgings,” Fasset said, as he parried D’Artagnan’s thrust. “He’s probably at Monsieur de Treville’s as we speak, looking for justification from that worthy gentleman.”
D’Artagnan managed to smile and hoped his face betrayed the proper triumphant expression and then just as quickly erased it. If he was lucky, he thought, as he battled Fasset down the stairs, then Fasset would think that Aramis was within and D’Artagnan was glad at the thought he had escaped.
“Curse you,” Fasset said. “To the deepest hell. He’s within, is he not?” and, with redoubled fury, he started fighting D’Artagnan up the stairs. But D’Artagnan couldn’t allow him to check Aramis’s quarters just yet, and he fought vigorously downward.
Down in the hall, the more timorous guards of the Cardinal had regained their courage. Not enough of their courage to help Bagot with Athos. Even madmen would scruple to get in Athos’s way when his dark blue eyes shone with that unholy light. They started up the stairs towards Porthos. Porthos fought four of them without breaking a sweat.
Two of them straggled past Porthos to challenge D’Artagnan. Without a word, Fasset turned and fought beside the young guard against his own comrades, his concentration intense, his swordplay deadly.
“Would you side with me?” D’Artagnan asked, puzzled.
“I would side with honor.”
“Is it honor to come arrest a man early morning, on a mere rumor?” he asked.
Fasset snorted, even as his sword made short work of his stunned former comrades. “Rumor? Spare me. We found his uniform in the lady’s room.”
“Knowing Aramis,” D’Artagnan said, as he fought an enemy three steps down, only slightly worried about having Fasset now behind him. “I’m only surprised you didn’t find two uniforms—a normal one, one for special days, and his lace and velvet outfit for the days when he didn’t wear a uniform. He practically lived at the lady’s.”
Fasset laughed behind him, as D’Artagnan sent his opponent’s sword flying over the stair railing and to the hall below. Then he resumed parrying the attacks of another two.
“But this uniform was the only one, and it was clear he’d run away naked.”
“How could he run away naked? And make it through half of Paris on the way back home.”
“Ah,” Fasset said, as he fought his three opponents down the steps, till he was side-by-side with D’Artagnan. “Ah, that I cannot answer, but we’ve long since, all of us in his eminence’s guards, lived in awe of those we call the four inseparables.” He turned and gave D’Artagnan a tight smile, before resuming fighting shoulder to shoulder with him.
Porthos had dispatched his more recent opponent who fell to the steps, his whimper the only mark of life left in him. Porthos jumped over the man’s body to resume his fight with Dlancey.
In the hall below a sound somewhere between a grunt and a scream was followed by Athos’s suddenly civil-again voice, “If you give me your sword, I shall help you fashion a tourniquet.”
As the sound of clashing metal had ceased down there, D’Artagnan assumed the suggestion had been followed.
He, himself, quickly made short work of his opponents by inflicting minor but disabling wounds through thigh and arm. Soon the two who had attacked Fasset and himself were lying against the walls or on the steps, groaning. And now Fasset turned to D’Artagnan and bowed. “Should we resume our fight?” he asked. Something like an ironic smile twisted his lips.
Without looking, D’Artagnan was aware of his friends coming up the stairs, aware of Porthos and Athos standing behind him. But neither of them made a move or said a word.
“Would you insist on entering Aramis’s rooms?” he asked.
Fasset bowed slightly, “I’m afraid I must,” he said. “How could I face the Cardinal without having fulfilled the mission he gave me?”
D’Artagnan looked back at his friends to judge their reaction. Porthos looked impassive, waiting. Athos, who was holding his right arm with his left hand just below a spreading red stain on his doublet, shrugged, as if to say that none of this made any difference to him.
D’Artagnan was not stupid. He could understand hints. The rooms that had been of such importance and must be defended at all costs were now of no importance at all. That meant—and D’Artagnan’s own internal clock told him this—that at least an hour had gone by. And Aramis, if nothing had befallen him, was now well on his way to his hideout. And the guards of the Cardinal could never intercept him unless they knew his exact destination.
D’Artagnan nodded to Fasset. “You shall see the rooms, then,” he said. “But with us present.”
Fasset’s turn to shrug, as if all this meant nothing.
D’Artagnan, followed closely by Porthos and Athos, escorted Fasset into the rooms.
“A large cross,” Fasset said, pausing in front of the crucifix on the wall of the entrance room.
“You must know Aramis means to take orders someday,” Porthos said.
Fasset was kind enough to make no comment at that. He looked at the interior room and opened the wardrobe, as though to register its emptiness. He flicked through the papers on the desk, but all without much interest.
