the musketeer's seamstress

by Sarah D'almeida

  Athos’s sword had no more than gleamed in the dim light, the dusty air, than there was a scurry and scuffle, and the noise of several men scrambling, prudently, down the stairs.

  This gave Dlancey and Fasset the chance to take a step back, and Bagot the chance to stand, solidly facing Athos, even if from a lower rung on the stairs. To his credit, Bagot looked not scared but annoyed, as though he were an accountant whose sums refused to come quite right. “Ventre saint gris,” he said. “You are a madman. You—”

  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, w
ho 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

  THE 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.

  Could Aramis kill the woman he loved? Why not? Others before him had. Athos himself . . . Athos stopped the image of his dead wife from surfacing in his mind. And yet . . . and yet, though he could believe Aramis capable of murder, he couldn’t believe him capable of deceiving his friends.

  Oh, truth be told, Athos himself had never told his friends of his crime, his dark, secret remorse. But the crime had happened long before he met even Aramis or Porthos, much less D’Artagnan. And he’d asked for their help with neither cover-up nor expiation, both of which he was managing on his own, though perhaps not as well as he would like to.

  But once they were friends and bonded as closely as brothers, Athos could not imagine any of them keeping a secret from the others. It was impossible. Aramis would have confessed to his transgression as he asked for help. He would have given his reason for the murder. And he would be sure as one could be sure of eventual death that his friends would stand by him no matter what his crime, stand as ready to save his neck in guilt as in innocence.

  No, it was a puzzle without solution, Athos thought, as he followed the others—who’d taken his silence for acquiescence—along the narrow warren of roads that led to the working-class street in which D’Artagnan rented lodgings. And yet there was nothing for it but to try to solve it, the three of them—none of whom was particularly well suited to the solving of mysteries. And Aramis was their man in the court, the one who knew duchesses and consorted with countesses.

  How was Athos, who was all but a recluse, going to do such a thing? And what were the chances of D’Artagnan, still new in town and a guard of Monsieur des Essarts—not even a musketeer—gaining entrance to the court? As for Porthos . . . Athos looked towards his friend who appeared both intent and worried, as if trying to solve some difficult puzzle and sighed. Porthos had trouble enough imagining anyone could lie, much less unraveling a duplicitous plot. It was all hopeless.

  But at that moment they had reached D’Artagnan’s home and D’Artagnan unlocked the door. “Planchet will be out
,” he said. “He said he needed to shop for food.”

  Planchet being D’Artagnan’s servant, Athos supposed his absence made their conversation all the more private.

  They climbed the staircase to D’Artagnan’s apartment, which was more spacious than Aramis’s, though in a less fashionable area of town. The entrance room sprawled large and was lit by two sunny windows that let the morning sun fall upon a broad table and a set of benches that D’Artagnan had got who knew where.

  This was the accustomed council of war headquarters, where the musketeers and their friend discussed whatever occupied their minds at the moment. Porthos and Athos fell, wordlessly, into their accustomed seats, on either side of the table, while D’Artagnan went within for his ancestral salve.

  While he was gone, Athos unlaced his doublet and pulled it off, then rolled his shirt sleeve up to reveal a jagged, deep wound on his forearm, just above his elbow.

  “The devil,” Porthos said. “That does not look like a scratch.”

  D’Artagnan, returning with salve and a roll of clean white linen said nothing. He merely set it on the table, beside Athos. “Do you wish to bandage it, or shall I?” he asked.

  Athos shrugged. “I will need your help to tie the bandage,” he said. Left unsaid, but implied, was that he would prefer not to have anyone touch him unless it were strictly needed. Much as he disliked to admit it, any touch, any human touch at all, made him think of betrayal and mockery. He’d learned to be contained within himself and, in himself, contain all his own needs. Without another word, he started slathering the salve on his wound. The yellow green paste smelled of herbs and felt curiously soothing to the skin. It stopped the bleeding on contact.

  “One thing I don’t understand,” Porthos said, while Athos was occupied at this task. He took a deep breath, like a man venturing onto unfamiliar waters. “Are we sure that this duchess was the woman Aramis called his seamstress? How could she be a duchess when she’s just the niece of his theology teacher?”