Read Dying by the sword Online
Authors: Sarah d'Almeida
Dying by the sword (37 page)
“Milady. Your . . . wife.”
Athos felt as if an ice-cold hand had clutched at his innards, but all he could say was, “I see.” And then, louder, “Grimaud, if you could bring some water to my room. I’ll help Monsieur D’Artagnan dress, while we speak.” And, ignoring Grimaud’s mumbled complaints, as he came towards them on the stairs again, Athos helped his friend up the stairs to his room. The only reason D’Artagnan needed help at all was that he appeared to have been running barefoot through shards of clay. “Some tiles that fell from a roof,” he said.
By the time Grimaud had come back with warm water in a jug, Athos had found D’Artagnan some underwear, and was digging through one of his clothes presses for a shirt. He didn’t see any point giving the boy doublet and hose now, since he would, doubtless, be going to bed. “Here,” he said, extending a shirt to D’Artagnan, only to find it rudely ripped off his hands by Grimaud, who went to the trunk and brought out quite a different shirt. “We can send for your clothes in the morning. I assume you left Planchet in your lodgings?”
D’Artagnan nodded. And added, half under his breath, “I hope he’s safe.”
And Athos looked up, helplessly, at Grimaud, who huffed. “I’ll go, and take Bazin and collect the boy. And we’ll get you your clothes for tomorrow.”
“Thank you, Grimaud,” Athos said.
“But first I’m going to bring you another jug of water, Monsieur D’Artagnan, and don’t you dare put those feet on Monsieur Athos’s bed. You left a trail of mud all up the stairs and across the floor.”
After Grimaud left to collect more water, Athos said, “You must forgive him. He’s anxious lest I should be disturbed. I have a feeling this is a truly bad night for him to feel this way.”
D’Artagnan gave him a serious look. “I’m afraid so,” he said, and proceeded to pour into Athos’s ears a tale as chilling as it was unbelievable.
“You believe,” Athos said, “that she set it up so you came upon her just as the ruffians appeared to be threatening her? Why? And how?”
“The how wouldn’t be difficult,” D’Artagnan said. “I suspect she has had us followed. If she is one of the Cardinal’s creatures, this can’t be wholly difficult.”
“No,” Athos said, but still felt the cold, clamped on his guts.
Water was delivered, and Athos told D’Artagnan, “I believe it would be best if you laid down and attempted to sleep. I don’t know how well you may do next to Aramis, since he alternates between snoring and telling people about the danger of chickens.” He smiled a little at D’Artagnan’s expression. “I assure you it’s true, and I assure you I have no more idea what he means than do you. I’m sure he means something, at least in his own mind, but what that might be, I cannot tell you. He is, needless to say, drunk.”
D’Artagnan looked at the blond musketeer curiously, as he snored, faceup on the bed. “It seems like something Aramis . . . I mean, it doesn’t seem like him.”
“Indeed,” Athos said. “And after your story, I’m beginning to wonder whether he did in fact get drunk or whether something was added to his food or drink, and, in that case, what that might be.”
He helped D’Artagnan rinse his feet, and then saw him climb onto the bed, on the opposite side of Aramis, before he headed out the door.
“I might yet come and try to sleep on a chair,” D’Artagnan said.
“You’re welcome to,” Athos answered and was, by that time, so tired that he couldn’t ever remember getting to the sitting room or crawling into his mound of cushions and cloaks.
He could however remember being startled awake by a loud knocking. For a long time, it seemed, he lay there, wishing that Grimaud would answer. But after a while, it occurred to him Grimaud couldn’t answer, since Grimaud had gone to fetch D’Artagnan’s Planchet. He grabbed a candle, which he’d forgotten to blow out, from the little table in the corner, reached for his sword, and pulling it from its sheath, held it in his hand, as he went down the stairs and threw the door open.
To find Porthos, holding what seemed to be a covered clay dish, staring at him. Athos blinked at the sight then tried to sheathe his sword, realized that he wasn’t wearing a sheath, and bowed slightly. “Come in, Porthos,” he said, stepping around his friend as he did so, and closing the door. “I presume that’s a dish of pigeons?”
