“Do you think that’s likely?” Porthos asked, resting one huge hand upon the table. “I presume you knew the man well enough to guess that.”
Athos inclined his head. “It would not be possible for the man I knew, but some years have passed. People change.”
“Indeed,” D’Artagnan said thinking how much he, himself had changed since he’d come to Paris full of high flung hopes and his father’s instructions to obey the Cardinal and the King equally.
“So,” Athos said, and sighed. “I shall borrow horses from Monsieur de Treville. Having been wounded this morning, I think I’m justified in taking a few days for my recovery. I shall go and see Raoul and study how much he’s changed. I’ll be back in a week.”
“You are not going alone,” Porthos said.
“I believe I must,” Athos said. “You must stay behind and get to know all the maids in the palace. Even for a man of your excellent talents, such a work should take at least a week.”
“But—” Porthos said, “If by chance her husband did murder her, and if he perceives your intentions in visiting him, he might try to kill you also. You cannot go alone.”
“I believe I must,” Athos repeated.
And once more, as he had many times in the past month, D’Artagnan felt as though he were invisible, as if his friends could not see him and would not dream of taking him into account in their plans.
Oh, he did not hold it against them or not exactly. He knew that for years there had been three inseparables, in feasting and fighting, in duel and field of battle. The three leaned on each other without thinking, as a man leaned on his own legs and counted on them to support his weight. To add a fourth to that number must feel as strange as adding a third leg.
At least D’Artagnan hoped that was it. He was not so foolish that he hadn’t perceived, in their investigation of the last murder, that there were secrets his friends kept from all—even each other. Perhaps Athos was afraid that by accompanying him D’Artagnan would penetrate the secret of Athos’s identity? But surely, D’Artagnan had gone a long way towards that with the last murder they’d solved. And he had spoken to no one about it. Not even to Porthos or Aramis. Surely Athos remembered that act of loyalty?
At any rate, D’Artagnan felt he must speak. “Athos,” he said, very quietly. “I am sure I can visit Monsieur des Essarts and let him know that I must accompany you on your trip for your health. Monsieur de Treville will vouch for all of us. Oh, he’ll know we’re all helping Aramis in some way, but he will not refuse us his help. You know he values Aramis.”
Athos frowned at D’Artagnan through this speech. Almost before D’Artagnan was done speaking, Porthos thundered his fist down on the table, making table and floor shake. “Sangre Dieu,” he said. “That’s it. The boy must go with you. He’s almost a child, still—” Porthos flashed D’Artagnan a smile, as though aware of the wound he was causing to the young guard. “But he’s the devil himself with a sword and he’s almost as devious as Aramis. With him by your side, I shall not worry.”
“But that leaves you alone in town,” Athos said.
“Oh, I know how to take care of myself,” Porthos said, and twirled the end of his red moustache. He grinned, a devil-may-care grin. “Look, Athos, most of the court thinks me too thick and too slow of mind to pose any threat in this type of case. They will think that Aramis is plotting something, and that you and D’Artagnan have been called to him. Me? I shall pass unnoticed.”
The idea that someone could not notice the redheaded giant struck D’Artagnan as laughable, and yet he knew exactly what Porthos meant. He had seen that attitude himself. People tittered behind their hands at Porthos, and laughed at his utterances as they would never dare do to either of the other musketeers. They didn’t seem to realize that Porthos’s lack of interest in discussions or philosophy, his inability or disinterest in complex plots, did not mean he lacked wit or sense.
“Well,” Athos said. He looked D’Artagnan over, appraisingly. “Certainly you’ve given proof of your trustworthiness in the last month.” He extended his hand to the young man. “I shall be pleased with your company. Meet me at Monsieur de Treville’s this evening, after you make your arrangements. I shall borrow horses for us and for Grimaud and Planchet. They must all be swift horses, for our servants must keep up with us.”
D’Artagnan shook Athos’s hand. The left one, he noted. And thought perhaps Athos was at least half-serious at going away to recover. D’Artagnan didn’t think his friend could easily fight another duel like today’s. “We shall meet here tonight, then,” he said.
