Death in Gascony

by Sarah D'almeida

  That was done in war but not in a duel.

  For a moment he wondered if that was what Aramis was pursuing as well; whether that was why he was so obsessed about the religion of the combatants. But Porthos had heard enough to surmise that Protestants too sought the blessing of the clergy before they died. And besides, chances were that Aramis was thinking of religion because he was Aramis. He was like that. He even read the lives of saints to likely females.

  Dismissing Aramis with a shrug of his massive shoulders, Porthos frowned at the drops of blood. It made no sense at all, but the only way he could think of for the trail of drops to add up to something was if Monsieur D’Artagnan had been wounded before and had arrived, bleeding, from that direction where the drops started on the wall. He’d jumped down from the wall—and there was a spatter of drops there, as though the movement had increased the bleeding—and challenged and attacked his adversary, suddenly.

  There were drops leading to the smaller puddle of blood. If the duel had been brief and intense, with Monsieur D’Artagnan attacking and the other man defending and neither of them moving much, any spatters of blood from Monsieur D’Artagnan would be lost in that bigger spurt when the sword that had sliced into his throat was pulled out.

  And then there was the pouring of blood at his dying.

  It wasn’t perfect, as far as explanations went. Though Porthos couldn’t find any facts that didn’t fit in it, it didn’t satisfy him completely. He didn’t like to come up with explanations like that, one on the other and not know for sure.

  However, the only way to know for sure was to interview the witnesses of the duel. He would do that too, later. At least if his friends didn’t. He had no idea what Athos and D’Artagnan might be doing. He’d been so absorbed in thinking about the bloodstains that he didn’t even remember if they’d discussed it at dinner.

  But until he could interview those who’d been there, Porthos would assume that Monsieur D’Artagnan had arrived wounded and that events had taken place as he thought now.

  Which meant, of course, that Monsieur D’Artagnan had been wounded elsewhere.

  Porthos bounded to the low wall, and, following the drops of blood, over the wall and down on the other side. There was a sort of path there. Not a real one and probably not an official path of any kind. Just the sort of path beaten by boys running between fields, or by women carrying water. It was not a straight path—they rarely were—but wound around taller scrub, and it turned aside from stones too big to jump onto or from heels too steep to climb.

  But the drops of blood followed its meandering, clear and black against the yellowish beaten dirt.

  Porthos followed it, like a hound on the scent of a hare. Leaving his horse behind, tied near the threshing floor, he followed the small footpath, this way and that, up and down small hillocks.

  It ended in a field and there—Porthos stopped—at the edge of the field, the scrub brush had been trampled and stomped and the field—left bare by harvest, save for a stubble of grass that looked much like the stubble on the face of an unshaven man—had been stepped on and kicked.

  It looked, Porthos thought, as though a great fight had taken place here. A fight too intense and strong for him to be able to tell whether there were two men or six, or ten.

  That there had been a fight, Porthos would swear to. He’d seen plenty of fields after duels. And this was a field where a duel had happened.

  He looked around himself and it was all fields and, in the distance, a straggle of protruding trees, like the tongue of the forest extending onto the fields. No houses. No place where some urchin might have lingered and seen something. Nothing.

  There was nothing for it. No obvious witness.

  But, on his way back to his horse, Porthos reasoned that just because there was no obvious witness it didn’t mean there were no witnesses.

  The place was wide open and not hidden. If he remembered rightly, the duel had taken place in the light of day, and there was no reason that someone might not have seen the fight that preceded it.

  Porthos had grown up in a rural area much like this—fields and woods and the occasional peasant house. He knew well enough how hard it was to hide anything at all without someone, somewhere, seeing it, commenting on it, and—if one were unlucky enough—carrying news of it to one’s father.

  So he would simply have to look further and spend more time at it. He would have to talk to the peasants hereabouts, in and out of the bastide.

  He remembered the sight of the area they’d had from the higher ground. He remembered that in addition to the bastide there was a straggle of peasant houses, here and there.

