The thing about Violette was that she was such a lousy writer. The beautifully shaped handwriting of the convent girl that Violette had once been was formed into words that were sometimes Spanish and sometimes French and sometimes some odd amalgam of the two which Aramis could only decipher thanks to his knowledge of Latin.
So many times he’d scolded her for her incapacity to write in one language only. But now he read her silly confusion through tears in his eyes and wished he could have her back—that he could spend one more night with her, receive one more letter from her. And he wouldn’t complain, not even if it was all in Spanish.
He put his hands on the stone parapet of his window, and rested his chin on them, looking out onto the fields gilded by the setting sun. They were empty now, the farmers having gone to their homes for dinner.
If he squinted in the direction of the nearby hamlet of Trois Mages, from which most of his domain’s peasants came, he could see faint traces of grey smoke climbing up against the blue sky. Suppers being cooked, he wagered.
And he wished—with all his heart and soul—that he and Violette could have been two of those peasants and able to marry and live together. He would leave every morning to work in the fields—his attempts at picturing this failed because though he’d lived in the country for most of his life, he’d never spent much time observing what farmers did all day. No matter. He was sure it was tiring and full of effort, but what did it matter? He’d come home every night to their hovel, to find his Violette and their children.
He pictured the children they would have had—blond as they were, with Violette’s expressive blue eyes. The girls would all be beauties and the boys all tall and strong, like their father.
He sighed, a sigh to burst his chest. Then he got up and turned around, clasping Violette’s letters, in their silk ribbon, to his chest. Sighing, he consigned them to a hiding place between a pile of books on his table.
He felt restless and small.
For years now, he’d been a musketeer, his own man, living in Paris as he pleased. And he’d had Violette.
But now Violette was gone and Aramis felt like he was a young man once more—helpless, bound to his formidable mother’s will.
It was as though his mother had preserved Aramis’s childhood, his youthful place in his home, just as she had preserved his father’s study.
And now his father’s study came to Aramis’s mind as an excellent place to hide in from his mother’s enforced devotions. His mother might keep it as a shrine, but he’d never seen her enter it.
It was locked, but as a musketeer in Paris—or even as a seminarian in his early years there—before Violette, Aramis had learned the fine art of picking locks and developed it into such a science that he could open almost any lock with a simple knife.
He found such a knife amid his youthful treasures, beneath a loose floorboard.
From there to running down the stairs to the entrance hall and his father’s locked room, was a moment.
Picking the lock took no time at all.
The study remained as he remembered from childhood—all was covered in dust save for a path from door to desk, crisscrossed by small, feminine footprints.
His mother’s, Aramis thought, as no one else had a key.
He followed the footprints to the chair behind a desk. The desk was a model that Aramis had often seen among courtiers in Paris. A series of little drawers and doors encircled a round writing surface, supported by spindly legs. A place for everything and, usually, one or two secret compartments in the bargain.
The desk was as dusty as everything else, but here and there, throughout, was the mark of Aramis’s mother’s hands as though she’d caressed it.
Suddenly the idea of hiding here was not so pleasing. He retraced his steps to the door.
Just in front of it there was an area where his mother’s footprints took a semicircular detour as if around an invisible obstacle.
Curious, Aramis scuffed the dust there, with a foot. The floor beneath was black.
Paint or rot?
The noise of a key turning in the lock made him look up to see the door open and the disapproving expression on his mother’s face.
For someone who’d once been beautiful and soft; for someone who couldn’t be much more than minor Spanish nobility, his mother managed to look remote as a goddess and disapproving as a queen.
“Maman,” Aramis said. He felt red climb his cheeks. “I just thought . . .” He said and stopped. He couldn’t tell her he’d thought of hiding out from her.
“Rene,” she said, and her face became a mask of deep sorrow. “You know you could have asked me for the keys, if you wanted to see your father’s study. There was—” She looked jealously towards the desk. “No reason for you to violate this space.”
Not sure what to say, Aramis nodded.
Suddenly there wasn’t much place to hide in this room.
His mother sighed.
“You know your father and I married in the spring. In fact, next week is the anniversary of the day we married.” Madame D’Herblay’s eyes were full of distant longing, like a child who looks upon a dream. “It seems so long ago now. He died, you know, only two years after your birth. Sometimes I wonder what would have become of him, what kind of man he would be now, had he lived long enough.”
Aramis said nothing. His mother rarely spoke of his father. In childhood, Aramis had formed a theory that his mother was a nun who’d escaped from a convent and his father an itinerant ribbon seller. It all seemed very logical to him, considering that no one ever mentioned his father, that his mother seemed to live at her devotions, and that the most dashing strangers to ever come to the manor were ribbon sellers. It wasn’t till he was five or so that the whole had stopped seeming the most plausible explanation. And even then it had taken his nursemaid’s shock at his theory to show him that it couldn’t possibly be true.
He had to repress an urge to smile, thinking of the young peasant’s look at her charge’s telling her that he was the illegitimate son of an escaped nun. She’d wasted no time in setting him to rights. And then his mother had made him write, several times, the verses of the bible that pertained to marriage. Aramis lost all interest in smiling.
