On My Lady's Honor (All for one, and one for all) (5 page)

How he hoped that Gerard’s family had been spared the worst.
 
Gerard’s letter had told him little – only that his sister, Sophie, was sick.
 
Sophie, his best friend’s twin sister, and the woman he had contracted to marry.

He fingered the miniature he carried in his breast pocket, next to his heart.
 
Gentleness and femininity shone out of her clear blue eyes, so like her brother’s in color, though, as befitted a woman, lacking his martial spark.
 
Her soft brown hair hung in pretty ringlets about her white neck as she gave a half smile at the painter who captured her spirit on the canvas.
 

She looked all softness and beauty – everything he admired in a woman and valued in a wife – and he was half in love with her already.
 
He ached to be her savior and protector – shielding her from all that would destroy the delicate blossom of her innocence.
 
He could not bear to lose her to Death before he had even begun to know her.
 
If the medicine he carried next to his heart could save her, he would count himself a lucky man.

He was barely three day’s ride away from his journey’s end when he came upon the mob of peasants on the road.
 
Hatless and shirtless most of them were, and dressed in little better than rags, but their faces all bore the same look of grim determination and desperation.
 

The foremost of them shook a pitchfork in his direction.
 
“Halt,” he called in a guttural voice when Lamotte had approached close enough to hear.

Lamotte pulled up his horse and laid his hand on the hilt of his sword, though he didn’t draw it out of its scabbard.
 
The villagers were unarmed – unless one could count wicked-looking scythes and pitchforks as weapons – and he was no coward to draw his sword on unarmed men.
 
“What do you want?”

The leader held his pitchfork braced on the ground with the sharpened points turned out towards him in a threatening manner.
 
“Don’t come any closer.
 
Turn your horse around and go back the way you’ve come.
 
You may not pass.”

“Why not?
 
I have done no wrong.”

A babble of angry voices came back to him.

“We have no sickness in our village.”

“We don’t like strangers around here.”

“Get back to the pit of Hell you’ve come from.”

“Get off with ye – we won’t have no truck with you, ye plague-ridden devil.”

He would not turn his horse around and lose a day’s riding because of the ill-founded fears of a mob of peasants.
 
Even now, his own sweet Sophie may be dying for want of his medicine.
 
“I come from Paris.
 
There is no plague there.
 
I do not have the sickness.”

“Then go back to where you’ve come from and leave us be.”

A general murmur of assent greeted these words.

“I cannot go back.
 
My betrothed wife is ill and I must bring her the medicines that will save her.
 
I must go on.”

The crowd shuffled its feet uneasily, not knowing what to make of his claim.
 
Then a man from the back spoke up.
 
“There ain’t no medicines made by man that can save one who has the plague.
 
It’s a curse sent from God to punish the wicked.”

“His wife deserves to die.”

“And he along with her.”

He did not like the turn the mutterings were taking, or the angry looks that were being directed his way.
 
He set his spurs to his horse, intending to break his way through the crowd by sheer force.

His horse was too weary from the days of traveling to respond quickly.
 
Before the pair of them could get through the mob, the villagers were upon him.

He saw the pitchfork being swung in his direction, but he could not escape it.
 
A sensation of fire burst into his side as the outermost tine tore through his flesh.
 
His horse screamed in pain, his powerful hooves lashing out at their attackers.

Many hands reached out to pull him out of his saddle.
 
He hit the ground with a thud on his newly injured side.
 
The world in front of him faded to gray and then went black, and he knew nothing more.

Six months later:

Sophie Delamanse rode slowly through the busy streets, taking in each new wonder with the wide open eyes of a stranger to the city.
 
The street vendors calling their wares, the swaggering young bullies parading their strength, the merchants going about their business, all the hurly-burly of the most important city in all of France – she marveled at the cacophony of sights and sounds and smells that was Paris.

The crowds at once disturbed and elated her.
 
She had lived alone in the deserted manor house in the Camargue all winter until she had become accustomed to the fearsome silence of solitude.
 
In Paris, she need never be alone again.

A woman of the street called out to her from a dirty alley.
 
She blushed and turned her head away before suddenly thinking better of her shyness and returning the woman’s saucy greeting with a polite tip of her plumed hat.
 
She was a man now – the reincarnation of her brother, Gerard, who lay still in his shallow grave in the marshy swamps of the Camargue.
 
She must remember her new self in all her dealings and bring honor to her brother’s name and to all her family.
 
She would remember her love for her brother and her hatred for all those who had wronged them both, and they would make her strong.

During the long, cold months of winter she had brooded constantly on her brother’s death.
 
Her guilt and despair had nigh destroyed her until she turned her pain and her guilt outwards and focussed her loathing on the enemy she could hate without destroying herself in the process - Count Lamotte.

For the first few weeks after her recovery she had waited for him to appear.
 
He had promised her brother that he would care for her.
 
Where, then, was he when she had most need of him?

Had he come to her then and saved her from the horror of spending the winter alone in a house of death, she would have welcomed him with open arms.
 
