Athos considered this a moment and realized he could not argue with Monsieur de Treville’s words. If it was true that someone had been so powerful as to strike Madame de Dreux through such underhanded means, surely he would be able to dispose of a musketeer and a guard traveling with their servants along country roads. He bowed to Monsieur de Treville’s superior wisdom and took the proffered leather purse as well. His funds were low, since he’d had a run of damnable luck at cards. “I will pay it back,” he said.
Monsieur de Treville allowed a smile to slide across his lips. “Athos, I would never doubt it.”
They bowed to their captain, and left, to the stables at the back where Grimaud and Planchet already waited with four horses.
No more than a breath later, they were crossing Paris, towards the road to Dreux. Newly awakened to the dangers of their journey, to the fact that if Aramis was innocent, then perforce someone else must be guilty, someone capable of great cunning and greater ruthlessness, Athos scanned the road and the upper stories.
And bridled, reigning in his horse as he noticed a knot of people ahead of him. There was a great press of apprentices and women, and others who could either legitimately be idle at this time of day or else who could legitimately be outdoors, pretending to be busy. At the edges of the crowd, at the back, street urchins pushed and shoved trying to get in.
One of those urchins noticed the two men on horseback, and came running back, to Athos’s horse. “I’ll show you a way around through the backstreets Monsieur.”
“Thanks,” Athos said. “But I know my way around Paris.” And, seeing the urchin’s great disappointment, he fished for a small coin from his sleeve pouch, and threw it at the boy. “What is the disturbance?”
The boy caught it midair, and looked at it, glinting in his palm, then flashed Athos a brief, feral grin. “It’s the acrobats,” he said. “Somersault artists and jugglers and tightrope walkers.”
Athos blinked. Such troupes were a nuisance. They came from who knew where and they left without warning. And their acrobatic abilities were often put to the use of cunning thefts. But the people would like them.
Looking attentively, he could see, ahead, the briefest glimmer of cloth, the slightest shimmer of silk. They dressed like kings and queens, too, these street performers, though often their clothes were threadbare and the supposed gold only so much painted glitter.
“Come D’Artagnan,” he told his friend. “I know a way around.”
D’Artagnan shook himself, as though waking. He’d been staring mesmerized into the crowd and Athos wondered if the young man wanted to watch the performers. D’Artagnan was, after all, little more than a boy and had come from some miserably forsaken village in Gascony. For him this poor show might be as entrancing as a royal ball.
But Athos could not find a way to ask his friend if he wanted to stay and watch without insulting the youth. So, he made sure that D’Artagnan was following, and then rode his horse apace through a maze of narrow streets, until they’d done a full circle and emerged again on the relatively large main street which had the width to allow two carriages to pass one by the other.
There, Athos spurred his horse to a trot and heard D’Artagnan catch up, behind him. Planchet and Grimaud’s horses’ hooves echoed still farther behind.
Cooks and Maids and the Secrets of the Fire; The Distinct Advantages of an Abundant Moustache and an Appreciation for Simple Pleasures
PORTHOS startled at the cook’s yell at him. He blinked at her, surprised, not used to being addressed by women in anything but an endearing tone. “I came,” he said, as the lie occurred to him almost without his thinking. “In search of my servant, a thieving scoundrel, about this size.” He pantomimed with his hand. “And about this wide, with abundant moustaches and a talent for the fast hand swipe.”
“Ah,” the cook said. “Mousqueton. He’s a scoundrel that one. Faster than a cat and twice as sneaky, for all his size. Why, just last week he made off with a whole chicken, freshly roasted.”
There was something Porthos—who had enjoyed the chicken quite well and thought of it with only the slightest hint of remorse—knew well enough from observing those around him. And that was that two people with a common grievance about the same person would soon find themselves on the way to friendship. And from what he could see, from the way the kitchen noises seemed to have hushed up at the woman’s speaking, this was the person in whose graces to be in the kitchen. Either she was the head cook or the one who had seized the authority in the absence of any other contender. In either case, it mattered not. In this kind of environment she would be the sole authority and appeased as such.