The Prodigal Musketeer; French Manners and Spanish Mourning; Regrets of Exile
THE sun was setting when Aramis reached his ancestral domains. The D’Herblay lands were neither very extensive nor very prosperous, but rather in both struck that happy medium that Greek philosophers held to be the mark of all virtue.
Aramis approached it from the North, coming in past vast fields and farms that other families tenanted for the D’Herblays. The age of the houses, all stone and some covered in ivy, attested to the age of the domain which, Aramis’s mother said, had been in the family since the time of Charlemagne. The first D’Herblay had been a companion of that great king.
Aramis wondered if it was all now to end with the scion of the house being executed as a murderer, and he had to avert his eyes and keep them upon the road. He didn’t see, nor want to see whether the workers on the fields recognized or noticed his passing.
He rode looking on the beaten-dirt road until he found himself riding through his mother’s extensive orchards, wreathed in bloom and leaf for the beginning of spring. After the effluvium of Paris, the smell of ripening fruit and flowers hit Aramis like a return to childhood. As a boy, he’d run through these orchards and hid in the branches from Bazin’s searching eyes. Even back then Bazin, a good ten years older than Aramis, had fixed on Aramis as his pass into a monastery. And that, perforce, meant he must enforce upon the child a virtue that Aramis was little inclined to take upon himself.
Then upon these thoughts came the memory of the last tree Aramis had climbed, or rather descended, and he rubbed at his arms, where the scratches were still visible, and sighed. Perhaps it would have been better for him if he’d listened to Bazin in those early, apple-stealing days.
He walked his horse, apace, between the trees. Here and there he caught glimpses of men and women among the trees. They all stopped and watched him pass. Was this, then how the prodigal came home? Wasn’t he supposed to be in tatters? And yet wasn’t his heart, even now, metaphorically in tatters?
Bazin caught up with him. Though—speed being needed—Aramis had made sure that Bazin had his own horse, as fast as Aramis’s own, Bazin always fell behind. Truth was, with his rotund build, the man was made to ride a mule and made the nervous Arabian buckle. Or perhaps the servant felt that it was not proper to ride side by side with his master.
In either case, he now dragged alongside Aramis and said, “I never expected to see this again.”
And Aramis, his eyes filled with beauty, his mind streaming with thoughts of his happy childhood said, “You didn’t?” in some surprise.
Bazin shook his head. His thin lips were set in disapproval, his eyes half closed in disdain. “I thought we’d be in a monastery by now, happy in the service of the Lord,” Bazin said.
“And you never thought to visit the domains again?” Aramis asked.
Bazin shook his head, while his closed-tight mouth mirrored his disapproval of what he would no doubt call the allure of the world.
Aramis shook his head in turn, not understanding Bazin. Bazin was the son of prosperous tenants on the D’Herblay lands, and his father had sometimes served as the elder Monsieur D’Herblay’s valet. Aramis, himself, as a child, had often visited the home of Bazin’s parents, where he’d been feted and petted by Bazin’s mother. He couldn’t imagine what his servant’s complaints about such an upbringing might be that made him not wish to see the dom
ain again.
But now they’d left the orchards behind and rode into what his mother pleased to call the park, but which was really nothing but large gardens, set with some old statues and a few stones disposed such as made them suitable to sit upon. The abundance of prey for hunting and the ornamental fountains of other, more prosperous parks quite eluded the D’Herblays. There was a fountain, in truth, but too old and blunted by time to look in any way ornamental.