Porthos looked down at the vessel in his hands and seemed for a moment quite confused. Then he said, “Oh. No. That is, it used to be. Now it’s just the empty dish.” As he spoke, he set it on the last step of the stairs, and looked up at Athos, who had gone up half a dozen steps, candle in one hand, sword in the other. “I used it to break into the Bastille.”
“I see,” Athos said, thinking that, in fact, those words were starting to have an apposite meaning to him.
“And I must tell you what Mousqueton said,” Porthos said. “Because I think it is deucedly important and in fact it might solve the whole mystery for us . . . only . . . only I’m not sure how. You know I’m not good at seeing the picture until it is all completed.”
“Yes,” Athos said. “Yes, of course.” And, making a sudden decision added, “Here, take my sword and candle up, Porthos. Put the sword with my clothes, then go in and wake D’Artagnan and Aramis on my bed. I can see all efforts at sleeping tonight will be blighted, and that I might as well give up and stay awake. Tell them it is time for a war council. And if Aramis speaks of chickens, for the love of heaven, pour a jug of water over his head. I believe there is still half a jug left from D’Artagnan’s washing.”
“But . . .” Porthos said. “Where are you going?”
“Myself? Only to the cellar to get a bottle of wine. Sobriety has proven much stranger than I can endure, and I believe a bottle might improve my feelings.”
A Head Like a Case of Rapiers; Where Some Ladies Must Be Protected and Others Delight in Danger
ARAMIS did not like being awakened. He tried to protest, as Porthos, ignored twice, finally grasped him by his shirt, at the nape of the neck, and bodily lifted him from the bed, carried him to the window, threw the window open and poured a good half a jug of water over his head.
While this worked admirably to clear Aramis’s head, it also left him spluttering, shivering, and with his wet hair and wetter shirt clinging to him.
“What is the meaning of this?” he asked Porthos, even as every one of the words he pronounced echoed inside his head in a fiendish way, coming back at him as both sound and pain. “Why did you pour water over my head?”
“You should thank the saints it’s water,” Porthos said. “Only because I didn’t have time to look and see if there is a chamberpot about the place. You tried to hit me.”
“You yelled in my ear,” Aramis said.
“Hardly, I merely told you to get up. It is not my fault that you are hungover.”
Aramis regarded Porthos with full disbelief, aware at the same time that they were both being watched by D’Artagnan with something very akin to the fond amusement of the adult watching two children fight over trivial things. Aramis knew he could not be hungover. He had not gone out drinking. Or at least, he didn’t remember going out drinking. He remembered, however, the long hot ride in the agonizingly slow oxcart. And he remembered the many farms each with a vintage worth sampling.
He also remembered—and he was fairly sure this had to be the result of drunken hallucinations—a scene that involved several armed men and a profusion of livestock, including something about chickens roasting in the setting sun. He groaned deep in his throat, “I have,” he said, “a head like a case of rapiers, too full and close together, so that every movement brings about a frantic clanking.”
Porthos regarded him with a jaundiced eye. “All the same,” he said, reaching for the towel that Athos kept near the washbasin, “Athos has said we must have a council of war. Dry your hair. He’ll be waiting in the sitting room.”
Athos was waiting, with an open bottle of wine and a cup, and an expression of bewildered amusement on his refined features. Aramis looked at him, remembering vaguely that Athos had addressed him with a sort of gentle reproach, but not having any idea at all what Athos had told him. He thought he had warned Athos about milady, too, which probably explained the crease of worry between his eyebrows.
It was possibly the strangest council of war the four of them have ever held. At least, it was the first one where three of them were in their shirts, their bare legs hanging out beneath. Also, the first one of them to which Aramis was so ridiculously hungover that he could barely speak beyond a whisper.
To his shocked disbelief, Athos handed him a cup about a quarter full of red wine. “Drink,” he said.
The smell of the wine climbed into Aramis’s nose and put a knot of nausea at his throat. He pushed it away.
