Dying by the sword (3 page)
Read Dying by the sword Online
Authors: Sarah d'Almeida
“Well, then,” Athos said, and though he heard the amusement in his own voice, he knew he was in dead earnest. “Let it be for our servants as it is for us. We’ll prove him innocent or die trying. One for all—”
“And all for one,” his friends answered in a single voice.
The Antechamber of Monsieur de Treville; The Inadvisability of Tempting a Musketeer; The Limits of the Possible
PORTHOS didn’t doubt that Monsieur de Treville would be able to do something about Mousqueton. After all, Monsieur de Treville, captain of the musketeers, often stood somewhere between a father and a confessor to his musketeers. He was the one who got them pardons from the King when they were arrested mid duel. He was the one who protected them from trouble when their amorous adventures landed them in hot water.
And he had been the one who, those many years ago when Aramis killed a man in a duel with Porthos as his second, had looked after them and given them a place to hide and identities to hide under. He had also, through the various travails in which the four friends found themselves involved, stood by their side and protected them. Porthos was sure that Monsieur de Treville could do something.
But when they arrived, the antechamber was crowded. Oh, it was normally crowded, serving the musketeers as gathering place, sports chamber and training room. The entire room—a huge, well-proportioned room of Italianate influence, furnished with fine mosaic floors and columned expanse—was the setting for impromptu mock duels—battles for position and place—in which the musketeers tested their mettle and fought with such abandon that a stranger might imagine they wished to kill each other. On the stairs, the more adventurous ones fought, gaining and losing a step or two, at the risk of eye or ear or limb.
Normally when in the antechamber, Porthos, Athos, Aramis and D’Artagnan whiled away their time fighting on the stairs—either against each other, or the four of them shoulder to shoulder against any challengers. But this time they were in a hurry and, as they came into the room, Aramis searched among the throng of musketeers for a harassed looking young man in the livery of Monsieur de Treville—one of his attendants or clerks, who made it his business to announce when someone might have an urgent need. He cut through the crowd to approach the small dark-haired gentleman and whisper in his ear.
As the gentleman turned to go through the dueling crowd on the stairs and Aramis turned back to his friends, Porthos heard behind him, “I’d say they’re worried. I hear Porthos’s servant was arrested for murder.”
“He let his own servant be taken?” another voice said.
“Worse. He let his servant be taken by Richelieu’s guards,” another said.
And yet another quipped in, in the tone of someone who would ape Aramis’s style of dressing and manner, without the slightest hint of the blond musketeer’s suave personality, “Well, murder surprises me, but we all know he’s a cursed little thief, don’t we.”
As Porthos felt his hand drop to the hilt of his sword, another voice said, “Oh, no. I wouldn’t say that.” Porthos halted his movement, but when the voice finished, “I’d never call Mousqueton little,” Porthos’s hand pulled up and his sword with it, glinting by the light coming in through the lead-paned windows of the antechamber.
“You dare,” he heard himself bellow, before he was even sure what he was about. “You insult me and my servant? In my hearing?”
Turning, he faced a group of five musketeers—it was plain they’d been the ones speaking. For one, even though the antechamber was so crowded that it would have been difficult for any individual person to move, everyone around them had managed to move back. They, themselves, looked as though they’d been stopped in the middle of taking a step back—but had done it too slowly to quite manage to meld with the crowd behind them, which managed to look as though they had always been back there, looking with interested eyes at the five and the irate giant redhead with his sword in hand.
Porthos’s eye alighted on each of the suddenly pale faces. Yes. As he expected. Three of them he didn’t know by name, though they’d probably been on the same side in a hundred street battles, when the cry of “to me, Musketeers” went up and any musketeer in range came to support his comrades.
The other two he knew all too well. One of them, Roux, who shared with Athos the superficial resemblance of being tall and dark haired—though his eyes were not dark blue and he did not have the same air of nobility—had for some time now taken to wearing the same old-fashioned, Spanish style tight doublets and flaring breeches that Athos favored. The other, Bernard D’Augine, was his best friend. Blond and slim like Aramis, he aped the blond musketeer in everything, from his fashionable clothes, to his habits of speech, and that annoying habit that Aramis had of turning his hand to contemplate his fingernails when he was about to say something particularly cutting.