And realized his mother was staring attentively at him.
“You probably think it very odd that I’ve always wanted you to go into the church,” she said, looking at him.
This was strange indeed. Madame D’Herblay had never cared what her son thought odd or not. “No, Maman,” he said. “I know you discerned in me some vocation, some hope that I—”
She clucked her tongue on the top of her mouth and sighed. “I thought it was for the best, Rene, I really did. But I don’t know how to explain it to you.”
“You are my mother. What do you need to explain? I’m only—”
Madame D’Herblay moved away from the window, and walked past her son. “Come with me, Rene,” she said. “To the cemetery.”
“The cemetery?” Aramis asked, shaking. He had some strange idea that his mother meant to open one of the family tombs and make him jump within. But the idea was monstrous. His mother had never sought to kill him. Only to bury him, living, in a monastery.
Into Aramis’s mind the suspicion that his mother had hated his father and now sought to avenge herself upon his son crept and grew. But he couldn’t believe it. He couldn’t countenance it. How could a son have such thoughts about his mother? Oh, he was the worst of sinners.
He walked after her, all the more determinedly because he was so sure he was sinning against her in his mind.
She locked the door again, then hurried out of the house, keeping two steps ahead of him, despite his walking fast on his long legs that often allowed him to keep up with Porthos effortlessly and made D’Artagnan, and even Athos, run to catch up. But then he thought he’d probably inherited his legs from his mother, as he had inherited her blond hair, her blue eyes, and her ability to seem innocent and in-approachable even
while ruling the house with an iron fist. At least, he could rule everyone but her.
“Maman, wait,” he said. But she didn’t stop and he had to run down the front steps to catch up with her . . . at least only two steps behind.
He remained two steps behind her as they reached the family cemetery north of the park. This was not a place that the little Rene D’Herblay had visited often. Oh, he was brought here for Masses on the anniversary of his father’s death, and for certain solemn occasions in which the life of the departed Chevalier D’Herblay was celebrated. But he had never had that morbid turn of mind that brought some adolescent boys to brood upon family cemetery stones.
And, of course, it had been many years since he passed through the ivy-choked gate in the half-ruined stone walls surmounted by rusty ironwork.
Within the cemetery, Madame D’Herblay stopped so suddenly that Aramis almost collided with her. He managed to arrest his movement just short of it, and go around to stand beside her.
She was looking around at a panorama of headstones and statues. The statues were few. The estate while wealthy when compared to the surrounding countryside, was, after all not a ducal estate, not even a count’s portion. Most of the statues were very old, their features erased by sun and rain, by succeeding winter and summers till you could not tell if it was an angel’s face or an old Roman goddess at which you were staring. In fact Aramis had often suspected that some of his ancestors had stolen the statues from nearby pagan temples.
Needless to say this was not an opinion that could be shared with his mother, who was looking around, her blue eyes lightly covered in trembling tears.
“So many graves,” she said. “Your family has been here since the time of Charlemagne, you know?”
Aramis knew. Or at least he’d been told so. If he were asked his true, honest opinion he’d have said his family or someone else who’d succeeded to the same name had been here a long time and left it at that. But now he contented himself with nodding.
“Do you know what I think when I come here?” his mother asked.
Did she come here often? Aramis had left the maternal abode for seminary in Paris when he was just fifteen. He’d been away, now, almost ten years. His mother looked very different to this older Aramis than she had looked to the dutiful and shy seminarian. Did his mother walk the cemetery at night? Or during the day for her afternoon stroll? And why?
He realized she was waiting for an answer from him. “What do you think of, maman?” he asked, though fairly sure he didn’t want to know.
“I think that families share a lot more than coats of arms,” she said and nodded, sadly. “Yes.”
Aramis looked upward at the darkening sky and wondered what in heaven’s name that meant.
“A lot more,” Madame D’Herblay said, as if speaking out of her own thoughts. Then she looked back over her shoulder, her countenance suddenly animated. “Rene, do you know where your father lies?”
“Maman?”
“Oh, come, surely you know where your father’s tomb is.”
Aramis did. He thought. “Down this lane,” he said, pointing. “And around that cluster of cypresses.” He called to mind the memory of the last time he’d come into the cemetery, at his mother’s instigation, to lay flowers on the paternal tomb before leaving for the seminary. “It is a white marble tomb, I think.”
His mother nodded and led him the right way through it. “Here,” she said, stopping in front of the tomb he’d described. “Can you read to me what the words say, Rene?”
“Maman, I’ve known how to read since the age of three. And Latin since the age of five.”
His mother only shook her head. “Read the words to me, Rene, please.”
Aramis sighed and nodded. “It says ‘Here Lies Rene D’Herblay, gone to his rest at the age of twenty-five, October 1598.’ ” He paused, shocked, because every time he’d come to the cemetery before, he’d somehow had the impression his father was older. Not an old man, exactly, but older, more seasoned. “Twenty-five, Maman?”
She only nodded. “There, Rene, your grandfather lies. Can you read his headstone?”
