A Candle For d'Artagnan

by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

  “Would it be better?” He pulled one of the pillows under his side and used it to prop himself over her.

  Her hold on him was broken, but she kept one hand on his lean hip. “Better? How?”

  “Would it seal our love more?” His brown eyes were warm with tenderness. “Would anything serve to do that? Will you tell me?” He ran the tips of his fingers over her face, concentrating on every contour of skin and bone.

  “With all there is between us, you can ask that?” Her eyes pricked, as they had done whenever she desired to weep—tears had been lost to her when she left her tomb, but the need for them remained.

  He bent and kissed the arch of her brow. “I didn’t think so, but I hoped there might be.”

  “Ah,” she said, not quite sighing. “If such things are possible, I have never known of them.” She unhooked her foot from his ankle. “What we have exceeds what most others know.”

  “But if there is more, I want it,” Charles said, bringing his foot around to capture her ankle.

  Olivia swung her free leg over Charles’ back, holding him as if she were in the saddle on a newly broken horse. “And I have compounded it,” she told him with a wistful laugh. “Oh, Charles, you must come back to me. I don’t want to lose you. I’m not ready to lose you.”

  “And I am not ready to lose you, either,” he said emphatically. “Not now, not a year from now, not a decade from now.”

  Her question came unbidden to her lips: “How can you be sure of it?” Once she asked, she wanted to hide from any answer he might offer her.

  “I am sure because I know you,” he said simply. “You are not one of those females who will try all life long to bend and mold herself to the will of her father or husband or son, and you are not one who will demand that her father or husband or son become what she demands they be. You are yourself, and as long as you are yourself, I will love you with all the passion in my soul, with the same passion I give to God and to the Kingdom of France. If I cannot offer myself to them, I have no right to offer myself to you.” He leaned forward and kissed her eyelids. “You have no reason to fear.”

  “You are very young,” Olivia reminded him, hoping that her oblique comment would not distress him.

  “I am not so young as you might think,” he objected. “I am not a pampered child of wealth and privilege who has never done a day’s labor; I have worked the land and defended it since I was old enough to swing an axe or master a horse.” He flopped back against the pillows, his luminous brown eyes on the gathered damask canopy. “It was required of us all; if I had been the oldest son instead of my brother Paul, they would have demanded that I spend more time in the schoolroom, to learn to write for magistrates and nobles, and to do sums. Paul is very good at such things, and he takes great care of Batz-Castelmore as well. While he was writing formal requests, I was learning how to use a sabre, how to throw a dagger, how to handle a lance, how to load and fire a musquet.” He put his hand to his chest. “I don’t mind about the figures, but I am sorry now I did not learn my letters better, so that I could send you notes and poetry while I am away on campaign.” He was suddenly embarrassed. “I have a friend who has sworn he will write for me. But the things I would want to tell you, I am not certain I could speak aloud for him.” He coughed once. “I will try, if that would please you.”

  Olivia took a deep breath. “It would please me very much. And if you would tell me where to find you, I would answer you with notes of my own.”

  Charles waved that suggestion away. “It isn’t wise. You would have to use the Cardinal’s couriers and that might increase danger to us both. Let me use the couriers of the Musqueteers—the notes will not be as swift in delivery, but they will not mark me as one of the Cardinal’s creatures. Which,” he added with a bit more vehemence, “I am not.”

  “No, you are not,” Olivia agreed with him at once. “You are a King’s Musqueteer, new to the service, and you have reason to prove yourself, or so you tell me.” She freed herself from the confusion of their legs. “It shall be as you wish, Charles.”

  “It isn’t what I would wish—I wish I had my own private couriers to carry letters to you every day, and I wish I knew how to write well enough to tell you every day how much I love you and how I miss you. But instead I will arrange for you to receive word from me as often as possible, and I will ask Isaac to write down what I tell him, and hope that I will not suddenly be struck dumb.” He reached out to finger her hair. “Will you give me a lock of this, to wear in a locket around my neck? My sister Claude gave me a locket with a picture of Saint Michel on it, with room for a lock of hair. I haven’t worn it—until now, I thought it was silly.”

  “I’ll give you a lock of my hair,” said Olivia, and was startled to realize that she had bestowed such a token only three times in the past. Not since that Sardinian troubador, three hundred years ago had she even considered such a gift.

  “What are you thinking?” Charles asked, seeing some ghost of her memories on her face.

  “I was hoping you would not regret your choice,” she said, assuaging her misgivings by realizing it was close enough to the truth: so many times before those who had come to her life had discovered that it was not what they had anticipated; sooner or later, they had given it up. For most of them, their end had been at least partially welcome.

  “Is that all?” Charles persisted.

  “No,” she admitted, “but the rest would mean little to you.” She was staring toward the window, noticing how much higher the sun had risen while they had been wrapped in each other’s arms.

  Charles sighed. “I pray you will decide to tell me about your reservations, someday.” Suddenly he gave her shoulder a gentle slap. “Come. I must eat and leave.”