In his defense—at least that Porthos knew—D’Augine had not taken to claiming that his passage through the musketeer corps was just a temporary detour on his way to becoming a priest. This, and this alone saved Porthos from wanting to cut his heart out right there. But he was not feeling particularly charitable for all that. “Draw,” he said, through clenched teeth. “All five of you draw. Let’s see if you’re match for my steel. Let’s see if, in my place, you would have been able to keep your servant from being arrested.”
He was dimly aware—as one atop a runaway horse is aware of the screams of those surrounding him—of Aramis’s voice saying “Porthos!” And of D’Artagnan’s putting in, “The edicts.”
He answered D’Artagnan. “Don’t worry. This is not dueling. It’s slaughter. I am going to—”
Before he had a chance to say what he was about to do, the voice that everyone in that antechamber obeyed rang from the top of the stairs. “Porthos! Athos! Aramis!” And, after the slightest hesitation, since Monsieur de Treville was not, after all, his captain, “D’Artagnan.”
The mass of men in the antechamber shifted again, parting like the sea before divine will. A clear path up the stairs was suddenly evident and through this loped Aramis, followed by Athos, who managed to rush while looking as if he weren’t doing so at all, and finally D’Artagnan, who tugged at Porthos’s sleeve on the way and whispered, “Sheathe.”
Porthos turned and sheathed, as he started up the stairs after his friends. Even at that moment, if one of the five had dared speak again, he feared he must turn back and massacre them, simply for the principle of it.
But there was no sound behind him, as he made it all the way up the stairs and got into the office in last place, just as Monsieur de Treville—taking his place behind a massive and cluttered desk—waved at the rest of them to take chairs.
Being invited to sit, in Monsieur de Treville’s office, was a rare occurrence and usually reserved for the delivery of bad news. Normally a conference in the captain’s office was restricted to one of two functions—informing the musketeers how far they’d trespassed on their captain’s goodwill and how they’d need to present really good reasons for their conduct or be dismissed; or listening to their problems and offering solutions.
Either type of conference usually took no more than a few minutes, though the musketeers could often swear that the first type took whole days or perhaps weeks. But now, something was very different. Worrisomely different, Porthos noticed, as he settled himself on a small chair with a cushioned seat, whose dainty proportions hadn’t been designed even for the normal musketeer much less someone of Porthos’s overlarge and over-muscular frame.
He held his breath and tried to keep his weight at least partly on his feet, afraid that if he shifted it to his behind the chair would splinter and crash to the ground in pieces beneath him. But even this concern wasn’t enough to keep him from noticing that Monsieur de Treville looked ashen pale, and his brow was knit in a frown of worry.
“The devil,” Porthos’s mouth blurted out. “Don’t tell me Mousqueton’s case is that difficult, Captain.”
The captain’s dark eyes turned to Porthos, in something like wonder. Many people who met Porthos looked at him in wonder when he spoke at all. It seemed to be against the laws of nature that someone that tall and that bulky, let alone possessed of the type of features that made people think of Viking longships, should be endowed with the French tongue and speak it without the least hint of an accent. Other people were surprised when Porthos perceived their intentions or saw through their motives. Because Porthos was not facile of language, and sometimes in fact said quite the wrong word at the most inappropriate time, people tended to assume he was stupid.
But Monsieur de Treville had known Porthos for years, and knew, furthermore, that none of his friends would associate with a dumb person because, all of them being quick of mind, the intercourse with a mental inferior would grate. Porthos knew he knew this, yet he looked upon Porthos with an astonished, wandering look for a long while.
At last he sighed. “It’s not Mousqueton, Porthos.” He frowned slightly and leaned forward on his desk, interlacing his hands atop of it. “I’m afraid it is far more complex than that, and perhaps . . .” He shrugged. “You could not have chosen a worse time, nor could have poor Mousqueton, to put himself in the hands of Richelieu.”
