by Leda Swann
At last came a knock on the door. The maid wrestled in a small hip bath, following it with plenty of jugs of steaming water. “Shall I stay and help you wash?” she asked in a bored voice, as she tipped the last of the water into the tub and began to roll up her sleeves in expectation of an invitation.
Miriame waved her away. “No thank you all the same.” She had a character to preserve now – one that she would easily lose again were some one to see her naked.
Once the maidservant had left, she bolted the door once more. Just for good measure she drew the coverlet off the bed and hung it over the door to make sure that every little peephole was safely covered. Only then did she begin to undress.
One by one she laid her rags aside and put the tip of her toe into the water. She had never had a whole bath before. Even when her mama had been alive, the most she had done was sponge herself all over with a washcloth.
She looked down at her feet. They were grey with grime, their nails black with accumulated dirt. She would not be so disrespectful of the stranger’s soft leather boots as to put her unwashed feet into them. Besides, no one would ever take her for a member of the gentry with face dirty and her hair matted and tangled with the filth of the streets. “Like it or not,” she told herself firmly, “you have to wash.”
Gingerly she sat down in the bath and rubbed herself all over with the sweet-smelling soap they had given her. The water was warm. She found to her surprise that washing wasn’t as bad as she had expected. Lying back in the warm water, her legs bent right up under her chin and her head resting on the edge of the tub, it was almost pleasant.
Or it was until she got soap in her eyes. That wasn’t much fun at all. She screwed up her face and bit back a wail as the harsh soap burned her. She splashed water on her face and blinked furiously until she could see again. Men did not cry because they got soap in their eyes in their bath. She scrubbed her face furiously, roughening the tender skin under her nose and around her chin, to make it look as though she had shaved herself closely.
Once her hair was washed, too, she got out of the tub and rubbed herself dry. Wrapping herself in the towel, she took the wide-toothed comb from the saddlebag and began the long, laborious task of combing through her hair. She’d kept it short for years, hacking it off above the shoulders so no one would ever suspect she was a woman. She didn’t like what happened to women on the streets – no more than she liked what happened to pretty boys – and was determined that no one would ever so much as suspect her disguise. Even despite the ragged haircut, though, it took her some time before the comb would go through it without getting snagged on a nasty snarl.
She drew out some fresh linen from the saddlebag and put it on, feeling more like a thief than she ever had before. Taking a man’s money was nothing, but taking this man’s linen as he lay back on the bed, dying by inches, gave her an uncomfortable feeling. She shook it off as well as she could. She had done him no harm, but tried her best to save him. His murderers should be the ones to harbor a guilty conscience, not her, who merely had the good fortune to profit from their crime.
The jacket fitted her well enough, buttoning across her front to hide the fact that she was a woman, but the breeches were far too big, bagging around her waist and bottom like a saggy skin. She knotted a leather tie around her waist to keep them up, and as an afterthought, added a pair of rolled-up stockings in the front to give a realistic bulge. She would defy anyone to catch her out now.
Boots now. With a reverent sigh she took the stranger’s boots and drew them on over her calves. They were slightly too long in the foot for her, but she hardly noticed. They were boots. Real leather boots, rich and brown, and as soft as her new-washed hair.
Her disguise was nearly complete. A scrap of leather to tie her hair at the nape of her neck, the stranger’s befeathered hat to clap on her head, his greatcoat to throw around her shoulders, his rings to go on her fingers, his letters to be tucked inside her jacket, and his well-stocked wallet to be worn inside her shirt next to her skin.
She made an awkward bow at the wall, wishing she had a looking-glass to check her disguise in. No matter, she had passed as a lad in rags for years – why would anyone suspect her now she was dressed as a gentleman?
The landlady was cutting up vegetables and tossing them into a stewpot when Miriame went into the kitchen. Her eyes widened when she saw Miriame in the doorway. “You do clean up nice,” she said, as she went back to her chopping.
