Read the musketeer's seamstress Online
Authors: Sarah d'Almeida
the musketeer's seamstress (23 page)
D’Artagnan shrugged. “It might be under a bed, or a chest, and it might have been forgotten. After all, in my own room, there is a place on the floor where the floorboard lifts and, with care, I can get a good view and listen to the people below.”
Athos looked shocked. “You spy on the people below you? Surely even in Gascony they know this is dishonorable.”
I’ faith, if Aramis didn’t come back soon, either Porthos or D’Artagnan would murder Athos, Porthos thought.
But D’Artagnan answered patiently enough. “No. I do not spy. But I tripped on the board by accident and it came loose and I realized I could see and hear my landlord with perfect ease. And I’m sure he doesn’t even know it’s there. Look, Athos.” He waved his hands excitedly as he spoke. “Look, I can see what Porthos is saying. If there were such an opening in the room above, concealed by a chest or a bed, or even a chair, and we found it and determined, by scuff marks or signs of recent use that this is how the murderer got in and out, we’d have a perfect clue of how the murder was committed. Because only someone who knew the palace in and out would know of that particular quirk. Do you understand?”
“I suppose I do,” Athos said, rubbing his forehead, as Porthos had observed him to do when he was nervous or worried. “But it seems like a foolish endeavor.”
“No more than what we’ve been doing,” D’Artagnan said. “Trying to find out motives for someone to want to kill the Duchess de Dreux. To some extent her husband was the logical suspect and it made sense to at least eliminate him first. But you seem convinced that he’s not the one.”
Athos looked very tired, and somehow aged, all of a sudden. “If he is, he’s a better actor than the devil, himself,” he said. “And it is a talent I never suspected in him.”
“So we’ll assume that is not it. And other than him, what obvious suspects do we have? Half the court? If she was conspiring with the Queen and the enemies of France, we need to count upon that number, the King and possibly the Cardinal too. And if she’d given away some of the Queen’s secrets, then the Queen too would fit that number. Surely you see the problem.”
Athos looked tired but nodded. “I suppose I do,” he said. He looked at Porthos and sighed. “And I apologize for losing my temper with you, Porthos. I know your problems with explaining your often brilliant ideas. But, Porthos, you must understand that this too seems like a dead end. However, I suppose we’ll go back to the palace and look at the room and the room above it, if we may.”
Porthos nodded. “That,” he said, “is one of the things we should do.”
“I don’t suppose it would be possible,” D’Artagnan asked, “for someone to throw a knife through that hole in the wall?”
“It wouldn’t be impossible,” Porthos said. “But it would necessitate moving the picture aside to throw the knife. I don’t know how it would look from the room or how visible the picture is from the bed.” He frowned. “You are right, I suppose we’ll have to go back to the palace.” Then he sighed, thinking of his last visit there. “Only you must promise me I don’t need to go near the kitchen.”
And because he’d told his friends all about the cook, this brought an amused grin to D’Artagnan’s face and an empathetic nod from Athos.
“I can promise you,” Athos said. “We shall not inflict the cook on you.”
A Letter from the Cardinal; Choices and Conflicts; The Inadvisability of Leaving the Mouse Near the Cat
A
RAMIS waited till he was in his room to read the letter. It was short and written in his eminence’s characteristic, decisive handwriting, in black ink which gave the impression that he had slashed angrily at the paper with the pen.
RAMIS waited till he was in his room to read the letter. It was short and written in his eminence’s characteristic, decisive handwriting, in black ink which gave the impression that he had slashed angrily at the paper with the pen.
“Dear Chevalier D’Herblay,” the letter began primly. “When living as a musketeer under an assumed identity, it is, you should know, a good idea to refrain from sending one’s lover letters headed by our true crest.”