And yet, the park, such as it was, held a thousand tumultuous memories for Aramis. There, behind that rock, he had stolen his first kiss—from a giggling, fresh-faced farmer’s girl. And there, where the oak tree spread its branches, sheltering the clearing around it from prying eyes which might peer from the upper stories of the house, he’d beheld his first naked . . . Well, girl. No one could call Yvette a woman, considering that at the time neither she nor Aramis had passed the magical age of ten. She was the daughter of one of his mother’s friends and, truth be told, he’d found the whole experience rather unexciting. Her body, naked, looked just like his—skinny and muscular, the legs scratched by tree climbing and the mishaps of childhood. She’d looked at his naked body—his undressing, too, being the payment she’d demanded for her lack of modesty—and made a rude comment about that part of his anatomy which differed from hers. And Aramis had been so shocked and offended that he’d taken off running, out of the clearing, quite forgetting he was in fact naked. Which transgression had earned him his mother’s disapproval and, at her order, a thrashing from Bazin.
Aramis smiled at the memory and at the one that came on the heels of it. The same Yvette, five years later, when her body had been not at all like his own and when she hadn’t found so much to laugh at in his anatomy.
“Rene!” said a person that had been bent over in a clump of flowers and grass to the left of the road—while Aramis’s fond memories held his gaze pinned to the right.
“Maman,” Rene D’Herblay said. Indeed it was the only word that would come to his lips. The Chevalier’s mother, Madame D’Herblay, was still a beautiful woman. She’d been born in Spain and from hence came her obsessive religion and her taste for ornate crucifixes.
However, her hair was that Titian gold that was known to fascinate painters and she’d been brought up in France, having early on been summoned by the D’Herblay family, so she could be brought up by her prospective mother-in-law in all the habits of the house. As such, her voice betrayed no taint of a Spanish accent as she said, “Rene, here? Without warning?”
“Maman,” D’Herblay said again, his mouth going dry. His mother had always dressed with severe modesty. At least since Rene could remember. Of course, since D’Herblay’s father had died when the Chevalier was still a toddler, that meant he didn’t remember his mother in anything but the severest black.
In the five years he’d been away, he’d expected some change. He wasn’t sure he expected it in this direction, though. Madame D’Herblay had augmented her normal mourning by adopting all but a nun’s habit. And not the habit of those nuns that lived near enough the court for their convents to hold soirees and salons.
No. Madame D’Herblay would not cater to such fripperies. Instead, she’d enveloped her head in a voluminous black cloth, from beneath which only a few straggles of reddish blond hair peeked. And her figure, which had still been quite youthful enough five years ago, had been wrapped in a formless black dress. The only jewelry she wore was a silver cross, the smaller replica of the one that D’Herblay had left behind at his lodgings.
She’d been bent, and weeding amid her roses—a pastime of which she’d always been fond. She stood, a bunch of weeds in each hand, their roots thick and tangled with dirt. “Rene,” she said again, and this time D’Herblay managed not to answer. She took a deep breath. “We thought you dead.”
To this, the Chevalier could only shake his head, because how could it be true? His mother had surely received the twice annual letters he sent her. He knew that sometimes she sent money, though she sent it to Bazin to dispense as needed and only to those needs she’d recognize—food, not wine, plain shirts, not embroidered ones, rosaries, not jewelry.
But he could not protest. Madame D’Herblay wiped her hands on her black dress, leaving streaks of brown across the black surface. “But no matter. You’re here now and we shall rejoice.”
She came near his horse, and waited while he dismounted, and offered her cheek to his kissing lips. Her cheek felt dry and powdery, not like human flesh at all, but more like the relic of some saint. The Chevalier felt the reverence he always did near his mother and, as always, was surprised anew that she was shorter than himself by a good head. In his memory she always grew to towering proportions and stood there, majestic and impassive, disapproving of all his choices and decisions.
As soon as he had kissed her, Madame D’Herblay turned and headed towards the house. Aramis followed, leading his horse, and heard the huffing and puffing behind himself that denoted that Bazin too had dismounted and was leading his horse.
At the end of the path it opened and widened to a cobbled patio in front of the house. The house itself was severe, almost plain—if anything five stories high, a hundred feet wide, and built of dark grey stone could ever be considered plain. But it lacked all the carving and other fripperies that other noble houses sported. The only carving, the only ornamentation, were monumental gargoyles sitting on each corner of the roof. Aramis remembered their spouting water in storms, the music of the waterfall near his window.
