Dying by the sword (23 page)
Read Dying by the sword Online
Authors: Sarah d'Almeida
Huguette raised her knees a little, bringing her grimy bare feet closer to her body, on the bench. “Are you in love with her too?” she asked.
“Too? And of course I’m not in love with her. I’ve never seen her.”
Huguette looked wishful. She had eyes somewhere between green and brown, and large, all out of proportion to her face. She stared at him a long time, then sighed. “You’ll be in love with her,” she said. “As soon as you see her.”
“Doubtful,” Aramis said, thinking of the only woman who had ever commanded his love, though he’d had a continuous stream of beauties grace his bed. Violette had not been branded with a fleur-de-lis. “And who has fallen in love with her, that you should say I’ll fall in love with her too?”
“Oh, everyone,” she said and sighed. “Everyone who sees her. But you shouldn’t fall in love with her, you know? Because she’s not very nice. I’ve heard her talk to the Cardinal, and she says that she has . . . killed people.” The huge eyes stared out at him, with what seemed to be very sincere shock.
“Lots of the Cardinal’s people kill other people,” Aramis said, and shrugged.
The girl sighed. “Yes, I guess they do. But not, normally, with poison. Or not while they’re in bed with them.”
Aramis raised his eyebrows. He was so completely taken aback, he was surprised into blurting, “I’ll take care never to be in bed with her.”
“See that you do,” Huguette said, very seriously. “I’ve heard that she has killed three husbands and a lover.”
“And does she have a name,” Aramis asked. “This sinner?”
“Why do you want to know? Do you want to meet her?”
Aramis shook his head. “No. But I think it will be easier to stay away from her if I know her name, and where she’s likely to be.”
“Most people just call her milady,” the girl said. “You know, in English. The last husband she killed with slow poison is said to have been an English earl. So she gets the title, you know. But his family was very suspicious and as soon as he died, they set about investigating his death, and she found things too hot for her in England, and so she came here.”
She hugged her bony knees, in a curiously unselfconscious and childish gesture. “I bet you no one else could tell you her name, but I can, because I heard her talking to Rochefort, and Rochefort was calling her Charlotte.”
Aramis felt as though an icy finger had run down his spine beneath his clothes. Whatever else was said, he was sure that Athos had referred to his wife as Charlotte. “Was she . . . was one of her husbands a count? A French count?”
The tavern waif shook her head, then shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “He might have been. But . . . You know they’re all dead, so what does it matter. There is a guard, in the palace, who calls her the black spider. He’s sensible at least, but most of the others aren’t. They say she’s so pretty that she must most certainly be as good as an angel.” She sighed. “I find that men can be very stupid.”
Agreeing with her, and counting out his money to pay the server, Aramis was about to say his farewells when he heard the next words tumbling out of the young woman’s mouth. “It is all very well, you know, but I heard her price for working for the Cardinal. I know that you’re a musketeer, which is why I feel a little naughty talking to you, and I know that you and your friends are forever fighting the guards of the Cardinal. But I also know that you look so kind, and I know you speak so sweetly, that it can’t probably be provoked by you.” She shrugged, completely unconscious of the irony of her words. “But I also know that when you do fight the guards, it is in duels, and it is all fair and correct. But milady is not like that. And I heard her tell the Cardinal that there was a musketeer she wanted dead. It appears he has done something to her, some time ago. Only I guess he wasn’t a musketeer then.”
She looked at Aramis, eyes wide, lips trembling a little. “She has found out he has become a musketeer, and her price for whatever she’s doing for the Cardinal is a safe conduct to be allowed to do what she wishes to this musketeer and his friends.”
“Do you remember the musketeer’s name?” Aramis asked, cold sweat now trickling down his body, and his mind clenching in panic. “Anything that might tell me who he is?”
“His name is Athos,” Huguette said. And, quite unaware that Aramis felt as though he’d just turned to stone, “I remember because it’s an odd name. Like yours.”