Athos pushed it back, “Drink!” he said. “I beg you to believe I know how to treat hangovers.”
And when Aramis merely looked up at Athos, in horror, Athos grasped his hair, at the nape of his neck, causing him to both tilt his head back and open his mouth. At which point Aramis, coughing and spluttering, remembered the story of someone or other who had drowned in a barrel of malmsey, and swallowed frantically to avoid the like fate. As his mouth cleared, he said, “I’ faith, Athos, I should challenge you to a duel.”
“Probably,” Athos said, in all seriousness. “But by the time you sober up enough to do it, I’d have defeated and disarmed you, and if you think I’m going to kill you and save you from feeling this hangover, you are sorely mistaken.” And with his aplomb unshaken, he returned to his seat, where he looked at Aramis, as he swallowed and coughed, and squinted at the light of the candles, to determine how many candles there really were and how they burned. He was fairly sure, in fact, that each of the candles did not support a roaring fire, but that was how he saw them, their light augmented by several extraneous auras.
“Over the past few hours,” Athos said, as he passed cups of wine around, “I have been awakened three times, each by one of you, and each time I’ve been greeted with a stranger story. It has become quite obvious to me that my best efforts to protect this group and keep you from harm have only spurned you to greater and more ridiculous feats of lunacy. So now I would like to know what each of you has discovered. Why don’t we start with you, Aramis, since you are the one who left this house earliest?”
Aramis, whose head still reverberated at every sound, looked at Athos in mute resentment. He was, alas, all too aware that Athos, in this mood, could not be gainsaid. Plus, he would be quite likely to grab Aramis by the nape of the neck again, and force yet more wine into him. There was that glint of amusement in his eyes, closely followed by a look of hard determination. It was a combination Aramis had never seen in Athos. D’Artagnan, yes, but Athos never.
“When I left here,” he said, “I decided to follow up on your impression that you had, in fact, seen your dead wife.” He unraveled the whole story of his meeting with Huguette, followed by his forced travel into the countryside, in the belly of a wooden box. He was in the sort of mood where he couldn’t think how to leave out the embarrassing parts—possibly because his hangover made him as awkward with words as must be Porthos’s normal predicament. He told the story morosely, including the insults that Jean and Marc had leveled at him, before he burst out of the box, and everywhere they had stopped afterwards and what they’d eaten.
Porthos had tried to interrupt, twice, only to have Athos hold his hand up for silence, so that Aramis had to continue unreeling the tale. Only when he got to the part where he’d arrived back at the city and been attacked by swordsmen again did he falter. “Only,” he said, “I don’t know if there were really any swordsmen, because to believe that, I have to believe, also, that there were several pigs and chickens and goats and that this was what allowed me to get away.”
“Well,” D’Artagnan said, “people in that neighborhood do keep livestock.”
Aramis could have warned D’Artagnan not to talk, because that would only bring Athos’s attention on him, but by the time he thought of it, of course, D’Artagnan had spoken and it was too late. Athos turned to him with a slow smile and said, “Why don’t you tell us where your follies have taken you, D’Artagnan?”
D’Artagnan told. Some of his words still boomed in Aramis’s head, but either Aramis’s headache was getting better, or D’Artagnan’s voice was not as loud and offensive to the strained cranium as Porthos’s and Athos’s could be.
The story he told was hard to piece together, mostly because Aramis felt as though he were trying to understand things through a field of blades. “You mean,” he finally said, “that Madame Bonacieux thought you had avoided her for the sake of fighting a duel? Why?”
Athos interrupted. “I believe I have the answer to that, but meanwhile, please finish your story, D’Artagnan.”
D’Artagnan finished it, and then Porthos was allowed to explain where he’d been and what he’d been doing. Since part of his efforts included listening to the conversation between Madame Bonacieux and Athos, something about it tickled Aramis’s mind.
“So,” he said. “Was the . . . No, I can’t believe it. I know I was suspicious that Marie might have sent the swordsmen after me—but it would be after me, because I insulted her. Never after the rest of you. And when this conversation happened, the insult couldn’t have happened yet.”
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