Death in Gascony (19 page)

I
’M
going to see the man who killed my father,
D’Artagnan thought. And the thought so consumed him that he barely paid attention to anything. Having left his cousin Edmond behind, he rode down a country path in de Bilh land. The path wound amid denuded vineyards till it came to a small pine woods, which encased the packed dirt ribbon as if it were a green tunnel.

Alone with the sound of his horse’s hooves and his own thoughts, D’Artagnan thought mostly on how many times he had seen de Bilh drinking with his father, and how unlikely he’d have thought it, had anyone told him his father would die at the tip of de Bilh’s sword.

It seemed senseless. It seemed insane. But then he thought of the note in his father’s drawer,
It was by my order and for the good of the kingdom.
Could whatever his father had been doing have involved de Bilh? And if not…what could it have been?

And then he thought of his mother saying de Bilh called her Marie. He didn’t want to think about it, and looked at the ground under his horse’s hooves, there, in the darkest part of the little woods, where only a thin yellow light filtered through the overarching branches of the palm trees above him.

It was a lucky thing his thoughts led him to look down just then. Had he not done so, he would have missed the movement of shadows on the ground of the path. There were three shadows, all armed. And all moving. Towards him.

He jumped from his horse—not wanting it injured—and took his sword out of its scabbard in a fluid motion.

The men were on him before he could see what they looked like. He had an impression of blurred motion—of cloaks and plumed hats and swords. The swords were the most immediate impression, one that intruded glaringly on his attention, as a blade thrust close barely allowed him the time to turn and parry. And then there was the one on the other side, aiming for his heart.

All the while he was aware of the third man, maneuvering at the edge of trees to get behind D’Artagnan.

D’Artagnan had neither illusions that these people would follow honorable duel rules, nor an extra hand with which to stop an attack by ambush.

It’s de Bilh,
he thought.
He will kill me as he killed my father.

Aloud, he screamed, “To me, musketeers! To me of the King!” His voice echoed strangled and desperate in his own ears and it was foolish to even call out, of course. Who would hear him here? Who would come to his help here?

His friends were at the house, having no idea where he’d gone. He’d not even brought Planchet with him. He would die here, alone, and add the mystery of his death to that of his father’s death.

And no doubt perfectly respectable people would swear he’d come upon de Bilh and drawn his sword and challenged the man to a duel without provocation. It would go down in town legend as the curse of the D’Artagnans.

All while these thoughts ran through his head, he turned and parried and fought. All the while in his mind, he gazed on his own death. And the man was still sneaking around behind him, and there was nothing he could do. Nothing.

There was a sound of wood hitting something to his left where the man had been when he’d last glimpsed him. Dancing back from a thrust, D’Artagnan risked a look. Where the enemy had been there was now an amiable giant holding a three branch.

“Mousqueton!” D’Artagnan shouted. “You here?”

“Yes, monsieur,” Mousqueton said. “Monsieur Athos said I should guard you. At a distance.”

“Ah, well, then,” D’Artagnan said, not absolutely sure what he meant by it, as he turned his attention to the two men coming at him with swords. Mousqueton still could not help him here, or not without running too much of a risk. Tree branches were not the nimblest tool to defend oneself from swords, and if he wadded in with just that, Mousqueton was likely to get hurt.

At least he wouldn’t be stabbed in the back, D’Artagnan thought, and there would be a witness of sorts.

And then running through the trees came a third man, sword drawn. D’Artagnan could see Mousqueton lift his branch, and he himself thought,
not another one
!

Only the man coming in screamed, “To me, villains,” and fell on one of the men attacking D’Artagnan, forcing the man to turn and give him his full attention—and leaving D’Artagnan with only one adversary.

It wasn’t till D’Artagnan had dispatched that one adversary that he looked at the man calmly pulling his sword out of a fallen foe and recognized the man he’d come to see.

“Monsieur de Bilh!” he said, surprised.

The older man, perhaps a finger’s width shorter than D’Artagnan and with white threads in his black hair, sheathed his sword and, taking off his hat, bowed to D’Artagnan. “At your service, Henri. I beg your pardon about this ambush on my own lands.” He looked down at the face of the man he’d killed. “Is it anyone you know, Henri? Because they don’t seem to me to be locals.”