She would nigh have welcomed the Devil himself, if he had come to rescue her.

Lamotte was her betrothed, she told herself over and over again as she huddled in front of the tiny fire she kept in the kitchen grate, eating her meager rations and trying to stop her teeth from chattering with cold.
 
Surely when he heard of her plight, he would ride to her rescue.
 
Gerard had had faith in him.
 
She did not want to believe that the Count was so afeared of the plague that he would break a solemn oath to her brother.

The weeks passed by at a snail’s pace, until snow covered the ground, making travel impossible and utterly destroying her hope that he might come to her.
 
She grew stronger in her solitude, but gradually she also grew more and more embittered against the man who might have saved her from this solitude but had not.

Lamotte had not come to claim her.
 
As the snows of winter started to melt she had to face the miserable truth – that like a sniveling coward he had stayed away to save his own skin, leaving his comrade-in-arms and his betrothed wife to die a miserable death.
 

Were he ever to renew his suit, she would treat him with the derision he deserved as a false friend and a traitor to loyalty and honor.
 
Lamotte: coward, traitor and false friend.
 
How she wished to make him suffer as her family had suffered.
 
How she hated him for being alive when all she loved were dead.

Lamotte.
 
The very name sounded evil on her tongue.
 
She could never wed him.
 
She would sooner murder him and cut open his heart and throw it to the wolves.

Spring arrived at last, and with it the knowledge that another such winter would drive her mad.
 
With spring came the news that Jean-Luc was dead, along with his father and much of their household.
 
She had no grieving left in her, but she said a rosary for their souls so that they may rest in peace the sooner.

A handful of villagers had survived the plague.
 
The most trustworthy of the survivors she made her steward, while she put into action the plan she had dreamed up at her lonely fireside.
 
As Sophie, she had nothing left to live for – she would become a ward of Louis XIV and sign her destiny over to the whim of the King.
 
She determined to remain Sophie no longer – instead, she would become her brother.

As Gerard, she would take control of her life.
 
As Gerard, she would win the honor that should have been his.
 
As Gerard she would live and as Gerard she would die.

Well she knew that she was a weaker, paler version of the proud Musketeer who had left Paris seven months ago to attend the betrothal and wedding of his twin sister.
 
That would easily be explained away by the weeks of illness she had suffered and the months of recuperation she had had to undergo before she, in the guise of her brother, had recovered sufficiently to be deemed fit for active service once more.

She only hoped that those who had known Gerard intimately would not be able to detect the slight softening of her features and the unusual smoothness of her chin, untouched by any razor.
 
With her hair cut short to curl around the nape of her neck, and wearing Gerard’s breeches and boots, she was an exact copy of her twin.
 
She would defy even her mother to tell them apart from more than ten feet away.

Neither would she be discovered a woman by lack of skill in the martial arts.
 
She had spent her last few months wisely – practicing with Gerard’s sword until her arm ached with weariness and riding Seafoam until it seemed as though she and the horse shared one body and one will.
 
She could ride now as well as her brother ever had.
 
Her skill with the sword was as yet still rudimentary, but she would work on that.

Even if her future companions noticed the changes in her face or her bearing, she doubted they would ever guess at the truth - it was too preposterous to be believed.
 
As far as the world knew, Sophie Delamanse was dead of the plague, and Gerard, after a lucky escape from the disease that had killed his entire family, was on his way back belatedly to rejoin his regiment.

Her brother had boarded with a widow in a respectable lodging house near the barracks.
 
Sophie paid a street lad a couple of sous to guide her there.
 
The boy led her through dark alleys and dirty streets, stopping in front of a shabby tenement with a ragged sign proclaiming rooms to let within.

The widow looked sideways at Sophie when she rapped at the door, travel sore and weary from her days on the road.
 
“So, you’ve come back then.”
 
She bared her gums in a attempt at a smile.
 
“I heard you was dead but I guess I heard wrong.
 
You’re in luck.
 
I’ve got a room free if you want to take it.
 
The gentleman who was in there hanged hisself the other week.
 
Still, I don’t ‘spose you’ll worry about that, having just come from the parts where there’s the plague and all.”

The room was in the garret, up four flights of stairs.
 
The heat up at the top of the house was stifling, the open wooden shutters did nothing to move the air, and there was barely enough room for the small bed and a dresser that were the room’s sole furnishings.

Tired and longing for a rest as she was, Sophie looked at the pokey accommodation with distaste.
 
“How much?”

The withered old crone named an exorbitant fee – nearly the whole of the recompense Sophie would receive from her duties as a Musketeer.
 

Sophie shook her head in disbelief.
 
“For such a small room?
 
With barely a window?”

“I’ll be charging you a mite extra coz you’ve come from the Camargue,” the old woman said, her beady eyes fixed relentlessly on Sophie’s face.
 
“It’s not everyone who’ll take in those as have had the sickness.
 
The other boarders don’t like it.
 
It’s bad for business.”