Dying by the sword (35 page)
Read Dying by the sword Online
Authors: Sarah d'Almeida
How much more would a woman feel that way, if she were dependent on the man for her chances at a future and at her child’s future at that?
Mousqueton seemed to read Porthos’s mind in his eyes. “It wasn’t, you know, that I didn’t understand her. Of course, I did. He might be a gambler and a bit wild, but he was the heir to a thriving business, a man with something to himself, some substance to spend.”
“And were you talking to his father when . . .” Porthos started. “I mean, what do you remember happening? Exactly?”
Mousqueton rubbed the top of his head. “The devil of it,” he said, “is that I only remember very confused things. I remember waking up, of course, and the corpse right here, and Faustine screaming her damn fool head nearby. And then, before I could fully open my eyes, for the infernal pain in my head, the Cardinal’s Guards were there, holding me. It was a devilish thing.”
Porthos nodded in understanding. “But nothing before that?” he said.
Mousqueton sighed. “I remember going in with sword and . . . working out some terms.”
“Terms?”
“Oh, he wanted . . .” Mousqueton shrugged. “He wanted one of us to find out exactly where and how much his son owed. It seems his gambling habit is worse than I’d thought, and his father wanted to know everything he owed. Of course . . .” He hesitated. “He was couching it all under the terms that if Pierre had truly blotted his copy book that badly, he would disinherit him. Something about sending him to the country, to be a smith, which I know for a fact he wouldn’t do, since Pierre is one of the best armorers in the country and his father was very proud of it. But he was saying that he would, you know, like people talk when they’re very upset. And he said that all his money and his business would then go to Faustine.” He rubbed his hand backwards through his hair, as though trying to comb it. It did nothing but increase the wildness with which it fanned around his face. “As though, you know, I could marry her for a few more coins . . .” He shrugged. “And as though I had any idea what to do with an armory. He was telling me, I remember, something about how the man he had trained—not Pierre, but the apprentice—could run it for me very profitably, and all I’d have to do was keep Faustine happy.” He frowned. “Which wouldn’t be such a bad deal, if only I thought anyone could.”
Where Monsieur D’Artagnan Wakes Up; The Strangeness of a Strange Bed; Fleur-de-Lis
D’ARTAGNAN woke up. The bed felt wrong. Too soft beneath him, and too hot too, as he appeared to be sinking halfway into a feather bed. The covers above him were far too suffocating, also. They increased his feeling of being hot, and also made him feel as if he could barely breathe.
He threw them back from his body and tried to think. He’d gone to dinner with milady, last night. That much he remembered. And also that milady had given him far too much wine. But how had he come to be naked on her bed? He could not remember. Probably the wine.
A look to the side showed him that she was under the covers, awake, looking at him. “Are you ready now, Monsieur le Guard?” she asked, her voice seductive, rising from the welter of sheets, her high breasts all the more prominent-seeming by being encompassed in a froth of silk.
But D’Artagnan was fully awake now, and fully alive to the possibilities and to everything that might have happened and might happen.
He remembered Planchet’s story. It seemed impossible that this blond beauty was Athos’s lost and infamous wife. And it seemed impossible that she might have drugged his wine, but unless D’Artagnan’s head for alcohol had inexplicably failed, drugging it was what she had, undeniably, done.
And while he could appreciate her beauty—which seemed even more pronounced under the light of day, the question remained of why she would want to sleep with him. Oh, he could understand Constance, at least at first, before she had—as he hoped she now had—found better reasons to care for him. Constance, in her confined life, shuttling between palace, where she was under the eye of her godfather, and her home, under the aegis of her much older husband, could not possibly have met anyone more dazzling than D’Artagnan—such as he was.
She had met a young, wild man, and had been attracted to him for that youth, which she did not share with her husband, and for the wildness which she’d spent most of her life trying to suppress. The love—and D’Artagnan truly hoped she loved him, because he surely loved her—had come later. But that had been the initial attraction.
