Death in Gascony

by Sarah D'almeida

  “Of course,” D’Artagnan said, as he finished his cup of wine. He wouldn’t say it. He couldn’t say it without courting that duel that he’d promised several people he would not undertake. But, in that moment, he was sure as he hoped to be sure of salvation that de Bilh was lying to him.

  Why would he be lying about D’Artagnan’s mother? Why would he be lying about having arranged her marriage to his old friend?

  D’Artagnan didn’t know. The thought crossed his mind that his mother might be involved with de Bilh. The idea, monstrous and horrifying, hung over D’Artagnan’s mind, not quite expressing itself.

  He drank his wine and wished he could wake; prayed that all this, from his father’s death on, was just a nightmare.

  The Tale of the Blood;

  Where D’Artagnan Ponders Unknown Relatives;

  The Cardinal’s Methods

  “SO, you see,” Porthos’s voice said, earnestly from within the recesses of Bayard’s quarters. “He was wounded before he was wounded.”

  “Porthos, you make no manner of sense,” Aramis’s voice echoed, after his. “What can you mean by that?”

  “I mean, see…”

  D’Artagnan hesitated a moment, outside the door into the rooms that Bayard and his wife used as their more or less private residence. It wasn’t, properly speaking, his home. Or at least, his father and mother were always scrupulous about respecting the servants’ privacy. But then, D’Artagnan, from his youngest years, had been in and out of their rooms as though he were their own. And he couldn’t imagine Bayard’s reaction to his invasion being more than a mild surprise.

  And besides all that, his friends were in there. And they were talking…D’Artagnan shook his head. They were talking of someone being wounded before he was wounded—which sounded much like what D’Artagnan had talked about with de Bilh. His father…

  D’Artagnan hastened down the long, dark corridor.

  “This blood stain?” Aramis said. “Couldn’t it have been from his mortal wound?”

  And on those words, D’Artagnan walked in on them and, for a moment, they all stopped talking and stood, as though caught at fault.

  They were in Bayard’s officine at the back of his lodgings—a small windowless room with a table and some shelves that were usually full with things to mend or modify for his wife or D’Artagnan’s parents.

  Right now, there was a suit of clothes on the table. Bayard was holding a lantern over it. And around the table, clustered as though they were surgeons examining a dead body, were his three friends.

  “Ah, D’Artagnan,” Porthos said, recovering first. “You see, we were examining—”

  Athos stepped in front of the table. “It is nothing, D’Artagnan. There’s no reason to distress yourself with—”

  “I want him to see it,” Porthos said, sounding mulish. “D’Artagnan has a good mind, and you’ll see he’ll agree that—”

  “Porthos, my friend,” Aramis interrupted. “I’ve told you this before, but you have all the natural sensibility of a donkey.”

  “Bah, sensibility,” Porthos said. “All I say is if D’Artagnan sees the bloodstains, he will see that—”

  “And at that I might have overestimated it,” Aramis said, softly.

  Meanwhile, D’Artagnan’s mind had worked. Porthos wanted him to see something pertaining to blood. There was a suit of clothes on the table. And he’d heard Porthos say his father had been wounded before he was wounded. From which D’Artagnan would deduce that his father had come wounded to the fatal duel—which, just as well as an issue of the brain or poison, could explain his behavior on that threshing floor.

  While his friends argued and protested, D’Artagnan stepped forward, feeling as though he were in a dream, and, gently, pushed Athos aside.

  “D’Artagnan!” Aramis said.

  “Are you sure?” Athos asked.

  But D’Artagnan, faced with one of his father’s familiar suits, covered in what was presumably his father’s blood, turned mute, questioning eyes to Porthos. “Porthos,” he said. “What do you mean he was wounded before he was wounded?”

  “Oh, you heard that?” Porthos said, immensely pleased. “Yes, look here—see that bloodstain? It’s wholly unconnected to the others.”

  “But the blood might have…poured that way, somehow,” D’Artagnan said, numbly. “Deflected…somehow.”