As though in a dream, Aramis went from headstone to headstone. The headstones of his female relatives ran the gamut from those who’d died very young—including Aramis’ own sister, dead just a year after his birth, at less than a month of age—to the very old. But all his male ancestors seemed to have died in their early to mid-twenties. All of them. Had the D’Herblays, then, always been raised by fearsome women like his mom?
“What do you see, Rene?”
“I see that most of my ancestors were raised by their mothers alone.”
“And why do you think that is?” his mother asked.
Aramis shrugged. “I suppose illness and war did for their husbands?”
“For some,” his mother said. “Come with me Rene.”
And, giving him no time to protest, staying just ahead of him as before, she took him into the house again and down a long unused corridor to the portrait gallery. On the way she received a lit candle from one of her seemingly invisible, invisibly controlled servants. It had grown dark, and the portrait gallery was a long room immersed in the evening gloom.
As his mother passed, with the pool of light thrown by her candle, Aramis was aware of the ancestors peering down at him, many—so it seemed to him—disapprovingly.
Most of them were, he noted, as fair as he. He also didn’t remember this from his younger visits to the place and he’d always assumed he’d got his coloration from his mother. Most of his ancestors, too, male and female alike, seemed to prefer the type of clothes that his mother believed brought with them the deadly contagion of sin.
Oh, there were portraits, here and there, of men in the somber attire of the church, or even in all black suits. But most of the men seemed to favor brightly colored silks and velvets in whatever the state of fashion was for their day. And they’d ornamented ears and fingers, hats and even their sword belts, with enough sparkling jewels to blind a passerby.
“Here,” his mother said, stopping. “What do you see?”
Aramis, not sure what the joke might be, looked up at a vast portrait that showed . . . himself. It couldn’t be himself. He was fairly sure he hadn’t sat for any portraits. And besides, this was a portrait of himself as he was now, wearing somehow oddly old-fashioned clothes. The collar was too narrow and the doublet in the old-fashioned, restrictive Spanish style that Athos was so fond of.
“It’s remarkable,” he said, forgetting all his annoyance at his mother. “How did you have this portrait of me made? And why? How could you have got an artist to Paris to take my likeness without my knowing? And why am I wearing clothes I’ve never owned?”
Madame D’Herblay sighed. “Rene, this was your father,” she said, very softly.
“My father?”
“Your father, painted just days before he died. Rene, those men in the cemetery, most of them died in a duel over an affair of honor. As did your father. I never wanted to tell you because, after all, it doesn’t edify a young boy to know that his father didn’t take his vows of marriage seriously. Your father was courting . . . or paying attention to a young lady. The same young lady was being courted by a young man named Armand de Richelieu. They clashed, and de Richelieu challenged your father for a duel. Upon which your father lost his life, when he was just a few years younger than you are now.”
Aramis was speechless.
“This, Aramis, is why I tried to bend your steps towards the church, your mind to holiness. I would rather you are the last of your name and do not leave descendants behind, than you die young, as your father did. Do not let me have that pain, of seeing you dead before your time, son.”
Aramis swallowed. “De Richelieu? The Cardinal?”
Madame D’Herblay nodded slowly. “Indeed. He lived to go into the church and to attain the highest honor of the kingdom. Unlike your poor father.”
“The Cardinal killed my father?” Aramis
said, and ran his hand down in front of his face, as though this would clear his vision and somehow show him something else than his look-alike father smiling down at him with his own sparkling green eyes and impudent mouth. “No wonder he hates me. No wonder he seeks my life when he can . . .”
“And am I right,” his mother asked. “To think that you have given him some way to press his animus against you?”
Aramis thought of Violette, dead in her room, seemingly without anyone else’s having a chance to murder her. If Aramis hadn’t been very lucky and very quick that night, he would have been caught and probably summarily executed upon the moment.
But . . . No one could have got into the room to kill Violette. And yet, someone must have, or else Aramis was the one who had done it. And Aramis was sure he hadn’t.
The agents of the Cardinal were everywhere. They often accomplished what seemed impossible.
“Wouldn’t it be better, Rene, to stay here, this time? There is a nearby Dominican order that has offered to send over one of their confessors to examine your conscience and your learning and determine whether you might not be ready to profess.”
“I always thought to join the Jesuits,” Aramis said, without thinking. “They have no set habits, so I could dress almost as I pleased.” He became aware of what he had said and of his mother’s reproachful gaze upon him.
“As you say, Maman,” he thought. Could he go to Paris? Would he dare go to Paris? If the Cardinal had murdered Violette solely to destroy the last descendant of his enemy, his friends would not find any proof of Aramis’s innocence. He would look guiltier than sin. And if he ever set foot in Paris again, he would surely be immediately ensnared. “As you say, Maman,” he said. “Send for the confessor.”
Where Dead Wives Mean Nothing Near Horses and Vineyards; The Happiness of a Rural Estate
ATHOS didn’t know whether to be amused or flattered that—while Grimaud tended to the horses—Raoul was kind enough to send a valet in to help Athos dress.
the musketeer's seamstress Page 13