Death in Gascony

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Death in Gascony Page 12

by Sarah D'almeida


  “Or perhaps my father just seemed strange because of his dealings with Richelieu?”

  His mother jumped a little. He would swear to it. Just the slightest jerk of the body, and the curl of her blond hair escaped between Marguerite’s fingers, and fell, causing the servant to exclaim.

  But it was all in a moment, and when D’Artagnan looked again his mother was composed and showing only surprise. “Richelieu?” she said, in some alarm. “The Cardinal? Why do you think your father was working for the Cardinal?”

  “Maman. You know you told me in your note that he was working for the Cardinal.”

  She dismissed her note with a wave of her hand. “I told you before,” she said, her voice sounding distressed. “I don’t know what I wrote in that note. I was so shocked and confused, and scared, you know, of…everything. Did I truly tell you he was working for the Cardinal?”

  D’Artagnan nodded.

  “Oh, what a very silly thing to do,” she said. And managed a very creditable peal of musical laughter. “Why would your father be working for the Cardinal? What would his eminence want from the depths of Gascony? What interest could he have here?”

  “I don’t know,” D’Artagnan said, while he tried to think over the situation. His mother was not only lying to him, she was giving the most creditable theatrical performance he’d seen from anyone in a long time, cunning Aramis included. In fact, the only reason he suspected her was that slight jerk of the body that he might or might not have seen. That and the note rustling inside his sleeve every time he moved his arm. “Perhaps being so near to Spain he thought my father could get him information on Spanish noblemen. How am I to know? In Paris they say even the owls and the rats spy for the Cardinal. So why not here?”

  His mother frowned. “Well, I assure you…that is…I don’t know of any work your father was doing for the Cardinal, nor of any reason for him to be doing so.”

  D’Artagnan realized she had worded her answer carefully enough so as not to lie openly to him. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  If he’d not spent six months in Paris and there been exposed to the guile of the masters in perfidy—Richelieu included—would he even have suspected his mother’s careful prevarication?

  “So, I assume you wouldn’t know what this is about,” he said, and, reaching into his sleeve, pinched the small piece of paper in between his fingers, and showed it to his mother at a distance.

  She squinted at it. “No,” she said. “I can’t read it from this far, but I’ve never seen it.” She blushed faintly and, D’Artagnan realized, was probably lying. Why else had she kept her husband’s study locked and not given the key to D’Artagnan as soon as he arrived? “What does it say?”

  “It says,” D’Artagnan said. “‘It was by my order and for the good of the state that the bearer of this note did what he had to do.’”

  His mother looked in the mirror at D’Artagnan’s reflection a long time, then she turned to her maid. “That’s well enough, Marguerite, you may go. I’ll dress myself.”

  Marguerite bowed and retreated, and D’Artagnan wondered if his mother was about to be frank.

  But instead, his mother turned around in her chair, to face him. She waited till she heard the door to her room close, then turned to D’Artagnan. “What was it that someone did, Henri? What does all that ‘for the good of the state’ mean?”

  “Maman,” he said. “You’re not a fool. Don’t pretend to be one.”

  She raised her eyebrows at him. “I am not being a fool. I simply don’t know of what you speak. Who has signed that letter, Henri?”

  “The Cardinal.”

  “Are you sure? It looked like it was signed with a single R. How could you tell from a single R that it was the Cardinal?”

  “I understand from my friends that this is how he often signs letters of this nature,” D’Artagnan said, now curious about how much his mother knew, and how much she would let slip. “How could you read the R from that far?”

  “Well, it was a single letter, and that was the only one it could be,” his mother said. “But son, where did you find it? And what could it possibly mean?”

  “I found it amid my father’s effects,” he said. “In his tower study.”

  His mother looked more agitated than ever. “In your father’s effects. Are you sure?”

  “Maman. How could I not be sure? I found it in that trunk on which he always rested his feet.”

  “But…how did you…”

  “Get into his study?” D’Artagnan asked, and smiled slightly. “I have my ways.” He got up and stepped closer to his mother. “Maman, you know I’d never believe you guilty of any crime, but you must understand you’re not making it easy for me to believe in your innocence. You knew about this note, did you not? Did you always know about it, or did you find it after his death?”

  “My innocence?” She looked at him, her eyes round and blank like the eyes of a statue. Put a mantel on her and she would pass for an image of a virgin saint. “What do you mean my innocence? What crime are you speaking of? Even if your father worked for the Cardinal, surely that would not be a crime. He is one of the most powerful men in France and he—”

  D’Artagnan shook his head. “No, not working for the Cardinal, though you must know there are many French noblemen and people close to the corridors of power who would consider it a crime. But we’re not about to argue that. No. It’s just that…what you say about my father’s duel makes me wonder…”

  His mother looked at him, agitated, a small pulse working at her white throat. “Makes you wonder if I walked up to him and ran him through the throat with a dueling sword?”

  D’Artagnan shook his head again, as much to free it of the image his mother had evoked as to deny her accusation. “No. But I wonder if it was quite above board, or if my father might have been murdered. If he was working for the Cardinal, he was enmeshed into politics where—trust me, mother—men often die.”

