by Karleen Koen
“Do I kill them?” one of the musketeers asked D’Artagnan.
“No! Aid! To our aid!” shouted D’Artagnan.
Hearing it, the musketeers in front of the house, ordered to stay with the king, looked at one another. On Louis’s orders, they’d made no move to stop monks herding distraught boys into the side building of the chapel. Louis dismounted, took his sword from his scabbard, and ran around the side of the house with them, Louise behind.
The sight that met their eyes stopped them for a moment, monks surrounding musketeers, who valiantly deflected the wild downward thrust of rakes and hoes with their swords. Other monks grabbed at swords with bare hands and didn’t seem to mind the gushing blood.
“Cease and desist,” Louis shouted. Could they even hear him over the pealing of that chapel bell? He took his hat from his head so they could see his face plainly. “I order you in my name, Louis, the fourteenth, king and keeper of this kingdom! I order you in the name of all that is holy to desist!”
“It’s the king!” shouted D’Artagnan.
Uncertain, monks stepped back, looked at one another. Hesitantly some began to bow, one or two fell to their knees.
Cinq Mars, who’d brought out saddled horses—he’d kept horses saddled ever since Louise had visited—began a wide run toward the front door of the house, but D’Artagnan moved from the square of musketeers.
“Stop in the name of the king!” he called. And then, “Old friend, it’s me, Charles de Batz-Castelmore d’Artagnan. Stop! Don’t make me kill you!”
“I order you to stop,” Louis called. He had joined D’Artagnan.
Cinq Mars turned to Louis, brought his sword to his forehead in a salute. Then he lunged for D’Artagnan, cutting the musketeer in his side, but the loose tabard made the aim inaccurate, and D’Artagnan was quick enough to fall back so that the wound didn’t disable him. Their swords met in that deadly clang of steel on steel that was serious battle. D’Artagnan inched Cinq Mars backward, the man fighting him like someone gone mad.
“Help him!” ordered Louis.
Other musketeers rushed forward, cutting Cinq Mars on each arm, and in spite of himself, Cinq Mars lowered his sword arm, just as D’Artagnan, his sword at point, pushed hard and deep through Cinq Mars’s chest below his shoulder. Cinq Mars staggered back, and the other musketeers tackled him, dropping him to the ground.
A howl rang out through the chaos. A thin, nearly grown boy with a shocking iron mask upon his face ran into the melee, pulling musketeers off Cinq Mars as if they weighed nothing. D’Artagnan raised his sword, but before he could use it, Louise was there, hanging on his sword arm.
“Don’t hurt him, please!” she cried.
“You mustn’t touch him—” Cinq Mars shouted.
But D’Artagnan’s blade grazed the boy, who gasped in shock and then to everyone’s horror, grabbed the sword with his hands, his fingers quickly reddening. The boy sat down abruptly.
“Enough!” shouted Louis.
“Yes, it’s enough!” cried the abbot of the monastery, who’d been herding the younger boys into the side building of the chapel, but was now here, a sword in his hand. “Obey his majesty!” he ordered.
So, thought Louis, he speaks, but the others remain silent. Louis knelt down to see this youth in an iron mask. Gasping, he lay on his side, but in a sudden, agile movement, the boy shoved Louis with his feet, knocking him backward. In another moment, the boy was surrounded by musketeers, swords all pointing downward, his abdomen their destination.
“Stop!” shouted Louis.
“He can’t understand,” panted Cinq Mars. And then he went silent. Better if they killed him, he thought.
The boy stood. It looked as if he was getting ready to charge, and one by one, musketeers gripped their swords in preparation. But he caught sight of Louise; she’d lost her hat and her hair was loose, out of its pins and on her shoulders. The boy tilted his head to one side. “Mama?” he said.
As if it were the most natural thing in the world, Louise replied, “Yes. Come with me like a good boy, won’t you, my dear?” She stepped toward the boy, reached to touch him, but he stepped back, trembling.
“We’ll go inside,” Louise said, “where it’s quiet. Come with me, dear boy.”
D’Artagnan looked to Louis, who gave a sharp nod of agreement.
