Marrying the Musketeer (36 page)

“He betrayed my father and had him taken to the Bastille.
 
He betrayed me.
 
He betrayed his own son.”

Miriame nodded as if she finally saw the hurt that had been urging her along for so long.
 
“You have a son?”

Courtney nodded.
 
Her secret was out at last, but she could feel no shame in it.
 
She loved her son and she had avenged herself on her son’s father.

“Pierre de Tournay’s son?”

Courtney glared at her.
 
“He is my son, not his father’s.
 
De Tournay may have begat him, but my boy has never known his father.
 
He is my son and mine alone.”

“What of De Tournay?
 
Does he know of this?”

Courtney turned her back on her friend and wiped away the tears from her eyes.
 
She did not want Miriame to see her weakness or suspect how much she still felt for her false lover.
 
“Pierre is dead.”

“You killed him?”
 
Miriame was matter-of-fact as always, thinking nothing of dispatching her enemies before they could dispatch her.

Yes, she had killed him.
 
Her mind knew the necessity of his death even as her heart and body cried out for his loss.
 
“I plotted his death and now he is dead.
 
I am as guilty as the man who wielded the sword that separated his body from his soul.
 
I should feel no regret in my heart for his passing – his death has avenged my honor.”

“You loved him once, I gather?”

“With all my heart and more of my soul than I should have given him.”

“You love him still?”

Now that he was dead, she could admit to what had plagued her in secret for many weeks.
 
She had never stopped loving her beautiful Pierre de Tournay.
 
Not for a second.
 
Even when she had most hated him and been most bitter against him, she had loved him.
 
Even when she had led him to his death to avenge her honor and the honor of her father, she had loved him.
 
As long as she lived, she would love him.
 
“I do.”

There was a short silence broken at last by Miriame.
 
“So, back to Paris, then, for you and I at any rate?
 
With the two of us together, we should have your father free in no time.”

“You cannot help me break my father out of the Bastille.
 
What if you are caught?”

She grinned.
 
“Did you think I would let you have all the excitement?
 
What happened to all for one and one for all?
 
There is no point in you risking your life to help your father.
 
You cannot break him out of the Bastille by yourself – you will need some help.
 
Preferably the help of a friend who has already broken into the Bastille and got away with it once before.”

Certainly Miriame’s help would be a godsend.
 
She had hardly thought about how she would tackle the prison break.
 
She had no idea how to get inside and even less idea how to get out again.
 
Short of going up to the front gate, waving her sword in the air and demanding to be let in, she had formed no plan of how to go about it.
 
“You will help me organize the rescue?”

Miriame rubbed her hands together with enthusiasm.
 
The excitement she felt about this new venture showed clearly on her face.
 
“I will more than help you plan it.
 
I will help you carry it out as well.”

Barely a week had gone by when a pair of hooded, cowled monks appeared at the gate of the Bastille.
 
Courtney shuffled uncomfortably inside her robe.
 
She was used to pretending to be a man, but she did not care for this particular disguise.
 
She was about to commit a crime against the laws of the land while dressed in the robes of a man of God.
 
Though she had little religious fervor, still her actions smacked uncomfortably of blasphemy.
 
Besides, her robe she was wearing stank abominably.
 
The stench made her want to gag.

The guards looked at them with little interest through the grating on the gate.
 
One of them spat at the ground by her feet, missing her boots by a scant inch.
 
“What do you want?” he asked in a surly voice.
 
He evidently had little time for men of God.

Miriame cleared her throat and spat on the pavement beside her in her turn.
 
“We’ve come to see the prisoners and to bring them the word of God in the prison of darkness they languish in.”
 
She sounded for all the world like a feeble, old man with the phlegm on his chest.

The guards nudged each other with great hilarity.
 
“It’s a bit damn late for that lot.”

Miriame shook her head slowly back and forth inside her cowl.
 
“It is never too late for a sinner to confess his crimes and expiate his sins.
 
Even these poor souls, lost in darkness, must be given the chance to see their salvation.”

“Damned do-gooders,” the surly soldier grumbled at them.
 
“Why can’t you go away and bother the prisoners in some other prison?
 
We have enough to see to without you damned monks bothering us.”

Miriame wagged her finger at the pair of them.
 
“Do not take the name of the Lord in vain.
 
The King has given our order the special right to minister unto the souls of the wretched unfortunates in the Bastille.”
 
She held out a paper to them in a crabbed, wrinkled hand, stained patchy brown with the juice from green walnut shells.
 
“See, I am carrying the special license that the King himself wrote out for the Abbot of my order.
 
Read it and see.”

One of the guards took the paper, held it upside down, shook his head over it and handed it to the other.
 
The other guard held it upside down as well and gave it a grave glance.
 
“It all looks in order to me.”

Courtney stifled a snort of nervous laughter, turning it into a dry cough instead.
 
Obviously neither of the guards could read, and were unwilling to admit to their ignorance in front of a couple of monks.
 