Quick as a wink, Miriame snaffled a couple of carrots and a turnip and stuffed them into one of the pockets of her greatcoat. They would do very well for her to munch on for her supper that night. “Thank you,” she said gravely.
“What can I do for you, Monsieur?” the landlady asked, putting down her vegetables and wiping her hands on her apron, when Miriame made no move to leave.
“My master upstairs is gravely ill and like to die.”
“Aye that he is,” the landlady agreed, absentmindedly sharpening her vegetable knife on a long steel that hung in a corner of the kitchen. “Them as murdered the poor lad did their evil work well. He’ll be lucky to last until tomorrow morn.”
“I must leave him for now to carry out a commission that he entrusted to me, but I would have him well looked after in my absence.” She held out the smallest of the stranger’s rings – a circle of gold with a dark blue stone embedded in it. “Care for him well. Cure him if you can. This should well recompense you for your trouble.”
The landlady put aside her knife and took the ring with a glint in her eye. Any protest that she may have made was instantly stifled at the sight of the jewel. “I shall.”
“And if you cannot cure him, then see he is decently buried.”
The landlady looked up sharply. “You will not be coming back, then?”
Miriame smiled to herself. Not if she could help it. She knew that the landlady suspected her theft, though she had bought the woman’s silence for now. “My journey must needs take me to the farthest corner of France, but I will return when I can for news of him,” she lied.
The landlady nodded, seemingly satisfied. “God speed you on your journey, then, Monsieur,” she said, chopping her vegetables with her newly sharpened knife with renewed vigor.
Miriame tipped her hat as she left, the purloined carrots giving her pocket a comforting weight. She’d not starve tonight.
The horse was well- rested and well-fed when she made her way to the stables. She tipped the stableboy a handful of sous for looking after it so well, and he saluted her with a tip of his dirty cap.
He looked after her with admiration as she clambered awkwardly on to its back. “Where be you off to then, Monsieur?” the lad asked, as she tightened her knuckles around the reins and urged her horse out of the yard.
She gave a big belly laugh as she rode off, clinging to the horse’s back like a beggar to a rich man’s leg. She could hardly believe it herself. “Me? I’m off to join the King’s Musketeers.”
Chapter 2
The Cardinal’s lips curled up into a sneer and he tossed the packet of letters on to the table in front of him. “What is this rubbish you have brought to me?” He swept his long robes around himself with a mutter of disgust and went to stand in the window, the harsh midday glare lighting up his malformed body and shrunken features with all Nature’s indifference and lack of mercy.
The man in front of him turned his hat over and over in his hands as beads of perspiration started to appear on his forehead. “The letters you asked for, your Excellency, the ones we were to take from the boy.”
The Cardinal whirled around and fixed the unhappy man with a baleful glare. “The letters I asked for? Pah! What nonsense! Why would I want such drivel?”
“They were from the right boy, I would swear to it,” the man protested. “We never lost sight of him for an instant. Besides, I would know his pretty face anywhere.” His voice was rich with disgust. “Dress him in a gown and you’d mistake him for a girl."
“They may be from the right boy, but they are not the right letters.” His voice held all the ice of a pond in midwinter, a coldness that no winter sun could efface. “Did you bother to look at them?”
The other man shrugged uneasily. “Wouldn’t do me any good if I did.”
The Cardinal stalked back to the table and slammed his fist down on the top. “Why must I be served by idiots and fools? Is there not a single literate thief or cut-throat in the whole of Paris?”
The thief wisely held his tongue.
The Cardinal picked up one of the letters, shook it open, and began to read. “`My dear son’,” he began. “`I hope this missive finds you well and in good health. God has seen fit to bless me with a fit of the rheumaticks this season, but other than that I am as hale and hearty as ever an old man can expect to be. By the grace of God your mother has been cured of her cough. The brindled cow had a calf last night. With God’s grace it will grow up to be a fine young bull. Your loving father, Henri.’” He shook the letter at the thief. “What good is this to me? How can I use the ramblings of a doddering old fool to discredit the King’s mistress? You have failed in your task. Failed. You do not deserve a single sou.”