D’Artagnan looked down at the face of the man he’d killed. It had a brutish quality beneath the wide open eyes with the expression of incredulity stamped on them. And it was no one he knew. Not from his homeland and not from Paris either.

“No one I know,” he said.

“Well, there it is,” de Bilh said. “We’d best talk about it inside. We’ll tell your servant—”

“He’s not my servant. He’s my friend, Porthos’s servant.”

“Is that so? And where did he get to?”

Just then there was the sound of a horse behind D’Artagnan, and he turned to see Mousqueton, leading his horse and another, that he’d presumably ridden. “He’d run a little. Got spooked,” Mousqueton said. “But I’ve got him back.”

“Thank you, Mousqueton.”

“Give the reins of his horse to Monsieur D’Artagnan, then,” de Bilh said. “And then bring these corpses to the house on yours. I’ll tell my people to dispose of them. Your master—Monsieur D’Artagnan and I shall be in the house.”

And with that announcement, he turned and led D’Artagnan, who led the horse, down the rest of the path, till it opened into a large yard. A stable boy came running from the stable to the left side of it, and took D’Artagnan’s horse.

And though there was no reason for it—de Bilh had, after all, helped him, possibly saved his life—D’Artagnan thought that this would be an easy way to dispose of him; that this was all that de Bilh meant to do.

“Come,” de Bilh said. And led him into the house through a nearby door then up a flight of stairs to a room comfortably appointed with tables, chairs and sofas.

“I heard you’d come to town,” de Bilh said, sinking into one of the yellow upholstered chairs and gesturing D’Artagnan to take the other, across a broad, low table. “And I did wonder if you meant to visit or…” He looked up at D’Artagnan, vaguely alarmed, as though an idea had just occurred to him. “By the Mass,” he said. “You don’t mean to challenge me for a duel, do you now?”

D’Artagnan shook his head, then sighed. “I came…to ask you about that last duel with my father. And then they attacked me.”

“I’m sorry again. It was in my lands. I had no idea such things happened in my lands, or I’d have…” He shook his head. “I beg your pardon most earnestly.”

D’Artagnan mumbled something—even he was not sure what.

“And no idea who they might be,” de Bilh said. “It’s come to that, then? Unknown men attacking people on my land…”

He seemed to be speaking to himself more than to D’Artagnan. A servant came in bearing a tray with a bottle of wine and two cups. De Bilh looked at the bottle for a long time. “Are you fond, then, of our local wine, boy? Your father never said.”

D’Artagnan nodded. “My father…I meant to ask you…my father…”

Monsieur de Bilh stopped, mid opening the bottle, and sighed. “Ah, your father. You know, I’ve been wondering all along what to tell you about that, and more than a little afraid you’d challenge me to a duel. Not that I don’t hold my own with a sword, but i’ faith, boy, I have no wish to fight you.”

“No,” D’Artagnan said, his voice sounding hollow and as though echoing from a long way off. “No. Everyone tells me not to duel for it, from the priest to my cousin Edmond. But I confess…I never had any intention to duel you.” He looked up. “I don’t know why everyone seems to think I’m such a hothead, forever in search of people to challenge to a duel.”

De Bilh looked up and a reminiscent look crossed his eyes. “D’Artagnan…your father, he said that in your first day in Paris you challenged three musketeers to a duel and you won too.”

“Well, I—” D’Artagnan started, feeling as though he should explain that he hadn’t exactly won so much as taken the musketeers’ side against the guards of the Cardinal. But he couldn’t quite remember what he’d told his father in that first letter from Paris. It seemed like years ago since the young, naive D’Artagnan had written to tell his father of the wonders of the capital. And it didn’t seem worth explaining.

“He told that story over and over again,” de Bilh said, offering D’Artagnan the mug, and smiling at him. “You’d never seen anyone so proud as he was of you.”

D’Artagnan nodded and took a sip of the wine, only afterwards thinking that it might very well be poisoned. But if that were the fact, it was an odd poison that left no trace of flavor in the beverage. He took another sip. “My father…” he said. “The duel…”

“Oh, it wasn’t a duel,” de Bilh said. “I know what people call it, but it wasn’t that. It was more of an accident. Henri, I swear on my own life I was just trying to stop him attacking me. And I’m still not sure that he wasn’t attacking me in jest.”