There, without the lady his mother saying anything or having to raise her voice to call them, two stable boys materialized, one on each side, and took the leads of Aramis’s and Bazin’s horses. Madame herself led them all the way up the curving steps to the house door. At the top, Aramis realized that Bazin had left—presumably to enter the house through some other doorway reserved for servants. That he felt Bazin’s absence as a loss and wished his servant would come back surprised him.
But the feeling as he went into the front hall didn’t surprise him at all. The hall of the D’Herblay house was tall and narrow, tiled in black and white. The walls, covered in dark red velvet, were hung with the portraits of great and noble ancestors, glaring down, in their warrior poses— swords strapped at waist—with a look of disapproval at his wasted life, his plebeian disguise.
The Chevalier felt an all too familiar sense of having entered a prison. A quiet prison, where only virtuous thoughts would be allowed.
To the left of the hall, a locked door, heavily paneled in oak, led to what had been Aramis’s father’s study.
That room he’d never entered. On two signal occasions, at his insistence, his mother had opened the door and shown him a small room with a desk, a chair and a shelf filled with red-leather bound volumes, all of it covered in dust. Apparently Madame D’Herblay, shocked at her husband’s sudden death, had decreed that this room never again be used nor, indeed, touched.
“Rejoice,” Madame D’Herblay said to the empty hall, or perhaps to the servants who, if they were wise, were lurking in the shadows waiting for her slightest command. “For this son of mine was dead and now he’s alive, he was lost but now he’s found.”
Aramis swallowed hard and reached for what remained of his wit and thought within the terrified mind of the Chevalier D’Herblay. He chuckled, a sound that echoed hollow in the immense hall. “You mean to tell me you shall kill the fatted calf, madame?” he asked.
But Madame D’Herblay only turned around to fix her errant son with a withering glare. “A calf? On a Friday? I wouldn’t dream of it.”
The Chevalier D’Herblay sighed. He had come back home.
Kitchen Wenches and Maids; Food for Thought; A Musketeer’s Loyalty
PORTHOS had never gone to the palace kitchens by himself. Oh, sometimes when it was cold and he’d stood guard too long, he’d sent his servant, Mousqueton, there, for a bit of wine, a bite of meat.
After all, Porthos was a musketeer, a gentleman of the sword. He had been
received by his majesty himself, and he was often chosen to guard the royal family. He should not be seen consorting with mere servants.
Besides which, Porthos had long run a deception on all his comrades as well as his closest friends. Proud of his clothes, his weapons, his noble ancestors, Porthos knew he cut a fine figure of a man. He knew he should be consorting with princesses, reading poetry to duchesses and, generally, holding up his place within the nobility. It was neither his fault nor his intention to admit that noblewomen bored him to tears. They talked of lace and silk, of who had danced with whom at the last royal ball—but, most of what they talked about was gossip. The not so subtly disguised venom in their descriptions of their fellow courtiers made Porthos feel queasy and, quickly, tired of their company.
Give him peasant girls, anytime, with their clean laughter, their simple jokes and their wish to make the giant feel happier by feeding him and cosseting him.
He blamed it all on his childhood in his parents’ abode, when he’d consorted mostly with the farmers, who admired him for his strength and size. From there to falling in love with their daughters had been a step. In fact it had been such an unequal romance that had caused his father to send Porthos to Paris, in search of fortune—and away from an impudent, doe-eyed farmer’s daughter who had dared dream of becoming Lady du Vallon.
But now Porthos had a legitimate reason to haunt the palace kitchens. He’d promised his friends he’d find out about passages. He took a deep breath, and twirled his moustache. He’d dressed as if he were about to pay a visit to a duchess, in the finest silk shirt, an embroidered velvet doublet and over breeches embroidered in a matching pattern of gilded flowers. In this garb, he’d stood guard, getting very odd looks from people who went in and out of the palace. Granted, the uniform of musketeer wasn’t mandatory, yet most people wore it, or at least wore the tunic and the hat. And very few of them stood guard in clothing more appropriate to a royal soiree.
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