Which the Cardinal would know having been acquainted with Aramis’s father. For that matter, Aramis thought that considering his resemblance to his sire, doubtlessly the Cardinal had long had some inkling of who the young man was but had not spoken because he could not without calling attention to his own illegal duel. “It took some trouble to find you, though, amid all the minor noblemen in France,” the letter continued with withering disdain. “Now that I trust I have accomplished it, I must give you my orders and they are these: I have proof you killed your lover. Your uniform and sword left behind in her room are proof enough, as is the certainty—my having examined all the other possibilities. That no one else could have come into the room. As such, I must therefore lay orders—and yes I mean orders, for one can always give orders to a murderer. My orders are simple—do not come back to Paris. Gratify your desire to take orders, or else find a likely provincial lass and marry her and devote yourself to your crops and your fields, your tenants and your servants. Do not come into Paris though, for if you do, I shall find it necessary to have you taken into the Bastille where, under the usual persuasion, you’ll doubtless tell us all we might want to know about how you committed the crime and why.”
Aramis read the letter twice through and then twirled the paper about in his hands, unsure about what it all meant and even more unsure about what to do. As a strange missive, it was exemplary of its kind.
The Cardinal said that he knew that Aramis had committed the murder. But if that were true, if he were indeed sure of that fact, why would he not want Aramis to return to Paris. Surely the Cardinal didn’t have any tender feelings that prevented his clapping Aramis in irons or sending him to the gallows. No. There must be more here. What it was, Aramis couldn’t begin to guess.
He turned the letter over and over in his hand. Take orders or marry some likely provincial lass.
Everything in him rebelled at the thought. The Musketeer in him, that Aramis who, for the last five years, through scuffle and duel, through conspiracy and peril, had fought the Cardinal at every turn and opposed him at every chance, now wanted to go back to Paris. Go back to Paris as soon as possible. Go back to Paris and find out what the Cardinal was up to and why he didn’t want Aramis to return.
There were other reasons. His mother had consented to give Aramis back his mirrors upon his agreeing to talk to the Dominican, but now that the Dominican was gone, this privilege would probably also be retracted. And Aramis’s hair remained too intractable for him to give up on brushes and mirrors. Besides, there was always the possibility his mother would take him on a never ending round of pilgrimages to expunge his supposed sin and to make it more likely he’d choose to go into the church.
A light sound from the window—laughter and a woman’s voice—called Aramis. But the pilgrimages and the visits to saints and their holy relics, would be unlikely to start while Lida lived with them.
Aramis crept close to the window and looked down. Somehow, somewhere, a kind soul had found Lida a gown cut in the French fashion. It was a frothy thing, all intense pink and lace, and low cut like the gowns that Violette used to wear. In this attire, it could be seen that Lida had, in fact, an abundance of female charms. Oh, not disproportionate to her light and pleasing figure, but abundant enough when pushed up by her tight-waisted gown, and displayed by the low cut of silk and velvet.
Aramis’s hands gripped the parapet, as he looked down on the girl, who appeared to be running and dancing amid the trees in the garden for no other reason than to enjoy her own running and playing. With two of her older, ponderous companions following, she sang out in Spanish accented French, “How freeing this gown is,” and laughed.
The two gorgons, still attired in Spanish style and in black, to boot, followed close. They had, Aramis supposed, instructions from his mother. But Aramis had spent most of his adolescence at home outwitting his mother on just this kind of instructions. His mother should know, he thought, that there were ways to get around the tightest of vigilances. After all, when he was only fourteen Aramis had introduced one of his mother’s companions to the lives of the saints with such thoroughness that the much older girl had been married off in some haste to an elderly and probably confused nobleman.
He looked at Lida and licked his lips. He would go out the side door, the servant’s entrance, and cut around behind the cover of trees to that dense place over there, where Lida danced closer and closer. With a little luck, he could give her a note without the two chaperons even knowing he was near.
With care, he wrote in a small piece of paper, “Dear Madame, if you wish for some diversion before your inevitable marriage, be kind enough to tell your companions that you wish to pray in solitude and then retire yourself to the small chapel on the left side of the house between the hours of four and five o’clock, when the local chaplain is busy with my mother at her devotions.” He signed it RH and it never occurred to him it wouldn’t be accepted or that Lida would prove incorruptible.