  His mother shrugged. “The worst that could be said about your father’s death was that it might not have been a fair duel. And that only because the two witnesses were both talking to Monsieur de Bilh moments before.”

  “Both seconds were for the other man?” D’Artagnan asked, shocked. This was a complete violation of the laws of duels. He was about to say that was enough to make it murder, when he remembered his very first duel in Paris, the one that had turned into a fight between musketeers and guards of the Cardinal.

  For that duel, he had challenged Athos, Porthos and Aramis, who were all seconds for each other, and he had brought no second of his own. He hadn’t known anyone in Paris. And though his father had known enough people in Gascony, if he had suddenly turned on Monsieur de Bilh for no reason any of his neighbors could understand, it was possible he couldn’t find a second, either.

  His mother shrugged. “They weren’t seconds. I don’t think it was planned, or else, if it was, Monsieur de Bilh had forgotten all about it. Which would explain why your father was so furious.”

  “My father was furious?”

  “Indeed. Or at least that’s what your cousin Edmond said.”

  “My cousin?” D’Artagnan asked in shock. “What had my cousin to do with it all?”

  “Well, he was one of the witnesses. The other one was our priest. Both of them said that your father appeared suddenly and that he was obviously drunk.”

  “How did they know he was drunk?” D’Artagnan asked, frowning. The idea of his father drunk was as unlikely as the idea of his father losing a duel. Oh, the older man drank. Everyone in this region drank, and when it was your own wine and your own brandy, made from your own grapes, it was very hard not to drink, at least to sample it. But his father could drink most men under the table, and D’Artagnan, in his seventeen years under his parents’ roof, had never seen his father lose control of his mouth or his movement.

  His mother only nodded. “They all three say he was very drunk. He came stumbling over the wall of the thres
hing floor, and he walked right up to where de Bilh was standing, and he drew his sword and called de Bilh a damnable coward and proceeded to attack him.”

  “My father? He attacked de Bilh like that?” Even in the men’s worst breaks of friendship, they’d never gone beyond exchanging curt words. “Why?”

  His mother shook her head and shrugged. “Who knows? None of us does. De Bilh didn’t even seem to know. And, oh, Henri, he was so sorry about your father’s death. I understand it happened in the rush of combat, but he was as shocked as I was, if not more. The poor man looked one step from the tomb, himself. ‘He wouldn’t stop attacking me, Marie,’ he said. ‘He kept attacking me, and I was only trying to parry, but instead, I struck him. I never meant it.’”

  “He called you Marie?” D’Artagnan asked, shocked. While de Bilh had been in and out of the house ever since D’Artagnan remembered, it was not done for men to call women to whom they were neither related nor married by their baptismal name.

  His mother colored, then shrugged. “No, I don’t think he did. I misspoke.” She got up. “I’m sorry, son. I’m still confused and shocked, and I should never have made you come back and get involved in this. You see, I’m just a foolish woman.”

  Looking him in the eyes, steadily unblinking, she said, “I need to dress, if I don’t want to be late for supper with your friends. I will speak to you later and answer any questions you might have. But now you must leave and let me dress.”

  D’Artagnan left the room, his mind whirling. He very much doubted that his mother could or would answer any questions he might have.

  His entire life, he’d seen his mother as a sweet innocent, relying on his father to keep her safe and steady. Had he been wrong all along?

  Porthos’s Mind; Blood in the Fields;

  The End of the Trail

  SOMETIMES Porthos despised his own mind. It wasn’t just that it would not work like the minds of his friends and those men who were generally accounted very smart at court. That was it too, of course. He could understand neither Latin nor Greek, and some of the conversations between Athos and Aramis made his head hurt.

  But it was not his mind’s insufficiency of words that galled him. No. The worst of how his mind worked was the things it got hold of and wouldn’t let go.

  All through that dismal dinner, with all of them very quiet—and D’Artagnan looking at his mother now and then, as though she had personally betrayed him—Porthos had thought of the blood drops.

  He didn’t know what D’Artagnan’s shock and indignation was all about. If he had to hazard a guess, he would suspect it was because his mother had dressed well and arranged her hair for supper with three nearly strange men so shortly after her husband had died.

  Why this should upset D’Artagnan, Porthos could not imagine. After all, it was an honor his mother did them in dressing up for them as though they were important guests, above her in social station. And besides, however grieved she must be, D’Artagnan couldn’t possibly imagine that a woman like her, as beautiful as she was, would spend the rest of her life in mourning her husband without finding another.

  He couldn’t understand it, and so he’d isolated himself from all the conversation around him and instead concentrated only on those drops of blood. It could be as Aramis had said. In fact, Aramis was a wise man and far more intelligent than Porthos, so it probably was as Aramis said. It could be that those small drops of blood had been shed by Monsieur D’Artagnan’s opponent as he returned home.

  But it seemed to Porthos that until they knew if the man had even been wounded in the fight, or whether he lived in the direction those drops had gone, he couldn’t be sure. And then…and then there was something else, something about the path of those drops that bothered him.