“In jest?” D’Artagnan asked.

“Well, surely, in jest. You remember the times he would pursue you or me, or one of the servants, three times around the yard, with his sword, only to sheathe his sword and laugh like a loon when at last he had us cornered.”

D’Artagnan nodded. He remembered. He remembered his father laughing and joking. He could not believe he would never again play that game with any of them.

“But then your father was attacking blindly,” de Bilh said. “And he threw himself at my sword, Henri. Threw himself. And that’s more than any of his playing.”

“Yes,” D’Artagnan said, and, again, his voice echoed hollow. “The priest thinks that perhaps he had something go wrong with his brain. Fell and hit it or simply…something went wrong.”

De Bilh looked surprised. “I’d give something to know that it was so,” he said. “Else I’ll have to carry the remorse of his death with me my whole life, without even understanding why he felt the need to attack me, or why…” He shrugged.

There didn’t seem to be anything else to say. Little though he’d said, de Bilh had confirmed what both the priest and Edmond had said. There was only so much that D’Artagnan could doubt the memories of all who’d been present.

And yet…and yet…“On the way here,” he said, taking another swig of the wine, “I was attacked twice, by parties of ruffians. Do you have the slightest idea why?”

De Bilh shook a little and looked stunned. “Attacked?” he said. “Well, there are bandits—”

D’Artagnan shook his head. “Not like that. These people were after me, personally and particularly. They wanted to kill me. They ignored my friends, unless my friends attacked them. And in the last hostelry in which we stayed, they drugged my friends and would have drugged me but for an accident of circumstance. And they said they were sent to cut the throat of the dark-haired one—which was almost certainly myself.”

“The devil,” Monsieur de Bilh said, staring at D’Artagnan not so much in disbelief but as though he couldn’t think of an explanation for what D’Artagnan was relating. “Are you sure then?”

“As sure as I am of breathing. That, by itself, almost makes me wonder if my father…Well. At the time I thought my father had been murdered and the whole simply disguised as a duel.”

De Bilh looked shocked. He opened his mouth, then closed it, only to open it again. No sound emerged. He shook his head. “The devil,” he said again, at last. “You thought I’d murdered your father? Murdered my oldest…almost my only friend?”

D’Artagnan sighed. “I don’t know what I thought. But it was possible, you know, that you hadn’t murdered him, that he’d been murdered by someone else who, somehow, convinced you to take responsibility and my cousin and Father Urtou to attest to it.”

“But no,” de Bilh said, his voice still echoing of shock and surprise. “No, Henri. In a way I wish it were so. It would be easier, truly, to know I’d nothing to do with his death, even if I had to lie over it. But no. He threw himself at my sword. It went in his neck, before I had the time to avert the blow.”

“Could he have been poisoned?” D’Artagnan said. “I mean, on that hostelry they gave us a sleeping potion. Perhaps they gave my father some herb or something that caused him to—”

“Attack me? Possible. You’ll have to ask your mother what he ate that day, and perhaps where he went before he came upon me on that threshing floor. If he stopped at the tavern in the morning and had something to eat, perhaps…” His voice trailed off. “At least that would explain it, D’Artagnan, if he’d been poisoned and was half out of his mind.”

D’Artagnan nodded. It was possible. It was possible this would be the sort of poison that made people see things and attack people without knowing who they were attacking. “Who…My mother says that my father was working for his eminence.”

De Bilh ran his fingers through his well-trimmed, salt-and-pepper beard. “Yes, Marie told me that too. I’ll be damned if I know of what she could be talking though.”

“Marie…” D’Artagnan said, and to de Bilh’s uncomprehending stare. “You called my mother Marie!”

“Oh…er?” Monsieur de Bilh looked surprised for a moment, only to laugh, suddenly. “But, Henri,” he said, his blue eyes sparkling with mirth, “I’ve always called your mother Marie. Why, I knew her when she was just a little girl, just like I knew you.”

His laugh echoed perhaps just a little false. Or at least D’Artagnan could have convinced himself of that. On the other hand…“Where did my mother grow up?” he asked, in sudden urgency.