Any woman who delighted so in a low cut gown longed for corruption. And Aramis, with his bright green eyes, his more than pleasing features, his muscular body and his noble bearing, had always been found enticing by the ladies—long before he’d fallen to Violette’s charms. Lida would prove no exception.
He smiled lightly, a smile only a little tinged by thoughts of Violette. The lady his mother should know it was not wise to put the cheese next to the mouse, nor the mouse near the cat.
Floors and Ceilings; A Secret Panel and a Masked Stranger
“
I
am sure that there is no way to get into this room through the room above,” Hermengarde said. She had procured them the key to the room from the Cardinal’s staff— at great peril, she said while looking at Mousqueton with the expression of one who expects a reward for her troubles.
I
am sure that there is no way to get into this room through the room above,” Hermengarde said. She had procured them the key to the room from the Cardinal’s staff— at great peril, she said while looking at Mousqueton with the expression of one who expects a reward for her troubles.
They’d come in, in a group, and ambled around the tight, confined space.
To D’Artagnan it seemed like luxury beyond all possible dreaming. Each of these furnishings was better than the best furniture that Madame D’Artagnan could command in her spacious house in Gascony. In fact, D’Artagnan was sure that there were more furnishings in this one room than there were in all of his mother’s house.
Massive wardrobes stood next to vast arm chairs, which in turn stood next to tables, and trunks and more arcane cabinets like something that Athos, casually, identified as an incense cabinet and a largish trunk that Athos had said looked like a jewelry box. In fact, opening it, D’Artagnan found that it was filled with bracelets and rings, with beaded necklaces and necklaces made of pearls, the valuable tossed in with the puerile, all of it without rhyme or reason, as though the owner had tossed things in at random and without caring how they fell.
He was tempted, for a moment, to say that someone must have rummaged through the trunk. But he didn’t. After all, Athos glanced over at the open jewelry box and made no comment. Which meant that, probably, this was how high-born ladies kept their jewelry.
By all piling on the side of the door and looking over towards the portrait hanging over the heavy wardrobe, they agreed it was just possible to throw a knife from there onto the bed, and that it wasn’t likely—and certainly not probable—that the Duchess de Dreux would have noticed the portrait moving.
Particularly not if she was looking towards the little room next to her bedroom where the
chaise percée
was kept, and anticipating Aramis’s return.
chaise percée
was kept, and anticipating Aramis’s return.
“And are you sure?” Athos asked again of the pleasing-faced blonde that Porthos had introduced as the maid Hermengarde, Mousqueton’s good friend. “There is no way through the ceiling?”
The girl curtseyed, as she seemed to do whenever Athos spoke to her at all. “I am sure, Monsieur. I attend on the Countess upstairs, and she has nothing on the floor in the middle of her room, which compasses all of this room. I can see clearly that there are no breaks, no cuts in the floorboards. Not even well disguised ones. As to that, I can respond that it’s impossible to come to this room from the room above. And look you, above,” she pointed at the ceiling. “See you a joining, any place where the ceiling would open?”
Athos looked up, and reluctantly had to admit that the ceiling was smooth plaster, virgin and innocent even of scratches much less of any point at which it could open or cut, or in otherwise allow anyone to come through.
“And besides,” Hermengarde said. “The Countess was in her room at the time, playing cards with friends, all of a certain age and all as respectable and religious as possible. In fact, she was one of the first to give the alarm when she heard the murd—The musketeer’s scream. So, you see, it is impossible.”
“Can we go to the passage then?” he asked, gesturing with his head towards the portrait over the wardrobe. “So we can see from there how easy it is to move the portrait aside?”
Hermengarde curtseyed, seemingly automatically, but she looked at all of them with a half-amused expression. “It will be a tough fit, getting all of you in there,” she said. “I will open the passage for you, and you may go in, and I’ll stand guard to make sure his eminence doesn’t come near. He’s been like a hornet whose nest has been disturbed, about this whole affair.”
She fished for the key, which she had hung on a loop inside the waistband of her skirt, and then she led them out of the room and locked the door. To D’Artagnan it was all like being led down the palace corridors and secret passages by Aramis and his lover, less than a month ago.
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