“At any rate,” Athos hurried on. “And for whatever reason, he admires my sword. He wouldn’t resist showing me a piece such as this. It would, you know, in his mind, somehow, even the score. Show me that he too had a piece worthy of being coveted. And it would make Porthos green with envy.”
D’Artagnan didn’t dispute this. He had got in a duel with Porthos—that very first day in Paris—by showing that the inside of Porthos’s cloak was not quite so magnificent as the exterior. And that had been enough to excite Porthos’s murderous ire. Impossible, after that not to know that Porthos liked showing off and expensive things.
Athos turned the dagger again in his hand. It was well balanced, exquisitely so for something whose carving meant it had been intended for a bauble, more than for serious grappling. In fact, Athos thought, taking it in his hand, though he often liked fighting—at least in battle— with a sword in one hand and a dagger in the other, he couldn’t imagine grasping this dagger for very long. Though it was finely polished, after a while the crevices and curves of the two lovers would indent themselves upon the palm. He frowned at it.
“Is there any way of finding to whom it belongs?” D’Artagnan asked. “Or belonged?”
Athos shrugged. “Perhaps,” he said. “Perhaps. Depends on how old it is, and through the blood it is impossible to tell how pale the ivory, and whether the slight tinge on it is aging or blood.” He looked at D’Artagnan and caught a look of total incomprehension and cursed himself for a snobbish fool who assumed that everyone had been raised in the same circumstances he’d been. “Ivory yellows as it ages. If this was carved much longer ago than my father’s time, then it will be visibly yellow.” He returned the dagger to its sheath with some care. “But if it was made in this generation, then someone will likely know who made it. There is a distinctive style to these pieces and usually only a few people in the world at any time can carve this finely. This was an expensive piece. If I take it down to the jewelers’ streets and ask around, someone will tell me where it came from, which will be a step to telling me who owned it last.”
He paused in his long speech and thought it over. “Of course, they might also have bought it and sold it recently, even if it is old. A lot of old families at court buy and sell their finest belongings as the occasion offers or the need arises. Sometimes I think the jewels of most noble families spend more time at the jewelers than in the family home.”
“Not an armorers?” D’Artagnan asked. “A jeweler?”
“I think so,” Athos said. “No serious armorer, nor anyone who intends this as a combat weapon would carve the handle in such a way. Judging from the theme of the carving, and the way it’s executed, I’d guess it to have been an engagement gift,” he said. “From some great lady to her betrothed.”
While speaking, they had reached Paris proper and were now in the thickly populated streets, bumping elbows with groups of jovial men out for a night of drinking, and with laughing couples on their way who knew from or to where.
Night had become darker, or at least, the light of the occasional lantern suspended over a tavern doorway seemed to be brighter than the light of the moon above.
“Jewelers’ street is just down here,” Athos said, taking his bearings, even as he covered the dagger with the end of his cloak, to obscure it from potential thieves. “Shall we go there now?”
“I can’t,” D’Artagnan said. “I’m due at Monsieur des Essarts’s, to stand guard from eight till midnight.”
Athos felt he’d been remiss. This last month, they’d all been standing guard in a group, either at the royal palace, at the Treville house or at Monsieur des Essarts. There had been much joking that by acquiring a young guard, Monsieur des Essarts had also availed himself of the three best swords in the musketeers corps.
“I’m sorry,” Athos said. “I had quite forgotten the schedule. This last week seems like a dream. Do you wish me to come and stand guard with you.”
D’Artagnan shook his head. “I feel it’s important we discover the murderer as soon as possible, particularly if . . . Particularly if it’s . . .” He cast a look around and didn’t pronounce the recognizable name.
Which was just as well since Athos often believed that the Cardinal had spies everywhere. Even, he thought, the ravens and the doves spied for his eminence. “If it’s someone important,” he said, before D’Artagnan should recover his courage and actually pronounce the name aloud.
D’Artagnan nodded.
“Yes,” Athos said. “I too feel it would be for the best if our friend’s name was cleared as soon as possible. And if whatever the plot is to get him out of Paris and out of circulation were foiled.”
D’Artagnan turned. “I wish you luck,” he said. He bowed slightly and parted company with Athos, who went his way into the jewelers’ street.
Footprints and Somersaults; Ghosts and Words; Monsieur Porthos’s Very Deep Doubts
PORTHOS parted with his friends just outside the palace. He had taken care not to leave by the kitchen area, and he’d left Mousqueton deep in conversation with Hermengarde.
He rather doubted he would see the scoundrel tonight, and that was as well. Because Porthos was thinking.
It still seemed to him that his friends were approaching this in a completely wrong way. How the two of them could still maintain that it was impossible for anyone to come in through the balcony when they’d seen someone come in through the balcony baffled Porthos. He classed it under the stupidity of very smart people, with a few other examples he’d seen from his friends such as Athos’s strange tendency to drink heavily and then gamble while drunk, as if wine made him more qualified to spot the marked card and the weighted dice.