  “Well, then, it didn’t,” Porthos said. “Couldn’t have. Look here.” He lifted the suit.

  Though the smell of old blood was overpowering, there was another smell. It was a smell for which D’Artagnan had no name, but which was as familiar to him as the smell of burning fire; the smell of food cooking; or any of the smells that he’d known from childhood. It was his father’s smell.

  He could remember being very young—he couldn’t have been much more than two—and his father traveling somewhere. D’Artagnan didn’t remember any of the details, if indeed he’d ever known them. But he remembered—fully in the charge of his mother and Marguerite—desperately missing his father. He remembered sneaking into his father’s room and putting his face on his father’s suit. The smell from that suit was the same smell that now came from this suit—the echoes still clear even through the stench of old blood.

  His eyes swimming with tears, he tried to concentrate on what Porthos was showing him, in the center of the bloodstain. And there was, as Porthos spread the fabric with his hand, just a tiny cut, there.

  “There’s the like in the doublet,” Porthos said. “In the exact same place, so don’t tell me it’s moth.”

  It didn’t look like moth. “No,” D’Artagnan said. “It is not moth.”

  “What is more,” Porthos said, with a hasty look at Bayard, “I went around here, and talked to the peasants, you know. And there’s a woman, Louise, in the farmhouse that way”—he pointed. “Outside the walls—”

  “Louise Boulanger?” Bayard said. “In the new farm?”

  “Might be,” Porthos said, as usual not resenting that a servant introduced himself in the conversation, though D’Artagnan noted that Athos raised his eyebrows.

  Porthos shrugged and went on, “She told me that she can see the fields from her attic, and, on the day of the duel, she saw a man come and…come up behind your father and touch him with something. She said at the time she couldn’t understand, and thought the man had just touched your father with a stick…But I’m sure that wasn’t it. You see, this cut and the blood…are on his back.”

  “But that would be right through his heart,” D’Artagnan said. “How could—”

  “Men do, sometimes, if they’re very strong,” Porthos said. “Survive even that type of injury.”

  “And your father was strong, monsieur,” Bayard said.

  D’Artagnan put his hand out to support himself on the edge of the table. “You…certainly you can’t possibly…Who…Murdered? My father? Who would want to murder him?”

  To his mind came the voice of de Bilh calling his mother Marie and saying he’d known her from a child. But he couldn’t believe that his mother was guilty. He’d rather suspect himself.

  Oh, his mother was not an angel, and not perfect. And she and his father argued—mostly because everyone, sooner or later, argued with Charles D’Artagnan. His very best friends said he derived more pleasure from a good argument than from just about anything else. But D’Artagnan remembered the looks they traded—by the fireside in the evening, or when his father walked in on his mother suddenly. He remembered the way their eyes softened and widened when they looked at each other.

  No. She could not have harmed him. She could not have betrayed him.

  “I don’t know,” Porthos said, softly, his words penetrating through the fog of what seemed to be a raging argument in D’Artagnan’s own mind.

  “The priest said your mother’s people came from Paris?” Athos said. “Perhaps someone…perhaps…”

  “One of my mother’s relatives?” D’Artagnan said, looking up. “Why would h
e want to kill me? Or my father?”

  “Well, you know…” Athos said. “If they live in Paris, it is possible they work for the Cardinal. And if they work for the Cardinal…” He shrugged. “Killing your father might be a way to get you to leave the city and come to Gascony.” He smiled a little. “And leave the four inseparables reduced by one.”

  Even if D’Artagnan could—which he couldn’t—believe he was so essential as to inspire the Cardinal to plot that way, it made no sense. “But…but my father had a…one of those notes from the Cardinal.”

  He realized from the looks on their faces that it was the first time they heard of this.

  “A safe-conduct?” Athos asked.

  “In his locked trunk, in his office,” D’Artagnan said. “With…a lot of other things.”