  If he was remembering correctly—and he thought he was, because his memory rarely played him tricks—then those drops didn’t mill around on the threshing ground, and finally head that way. No. They were straight that way and to the place where D’Artagnan’s father had been run through.

  Surely if his opponent had run him through and immediately taken off running in the other direction, this would be known and would have been talked about?

  Even in Paris, where the edicts against dueling were enforced—as Porthos knew they weren’t in the provinces, or not yet—one did not kill an opponent in a duel and then run immediately away, without so much as checking to make sure the other man was dead. At the very least, Porthos would expect the drops to loop from the duel area to the place where D’Artagnan’s father had fallen, and then go the other way and over the wall.

  But instead there was nothing—nothing but that straight retreat or advance the other way.

  It didn’t seem right. And because it didn’t seem right, Porthos’s mind wouldn’t let it be. He could tell himself it didn’t matter. He could tell himself he was a fool for thinking on it nonstop. And yet, his foolish mind would not let go of it, and it would keep on worrying at it like a starving dog at a juicy bone.

  In bed, he woke up in the night, again and again, thinking he’d seen the logical explanation of those blood drops in a dream, but just could not remember it. He stared at his ceiling and tried to understand it, and he could not.

  At last, as dawn tinged the horizon a light pink, he’d got up, put on his clothes, and left the house as silently as he could and got his horse from the stable, to retrace his way to the threshing floor.

  The bastide was very quiet early dawn, but by the time he’d left it behind and found himself amid the fields, the sun was up in the cloudless sky and the day was a warm one for November. Birds sang hesitantly in the nearby trees.

  The pale, unblinking light illuminated the threshing floor unforgivingly. The blood stains were more visible than ever. There was the pool of blood that had doubtless come from the duelist’s thrust into D’Artagnan’s father’s throat, and from his withdrawing his sword.

  The still-pumping heart of Monsieur D’Artagnan père would have propelled blood out, along with the sword’s withdrawal. And it would have jetted out like so, making exactly the pattern of blood on the smooth stones that Porthos saw just there.

  And then he would stagger back, once, twice, his own feet leaving bloodstained footmarks on the stones. Back, and back, as his heart struggled to keep pumping, despite the severing of one of the body’s arteries. Back and back, till his heart lost its battle—or at least his consciousness did—and he collapsed on the floor, there, where the rest of his blood had drained away until he was dead.

  That explained the bigger stain there, indicative of a bigger puddle accumulated over a longer time.

  There was no other blood, no indication of his adversary having received a wound—except the trail of very small drops going the other way along the threshing floor to the edge of the wall.

  Again Porthos retraced his steps to that wall, saw the blood that crossed it and, leaning over the wall, saw the same blood drops in the hard packed dirt and stunted shrubs around the threshing floor.

  Aramis said it was the adversary retreating, but when had the adversary gotten wounded, then?

  If Monsieur D’Artagnan had wounded the other man in the fight, it had to have been before the man’s final thrust, right? Or at least, it was most likely to be like that. However, it wouldn’t be the first time that Porthos had seen a man come back at his slayer after being run through.

  There was this duel he’d fought, back when he was young and foolish, where, after running the other man through, Porthos had assumed he had won the fray and turned his back on the enemy who was staggering and had, in fact, gone down on one knee.

  Porthos had turned his back to ask the second if he would require satisfaction. If it hadn’t been for the look of shock in the second’s eye, as he looked over Porthos’s shoulder, Porthos would never have turned. And he would never have jumped out of the way of the sword his mortally wounded adversary had lifted and was bringing down to cleave Porthos’s head.

  So, he wasn�
�t such a fool as to assume it was impossible for a mortally wounded man to inflict injury. No. But the thing was, there was the puddle of the wounding, and there, clearly marked by back-stepping footprints of the dying man in his own blood, ten steps away, the puddle of the dying. Nowhere was there the faltering step forward, the attempt at attack.

  So it was more than sure—almost absolutely sure—that Monsieur D’Artagnan had not rallied from his fatal injury for long enough to wound his foe. It being so, that meant that any injury from which the other man could have bled must, perforce, have been inflicted before Monsieur D’Artagnan had been run through.

  But, in that case, there would be more drops of blood, as the adversary jumped around and parried and thrust—all activities likely to cause the blood to loosen from a recent wound. There would be increasing blood, as the fighting made the man bleed more.

  None of this was there.

  And in the unlikely event the man had been wounded, say, by Monsieur D’Artagnan’s sword as he collapsed…or that the man had nicked himself on his own sword in retrieving it, surely there would be drops of blood as he approached the falling man to determine if he was alive or dead.

  Regardless of the reason for the duel, even in case of mortal offense, the winner of a contest would verify that his adversary had died—or else if he was alive and needed assistance.

  A gentleman, and Porthos had heard no rumblings that the slayer of Monsieur D’Artagnan was not one, would never abandon a wounded opponent without seeking help for him. If the hatred between them were such that it demanded more satisfaction, then the man would arrange for them to meet again and to settle anything that hadn’t, so far, been settled between them. He would not, however, leave an enemy to bleed to death alone and without even the benefit of the sacraments.

 

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