Now he was sure—as sure as he was of breathing—that milady had her share of acquaintances who were far more dazzling and interesting than D’Artagnan. Noble, beautiful and doubtlessly connected, she could have her share of titled heads. Even if callow youth were what she wanted, there were a good many young bucks of good family and better looks than D’Artagnan, men she could exhibit abroad, displaying her court and her conquests.
So why had she decided upon D’Artagnan, on the glance of a moment, on the pretext that he had saved her? Why had she conceived such a strong desire for him that she must drag him to her bed and attempt to have her very complex, and rather more knowing than he expected, way with him?
Unless, D’Artagnan thought, she was indeed Athos’s wife and had informed herself of the friendship that united the four inseparables, that friendship which had, at many times and different places been the saving—both physical and spiritual—of all of them.
If it were so, doubtlessly she also knew that Athos had stood in D’Artagnan’s heart in place of a father since D’Artagnan had lost his own father, or possibly before. And he thought—though he’d never dared ask—that Athos thought of D’Artagnan as a son.
What greater revenge was there, D’Artagnan thought, than to seduce the adopted son of the man who had tried to kill her, the man who had repudiated her? Having seduced D’Artagnan, she could either utterly destroy him or turn him against Athos, whichever offered. And even with his eyes open, in the full light of day, D’Artagnan wasn’t sure she could not do either of those. Even now.
She looked at him, her luminous blue eyes sparkling with mischief. And he thought that were it not for his love for Constance, he would be succumbing even now. He thought of Constance’s image, her beautiful face, and that smile she gave him when he had particularly pleased her.
He managed to look away from milady, and the way her hair fell, moonlight-like, outlining her shoulders, her breasts. She breathed deeply, and her breasts rose and fell. He started sliding his legs off the bed, a risky proposition, since he had not the slightest idea how far the floor was from here. But he was determined to find out. “I must be going,” he said. “I am sorry my stupid head made it so difficult for you last night that I must sleep in your bed, but truly I must be going. I have guard duty,” he remembered, with a pang that, in fact, he’d had guard duty the night before. He hoped someone had covered his lack and, though he counted on Monsieur de Treville to smooth things with Monsieur des Essarts, his brother-in-law, he wasn’t absolutely sure he could explain this to Monsieur de Treville.
As he was about to slip off the bed, she grabbed his shoulder in a surprisingly strong hand. “Stay,” she said. And giggled. “You’ve been no trouble at all.”
Her other hand, insinuatingly, curled around his neck and onto his chest, to rake nails very lightly over his heart and head downwards.
Gritting his teeth together, he thought, suddenly, clearly, that the nightgown, mostly transparent as it was on the front, was nonetheless utterly closed in the back, covering it up all the way to her neck. Which, if he understood, was not the sort of design used for this sort of garment.
While her hand explored parts of him he’d never meant anyone but Constance to touch—or at least not for a great many years—he pulled himself up onto the bed by the force of his arm, so that he was more firmly seated. This had the side effect of dislodging her from her position, half-draped over him.
She took it in good part. Now, facing him, she grinned, and lunged forward to kiss him.
D’Artagnan could no more have stopped what he did than he could have willed himself to stop eating or sleeping. Curiosity, his desire to know what was happening and what things meant, was his defining characteristic, his strongest need. Even as her lips met his, as he kept his mouth resolutely closed against her assault, he reached back and, with a strong hand, tore the flimsy cloth that covered her shoulders.
And then just as quickly, he pulled away from her and looked back there, to see, faded and obviously covered in cosmetics, a smaller than normal brand, in the shape of a fleur-de-lis. He blinked at it, and, shocked that he must still, after all, be under the influence of whatever she’d given him, heard himself say, under his breath, “The fleur-de-lis. You are Athos’s wife.”
If the woman who had shared the bed with him had suddenly transformed into a tigress, the change couldn’t have been more startling or more obvious.