  “How uncivil,” said Olivia, managing to smile in spite of her renewed apprehension at his leaving.

  “It is, isn’t it?” he agreed cheerfully as he got out of bed. “But if you will hurry, you may watch me leap onto my horse and dash off to join my regiment.” He had gathered up his breeches, but before pulling them on once more, he gave her a long, intense stare. “I don’t want to go.”

  “I wish you didn’t have to, as well,” Olivia said as she rose more sedately. She took her night rail from the chair near the bed and draped it around her shoulders.

  “You know that nothing is dearer to me than my honor,” Charles said, in a deep, steady tone that Olivia had heard only once before. “But if you were to ask it, I would give it up, and gladly, to have your love.”

  It took a short while before Olivia trusted herself to answer. “Well, then you are fortunate, for I would never ask that of you, Charles. And if I did, my love would be worth less than the dust on the road.”

  His smile was faint but the glint was back in his eyes. “Touche, my beloved.” With that, he went back to dressing, and the things they said were simple, inconsequent comments, less painful and dangerous than the turmoil each stirred in the other.

  Text of a letter from Cardinal Jules Mazarin to his second cousin Gennaro Colonna, now with the Spanish forces in Mexico. Written in French.

  To my errant kinsman now in the New World, your cousin in France sends greetings, and the hopes that his prayers will aid with those of others to bring you once again to honor and Grace, for the reputation of our family and the triumph of our religion.

  You have informed me in your most recent letter that you have encountered nothing but the most heathen of savages, all of them decked out in gold and jewels and flaunting their false gods in the face of the Christian monks and priests who have come to teach them the ways of Christ. I have read other reports that show some of the same observations, but without the consequences of your own impressions. Your sense of frustration at the lack of faith on the part of these heathen, and their lack of Grace, is understandable enough, and if that were all your message, I would rejoice and inform our relatives that at last you have set your feet on the true path and have started the journey that must ultimately
lead to the salvation of your soul and the restoration of your position within the family. But, sadly, you do not stop there. You are not content to observe those who are obdurate in their resistance to the teachings of Christ, and the tranquility of soul that comes with acquiescence in the Will of God, which is the reward on earth given to true Christians. You give it as your opinion that since these heathen are not won to the cause of Christ and are not willing to bow down to the Cross, that they are therefore unworthy of anything but the most unforgiving treatment, and any sort of degradation that you and your companions, as soldiers of the True Faith, can mete out to them for their obstinate refusal to accept Christ.

  For the sake of all the Saints, why should they, those poor, ignorant savages, accept the promise of salvation and paradise when you, who carry His banner, treat them as you would hesitate to treat animals. Your letter describes—with hideous pride—the way in which you violated the women of a chieftain’s family, and then killed them all by pulling out their intestines and nailing them to the floor. This is not the act of a good Christian soldier, and certainly not the act of one who professes to accept the laws of Christ as binding on his own fate. This is an overwhelming denial of the very nature of the Word of Christ, which is postulated on peace and love in His Name. To cause such terrible carnage shows a complete lack of respect for the oath you have taken as a soldier fighting in the name of the Christian King of Spain and the Church. You say that this was not the only incident, but the most recent, and therefore the one you have most knowledge of. You say that without such acts the heathen will not be subdued to the Christian faith. You claim that the fact that these are heathen excuses everything you do, but I cannot and I do not agree with you. You have taken the teachings of Christ and perverted them to your own nefarious purpose, making them worse than the most intolerable behavior of Nero and other debauched Emperors before the salvation of Christ found its heart in Rome.

  I will offer you this homily in the fervent hope that it will create within you some understanding of the enormity of your trespasses against the Holy Spirit, and will stand you in good stead in future when you are tempted to indulge again in those excesses you have described and have not repented of, either in the act itself, nor in the sins that drove you to such atrocious errors.

  There was a man who had lived all his life in disfavor, with his family and with his God. He was not a bad man, if badness is measured by the ferocity of his sins, but he was one who viewed the world and those around him with contempt; he respected no one and nothing in this world, and feared nothing in the next. He was thought to be a man without conscience by those who had cause to work with him, and as a hardened sinner by those who heard of him from others. He cared nothing for their thoughts of him, and when questioned on the matter, he said he was well-content to live alone and thus be freed from the company of rogues and fools. He was so unwilling to enter into the society of his city and his family that he chose to live away from them, and to regard them as nothing more than travelers, with no obligation or claim shared with them greater than their human necessities, which for him did not include love, honor, or religion. It was his contention that to have friends was to have liabilities, and to have family was to have constant unjustified demands made on him. When he learned that his father had disowned him and taken away his inheritance, the man was amused for it justified his vexation with the world. He declared that he had had nothing from his father while the man lived and it was nothing to him that he was disowned.