  In those houses, somewhere, there might very well be someone who’d seen people fighting in this field. They’d be able to tell Porthos whether the wounded man was Monsieur D’Artagnan père, and whether he’d been wounded fairly or by stealth. Somewhere in those houses, there might very well be someone who knew who had sounded whom, and whether the men were the same who’d fought a duel later on, at the threshing floor.

  Porthos would be able to find the reason for those blood drops. And then he could stop thinking about them.

  A Musketeer’s Piety; Witness to Death; Where Some Truths Are Harder Than Others

  IT was at the moment of the elevation of the Host that D’Artagnan noticed Aramis.

  He should have seen him earlier. After all, early Mass in the small church near D’Artagnan’s house was usually attended only by those retainers of the house—Bayard and Marguerite and one or two of the men and women who came for the day—who felt particularly religious that early in the morning.

  Even Mass at the larger church, in the center of the town, was sparsely attended, early morning on a weekday. For one, this was Gascony, where enough people remained who weren’t exactly good Catholics. And tired of the continuous fighting over the last century, their Catholic neighbors often pretended not to notice that they didn’t attend church. As long as a man didn’t cause trouble, his neighbors tried not to noticed what faith he believed in.

  So the churches were sparsely attended, and at that, attended mostly by local peasants: a short, stocky, dark-haired breed. All of which should have made the tall, slim, blond Aramis very visible.

  But the church was dark in the early morning. A Roman church, with its small, arched windows far up enough on the walls to allow the church to be turned into a fortress, it was dark at the best of times. Early morning it was darker than that, the dim light scarcely enough to see the pews, and the vague shadows of the other people at Mass—and the figure of the priest at the altar.

  And then, D’Artagnan had been preoccupied with what brought him here—not a startle of sudden piety, but the need to ask the priest how his father had died.

  His mother’s behavior was so odd that D’Artagnan had spent half the night running away in his own mind from unfilial thoughts that his mother had engineered the death of his father.

  And now he was here, hoping to lay the matter to rest.

  So, when the priest lifted the Host, and people knelt for the adoration, was the first time he caught sight of Aramis in the front pew. The light had glinted briefly on the musketeer’s hair as he knelt.

  What was Aramis doing here? Was he here on the same errand D’Artagnan was? And if so, why had he come? Had he—also—suspected D’Artagnan’s mother? And if he did, why? Could his mother be truly culpable?

  In a worry that mimicked the effects of fever to an amazing extent, D’Artagnan had gone through the movements of the rest of the Mass in a confusion of suspicion and fear—and guilt at suspecting his own mother.

  And after the Mass, as he got up to follow the priest into the sacristy, he found himself a step behind Aramis. “Father, please,” he said, just echoing Aramis.

  The priest was old. He’d been old ever since D’Artagnan remembered. In fact, D’Artagnan couldn’t approach him without feeling as though he were again a small boy coming to him for lessons on the first letters or for instr
uction in doctrine.

  Small, bent over, the priest had skin the color of old clay—the sort of skin of someone who started out olive skinned and then spent most of his life outdoors, in all weather. He’d seen the priest, often enough, cross the fields in the full heat of day to take the last sacraments to some peasant that lie dying in some hovel far from the bastide.

  The younger priest who ministered at the larger church was not so devoted. But this man was. His name was Father Ustou, and the peasants hereabouts whispered that he was a saint.

  He now turned his heavily lined face to them, looking first at Aramis, and then at D’Artagnan, with small, dark eyes that shone from amid the wrinkles. “Ah, my sons,” he said, clearly confused. “How may I help you?”

  Aramis started to open his mouth, but then bowed slightly to D’Artagnan as if to indicate that the younger man had a greater right to ask questions.

  D’Artagnan bowed in turn, to thank him for the courtesy, all the while wondering if Aramis suspected D’Artagnan’s mother, and if so, why. Of course, Aramis knew a lot about women. He could read their minds and hearts like other men could read books.

  “Father,” D’Artagnan said, rushing, afraid of losing his courage if he waited. “My mother says you were one of the witnesses at my father’s duel, and I wanted to know…I wanted to know what you remembered.”