Porthos felt bewildered “But we didn’t choose—”
“No, of course not,” Monsieur de Treville said, and looked up, his dark eyes, despite their worry, managing to look somewhat amused at the idea of Mousqueton voluntarily getting arrested by Richelieu. Monsieur de Treville was from Gascony, D’Artagnan’s compatriot. And, like D’Artagnan, he had the olive skin of the region, the quick eyes, the piercing gaze, and the sense of humor that surfaced even at the moment of greatest tension. “No.” He looked around the room, fixing each of them with his gaze in turn and arresting, at last, on Aramis. “I would guess you know what this is about?”
Porthos now turned to Aramis, arguably his best friend among the inseparables, in utter bewilderment. “Let me tell you what this is about,” he said, before Aramis—who was studying his nails—could speak. “Captain, I don’t know what you’ve been told, but here is what happened. I broke my sword, and I sent Mousqueton to the armorer to mend it—you know, the one on Rue des Echarps. I didn’t have money for it, but Mousqueton and the armorer knew each other, and I thought they could . . . well, Mousqueton often arranged to trade one of my old cloaks or something, you see . . . So, anyway, I sent him. And next thing we know, he’d been arrested for murder and attempted theft. And you know he never stole anything.” And then, with sudden recollection of his servant’s habits, and seeing the quickening of humor in Monsieur de Treville’s eyes. “Well, not as such. Getting the occasional loaf of bread or bottle of wine isn’t stealing. It’s . . . it’s keeping from starving.” He said, opening his hands in a show of helplessness.
And Monsieur de Treville, who knew just how often Louis XIII’s encumbered finances meant that he must delay paying his musketeers, and to what straits his musketeers could be driven, nodded and opened his hands a little in sympathy. “Yes, I know the facts of the case, Porthos. The musketeers all bring me news sometimes before the principals of the event, themselves, know. In fact, just before you arrived, I was going to have you called, in case you’d chanced to come in, because . . .” He paused, and looked, this time to the chair by Porthos’s side, where D’Artagnan, the youngest and smallest of them all, sat, prim and proper like a schoolchild. “D’Artagnan,” he said. “Did nothing about what happened strike you as odd?”
“Only one thing,” D’Artagnan said. “Why five guards of the Cardinal were right there, on hand, to arrest Mousqueton. It might mean nothing. They might have simply been getting their swords mended, as Mousqueton was, but . . .” D’Artagnan took a deep breath. “All the same they seemed a little too quick, almost gleeful to arrest him. Of course with the edict hanging over our heads, they knew we wouldn’t dare fight them, and yet it seems a little . . .” He seemed to hesitate. “Intemperate to arrest the servant of someone like Porthos, on no more than the cry of the mob.”
“And to take him to the Bastille!” Porthos said, in a tone of outrage.
Monsieur de Treville nodded at D’Artagnan and turned to Aramis. “And you, Chevalier, I believe know why they were so quick to arrest him, even if none of us can be sure what brought them there?”
“Yes,” Aramis said. “Or rather . . .” He hesitated. “I believe I do, though since I intend on taking orders as soon as it is possible, I’m not very interested in these worldly affairs.” This was roughly, Porthos thought, the equivalent of an ant not liking to be immersed in sugar. Aramis was always alive to every rumor and knew the heart of every conspiracy. He watched as his friend, apparently unaware of the irony of his words, looked at his nails again and scratched, absorbedly at one with the index nail of the other hand. “But I have heard that a certain duchess who is close friends with the Queen . . . That is, I heard that who some of their correspondence has been intercepted, and that the Queen fears the duchess will be taken from her as . . . as so many of her friends have.”
“I see,” Monsieur de Treville said. “And you lack all knowledge of the contents of this correspondence.”
“I’ve been given to understand,” Aramis said. “That someone of a suspicious turn of mind might think that it fomented conspiracy against him or even . . .” He shrugged slightly. “A plot to assassinate him.”
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