Death in Gascony (3 page)

A
THOS
woke up with someone climbing in through his window. Or rather, he woke up with the window slowly creaking open and then scuffing sounds, as though someone were dragging himself up through the window.

It was so impossible, so patently impossible for anyone to be insane enough to break into a musketeer’s room—much less the room of one of the most dangerous of that band of barely disciplined ruffians—that Athos knew he had to be dreaming. Asleep on the massive, curtained bed that he’d brought with him from his estate, wearing only his shirt, he turned in bed, trying to find a more comfortable position.

This turn caused the linen sheet and the blanket to slip aside. He felt a cold current of air. Cold. As if someone had opened the window, prior to climbing in. The scuffing sounds were followed by two light thumps, like the sound of a not very heavy someone jumping into the room.

Athos rose. He rose before waking, tearing aside the linen sheet. His hand grabbed for the sword that he kept always by the side of the bed. By the time he opened his eyes fully, he was standing, sword in hand, bearing down on a slim figure by the window.

The figure—little more than an indistinct darker patch in the surrounding gloom—was that of a tall young man, or perhaps a woman. Tall, almost as tall as Athos himself, but much, much slimmer, with no sign of the muscles that made the musketeer a dangerous foe in combat. It made a bleating sound and pressed itself against the wall, arms splayed against it, as if it were trying to crawl into the wall.

“Ruffian,” Athos said. “You thought you could come through my window and kill me while I slept. Do you go about robbing innocent men in their sleep?”

And to scare the creature—whom Athos could tell wasn’t armed, and whom he merely wished to terrify away from a criminal life—Athos thrust his sword forward, stopping a hair’s breadth from the intruder’s chest.

“Monsieur,” the creature bleated. And, on a deep breath, drawn in with force, like that of a drowning man, he added, “Monsieur Athos, it is I.”

Athos blinked. That someone would break into his room was impossible enough. That it was someone who knew him—not only by reputation but by name—was unbelievable. No one, not a single one of his friends would presume that far upon their friendship as to startle Athos out of a sound sleep and count on escaping unscathed before the musketeer even regained his senses.

This was not one of his friends. Athos blinked again. “Who—”

“Monsieur, it’s Planchet. You must help me with my master.”

“D’Artagnan,” Athos said, his voice filled with alarm. The young guard, almost young enough to be his son, had become somewhat Athos’s adopted son in these last six months. By virtue of being the oldest of the musketeers, the erstwhile Count de la Fere had made it his business to keep the youngest of his friends out of trouble. Which, given D’Artagnan’s nature, often proved a fraught and slippery business. “What has happened to D’Artagnan? Speak. Is he wounded?”

But Planchet only bleated again, “Monsieur,” and Athos realized that he was still holding his blade in close proximity to Planchet’s heart, and that there was a good chance the youth was scared.

He withdrew the blade and, by touch, made his way to the mantel in his room, from which he grabbed a candle in its pewter candlestick. He lit it from an ember in the banked fire in his hearth.

The wick, flaring to life, revealed a very pale Planchet still knit with the wall, as though fearing another bout of homicidal madness from Athos.

“Don’t be a fool,” Athos said, and setting the candle on the mantel, started casting about for his breeches and doublet. “What of your master? With what do you need my help? Is he wounded? Surely not. We left him hale. Did he—”

“He’s mad,” Planchet said.

Athos looked over his shoulder, as the young servant took a step away from the window. “If by mad you mean wandering in his wits, I doubt it. D’Artagnan is one of the shrewdest men I know. Granted, the shock and grief over his father’s death,” Athos said, remembering the contents of the letter he’d taken from Planchet’s hand and read before passing it on to D’Artagnan, “might cause him to act a little distraught. But…mad?”

Planchet leaned against the wall again, this time as if he needed support. His skin was ashen grey, in shocking contrast with his hair. “He’s getting ready to leave for Gascony now,” he said. “Even as we speak, there are two horses tied at your door. They belong to Monsieur de Treville, and they will be used to carry my master and myself to Gascony. From whence I am to come back and return the horses.”

“You are to come back?” Athos asked. “But we’d said—We’d agreed—” He controlled himself and pressed his lips together, as though grimly accepting the inevitable. “I see,” he said. “And your master?”

“He stays in Gascony, monsieur. He says he’s his father’s only son and that he must fulfill his duty. He says—”

“Doubtless a great deal of nonsense,” Athos said, pulling his doublet laces so tight that they were just short of impeding respiration. “His father was killed, and we don’t know why, so he would go and brave Gascony on his own?”