  The priest squinted, “Henri? Is that you? I didn’t recognize you in those clothes.” He smiled a little, vaguely. “So sad that you had to come back for such a reason.” He sighed. “Yes, yes, your father…I was there, when your father died.” Another sigh. “Such a strong man, you know, and in general a very good man. So sad for him to die like that, over such a foolish thing.”

  “What foolish thing?” D’Artagnan asked. “Why did they fight?”

  The priest made his way fully into the sacristy and put away the vessels of the Mass in a cabinet, which he locked. “No one knows that, my son. Not even Monsieur de Bilh, who I think would give something to know it.”

  “How is it possible then,” D’Artagnan asked, “for two men to fight to the death without any idea of the reason for fighting?”

  The priest shook his head. “It wasn’t a fight to the death. Not from where I was standing. It was more…well…Monsieur de Bilh was defending himself from your father’s mad attack. The poor man laments every day that an unlucky thrust killed his friend.”

  “But—Why was my father attacking him?”

  “We don’t know. This is what happened.” The priest, his cleanup after Mass done, turned around to face them. “I was talking with Monsieur de Bilh and your cousin, Edmond de Bigorre. Edmond was telling me the story of a saint, that he heard from his fiancée, and asking if I’d ever heard the like, and Monsieur de Bilh was waiting by. He wanted to speak to me of some of the poor I’ve been helping. He proposed to give employment to the man, if your father would consent to let him take it outside his lands. And as this was going on, I heard your father roar.

  “We all turned to see him running through the fields towards the threshing floor where we were…” The priest frowned. “He ran…erratically. As if he’d had too much to drink. Not straight, you know, but stumbling a little and veering now this way and now that way. I remember thinking it very odd, because here we were, and not noon yet, and I’d never seen your father drunk, your know.”

  “No,” D’Artagnan said, and his voice echoed hollow in his own ears. “Nor have I.”

  The priest nodded and his bald head shone like cured leather under the light from the sad single candle in front of the sacrarium. “But he was drunk, Henri. Drunk or…” The priest crossed himself hastily. “In the grip of an unholy spirit.” He looked up at D’Artagnan as though afraid of the response. When that didn’t come he continued. “He didn’t seem to recognize any of us who were before him—not one of us—and he came charging at Monsieur de Bilh, sword in hand, and called him a villain.” From the depths of his sleeve, the priest extracted a handkerchief, with which he mopped his glistening forehead. “It was a close-in fight, Monsieur Henri. Close fought. And then, while de Bilh tried to fend him off, your father charged blindly. He impaled himself on that sword, Monsieur Henri, and that’s the truth. So much so that I was not sure I was within the rights of the church to give him a Christian burial.”

  “You mean…” D’Artagnan said, his legs going weak, his knees losing their steadiness. “That my father committed suicide? That he killed himself?”

  The priest sighed. Again the hand with the kerchief mopped at his brow. “I don’t know. I don’t think so—or not on purpose. Had I thought so, I’d never have given him Christian burial on consecrated land. I do not mock the rules of the holy church.”

  “No,” D’Artagnan said, but in his mind he could see it all too well—the bright sunlight on the threshing floor, and his father running into a sword. He thought of that dress and the uniform under the table, on the chest his father used to rest his feet upon. If a man had left behind everything he prized, and love besides…

  Perhaps his father had held onto life and forged on so long as he had to bring up an heir to the name. But now D’Artagnan was grown, and had gone to Paris to seek his fortune. Perhaps his father thought himself exonerated of the duty to keep going now.

  But no. D’Artagnan thought of his father as he’d last seen him. He thought of his father having a mock duel with him in the broad yard of their house, just the day before D’Artagnan had left for Paris.

  His father had danced and jumped, and laughed with delight both at outwitting D’Artagnan and when D’Artagnan outwitted him. He’d been happy. Very happy. And it was hard to think of it as the happiness of a man who had finally discharged his duty and who could now put a period to his life.