He removed his hat and bowed to her, trying to look meek and yet roguish for it was his experience that meek men never interested women very much, while roguish ones never had their full confidence. Trying to strike a happy medium, he held his plumed hat to his chest and bowed. “Ah, madame,” he said. “You have my condolences, for it’s not the first time the rascal has made away with my own belongings. Surely you noted how he wore gold buttons and lace. Well, such disappear from my chests all the time.”
The cook nodded. “And how come you tolerate the rascal?”
“Ah,” he lied happilly. “It was a promise I made his mother who was my mother’s favorite maid. I told her I would look after Mousqueton and keep him from the gallows.” He sighed, one of his big, contrite sighs.
The woman’s eyes softened. “I have a brother,” she said. “Who is exactly like that. And I wish I could find him as kind a master.”
“So my rascal comes here often?” Porthos said.
“Often and often.” The woman nodded. “He always says he needs the food for his master.” She ran her gaze appreciatively across the breadth of Porthos gold-cloak bedecked shoulders and down his silk-bedecked muscular chest. “As if you’d need it.”
Porthos shook his head in empathy.
“Come on down,” the cook said. “Sit down with me, and we’ll talk about it.”
Porthos walked down the stairs, and, with the cook, sat at a broad table far from the fire and near the door. The cook twitched and made minimal gestures and in no time at all a fresh-faced country wench deposited two mugs of red wine in front of them.
It occurred to Porthos that this cook, like Athos, had worked out a system of signals by which means she commanded her subordinates. But then, he thought, listening to the din of knives and spits, of roaring fire and screaming women, how else was she to command them, but with gestures?
He sipped the wine, as the cook spoke again. “I don’t suppose you have a friend looking for a servant? One who would use the same consideration to my brother that you use for your Mousqueton? My brother he’s not bad you see . . . he’s only . . . well, he doesn’t understand why he shouldn’t have the finer things of life that others have, and it upsets him. He’s a good boy, but weak.”
Porthos nodded and sighed. “So is Mousqueton,” he said. Though his conscience reproached him for telling a falsehood. Truth be told, with his servant it was always more a matter of seeing what he could possibly get away with, what he could abscond with right from beneath observer’s noses. Meanwhile Porthos, taking a sip of the wine and finding it of better quality than he expected, was trying to frame a way to ask the woman about secret passages in the palace.
His instinct was to come right out and blurt it, of course, ask her about the famed secret passages of the palace. But even Porthos was not so direct or so trusting in the simplicity of life as to plunge headlong into that subject.
Instead, he chose to take a detour and approach it by degrees. “Unfortunately,” he said. “My friend who is best connected and who knows his way around every great house in Paris . . .” He stopped and sighed and drank his wine. He could feel the cook’s beady eyes fixed on him. “Well, his name is Aramis and—”
The cook gasped and took her large capable hand to her mouth. “Not that Aramis. Not the blond musketeer who was the lover of Madame Ys
abella de Yabarra y Navarro de Dreux?”
Porthos sighed and did his utmost to look grieved at having to mention this sad fact. Truth was, he knew people well enough. A friend who might be a murderer was even better than a thieving servant to buy him time and the attention of the cook.
“Aramis loved her well, it’s true,” he said. “He told us she was a seamstress, the niece of his theology professor . . . He called her Violette.”
The cook smiled at the idea of the duchess being the niece of a theology professor. “He seemed so nice,” she said. “The musketeer, not the theology professor. Always talking about doctrinal stuff and theology. He said he meant to be a priest one day.” She sighed. “But I guess that is all over now.”
Here Porthos stirred. “Why?”
“Well, having killed the Duchess de Dreux.” The cook shrugged her capable shoulders, muscular from years of lifting pans and turning spits loaded with game. Her gesture, with no words, seemed to imply that Aramis’s life was as good as over.