She came at him, claws and teeth, tearing at his face, at his still wounded shoulder. He grabbed at her wrists. She pulled out of his grasp. Screaming in fury, she dove for her pillow, to emerge holding a long and vicious looking dagger.
Addled still by the aftereffects of whatever she’d given him, D’Artagnan only managed to roll out of her way just in time. But she pulled the dagger that had embedded in the bedclothes, and came after him again.
He rolled off the bed, hitting the floor with more force than he’d expected, because the bed was almost as high as his hips. On the floor, he crawled forward, until his head cleared and he could walk.
And then he realized she was right behind him. Stooping, to grab a bundle of clothes and a hat on a nearby chair, he picked up a pretty little statuette of Cupid, on a writing desk by the window, and used it, held in his good hand, to smash the window, then half jumped and half fell through the window onto the roof below.
Milady didn’t seem able to follow that action, or perhaps wasn’t willing to follow, as D’Artagnan ran, with more desperation than grace across the roof of the house next to milady’s lodgings, clothing firmly held in his hand. Instead, she stood at the window and screamed, “Murder, thief, rape!”
Any second, her desperate screams would attract the neighbors from their beds, and they would come after D’Artagnan. What else would they do, seeing him running naked along the roofs.
Desperately, he aimed for a corner of the roof, aware that he was still fully in her sight, and looked down at an intertwining network of stone-bordered balconies. He stepped on one, then swung onto the one below it, suspending himself by his good arm, which was already holding clothes.
It was slow progress, but progress, and he went from balcony to balcony, moving to the other side of the building as he did so, so that by the time he landed, in the dark alley beneath, he was in quite a different location than where milady would have seen him disappear.
It was only when he alighted in the alley and took a deep breath that he took a look at the clothes he was holding. They’d been resting on a chair, on the way to the window—and they were not even vaguely his. They consisted of a dark red dress, and a matching hat, with a very slight veil.
D’Artagnan looked at them in dismay. Well . . . he couldn’t walk naked through the streets of Paris.
9
9
Where Monsieur le Comte Receives Several Surprises; The Difference Between a Roasted Chicken and a Live Countess; Athos Loses his Battle with Reality
BY the time Athos got home, he could have truthfully said that not much was on his mind, other than his desire for some dinner and for the comfort of his bed. He was telling himself he needed to shave, and wondering if he should do it now or leave it till tomorrow morning. His beard and moustache, which he wore carefully trimmed and shaped, depended for their look on his keeping the rest of his face hair free, which he was sure it wasn’t now.
If he had been in an introspective mood, he would have admitted that another part of him was thinking of the duchess’s soft breasts pressed against his chest, of the feeling of her, light and lively, in his hands, of the taste of her mouth against his, of the sheer joy of their kiss. But he shut out any such thoughts and told himself that if he dwelt on them it would only mean he would turn his feet towards the palace once more. And then, where that led no one knew, save that Athos was not one to share, and he was not one to take kindly to his ladylove exposing herself to danger. So their affair would be of very short duration and end with his heart broken.
Instead, he walked along and thought that he would have to ask Grimaud to ask of Planchet to make sure his master returned Athos’s doublet and shirt. Or if not, Athos would have to procure new ones, an activity he found so distasteful that he tended to avoid doing it more than once a decade.
In this mood, divided, he reached his lodgings and unlocked the door and went in. The sight of Grimaud standing in the small vestibule was so unexpected that, for a long moment, Athos did not realize he was there. And when he did, it was to blink, bewilderedly. “Grimaud!” he said. “What has happened?”
The second because his old retainer had his arms crossed, and his legs planted, as though ready for a battle. His eyes were blazing and his face pale, and he looked altogether as though he were preparing to challenge Athos on something, which was always a very strange and rare event. The poor man submitted to using sign language and uttering not a word for months at a time, when Athos was in such a state of mind that the sound of a human voice disturbed him. He submitted to leaving behind the estate in which he had a good many friends, and even more sycophants. All for the sake of Athos.
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