Where Monsieur Aramis Attempts to Investigate; Creditors with No Sense of Humor; It Is Better to Bless Than to Fight
ARAMIS, having left the tavern in good time, and finding himself, as of yet, devoid of followers, stood in a narrow alley, removing his gloves and slipping them back on, a trick he had when he was in something of a puzzle.
He could return to Athos’s house, but he could not imagine why he would be needed there. After all, the two most affected by alcohol were sleeping and, if he knew Porthos, the one least affected by alcohol would be snoring—and loudly too. This meant that Athos’s chamber was the last place to seek repose. As for the sitting room, he supposed he could sleep on a chair, or rolled upon his cloak on the floor. In fact, he’d slept in far worse conditions, when the King’s honor demanded that they march to battle. He remembered nights in arms, spent sleeping standing up, against a wall, under the pouring rain.
He had no wish to repeat that experience, though he was fairly sure he would, when next the kingdom embroiled itself in war with its neighbors over someone’s religion or someone else’s vacant throne. Until then, he had absolutely no interest in recollecting the hardships of battle by putting himself in discomfort.
Thoughts of his bed, its soft mattress and immaculate linen sheets, came to mind. Only he remembered the tone of voice in which Huguette had told about the woman, Charlotte. If she was one of the Cardinal’s minions; if she was even half so dangerous as Huguette believed . . . Well, it would be all up. Perhaps Aramis was becoming as afraid of shadows as his friends had been under the influence of alcohol, but he still couldn’t dispose of the conviction that the last place he should go was his lodgings. If she had asked for Athos’s life—and by extension their lives—as recompense, then heaven only knew what information the Cardinal might have given her, and what it might mean as far as their being safe in their own homes and in their own beds. And if he went home now, he wouldn’t even have the relatively ineffective Bazin as a guard.
And yet, he couldn’t imagine going to Athos’s house and crowding upon the already crowded floor or the even more crowded bed. He could, he thought, ask Grimaud for his bed, and he was fairly sure Grimaud would give it to him too. But Grimaud was old enough to be Athos’s father, which meant, in the end, that he was almost old enough to be Aramis’s grandfather. No good could come of this. Aramis could obtain his bed, but he would find himself unable to sleep for the remorse.
The other part of it was that he did not, very much, feel like sleeping. His body was charged with a sort of electrical energy, and he could not help but want to do something. Part of it was, he very much feared, that he wasn’t sure he could go home and sleep. Not with the idea that Athos’s wife was far worse than anything that Athos could represent with his story and that she wanted all their lives. If Huguette had not exaggerated—and though the girl could be fairly zany, in the past he had found her rather purple information, if anything, on the side of understated—then this woman was of the type that could not possibly have tolerated the injury that Athos had done her. He and everyone associated with him would be slated for death and this would most certainly include the friends that everyone knew spent most of every day with him.
Aramis was very much afraid even his well-appointed bed would not soothe him into sleep. And he certainly didn’t want to go back to Athos’s lodgings, wake his friend and tell him that the wife he’d thought dead was not only alive, but she was no common grade of criminal or fugitive. No, she was the sort of criminal or fugitive who could climb to the top rungs of society and destroy all those who stood in her way.
Aramis became aware that he was holding the tip of his tongue between his teeth, as though he were forcibly attempting to keep himself from telling the absent Athos the bad news. Which meant he definitely wasn’t ready to face his—who would be extremely hungover—friend. And he wasn’t ready to seek comfort in his bed, supposing there were no sharpened stakes waiting at his own doorstep, which at the moment was a somewhat unwarranted supposition.
So . . . So he would go to the armory, he thought. He had heard Porthos’s description, and D’Artagnan’s account of local gossip, but he was quite willing to bet that there was a nightlife in the area also, and that those abroad at that time would be more willing to talk to him than to Porthos or D’Artagnan. After all, people were more respectful of someone who was obviously a nobleman and wasn’t afraid to command their respect.