As if there weren’t a dozen men and a king watching, half of them ready to pierce him if he made a single, wrong move, the boy followed Louise into the house, down the hall, into a chamber. Louis, his men, the abbot followed.
“Won’t you sit down, my dear one,” Louise said.
Hesitantly, the boy sat in a chair.
“What goes on here?” Louis demanded. No one answered him. “I want the mask taken off,” he ordered.
“He’ll become wild,” said the abbot.
“Will you do the honors?” Louis said to Louise.
Carefully, talking to him all the while, explaining every move she made, Louise began to fumble with unfastening leather straps. Musketeers stood poised in a semicircle, swords drawn.
“Mama,” the boy made the one word a song he repeated over and over. He had begun to rock back and forth so that Louise’s task was difficult.
D’Artagnan walked outside the house to a prone Cinq Mars, surrounded by monks attempting to stanch his wound.
Cinq Mars opened his eyes. “Don’t do this,” he said, enough blood lost that words were difficult for him. “You mustn’t, the cardinal’s orders.”
“The cardinal is dead, my friend.”
“Queen’s orders.”
“I take orders from one man only. His orders stand above all others. So did you, once upon a time.”
“You don’t comprehend—” Cinq Mars stopped speaking, closed his eyes.
D’Artagnan leaned down, felt his chest. A rise and fall, but there was fresh blood on the bandage the monks had made.
“Will he die?” he asked them, but, of course, they didn’t answer. D’Artagnan re-entered the house, walked down the long hall. He could hear the boy’s tuneless, one-word song. How old is he? thought D’Artagnan, estimating ten and three or four years or so. Miss de la Baume le Blanc was still fumbling with the undoing of the mask. Thinking to help, D’Artagnan stepped behind her, but she had the final strap undone, and the mask clattered suddenly to the floor. The boy jerked his arms around his knees and leaned backward in the chair, howling as it fell over.
“Out! Everyone out!” shouted Louis.
D’Artagnan could see amazement and horror on the king’s face.
“Now!” Louis pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes, and to D’Artagnan’s horror, he bent over.
“Out! Out!” screamed Louise, fierce, suddenly as strong as any man around her, pushing at D’Artagnan, at any musketeer still in the chamber. Men obeyed, moving into the hall. She shoved at the lieutenant of the musketeers as if he didn’t make two of her.
“I’m not leaving his majesty!” D’Artagnan said.
Louise ran to Louis, in a crouched position now, hands to his face, weeping as if he’d seen his father fall in a battlefield, the child his wife carried die. And all the while the boy rocked back and forth in his curled position on the floor, rocked back and forth, howling.
D’Artagnan didn’t know what to do. Louise stood before the king holding out her skirts the way a butterfly would its wings, hiding his majesty with them, as if no one, not even his most trusted lieutenant, must see him weep.
“Hush,” she said, but whether it was to the boy or his majesty or to the world at large she spoke, D’Artagnan had no idea. D’Artagnan went to the boy, knelt so he could see the face of this child who had turned their world upside down. Even howling, even thin and half-grown, the boy looked so like the king that he might have been his brother, possibly his twin. The deep-socketed dark eyes, the shape of the proud nose, the full mouth, even the brown, thick hair, matted as it was. Shock filled D’Artagnan, as too many possibilities, too many memories spu
n themselves in his head.
“Who is this?” he asked the world in general and himself.
The question brought Louis to his senses. He stood, wiped his face. “D’Artagnan, put the mask back on,” he ordered.
Louise made a sound, somewhere between a gasp and a cry.
“Leave, now!” Louis told her.
She ran from the chamber. Louis walked to the rocking boy and D’Artagnan.
“He has to be drugged with wine and chamomile and poppy dust,” said a quiet voice.
Louis and D’Artagnan turned. There, against the wall, stood the abbot of the monastery. He hadn’t obeyed Louis’s command to leave the chamber.
“Order it,” said Louis.
The abbot went down the hall, called a name, and after a time a monk appeared in the doorway like a dark shadow, his face strained and white.