“We did not fail altogether,” the thief complained, his face black at the prospect of missing out entirely on the promised reward. “You asked us to do away with the boy, and we did that right enough.”
The Cardinal’s face was suffused with anger. “You murdered the boy before the letters were in your possession?”
The thief misread the signs of anger on the Cardinal’s face. “He won’t be bothering you now, for sure,” he said, his voice thick with satisfaction. “We left him a-lying on the streets, dead as a doornail.”
The Cardinal clenched and unclenched his fists as if he would love to strike the bigger man dead on the spot himself. “You are a fool. A triple fool. Where are the papers now?”
Comprehension flooded over the thief’s face. His face went red and he stood as if rooted to the spot. “I...I...”
“You don’t know.” It was a statement, not a question.
The thief was silent, not able to deny it, but fearing to assent.
“Out of all the people in Paris who may have come across the body of the young fool, you have no idea which one found him first. You have no idea who may have stolen the horse or searched the body, and found the very papers we seek? You do not know if they are in the hands of our enemies even as we speak? You do not even know if they have already been destroyed?”
The thief shook his head and drops of perspiration started to run down his forehead. He wiped them away with the back of his sleeve. The stench of fear hung in the air. “I do not know, your Excellency.” His voice was the merest thread of a whisper.
“It seems to me that you have just made your task a good deal harder than it was before.” The Cardinal’s voice was smooth as silk and as menacing as the hiss of a viper. “I want those papers. Do you understand me?”
“But how can I possibly...” The thief’s planned protest trailed away into silence at the look on the Cardinal’s face.
“How you find them is your own affair. You lost them once through your stupid carelessness. Do not lose them again. And remember,” the Cardinal said, as he fixed his eyes on the thief’s face, “I will not be a happy man if you have wasted my chance to ruin the King’s harlot through your stupidity. I do not tolerate failure in my servants. Not a second time.”
Miriame stuck her hat at a jaunty angle and whistled a little ditty as she rode into the barracks, though inside she was shaking like a leaf in a storm. A couple of soldiers were lounging around in the yard as she dismounted and stretched ostentatiously as if she had been riding all day. Her backside was damn near numb anyways. She’d never been on the back of a horse before and right glad she was to get off it again. She wasn’t sure she liked sitting all the way up there close to the sky. The ground was such a long way down.
She glanced sideways at the uniforms as she stretched. Very soon now, if she played well the hand that Fate had dealt her, she’d be one of them.
Never again would she go to bed hungry at night for want of a bite to eat for supper. Never again would she shiver in her thin blanket as the hail and sleet battered through the thin roof of the room she lay in, huddling against the filthy lice-ridden bodies of her fellow beggars to keep from freezing to her death. She was going to be a soldier. Not just any old soldier, either. She was going to join the elite of the elite – the King’s Musketeers.
She was crazy to think that she, a beggar from the streets and a woman to boot, could get away with such a crazy plan. She wiped her sweaty palms on her breeches, hoping they wouldn’t leave a mark. She couldn’t go back now.
The other soldiers were watching her with absent-minded curiosity. She gave them a lazy salute, hiding her fear as best she could. “Hey, where’s the Captain?”
“You joining up?” one of them asked her. He was a short, squat, muscular looking fellow, almost as wide as he was tall.
“If the Captain’ll have me.”
The other one, a big bear of a man with powerful-looking legs and hands the size of bear paws, looked mildly interested. “Can you fight?”
She thought about that for a moment. She’d learned early on in life that it was usually smarter to run away if she could. “When I have to.”
The smaller soldier looked at the bigger one, and the bigger one gave a brief nod, as if giving his permission. The smaller one drew his sword out of its scabbard, tossed it lightly from one hand to the other and grinned at Miriame. “So put up your sword and show me.”