He walked around the garden, fully absorbed in these thoughts, to stand under the balcony that gave onto the dead Duchess’s room. Well, truth be told, he could not— anymore than his friends could—see how anyone could get in through the balcony. He looked up and up and up, at the little stone parapet, then turned around to look at the nearby tree. The tips of the branches there still showed the signs of Aramis’s disastrous fall among them. But there were no fresh leaves on the ground. And no fresh leaves meant that no one had climbed up into—or out of—the tree recently.
Not that climbing up the window from the tree would be possible. At least, as Porthos measured the two or three body lengths of his body between the tree and the stone parapet, he couldn’t imagine anyone even leaping that distance.
But of course, they might have left that way. They might. Except that here were no leaves.
He then looked at the ground and set about tracing the path of the footprints that were about the same size as the ones he’d seen upstairs in the bedroom.
Easier said than done, as the foot size had looked average for a woman or a young man. About the size of Porthos’s extended palm, from tip to wrist. And a lot of women and young men lived in the palace or worked there, to judge from the maze of crisscrossing footprints upon the reddish dirt. To make it worse, there were areas of grass and areas in which the dirt was quite packed.
However, Porthos reasoned, to make the footprints that the intruder had made upon the bedroom floor, he or she (he was not yet convinced of Athos’s determination of gender—after all, how much did Athos look at women?) would have needed to step on very loose red dirt.
The only place Porthos could find dirt loose enough was upon the flowerbed in which the tree was planted.
Experimentally, he put his foot in it, then on a grassy area nearby and the traces of dirt looked the same. In fact, he if looked at the tree bark closely, he could see, here and there, bits of the same dirt.
Someone had climbed the tree. But that made no sense. If there were signs that the person had come down via the tree, as Aramis had, that would at least make a little bit of sense. But no. You’d leave red dirt on the bark going up, not coming down.
Porthos stepped away from the tree and looked from it to the balcony and back again. Impossible. Also, insane.
Oh, he would readily admit that the tree went as high as the balcony, but at the very top, it was a mere wisp, a thin trunk, like that of a yearling tree. And, yes, Porthos readily admitted that the masked person in the room had been smaller and lighter than him. Probably smaller and lighter than D’Artagnan, whom Porthos was fairly sure of being able to lift with one hand and without straining—despite the young man’s muscular build.
But let’s suppose the woman—or man, or the devil himself—was as light and lithe as a human could possibly be. Let’s suppose that he or she had climbed all the way up to the top of the tree, and, from the top of the tree, eyed the distant balcony.
Could he or she have made it there? Porthos would be cursed if he could figure out how, barring growing wings.
And on this, it seemed to him, the whole thing hinged. Who could have got into the room, not who had a motive to kill Violette, or even who had a motive to kill Violette while Aramis was in her room.
Achieving the heights of that room was such an impossible, miraculous task that Porthos could not imagine its being simply an incidental step in murdering someone. No. He was sure of it. Whoever knew a method to scale those heights was the person who’d killed Violette.
Something else bothered him about the phantom who’d pranced into the room. The mask. If you were nobody, and nobody in the palace knew you, why would you care if someone saw you there? Why would you mind if you were recognized?
He was sure that if he solved those two puzzles—who might have gained access to the balcony, and why whoever had done it wore a mask, he would have the solution to the whole thing.
But right now it seemed a hopeless endeavor.
Meanwhile, it was getting dark. He felt his meager coin pouch. He couldn’t wait for Mousqueton, nor send Mousqueton to get him food as he normally would. And he really couldn’t hope that Mousqueton would steal something for him. For one, because he was afraid the cook would avenge herself on Mousqueton for her disappointment in Porthos.
He would, he thought, go to a nearby tavern and see if he could get some bread and cheese, and think over the whole puzzle of how a human being could grow wings.
In his mind, he could hear Aramis say that wings were the reward for a life well lived, for an attainment of sanctity.
Somehow, he didn’t think the person who’d come into the room, for all his or her devotion to the little cross, was a saint. Or an angel.
Messengers and Queries; The Elusiveness of Musketeers; Where Aramis Gets Tired of Waiting
“MONSIEUR,” Aramis said. “I never meant to cause you difficulties, or—”
Monsieur de Treville waved it all away and sighed. “Oh, it means nothing,” he said. “I’m sure you didn’t mean it, just as I know you did it. You musketeers are all the same. Sometimes I feel I would have fewer foolish actions and intemperate, unconsidered plots to contend with had the King put me in charge of the royal nursery at the palace.”
Aramis said nothing. He said nothing because he couldn’t feel offended by such a claim, which was one of Monsieur de Treville’s favorite claims, an expression of his exasperation at his headstrong subordinates.
Monsieur de Treville drummed his fingers upon his desk. “The devil of it,” he said, “is that I believe you’re innocent.”
Aramis nodded, slightly. He was still in shock over having found out how close he’d come to fatherhood. The whole thing was a nightmare. He’d thought he’d lost a lover, the other half of his soul. As it turned out, he might have lost much more than that.