The hours of labor they had put into making the forgery semi-believable had been quite wasted.

“I am on the Lord’s mission,” Miriame reminded them in her cracked old man’s voice.
 
“The King has graciously smiled on our attempts to save the immortal souls of his erring subjects, though their lives are forfeit under his law.
 
The Lord will look kindly on you for helping us to help the needy ones in your care.”

The less grumpy of the guards unlocked the gate.
 
“Come on in, then, the pair of you,” he said begrudgingly.
 
“We’ll have to search you for weapons before we let you go further.”

Miriame shambled in and Courtney shuffled in after her.
 
Courtney gave another hacking cough.
 
“If you insist,” Miriame said, holding out her empty hands.
 
“Do not forget that I am a man of God and that my concern is with the immortal souls of your prisoners, not with their bodies.
 
I would rather have a man suffer a thousand agonizing deaths and have his soul go to heaven, than to save a thousand lives only to have their souls captured by the devil in the end.”

The guards wrinkled their noses at the smell as the pair of them came closer.
 
Courtney gave another theatrical cough and spat thickly on the floor at their feet.

“Ugh, I’m not touching them,” the surly guard muttered.
 
“They’ll give me fleas, if not something worse.
 
They stink like week old carrion in the summer.”

Miriame looked unconcerned at the insult.
 
“My soul is pure though my body be foul.
 
In Heaven I shall number among the angels though I am despised on the earth.”

The other guard looked equally revolted at the thought of searching them.
 
“Come with me,” he said, hastily crossing himself to protect himself from any plagues they carried with them and waving them on behind him.
 
He hurried down the corridors of the prison and unlocked a heavy oak door and opened it into a large chamber filled with sorry-looking specimens.
 
“Minister to this lot,” he said with a shrug, as he shoved them inside.
 
“God knows but that they need it as much as any others.
 
Enjoy yourself saving the souls of thieves and robbers condemned to die.
 
I shall fetch you tonight before I go off duty.”
 

Courtney felt her heart sink as the guard shut the door behind them and she heard the key turn in the lock.
 
She and Miriame were locked in a cell in the Bastille with a thoroughly ruffian crowd until the evening came.
 
Thank the Lord that many of them were shackled to the wall and could not easily get at them, or their safety might well be at risk.

Miriame gave a quick nod to Courtney.
 
Courtney nodded back.
 
Their lives depended on them keeping up their masquerade until Courtney’s father was located.
 
They did not want to be betrayed by one of the prisoners hoping to win his freedom by giving away their secrets.

Miriame stood in the middle of the room and began to talk in her cracked, wheezy voice about the Lord.
 
Most of the prisoners ignored her, lost in their own personal misery.
 
A few of the bolder ones with some spirit left called out some feeble insults.
 
A thin man with a scared, pointed face like a cornered ferret started to cry and wail that his soul was lost forever, that he repented of his sins, and that he would live a blameless life forever more if only they would save him from the gallows.
 

One of the others cuffed him viciously to shut him up.
 
“Bastard child-killer,” he said, with venom in his voice.
 
“Confess and repent all you like, but you’ll fry in Hell forever for what you’ve done.
 
The sooner your neck is stretched the better.”

The man he had cuffed huddled back into his corner, his arms clasped around his knees, his loud laments subsiding into pathetic whimpering.

Courtney went around the room, making the sign of the cross in front of every person, searching the face of each miserable prisoner in the hopes of finding her father.

Several dozen men of all ages were crowded into the chamber.
 
She made one pass through the room, then another, making the sign of the cross and murmuring a few pious words over each person.
 
None of them were her father.

She had not expected to find him right away, but she was disappointed nonetheless.
 
She was prepared to spend weeks, if not months, in here searching for him, but she did not have that long.
 
With luck, their disguise would hold out for a sennight or more.
 
Too much longer than that and the guards would start to get suspicious, or think of checking out their story, or even search them properly one day, despite the stench of the filthy robes they wore.
 
If that were ever to happen, they would be lost.

Miriame was still intoning on about the wonders of God and the miracles His Son had worked in the world in the most uninspiring way possible.
 
Courtney caught her eye and gave a slight shake of her head in the agreed on signal that none of the prisoners in the chamber were of any particular interest to them.
 
Miriame gave an almost imperceptible shrug and continued on her lecture.
 

Courtney went through the prisoners again, taking her role as priest coming to succor the needy more seriously this time.
 
While she was here in the garb of a priest, she may as well make herself useful.
 
She saw the face of her father in each of the sad and sorry men before her.
 
God had given her the opportunity to help them in their need.
 
She would do what she could for them in the hopes that somehow, someone would do the same for her father in his turn.

With a sympathetic heart she listened to the confessions of those who wanted to unburden their souls to a priest before their death, and comforted as best she could those who needed comfort.
 
She hoped that God would forgive her deception.
 
Though she was only a fake priest, she hoped that God would accept the contrition of the prisoners for their misdeeds and acknowledge the absolution she gave them for their sins.