“Give him the wine. Replace the mask. See to the cuts the sword made.” Louis walked through the cluster of people knotted in the hall and ordered them all outside. Following, he walked to where Cinq Mars lay on the ground.
“Is he going to die?” Louis asked a monk attending him.
“Not today, majesty.” Cinq Mars spoke in a whisper without opening his eyes. Then he said in a stronger tone, “Did you kill him?”
“No.”
“Better that you had.”
“You owe me some explanations.”
“There is nothing to say, sire.”
“There is everything, and you will begin now. Away with you,” Louis ordered the hovering monk. He knelt down at Cinq Mars’s side. “Open your eyes,” he commanded, his own as hard as two stones. “Now. I command the truth even if you die saying it. My commands take precedence over any other, over my mother, over the cardinal. I am king. How old is he?”
Cinq Mars was silent.
“When did he become your charge?”
Again silence.
“Who are his parents?”
But there was no answer.
D’Artagnan stepped outside, wiping his hands on a huge handkerchief, his mind reeling, pushing far back into long-gone years, when rumors filled the court the way the boy’s howls filled the chamber behind him. Louis turned as D’Artagnan walked to him, and D’Artagnan had never seen an expression like this one on his majesty’s face.
“Take the boy to Pignerol.” It was a fortress across the mountains.
From the ground, Cinq Mars pleaded. “Let me go with him, I beg you, sire. He knows me. He feels safe with me.”
“Certainly you go with him.” Louis’s words were clipped. “Who is the monk who attends him?”
“Father Gabriel,” whispered Cinq Mars.
“The boy, Cinq Mars, Father Gabriel, the abbot, you’re to take them all to Pignerol,” he said to D’Artagnan.
“I can’t leave you,” D’Artagnan replied.
“You not only can, you will. Put your second best man in your place, take your best man and a small troop with you. Once there, lock them all in separate cells.”
They walked back to the house, Louis talking as fast as he walked. “I don’t want them hurt, but I also don’t want them seen by anyone. I don’t want that mask removed from the boy until I send an express order signed with my name and my name alone. I want this monastery disbanded now.”
Only his holiness might order that, thought D’Artagnan, but he knew better than to voice those words.
“Herd all the monks and the boys into the chapel except the abbot. Tell them prayers are required for this day. Lock the doors behind them. Send someone immediately to Fontainebleau and bring back the rest of the Grays. Tell them to bring at least six wagons and three carriages and all the lantern oil and pitch they can put their hands to. They’re to drive, no grooms. It’s to be done quietly, in secret. Count the boys, see how many there are.”
Inside the house, Louis strode to the abbot. “Take me to your chamber.”
In the abbot’s chamber, Louis was as clear and as cold as the chapel bell ringing earlier had been. “How long has he been here?”
The abbot rubbed his eyes tiredly. “Since he was a babe.”
“Who knows he’s here?”
“A great lady.”
“What great lady?”
“She was always masked and cloaked. And his eminence, God rest his soul, sometimes he came.”
“What monks attend him?”
The abbot measured Louis, the hooded eyes, the grim mouth, and said nothing.
“I can simply imprison them all or put them on my galleys in the Mediterranean, where they’ll stay the rest of their lives, with their tongues cut out for safe measure.” Louis’s eyes never left the abbot’s face. When the abbot didn’t answer, Louis stood, slapped a riding glove against one hand with a sharp crack. “You are to remain here until I order differently.”
“God is my commander, sire.”
“I am God’s first liege in this kingdom, and by God, you will do as I say, or you will be the first to row a galley, the first without a tongue! Paper and pen.”
The abbot pointed, and Louis picked them up. Outside, he ordered a waiting musketeer to stand guard at the abbot’s door. “He isn’t to leave,” he told him.
He saw that musketeers were guiding monks into the chapel, boys with them. He went to the house, passing Cinq Mars, who lay still. In the house, the monk called Father Gabriel knelt beside the boy, whose iron mask was strapped back in place. There was an empty cup on the floor, and the boy was still.
“Thank you, Father,” Louis said. “If you’ll go to the chapel now with the others.” Louis said to a musketeer, “Follow him to the chapel. Keep sight of him at all times.”