“Yes,” Planchet said. “He says he doesn’t want to drag you into this, since he can never return with you to Paris, and that—”

“As you say,” Athos said, strapping on his sword belt. “Mad. You did well to come to me, even if you could have used a more orthodox way of gaining entry.”

“I knocked,” Planchet said. “And knocked. But I can’t delay too long or my master will suspect…”

“Indeed. So you took your life in your hands. A brave man, Planchet.”

Planchet didn’t look particularly brave. He looked like he might lose consciousness at any minute, after the shocks of the last few moments.

“Perhaps you can leave through the front door this time, though,” Athos said. “I told Grimaud not to open to anyone, you see, which is why you had no answer. I thought we’d be traveling in the morning. I see D’Artagnan has changed this.”

“Monsieur, you can’t let him go alone. He—”

“Wouldn’t dream of it. You go to your master. I will go to Porthos and Aramis at the Palais Royale.”

“But Monsieur, you’ll never catch up with us.”

“Don’t worry about that. I know shortcuts. Trust me. We would not let your master face possible murder alone.”

“But I don’t know which road we’re taking, and I…”

“Worry not. We’ll find out. Your master is not the first man we’ve followed.” He allowed a small smile to tug on his lips remembering all the mad adventures they’d engaged in, even just since D’Artagnan had joined them. The people they’d followed. The mysteries they’d solved. “But you see, I must get Aramis and Porthos and then I must speak to Monsieur de Treville, or at least leave a note. And find someone else to take our places in the guard roster. It is a duty we can’t simply walk away from.”

“Monsieur, monsieur,” Planchet said, alarmed by this long list of things to do. “But my master will leave as soon as I arrive. I know it. It will be hard to ever find us.”

“Don’t worry,” Athos said. “Don’t worry. We will catch you before you’re too far gone.”

He followed the boy down the stairs to the street, his mind efficiently organizing things and listing what he must do like any general marshaling troops for a difficult campaign. He had no doubts they’d catch D’Artagnan. Though the Gascon was as cunning and twisty minded as Aramis at his worst, he was not likely to be using his cunning fully to escape his friends. He was more likely—being modest and placing a low value on his own company and friendship—to think as soon as he was gone they would utterly forget him. The fool.

They would follow him and they would go to Gascony with him. But what madness had the boy’s father got into? What could he have been doing for the Cardinal? What tangle would they find in Gascony?

D
’ARTAGNAN’S
face felt frozen from galloping against the cold air of fall. Though he wasn’t galloping anymore. For a long time, he’d kept up a fast pace.

He thought of the letters he’d left in his lodging, neatly lined up. One for Athos, which explained everything and made it clear he must leave and that there was no other choice. The letter for Constance was within it, and beside it were the letters to Monsieur des Essarts and Monsieur de Treville. He hadn’t left letters for the other two. He trusted Athos to explain it to them. Besides, had he left a letter for Porthos, Porthos would have made Athos explain it to him all the same and Aramis. Aramis…

D’Artagnan made a face. He couldn’t avoid the thought of Aramis reading his farewell letter with one of those unnerving little smiles that seemed to say he saw through you and he didn’t believe a word you said. Did D’Artagnan believe a word he said? Was it then so necessary that he left Paris and all behind? Was it so necessary that he bury himself in Gascony, just because his father was dead?

His father…In his mind, his father’s features formed, laughing with the excitement of a mock duel with D’Artagnan. His father. Ever since D’Artagnan was very small, his father had been the man to imitate, the man whose footsteps he wished to follow.

He remembered being barely a toddler and walking behind his father, trying to imitate his father’s limp because—ignorant of the causes of it—he assumed this was how a man walked. Or at least a man anyone would admire.

Then, in early childhood he’d heard his father’s tales of his adventures in Paris, and he’d known he would have to go there as a young man and have those too, before coming home to live in Gascony.
Before coming home
…

Why did the words feel like the lid of a coffin shutting off all light? Hadn’t he always wanted to return to Gascony after he was done with his wild years in Paris?

But some part of him protested that he hadn’t wanted to return now. Not just yet. Not while he was still barely a man. When he’d imagined going back, he’d been a thirty-year-old veteran of the musketeers, with an abundant moustache and a scar or two like his father’s, and his own supply of jokes and stories and battle memories.