Of course, Athos could probably do the nobleman act better than Aramis, but Athos was more likely to scare them into silence than to get them to speak. Aramis they tended to think of as a fool and a dandy, and as such they viewed him as quite inoffensive.
With this happy thought, he set off at a fast clip towards the neighborhood of small close houses where the armory was. It had the advantage of being—he supposed—the very last place where anyone would look for him, just now. And it should keep Aramis happily occupied till dawn when perhaps he would be ready to brave his friends.
What he did not exactly count on was on finding the streets around the armory as empty as those of a ghost town, where everyone had suddenly died in the privacy of their houses, leaving the outside areas haunted only by shadows. Aramis took a moment to reason that, after all, he was used to musketeers and to taverns, to wenches who prowled the night and to courtiers. He was not used to people who actually woke up in the morning and worked. He supposed those would need to sleep at night.
Yet, unwilling to turn and go back to his friends, he, instead, walked around the armory. He tested the front door which, doubtless as a follow-up to Porthos’s interesting adventure, had been chained. Then he walked around, noticing how close the armory was to the house. Leaning one on the other, in fact. He wondered if there was an internal connecting passage and went along to poke his head in the narrow space between the two—so narrow, in fact, that it was hard to get his hand in between the two walls. Which he was in the process of doing when he heard a crunch of feet on gravel behind him. He started to turn around, but before he could someone or something swept his hat from his head. And something heavy hit him hard on the back of the head and the world went black.
He woke up in complete darkness and being jolted about. His first thought was that he was in a carriage, but judging from the jolts, he was being carried around in something that shook all over the place—which meant a not very good carriage, he supposed. He reached up, only to find out that if it was a carriage, it was a very small one, since he was confined, in a sitting position, with his back bent over forward, in a space barely large enough to contain him. A frantic feeling of the space around him disclosed that they had taken his sword and—apparently—his hat as well.
His first, terrifying thought was that he was in a coffin. But if he were in a coffin, the coffin was still being carried around and not confined in the ground. And besides, Aramis had never seen a coffin the shape his enclosure appeared to be—fairly high and rectangular at the base, and covered over by a domed space.
Because his head hurt like blazes, it took him a moment for the shape to connect in his head to the only thing it could be—a storage trunk, of the sort used to deposit tools and clothes, or anything else. It smelled faintly of sap, so it must be fairly new and made of wood. And, now that his eyes were accustomed to the darkness, Aramis could tell that there was a small crack all around, through which light and air came. There was also a hole which was clearly a keyhole.
Aramis peeked through this keyhole and to his shock saw light of morning and also what appeared to be a swath of countryside. And someone’s back, dressed in rough homespun. He was being taken somewhere in an open cart, by men dressed in homespun. Probably men who did not know him and whom he did not know, though it was always possible, of course, that they were wearing disguises.
In Aramis’s mind, he had a view of the trunk, with him inside it, being dropped into a hole in the ground and covered over. That, doubtless, would be a solution to his having penetrated some portion of De Chevreuse’s conspiracy. Perhaps to other things too. Perhaps the whole thing with the armorer was that it was part of the same conspiracy. It would explain the guards’ presence on the scene so soon after the murder and their eagerness to take Mousqueton in. In fact, as far as that went, it explained a lot. Including why Aramis was now inside a trunk.
Well, he might in the end finish his life in a hole in the ground while still alive, but he would be damned if he allowed them to do it while he was still and well behaved.
Raising his fist, he pounded hard on the lid of the trunk. “Hey,” he called. “Hey, you above, let me out.”
“Ah, woke up, have you, sleeping beauty?” A rough voice, with a plebeian accent, answered him. “Well and good, now be quiet and no harm will come to you.”
“Why should I be quiet?” Aramis said, pounding on the lid again. “What are you doing to me?”
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