He found Louise in a nearby chamber, kneeling at a prayer stand, eyes closed. She didn’t turn her head at the sound of his steps, but he’d deal with her later. Right now, he would gladly accept whatever prayers came his way.
“I’ve sent for the rest of the troop,” D’Artagnan told him.
“I want the monks in the Bastille.” Louis was at a table, scratching out words on a paper. “Here’s a lettre de cachet for all of them. Have them taken into Paris as quietly as possible, at night. I want no crowds, no witnesses. The governor of the Bastille is to lock them up, no one else.”
D’Artagnan blinked. A lettre de cachet meant the person jailed went inside without any record of the arrest. It was a way to lose people forever. “And the other children?”
“Give each of them this wine they make for the boy. Take them to the Carmelites in Paris and leave them in their courtyard. Once the rest of the musketeers have arrived, we’ll disperse children and monks to wagons. You’ll have the carriages. I don’t want Cinq Mars and the abbot in the same carriage, nor the boy with either of them, so that means you’ll guide three carriages. I want you in the one with the boy. We’ll put a torch to this place. I don’t want so much as a fence piling left standing, and I don’t care what else burns down around this!”
“Yes, sire.”
D’Artagnan’s mind was reeling. Who was this young man with no hesitation in thought or deed? How many years had it been since there’d been a king with this kind of will, this kind of strength? D’Artagnan had seen the machinations of Richelieu, of Louis XIII, of Mazarin, not to mention the highest in the land, princes and princesses, noblemen and women in that cast of treacherous splendor that fought the power of the crown because they wished to wear it themselves. He thought he’d seen it all. There was a stirring in him, a militant respect. Here now was someone to serve. A young lion. A tiger whose claws were only now unfurling. A hawk who flew high above them all and called down orders from on high. Mary, Mother of God, the kingdom was in for the ride of its life. A sharp, soldier’s pride filled him.
“I watched the monks. They communicate with their hands. Let everyone know. I want no escapes planned. Get a gag around Cinq Mars’s mouth, and keep it there.”
D’Artagnan walked outside to bind Cinq Mars’s mouth himself. The monk attending Cinq Mars frowned, and D�
��Artagnan said, “He’s committed high treason.”
Back in the house, he walked down the hall toward the chamber that held the boy, but he stopped on the threshold because inside, Louis knelt on one knee before the youth, and it was clear he was praying. D’Artagnan stepped back quickly into the hall, crossed himself, and said his own quick prayer to send on high with his majesty’s, and then went back outside to see that everything was in order.
“Look sharp!” he snapped to anyone who crossed his path, his mind going over his majesty’s plan, adding his own improvements. In another few hours, there’d be plenty of loyal hands and keen minds. Before dawn tomorrow, the others would be in Paris. They should stop on the outskirts of Paris and send word to the governor of the Bastille to make ready for them. He’d have his majesty write a letter to the governor now and send a musketeer on his way with it. The boys should be divided among monasteries in Paris, rather than going to one. He’d suggest that to his majesty. Wagons would separate outside the Bastille, the boys in some, the monks in the rest. They would roll into a quiet, hidden courtyard in the bowels of the prison, and the monks would be dispersed like trapped mice. He shuddered. Poor men. The Bastille was a grim place. And there was brandy and wine to save. He recognized the mark on barrels in one of the buildings. It was a fine vintage they made here. That must be loaded onto wagons, too, and lumber back to Fontainebleau.
HOURS LATER, it was begun. Musketeers were everywhere. As the sun set, wagons stood ready to roll toward Paris. The carriages awaited only D’Artagnan’s command to depart. And he would not give it until he saw the wagons on their way. Now, he waited for his majesty to finish his private discussion with the young miss.
Inside the house, Louis questioned Louise, something he’d put off too long. “Have you ever delivered a sealed note to my chambers for someone?”
“Yes. For Madame.”
“Someone other than Madame?”
“No.”
“Has the viscount ever asked you to spy on me?”
“No.”
“Why did you stand in front of me?”
“So that no one should see you weep.”