He’d go back, then, and marry one of the buxom local beauties and set about siring little D’Artagnans. And in the evening his father and he would sit by the fire and sip at their drinks, and trade stories.

And there was the rub; and this he kept coming back to. His father wouldn’t be there. And because his father wouldn’t be there, D’Artagnan must be. Now. There would be no time to save money, no time to establish a reputation. No time to be young.

He rode his horse silently on a deserted road amid denuded fields. The harvest had been taken in and all that remained behind were stubbly stalks, covered in frost, sparkling in the moonlight. In the horizon there was as yet no sun or color, but rather that dishwater-dingy light that precedes the breaking of dawn.

“Monsieur,” Planchet shouted from the side. “Monsieur.”

He turned to look at his servant. He was, like D’Artagnan, wrapped in a cloak, his somewhat thinner than D’Artagnan’s, having been D’Artagnan’s before the guard’s pay had allowed the young man to replace it with a thicker and better one. But the cloak’s hood had fallen down a little, revealing Planchet’s tuft of red hair, his very pale face. The tip of his nose was angry red, and dripped a little.

Planchet shouted at D’Artagnan, “We have to stop and rest the horses, monsieur. We can’t keep them up like this without rest. They’ll burst.”

D’Artagnan realized his horse had slowed considerably and faltered once or twice. He’d pressed horses fast before this, of course. There had been cross-country races in great urgency. But then he’d been with his friends, and they’d had changes of mounts arranged at hostelries. Or had arranged for changes of mounts on the spot and paid more.

D’Artagnan could do neither. And beyond the natural reluctance at injuring a fine animal, he couldn’t in conscience hurt this horse, since it was Monsieur de Treville’s.

No. He must stop, that much was true. In fact, thinking of it, he slowed down to almost a walk.

The thing was, he knew exactly how much was in his purse, and how long he and Planchet could be on the road, before he got to his paternal abode, and the two totals didn’t match. He could not buy lodging at any hostelry—much less lodging and care for his horse—and manage to get to Gascony.

A spurt of anger surged up that he’d never thought of the cold, before. He’d assumed he could stop and sleep by the roadside. He’d traveled this road six months ago, in the opposite direction, mounted on his old, orange horse, a gift from his father. But stopping hadn’t been a problem before. It had been spring, and, the weather being mild, he’d pastured his horse by the roadside while he himself slept in a nearby thicket and ate whatever fruit offered from roadside trees. He’d stopped at an inn only once, in Meung.

But now, in this weather, stopping just by the roadside was not an option. Not unless he wished to catch his death in the cold and damp. And barring foraging for fallen wheat grains amid the harvested fields or the last shrunken and dried cluster of grapes accidentally left behind on some vine, there would be no food. And no food for the horses either.

Just as his mind had reached this melancholy place and he was again weighing the travel he must accomplish against his meager purse, he saw as if a shadow among the trees. It was stone and half-ruined, but it sparked a memory.

When he’d traveled in the other direction and been this far from Paris, he’d seen, near to where he’d paused for a rest, the ruin of an old building. Very old. It looked like what remained of some defensive tower, perhaps going back so far as the Romans.

As his horse pastured and rested, after D’Artagnan had rubbed him down, D’Artagnan, with a surfeit of youthful spirits, had explored the surroundings, including the remains of the tower. And he’d found, as was often common with such ancient ruins in rural locales, that the place smelled strongly of sheep and had within it a feeding through and such arrangements as indicated that it was used for lodging a flock through the winter months.

Of course the floor had been thick with muck and, it being spring, the place had been deserted, the flock probably in the fields with their shepherd. Now, in winter, it would probably be occupied and there was a good chance the shepherd slept within it, with the sheep. He would have to bribe the shepherd for oats for the horses and for lodging for himself and his servant. On the other hand, mucky and all, it would at least be warm and relatively safe. And the shepherd’s bribe would probably cost much less than a night at an inn. And there was always, after all, the chance that the shepherd wouldn’t be there. Sometimes such buildings were merely left locked, and not with an on-site guard. Well enough.

D’Artagnan dismounted from his horse with a leap, then motioned to Planchet. But Planchet—amid his many admirable qualities—was a trained horseman, raised in his father’s horse farm in Picardy. More than that, he was accomplished at following his master’s actions and guessing what they must do without asking any questions. Only Grimaud, whom Athos had trained to the task, excelled more than the young former accountant in obeying unspoken orders.