Porthos frowned. Part of the frown was automatic. He’d known Aramis since Aramis was little more than an apprentice priestling, his words all rounded, his manner all meek and mild. He still could not imagine Aramis killing a woman, particularly not that woman on whom so much of Aramis’s heart and soul hung.
The other part of the frown was calculated, a deliberate move to draw in the attention of the woman.
It worked. The cook, her eyes on him, frowned, slowly. “You know something, don’t you? You don’t think he killed her.”
“Oh, it is not that,” Porthos said, and, because he was not used to deceiving anyone, he felt an odd excitement, his heart beating in his throat. He felt prouder than he ever did of his wins on the battlefield, and he wished that Aramis, who always said that Porthos couldn’t deceive a child, would see him now. “It’s just that Aramis loved the woman so much.”
“Well, it is often the greatest lovers who kill their beloved, isn’t it?” the cook asked, raising her thick eyebrows while a no less thick finger beat a delicate tattoo on the handle of her mug. “Passion is fickle, is it not? They discover that she has another on the side, or that she is intending on replacing them and . . . well . . . there it is.”
“But . . .” Porthos felt his heart shrink within his chest. Perhaps there was something here that the entire palace knew, something that Aramis had kept from even his closest friends. As Porthos had told Athos, the servants always knew about everyone’s lives.
“But was there such a one? One that she loved more, or that she intended to replace Aramis with?” He asked, and watched while the woman bit her lower lip, as though in deep thought.
Was that possible? While Porthos could not imagine Aramis killing the woman he loved even then, well . . . In Porthos’s knowledge, Aramis just moved from girl to girl, from flower to flower hardly giving them time to realize they’d been loved, much less to experience the disappointment of losing him. But Aramis hadn’t been quite normal about Violette. He’d stayed with her for years now, and he talked of her as other men talked about their wives. He trusted her with everything, even—Porthos suspected—his true identity.
But the cook shook her head, slowly. “No . . .” she conceded at last. “No . . . I can’t imagine . . .” She shrugged. “Well, to tell you the truth, monsieur, before the musketeer came to her bed, she dallied with many. Sometimes we took bets as to whether a valet sent to her room with hot water or a tisane would return quickly enough and unmolested. But then all of a sudden there was the blond musketeer. Aramis, as he’s called. And all the kitchen wenches,” she made a dismissive gesture towards the various girls and women laboring at the various fireplaces, chopping foodstuffs, kneading bread, throughout the expansive area. “All the kitchen wenches made jokes about how he must be endowed that he could make Madame de Dreux want no one else. And also . . .” She grinned. “About how long before she gave the Duke de Dreux a blond heir.” She nodded as if to herself. “The woman was that smitten that she might have lost all sense of propriety.”
Porthos took a deep breath in relief. If Violette didn’t have a lover, then Aramis hadn’t killed her. The whole case was that simple to Porthos who was not willing to entertain a moment of doubt on the subject of his friend’s morals.
Aramis dallied with women—as, who didn’t? Well, perhaps Athos whose taste in women was so wretched that it was safer for everyone, and himself too, if he didn’t dally with anyone—and sometimes the women were married. It was just the way musketeers lived. What single woman would want to attach herself to a man with few prospects except those of living in the army forever, going here and there at the command of his king and risking his life on battlefields?
But Porthos couldn’t imagine Aramis maltreating a woman for the fun of it. As far as that went, he was a good man. He fought in duels, with those who insulted or challenged him, and he dallied with the occasional married woman, but in neither case did he overrun his bounds. He didn’t kill for fun.
He sighed, a sigh of deep frustration.
“I’d swear my friend didn’t do it.”
“And yet,” the cook said. “He was alone with her, in a locked room. He jumped from the balcony so fast that he left his clothes behind.”
It all came back to that again. That damned locked room. How could a murderer have got in it without Aramis’s noticing? “Perhaps . . .” Porthos said. “Well, palaces are notorious for having . . . I mean, kings get jealous. And kings like to have a secret way to get at their mistresses. I mean . . . Passages and corridors and things with eyes in pictures.”