“How long has he been gone?” he asked, putting his gloves on, gloves he must have taken off before reaching the house.
D’Artagnan smiled. “You don’t expect me to tell you that?”
“I don’t expect you to tell me anything at all,” Fasset said, and something very much like a grudgingly admiring smile crossed his lips. “It is fortunate for Monsieur Aramis that he has such loyal friends.” He adjusted his gloves in place and looked up to meet D’Artagnan’s gaze with his own, acute, dark gaze. “I hope your confidence in him is not misplaced. I will now collect my comrades and go back to the Cardinal’s. Good day, sir.”
A Council of War; The Various Kinds of Seamstresses; The Memory of Husbands
T
HE wound in Athos’s arm was deeper than it looked and more painful. Bagot’s sword had pierced all the way down to his bone, and slid along the bone, so that every movement of his right arm brought a painful shock down to his hand and up to his shoulder.
HE wound in Athos’s arm was deeper than it looked and more painful. Bagot’s sword had pierced all the way down to his bone, and slid along the bone, so that every movement of his right arm brought a painful shock down to his hand and up to his shoulder.
He thought he was bearing it tolerably well, but he should have remembered his friends knew him better than that. Before he could make an excuse and leave for his own lodgings, to nurse his own wound with the help of Grimaud’s tight-lipped wrapping of ligatures and a fine bottle of wine that could make the devil himself forget his wickedness, Athos saw D’Artagnan looking sharply at him.
They had just left Aramis’s house, trusting the wretched Fasset to deal with the remainder of his expeditionary force, most of whom were either too wounded or too weak to walk.
Athos, in his role as the oldest and almost as an adoptive father to his friends, had got a key to Aramis’s lodgings from the landlord and locked the door behind himself. He’d instructed the landlord to give no one the key, though he didn’t know if the man had heard or if he would obey. These days it didn’t seem as though any landlords were honest, any merchants respectful, or any noblemen honorable. Indeed, in Athos’s dimmed view, the whole world was sinking into a morass of disorder.
Which was why it didn’t surprise him to see D’Artagnan, a seventeen-year-old youth, staring at him with the disapproval that Athos would have expected of his elders and betters. He straightened his spine, insensibly, under the scrutiny, and found his upper lip curling in disdain, ready to refuse the young man’s pity or scorn at his wounding.
But D’Artagnan’s dark eyes shifted, and his expression became one of frowning concern. “The salve . . .” he said, and paused, as if searching for words. “You remember the salve, the recipe of which my mother gave me before I left my father’s house? Be the wound ever so grave, the injury so severe, as long as no vital organ is touched, it will cause it to heal three days. I have had the chance to make it useful to you in the past.”
Athos remembered this same speech. “Yes. Last month, when we first met and I was nursing a shoulder wound.”
“My lodging at the Rue des Fossoyers is nearby and I have a jar of salve ready.”
“It is nothing,” Athos said. He didn’t even know why, except that he didn’t like for anyone to see him weak or wounded. And in their brief acquaintance D’Artagnan had seen this all too often already. “It is a scratch.”
Porthos, who had held silent through all this, cleared his throat as he looked meaningfully at Athos’s sleeve, which was now so drenched in blood that a trickle of it was dripping below his wrist and down his hand.
Athos looked at Porthos, then rounded on D’Artagnan, expecting to read pity or annoyance in the young man’s eyes. But D’Artagnan had turned away and, as they walked, was scanning the street ahead of him as though something vital held his interest in the midmorning sidewalks and their sparse foot traffic of shopping housewives and surly apprentices.
“We have to talk at any rate,” the young man said, as he looked ahead. “Of topics best not described on the street. Unlike Fasset I have no fear for our friend’s culpability, but still we told him we would do our best to clear his name and his honor while he was gone . . .”
And on that he’d got Athos, because Athos could not deny that they should be investigating the murder, that they should be talking in private. And D’Artagnan’s house was the one nearest. And—if he owned the truth to himself— Athos could profit from the salve upon his arm. The pain was near unbearable, and all the nursing that Athos’s servant, Grimaud, would give him would be the wrapping of a ligature to stop the bleeding. But that would do nothing for the pain or the possibility of fever.
D’Artagnan’s salve, if it worked, might keep Athos’s head clear enough to find the murderer in this crime. Not that there was a murderer to find. Or none other than Aramis. Because, how could there be another one? Aramis had been alone with the woman, locked in. And yet Athos refused to believe that Aramis would lie to them.
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