  Besides, his father had been ever mindful of how what he did affected others. He’d been the most attentive of fathers, the most considerate of husbands. Had he indeed been so pained at having to leave his Parisian life and perhaps his Parisian love behind, he wouldn’t have forced his son to do the same.

  And he would never use Monsieur de Bilh to put an end to himself. The two of them were friends when they weren’t raging enemies, but on the whole the friends had lasted longer than the enemies. And besides…And besides even had Monsieur de Bilh been his father’s heartfelt foe, it would be an injustice to implicate him in a death he hadn’t intended. And D’Artagnan’s father wasn’t an unjust man.

  “I think he was drunk, Monsieur Henri,” the priest said, as though reading D’Artagnan’s mind. “Or…not himself.”

  “There is an illness…” Aramis said. “That sometimes comes on men, particularly older men. Something happens in the brain. One of my teachers, who was learned in such things said that something burst in their brain. It made them…strange. Like a man who’s been hit a blow to the head.”

  “Of course that might be it too,” the priest said. “Perhaps his horse tossed him. They found his horse, you know, much later. It had run free. He didn’t look…” He looked at D’Artagnan. “Your father didn’t look as though he had fallen from the horse, but you never know. Perhaps he had. That would explain his behavior.

  “But you need not be afraid he died a suicide. I’m sure in his heart of hearts your father could never have meant such a thing; could never have done it. I’m sure of it, Monsieur Henri. So sure that I have said all the Masses I can for his soul. And he was a good man, you know?” The priest’s old, shriveled hand rested on D’Artagnan’s arm, like a claw, but a benevolent claw. “He had his foibles, as who doesn’t, all of us being fallen men. But in all that, and for all that, he was a good man and I’m sure when you and I, at last, come to the heavenly mansion, we’ll find him there waiting for us.”

  D’Artagnan nodded, but his heart felt tight, tight, as though deep inside a hand were squeezing it. Yes, yes, he’d suspected something wrong with his father’s death since he’d first heard of it. But now he could not doubt that something untoward and underhanded had happened. He
could not doubt his father had met with foul play of some sort.

  Either that…Either that or he’d gone mad.

  And it fell to his son—his only son—and heir to find out exactly what that untoward something might be. It fell to his son, his only heir, to find out the reasons for his death, and who might have caused it.

  “I’m sorry to pain you with the description of what happened, my son,” the priest said in an almost whisper. “But I thought it best if you knew the truth.”

  “It is,” D’Artagnan said. “And I thank you, Father.” He bent to kiss the man’s ring, then walked out into the sunlight.

  He’d been so absorbed in his own misery he didn’t realize Aramis had walked out with him till he heard the musketeer say, “I’m sure it wasn’t a suicide, D’Artagnan. I wouldn’t worry on it. Pere Ustou impressed me as a most careful man, and if there had been the slightest chance—”

  D’Artagnan shook his head. “I never thought there was. Not of suicide,” he said. He sighed deeply. “If it were…while I would worry about his eternal fate, I would no longer need to worry about how he died. No, Aramis. What I’m worried about is that I’m sure—almost absolutely sure—someone murdered him.”

  Aramis seemed taken aback. He leaned backwards a little, managing somehow to make himself appear more detached and superior. “What mean you? How can you be sure of such a thing, when Father Ustou just told us—”

  “That my father acted drunk—which I know he could not be. Or in the grip of demons—which you know few of us are bad enough to warrant. Or had gone mad. You say it is possible to go mad from a blow to the head. And there’s poison, you know.” He shook his head. “I’m not doubting that my father attacked Monsieur de Bilh or instigated the duel. I’m not even doubting that he ran himself into a sword. But what I’m wondering is what happened before to cause him to act that way. And who brought it about.”

  Aramis frowned at him. Not with displeasure, but more as though D’Artagnan were the obscure text of a forgotten book, which Aramis was having trouble reading. “Perhaps,” he said at very long last. “And if that’s the case, who can it be? What enemies did your father have?”