  Think of this unfortunate being, my cousin, and apply his lamentable actions to your own life. Before I continue with the tale, I wish you will take the time to review your own statements and letters which are not unlike the contentions of this most unhappy mortal. You may think that there is nothing to see, but I assure you that there is, and I am convinced that you have fallen into the same terrible trap as this fellow did. If you are able to discern the similarities, then hear the end of this unhappy story, and profit by it. You have said that you do not wish to be read lessons and that you have seen enough of the world to know what is what, but I, as your affectionate cousin, cannot agree with you.

  Let me continue with this narrative, with renewed implorations that you read what is here as being for your benefit, a timely warning—albeit an unwelcome and unsolicited one—given to one of my own blood who appears to be willing to damn himself forever as a gesture of pique.

  The man, the fellow I have mentioned who cared so little for his fellow man, was rumored to have wealth hidden in his house. Because he kept few servants and did not pay them well or treat them with respect, two of them were willing to speak of their master with strangers who accosted them in a local inn. They revealed, for the price of a small meal and two tankards of wine, that they had never seen the treasure their master was supposed to possess but had never been given any information by him that it did not. They were venal enough to accept a small bribe to inform these strangers of the best way into the man’s house, and then, being full of food and wine, wended their way back to their master’s house smug in the knowledge that they had at last some profit for their dealings with the man.

  The strangers were, of course, thieves, and desperate men, who two nights later broke into the house and began to search for the treasure they wished to find. The man had only three servants who slept in the house itself, the others being required to stay in the farmers’ houses of his estate, and these three were quickly overwhelmed by the robbers. Had their master shown them more regard and thereby sealed their loyalty, it might have gone otherwise, for it was apparent that his servants were not much moved to protect him. So it was that the robbers plundered through the house, searching for the treasure said to be hidden there. When none was found, the robbers determined to extract the location from the man who owned the estate, and they took up the task with skill and determination. First they bound him and hit his ankles with metal rods, demanding that the man tell them where he had hidden his gold. It was useless for the man to protest that he had none, that his father had left him none, and that he was of a solitary nature and not merely a miser. The robbers, as is often the case with such violent men, did not believe him, and so worked greater harm on his flesh, culminating in blinding him. Then they set fire to the house, so great was their disappointment and anger at not discovering the gold they were sure was hidden there.

  So the man was now without any property, he was crippled from the blows to his ankles, and he was blind. In vain he called for his servants, who had fled upon the arrival of the robbers. No aid had been summoned on his behalf, no one had come to help him when he had cried out. He might have died in the fire that consumed the house but that the robbers had left one door open and the man was able to drag himself out of it. Once beyond the door, he collapsed, and it was there he woke in the morning, quite alone. None of his servants returned to aid or succor him. When he hauled his maimed body to the nearest church, he was turned away from there because of his apostasy, and the monks of the monastery had no place for him when he at last reached their portals. They promised to pray for him, as they had always done in the past, but they could offer him no shelter and no food, for he had disavowed the company of those in the true faith of God.

  So this maimed and ruined man was left to be a beggar on the road, without shelter or aid. His relatives, after a few attempts to find him, abandoned the search and brought the man’s nephews to work his land and rebuild his house. They revered his memory as one dead to them already and they strove not to speak ill of him; in consequence they spoke very little of him at all. The man knew suffering without end and distress beyond imagining because he turned from those who would have been his staunch support in his ordeal, and he mocked the very soul of charity, so that it was no longer available to him. When he died he was left to rot in a ditch, and wild dogs fed on the flesh of his carcass while his soul descended to Hell, to the ministrations of devils more cruel and cunning than the robbers had ever been. His prayers were usele
ss then, for he had not repented and God no longer had jurisdiction over his soul.

  I pray that you will come to your senses in time to keep from treading the same road this unfortunate man trod. I beg you to think of your soul and the souls of those as yet unconverted, for they are as much in your hands as are the souls of innocent children who entrust you to bring them protection from evil. You will find no profit in what you do, and you will not thrive if you continue in this way. I urge you to seek the advice of the priests who accompany you and to act upon their recommendations, for that way is the road to salvation and the preservation of your life.

  This letter will be carried to you by Frey Andreas on the Sagrada Familia which departs for the New World on the 22nd day of July, the Feast of Marie Madelaine; it would do well for you to remember her in your thoughts and your devotions, for she was guilty of far more serious sins than you have committed—or so I trust—and was absolved of all of them when she undertook to live a virtuous life. Consider how grievous her trespasses were, and how exalted she is now. You are not incorrigible unless you will make no effort to improve yourself. God will lend you His strength if you will but ask for it. That is the promise which His Son won for all of us with His precious Blood. Do not spurn it, cousin, and never despise it, as you have professed once to do. That Blood was shed for you, and your soul is as much a treasure in Heaven as that of the holiest monks and nuns. Repent your past sins and resolve to sin no more; God will welcome you with the blessed if you will truly put your errors behind you. Mere Marie will intercede for you if you will ask it in her Son’s Name. How can I tell you what joy it would bring to me to learn that you had put your past behind you? It is always in my thoughts.

  With all my prayers and all my hope that you will turn from your disastrous course and establish yourself with the righteous and the blessed, I send you my blessing.