Before the thought of Athos could bring gloom to his mind anew, D’Artagnan motioned with his hand and spoke, in a controlled shout, to be heard through the cloak and the hoofbeats of the horses they led by the rein, “There’s a stable there. With sheep. Well, a ruin where someone keeps sheep. I say we try to lodge there for a few hours.”

Another admirable trait of Planchet’s was that he never argued without need but often thought of things even D’Artagnan overlooked. He started following D’Artagnan’s path but turned. “You know, monsieur, there’s a good chance there will be a guard—”

“I know. We’ll bribe him.”

“Monsieur!” this was said with dismay. “I meant a guard dog. I doubt there will be a human guard this far out of Paris. They probably all know each other and sheep and cattle thieves tend to have a short life in this region. But a guard dog, they’ll have. The same sheep dog that accompanies the creatures in the summer.”

“Oh,” D’Artagnan said, at a loss. And stopped, because he didn’t know what else to say. His family had dogs, shaggy, shambling brutes that served equally to guard the sheep and to accompany his father on his hunts, and who were dreadful at both tasks, but nonetheless very cheerful in their incompetence. Always ready with lolling tongues and panting goodwill to welcome the son of the house and fetch a stick for him, or, when he was older, to follow him on a mad run through the fields.

He had an idea a strange sheep dog would not be anywhere near so friendly. And he had no experience of unfriendly dogs. His family being the most important in their small hamlet, it was respected enough that dogs were taught not to attack young D’Artagnan.

He frowned at Planchet. “Well…All the same, we have to try to stay there overnight, because…”

Planchet shook his head again, as though D’Artagnan had completely misunderstood him. “I don’t mean we shouldn’t. What I meant to ask was…well…I saved some of the sausage from yesterday’s dinner. I thought we might get hungry on the way and…not have much time to dine by sleeping. And I thought…If you’d give me your permission, I could use it as another sort of bribe for the dog. In my father’s farm…well…I have experience of dogs.”

D’Artagnan couldn’t help laughing a little—just a chuckle in his throat. “Of course you may bribe the dog with the sausage. I didn’t even know we had any left. I supposed you had eaten it.”

Planchet nodded. He wiped his dripping nose on the back of his hand. “If monsieur wouldn’t mind, then, I’ll go ahead of you, and calm the dog. If the door is locked, I’ll open the padlock. It is not a problem.”

“You are truly a jewel among servants,” D’Artagnan said, without irony.

They had turned into a narrow path amid sparse pine trees, which wound to take them to the clearing D’Artagnan remembered. It was irregular and large and looked as a natural clearing.

The
natural
part might be pushing a point, as, beneath his scuffing boots and a very thin layer of dirt, he could feel the rounded edges of ancient paving stones. So likely, the trees couldn’t get hold because of tightly laid paving.

However it was, the irregular clearing held only the one building. D’Artagnan waited with the horses while Planchet approached the padlocked door, calling out reassurances that he came in peace. Those changed to a tone of greeting and delight. D’Artagnan knew his servant was greeting a dog. It was a voice range Planchet used for horses and dogs and children and cats, no one else. He could barely see the motions as his servant reached into his pouch and gave something to the creature, all the while saying, “Who’s a good puppy, then? Who is?”

The mass of fur hobbling and bobbing just past Planchet did not look so much like a puppy as like an overgrown, shaggy horse who—judging from the sounds—had learned to bark and yip. Smiling, D’Artagnan watched as Planchet turned, the dog’s head playfully clasped in his arm, saying, “Monsieur, you may come. The sheep are confined within. There’s room—”

Planchet froze. His gaze was turned just slightly over D’Artagnan’s shoulder. D’Artagnan had lived in quite close quarters with Planchet and he knew his servant’s expressions like he knew his own. There was no alarm on the boy’s face, just a slow, puzzled frown.

And D’Artagnan had heard steps behind him, just a second before Planchet froze. Or not quite steps. The sound of a branch snapping, a leaf rustling.

The only reason for no alarm in Planchet’s face was that the person approaching, from behind, was one of the shepherds or a rough villager.

“Ah, good man,” D’Artagnan said, turning around, an ingratiating smile on his lips. “I see you think—”

His words stopped. His smile vanished. The men he’d turned to face were six and not dressed like rustics. They wore heavy, dark cloaks of at least as good quality as D’Artagnan’s, and their faces were hidden in the folds of their hoods.

As D’Artagnan watched, astounded, the lead threw his cloak open and unsheathed his sword.