Death in Gascony (18 page)

“No, I know they happen.” He smiled a little. “Though it’s odd to think of them happening to one’s friends, if…if I may say so. I mean, we think of the women with whom we…associate, but not…”

“Not of our friends’ mothers, no,” Athos said, and made a face that Aramis couldn’t quite interpret. “Though you realize that Madame D’Artagnan is probably not much older than I, if she’s older at all.”

“Well…and there’s the other thing. I don’t know how to…Well…Madame D’Artagnan seems to be a mystery.”

“All women are mysteries,” Athos said. “Mysteries that the sane man leaves unsolved.”

Aramis permitted himself a smile. Athos’s misogyny was too well known to be worthy of more than a smile. “Perhaps so, my friend. But Madame D’Artagnan is more of a mystery than most. She was raised in Paris, the priest said. I don’t know how she came by Monsieur D’Artagnan at all. With their age difference, you’d think…”

Athos shrugged. “How does anyone come by anyone else? A cross-country journey, a trip into the provinces, and two traveling parties that meet. Or else, we know that Monsieur D’Artagnan spent sometime in the capital, in the service of the King. Perhaps one of his old army friends had a likely daughter.”

“Of course,” Aramis said. He let out breath, in frustration. “Oh, I don’t know. That is not how it felt to me. There was something more…I can’t even begin to explain it. Just the feeling that there was something about her living in Paris that the priest did not wish to discuss.”

“It could be nothing but the child on the way, Aramis. You know better than most that many men of the church feel very shy about such things.”

Aramis nodded. “But all the same…It left me feeling uneasy. Only you say we don’t have time to go to Paris and investigate.”

“No,” Athos said. “Or at least, that is our last resort, and I would have to somehow take D’Artagnan with us.” He frowned again, as if remembering something. “So what was there about de Comminges?”

“Nothing. Or nothing that I can put my finger on, except…” He again exhaled in frustration. He was beginning to understand some of his friend Porthos’s problems with words. Now he, who was normally so fluent and quick, seemed to be searching in vain for words and coming up wanting. “Except the priest made it such a point of bringing him into the discussion…as though he expected me to glean something from the mention. He said that Monsieur de Comminges, like the D’Artagnans of old, was Protestant, then Catholic, and then maybe at last Protestant again, and yet his heirs—whom I understand ascended just very recently—were good Catholics.” He heard his own voice taper at the end of the sentence, and realized how irrelevant it sounded, said aloud. “I’m perhaps making too much of it,” he said, defensively. “But he just made it such a point of bringing the matter up.”

He looked up at Athos, expecting his friend to shrug or to look like Aramis had taken leave of his senses. But instead Athos was looking at him, with just the slightest of frowns, like a man concentrating on an object that’s not quite visible.

“Perhaps we should speak to the priest again,” he said. “Perhaps tomorrow morning.”

“You don’t think, then,” Aramis said, feeling an absurd amount of relief, “that it’s all a mare’s nest.”

“Oh, it might very well be a mare’s nest,” Athos said. “But I trust your intuition. You’ve looked into murders before. If you feel that the priest brought de Comminges up in an unwarranted manner, then he probably did. Perhaps it is nothing but the drifting mind of an old man. Or perhaps…”

“Or perhaps…?”

“Or perhaps it is much more.”

“L
ISTEN
here, Bayard,” Porthos said, coming into the courtyard, under the noonday sun, and finding the old servant busy, as it seemed, putting wooden handles onto agricultural implements.

The old man looked up at the redheaded giant’s approach. “Monsieur?” he asked with that curious Gascon lilt to the word that Porthos always thought was part accent and part defiance.

“Your master’s clothes. Was he buried in them?”

The man stared, dropping the handle he’d been holding in his hand—a polished bit of wood. “My master’s clothes? Well…certes we didn’t bury him naked.”

Porthos, dismayed, realized he had, yet again, let his treacherous tongue betray his meaning. “No, no, man. I don’t mean you’d have him buried naked.” He crossed himself at the thought. “Forbid the idea. No. I know you buried him dressed as a Christian. The question is, did you bury him in the clothes in which he died?”

“Oh,” the old man said, comprehension dawning. “No, monsieur. Only because, you know, the clothes were all over blood and you can just imagine the yelling at I’d get when my master rose for the final judgement, all dressed in his bloody clothes.