He might have lost a chance at future generations of Herblays, at continuing his father’s name. He might have lost a chance at uniting his blood with that of the highest families in France, even if his son would never have been able to claim the connection.
Had her husband known of the child? Could he have killed her for that?
Somehow Aramis doubted it. Violette spoke of her husband occasionally and from the sound of it what they possessed between them had all the warmth of a business arrangement. In the midst of the feasts for the King and Queen’s marriage, they’d never even consummated their marriage.
Not that Violette had come to Aramis’s bed a virgin. No. By the time she’d asked him to lay between her silk sheets that cold winter’s night, Violette had already had several lovers, most of them more important personages than Aramis.
But she had loved him . . .
Lost again in his misery, he was looking at his boots and pondering the futility of life in general and the futility of his own life in particular.
Monsieur de Treville’s closing the door between the office and the antechamber roused him. He looked up. The captain stood at the door, tapping the toe of his boot in an unconscious gesture of impatience. “None of your comrades are in the antechamber,” he said. “Neither Porthos, nor Athos, nor even the young Gascon. I’d have sworn they, all three of them, live in the antechamber, hoping for an invitation to dinner or a duel, both of which they seem to consider essential for their lives, but now none is there.”
Aramis made a gesture of dismissal, trying to remember the day of the week. Wrinkling his brow with the effort of thinking of anything but his sudden and cruel bereavement, he said, “I think D’Artagnan is standing guard at Monsieur des Essarts. And they’re probably with him.”
“I’ve thought of that,” the captain said. “And I’ve sent three runners, one to each of their lodgings and one to my brother-in-law’s palace. One or the other of them should be home, and I’ve asked that he come here right away.”
Aramis didn’t understand this at all. “Why?” he asked.
“Because one or the other of them should have some idea of where to hide you. I confess I don’t. I could put you in one of several monasteries where I have acquaintances, but I think you’re rather well known at all of them. You have, if you forgive me saying so, Aramis, a recognizable face. And everyone knows the story of the musketeer who quotes theology.”
Aramis nodded. He supposed he’d made himself notorious. It was only one of his many sins. Woe to him who gives scandal.
He continued contemplating the sad state of his boots and the sorry state of his soul. He never quite felt as though he owed enough penance to go back to his mother’s house and face the humorless Dominican again.
If he had to, at any rate, he’d profess here in town and with the Jesuits.
Of course, no order would take him. Not now, when half of Paris believed him guilty of murder, and the other half didn’t only because they’d never heard of him or met him.
Monsieur de Treville brought him out of the reverie by closing his door to the antechamber again. The captain stood by the door, his hands open in a gesture of impotence in the face of the trials of life. “None of them are at their lodgings and the man sent to Monsieur des Essarts couldn’t find the Gascon.” Monsieur de Treville shrugged. “I truly don’t know what to do with you, Aramis.”
Aramis didn’t quite know what to do with himself either. But he knew sitting in this chair, listening to the accustomed chatter from the antechamber was sheer torture. After all, the chatter was as distant from him just now, as barred to him, as if it had been the language of the angels or the musings of the gods. Aramis couldn’t simply walk out there and meet his old comrades at arms and fall easily into the pattern of gossip and bragging, of friendship and rivalry that had been his life for these many years.
The corps of musketeers was not so different from a monastery, he thought. Both offered brotherhood. And he imagined that being defrocked hurt as much as having suspicion and doubt bar him from the musketeers.
He turned to Monsieur de Treville, “Let me go,” he said. “I will find my own way.”
As he spoke, he was gathering his own hair—the fine, soft mass of it, twisting and knotting it, till he could pile it at the top of his head and pull his black hat down over the whole.
“How are you going to leave?” Monsieur de Treville asked. “My plan was to get one of your frien
ds here, or preferably all of them, and have you follow them, through the antechamber, play the part of one of their servants.”
Which meant only that either it had been a very long time since Monsieur de Treville had engaged in any sort of covert intrigue, or that even their captain had no idea of how well the musketeers, as a body, knew each other.
They’d fought together, roomed together at the battle fronts, challenged each other on the stairs up to the antechamber, got drunk together and wenched together. There were very few men in the corps, and those new acquisitions only, that Aramis wouldn’t know even with the degree of disguise he was wearing.
As for himself, as long as he’d been in the corps, as notorious as he was? A turn of the head, a step into that antechamber, and a dozen voices would call out “Aramis.”
Which meant that Monsieur de Treville’s plan had been useless all along.
“I will go out the same way I came,” he told Monsieur de Treville.
And saying this, he perched on the parapet of the window and prepared to jump. The tree was a little ways away, but nothing like what it had been jumping from Violette’s window. And what was more, he could—if he got to the tree—run along it right to the wall. Some of the branches seemed to overhang the wall or close enough. That meant he could leave here, and not go around to one of the entrances that were doubtless watched.
If he took minimal precautions, to jump when the street was not busy, no one would notice.
And then . . . And then he would make his way to Porthos’s house—the one that offered the best view of its front door, being situated on an ample, broad street.
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