He thought he’d made rather a bad jumble of it, but the cook’s eyes widened. “Secret passages.” She smacked her thick lips together. “Oh . . . I hadn’t thought of that. Mind you, I don’t think there are any passages, but then I’m not the one who cleans or supplies the nobles up there . . .” She grinned, displaying crooked teeth. “Oh, I shall ask around, Monsieur. Thank you so much for giving me such an idea. Perhaps I can discover something . . .”
And while Porthos was thinking that there must be some way he could ask about what she found, without being too conspicuous, he looked up and found her staring at him with an expression akin to hunger.
“I don’t suppose, Monsieur,” she said. “Musketeers have to eat too. I don’t suppose you would stay till dinner and then . . . perhaps . . .” She did her best at a coquettish expression. “I have my own room, you know, behind the kitchens.”
Porthos blinked. He had never thought the woman would think of him in that way. Not that he, in the way of such things, disdained working women. On the contrary. He’d been aware for some time that he preferred hardworking women with callused hands. But this woman, though in a certain light she could be considered appetizing if not pretty—in a very dim light—simply could not have Porthos.
Porthos shifted uncomfortably in his seat. Truth be told, he was as attached to a woman as Aramis had been to his duchess. Perhaps more so. Madame Athenais Coquenard, an accountant’s wife, might not be pretty. She was certainly no longer young. And nothing in her wardrobe compared to the clothes a duchess commanded. As for the largess she could bestow upon the musketeer that held her heart . . . well, that, too, was little and measured out, as her husband kept control of the household finances.
However, since he’d first climbed to her window, Porthos found that all other women had lost their allure. Oh, he could admire them, and he knew the turn of a full bosom or an elegant ankle would always catch his eye.
But when it came to it, and strange as it might seem, he would feel as guilty for sleeping with another woman as if he were committing adultery—oh, not the pleasing kind he committed with Athenais. Rather, as if he were betraying her. And his own heart. And that he could not do.
And yet, he needed to get this woman to tell him what she found.
Porthos managed to plaster a look of regret on his face—it was half felt. He could have used the dinner—and he bowed to the woman. “Madame. I wo
uld love to accept your very generous invitation, but I have business tonight.” And seeing her face fall, he hastened. “Important business. For . . . Monsieur de Treville himself.” He got up from the bench, and bent over the woman’s hand, lightly kissing the fingers which were pleasantly perfumed of roast. “I shall return tomorrow, though, if I should be so favored.”
“Oh, do,” the woman said. “Do return tomorrow. Perhaps I’ll have some gossip about secret passages for you.”
Porthos hoped so. He also hoped that he would find some way to evade spending the night. In fact, he thought he’d best prearrange it.
He bowed again, and left the kitchen, thinking.
The Prodigal’s Awakening; Brushes and Mirrors; Monacal Disciplines
ARAMIS turned in bed and woke up with the sun in his eyes. For a moment he was confused. His room in Paris didn’t have a window directly facing the bed through which daylight could arrive and intrude upon his sleeping hours.
He blinked disconsolately in the light, while his mind caught up with the location of his body. His nose filled with a smell he hadn’t smelled in a long time, a clean smell of . . . grass? Flowers? His eyes, wide open, gave him an impression of overwhelming light and whiteness. And his ears filled with the noise of birds and, distantly, the just-tuneless song of women in the repetitive, monotonous tone of a folk work song.
All of this worked in his memory to one thing. His childhood home.
He reached beneath himself to feel his narrow bed with its scrupulously clean sheets and looked around his small, clean room. No, not clean, bare. White walls. A wooden cross on the wall, watching over his bed, his every move, his very thoughts. A peg on the far wall was supposed to hold all his suits—all it held at the moment was the two black suits—velvet, but still black—that he’d been allowed all the time he was growing up. They consisted of knee breeches and tightly laced doublets in the fashion of twenty years ago, the fashion that Athos favored. Where his trunk with the clothes he’d bought in Paris had gone, was anybody’s guess. No, not guess. His mom would have seen to it that it was . . . disposed of.
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