  “Monsieur D’Artagnan worked for the Cardinal,” Bayard said, as though he suspected them all of being less than sane. “I’ve told Monsieur Athos that the Cardinal and the King have sent horses for him. Why would you think the Cardinal would want to murder my master?”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time his eminence disposed of his own agents that way,” Porthos said.

  Before Bayard could speak—though he had opened his mouth and was obviously intent in defending the man whom D’Artagnan’s own father had called a great man—Aramis said, “But it’s not even necessarily so. I mean, just because you found a safe-conduct, D’Artagnan, it doesn’t follow that it was given to your father. Those all are addressed to the bearer. Perhaps your father found it. Or perhaps he got it from someone in a duel. I know your mother believed that he worked for the Cardinal.” He pronounced it as though he were saying he worked for Satan. “And I know Bayard here thinks he was paid in horses, but there are other explanations for all of it. And your mother and Bayard might have misunderstood his intent too.”

  “I didn’t miss—”

  “Or he might have been making a jest,” Aramis said. And this time Bayard was silent. “The thing is, D’Artagnan, of the two times you were attacked, the first one was indisputably by guards of his eminence. And the second it was, without doubt, the kind of riffraff that his eminence is likely to hire.”

  “Three times,” D’Artagnan said. “I was attacked three times.” He told them of the attackers outside de Bilh’s home, all the while feeling as though his head were swimming and this weren’t quite real. Couldn’t be quite real. “But those too…” he said. “Might very well be the type of men that his eminence is likely to hire. They weren’t locals, and they were…Well…I don’t think they would have scrupled to kill me by ambush or in secret. If I hadn’t seen their shadows as they approached…I think they would have killed my horse, and then me, while I was stunned.” He shook his head. “As it was…One of them was sneaking around towards my back when Mousqueton—who says you sent him, Athos—killed him with a blow from a tree branch.”

  “Very handy that way, Mousqueton,” Porthos said.

  D’Artagnan nodded. “So yes, they could have been sent by his eminence.” In his heart of hearts he wanted to believe that. Richelieu had been his sworn enemy since his first day in the capital. He’d tried to kill or capture D’Artagnan’s friends by various methods, the latest one being to send those totally hapless guards after them.

  He could have no love lost for D’Artagnan. But it made no sense. Try as D’Artagnan might, a lot of it still made no sense.

  His mother was either the last one of her line or she wasn’t. If she was, what relatives, near or far, could have been convinced to serve the Cardinal? And if she wasn’t, what family did she have? What was their station?

  It came to him, almost as a flash, that perhaps his mother was the last heiress to some great fortune. Sometimes, the way the noble houses tangled and twisted and—suddenly—died off, it was possible to have relatives you’d never heard of.

  Perhaps his mother had rich and powerful relatives who’d died leaving her a fortune of which she was quite unawares.

  From all D’Artagnan had heard about the Cardinal’s methods in the capital, it would not be unheard of for his eminence to dispose of an heiress before she knew she was such and to claim her estate as his own.

  “I must talk to my mother,” he said. And stumbled out of the room, towards sunlight and air. And from there, into the main house, in search of answers.

  Madame D’Artagnan’s Confusion; Where Relatives Aren’t Exactly Relatives;

  The Impossibility of Making Women Speak

  “MAMAN,” D’Artagnan said, coming upon his mother in one of the upstairs hallways. She was sitting on one of the stone window seats that protruded from the wall on either side of the broad window—allowing someone to sit with a view of the outside or plenty of light.

  Light was the material consideration in this case. His mother was working at white fabric, embroidering it in light colors. She looked up from her work and for a moment, for just a moment, D’Artagnan would have sworn she was on the verge of tears.

  But she blinked, and smiled dazzlingly at him. “Ah, son,” she said. “Come sit.” And pointed on the other seat beside the broad window.

  D’Artagnan sat. The window was glazed in tiny panes set in a lead frame. Through the uneven, thick glass he could see the fields outside, and villages, all of it looking like it was underwater.

  “You left very early,” his mother said. “Before I was up.”

