Marrying the Musketeer (41 page)

“One or two.
 
If they are still alive, that is.
 
Sewer rats are pretty short-lived creatures.
 
Long tails, but short lives.”

“Find one of them for me.
 
I will pay well for information, and even better for a guide to take me through.”
 
The thought of being alone and lost down a maze of underground sewers sent shivers of pure terror into her heart, but not even that would stop her.

Miriame looked grave for the first time that evening.
 
“You are sure you really want to do this?”

Courtney closed her eyes.
 
She was almost asleep already.
 
“Utterly sure.”

“Then I will not stand in your way.”

While Courtney slept all through the next day, recovering from the journey, Miriame went out onto the streets of Paris in search of a sewer rat for a guide.
 
Courtney was dozing restlessly when her friend returned.
 
She woke up with a start as Miriame sauntered in through the door.
 
“Have you found someone?”

“A sewer rat, indeed.
 
He’ll guide you there for ten francs.”

Only ten francs?
 
Courtney shook her head.
 
Before she had become a Musketeer and an outlaw, she would not have put the tip of one dainty toe into the sewers for ten times ten francs, let alone guide a stranger through the dark maze of their tunnels.
 
“No more than that?”

“For another twenty, he’ll wait for you for an hour or two, and guide you out again.
 
But Courtney...”

“Yes?”

“Do not trust him.
 
Sewer rats are vicious creatures – meaner even than their bewhiskered and tailed cousins.
 
If he though he could more from you dead than alive, he’d slit your throat as easily as I’d slice a hunk of cheese.
 
I don’t trust him.
 
He stinks of worse things than sewer slime.
 
Indeed, I do not like this escapade at all – I would rather you did not go.
 
Give it some time, and we can think of a better way.”

Despite the warning, Courtney would not turn back.
 
She would simply not turn her back on her guide and give him the opportunity to betray her.

Despite her misgivings, Miriame lent her some old clothes: woolen trousers, a long shirt for the job, and a pair of thick-soled boots.
 
“Anything you wear down there will be ruined for ever.
 
You could wash it twenty times over and it would still smell just as bad.”

Courtney tucked the shirt into her pants, pulled on her boots, and tucked her hair into a woolen cap.
 
She felt as prepared as she was ever going to feel.

“Just one things more,” Miriame said, as they walked out to meet her unsavory guide.
 
She handed Miriame a large metal key.
 
“This.”

Courtney tucked it into her shirt.
 
“What is it for?”

“I took it off the guard I brained last visit we paid to prison.
 
It’s the key to the cell that Pierre was being held in.
 
If your luck is in, he will still be there.”

She patted her shirt protectively where she had hidden the key.
 
How glad she was now of Miriame’s nimble, thieving fingers.

Her guide was as unsavory as she could have expected.
 
Though Miriame swore he was not above thirty years old, he was stooped like an old man, and his face was splotched and wrinkled with premature aging.
 
What’s more, he smelled.

Courtney resisted the temptation to hold her nose at the stench.
 
It would be worse before it was better, she knew, but the smell of him nigh made her sick.
 

He held out a crabbed claw to her which she took gingerly.
 
He placed his free hand over hers and looked at her straight in the eye.
 
He chuckled at her obvious discomfort with his touch.
 
“So, you want to get to the prison, huh?”

She extracted her hand from his with a shudder.
 
“I do.”

“You’ll have to leave your dainty ways behind you at the entrance to the sewers,” her guide said with a wheezy cackle.
 
“You’ll meet a lot worse than me down there before you’re done.”

She’d almost rather deal with a four-legged rat than this two-legged variety.
 
It would be more predictable in its viciousness.
 
“No doubt I will.”

He eyed up her boots and clothes with a covetous gaze.
 
“You’re dressed fancy enough.
 
Have you got the money?”

She handed him ten francs.

“And the money for staying behind to guide you out?”

“I have left all my money with my friend here,” she said, gesturing at Miriame.
 
“You’ll get it when you deliver me safe and sound again, and not a moment before.”

He gave her an ill look at that and grumbled into his straggly beard.
 

Miriame showed her teeth at him in an evil smile.
 
“Not a sou will you get of it until I see my friend again with my own eyes.”

He jerked his head at her and shuffled off with a stooped gait.
 
“Come along then.”

The sewers were dank and cold and the stench that emanated out of them was overpowering.
 
Courtney gagged as she started to clamber down the iron steps stuck at regular intervals into the stone sides of the huge pipes after her guide.

“You gets used to the smell after a while,” an amused voice came out of the darkness as she doubled up on the ground trying not to be sick.
 
“Me?
 
I don’t even smell it any more.”

It was even worse when they started to walk through the tunnels.
 
