Death in Gascony (20 page)

“Where? Why, Paris of course.”

“Paris?” D’Artagnan asked, in confusion. He’d never asked his mother, but she spoke with a Gascon accent and, in fact, spoke the local dialect with the best of them. He knew she’d spent some time in a convent as a young woman, but he didn’t know where, nor why. He’d assumed she’d been boarded, as girls often were, to learn some letters and sewing, before she was married. “And her people…?”

“All dead now,” de Bilh said, and nodded, perhaps a little too enthusiastically. “All dead. That’s why she never told you of when she was young, I’d wager. But yes, I knew her. Her father…” And here, he hesitated, as he had hesitated when he’d mentioned D’Artagnan’s father. “I was very young, you see, and her father was…a very good friend of mine.”

It all made no sense. D’Artagnan shook his head ruefully. Until now, he’d never had any curiosity about his mother’s people—parents, or other relatives. In a Gascony crisscrossed by wars and treasons, it wasn’t so unusual for a still-young woman to have no living relatives. He’d thought—if he thought about it at all—that his mother had been an orphan and raised in a convent, perhaps. And that her marriage to his father had been arranged in some way. “How did she come to meet my father?” he asked suddenly. “Was it while he was in Paris?”

He’d asked it before he realized that would be impossible. His father was that much older than his mother. A good twenty years at least. Though D’Artagnan wasn’t absolutely sure—his father didn’t like talking about it—he thought his father must have been over sixty. And he’d left the capital and settled down long before Marie D’Artagnan could even had been walking on her own, much less of marriageable age. She might very well not even have been born by then.

“No,” de Bilh said, his words following as confirmation on D’Artagnan’s thoughts. “No. Your father was married for a long time to…a lady his parents had arranged for him to marry.” He smiled distantly. “We married at around the same time, in fact. Married women that our parents had arranged for us to marry.”

“And he was unhappy?” D’Artagnan asked.

“Uh?” de Bilh shook his head. “I don’t believe so. Amelie was a good woman. Perhaps a little insipid, but…enfin. One doesn’t marry a woman to be entertained. And she was a good wife to him, just like my Jeanne was to me. Neither of us had children. Well, at least not for a very long time. And then Amelie died giving birth, when she finally did conceive.” He looked into his wine a long time. “It was all…” He shrugged. “But your father and I stayed friends for a long time, and that was how…” Here he looked at D’Artagnan, and his gaze for a moment looked as though a brilliant idea had just occurred to him. “That was how I came to arrange his marriage to your mother.”

“You arranged their marriage?” D’Artagnan asked, surprised. “But…”

“Well, nothing for it, you know. She was a young and penniless woman, who’d just lost both her parents. And he was a widower and direly in need of descendants and an heir to take over his lands on his death…though death was very far from both our thoughts, then, of course.”

“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.

“S
O
,
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 he 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.