  “I went to Mass,” he said, impatiently.

  “Ah, that must be a new habit from Paris,” she said. “Going to the early Mass and on a weekday yet.”

  He didn’t rise to the bait. True, he’d never been afflicted with an excess of piety and was rarely known to make an effort to attend more than the Sunday Mass—and that one often midmorning at the larger church.

  But this was not the time to allow his mother to tease him about the lazy habits he’d left behind when he’d left the house. And it was not the time to allow her to indulge in motherly reminiscences of his stubbornness either. Instead, D’Artagnan spoke quickly, before he could lose his courage, “Maman, did you grow up in Paris?”

  She startled, then laughed a little—a laughter that seemed out of place in someone who was pale from crying; wearing all black; and in whose eyes, tears shone, still. “Yes, Henri, I did. Remember I used to tell you stories when you were very little?”

  “No, you told me stories of the convent,” he said.

  “That too,” she said. “But surely I told you stories of the capital, as well, and of what it was like to grow up in a big city.”

  He shook his head impatiently. “No. Not that I remember. I don’t remember your mentioning your mother or father, ever.”

  “Oh.” She shook her head. “No, I wouldn’t have mentioned them. You see…I never knew either of them.”

  “How not? Not know your own parents?”

  “My mother died at my birth and my father…And my father shortly after, Henri. So, you see, there was not much to know. I grew up with some distant cousins, who brought me up as if I were their own.”

  “And are they still alive?” he asked.

  Marie D’Artagnan shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s been a long time, and, you know, the parents died there too, and I haven’t kept up my acquaintance with their children.”

  “Acquaintance? They raised you!”

  She laughed a little again, as though his outrage amused her. “Well, it is not that simple, you know. They raised me, it is true, when I was very little. But at six, I was sent to the convent as a boarder.”

  “So you could learn your letters?” D’Artagnan asked.

  “That,” she said, in tones of great patience. “And I think they hoped I would have a religious vocation, since I didn’t have any other relatives or…” She shrugged. “They always said it was what my father wished me to do.”

  “But your father was dead,” D’Artagnan said. And remembered de Bilh saying her parents had only died just before her wedding.

  She frowned a little. “Well, ye
s, but they said it was his last wish, and who was I to deny his last wish? But you know, I never professed. A lot of the other girls professed at twelve or so, but I never did. I felt it wasn’t quite right and that I’d prefer marrying and having children.” She smiled at him. “Which, as you see, is what I’ve done.”

  “But you speak Gascon!”

  “Oh, yes. My parents were from Gascony. As were my distant cousins. And so, you see, I speak Gascon, though I had to become familiar with it again after I married your father.”

  “And how did you marry my father?”

  “I met him and fell in love with him and he offered for my hand,” Marie D’Artagnan said. She looked confused. “And then we married.”

  “No, but how did you come to meet him, if you were in a convent, I presume in Paris?”

  “Oh…some…some friends of his had mentioned me and he came to meet me.”

  D’Artagnan chewed the corner of his lip. There were already enough contradictions between his mother’s stories and Monsieur de Bilh’s. And she didn’t seem to remember that de Bilh had arranged the marriage.

  And yet, it was all capable of a very simple explanation. Perhaps de Bilh had forgotten that she lived with guardians and not parents. Or perhaps because she was in the convent then, and he was talking to guardians, he wasn’t sure exactly of the relationship between them. And it was possible his mother truly didn’t remember how she’d come to meet her future husband. Perhaps the dazzle of meeting Charles D’Artagnan had driven every other thought from her mind. Perhaps. He’d been that much bigger than life, a man who attracted attention wherever he went.

  Or perhaps she’d been Monsieur de Bilh’s sweetheart before settling for Monsieur D’Artagnan. Perhaps that had been her big romance. And perhaps it had been through his agency—intentional or not—that they met. In which case it made perfect sense for her to refuse to tell the story to her son. It would also account for the sudden flame of blush putting roses in her otherwise mortally pale cheeks.

  And yet…