They could take no light with them – it was too dangerous to carry a torch down there for fear of explosions – but once in a while the grey light of the outdoors filtered in through a grating in the roof.
 
Courtney plodded through the filth on the ground in her thick boots, trying hard not to think about what she was stepping on.
 
She didn’t want to know.
 
The ground was uneven, and several times she stumbled and nearly fell headlong into the muck.

“Keep your hand on the wall,” her guide advised her.
 
“Feel your way along.”

The walls were cold and wet and slimy with festering moulds that thrived on filth.
 
She had to force herself to touch them, to steady herself against them.
 
Anything had to be better than falling face first into the filth.

At one point she heard squeakings and rustlings around her on every side as she plodded along through the endless tunnels.
 

“Naught to fear.
 
Just rats.”

She didn’t like rats.
 
She had never liked them.

At one point she thought she trod on one.
 
There was a louder than usual squeak and she felt something suspiciously like a tail whisk out from under her foot.
 
She suppressed a squeal herself.
 
She did not want to show her fear to her guide.

She had long since lost all sense of direction when her guide stopped under a grating that let a shaft of pale light into the tunnels.
 
“Up there.
 
They say it leads right into the Bastille itself.”

“You don’t know for sure?”

He gave a wheezy cackle.
 
“Do you think me a fool?
 
I wouldn’t go up into the Bastille – not for nothing.
 
Them as goes in there don’t come out again.”

“I will come out again.”

“So you says.
 
So you says.”
 
He spat on the ground, his spittle mixing with the other noxious ingredients in the witches brew that festered in the sewers.
 
“I’ll be waiting for you here for a whiles, but you’d better hurry if you wants a guide out again.
 
I can’t be waiting her all day.
 
I’ve got places to go and rats to catch.”

Courtney clambered up the iron railings, pushed up the grate and, after a quick look around, climbed out into the deserted yard.

She was in the Bastille alright – right in the very middle of it, surrounded by walls on all sides, and horribly exposed to whoever might stroll by.
 
Bent double, she raced over to the nearest wall, taking cover in the shadows as best she could.

She was only just in time.
 
One of the heavy doors to the yard opened and a couple of guards sauntered out, luckily for her more intent on their conversation than on looking for intruders.
 
She noticed with great interest that they did not stop to lock the door behind them.
 
Security in the Bastille must be lax, or else the guards were confident that the other methods they used to subdue their prisoners, manacling them to the wall or locking them in dungeons, were sufficient on their own to prevent an escape.

Courtney waited until they had gone in again via another entrance.
 
Then, with all the stealth of a cat on the prowl, she crept along the wall, in and out of crevices in the stonework, keeping to the darkness as best she could, until she reached the block where she was sure that Pierre was kept – if he was still there.

She squelched that thought.
 
She had to believe that he was still there, that he had not been taken off to a remote chamber where he was being tortured to tell his secrets, or had already been summarily disposed of.
 
Time enough to panic when she could not find him.
 
She would not lose her head now when she most needed it.

The door creaked on its hinges as she opened it just wide enough to slip inside.
 
The corridor was silent and deserted.
 
Her soft-soled boots made little noise on the floor as she slipped along the corridors, searching for the chamber that held her Pierre.

Muted screams and wails came from behind some of the doors as she passed.
 
She blocked her ears to the noise.
 
Much as she would like to, she could not rescue them all.

She came to a stop outside one of the doors.
 
She was sure it was the one her father had shared with Pierre.
 
She drew the key out of her shirt with a trembling hand and fitted it into the lock with a fervent prayer that Pierre was still there.

The key turned in the lock.
 
The door swung open.
 
She was inside.

Pierre, sitting on the cold stone floor of his prison elbows on his knees and head in his hands, did not move as the door to his chamber opened.
 
He had no wish to look upon the face of the guard who was to take him to face another session with the pair of monks in the torture chamber as they tried to wrest out of him the names of his accomplices in treason.
 
He did not know which was worse to bear, the glee on the faces of the more vicious of them, or the pity on the faces of the others.

He tried not to show his fear as the guard drew closer, but the memory of his first session in the torture room made him give an involuntary shudder.
 
A few more sessions like that and he would no longer even be a man.
 
He would be a ruined wreck of a human with no reason and no sense left.
 
A bag of aching bones and ripped apart limbs.
 
A creature that existed only to feel pain.

He would not walk willingly to his torture chamber this time.
 
They could drag him there and he would not be able to stop them, but he would not cooperate in his own degradation.
 
Torture him all they might and they would not get a word out of him that would incriminate Courtney.
 
Not one single word.

A whisper of a sound came through the room.
 
It sounded like the voice of his beloved calling his name.
 
He ignored it.
 
It was only the confines of the dungeon and the fear of more torture that was deluding him and making him hear things that were not there.