“‘Bayard,’ he’d tell me, in that tone of voice he used when he was young and I forgot something he needed for the campaigns. ‘Bayard,’ he’d say, ‘what could you have been thinking?’” He shook his head, while his lips twisted in the slightest of smiles, as though remembering his master’s ill temper gave him comfort now. “And besides, monsieur, this is the thing, that my master lain for the wake, you know, visible to all, and we’d not want him to make a sad spectacle of himself. So, no. Madame D’Artagnan,” he said, pronouncing the name with distinct disapproval, “and Marguerite, themselves, washed him, and I brought him his best suit of clothes.”

Porthos nodded, not knowing what else to do and suspecting there were tears just waiting to let loose from the old man’s eyes. “Look, Bayard, the thing is…Did you dispose of the clothes he wore when he got wounded?”

“Dispose of…?” The man shook his head. “Well, no, monsieur. I did not. You see, there’s some good patches there, and besides, Marguerite thinks that she can wash the blood away. Not, but I think that’s foolish, but you see, just because he died in them, doesn’t make the clothes unusable. Stained, surely, but the master was always very close with his money and his things, and he would be the last to want us to waste money. So…”

“Has she washed them, yet?”

“No. She says she means to, but the thing is, I don’t think she’s quite able to yet. Not over her own grief for the master, you know.”

“I understand,” Porthos said, and indeed, composed his face to the most understanding expression he could manage. “And could you perhaps show me the clothes, Bayard?”

“Why?” Bayard asked, looking straight at him.

Porthos shook his head. “I don’t think I can explain it to you, as such. I’m not very good with words. But there’s something…strange about your master’s death. I think those clothes—the blood on them might help me understand what it might be.”

Bayard frowned at him. “But, monsieur. The clothes are all over blood. Thick with it. He was wounded on the neck, where the great vein runs…” And now the tears did come, a shimmer in the man’s dark eyes. “My poor master. What a terrible thing. One moment there, and fighting, and the next…well…Monsieur de Bilh and that de Bigorre sent for help, but by the time people got there, he was dead, and no wonder, with a cut to the throat. And his clothes were that soaked.”

Porthos nodded patiently. The last thing he wanted to do, in fact, the last thing he thought could help him attain his objective of looking at the clothes, was to get in an argument with the old servant. In his experience such old servitors, attached to ancient houses, were very much dictators when it came to protecting the family from strangers. And this one, clearly, was very attached to his dead master.

“I understand, but, Bayard, both the priest and all…all of them, say he was acting funny when he approached the threshing floor. And I think I found a trail of blood through the fields, approaching the threshing floor. From the…from old Jacques’ field,” he said, proudly remembering the name the locals had given it.

Bayard stared at him a while, as though trying to figure what game Porthos was playing. Porthos could not entirely blame him. After all, most noblemen were like Aramis or even Athos, quite capable of duplicity, and of having two or three plans, one within the other, in anything they did. But for himself, he’d just confessed the truth, save for involving the peasant woman who might have seen Monsieur D’Artagnan’s first fight. And that only because he did not want to expose the woman to any revenge, if any were coming, or even to any gossip.

So he stood his ground and tried to look as guileless as he was. Truth be told, he suspected that he only managed to look as though he had a very severe toothache. But with that, it must have succeeded.

Bayard nodded to him and sighed. “Very well, monsieur,” he said. He looked at the sky. “It doesn’t look like rain, at any rate, so these tools can stay here without peril of getting wet. If you will come with me.”

Turning, he entered the house through a door close by and opposite the one that D’Artagnan had taken into the house the night before. This door led to a lower passage, such that Porthos needed to bow considerably to follow without hitting his head.

The passage was like a dark tunnel with doors opening from it. From what Porthos could see of those doors, he thought that Bayard and Marguerite lived here, in this part of the house, which might very well, at some time, have been storage for grain or provisions. Perhaps the much more abundant provisions, which had doubtless been needed by the house at any time that the bastide was under siege by enemy troops.

Now it was furnished in simple but comfortable style with straightforward furniture probably homemade of pine planks. It reminded Porthos of the homes of his peasant friends when he’d been a boy in his father’s domains.

The smell of something savory boiling only added to the hominess. But at the end of the passage, Bayard took a sudden right turn into a tiny room whose walls were covered in shelves. On the shelves, in disarray, lay what seemed to be a broken sword, a couple of broken plates, a leather harness that Porthos suspected would also be found in need of mending, and, neatly folded at the top, a suit of clothes. The smell in the air was thick with sickly sweet odor of rot and old blood.

“I keep things here as I mean to mend,” Bayard said. “Plates and such, you know, that I do for my wife. But I put Monsieur D’Artagnan’s suit here too, because Marguerite says she won’t get to wash it, or not properly, till she can wash outside in the river. She said blood mostly takes soaking, and lot of running water, so I…”

He continued speaking, but Porthos wasn’t attending. In front of the shelves there was a battered table, made of little more than planks of pine lashed together.