She was startled out of her rather fragile composure. “Now?”
“You’re not scared, are you?” the squat man taunted.
Scared? Of him? She laughed out loud. She was scared of hunger and of cold, of the man with the cold voice who had raped and knifed her baby sister, and of the King’s executioner in his black hood with holes cut out for him to see his victims through, but she wasn’t scared of anything else. She simply didn’t see the point of wasting her energy fighting when she didn’t have to.
Now, it seems, was one of those times when she had to fight rather than run. How hard could it be? All she had to do was to look reasonably convincing...
She looped her horse’s reins over a post by the water trough, took off her greatcoat, slung it over the horse’s back and whirled to face her opponent, sword in hand.
He was waiting for her in the center of the yard, his legs apart and his sword in his hand. Miriame hefted her blade in her fist, feeling its weight. She’d not used a sword before, having only had a little knife she carried with her, sharpened to a wicked point on a flint she’d stolen. She waved it a few times in the air, testing its weight. She found it rather awkward.
The squat man laughed at her and flicked his sword expertly in the air.
To Miriame’s surprise, the sword in her hand was suddenly on the ground and her opponent’s sword was at her neck. She blinked. She hadn’t even seen it coming.
The squat man laughed again and turned towards the bear-like soldier. “What do you say, Captain? Are you desperate enough to take on this untried youth who can’t even hold a sword? Or shall I send him back again to where he came from with a flea in his ear for wasting your time?”
He should not have turned his back on Miriame. The sword out of her hand, she could fight the way she was used to. Without making a sound to warn him, she kicked out viciously at him, catching him on the back of the knee and making his legs buckle. He fell to one knee and turned his head in astonishment, sword still in his hard. “What the...?” he started to say.
Miriame avoided his sword deftly and chopped his wrist hard with the edge of her hand. He gave a yelp of pain and his sword fell to the ground into the dirt of the yard. “What do you think you’re doing?” he spluttered.
With a quick movement she drew the knife out of her boot, crouched on her heels by his side, and pressed the tip of the bla
de into his neck, just below his ear, hard enough to nick the skin. “This is the way I fight,” she hissed into his ear, as his face turned slightly pale. “I give no quarter and expect none in return. When I fight, I fight to kill.”
“Enough, enough,” the bear-like man called. “Put your weapon away.”
Miriame dug the point of her knife in just a little harder, to teach the squat man a lesson he would not forget in a hurry, and leaped to her feet, her knife disappearing into her boot again in a flash.
“You fight like a savage, not like a gentleman,” the squat man complained as he got to his feet again, but there was a measure of respect for Miriame in his eyes that hadn’t been there before.
“True enough,” Miriame agreed equably. “But I had you for all that.”
He shrugged. “Only because I let you go and turned my back on you for a moment.”
“The more fool you.”
“Any gentleman would have confessed himself beaten already and honorably surrendered his sword.”
Miriame snorted. “Then `any gentleman’ would be a fool. And so are you, for trusting me to behave like one. Your trust could have gotten you killed just now.”
He opened his mouth to argue, then shut it again. “I won’t make that mistake a second time, Monsieur savage.”
She smiled with all her teeth bared. “Few people do.”
The bear-like soldier interrupted their argument. “So, Renouf,” he said, “are you still of a mind to send the boy home again with a flea in his ear?”
“No, Captain,” the squat man answered. “Let him stay so that I may have the pleasure of teaching him better manners. He fights like a rabid dog.”
The bear-like soldier grinned as he ambled over to Miriame. “Captain D’Artagnan at your service, Monsieur savage,” he said, as he held out his hand. “Welcome to the King’s Musketeers.”
Miriame suppressed her grin of exultation and fumbled in her pocket for the letters she had stolen. She held them out to the soldier. “Thank you, Captain. Do you need these to vouch for me?” She could hardly believe how easy it had been to fool them both – surely he would want to at least read her precious letters before he accepted her into his company.