Porthos reached up for the suit of clothes, unfolded it, laid it on the table. It was very much like the suit that D’Artagnan had worn into Paris six months ago. Faded by much washing, both breeches and doublet showed an ugly russet color that Porthos was willing to bet bore no resemblance to its original color.

Over that color, black splattered—black that had once been blood. And though Bayard had said it was all soaked through, this was not true. Only about a third of it was stained, all over the right side of the body and the right sleeve.

The cut of the doublet itself was like Athos’s—in the Spanish manner that had been fashionable in France ten years ago—the type that was tightly laced and molded to the body.

More fashionable, now, was the German sort of doublet, where the fabric flowed more freely and the lacing was less restrictive. But all that meant nothing—not even how up to date Monsieur D’Artagnan might be.

Porthos, who was quite interested in fashion, had been looking around him as they progressed deeper into Gascony. And the deeper they got, the more the Spanish doublets were favored over any other style. Which Porthos supposed made perfect sense, considering how close they were to Spain.

He spread the doublet carefully, and then the breeches. Inside the breeches—there the blood was pooled in patches, as though most of it had come when Monsieur D’Artagnan had fallen down on his own shed blood—was a shirt, where the blood was the same obvious pattern as on the doublet…save for one thing.

On the shirt, in the back, a little to the left side, it was obvious that there was a tiny rip and a small flourishing of blood. Well, small as a way of speaking, as it could not be covered by Porthos’s spread out hand. But that flow was quite independent of the other, and the cut in the middle of it could not be denied, thin though it was.

Porthos realized he must have made some sound at the discovery, as Bayard said, “What is it, monsieur?”

“Here,” Porthos said, and showed him the small hole.

“It could be the moth,” Bayard said, thoughtfully, looking up at Porthos, as though trying to gage how this excuse would be received.

“Well, then, assuredly it’s not the moth, for I’ve looked around this shirt everywhere and there’s no other signs of weakness or age, so why would there be a moth hole? In fact, the shirt looks quite new.”

“It is. It is, at that, but…but you know, sometimes the moth.”

“Leave off with the moth, man,” Porthos said, irritably. “Look here.” He showed him the stain again. “See how that stain does not touch any of the other stained portions, and how that hole is right in the center of it? I will bet you it speaks of another wound, an earlier one, that made your master bleed all across the fields to that threshing floor.”

He picked up the doublet, and examined it in the same area that the shirt had the hole and the stain. There too, against the russet fabric, there was the much darker stain of the blood, and in the center of it a small rent that exactly matched the rent in the shirt. “And then, what are you going to tell me, uh, Bayard,” Porthos said, showing him the newly discovered hole. “That the moth with great ability pierced both the shirt and the doublet at the same spot?”

Bayard stared at the doublet a long time. “It does seem as though…” He said. “But what kind of blade would cause that rent? It is so narrow.”

“A stiletto,” Porthos said, proud to remember the word he’d heard from Athos and Aramis a long time ago. “At least it looks like it to me. There’s these three-sided Italian blades, you see, very thin. And they cut on all three sides. And it looks like something like that.”

“But why would Italians want to wound my master?” Bayard asked, in shock. “We never fought against Italians. Well, there might have been Italian mercenaries in some armies we fought, but it was all so long ago.”

“I don’t know,” Porthos said. “But the way this blade went in, I’d say there’s a good chance it pierced your master’s heart. And doubtless made him lose enough blood that he was already dying as he came onto Monsieur de Bilh on the threshing floor.”

“But…” Bayard protested. “If it pierced his heart, would it not have killed him?”

Porthos shrugged. “Not always. There’s times when you put a sword, even, through someone’s heart and they still have it in them to turn and come at you.” He shook his head. “I used to teach fencing, see, and I always told my students not to ignore the adversary when he had fallen. There are people capable of such stamina, that, even though they are already dying, they will turn and kill the adversary with their last breath. So…you see…”

“Monsieur was very strong,” Bayard said. “Very strong. They used to call him the horse of Gascony, you know, when we were young and in the King’s service. Because he was like one of those horses who keep moving and fighting long after they should have collapsed.”

He looked at Porthos, miserably. “But that means…my master was murdered, does it not? Or does anyone duel with these…still…”

“Stilettos,” Porthos said. “And not to my knowledge. Besides, look here, the cut is at the back of your master’s suit.”

“So it is,” Bayard said, disconsolately. “Mark my words, it was at that woman’s orders.”